Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (24 page)

Then came the awkward bit. Ross got the other two to sit down with her and together they compiled a list of questions for Ross to put to Flamstead that evening, both about their immediate
operational needs and more general ones about the place of the ‘gods’ in London, what exactly the other ‘boroughs’ were, what the nature of Hell was, et cetera. She would
have to see how much of this she could sensibly include in the conversation, but it was better to have a shopping list. Costain seemed just a little relieved at them treating this as an operation,
not a date. If he’d wanted to, could he order her not to? If he had, Ross was pretty sure that tonight’s events would immediately become a date again, because she wasn’t about to
miss this opportunity. No, Costain wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t sure what he was feeling; he was keeping his cards close to his chest. That line about ‘offering herself up’ had
annoyed her. Costain knew how fucked up she sometimes got about sex. Such an adolescent thing to say. It wasn’t like she was going to fuck Flamstead, was it? Even if that had been on her
agenda, it was none of his business.

That night, Ross wore her only evening-out dress, which frankly needed dry cleaning. She got out of the taxi in front of the Berkeley Hotel, in Knightsbridge, and was both
taken aback and at the same time a little relieved to see the familiar figure of Flamstead waiting on the steps outside the rather ordinary brown building. On the way over, she’d tried to
call Quill and had left a message on his voicemail. She had gone a bit beyond businesslike in asking him to please come back.

‘Well, you look like you got dragged through a hedge backwards,’ said Flamstead. He obviously saw that she thought he might be being serious and grinned. ‘I tell the truth at
all times. This is quite the everyday encounter, eh?’ He gestured towards the restaurant. ‘Honestly,
I
find it all a bit intimidating.’ So, if what Sefton had told her was
correct, he lied continually, was incapable of doing otherwise. This was going to be interesting. Or, to use another word, complicated. He seemed nervous, which, given the circumstances, was bloody
extraordinary.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘I mean . . . properly.’

He had a table reserved, and everyone was very nice, when Ross was expecting any minute for someone to scowl and say they didn’t know how someone from Bermondsey could have slipped through
security. Flamstead said Marcus, who was presumably the chef or the manager, was a complete stranger to him. The decor was plush, wood shining, surfaces plum-coloured and polished. There was a
warm, hearty smell in the air. She kept her coat with her, rather than give it to the . . . whatever he was called . . . who wanted it. She put it on the back of her chair and saw that nobody else
had done that. Flamstead seemed not to notice, which was decent of him, and just showed what a good actor he was. He pointed things out on the wine list, saying they were all terrible, those
fingers dancing about. Ross sighed inwardly. The history of deities going on ‘dates’ with people . . . from what she’d read of mythology, it seldom ended well. Still, if he had
got ‘incarnated’, this was also a bloke, which might explain why he seemed ill at ease, sometimes, in his own skin. She kept her police face on, and so was probably looking much calmer
than she felt. Being ‘in the field’ like this was entirely beyond what she’d been trained for as an analyst. Mixing business and pleasure was taboo also.

‘So,’ she said, after they’d ordered, ‘like you said, this is a bit weird.’

‘But not intimidating, I hope.’

‘You mean you hope it
is
?’

‘Obviously, I don’t want to
impress
you or anything.’

‘Why did you want to take me out to dinner?’

‘For, well, all the usual reasons. Your eyes.’ Was that a lie? How could just saying ‘your eyes’ as a sentence be a lie? This was certainly keeping her on her toes.
‘One different than the other. That’s the secret of David Bowie’s success. As I told him the other day.’

‘So you’ve probably never met David Bowie. Don’t you have cosmic goddesses or whatever to go on dates with?’

‘You could call some of the actresses I hang around with that, I suppose.’

There had been something puzzling in his tone there, like they were at cross purposes. ‘No, I mean . . . Listen, Kev told me everything. I know who you really are.’ He looked
puzzled. ‘You might not have got his name. The one you . . .’ She suddenly realized how weird this sounded. ‘Appeared in the dream to.’

He was now looking completely bewildered. ‘Was . . . this in a play or something? I don’t remember him.’

‘Sorry, how did you get my number?’

‘You gave it to me. When you visited the set with your Mr Quill.’

