Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘So,’ she said, after they’d ordered, ‘like you said, this is a bit weird.’

  ‘But not intimidating, I hope.’

  ‘You mean you hope it is?’

  ‘Obviously, I don’t want to impress you or anything.’

  ‘Why did you want to take me out to dinner?’

  ‘For, well, all the usual reasons. Your eyes.’ Was that a lie? How could just saying ‘your eyes’ as a sentence be a lie? This was certainly keeping her on her toes. ‘One different than the other. That’s the secret of David Bowie’s success. As I told him the other day.’

  ‘So you’ve probably never met David Bowie. Don’t you have cosmic goddesses or whatever to go on dates with?’

  ‘You could call some of the actresses I hang around with that, I suppose.’

  There had been something puzzling in his tone there, like they were at cross purposes. ‘No, I mean . . . Listen, Kev told me everything. I know who you really are.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You might not have got his name. The one you . . .’ She suddenly realized how weird this sounded. ‘Appeared in the dream to.’

  He was now looking completely bewildered. ‘Was . . . this in a play or something? I don’t remember him.’

  ‘Sorry, how did you get my number?’

  ‘You gave it to me. When you visited the set with your Mr Quill.’

  She was certain she hadn’t. She was also now not sure if she was actually talking to someone who always lied. Flamstead was looking so completely lost that she felt like she might have somehow woken up from the nightmare her and her mates’ lives had been for the last few years, to a normal life without gods and ghosts. ‘Right,’ she said carefully, ‘so you’re just an actor?’ This ‘date’ really wasn’t going so well.

  ‘Yes.’ He slapped a big hand flat on the table. Finally, something he could answer concretely. However . . . was that a twinkle in his eye? Had he just felt a moment of triumph at having convinced her of something?

  She took a second to compose herself. She got the feeling she was being tested. That, at least, was something she understood. She had to go round him, get past him, trip him up. She found she was looking into those eyes, feeling warm inside at the challenge. How bloody awful was it that this couldn’t be fun for her? Her body was appreciating his attention, but she herself, unable to feel joy, felt like she was about to take a driving test. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘what I don’t get is why someone like you is interested in an ordinary office worker in law enforcement.’

  ‘Ordinary?’ He kept that as a question, which couldn’t be a lie. ‘Let me see, what would Sherlock deduce about you?’ She was pretty sure that any serious actor seeking to impress wouldn’t at this point have brought his most famous character into it, like she was a nine-year-old asking for an autograph. Or was he really that useless with women? ‘Are you from . . . Bermondsey?’

  Was he that good with accents? Maybe that was an actor thing. Or could he have learned that off the Internet? Only with a stalker level of research. She decided to mess with him. ‘No.’

  ‘Really? Damn. You’re involved with someone . . . No, not anymore.’

  She broke eye contact. She didn’t like this game. She didn’t like what those lies said. ‘I have . . .’ OK, she decided, she didn’t have to be entirely honest with him either. ‘I have . . . a medical condition. I can’t feel happiness.’

  He looked deeply concerned. ‘You have anhedonia.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Ross to look up a name for the state she was in. ‘Do actors often know obscure mental health terms?’

  ‘Wasn’t that also the working title for Annie Hall?’

  ‘If it was, they went with the right one.’

  ‘So . . . was it the result of a trauma, or . . . ?’ He was now playing the part of someone who was out of his depth with the issues of someone he’d just met, and was playing it well.

  The waiter arrived with their drinks, which gave her time to formulate a strategy. As soon as he left, she went on the offensive.

  ‘It was the result of the relationship you intuited or looked up on Google like you’re stalking me.’

  ‘I haven’t been!’

  Oh God, he had been. She kept him off balance, sticking out her bare arm across the table. ‘It’s the full deal. Go on, try.’

  ‘Try what?’

  ‘Tickle me. I’m very ticklish.’ She raised the arm behind her head, glad her dress was sleeveless and that she’d shaved for this. ‘Tickle me under there.’

