Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (30 page)

Sefton walked in a small circle, then deliberately began again. ‘We’re not being bugged,’ he said. ‘I’d swear to it. Last time I set up defences around here, I
thought about that.’

‘The next Holmes stories,’ said Ross, ‘are “The
Gloria Scott
”, outside London, “The Musgrave Ritual”, which has a murder, but is also outside
London, “The Reigate Squire”, outside London, and “The Crooked Man”, same again. So the next point where we’ll have a chance to intercept is “The Resident
Patient”.’

‘What happens in that one?’ asked Sefton.

‘A mock trial and hanging,’ said Costain. ‘The target will ideally be a private doctor who once played Holmes, or who now could be
forced
to play him. It’ll be
somewhere near a medical practice in Brook Street in Mayfair. The main inquiry are all over this and are already staking out the options.’

‘How many stories are left?’ said Sefton.

‘Thirty-six, and two novels, and that’s assuming they’re sticking to the Conan Doyle, ’cos there are lots of other authors who then wrote Holmes stories,’ said
Costain.

‘There’s a major point in Holmes’s life coming up soon,’ said Ross. ‘We’re getting close to him going over the Reichenbach Falls, seemingly to his
death.’

‘Tough for him to do,’ said Costain, ‘considering he’s already dead.’ He looked down at a message on his phone. ‘The warrant to search Ballard’s
premises has come through. So that’s our last thing before the weekend.’ Ross thought for a moment she saw a flash of guilt on his face. This weekend, they were going to leave Sefton
behind, at this lowest point of their investigation, and pursue her own selfish ends. The look was gone again a moment later. Costain was too good an undercover to show his true feelings like
that.

She turned back to the ops board. If only she could say the same.

Ballard had said he had many homes, but the one Costain had the warrant for was the one he’d claimed as his main address, an apartment in the Heron building at Moorgate.
Looking up at the black-and-white, chilly facade, which was like a pile of metal packing crates, shining industrially against the night sky, Sefton was once more reminded of how being a copper was
to continually be a beggar at the feast, an unwelcome visitor to places in which one could never hope to live.

They entered the building, found they were facing, weirdly, an enormous fish tank and took quite a while to find someone they could talk to about their warrant.

The apartment took up a whole floor of the building, the twenty-eighth. The elevator opened onto a lobby area, and the key cards they’d been given operated both the lift
itself and the door on the other side of the elegantly designed space. It already looked like the home of a collector, with what looked like some sort of fossil shell perched in front of an
enormous picture window, and paintings, all of London subjects, on the walls even here. The weight the Sight gave to what lay beyond was the total of what Sefton had felt on approaching the
building. He’d felt it above him as they’d entered the tower, and all the way up in the lift. ‘He’s got some shit in here,’ he said.

They donned evidence gloves and opened the inner door. Inside, it was immediately obvious that the place had been searched. Drawers were open; a desk had been taken apart. There was no wreckage.
The door of the wall safe, unhidden, obvious, was still closed. In the movies, such searches were often meant to have happened at speed, and for some reason those searching usually seemed to have
just broken things for the hell of it. This one looked to have been thorough and to have time taken over it. There must have been some sort of ticking clock, though, or why leave evidence that it
had been done at all? Unless the searchers were so confident in their power they just didn’t care. Sefton quickly went to one of the inner doors and listened. Was anyone still in here?

Costain came over, listened himself for only a moment, then opened it. It took just a few moments for them to be certain they were still alone. ‘Any sign of walkthrough?’ he asked.
He went to the walls and started to look for signs of a chalk door, then stopped himself. ‘Of course not – we’re on the twenty-eighth floor.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up about it,’ said Ross. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to encounter a suspect who can fly. But, couple of steps less amazing, if they can walk
through walls, maybe they can also hack a key-card system.’

‘It’s weird,’ said Sefton, ‘that Ballard didn’t have better defences.’

‘When I was with his lot,’ said Costain, ‘he was always saying about how few people knew about this shit, how he was just about the only big boss left. Though he may have been
deluded about that. Besides, we only learned where this was when he had to give an address on arrest. He never told us lot about it.’

