Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘I think Flamstead . . . let’s call him the Trickster . . . got . . . involved with me in response to Holmes trying to distract me,’ said Ross. ‘He offered me a . . . shit, a very simple, calming relationship, in which he encouraged me, and pushed me towards the finish line of getting my happiness back a lot faster than Holmes wanted. He couldn’t tell me outright about Holmes. That seems to be against the rules for the God of Lies.’

  ‘For all the gods,’ added Sefton.

  ‘He was hoping I’d realize, and in the end I did. Still . . . caring about me . . .’ She looked to Costain. ‘That was initially part of Holmes’s perfect disguise. The Trickster played on it, though, made him get into a competition, made it an appeal to his sense of chivalry, made it all very Victorian and love-triangly. And deeply, deeply shit. When I saw you . . . the person who I thought was you . . . pacing outside my hotel room, that obsessed, that Victorian . . . I realized it wasn’t you.’

  Costain found he was smiling. ‘I didn’t find that story so difficult.’

  ‘You pissed me off, a few months back, by doing something you felt strongly about, against what I might have wanted. You took my choice away from me. But you didn’t try to manipulate me.’

  ‘Do you feel Flamstead also manipulated you?’ He asked the question gently.

  She paused for a moment, making eye contact with him, her tooth biting her bottom lip. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ she said finally.

  Sefton made an ahem noise. Moving on. ‘It’s not just Flamstead who’s limited by his nature,’ he said. ‘Fake Costain—’

  ‘Couldn’t we just call him Holmes?’ said Costain.

  ‘He told me that Ross was the sun that went round his earth. I’m sure he wanted to set up those astronomical photos to point to the asteroid called Moriarty, but because it’s emphasized in the books that Holmes knows nothing about astronomy, because none of his versions do, he would never have been able to get that right.’

  ‘You thought I didn’t know that about the sun?’ said Costain.

  ‘I thought . . . you’d stumbled over a romantic turn of phrase.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Why,’ said Quill, speaking up again, his hand shaking as he visibly tried to hold on to his point, ‘is Sherlock Holmes killing people? What’s the motive?’

  Ross wrote ‘motive’ on the board and attached it to Holmes. They looked at it for a while.

  ‘What did Fake Costain tell you?’ said Costain. ‘He’d be as good an undercover as I was, so he wouldn’t have asked that many questions, unless he had an in-character reason to do so, but what could you tell about what he wanted?’

  ‘He said,’ said Ross, ‘that the murders might continue after they’d run out of works by Conan Doyle.’

  ‘So that’s a lie, then,’ said Costain, remembering occasions as an undercover when he’d planted just that sort of misdirection. ‘He’s looking at the end of the Conan Doyle stories as a finishing line.’

  ‘Or . . .’ said Ross, ‘there’s another obvious end point. Assuming he tries for another victim near Brook Street, then there’s the murder in “The Greek Interpreter”, nobody dies in “The Naval Treaty”, so that’s the last one before Holmes is “killed” and brought back to life in “The Empty House”.’

  ‘It could be either,’ said Quill. ‘If this was a real person . . .’ He ran a hand down his face and had to pause to control his breathing. ‘We’d say he was a bit like me, wouldn’t we? That he’d had an episode of some kind, changed his character. ’Cos Sherlock Holmes, what does he stand for, above all else? Upholding the law.’

  ‘In the books,’ said Sefton, ‘he often lets people off, if he thinks they deserve it. But, yeah, Jimmy, he doesn’t go the other way.’

  Ross moved her finger quickly down the list of victims. ‘Wait a sec. We noted how most of these had criminal records, except . . . Lassiter, and you two.’

  ‘No amount of research could tell him I was a bit dodgy,’ said Costain. ‘At first, when I was his prisoner, Holmes spoke very politely to me, like this was an awful duty he didn’t enjoy going through with. Then he suddenly went all cold. It was like he learned about me.’

  Sefton looked awkward. ‘I think I said something about that when I talked to Fake Costain on the train.’

