by Paul Cornell
‘That’s what acting is.’
‘That’s what I mean! Letter of the bloody law! Why is it like that? Go on, tell me everything that’s going on here. Just tell me who’s doing the murders. I bet you won’t, will you? Even if I’m going to die.’
‘You’ve realized that it’s the letter of the law for those like me, and especially for me, to never give a straight answer. We’re not built like that.’
‘Of course you’re not. Of course. So why are you bloody here?’
Flamstead smiled, as if they were now getting to what was really important. ‘Well, you see, in my physical form, as Gilbert, I got interested in that comrade of yours Lisa when she visited us yesterday. I felt around the shape of her in the world and found you, the only one of your lot I could have a sensible chat with. I’m not actually here in this room, a celebrity visitor. That’d cause far too much fuss. Though I must confess, I do like the attention. No, I’ve taken advantage of your coma to get inside you, and turned this bit of human London into an anteroom to my own borough, just so we could talk.’
‘Your own borough?’
‘Never mind that now. Let’s talk about Lisa Ross.’
Sefton wondered if he was hallucinating after all. ‘What about her?’
‘There’s something peculiar about her. What is it?’
Sefton briefly outlined the circumstances in which Ross had lost the ability to feel happiness.
‘Oh,’ said Flamstead, a finger to his lips, ‘oh, now everything makes so much sense. Just one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘Is she, you know . . . seeing anyone?’
It took some urgent communication between Ross, Lofthouse and the authorities of HM Prison Brixton to get Ross and Costain in to see Ballard at such short notice, but Ross could hear on the other end of the phone how highly motivated Lofthouse was to get that done. She’d always got the impression Lofthouse liked Sefton. ‘Liked’ seemed too small a word for how close Ross herself felt to him. With Quill the way he was now, Kev was what kept her hanging on in this job. She’d come with Costain because she wanted to do everything she could, and she couldn’t do that by his bedside. ‘How do you want to do this?’ she asked as they were led through the corridors towards the interview rooms.
‘Your call. You’ve seen a lot more interviews than I have.’
Ross glanced over to the prison officer, but decided she didn’t care what they said or did. ‘We don’t have much to offer Ballard except what’s already on the way. Given they were going to share valuable data, maybe he’d care about Kev dying.’
Costain shook his head. ‘Even if he did, he’d want to make us pay for it.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘You know, when he and I worked together, we got quite close.’
‘You want to make it appear to him that you’re still dodgy?’
‘Yeah, how about I indicate to him that I’d be willing to play you lot for him, maybe to slip him a few items out of Sefton’s holdall, in return for anything that’d keep Kev alive? Because I’m desperate for my mate not to die.’
‘And what do you do if he plays ball?’
‘Turns out I lied to him, but he’s not so badly off, with that lovely deal and all.’
‘Yeah, that maze of shite is one possibility. Or how about you just beat it out of him?’
He frowned at her. ‘No. Because . . . what Kev would want us to . . . Listen, we don’t just need Ballard for today, do we? We’re hoping he’ll be an ongoing source. And . . . I’m trying to not be so . . .’ He seemed unable to find the words, threw up his hands.
‘OK. Go for your plan.’
He looked relieved, smiled that disarming smile at her. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t come on all—’
‘I’m just here for Kev, all right?’ He didn’t even look impatient. Ross considered him, as he looked away from her once more. How much of all that had been for her benefit? The stoic, hurt man, trying to make amends, with no desire for reward. What a perfect disguise.
She let him go into the interview room alone, and once the prison officer had withdrawn, she sat outside the door, plastic cup of coffee in hand. She wondered if, after all, she would hear sounds of violence from inside the interview room. There were none. After ten minutes, Costain opened the door and beckoned for her to come in. Ballard sat across the table, looking pleased with himself. ‘We’ve been having a chat,’ he said.
‘Fuck you, Hannibal Lecter. What have you got for us?’
‘She’s the good cop,’ said Costain.
Ballard barely seemed to notice. ‘I’m told you’re an analyst,’ he said. ‘Is it you I have to thank for getting me caught?’
