Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (26 page)

As Costain drove them to Lombard Street, Sefton found himself taking comfort in their preparations. Jimmy had taught all of them to work outside their specialities. It was
teamwork, sharing the burden, that saved their mutual sanity. It should have been pretty obvious that if one of them was going to lose it, it would be Quill, the one for whom responsibility meant
he couldn’t lean as much on the others. Especially after Hell. Who could come back from that and try to lead a normal life again? If they could find him, perhaps this would turn out to be the
best thing that could have happened for Jimmy. Perhaps.

Sefton got a call from Ballard, who’d just walked out of remand, a free man, Lofthouse’s deal having been officially made and accepted. Sefton put it on speaker. ‘I owe all of
you a great deal,’ Ballard said, ‘and I will repay.’ Sefton got the feeling, somehow, that he was laughing at them. He wished he felt able to ask Ballard if he had anything to
help find Jimmy, but he didn’t trust him enough for that. He instead outlined, without giving the whole game away, their current operation. Ballard said he perhaps had something that could
locate a particular individual. That, thought Sefton, might be useful for any one of this gang, or for Watson, whose absence was still a closed book to them, but also might especially help find
Quill. He’d be in touch.

Lombard Street wasn’t that long, a narrow grey street of imposing buildings with arcade lanes of shops leading off on both sides. It turned left off Moorgate, just past Bank Tube station,
and swiftly became Fenchurch Street. They’d agreed that, given the flexibility they’d previously shown, the killers would probably settle for the death of a Holmes anywhere within a
quarter-mile. There was a Pret a Manger and a Sainsbury’s Local, lunch places for office workers, fashion and fitness stores. There were also still three major banks with offices nearby, one
with a branch entrance on the street itself, the others with less obvious offices back along the side streets, and a corporate finance company, which also, they’d found out, had a safe.

Costain parked on the narrow one-way street in front of doors that said they were in use at all times but led to a brownfield site, and propped his logbook in the window to deter traffic
wardens. It was a cool autumn day. Sefton registered sunlight as he got out of the car, looked at Costain and Ross’s grim faces, and wondered if they would find hope anywhere.

They split up for the interviews. Sefton went to the corporate finance company and talked to a smart fortysomething woman called Emily Jacobs, who had, to his surprise, after
having received his call, read forward in the Holmes stories and knew exactly what he’d be looking for from ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’. ‘I agree that the
“watchman” who gets beaten to death in the story sounds most like a modern-day security guard. I called round all our security personnel personally this morning, those on shift and
those off, and I have one who thinks he might have once gone to a fancy-dress party as Sherlock Holmes. He asks does that count?’

‘Let’s assume it does. Being a security guard, he’s not going to have a criminal record, right?’ Although for their victims to have a criminal record seemed a preference
rather than a necessity for their killers, it was a detail that might serve to make one victim more attractive than another.

‘Well, no actual record,’ said Jacobs. There was a ‘but’ she couldn’t say out loud, but communicated to him with pursed lips.

‘Can I talk to him?’ said Sefton.

Johnny Horner had a carefully tended quiff, sideburns that showed he’d had a haircut after getting a tan, and described himself as ‘a little bit wa-hey, a little
bit woo’, the geezer character straight out of
The Fast Show.
He’d been in this job two weeks, and his attitude, an in-your-face and rather forced cheekiness, made Sefton wonder
if his employers were regretting the hire and waiting for the end of his six months. Background checks revealed nothing dodgy, though. When asked, Johnny had a lot of big talk about knowing the bad
lads when he was a kid, and that was probably true.

Sefton checked in with his colleagues, who’d found just one other potential Sherlock, an upstanding citizen in the rather dull way of most security personnel. They’d agreed earlier
that actually putting a deerstalker on someone and deliberately making their own target was unethical. So, all in all, Costain decided Horner was their best option as bait.

