Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (20 page)

He surfaced at Bond Street and walked up the well-heeled streets of apartments and offices until he got to Manchester Square, where he took a right. Google Maps took him to the corner of Welbeck
Street and Bentinck Street. It was dark now, with lights on in some of the apartments, the air filled with the noise of cars and the occasional burst of music from them. He stayed on the corner,
almost willing it to happen, a ghost van with two horses to roar down Welbeck Street and off down Bentinck, to escape into the night via Marylebone Lane. He waited some more. Nothing. It started to
rain. Quill finally, grudgingly, turned right and headed down Welbeck Street, then turned a couple more corners and found Vere Street.

He stood between a Pret a Manger and a Debenhams, both lit and warm. Here he was hoping to be attacked, for a brick to fall from a high roof, aimed at his head. Again, he waited. Again, nothing.
He closed his eyes. Perhaps the alternative to what he was feeling was to go to a pub, to let go and really fucking enjoy himself, to lose himself in doing all the things he enjoyed so that when
death did finally come, and Hell with it, at least he could say he’d lived fully first. Wouldn’t that involve sex too? He couldn’t think about that away from Sarah. He
didn’t want to go to Hell and deserve it. If he got pissed, he ran the risk of telling her the truth when he got home. He realized he was thinking about his own situation again. Nothing had
happened. Damn it. He’d been so sure. He started to move in the general direction of Bond Street.

There was a sudden shout that sounded more like a snarl and Quill’s eyes snapped open as he threw himself backwards, instinctively, and just had time to see a cyclist all in black racing
away from him. Was that some sort of cosh in his hand? If it was, it must have missed Quill’s head by inches. The man turned the corner.

‘Hoi!’ Quill shouted, and sprinted after him, but by the time he’d got there, the cyclist had already vanished into the Oxford Street traffic. ‘Oh, I’ve got you
now,’ said Quill, panting as he leaned on the corner. He felt himself shaking and willed it to stop. Finally, there was something he could do. Finally, he had something to hold on to.

Sefton spent the next two days in Stoke d’Abernon going door to door with Costain, getting a lot of nice conversations, but also sometimes suspicious encounters on the
doorstep. Sometimes people failed to come to the door at all, when the twitching of the curtains clearly indicated there was someone at home. At one point, as they were leaving a particularly
manicured close, a uniform showed up and enquired what they were doing there. Sefton hung back and watched Costain politely explain their mission here, which resulted in the lid saying,
‘Yeah, whatever. Let’s just keep it moving along, OK?’

Sefton nearly got out his warrant card and asked who this youth’s boss was, but then he noted Costain’s warning glance. They didn’t want the local nick gossiping about the
big-time London undercovers in town, that obviously something tasty was going down. They moved on.

In the evenings, they worked the pubs. They met a lot of genuine and pleasant people. Their skill set was all about getting folk to open up. They heard a couple of anecdotes about friends of
friends who’d played Sherlock Holmes, but nobody had played him themselves. In a small town like this, the numbers who had must be tiny, approaching zero. Sefton started to wonder if they
were actually seeking a specific individual, a target their opponents might already have in mind.

Someone mentioned the nearby Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, and Sefton and Costain shared a sudden moment of excitement about making the connection between Holmes and the famous violinist, but
a visit to the school the next day revealed that none of the current students had done anything like stand in for Holmes’s hands on television. The administrator got scared of the warrant
cards they showed and their refusal to reveal the purpose behind their questions and clearly started wondering if his school was harbouring the ‘Sherlock Holmes killer’. It took a long
time to talk him down and make absolutely sure there were no potential victims on the premises. Despite the administrator’s promises of secrecy, that looked like gossip waiting to happen.
Ross reported that the handful of messages left on the office answerphone hadn’t yet yielded anyone who actually lived in Stoke, just people from outside who’d been contacted by mates
who’d read the leaflet.

They decided the next day would go more quickly if they split up. Sefton went to a small newsagent’s, which looked rather out of place on its leafy corner and which kept a pristine red
postbox outside, and checked out that day’s local newspaper. If Ross couldn’t find anyone in this town who’d played Sherlock Holmes, then their opponents might also be struggling,
and might have had to abandon the Internet for local measures such as small ads. Nothing in those today. There also wasn’t anything in the cards in the window of the shop.