  ‘Oh, ta for that. Until then, I reckon he was planning to let me go.’

  ‘So Holmes prefers to kill criminals,’ said Ross. ‘But it was him trying to off Sefton that knocked us off this train of thought in the first place.’

  ‘Victorian values!’ said Sefton, a sudden realization. ‘Oh, you homophobic shit, Sherlock.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ said Costain. ‘That was a crime back in Oscar Wilde’s day, and of those inner Sherlocks, most of them are Victorian.’

  ‘What about Lassiter?’ Ross looked back to the man’s records on the PC. ‘His disability was chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that definitely wasn’t recognized in Holmes’s day. Making him a malingerer and a scoundrel, someone taking money away from the deserving poor.’ She ran a line between all the victims and wrote the word ‘criminal’ beside it. ‘We have a new limiting factor. He tries for the location and circumstances of the original deaths, he needs victims who played Sherlock Holmes, and he insists, in his broad definition of the term, on them being criminals.’

  ‘We still don’t know why,’ said Quill.

  ‘Then now we should summon Watson,’ said Sefton, ‘and ask.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Sefton checked the many Sherlockian blogs and message boards, and found that everywhere now the outrage was the same. Although, to his surprise, a significant majority of fans wanted at least one of the three current Watsons to die, a vast number of those following Holmes were horrified and furious. There were petitions. There were calls for the shows’ runners to be hunted down and murdered. The calls for calm from more moderate sections of the fandom had only started a new cycle of horror and recrimination.

  Many of the fans had already worked out, and this surprised him too, that the three production offices were behind what had been designed to be seen as leaks. That made them even more angry. ‘I think,’ he said, standing up from the wheezing office PC, ‘we’re on. Last time I tried this, I used a bit of an . . .’ He decided he didn’t want to mention the details. ‘Easy sacrifice. This time’ – he looked around the group. He’d already decided that Costain, Quill and Ross had suffered enough – ‘it’s got to be something more serious, and it’ll be me who does it.’

  Costain watched as Sefton used chalk on the floor of the Portakabin to produce a new map of the boroughs of London, with certain features emphasized. Had Sefton, he wondered, been pleased at him seemingly reaching out to him on that train journey? Holmes, with his perfect disguise, had obviously thought that wouldn’t seem outlandish. The moment of togetherness he’d felt with the rest of his team was being undermined by something, though, something he noted whenever Ross or Sefton looked at Quill. Finally, he squatted down beside Sefton and whispered. ‘Kev,’ he said, ‘you two know what’s getting to Jimmy, don’t you?’

  Sefton stopped what he was doing. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘It’s something huge, right? Tell me. I’m back. I can handle it.’

  Sefton hesitated only for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘it’s about Hell.’

  Lofthouse stood outside her house. She had emerged, an hour ago, at the top of a circular stairwell on a disused platform of what had turned out to be Mornington Crescent Underground station. She’d had to throw herself, many times, against a wooden shutter before it had broken, and had finally stumbled back into a corridor full of commuters who didn’t look twice at this wreck of a woman who smelt of shit. The force of what the Sight had revealed all around her had staggered her, had become more and more overwhelming as she’d headed for the surface.

  She’d taken her warrant card from her bra and waved it to get her past the turnstiles. She’d managed to stumble out of the station and had ha
d to wave her card again at the taxi rank to make a driver listen to her. She had slept all the way home, despite there being no angle at which she wasn’t in pain. The psychedelic nightmare outside seemed muffled by the confines of the taxi.

  The door opened. Out stepped Peter, looking at first puzzled at her appearance, then shocked. He opened his mouth to ask some awkward questions, but before he could do so, she was in his arms. The Smiling Man, it seemed, when it had ceased to be necessary, had stopped his cruelty. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve rather missed you.’

  Costain was glad to know the truth. The other two had watched as Sefton had told him. Then he’d gone straight over to Quill and just bloody held him, and Jimmy had held him back. They were that far gone now. Then he’d stepped back. ‘We’ll find a way to change things, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sefton and Ross had nodded at once.