They started to examine what had been searched. ‘There must still be significant stuff here, or what are we feeling with the Sight?’ said Sefton.

‘So maybe the searchers weren’t Sighted?’ said Ross.

‘Good assumption, but noted as one.’ Costain knocked her familiar caveat about assumptions back at her.

Sefton closed his eyes and let his sense of balance lead him across the floor to where he felt the Sight was indicating the greatest power was, through into the bedroom. There was something
under the bed. Feeling a bit vulnerable once again, Sefton looked under the bed and saw, as well as a collection of what looked like bondage gear . . .

He could feel the presence of something beneath the polished wooden floor. He swept away the cuffs and straps, and found, with his Sighted fingers, an indentation, a panel. It didn’t give
at his touch, of course.

With the help of the others, he moved the bed aside. Sefton felt out the dimensions of the anomaly. It felt like it was hiding rather fearfully, like it was thin. He’d never before found
himself ascribing emotions to planks of wood. This was how the Sight was changing him. In their business, you couldn’t even rely on what was under your feet not to have an opinion.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. He stood up, raised his boot and brought it down in the middle of the spot. The floor broke. They were rather more careful in excavating the pieces, making a pile of
them, still with their evidence gloves on. In the shallow compartment beneath was a single piece of paper. Ross picked it out and read.

It was a list of artefacts, with locations given beside them, including the ‘draft for healing once’ with the location given, Ross confirmed, being the lock-up where she and Costain
had found it.

‘Jackpot,’ said Sefton. ‘One item on this list was kept in this apartment. I wonder if they found it.’

The item was a ‘bastard scourge’. It was meant to be in a hidden compartment in the desk. They found the compartment, but it was empty. ‘This list is a major step forward,
anyway,’ said Ross. ‘There’s no reason to think our opponents know about these. Does anything on here sound like it could help with the current operation, or in finding
Jimmy?’

They studied the list at length. Most of the names of the objects were pretty straightforward descriptions of their function. None of them sounded like an item for finding anyone, which meant
that Ballard had either been lying about his capacity to do that or had still more caches elsewhere.

Ross finally sighed. ‘I don’t think anything here is of immediate help.’

‘In that case,’ said Costain, ‘rather than rushing about now, I’ll spend Monday and Tuesday visiting these locations and bringing the haul back to the Hill.’

‘We can help with that,’ said Sefton.

Costain shook his head. ‘I’m keeping the grunt work off you two. I think that’s what Jimmy would do. I hope it is, anyway. I hope at some point we find a whole bunch of stuff
to crack whatever this gang of murderers shit is, and something to get Quill back and make him better, and then . . .’ He finally gave way to a grin. ‘Then I can stop bloody trying to
lead.’

Sefton put a hand on his shoulder and smiled back. ‘We’re all,’ he said, ‘looking forward to that.’

Lofthouse was glad of her torch. She was picking her way down through absolute darkness, in what she was sure now were natural caverns, carved by water. The path she followed,
however, had been made by the erosion of feet. What could it have been like for the first person to do this? When would that have been? Would they have been from some tribe, seeking to go into the
earth for their religion? Was that religion anything to do with what Jimmy’s team encountered these days?

Her mind was going to wander, she realized, and she better let it, because otherwise she would only fret on the multiple risks she was taking. If she was lost down here, nobody would ever find
her, and that bastard inside Peter might hurt him out of spite. Beside the path, at intervals, had been left offerings, long-crumbled sprigs of plants, rings and coins all snapped in two. There
were things written on the walls too, like tourist graffiti, but of a very specialist sort, some in English, but also in German, Spanish and in Japanese characters. Some of the writings replied to
each other, like a conversation carried on over decades. ‘Not long now until the drop.’ ‘Don’t hack your karma like that.’ ‘Fuck the Rat Queen.’ ‘Is
that an order?’ Most of what they referred to was gibberish to her, but Kev Sefton would love this stuff. Her map had turned out to be only a very rough description of the terrain. Of much
more help were the path itself and the urging of the key on her bracelet, which she could feel straining on her wrist like a terrier heading for the park.

