Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (17 page)

He got out of the car and stared into the dark, his breath billowing around him. He took a step towards the darkness on the corner, then waited, hoping to hear a reaction. ‘Hello?’
he called. No response. He heard a noise, a definite noise, and was suddenly running, was at the corner in seconds, saw a change in the shadow as he reached it . . . and found Mrs Epton putting out
her recycling.

‘Evening,’ he said, breathing a bit too hard. ‘Did you see anyone else pass by, in just this last minute or so?’

Mrs Epton, looking nervous at why he was asking, said she hadn’t, and then he asked again if she was certain, and now he felt sure that she was looking nervous because of him.

He stayed outside for a while, wondering if the feeling of being watched would come back. It didn’t, and he finally went inside. Sarah would already be in bed and asleep,
and he could hear Jessica snoring. He took out his phone, and making himself not think twice, he called Laura. She’d probably be awake. Indeed, she answered after two rings. ‘What can I
do for you at this time of night, James?’ Her voice, to him, always sounded deliberately soft, like she was consciously trying to cut out the masculine sounds. That apparent carefulness had
always charmed him. It was how priests should sound, how he wanted everyone to sound.

He made himself sound calm in return. ‘Just something I wanted to have a chat with you about. Listen, are you sure you want to move to London?’

‘Well, yeah. I’ve got interviews lined up. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s just . . . things aren’t great here these days.’

‘I’m a big girl.’ Indeed, he’d seen her get abuse on the street that had amazed him. She insisted on going to football and walking wherever she wanted to, which resulted
in repeated verbal abuse, and on some occasions physical attacks too. She lived a life the harshness of which would be difficult to get most people to believe. What could he say to her to put her
off London?

‘I . . . can’t tell you why, but I’m serious. There’s an enormous threat to . . . I’m calling people I, you know, people I care about.’

‘Christ, is it a nuclear bomb or something? I’m not moving for weeks. It’s not like . . . What about Sarah and Jess?’

‘I . . . I haven’t told them.’

‘You’ve had a warning about some sort of terrorist threat and . . . ?!’

‘No. Nothing like that. They’re not in danger.’ If only that was true. ‘This is a problem purely for . . .’

‘For people like me?’

This had all gone too fast for him to do anything but react, but OK, that would do. ‘Yeah.’

There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment. Then she spoke again. ‘You’re telling me there’s been some sort of serious long-term threat made against
transsexuals in London?’

Quill found that he couldn’t lie about the job. He really should have written down what he was going to say. ‘Well, no . . .’

‘I can keep your name out of it, but if there’s been a threat, there are people I need to tell, to make the community aware of what’s going on. Why haven’t we been told
officially? Are they even planning to do that? Who are we talking about? Some extreme religious group?’

What could he say? There was nothing he could say. He had to say something. ‘It’s nothing anyone in authority knows about. It’s probably just me being paranoid.’

‘James, please!’

He felt as if the muscles down the back of his neck had locked. He wanted to tell her everything, but that would mean telling her more than he’d told Sarah. That would mean telling
Sarah.

After a moment’s silence, she took pity on him. ‘Listen, when I come down, you’re going to tell me everything about this, all right?’

‘Could you . . . could you please not come down?’ He didn’t know how long a stay would be counted as ‘living in London’.

There was a long silence now. Quill recognized it. He was about to say something again, perhaps to apologize, when she spoke up once more, and now she was extremely calm and precise.
‘Don’t tell me to be a coward, OK? Not when you won’t tell me what the threat is. I live with this every day.’

He tried to back down, to say it was probably nothing. She tried a couple more times to get him to tell her what was going on. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, finally. ‘I mean, is
there anything . . . wrong?’
With you
, she could have added. No, that was unfair.

‘Of course not. Look, it’s late . . .’ He tried to downplay it now, made jokes, tried to talk about the football. She was having none of it. He eventually broke down and
angrily, desperately, asked her to not say anything about this conversation to Sarah. Laura, now completely lost and very worried, agreed, but like she was going to keep to that.