Costain brought over a map with the locations of various large safes marked on it. Ross arrived, and together they got Jacobs talking to the owners of a small, and relatively lightly defended,
investment broker’s nearby. The company owned, as a relic of their building’s history, a truly gigantic safe. Horner, to give him credit, was immediately up for their plan. He and the
other potential Holmes would be given leave until next Thursday, indeed ordered not to come anywhere near the street. Then, on Thursday morning, the main investigation having liaised with
Costain’s team in a truly enormous stake-out operation, Horner would take his place as guard near that safe. He was to tell everyone on social media that he was off for a couple of days, and
exactly when he’d be back.

‘Cushy job,’ he said.

‘With a very brave bit at the end,’ said Sefton.

Horner shook his head. ‘If you catch this nutter, then I’m just looking out for my mates. Besides, nothing’s going to happen to me with all you lot hiding in every corner, is
it?’

Sefton looked awkwardly at the other two. ‘Tempting fate, we call that,’ he said. He didn’t add that in their business there might actually be a fate to tempt. They said their
goodbyes to their new allies, returned to their car and, as they’d been reflexively doing all this time, once more checked their messages.

Nobody had seen Quill.

Quill kept wanting to explain to someone exactly what he was doing. It could, he was sure, look a bit unusual to someone on the outside. He’d kept his phone switched off
after he’d abandoned the car, and made sure to change as soon as possible out of the clothes he’d left the house in, into the civvies he kept handy for just such a moment as this.
They’d find him if he switched the phone on, even just for a moment to look at Jessica’s picture. It wasn’t Sarah’s fault; he kept having to remind himself of that. She
hadn’t been deliberately getting in his way, had she?
Had
she? No, he couldn’t believe that of her. This Moriarty he was chasing, he might be some sort of cosmic power, but Quill
didn’t think he could have got to Sarah. He’d realized, a couple of hours after he’d left the car behind, and was walking past White Hart Lane, on his way into town, that he
wasn’t going to be able to sleep in a bed tonight. If he used his cards to get a hotel room, or took cash out, they’d be able to locate him. Still, a night’s discomfort
wasn’t too much to ask of someone who’d gone out on a limb to solve history’s biggest crime.

He was still surprised by how small London was. Even keeping off the obvious ways, where they might have uniforms or doctors looking for him, the walk into the centre of town only took four
hours. It was teatime before he found himself looking up at Centre Point. He stopped at the Starbucks on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, and felt the first nip of cold through
his coat and waited.

Yes, he could hear them, distantly, the sounds that had pursued him since he was in the car. They were trying to find him, slipping through the narrow lanes between these dark buildings. The
sounds were of a carriage driven by urgently spurred horses. Amazing, to think that was possible, to think that only a couple of years back if someone told him they were being followed by such a
thing, he’d have said they were mad.

The way the buildings were changing, revealing their real faces to the Sight, that was indicative too. He could see Victorian detail even in Centre Point, as if it was a gigantic rookery of slum
apartments. Up into the sky went the washing lines from it out to other great buildings, the sky itself brown like a Hogarth cartoon, full of flying scraps, the contents of buckets, the vapours of
noxious exhalations, disease.

Had he ever left Hell?

He realized it would be such a relief if he hadn’t. It would let all this be OK. It would mean only he was at risk. It would mean all this awful hope had just been a trick. No, though, he
could feel the Sight telling him this wasn’t Hell. Not yet. This was just a place that was becoming more like it. These opinions he had about what was going on, what he had to do, they
weren’t a cry for help; they were who he was now, and they were concrete, they could be proven. He was going to do it. But those hoofbeats were getting closer all the time.

He would soon have to find somewhere to spend the night. That didn’t matter very much. All that mattered was the pursuit, him of it and it of him. He tried to explain all this to the old
lady standing beside him, but she moved off before he got a few sentences in. He held in the anger he felt at her, and turned to walk again through the maze the city was becoming.

Sarah Quill hadn’t shared her husband’s often changing but usually low opinion of Tony Costain. He’d always seemed to her like the sort of bloke who was
trying to project all sorts of things about himself because he couldn’t face his own vulnerability, a vulnerability she’d found herself liking. Now, his presence in her home was
especially welcome. He’d brought his colleagues over to interview her, to go over once again any details Kevin might have missed.