She was certain she hadn’t. She was also now not sure if she was actually talking to someone who always lied. Flamstead was looking so completely lost that she felt like she might have
somehow woken up from the nightmare her and her mates’ lives had been for the last few years, to a normal life without gods and ghosts. ‘Right,’ she said carefully, ‘so
you’re just an actor?’ This ‘date’ really wasn’t going so well.

‘Yes.’ He slapped a big hand flat on the table. Finally, something he could answer concretely. However . . . was that a twinkle in his eye? Had he just felt a moment of triumph at
having convinced her of something?

She took a second to compose herself. She got the feeling she was being tested. That, at least, was something she understood. She had to go round him, get past him, trip him up. She found she
was looking into those eyes, feeling warm inside at the challenge. How bloody awful was it that this couldn’t be fun for her? Her body was appreciating his attention, but she herself, unable
to feel joy, felt like she was about to take a driving test. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘what I don’t get is why someone like you is interested in an ordinary office worker in law
enforcement.’

‘Ordinary?’ He kept that as a question, which couldn’t be a lie. ‘Let me see, what would Sherlock deduce about you?’ She was pretty sure that any serious actor
seeking to impress wouldn’t at this point have brought his most famous character into it, like she was a nine-year-old asking for an autograph. Or was he really that useless with women?
‘Are you from . . . Bermondsey?’

Was he that good with accents? Maybe that was an actor thing. Or could he have learned that off the Internet? Only with a stalker level of research. She decided to mess with him.
‘No.’

‘Really? Damn. You’re involved with someone . . . No, not anymore.’

She broke eye contact. She didn’t like this game. She didn’t like what those lies said. ‘I have . . .’ OK, she decided, she didn’t have to be entirely honest with
him either. ‘I have . . . a medical condition. I can’t feel happiness.’

He looked deeply concerned. ‘You have anhedonia.’

It hadn’t occurred to Ross to look up a name for the state she was in. ‘Do actors often know obscure mental health terms?’

‘Wasn’t that also the working title for
Annie Hall
?’

‘If it was, they went with the right one.’

‘So . . . was it the result of a trauma, or . . . ?’ He was now playing the part of someone who was out of his depth with the issues of someone he’d just met, and was playing
it well.

The waiter arrived with their drinks, which gave her time to formulate a strategy. As soon as he left, she went on the offensive.

‘It was the result of the relationship you intuited or looked up on Google like you’re stalking me.’

‘I haven’t been!’

Oh God, he had been. She kept him off balance, sticking out her bare arm across the table. ‘It’s the full deal. Go on, try.’

‘Try what?’

‘Tickle me. I’m very ticklish.’ She raised the arm behind her head, glad her dress was sleeveless and that she’d shaved for this. ‘Tickle me under there.’

Other diners were looking over, but she didn’t care. Now they were working for her. He’d adopted a rather bohemian pose, after all. An actor couldn’t resist causing a bit of a
scene. He put on an ‘anything once’ expression, stood and walked over to get behind her. He smiled to the other diners, making this into a performance, making this OK. She saw them
smiling back. He placed the fingers of his right hand carefully just below her armpit, on her bare skin. He did that with only slight hesitancy, maybe apt for someone who’d done weird
self-consciousness-erasing shit in stage school, but perhaps also with the arrogance of a god. Then he ran his fingers up her arm, daring for the shortest time to be sensual, and her body reacted
again, because she hadn’t been touched for far too long. Then he turned it into comedy and went, ‘Tickle, tickle, tickle!’ out loud as he did so.

She winced. ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Ow. Ow!’

He stopped, looked aghast at the expression of genuine discomfort on her face, got quickly back into his seat. ‘I don’t understand.’ Was he saying he did?

‘I found out about that early on,’ she said. ‘Without emotional pleasure, the physical pleasure is just annoying, and that quickly kind of shorts out into actual
pain.’

He paused, forming his fingers, with a surprising lack of pretentiousness, into a steeple. ‘Is that true of all physical pleasure?’

She took a long sip from her glass, keeping eye contact. She watched his gaze darting around her face, checking out her lips. ‘No,’ she said finally, letting an awareness of what he
meant into her voice, a little teasing. ‘Most physical pleasure doesn’t connect to laughter. Also’ – she moved back to serious again, trying to keep him off balance –
‘my dad’s . . . imprisoned. I used to be able to see him; now I can’t.’