‘Team effort.’ Ross didn’t like that silky tone of voice one bit. ‘We’re working against the clock here—’
‘And I’m still waiting for my deal, but . . .’ He glanced towards Costain and obviously chose his words carefully. ‘I’ve been persuaded to show a bit more goodwill. So. Here’s something to help your friend, who I look forward to seeing again, safe and sound.’ He wrote down an address and a series of numbers. ‘Storage place near Wembley. This code will get you into one drawer of one of my many lock-ups. In it is just one item, instructions on the label. And here’s my written authorization to them to let you in.’ He scribbled a quick note on another piece of paper.
When he was finished, Ross grabbed both pieces of paper and made to go.
‘Wait a moment,’ said Ballard. Costain put a restraining hand on Ross’s arm. ‘There’s something very important you should know. That blade your friend showed me: I told him it was a fetch kettle, but I didn’t say what spiel it contained. It’s this one, and I hope you never need to make use of it. That weapon will allow you to kill what I’d call a figment, but you’d probably call a ghost.’
Ross nodded. So that was something confirmed. It also indicated there was more where that came from. ‘I’m sure you’ll get your deal,’ she said. ‘We have to get going.’
They marched with the prison officer back down the corridor. ‘That was weird,’ said Costain. ‘Why did he share that, and why then?’
Ross shook her head. ‘Maybe you shook him up so much he thought he needed to give us more.’
‘I didn’t go hard on him. I went dodgy, like I told you, said I’d sell you all out. Maybe that was for my benefit. Maybe he wants me to get him the knife.’
Ross rubbed her brow. ‘Every time I think I’ve got every data point about this op into my head, something new comes along, something with bits I haven’t worked out yet. It’s like distraction after distraction.’
‘You’ll get there.’ That smile again.
Ross just shook her head and was silent as they got through the exit procedures as fast as they could. Having checked the alibis of the three Sherlock actors and found them all to be vouched for at the time of the murders, she’d just finished ploughing through the threatening messages sent to them when she’d heard about Kev. She’d become numbed to the torrent of abuse celebrities, hugely and particularly Alice Cassell, got every day, and had found nothing to take them any further, and then she’d been told her friend was a victim. It had felt like payback for her own lack of feeling.
She got her mobile back as they left the building and saw a message from Lofthouse had arrived. ‘Fuck,’ she said as she read it, wanting to throw down the device.
‘What? Is Kev—?’
‘A zoo in Kent has reported that two of its snakes were stolen.’ She heard the ping of the second email coming in and looked, her heart sinking. ‘And they’ve found a body. One Danny Mills, aged seventeen, in Stoke d’Abernon; the snake was still in the room. Uniforms are all over it. There was a window left open.’
‘Shit. They got it done.’
‘There’s a link here, a YouTube video. His parents showed it to the local uniforms; they thought it might have been a suicide note. Or that he might have bought the snake as some sort of prank. He did stuff like that, apparently. Couple of incide
nts with the police, nothing major. A baby son – bloody hell – who he didn’t see much of, bit of a waster.’
Ross started the video playing as they got into the unmarked car Costain had had waiting for them when they got back into London. Costain didn’t try to look as he accelerated violently, heading for the Stockwell Road.
The kid on the screen of her phone, a kind-looking youth with freckles and mad hair, nobody’s idea of a father, was talking to a webcam, full of energy. ‘So, OK, cheating, getting in first. I know about the reality-TV show, OK? I’m not just going to call your number and enter like I’m nobody. The two guys who went round town asking about people who’d played Sherlock Holmes, well, one of your film crew was in the pub, and he said maybe a bit too much, and when it gets out about the prize, you’ll have everyone doing this, so, like I said . . .’
‘Fuck,’ said Costain. ‘Fuck, they played us. Again.’
Ross wanted to hit something. Whoever she was playing against kept using her own moves to . . . to kill people. The kid on screen produced, suddenly, a deerstalker hat, which looked like it had been made from folded paper, and slapped it onto his head at a jaunty angle. Then he pulled out a guitar. As he started to play what Ross thought was probably quite a clever song about how he’d always wanted to be Sherlock Holmes, and now he’d got the chance, her heart sank. She imagined this bright, foolish kid, thrashing about, having the same heart attack Kev had had, but his parents too fast asleep to hear him. Parents whose first thought had been suicide by snake. She made herself watch to the end.