‘There was something he wasn’t telling me,’ she said as they sat in her living room. She could hear Jessica on the baby monitor, talking to herself upstairs, talking about
Daddy. ‘Something that was getting to him. He kept talking about Laura moving to London, as if he’s so scared of this place now . . . Well, I don’t blame him. But it’s OK
for millions of people.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ross, whose calm surface had come as a surprise, such a change from the intensity of the last time Sarah had seen her. She had also been altered by this insane job the
four of them did. ‘We all got the feeling he wanted to speak up about something.’

‘We should have given him the chance,’ said Sefton.

They went over everything, managing to get a pretty accurate idea of what was in the bag Quill had put together and hidden from her. ‘If he calls,’ said Ross finally, ‘please
tell him we want to listen.’ Sarah had to close her eyes, resenting the implication that she hadn’t told him that, though she doubted Ross had meant it that way.

After they left, Sarah listened as Jessica talked herself to sleep, then lay back in the sofa and looked at where she would normally expect to see Quill. She couldn’t do this alone. That
lot were wrapped up in their usual horrors, the ones that were one day going to eat them like they’d eaten Quill. She needed family; she needed someone who could help, who knew Quill. She
picked up the phone and made the call. ‘Laura,’ she said, ‘listen, something’s happened. Could you come down to London a few weeks early, live with us for a while?
We’ve still got the spare room.’

At lunchtime on the Wednesday, with nothing to do at the Portakabin except monitor the build-up to Thursday morning’s operation and wait for news about Quill, Ross
accepted Flamstead’s invitation to come for a walk in Hyde Park.

Flamstead smiled at the passers-by who recognized him, signed autographs. Ross wondered if pictures of them were going to end up in the tabloids. She finally told him, not regarding it as an
operational matter, all about Quill. He listened, concerned, upset. Were those emotions lies too? Surely not. How could any being function like that? ‘How’s Costain taking it?’ he
said, out of the blue.

Ross didn’t like that he’d asked. ‘Costain? He’s trying to make out it’s not hurting him, being stoic. He says he doesn’t like where your version of Holmes is
going. I don’t think he’d have had an opinion before. This isn’t some sort of pissing contest for you as well, is it?’

‘Now, how can I possibly answer that?’

She should know better than to ask him direct questions. ‘I’m going to one of the London auctions tomorrow night. Do you know about those?’ She wanted to say, ridiculously,
that as well as perhaps having a chance to get her happiness back, they might find something to help with their current operation. That was a distant possibility, however, and she was talking here,
she suspected, to someone who could spot half-truths a mile away.

‘Ah. Alone?’ His tone indicated he knew what she was talking about.

‘No.’

‘What does Costain stand to gain by accompanying you?’

She was pleased at his insight. ‘My trust, I guess.’

He took her arm in his and put a gentle hand on it. ‘Ah,’ was all he said again.

The location for the auction was, as always, somewhere special. That Wednesday night, Costain and Ross took the train out to Greenwich, threaded their way through the bohemian
streets, still packed with tourists and summer food vendors, and, having been given the nod by an oddly shabby-looking security guard at the locked gates of the park, made their way up the hill
towards the Royal Observatory.

As they climbed the incline, Ross looked down on London, lit up on this clear night. The Sight made Greenwich into somewhere that smelt of the sea, and overwhelmed you with the knowledge of
time. She could feel, in this hill, the small weight of her own years, the steady decay of everything, how short a while was left to her. From the hill she could see, above London, constellations,
a web of lines actually drawn in the sky, making the stars feel trapped. As they walked higher, the feeling got more and more intense, like they were inside an enormous clock, and she knew it was
about to strike the hour. It felt like the grandeur above them was locked, by this hill, into the notion of Britishness, that here was somewhere that connected the eternal to Empire. This feeling
was still at play in London below, but it was complicated, worrying. Here was displayed, for all to get nervous about, one of the grand certainties that nobody felt certain of anymore.