  Other diners were looking over, but she didn’t care. Now they were working for her. He’d adopted a rather bohemian pose, after all. An actor couldn’t resist causing a bit of a scene. He put on an ‘anything once’ expression, stood and walked over to get behind her. He smiled to the other diners, making this into a performance, making this OK. She saw them smiling back. He placed the fingers of his right hand carefully just below her armpit, on her bare skin. He did that with only slight hesitancy, maybe apt for someone who’d done weird self-consciousness-erasing shit in stage school, but perhaps also with the arrogance of a god. Then he ran his fingers up her arm, daring for the shortest time to be sensual, and her body reacted again, because she hadn’t been touched for far too long. Then he turned it into comedy and went, ‘Tickle, tickle, tickle!’ out loud as he did so.

  She winced. ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Ow. Ow!’

  He stopped, looked aghast at the expression of genuine discomfort on her face, got quickly back into his seat. ‘I don’t understand.’ Was he saying he did?

  ‘I found out about that early on,’ she said. ‘Without emotional pleasure, the physical pleasure is just annoying, and that quickly kind of shorts out into actual pain.’

  He paused, forming his fingers, with a surprising lack of pretentiousness, into a steeple. ‘Is that true of all physical pleasure?’

  She took a long sip from her glass, keeping eye contact. She watched his gaze darting around her face, checking out her lips. ‘No,’ she said finally, letting an awareness of what he meant into her voice, a little teasing. ‘Most physical pleasure doesn’t connect to laughter. Also’ – she moved back to serious again, trying to keep him off balance – ‘my dad’s . . . imprisoned. I used to be able to see him; now I can’t.’

  ‘Is he from Bermondsey too?’

  ‘He isn’t from there either.’ She wasn’t sure she liked lying to this man who seemed genuinely interested in her situation, even if he himself was lying at every moment. She tried something else, using exactly the same words she’d used before. ‘What I don’t get is why someone like you is interested in an ordinary office worker in law enforcement.’

  He nearly replied exactly the same thing as last time, but stopped himself. That was something her team had noted about the ‘ghosts’ they dealt with, that they often seemed to use stock responses, like video-game characters. Were the ‘gods’ the same? ‘Only because you’re very attractive,’ he settled on.

  She suddenly wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. Which meant she was getting far too into this. She took a big gulp of her wine instead. There had been an ‘only’ there, hadn’t there?

  ‘Or perhaps it’s just because of the case you’re investigating.’

  ‘Right, I thought so. You’re only interested in the case and want to quiz me about it.’

  ‘I’m not only interested in . . . No, I mean . . .’ He had actually tripped over his own need to lie, and now he was getting flustered about it. If he was this Trickster deity, he was also the human he claimed to be, and the human part of him, evidently, could get flustered.

  Their first course arrived. She’d ordered a salad, not wanting to have to deal with anything she didn’t understand the name of. She tried it. Her palate and mouth gave her signals that once would have been pleasurable, but were now like watching a party from outside the window. She had to exercise harder these days, she’d found, because her body was used to a certain amount of pleasurable satisfaction from food and kept urging her to find i
t now in quantity rather than quality. She wondered if sex would be the same. God, she hoped he didn’t want to go there. Her body, though, detached from her in a terrible way, did. That made her feel . . . ashamed. It made her think of that awful thing Costain had said about offering herself.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, gently, putting down his soup spoon. ‘You rather left me hanging there; you drifted off.’

  No, he had. He was now sounding like someone who genuinely thought he was in the middle of a terrible date. Or was that him getting the better of her, another play? ‘Sorry. I’m not used to blokes being interested in me.’ Which was really a bit of a lie. ‘I get lied to a lot.’ To that last line she added a meaningful glance.

