by Paul Cornell
Flamstead was glaring at him, unmoved, as the rest of the crew either retreated, hoping for the security guards to catch up, or stepped forwards defensively. ‘The Bastard Scourge won’t work on me.’
‘Then try this!’ The man pulled a revolver from his coat and Cara suddenly thought it must be real. That he was going to kill them all. The man leaped forwards, grabbed Flamstead round the throat, the gun against his head, and started backing away. Now, to Cara’s amazement, he looked like an entirely different excellent actor playing Sherlock Holmes. ‘I will finish this!’ he called upwards, like he was calling out to God. ‘This surely must be enough! I will complete my side of the bargain!’ Cara watched, helpless, as he started to drag Flamstead away.
By the time Costain had brought the car skidding to a halt in the car park of the Shoreditch warehouse, Quill’s team had no more need of the shouted directions of Moriarty. The hostage situation was all over the news. Local uniforms had arrived outside, where stood a large group of employees, being pushed back behind a barrier. The media were also arriving from all directions.
‘Are you up to this?’ whispered Sefton as Quill got out of the car. The emphasis on Moriarty seemed to have done him some good, but Sefton would have preferred it if Quill had let them do this without him.
‘I have to be, don’t I?’ said Quill. ‘I have to try what you told me to do, only big time. Give me a sec to get into character.’ He took a deep breath, then pulled out his warrant card and marched through the crowd, the others following him. ‘All right, the cavalry’s here. Move your arses.’ A combination of dropping the names of Clarke and Lofthouse and sheer loudness got them to the centre of the developing operation, Quill being the highest-ranking officer so far at the scene. The top floors of the warehouse complex had been cleared. Holmes had taken Flamstead to the roof.
Quill established that his team would report in with the uniforms keeping watch on the stairwell, ask about the latest developments and then come back down to await the arrival of a senior officer assigned to manage the siege situation. When they got out of the lift at the floor with rooftop access, Quill went straight to the two uniforms waiting at the stairwell door and asked them the situation like he was that officer. Having heard there’d been no contact with the suspect in the last ten minutes, he nodded to them and walked straight up the stairwell. Sefton made himself adopt similar confidence and followed, Costain and Ross beside him. Worryingly, Moriarty, invisible to the police officers, came too. ‘I’ll try and keep him on his lead,’ muttered Quill. ‘He’s got form for trying to throw Holmes from a great height.’
They emerged onto the blustery rooftop, the Thames stretching in front of them, to find two small figures at the other side of the expanse of roof, air-conditioning ducts between them. They were against the far edge, just a low wall, with, behind it, a fall of five storeys to the street. Holmes, flickering between multiple appearances at an even greater rate, still had his gun, Flamstead remained in his grip.
‘Why hasn’t he killed him already?’ whispered Costain.
As they stepped closer, what Holmes was shouting offered one possible answer. ‘Is this good enough?’ he yelled at the sky. ‘Will I have my freedom?’
‘He knows who Flamstead really is,’ said Ross. ‘He must know this would be an enormous sacrifice.’ She was being entirely professional, showing no sign of having a connection to the hostage. Well, no sign apart from a helpless look back to Sefton as his gaze met hers.
‘Can he be killed?’ asked Sefton. ‘He said he got incarnated.’
‘Which I suppose means he’s mortal,’ said Ross. ‘Or at least some part of him is a person, or something. Anyway, do you fancy just letting him die?’
Sefton took that to be a rhetorical question. They made their way slowly towards the two figures and stopped when first Flamstead and then Holmes saw them.
‘If you try and stop me,’ called Holmes, ‘I shall shoot him. I have no choice.’
Quill took two paces forwards, his hands raised. ‘Yeah, but you’re not . . . you’re not sure, are you? We wouldn’t all be here otherwise. You trust that smiling bastard to hold up his end of a deal, do you?’ Quill was visibly not, now, the caricature of himself he’d forced himself to be to get up here. His voice and hands were shaking. He seemed almost as desperate as Holmes.