It was while he was checking those that Sefton heard a voice calling to him and turned to see an old lady coming out of the shop, a newspaper under her arm. She had the look about her of someone
who did good works, a satchel over her shoulder, a cardigan with lots of pockets and flat, sturdy shoes.

‘Excuse me, but you’re one of the two young men, aren’t you? Sherlock Holmes? Those?’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, I hope you’re willing to believe something that sounds very strange.’

Sefton grinned. ‘Ma’am, you’ve come to the right people.’

The woman, who said she didn’t want to give her name, because ‘Enough people around here think I’m batty already’, led him to a square of parkland near
a garden centre. ‘I always get up early,’ she said, ‘with the lark. One of the advantages of getting old. I take a walk if the weather’s all right. Still safe to do so round
here. About a week ago – no, you’ll want me to be precise, won’t you, because you’re a policeman? Don’t look so shocked. I know people at the Yehudi. They’ve
been talking about nothing else . . . Yes, it was last Wednesday, about six, just getting light, anyway. I was doing my usual circular walk, from my house to that newsagent, and as I came to the
edge of the trees here, well, there he was. Sherlock Holmes, standing stock-still in the middle of the park. By the slides.’

‘How did you know it was Sherlock Holmes?’

She looked at him like he was mad. ‘He was wearing a deerstalker and a little cape.’

‘Did you see his face?’ Sefton, not really believing what he was hearing, had got out his special notebook.

‘He was quite far away. I got an impression of . . . I was going to say he had a long nose, but I think perhaps now I’m just saying what he
ought
to look like, if you see what
I mean.’

Sefton’s mind was racing. Was this an encounter with the ‘ghost’ of Holmes
after
he’d been ‘killed’? Had he come back? Or would that be the ghost of
the ghost? These days, he had to wrap his brain around thoughts as mad as that. Or was this just someone pretending to be Holmes? If so, here was a potential victim. Perhaps this guy was already
lying dead in bed somewhere in this town, victim of a snakebite, his body as yet unfound. Or perhaps this was all just an old lady seeing things, or making something up.

‘Why did you say this was very strange?’

‘You mean, apart from meeting some random loony dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a park in the first light of dawn? It was what he did next. He started to . . . Well, it wasn’t
exactly a dance. He saw I’d stopped and was watching him, and he started making these gestures with his arms. Very specific. He would raise his arms in a particular way, then lower them, then
walk a couple of paces, then do a different shape. He did it over and over, the same patterns every time. He was like something out of
Monty Python
. When he started, I was going to call out
to him and ask what he was doing, but then I got a bit scared, and wondered if I walked off, was he going to follow me? Because all the papers are full of Sherlock Holmes murders. So I was stuck
there, rather.’

‘What did these gestures look like?’

She bit her lip, clearly upset that she couldn’t remember offhand. ‘Go over there.’ She flapped her hand.

Sefton walked back ten paces. Under her instructions, he raised and lowered his arms, until she was certain of each of the four poses the man had struck. Sefton drew what he’d been doing,
then showed the old lady, who nodded eagerly. ‘What happened then?’

‘He bowed. Honestly. Then he walked off through those trees. I very much went the other way. When I got home a couple of minutes later, I was shivering. It was as if I’d encountered
. . . it sounds silly, but . . . something supernatural.’

‘Ma’am, you’ve been really helpful. If I could just take your contact details, my colleague Lisa—’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve told you all I know. I don’t want anyone calling.’

Sefton tried a little more persuasion, but it clearly wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He’d made several notes about clues she’d given away to where she lived. He was pretty
sure if they really needed to, they could find her. He thanked her and, once she’d gone, went over to the gap in the trees. He walked through it, looking more closely at the ground, and
beyond it found only a further area of parkland. There was a fence that backed onto a row of houses with alleys in between.