‘Pub, mates, description,’ said Costain, still concentrating on the road.
‘I’m sure,’ said Ross, clicking off her phone, ‘that a description of whoever he met in that pub will add yet another member to the gang.’ And, she thought, another spiky data point to her brain. She closed her eyes and tried to get some sleep, but an anger that was growing all the time wouldn’t let her.
‘Turns out you can’t fingerprint a snake.’ Lofthouse was standing awkwardly at Sefton’s bedside, beside a young man who’d introduced himself as Joe. This was, she supposed, Sefton’s partner. Fifteen minutes ago, the doctors had injected Sefton with the antivenom. Lofthouse had heard the air ambulance that had delivered it landing outside, which had been when Joe had entered too. He’d gone straight to Sefton and had stopped, wanting to touch him, but obviously not wanting to disturb the cannula. Finally, he’d just reached out and put a hand to the side of Sefton’s face. Only then had he looked back to Lofthouse and introduced himself.
‘Sorry?’ Joe now looked to her again.
‘The local police have confirmed there’s nobody of that old lady’s description living in the area she said she was from. From what I’ve been reading on my phone, the Danny Mills murder has confirmed for the media the idea that there’s something about Sherlock Holmes going on with all these killings, but thanks to information we’ve withheld, it’s not yet apparent that the victims all played Holmes. So some of the killings remain unconnected in the public mind. That could help us later.’
‘Don’t you want to tell the public? I mean, warn people?’
‘It’d be a hell of a public service announcement. “Have you played or do you know someone who has played Sherlock Holmes?” No. You couldn’t get people to take it seriously. They’d start daring each other. Bloody people.’
‘That’s what got him here,’ said Joe, looking back to Sefton. ‘How weird the shit you deal with is. It’s like those people who end up in the “Strange Deaths” column in Fortean Times. That’s the risk he takes, every day.’
He was making her think about Peter. About how much harder to deal with a bizarre risk was when it was someone you loved taking it rather than yourself. At the end of her working day yesterday, she’d finally found something useful to compare the squiggles on the piece of paper to. She’d ordered some books from the Met archives, mostly stuff one would expect her to consult, but one of them just happened to be a collection of maps of London, and one of those maps had turned out to be what she was after. An inkling in the back of her head led her to a diagram of natural tunnels that ran beneath the surface, alongside the many artificial ones.
Her piece of paper hadn’t been an exact match, but it was close enough to convince her. That was what the key had wanted her to find. Whatever its mission, its desire seemed to be to give her more knowledge. It might take her somewhere that would give her access to new objects and powers, something that might give her the ability not only to help James’s team but to free Peter. Now she had to find a stealthy moment to buy the equipment she needed to pursue that lead.
A noise from the doorway made them both turn, and in rushed Costain and Ross. Ross was carrying a tiny bottle, the lid of which she was already unscrewing. The bottle was green and covered in the grime of ages. ‘The tears of Boadicea, they’re called,’ she said, not stopping to acknowledge Joe. ‘The label says they can heal anything, instantly.’
‘Do we know anything about—?’
‘No. The label was written in the 1870s. No provenance, nothing I can find online.’
‘Only, they’ve injected him with the antivenom, and if that’s a risk—’
‘It doesn’t seem to be doing him any good,’ said Joe. ‘They said he’d slowly come round, and he doesn’t seem to be. Let him drink it.’
‘I’m meant to throw it on him.’ She had the rusty cap off now.
‘I’m senior officer,’ said Lofthouse. ‘I say we wait to see if—’
Ross threw the liquid.
Sefton sat up in bed and screamed.
He was reaching blindly for something in front of him, his hands scrabbling, his eyes wide and wild. He sucked in a huge breath. The monitors went wild. Medical personnel rushed in. Ross picked up the empty bottle from where she’d dropped it. Joe was trying to talk to the doctors, trying desperately to ask if Kev was all right.
‘I’m all right!’ That voice was familiar.