‘If he does not, then I shall have at least tried. My existence is necessary to redeem this infested, degenerate, fallen London. I must do whatever it takes to save it.’
‘You’ll be a little cog in the wheel of order,’ shouted Flamstead. ‘That smiling bastard is using you, first to create chaos in this world, then to clamp down on it when this world is his. I need this world to operate; I need a background of real life in London to play tricks and dramatic reversals against. I also need some free human beings around to be tricked. I do not need either his near future or his outcome, and yes, I can tell the truth to you because you are not yet, sir, a person!’
Holmes just looked to the sky again and shouted. ‘Is he enough? Will you be content with him?’
‘I think it’s a delaying tactic,’ said Costain, moving close enough for only Sefton to hear. ‘His better nature is still in there, and he’s finding reasons not to finish this now.’
‘We talked to John,’ Sefton called to Holmes, stepping forwards.
Holmes lowered his gaze and looked furiously at them. ‘I kept him away from this,’ he said. ‘He knows nothing.’
‘He’s horrified at what you’ve become, Sherlock. He’s sure this isn’t the real you. You’re afraid because you’ve been influenced in every direction, by everyone who’s got their own version. The stress of that, it’s warped you out of shape. You were willing to kill me, even though I’m a police officer. That isn’t Sherlock Holmes.’
‘You’re . . . a degenerate! Or enough of one for the rules I have set myself. I’m—’
Sefton didn’t want to hear his apology. ‘Except that a lot of people now see you like that too. A lot of people think you and John are a couple. And if that’s part of what you feel inside, if that’s part of what you hate—’
Holmes jerked his revolver in their direction and fired.
They dived for cover behind the nearest duct.
‘Would you please not try to out Sherlock Holmes?’ whispered Costain.
Quill stood up again, ignoring the others trying to pull him back. ‘It’s all part of the same thing,’ he called. ‘You feel you’re torn apart; you don’t know what to believe in; you don’t know who you are? Well, look at me!’
Before Sefton could stop him, Quill had walked right out of cover and had started marching towards Holmes and Flamstead.
‘That room full of meaningless clues you put together, that led me to Hell. Are you willing to send me back there, right now? Is this version of yourself you’re trying to live with able to do that?’
‘I also have no criminal record,’ yelled Flamstead, his chin shoved up by the gun barrel. ‘As a human being, I am utterly blameless. Don’t you see what you’re doing to your reputation, your good name? Do you want to be the man who killed Sherlock Holmes?’
‘I think maybe he does,’ whispered Sefton.
‘You’re looking to be a real person,’ called Quill. He stopped a few feet away from Holmes and Flamstead. ‘Haven’t you thought that maybe all this horrible confusion is what that’s like?’
Holmes looked desperately around him, looked back over the edge of the building.
‘He’s thinking about jumping,’ said Costain. ‘I’m not letting that fucker off that easily.’ He got up out of cover, leaving Moriarty as a shadow behind the vent, and went to stand beside Quill. Sefton felt Ross get up beside him as they marched over too. He couldn’t stop looking at the gun, at the small object that might suddenly be turned in Holmes’s hand and kill any of them.
Holmes looked desperately between them. ‘Everything has to mean something,’ he said, as if starting a lecture. ‘Logic states that the movem
ent of every particle may be deduced from the movement of every other, that were we able to observe every action—’
‘We’d still know fuck all,’ said Quill. He took a step forwards. Because he did, they all did. ‘When you wrote about the “ultimate crime” on the back of that photo, did you know what you were talking about?’
‘I wrote it merely to send you astray. I regret you have fallen so far. Perhaps when I wrote, I sensed there was a wrongness in the world, a fault in all our stars, and that informed my deception. I am not used to not knowing what occurs in my own depths, how it seems to surface in surprising ways.’
‘You’ve got to be careful with that,’ said Quill. ‘It’s easy to get deluded when London’s helping you along. Sometimes a cyclist is just a cyclist.’
