Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (11 page)

Bates laughed, didn’t flinch. ‘What the fuck?’

Costain pointed at the bell. ‘Made in London.’

Here was something. A tiny reaction. ‘Fuck off.’

‘Oh, what, did you think the law didn’t know about all that stuff, that it was a whole world of freedom for shit like you? We see so many like you, son. We’re in that world; we
hear it all. We walk with the Rat King to our left.’ Now the boy
was
reacting, trying to hide it. He was looking at the bell, clearly not feeling it, but as if he’d suddenly
thought it might have some power that could be a threat to him. ‘Oh, there we go – the bell’s a bit more meaningful now, right? You want to call someone? You reckon anyone
official here knows what I’m talking about? You reckon your lawyer knows about it? The law on your side don’t know this stuff, but the law on
my
side does.’

The boy shut down, his face a mask. He was breathing hard, though. He hadn’t expected this level of knowledge on Costain’s part. He was still wondering what the bell might be there
for. His eyes kept flicking to it, and he was hunched up a little now, like . . . like he was personally afraid of it, like it was a drugs scanner. Costain carefully lifted up the bell and looked
at it, grinned, like he’d taken a reading off it, then looked the boy up and down. Bates stiffened, guilty of something.

‘So you see what this means? Your “alibi” means fuck all to me. I know you got out of here. I know you did those murders. Your blood’s at one crime scene; you’re
caught on bloody camera at the other. They showed you that video, the last lot that were through here, right? Only, they believed you when you said “just someone who looks like me”, and
I fucking don’t.’

Bates tried to front it out. ‘So what you do about that, blood? If lawyers don’t believe this stuff, how you going to—?’

He hadn’t finished his sentence before Costain had leaped out of his seat, grabbed him and slammed his head into the table. He hauled the boy’s head back and threw him off his seat
onto the ground. Costain moved quickly forwards, as if he was about to start kicking, and stopped to let the boy squirm out of the way, heave himself up against the wall, put a hand to his nose to
stem the flow of blood. Costain wasn’t actually prepared to take the violence any further, but the kid didn’t know that.

He yelled helplessly as Costain grabbed him again, the sound of someone who’d been beaten a lot. There was a tiny sound of Hell in that shout, but Costain didn’t let himself care. He
was doing this now just so he could get close enough to search him, to catch a tiny hint of something of the Sight about the boy’s clothes, to find—

There it was. Costain pushed the boy back so he hit the wall and put a finger between his eyes. ‘Take whatever that is out of your top pocket. Slowly.’

Bates hesitated, saw the look in Costain’s eye, then reached inside his uniform and produced a stick of chalk, roaring with Sighted power, power that had been weirdly and entirely muted by
being inside the kid’s clothes. It must be designed that way, thought Costain distantly, as he felt the extraordinary weight of the thing. He put his hand out and Bates reluctantly gave him
the chalk.

Costain expected it to be heavier than the slight weight that rested in his palm. Now he needed to know exactly what this was and if possible where it came from, because who knew whether or not
Ballard would dish, or even know? But, as in undercover work, to ask was to give away more than you got.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Clever. You figured you could just keep it on you, ’cos nobody’s going to care about this in a search, are they? Nobody’s going to nick it
either. Where did a nobody like you get hold of something like this?’

Bates had blood on his lip, his tongue flicking to it. He was sizing Costain up, wondering how to get the best deal. ‘That’ll cost you.’ He stepped back as Costain moved as if
to attack him again, and his voice got shrill. ‘I didn’t kill no one. If I tell you, you gonna move against him, finger him for this, not me. I used it, but I didn’t use it to go
and fucking kill no one. It was him. I can prove it.’

So the chalk
could
be used to get out of here, and to get in and out of the Holmes murder scene, in the same way Ballard had used it.

‘Who are you going on about?’ Costain asked.

‘This bloke. Remand prisoner, I think he was. He was in his own clothes, anyway. You know they go on about this shit in here. Some of them got their fucking religion, and some of them talk
about voodoo or whatever. But just a few of them, they really know. You get to be able to tell. They ain’t showy about it. You get to know them, and they’ll do tricks with it, like
passing out fags from an empty hand, and you can see them appear – it’s not like some fucking thing on telly.’