  ‘They’re saying we’ll sort it,’ said Quill, still askew, his gaze searching Costain’s face. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘One step at a time,’ said Sefton, taking a scalpel from his holdall. ‘Starting with the job in hand. OK?’ They all agreed. ‘This is from a very London teaching hospital. So.’ He went to his map and cut his thumb, then squeezed a dot of blood onto the major points he’d scrawled on the floor. ‘The way this works,’ he said, sounding like somebody doing nothing more dangerous than building a train set, ‘is that the shape will demand the blood it needs, so I can start small and then, well, it might get serious.’

  ‘Kev—’ began Quill.

  ‘This is the least I can do. So let me handle my speciality, OK? OK.’

  They let him. He finished the map. He got them to each stand at one of the main points of the compass; then he started to call to the points in between, listing London locations, many of them completely obscure to Costain.

  As Costain watched, the map started to become alive, to take on aspects of London itself, to bloom with greenery and moving people. Sefton started to call to the streets around Baker Street; then he listed the buildings of Baker Street itself, then 221B; then, his voice sounding more demanding, he called out for Dr John H. Watson. He called him in the name of all the online communities he’d got thinking about the man, in the name of some of the most outrageous commentators, who in their horrible passion had demanded real suffering for a fictional character. He named them all. He offered his own blood aloud and then winced as some more of it was obviously taken into the map. They had to stay where they were, Costain realized, too far from him to help.

  Sefton made a final effort. ‘I break the bonds that hold you, which were inexpertly made, made by device, when here I call by blood.’ He yelled as the map bloomed once again, and then, suddenly, a figure stood on the space where Baker Street was drawn.

  He was flickering, like Holmes had been, between so many actors and drawings, but this image seemed to have a little more stability than the one of Holmes. There was so often a moustache that this image had one, and the face stayed humane and friendly. ‘My friends . . .’ he said, and his voice was similarly odd, modulated across so many different accents at once, ‘for I may, I think, call you that, have you saved me from imprisonment?’

  ‘I don’t think we can do that permanently,’ said Sefton, sounding like he knew he couldn’t keep this going for very long. ‘We’re police officers. Please, quickly, tell us all you can.’

  The figure looked around the room. ‘You will have to forgive me. I am not used to discourse with . . . anyone, entirely. My friend Sherlock Holmes and I have lived in a sort of . . . I suppose you would call it a dream world, a vague existence without the detail and volition I experience in this, what I can only imagine must be the . . . real world? I gather we were . . . it taxes the mind even to say it . . . fictions? This we never imagined.’

  ‘When did that change?’ asked Ross.

  ‘A few short weeks ago. I still do not have a clear idea of time. There came a moment of . . . awakening, when the world around us suddenly gained undreamed-of clarity and solidity, and my thoughts were suddenly not those of a fever but . . . my own, jumbled and unexamined as they are. Every time one seeks to consider one’s own . . . being, one finds such a muddle now, as if the exterior has been clarified to exactly the same extent that the interior has . . . become confused.’ His expression was anguished, though, with clear effort, he was keeping his voice steady. ‘Holmes quickly understood our situation, pointed out many extraordinary differences between this new world outside our window and the one we had inhabited. He made forays downstairs, then outside. He solved some cases, extraordinary as it may sound, at a distance, simply through his reading. He provided the police, anonymously, with solutions to several major crimes.’

  ‘No wonder the Met’s been doing so well lately,’ said Ross.