The doctor and nurses stepped back, staring. Lofthouse led her people through them, to see Kevin Sefton sitting up in bed, one hand out to hold Joe’s. Kev was breathing normally now, relief all over his face. He started tugging at the dressing on his arm, then, alarmed by the reaction of the medics, thought better of it. Joe was looking worried again, as if Kev might have suffered some sort of brain damage, but Sefton’s mania finally left him and he slumped back on the pillow. ‘Really, I’m OK.’
‘Thank God,’ said Joe.
‘Well, a god. He says to thank him.’
‘Who does?’ asked Costain.
Sefton looked around the medics who were now checking him over, obviously worried that if he came out with it, they’d start examining his head. ‘It’s complicated.’ He looked over to Ross. ‘I’ve got a message for you too.’
Lofthouse felt such relief she needed to put a hand on the wall to steady herself. She hadn’t, it turned out, been present at the death of one of her officers. Someone else, though, should have been here. Where the hell was Quill?
FIFTEEN
Quill had no idea why Sarah was looking at him with such a weird expression. She’d been like that every time she came home from work the last couple of days. She’d kept getting Jessica to go and do something else, rather than help Daddy out with the ops board he’d constructed in the kitchen. OK, so it did get in the way a bit, but where else could he put it?
‘So you’re not on leave?’ she said.
‘How many times? I’m working. So I don’t need to tell them. I’m working from home. Working on the case. I’ve switched my phone off. Erased their messages on the home phone. I’m waiting until I can give it all to them in a bundle with a ribbon on top. I’m closer to the case than they are, right now. I just don’t want to tell them.’
‘Why don’t you want to tell them?’ What was that weird sound in her voice?
‘Because they’d come up with loads of complications, and I need to think clearly, so I took it away.’
‘But—�
��
‘Stop making it complicated. Would you, please? Could you?!’ He hated feeling angry at her, but every time she’d spoken to him, she’d got in the way. He didn’t feel able to cope with even the slightest complication. That was why, obviously, he’d taken his work home, so he could focus on it, narrow it down.
‘Are you going to stop shouting at me?’
‘When you start . . . just . . . seeing sense! Let me work!’
‘OK.’ She sat down on the kitchen floor, her back against the fridge. ‘Explain it to me.’
Quill pointed to the drawing he’d made of what Holmes had written on the back of the photo. He’d attached the drawing to the cork board by the back door. He’d had to take down all the stuff from Jessica’s preschool. ‘Yes. Finally. Good to be able to share this with you. Keep up. Here’s what Sherlock wrote: “The ultimate crime.” He obviously thought the photo must be a clue to it. What’s the ultimate crime?’
‘You tell me.’ Still that same strange, annoying carefulness in her voice.
‘I think it’s what I got an inkling of when I was in Hell, the kidnapping of people from . . . other sorts of afterlifes, bundling them all into Hell. That seems to have happened a few years back.’
‘What? You never said anything about that.’
Quill realized he was on worrying ground here. That had come close to telling her what he couldn’t tell her, what he was on the way to sorting, so he would never have to. ‘I saw clues about it there; I worked it out the other day. That’s the ultimate crime.’
‘Well, it could be, if—’
He deliberately cut her off. ‘Holmes was always about just deserts. What if he started working on that crime, maybe found a way to solve it and then was killed to stop him from revealing it?’ Before she could answer, he excitedly pointed to the various other drawings he’d put up around the kitchen. Some of them were just sketches, stick figures, some of them he’d tried to put some real work into. Which was a bit unprofessional, yes. He was under a lot of stress; he sometimes needed something to work on, something to distract him. ‘The name of the company that hired the Lone Star, Missing Room – that’s also the name of a 2011 album by a French-American rock band with a meaningful name. There’s also an asteroid that shares that name!’ He found his drawing of what was admittedly just a field of stars. He hadn’t copied every single one from the photo on his phone, but he had copied the index numbers round the edges. ‘I’ll bet that’s pictured somewhere on the star field photo that was sent to Holmes! Dean Michael! The first names of two famous people, one fictional, one real, but both with the same surname!’ She was looking like she still didn’t get it. ‘The same as the name of the rock band and the asteroid! Moriarty!’