Sefton sniffed the air as he went and kept an eye out for traces of silver and gold. Nothing. He wouldn’t necessarily expect anything to remain after a few days, even if those weird
gestures had been meant to achieve some supernatural effect. He felt intuitively that rain, of the sort he’d heard on his hotel window last night, would wash this stuff away, but this was
another of the many things he didn’t yet know. Still, here was something meaningful, something potentially huge, and very weird.

At an isolated table in the hotel bar that evening, Sefton showed Costain what he’d drawn in his notebook. ‘Is it a message?’ Costain wondered aloud.
‘If the ghost of Holmes has somehow come back, why is he here, and not in Baker Street? Here,
is
he . . . ?’

‘I called Ross and got her to take a look. He’s not back in Baker Street. And I suppose this is one of the locations featured in the stories, but not one where you’d think
Holmes would be remembered. Unless there are a lot of people here who specifically expect him to be around, like with all those Losley ghosts that popped up everywhere.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And why communicate to some old lady who’s nothing to do with anything? I’m thinking maybe it’s about place and time. I’m going to go over there tomorrow morning
and see if he shows up again.’

Costain turned the book in his hands, looking at the four stick figures from every angle. ‘Stick figures, like on the blade. Like in that Holmes story.’

‘One of the figures performed live for the old lady is a bit like one of the ones from the blade, but the other three really aren’t. That one there – the third one, one arm up
and the other diagonally down – that’s the flag semaphore letter “K”, but only because he’s got his legs together. In semaphore, only the arms matter, and he’s
definitely doing things with his legs. That’s the only standard coded meaning I can find, and that’s pushing it.’

‘Ross’ll see something.’

‘Yeah. I hope.’ He found himself smiling. ‘You’re still so into her, aren’t you?’

Costain looked suddenly vulnerable, almost angry, then visibly let it go. ‘She’s like the sun round my earth, mate. Still. She’s way over there, and she doesn’t care if
she shines on me or not.’

Sefton closed his hotel-room door behind him and called Joe, who was also away from home, at an academic conference in Oxford, where he said his major function was to stand
behind his publisher’s stall and drink coffee while everyone else was in lectures. Sefton told him a few details about the case, thankful that Quill’s rules for their team allowed him
to do so, asked his opinion about the stick men. Joe agreed with Costain that Ross would crack the code. ‘If you ever meet her,’ said Sefton, ‘she’s not going to live up to
your expectations.’

‘I do see her basically as Wonder Woman,’ Joe agreed. Sefton told him he loved him and they said goodnight.

Sefton tried to read on his phone before going to sleep in the too-tight sheets of the hotel bed. He was making his way through the later Holmes stories, wanting to keep a step ahead. There was
a lot of weird stuff here. Having killed his hero and been forced by public opinion to bring him back, Conan Doyle seemed not to know what to do with him. The public wanted him to live, but his
creator didn’t. Sefton’s last conscious thought was that the ‘ghost’ of Holmes must have been traumatized by that, all the time.

In his dreams that night, Holmes came urgently to Sefton, tried to get a message through to him. There was a telegram, an urgent communication; he had to rip the envelope open, quickly; they may
already be too late! But there was nothing inside the envelope. Something was hissing; an unignited gas flame bursting up angrily into Holmes’s study. Sefton tried to haul something over it,
to put it out. There was a sudden pain in his left arm, a burn!

The pain shoved him up out of his dreams. He flailed around the bed, his eyes opening, realizing there was a weight on his arm, something preventing him as he tried to thrash it away. The pain
suddenly doubled into something he couldn’t deal with and he saw the thing he couldn’t get off his arm.

A snake.

Sefton leaped out of bed and realized he wasn’t going to make it to the phone. The pain was suddenly too big again, and it shoved itself up into his throat and head. He managed to yell. He
fell and the darkness rushed in to take him.

Ross stood at the end of the bed, Costain beside her. He was looking as horrified and empty as she felt. In the bed lay Kevin Sefton, his face covered by an oxygen mask, his
bandaged arm still in a splint and hooked up to an IV, his skin deathly pale. Ross had found the number for Joe in his phone. He was heading here, to Walton Community Hospital, five or six miles
from the hotel where, hours before, Sefton had been attacked. Ross had taken a hire car out of London, before the trains started. They’d both tried to call Quill, but kept getting his
voicemail.