  ‘Holmes also realized something else, however. To his vast surprise, he discovered, in his close examination of the modern city into which he had awoken, the existence of the supernatural. In my memory, he usually has no truck with theories of that sort, although, sometimes I feel that . . . Forgive me, my memories of him are confused also. It took time for him to convince me of it, but convince me he did. He read so much, so fast. He used the devices in the office downstairs to move through page after page of information, searching and cross-referencing, making conclusions at a lightning pace. He communicated with many in distant parts; he set up deals using monies that he found he had at his disposal. He became the spider at the centre of a web of . . . I feared for him when he spoke one night of the sort of people he was employing. He began studying how to make best use of what he discovered about London. He brought to our rooms objects and books. He . . . experimented. Awful sacrifices. Animals taken from the street. This was against everything he stood for or believed in. This was not him. I begged him to stop. I used every iota of moral certainty that I had to tell him this was wrong. When he wanted to go further, I even threatened him with force. He finally gave way and ceased.’

  ‘You’re his conscience,’ whispered Quill. ‘No wonder he had to lock you up.’

  ‘He finally made . . . an individual . . . appear in his study. I think, though I hesitate to say it, this individual must have been . . . that being which our culture and religion has always known as Satan.’

  ‘Description?’ Ross now had her notebooks out and was writing at speed.

  ‘A man in his mid-thirties, thinning hair, dressed in what we would regard as too shabby a style for business but which seems to be the way in this world, always with this same foolish grin on his face. Yet I knew, in my bones, this was the evil one himself.’

  ‘We learned at the conference that he’s not Satan,’ said Ross. ‘He’s just a very naughty boy.’

  Watson looked puzzled at her. ‘In any case, they had a conversation to which I was not privy. Upon his departure, Holmes shook the man’s hand. Which I saw with great trepidation. After the man had gone, my friend would not talk to me, or look me in the eye. He went out and returned with a strange dagger, about which he would say nothing. He ordered a parcel to be delivered downstairs, astronomical charts and photos, about which he consulted me, though I knew too little to advise him.’

  ‘Even with the Internet,’ said Costain, ‘Holmes can’t learn anything about astronomy.’

  ‘Once it had arrived, he began, in the space of one night, a weird campaign against the fittings of his study, changing many things in odd and startling ways. He asked me to trust him, said all would be well when he had completed his bargain, that no innocents would be harmed, and many more saved with . . . what would come to pass.’ Watson visibly hesitated.

  ‘What would come to pass?’ asked Quill.

  ‘When we would both find ourselves “whole and real forever”. Those were his very words. When we would be no longer subject to the whims of the public imagination and could save this rotten new London from the crime and disorder it seemed to revel in. I told him none of this meant anything to me, that I did not believe his caveats. He tol
d me he would see me as flesh and blood in the empty house. Whatever that means.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Ross, ‘that’s what he’s doing. That’s the motive. He wants to become a real boy.’

  ‘Holmes and Watson were made solid, made real, by “Holmesmania”,’ whispered Sefton. ‘By those three productions all happening at once, by so many people being interested. London’s got to a point where its memory can do that.’

  ‘But Holmes wants to go further,’ said Costain. ‘He’s deduced that when the furore dies down, he’ll go back to being a ghost, and he can’t have that.’

  ‘So he’s made a deal with the Smiling Man,’ said Quill. ‘This series of ritual murders, a media sensation to keep London scared, to keep it moving in the direction he wants, like with Losley and the Ripper. In return Holmes gets continuing real life.’

  ‘And he’s trying to source it ethically,’ finished Ross.

  ‘He told me,’ continued Watson, ‘he would summon me again when he had “done what he had to do”. He produced an object that he had on his person. I didn’t see much of it in that moment. He flung me, with all the skill of a master of bartitsu, and the great strength he sometimes displays, backwards. I had a moment to glimpse that I was being flung not to the floor but through some sort of hole. A hole in mid-air. I landed in an empty version of our rooms, with a view outside of a London that, as I discovered in the next few days, was empty of all my fellow beings. I felt the pull, on one occasion, of something in the air, and assumed it was him summoning me home, but that sensation ceased.’

  ‘That was me,’ said Sefton. ‘Best not get into the details.’

  ‘The next thing I have to report is you bringing me here now. I thank my saviour that you are the police, and that you know enough that you may prevent my friend from undertaking whatever terrible course of action he has planned.’