‘Well,’ said Holmes, lowering the pistol from Flamstead’s chin, ‘I shall try to be myself at the end, at least. I may be in the wrong place, using the wrong methods, and I have chosen a blameless victim. But the latter I can remedy.’ He raised the gun once more and this time it was aimed at Costain. ‘Perhaps you will balance my scales.’
Sefton looked to Ross. Her expression was a mixture of fear and fury. He looked back to see Costain readying himself to leap forwards.
‘Hey,’ yelled Flamstead, as only an actor could.
But Holmes was not to be distracted. His finger squeezed the trigger.
‘I’m glad I got your happiness back,’ said Flamstead.
Before anyone could react, Flamstead grabbed Holmes. He wrestled for half a moment with that enormous steely strength. Then he flung their combined weight towards the wall.
The two men fell together.
Sherlock Holmes fell. The god who was in disguise as an actor fell with him. He was laughing at him.
In the few moments available to him, Holmes thought about the crime scene he’d created.
He wondered where all the ideas had come from. Some of it was to aid his deception, of course. There had been logic in the lettering on the blade, in the shaping of a spiral to make Quill think of a previous case. There had also been an attempt at logic, which had failed because of his innate character, in the choice of astronomical photos. Then there had been something he could not avoid, in the presence of the chalk outline. Once the ‘deed’ had been done, he had to leave, and, since he was becoming more solid all the time, there was the possibility the assistant curator might have seen him. The rest, though, the rest! He had casually pricked out the eyes of a woman many of those inside him had loved, as if she must not see what he was doing. He had taken snippets from his letters, books from his shelves, even melted his own head as if to signal that he was uncertain as to the contents of his mind. The symbol of his sovereign, ‘V.R.’, written in gunshot on his wall, he had drawn lines across, connecting those dots as if to spell out something else, as if hoping to live under a different power structure. He had arranged his own corpse to point towards two men who had always inspired him, like Michelangelo had arranged Adam pointing to God, without, Holmes had thought at the time, any idea in his head other than to confuse. However, those he pointed to were someone who wanted to emancipate every one of those enslaved, and someone who had died in the service of many, overwhelmed, but had become a hero in so dying. Were they both indicative of some greater purpose, the potential for which was as yet locked in the multitudes he contained?
Below him, Holmes glimpsed, in his last moment, the being with whom he had made his pact. He was looking up at him, smiling as always. He was anticipating where Holmes was going.
Holmes dedicated himself to his God(s) or none, in that moment. He also dedicated himself to a new mission. The ultimate crime. He must solve it. He was going to try. It would be some time before he saw his friend again. If he ever would. He had arranged for Watson to be freed into fiction once more. But the empty house would remain empty.
The laughter ceased and Holmes managed not to cry out in the moment.
Ross and the others elbowed their way through the crowd and found, lying on the kerb, Flamstead’s body. He was a smashed corpse, far beyond help. A little way back from Flamstead lay the body of Holmes. Every form he flickered through was crumpled, his limbs at awkward angles. The gun lay nearby.
‘What are we looking at?’ Sefton said, gazing down at the body. ‘What are they going to bury?’
‘Something that wasn’t enough of a human being,’ said Costain.
Quill put a hand over his eyes as officers started to run up, demanding his attention. The other two quickly yelled at them to back off and started to lead Quill away.
Ross squatted beside the wreck of Flamstead and tried to see the god. She hoped part of him was still alive somewhere, and that there had been only a moment of pain. She touched his face and felt a little better to have made that gesture, whatever it meant.
THIRTY-FIVE
James Quill went home. He got there just after Jessica had gone to bed, which was a relief, because he didn’t feel able to pretend to be normal, not even for her. Sarah met him calmly, desperate to say and do the right thing. He hated that desperation. He hated the anger that rose inside him in reaction to it. Laura stayed a little back from both of them, wanting to stay to support her sister, but also, Quill supposed, wondering if she should leave them to talk.
‘Thank you for coming after me,’ he said.
‘Get better,’ she said. ‘Then save us all. No pressure.’ She looked to Sarah, got a nod that it was OK, then kissed Quill on the cheek and left them to talk.