Quill finally put the phone down and found he was shaking. He wanted to do what someone in the movies did now: drink; smash something; punch the wall and not go immediately to casualty. He was
confined by the rules of the world only he knew about, which he didn’t fully understand. He sat down, not wanting to go upstairs, thinking of Hell, back in it.

Lofthouse had kept the papers and the gun in her briefcase at home, and had not so much as looked at them, not so much as moved the case. When she’d got into her office
at the Hill on the first morning of Quill’s team’s planning for the
Lone Star
raid, she first made herself check in about the progress of current investigations. She’d
discovered, among other things, that the walls of the nick that had been dusted for prints had found only a few, all identified as being from police officers and suspects who’d been in those
corridors. That had been a long shot in any case. Someone who’d planned so meticulously to have Quill’s team bring a victim to where they needed to be would surely have taken the
trouble to wear gloves. Finally, she told her assistant she wasn’t to see anyone or take any calls, and had opened her briefcase and inspected what she’d found.

The gun was indeed a functional shotgun, double-barrelled, in the ‘over and under’ fashion, one barrel atop the other. Lofthouse came from a farming family and knew a little about
such weapons. The top barrel was inscribed ‘J. Purdey and Sons, London’ in gold inlay. That was a firm she had actually heard of, which, this being presumably an item from Quill’s
side of the curtain, came as a bit of a surprise. The gun had been kept in great condition. The metal of the barrels was patterned, a very fine finish like the wings of a butterfly. It didn’t
look to be a matter of engraving, but something about the metal itself. Lofthouse wished she could look it up on the Internet, but her every keystroke would be looked at and thought about. A very
London gun, certainly, but was that all there was to it? She checked the chambers and found that each was loaded. Oh, terrific, she’d kept a bloody loaded shotgun in her briefcase as
she’d jolted along.

Carefully, she removed the cartridges. Now, these looked like nothing she’d ever seen before. They seemed to be made of soft white paper, with something that made a shaking noise inside, a
metal cap on one end that bore no inscription. Could these even work in a shotgun? With no supply of ammunition, unless she wanted to covertly buy some normal cartridges, two shots were all she
had. So practice was out of the question. Whatever was in these was designed to take down . . . something. There was no way she was going to be able to find out what.

She put the shotgun back in the drawer, the cartridges beside it, and turned her attention to the papers. She wished she’d had more time in the apartment. She was sure she’d have
found many other useful things. Instead, she had the contents of one locked drawer, which was what the key had regarded as the most important thing, and the safe.

The papers had clearly been kept folded for many years – they unfolded with reluctance, and the folds left white lines across what was revealed. It was a diagram, drawn in ink by a brush,
wavy lines going across the page, then splitting, like the branches of a tree, until several of them, further down the page, led to a big circle. It reminded her distantly of a calligraphy
exercise, but there was no writing of any kind. Lofthouse held the page up to the light to see any sign of invisible ink, but there was none. This was what the key had regarded as most significant,
but she had no idea, as with the gun, what the piece of paper was for, what it might mean. Apart, that was, from one immediate and obvious deduction. ‘You’re a map,’ she said out
loud. ‘But to what?’

The morning after the
Lone Star
raid, Ross got into the Portakabin before anyone else. Listening to the radio on the way in had been an education in how the media
adjusted a narrative. They were now reporting the ‘Sherlock murders’ as if they never had been the ‘
Study in Scarlet
murders’. Although the news organizations had
made the connection that Erik Gullister had played Holmes, they didn’t yet know that about the other victims. Also, they seemed to think the suspects in custody now were fancied for the
earlier murders too, a perception that would probably vanish before lunchtime, when it became clear they hadn’t been in the UK at the time. Duleep’s family had confirmed he had indeed
once played Sherlock Holmes in a local amateur dramatic production.