  He sighed. ‘I don’t enjoy lying to you. I am who I say I am. Basically, I just want you to feel . . .’ He paused, obviously trying to find the right word to insert where ‘happy’ should go. ‘The opposite of comfortable and calm.’ Perhaps that was his way of confirming who he really was, that he was indicating that he had to say the opposite of what he meant?

  ‘You mean uncomfortable and alarmed? Or involved and excited?’

  He looked sad, trapped even. He had just told her who he was, she was sure of it. ‘Please . . .’ He literally couldn’t finish that sentence.

  She decided to be merciful. The nature of the Gods of London seemed to be as limited as that of the ghosts. If she was going to hear anything useful tonight, she had to give him something to work with. ‘How about I tell you my story?’ she said. ‘Then you tell me yours?’

  He just smiled. Which she took as permission to continue. So, through the clearing away of the first course and the arrival of their main meal, the nature of which, on his plate, she couldn’t guess at, but in her case was something with chicken, she talked. She felt a reduction in stress as she did so. That was the closest she got to comfort, these days, hitting the limit of lack of pain. She’d learned to reach for that slow dropping down the scale, rather than the excitement of approaching pleasure. It had made her quiet, confined. She was like an animal who’d started to accept its confinement, to be changed by it. It was bad to think about. It was good to talk about, even using medical euphemisms as she still did now. Although she was pretty sure the man opposite her would know about Hell and deities and ghosts, the diners around her, all straining to hear the celebrity, wouldn’t. For that release, and to pursue her list of questions, she would have to wait until they went somewhere quiet. She wanted, she was pretty sure they both wanted, him to be honest with her.

  He listened attentively, nodding when those nods could be taken to be the opposite of agreement. He listened like a god who still needed to learn about the world. Ross skipped past the details that were impossible, and avoided anything of operational significance. Over dessert, for which Ross chose, relieved, treacle pud and custard, only to find it was a very small treacle pud on a huge plate, she reached the present day.

  ‘Is your detective inspector all right?’ he asked. ‘He seemed entirely sane.’ She told him about Quill’s leave of absence, but didn’t feel loyalty allowed her to describe his erratic behaviour. ‘So you’re left with this man Costain in charge? It’s not like you talk about him at all. Sherlock would say—’

  ‘Sherlock’s not here.’

  ‘Sherlock would say you’re not at all sensitive about this.’

  ‘Sherlock wouldn’t, because all of his supposed deduction was about physical clues, not about how random most people are, and besides, Sherlock can fuck right off.’

  He laughed, took the bill from the hand of the waiter that proffered it, dropped a card into it without looking, handed it back. Ross had decided before she got here that, much as she’d like to go Dutch, she’d let him pay for food she wasn’t capable of enjoying. ‘Would you like to go on somewhere? Dancing? I think I’d like to distract you from your current investigation.’

  Somewhere loud, where she couldn’t ask questions? No. She felt emotionally like she was anticipating a swim or a run. Her physical arousal was moving her away from her baseline of comfort, though. She wondered if they could find a way to talk that was about ease rather than excitement. ‘How about we go back to mine?’ she asked.

  Once again, he just smiled.

  SEVENTEEN

  Joe had been incredulous about Sefton getting back to work so quickly. ‘So they can just snap their fingers and do that, then? Get poison out of your system, miraculously, like proper gods?’

  Sefton had said they obviously could. Joe had replied that it’d be a good thing to get one of these gods on Kev’s side permanently. Then his expression had gone all trying not to cry, and Sefton had held him. They ended up laughing in relief at him having come out the other side OK. Sefton, as always, did his best to reassure him.

  The next morning, before getting into his car, he tried to call Ross, half interested in the answers to their work questions, half in a ‘so, girlfriend’ kind of way, but he only got her voicemail. Immediately he clicked off, his phone rang again. It was Sarah Quill. Sefton was the only one of his team she had managed to get hold of. She hadn’t left messages for the others; she didn’t want to say what was going on. She asked him to come over as soon as he could.