She nearly slipped, despite the spikes on her boots, at a sharp curve of the path. The air was getting very cold, and damp. You could tell you were in a cave. The path opened out, after a little
while, into a wider gallery, and the path now had an edge to it, a slope of scree, which led down into a plunge the depths of which her torch couldn’t penetrate. On the wall now were
desperate warnings, big letters: watch your step.

There were also stalactites and stalagmites, but the colours, she saw as she washed the torch beam over them, weren’t the pale hues she associated with caving. Here were rust reds and
bright yellows, and sick-looking greens. These, she realized, were stalactites of industry, chemicals from human work that had managed to seep deep underground. She wondered how long that process
had taken. Lost in thought, it took her a moment to recognize what the latest shape her torch had caught actually was.

A face! She stepped back for a moment, hearing the echo of her gasp, and then she realized what she was seeing, the torch beam having held firm: a skull, atop a skeleton that had been propped up
against a wall and had now been moulded into it, its bones covered by the process that had formed the stalactites. The chest of the skeleton had been caved in, as if from some sort of impact. It
looked like something an animal might do. Or had people fought on their way down? Just beyond the skeleton was a plummet into nothingness, as if the slope had eroded under him. A sign on the wall
beside her had a big red arrow pointing to him. According to it, his name was Boney.

She had, of course, no idea what she’d come down here to find. All she knew was that for her to follow the map was what the key wanted above all. She had gambled everything she loved on
something impossible.

Quill had walked a long way in the dark, pleased at how the act of walking allowed him to bring his theories back to mind again, to make sure every detail was correct, this
tremendous bedrock he could rely on. He’d memorized them, like songs, rhythms to walk to. Some of those songs would just wander into his head and he’d be their instrument for a while,
and that was, well, he didn’t know if that was great or distressing. He was quite glad nobody was asking him how he felt.

He’d come to what seemed to be an empty suburb, a modern group of houses, nestling in the Victorian wonderland that had grown up all around. This was a new development in Hell, avenues and
closes with pristine two-bedroomed semis, new builds, with tended lawns, but no cars outside, nobody living there.

He walked past a security office with a light on, and a sign that had said something about the houses being on sale, but the sign looked like it had been there a long time. He walked into the
middle of an island of grass in the midst of a circle of houses, a sapling at its centre, and turned, seeking even one light in all these would-be homes.

This place was blank to the Sight too, a nowhere where nothing was remembered. Why was nobody living here? He realized that he’d heard about this place, or somewhere else like it. The
developers thought it better to keep the houses empty than to drop their prices. A bunch of squatters had been removed from somewhere like this. So could he live here, then, while he pursued his
enquiries, or while they pursued him? Why not, old son? He had enough stuff in his bag now to begin a proper diagram of his operational theories. He tried a couple of back doors. He found one
open.

He walked carefully into the house, then forgot the idea of walking carefully and marched into the kitchen, shouting that he was moving carefully, that he was an armed police officer. He laughed
that he wasn’t. He could hear the sound, he realized, of a television.

He wondered if he’d returned home, if Sarah and Jessica were going to be in the lounge. There was the light of a telly under the door. He eased the door open, finding enormous pain inside
him at the idea of the joy of seeing Jessica again, enormous difficulty at the idea of seeing Sarah, of what that would mean he had to face.

They weren’t in here. There was an armchair and there was a television, tuned to static, and nothing else in the room. In the armchair sat the Smiling Man. He was beaming at the fuzz on
the screen. He turned to look at Quill.

Quill wasn’t afraid. Or he wasn’t much more now than he was all the time these days. This was to be expected if he was in Hell. If there was going to be punishment, he wished
they’d get on with it.

He had all sorts of questions he wanted to ask. He wanted to check his theories.

The Smiling Man held up a remote control, a signal not to talk, and pointed it at the screen. The image changed to a picture of Laura, in her pyjamas, entering what Quill recognized as
Jessica’s room. She was in London. She was about to sleep in London. To
live
in London, to stay several days, if that was what that meant, and it must be, mustn’t it, or why was
he being shown it? She was about to qualify for Hell. Jessica would be in bed with her mum: this is what they always did when they had visitors. This should have been OK, because they were all
already in Hell, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t.