The money trail to the company called Missing Room had gone cold in a Swiss bank. To buy and rename a ship took a lot of money, but it had already become clear that whoever they were playing
against had power in the material world. They’d put together a team that had included the striking individual who had killed Bates, the mercenaries on the ship and Dean Michael, if that was
his real name. Who knew how many others?

She was about to start rebuilding the ops board when she heard a sound behind her. Costain had entered. He still looked bruised about the face. Normally these days he’d come in late, to
make sure they weren’t alone. Oh God, was he going to try some new tactic to get past her guard?

‘I’m going to put myself at your service,’ he said, without even a good morning. ‘We could try to put it all right.’

‘If you mean you and me—’

‘No, I mean what’s most wrong with your life.’

‘You’re talking about helping me get back my future happiness?’

He nodded.

‘Yeah, OK, listen, I’m not some sort of prize, where you work hard on my behalf and then earn the right to shag me.’

Costain’s expression remained surprisingly stoic. ‘What happened to me down there . . .’ He meant inside the ship. ‘They
hated
me, Lisa. There was nothing more to
them than that. All I could think about while they were on me . . . I wanted to come back out into the light and . . . I just want to come back into the light, OK?’

It was entirely possible that he might come up with some useful idea about how to get her happiness back, considering all the dodgy contacts he had. That usefulness would still be there even if
he couldn’t live up to his fine sentiments, which was obviously going to turn out to be the case. The next auction of occult London items, when those in the know traditionally gathered to bid
cash or barter for objects of power, was on 23 September, the autumn equinox. The auction house now owned Ross’s future happiness. They had taken it from her in the form of a liquid and
presumably bottled it. She’d sold it to them in return for a chance to get her dad out of Hell. Costain had fucked that up, but Ross had always been planning on going to the next auction, to
see if the house was immediately going to sell it on. She’d imagined pleading with whoever bought it, or following them, grabbing it from them . . . but those had been useless dreams. With
Costain on her side, she’d have more force to put towards the second course of action, more guile to put towards the first. But still . . .

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Sefton entered and pointed at Costain. He looked like he’d just been struck by a terrifying idea. ‘Have you,’ he said, ‘ever played Sherlock Holmes?’

‘What?’

‘Oh,’ said Ross, realizing. She should have thought of this. ‘He’s wondering if what happened to you on the boat was attempted murder.’

‘But . . . were there two deaths in that story? Or is the next murder in the stories on the river too?’

‘No to both,’ said Ross. ‘The attack on you was an anomaly. I thought you were reading ahead?’

Costain looked awkward. ‘Got a bit bored with it,’ he said.

‘I’m not saying that Klan members wouldn’t just do that for fun,’ said Sefton.

‘But they did go out of their way,’ agreed Costain. ‘No, I’ve never played Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t the sort for school plays.’

They all looked round at the sound of Quill arriving. He looked pale, like he hadn’t slept. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘today, I think one of you better lead, because I am just .
. .’ He looked as if he was appealing to them to say he was unfit for work, to let him off the hook.

They all went to him. ‘Jimmy,’ said Ross, ‘please, just tell us?’

He shrugged off their expressions of concern, shook his head, sat down. ‘Could one of you, please . . . ?’

‘All right,’ said Costain. ‘You get yourself together, Jimmy. We’re here for you. Next move: we interview the
Lone Star
crew.’

They actually had a one-way mirror at Wapping High Street nick, like in American cop shows. Ross and Quill watched from the next room as Sefton and Costain played good cop and
bad cop. Ross had been worried about Costain conducting the interview, but he stayed within the bounds of the law, satisfied, it seemed, to have got a reaction out of the men when he walked in.
They hadn’t expected their victim. That had been just about their only reaction, though.

‘I should go in there,’ said Quill. ‘I’d fucking show them.’

‘No, sir,’ said Ross, and after a glare, he backed down. The idea that the mercenaries had powerful connections, plus the previous death in custody, had been enough to sell the Met
mainstream on the policy of keeping them in maximum security between interviews, guarded round the clock. It was the only way Ross could think of of guarding against rescue from someone who could
walk through walls.