  So here he was, at Quill’s house, which he’d last seen with the shadows of an urgent investigation hanging over it. Now it felt bad in an entirely different way. Sefton could feel the wrongness as he walked to the door, feel that now this place was . . . haunted. Sarah answered; she had that trying-not-to-cry expression, but with it was a great determination and anger. ‘He’s in the kitchen,’ she said.

  Sefton felt Quill’s presence before he saw him. He’d never experienced this sensation of the Sight before, to feel a place haunted by a living person. Quill was squatting by the fridge as he entered, drawing slowly and carefully on a piece of paper. He looked up and nodded. ‘Yeah, good, now’s the right time for you to be here.’

  Sarah looked anguished at Sefton. ‘I called him, Quill.’

  ‘Well, good for you. What do you want, a medal? Just because for once you haven’t put something in my way, just because you accidentally got something right. Kev, never mind her, look at this.’ He was drawing, Sefton saw, what seemed to be a star map. ‘She says the asteroid couldn’t be in that part of the sky. I say it could, millions of years ago. We may be dealing with a crime that old. Logic, you see?’

  So Sefton asked, and heard the whole theory, which jumped over many lapses of logic with phrases like ‘That must mean . . .’ Sefton called him on this the first couple of times, only for Quill to become suddenly furious, to say he was getting in the way like Sarah was.

  Oh God. Sefton looked back to Sarah. She must have been putting up with this for the last few days. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ve got all that on board now. I’ll just go and get my notebook and write it down.’ Quill nodded, pleased, and went back to his drawing.

  Sefton led Sarah into the spare bedroom upstairs, where he was sure Quill couldn’t hear them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘You should have called us earlier.’

  Sarah was trying desperately to keep it together, a hardness about her eyes and mouth, not giving in to collapse just because help was at hand. ‘I kept waiting for it all to make sense. I mean, what he’s saying isn’t so mad, is it? At least, not all of it. Not with what you lot have been through. It’s the anger I can’t deal with. He doesn’t show that to Jessica – he doesn’t let himself do that – he just . . . keeps it for me. She’s in nursery now. He’s got so much worse today. I don’t want her seeing him like this. If you could just take him back to the nick and all talk to him, maybe you could . . . persuade him that’s not true?’

  He was sure she knew that was hopeless. She just didn’t want to think about what the next stage would be. ‘I think . . . we need to get some qualified medical people involved.’

  ‘I don’t want him dragged off and locked up in some . . .’ She was crying now, keeping going through it, so determined. Sefton put a hand on her shoulde
r, amazed at her. Sarah had gone through the trauma of having Quill die and come back, and now this, and was somehow still on her feet.

  ‘It won’t be like that. We’ll make sure it isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t want him on drugs either. I want him able to find his way back to that mind of his. This is all because of what he saw in Hell. He never told me everything. It’s still in him; he’s never going to get away from it.’

  Sefton was sure that was the case, especially the bit about Quill not telling her something. ‘They’ll start by talking to him. Maybe that’s all it’ll take. Do you want me to make the call? I mean, to Lofthouse, because I have no idea who else to contact, but she will.’

  Sarah visibly forced herself to nod. ‘Please.’

  Sefton started hitting buttons on his phone. ‘And then I’m going to stay put, OK? You can go for a walk, get a coffee or something. I’ll look after—’ There was a sudden noise from down the hallway, a door slamming, then fast footsteps down the stairs. Sefton ran out, saw Quill wasn’t there. He ran downstairs, out through the front door . . . just in time to see Quill’s car speeding off into the distance. He stood there for a moment, desperate, wanting to yell after him.

  Ross lay in the curve of the arm of the sleeping actor. What a strange thing to wake up and see a famous person on your pillow. She was steady, calm, set for now at an absence of all pain and stress, the best she could feel. He had been objectively lovely last night, very interested in satisfying her, but urgent about his own needs too. She had been trying, as they undressed each other, to ask him some of the questions her team had prepared, hoping his human body’s needs would overrule his desire to be careful.