Quill went to sit at the kitchen table. Sarah put the kettle on and sat down opposite him. ‘I’m sorry—’ he began.
‘Quill, you’re not well. You don’t have to be sorry.’
He made himself not slap the table. Moriarty appeared beside him, and that eased the pressure, a little. ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve been thinking about you and about Jessica. I’m ill, and I can’t heal myself, and I can’t use London shit to do it. I need proper help.’
Sarah pulled from her back pocket a notepad and put it on the table. ‘Here are some numbers to call.’
He wanted to cry. He decided to let himself. He found he was already. ‘It’s going to take a long time.’
She went to hold him. He let her. ‘That’s OK.’
One bright October morning, Rebecca Lofthouse went across the road from her office at Gipsy Hill to watch as Lisa Ross unpinned the ops board. Quill was on compassionate leave, so marking the end of Operation Game was her job. Her injuries had begun to heal. Physiotherapy was giving her a new lease of life, at the same time as the Sight had put dread into her morning commute. Operation Game had been brought to a conclusion, but, uniquely in the annals of police work, they would have to wait to see if their prime suspect returned from the afterlife. With the death of Flamstead, media interest in Sherlock Holmes was at an all-time high. It would take months, maybe years, to fade. So there was the distinct possibility that Holmes might reappear once again as, in Sefton’s words, ‘a ghost with benefits’.
If so, would that ghost again attempt to become real? Sefton was looking in on 221B Baker Street on a daily basis. There was as yet no sign of either Holmes or Watson. The crew of the Lone Star had been extradited back to the US, and various other of Holmes’s paid henchmen had been uncovered and arrested. That was a process that was going to take a while to complete.
Lofthouse looked down the list of operational aims. They had, in the end, ensured the safety of the public, gathered evidence of offences, identified and traced the subjects involved, and destroyed them. They had not discovered a means to arrest those subjects.
Costain saw where she was looking. ‘About fifty-fifty,’ he said. ‘For us, that’s a result.’
Ross turned to glare at him. ‘Jimmy’s on the way to getting his sanity back,’ she said. ‘The boss here got her husband back. I got my happiness back and I beat Sherlock Holmes. And you’re back.’
‘Cheers,’ said Costain.
‘So,’ said Ross, ‘better tha
n fifty-fifty.’ She turned back to the board.
Lofthouse looked to Costain and saw he was smiling.
‘For people who are meant to be devastated by the revelation that we’re going to Hell,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re doing OK. We’ve now got an idea of our cultural history, and we’re starting to make inroads into community policing.’
‘Yeah,’ said Costain, ‘but the news about Hell is going to do the damage it’s supposed to. It’s like the Smiling Man’s given a case of depression to the whole occult community. Plus, there’s what he did to that underground reservoir. No more giving out the Sight.’
‘Also,’ said Lofthouse, ‘from what I saw happen to the Continuing Projects Team, Halloween may be a special day for the opposition, and we’ve got that coming up soon.’
‘I don’t know why,’ said Ross, taking the piece of cardboard with the name of the operation on it from the board and putting it into a drawer, ‘maybe it’s just getting my normal brain chemistry back, but . . . I can’t help but feel hope.’
When all the paperwork, such as it was, was finished, Lofthouse let them all go home, prior to taking a few days off.
In her car on the way back to Catford, in the early evening darkness, Ross thought about the challenge ahead of them. They had it from several sources now that every single Londoner being headed for Hell was a recent development. Lofthouse’s story of what had happened to the Continuing Projects Team on Halloween five years ago made Ross wonder if that had also been the moment that change had been made. It was certainly the moment everyone in the occult underworld looked back to as the big alteration to their world. Brent, the Other, Mother, or whatever she wanted to be called, had said that moment of change had been when Lucifer, whatever that God of London had been like, had been murdered and something else had taken his place. Was that something else the Smiling Man?
Was there anything four coppers and an intelligence analyst could do in the face of cosmic horrors like that?