That was something Sefton was going to enjoy hearing about, that the culture of the Sight was known to prisoners. Costain wondered if that, like so much about their world, had been a development
of the last few years. ‘Yeah,’ he said, careful not to appear interested, ‘this bloke.’

‘He was one of them lot, was talking to all the ones like that. He was in here for a few days, told me that he could get me out if I liked. I was all, yeah, sure. He meant it, though. He
showed me how to use it, drew a door and walked through the wall of the shower block, did it again, came back, rubbed the mark off before anyone saw. He called it walkthrough.’

‘Does just what it says on the tin. No, don’t smile at me, son. He gave you it out of the goodness of his heart, did he?’

‘No, that’s what I mean by proof. Look.’ Bates rolled up his sleeve and showed Costain the tiniest of needle marks in the crook of his arm. ‘He said he wanted some of my
blood in return. I asked the boys who knew about this and they said, yeah, that’s the sort of deal they make – he wasn’t taking the piss. So I got some works and he took the blood
and that’s what he fucking used to set me up.’

‘What about the CCTV footage?’

‘Come on, man, he can walk through fucking walls! He could make that camera see whatever it wanted to, couldn’t he?’

Costain admitted to himself that Bates’s story was starting to sound plausible, though the boy’s idea that a pinprick in his arm was ‘proof’ was typical prisoner
bollocks. ‘Didn’t you stop to wonder what he was doing in here if he could get out? Bigger question: why are you still here?’

Bates looked incredulous. ‘Mate, if you can get out, this is a fucking hotel. Food and bed and your mates. I used the chalk to go out, come back. I thought that’s what that bloke was
doing too. I thought he had loads of these. I thought everyone was into it, or maybe they’d been in the last place this bloke was inside. I got out after lights out, had a smoke, got laid,
back for breakfast. Easy fucking life. But I never used it to kill nobody; this fucker did. He took that blood to set me up for it.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Dean Michael. No, being serious.’

That sounded a bit like a job name, which was going to make finding the prisoner on the jail’s records that much harder. Costain got the relevant dates from Bates, and a description:
black, maybe some Latin too; six foot or so; goatee; tattoo of something like a dragon down the side of his neck.

Bates looked worried again as Costain stood to leave. ‘Give me the chalk back.’

‘Like I’m going to do that.’

‘That’s my property! I’ll tell them you stole something from me.’ He sounded suddenly like the frightened child who was underneath everything else he was.

Costain was sure Bates knew as well as he did that the authorities here wouldn’t care what he’d taken, especially if the item in question turned out to be a piece of chalk. But what
else could the boy do? He was losing the key to his freedom. He took a sudden pace towards Costain, force being his next option. Costain faced him down and he finally turned away.

‘You better fucking catch him, then,’ said Albie Bates.

After Bates had been taken back into the main body of the jail, Costain went to the prison officer on duty at the end of the row of interview rooms and asked about what this
lot called ‘the establishment’ of the jail. It took him a couple of hours in the office to go through all the records on the C-NOMIS system, and thankfully he found a skilled operator
to help him. They kept a specific record of tattoos. No prisoner of the description Bates had given had been through here during the time Bates had been in Wandsworth.

Costain was sure the frightened child inside the no-hoper hadn’t been lying to him. Which left him with lots of loose ends to add to the ops board. He headed for the exit and tried not to
speed up as he did so.

As he walked the corridor back towards reception, he saw out of the corner of his eye the beaten-down figure of Wilde looking at him from a corner, caring for another lost child. He shook his
head and dismissed it.

He could have said something to Bates, couldn’t he, told him he could have his chalk back after the investigation? Of course not – that would be letting a dangerous prisoner escape,
despite the fact that it had made no difference to the world when he’d been coming and going. Still, Costain was always a stickler for the rules, right?