‘Is he from Bermondsey too?’

‘He isn’t from there
either
.’ She wasn’t sure she liked lying to this man who seemed genuinely interested in her situation, even if he himself was lying at every
moment. She tried something else, using exactly the same words she’d used before. ‘What I don’t get is why someone like you is interested in an ordinary office worker in law
enforcement.’

He nearly replied exactly the same thing as last time, but stopped himself. That was something her team had noted about the ‘ghosts’ they dealt with, that they often seemed to use
stock responses, like video-game characters. Were the ‘gods’ the same? ‘Only because you’re very attractive,’ he settled on.

She suddenly wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. Which meant she was getting far too into this. She took a big gulp of her wine instead. There had been an ‘only’ there,
hadn’t there?

‘Or perhaps it’s just because of the case you’re investigating.’

‘Right, I thought so. You’re only interested in the case and want to quiz me about it.’

‘I’m not only interested in . . . No, I mean . . .’ He had actually tripped over his own need to lie, and now he was getting flustered about it. If he was this Trickster deity,
he was also the human he claimed to be, and the human part of him, evidently, could get flustered.

Their first course arrived. She’d ordered a salad, not wanting to have to deal with anything she didn’t understand the name of. She tried it. Her palate and mouth gave her signals
that once would have been pleasurable, but were now like watching a party from outside the window. She had to exercise harder these days, she’d found, because her body was used to a certain
amount of pleasurable satisfaction from food and kept urging her to find it now in quantity rather than quality. She wondered if sex would be the same. God, she hoped he didn’t want to go
there. Her body, though, detached from her in a terrible way, did. That made her feel . . . ashamed. It made her think of that awful thing Costain had said about offering herself.

‘Hey,’ he said, gently, putting down his soup spoon. ‘You rather left me hanging there; you drifted off.’

No,
he
had. He was now sounding like someone who genuinely thought he was in the middle of a terrible date. Or was that him getting the better of her, another play? ‘Sorry.
I’m not used to blokes being interested in me.’ Which was really a bit of a lie. ‘I get lied to a lot.’ To that last line she added a meaningful glance.

He sighed. ‘I don’t enjoy lying to you. I am who I say I am. Basically, I just want you to feel . . .’ He paused, obviously trying to find the right word to insert where
‘happy’ should go. ‘The opposite of comfortable and calm.’ Perhaps that was his way of confirming who he really was, that he was indicating that he had to say the opposite
of what he meant?

‘You mean uncomfortable and alarmed? Or involved and excited?’

He looked sad, trapped even. He
had
just told her who he was, she was sure of it. ‘Please . . .’ He literally couldn’t finish that sentence.

She decided to be merciful. The nature of the Gods of London seemed to be as limited as that of the ghosts. If she was going to hear anything useful tonight, she had to give him something to
work with. ‘How about I tell you my story?’ she said. ‘Then you tell me yours?’

He just smiled. Which she took as permission to continue. So, through the clearing away of the first course and the arrival of their main meal, the nature of which, on his plate, she
couldn’t guess at, but in her case was something with chicken, she talked. She felt a reduction in stress as she did so. That was the closest she got to comfort, these days, hitting the limit
of lack of pain. She’d learned to reach for that slow dropping down the scale, rather than the excitement of approaching pleasure. It had made her quiet, confined. She was like an animal
who’d started to accept its confinement, to be changed by it. It was bad to think about. It was good to talk about, even using medical euphemisms as she still did now. Although she was pretty
sure the man opposite her would know about Hell and deities and ghosts, the diners around her, all straining to hear the celebrity, wouldn’t. For that release, and to pursue her list of
questions, she would have to wait until they went somewhere quiet. She wanted, she was pretty sure they both wanted, him to be honest with her.

He listened attentively, nodding when those nods could be taken to be the opposite of agreement. He listened like a god who still needed to learn about the world. Ross skipped past the details
that were impossible, and avoided anything of operational significance. Over dessert, for which Ross chose, relieved, treacle pud and custard, only to find it was a very small treacle pud on a huge
plate, she reached the present day.