He got out, reached his car, found he was leaning heavily on it without opening the door. The building behind him mocked him with its weight and his complicity, its shadow lying on his back. It
wasn’t his job to redeem every prisoner who was a little shit because of the shit done to him and so on and so on back to the start of time, was it? He’d decided a while back to stop
living in fear of Hell, and he wasn’t planning to return to that, but again he thought about how he was going to bring these new points of information back to Ross, and how she would resent
it being him who brought them. How they could never, as it stood, do their job together in peace.

He wasn’t a saint. Maybe, though, he could do better about how he was, about the choices he made. He wanted desperately to do better for Ross. He took the chalk from his pocket and
wondered about using it to step out of this life and be someone different, someone good. He could just be that, couldn’t he? He could just decide to change. He put the chalk back in his
pocket, with a question not an answer in his mind, got into his car and drove too quickly out of the prison.

Mark Ballard had been incarcerated on remand in HM Prison Brixton, somewhere Sefton had never previously set foot. He did so now with a mixture of dread and interest, a mixture
in which, he had to admit, he’d started to find great satisfaction.

As he walked down the corridors that howled with history, he wished his colleagues could be where he was now, emotionally: explorers in a new world, not victims of it. He hoped
this case might still help get them there, no matter how much simpler it suddenly seemed to have got.

Ballard, as the team’s reading for Operation Dante had left them in no doubt, was a real piece of work. He made the Keel brothers, those hardcore entrepreneurs who’d forced their
peers to start dealing in cash, look like amateurs. He’d profited from the sudden absence of law in hidden London in the last few years, and he’d done it in secret, without showing off,
either aware that some new law would come along or anticipating it might. He wouldn’t be overawed by anything Sefton could present him with. So Sefton was planning on taking a different
approach.

Ballard was lounging in the interview-room chair, in that same expensive suit he’d worn for the bank job, which was now looking a little crumpled. He was sipping from a cup of coffee.
Sefton sat down opposite, aware he was a bloke who shopped at JD Sports. He opened his faithful holdall and, without ceremony, put onto the table, still in its evidence bag, the blade that had
killed Sherlock Holmes. ‘Mr Ballard,’ he said, ‘we’d like your professional opinion.’

‘Yes, I was expecting something like this.’ He glanced at the weapon, then looked back to Sefton. ‘I didn’t think that, having caught me, you’d let me go to waste.
Who are you people?’

‘We’re what replaced the Continuing Projects Team.’

‘Who?’

Sefton knew from previous dealings with the occult underworld in London that it had been known there was law out there, but they’d been seen more as a limiting force than a team with a
name and a base. Maybe that said something about how they’d operated. Way in the background, most likely. ‘We’re the new law for our sort of London.’

‘The new Shadow Police?’

So some of them at least had given this force in their lives a name. Sefton gave Ballard a few bare details about what they’d done so far. It was enough of the truth, he hoped, to gain
some trust. Ballard said immediately he hadn’t known anything about what had preceded them, only that everyone had said there was something, and that around the point where he’d started
to flex his muscles, everyone started saying it had gone away. ‘I wondered what the Mora Losley case was about. I was out of London for the Ripper, thank God. I only came back when I heard
the riots were over.’

‘People like us, we’re always going to come back, though, right?’

Ballard laughed, as if noting Sefton’s on-the-nose attempt at fellow feeling. ‘Yeah, but who’s this “we”, kemo sabe? What exactly are you offering me
here?’

‘I was thinking about the sort of deal sometimes offered to hackers. You become a white hat, consult for us, stop committing crimes. You get to live off your previous immoral earnings, no
questions asked.’

‘I don’t know, I was looking forward to the trial.’

‘Yeah, so were we. We got a narrative sorted before the raid that doesn’t include anything a jury would find impossible to believe.’

‘Whatever.’ Ballard’s expression remained placid. ‘You’d never keep me inside.’

‘Because of that stick of chalk of yours? We’d put a watch on what you took in and what got in to you, and, between you and me, if you did a runner, you’d find yourself with
some serious off-the-books shit on your tail.’ Not that Sefton had anything of the sort at the ready, but he was pretty sure the threat would seem credible.