Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (35 page)

‘You’re bound by the circle, Mum,’ said Flamstead, ‘by the size of that sacrifice.’

‘The sign says that everyone who has ever lived in London goes to Hell,’ hissed Brent. ‘It’s true, though it hasn’t always been. It all changed when Lucifer was
murdered and something else took his place. There. Now nobody can be happy!’

A couple of the people in the circle stood up. One of them ran for the door. The remaining ones had started to weep, to ask urgent questions. The truth was out. Christ, what weight had Jimmy
carried all this time? No wonder he’d broken and fled.

With a great yell, Brent threw up her hands in a gesture of disgust and vanished. The brazier fell, and smoke burst into the room. The fire alarm sounded, and water started to pour down from
sprinklers in the ceiling. ‘How dare you compromise her like this?’ yelled Costain. ‘Get her away from this downpour!’

Ross was utterly bemused as Costain squared up to a pleased-looking Flamstead, both getting sodden with water. That was so different from his normal way of speaking, and he now didn’t seem
to need the slightest cause before charging into battle on her behalf like a smitten teenager. What the fuck? But she had much more urgent things to worry about. Coughing, she allowed Flamstead and
Costain, actually shouldering each other for the privilege, to lead her out of the room. ‘I need . . .’ she coughed as they all stumbled out into the corridor, the alarm lights flashing
around them, ‘I need to find Tock.’

He was in the car park, as was everyone else as they streamed out of the hotel. He was being surrounded, Ross saw, by a swiftly growing crowd of people, all of whom seemed to
be telling him and each other the terrible news. Some of them actually ran up and made to attack Flamstead, as he followed Ross and Costain, but he shouted to them about whether or not they
believed Brent, and him knowing her name held them back.

Tock glared as Ross reached him. ‘So this isn’t a trick of his?’ He was pointing at Flamstead.

‘The Other said it,’ an exasperated woman shouted beside him. ‘She was bound by the circle: she had to tell the truth.’

‘All right, all right.’ He ran a hand over his thinning hair, like a gorilla making a blunt gesture of aggression. ‘Well, we’re fucked, aren’t we? That’s what
happened a few years back – that was the big change, our souls all being chucked into the shitter. We had our conference and we got our answer.’

‘You don’t know who we are,’ said Ross.

‘I don’t want to know who you are, love.’

Ross looked to Costain, who hesitated, so she reached into his jacket and grabbed his warrant card. ‘
We’re
the law now,’ she said. ‘We’re part of what
you’re having this conference about.’ A reaction spread through the crowd: angry, mixed up, not understanding.

‘I’m on their side!’ called Flamstead.

‘You heard him lie then,’ said Ross. ‘He’s not with us, he’s just helping us with our enquiries. We have access to the Continuing Projects Team’s files, some
of their equipment—’

‘You’re lying,’ said Tock. He pointed to Costain. ‘He doesn’t use blanket. We check for coppers, and he isn’t one.’

‘I realized after failing to use blanket a couple of times,’ said Costain, ‘that I’m safe without it. I guess I give off a vibe that’s more . . . criminal.’
He looked a little lost to Ross. ‘Now you know. I didn’t want you to. I would give anything in the world for you not to—’

‘It’s because he was an undercover,’ she said, cutting him off before he went on and on. It was a working theory, but still it left questions to answer. Later for that.
‘Listen, our boss is Detective Inspector James Quill. He went to Hell and he came back. He nicked Mora Losley. He put the Ripper back to bed.’ Neither of those were strictly true, but
it was all close enough to satisfy the crowd around her, who were busy slapping her with gestures to check her veracity. ‘Our specialist is Kevin Sefton, who’s met with Brutus and the
Rat King.’ She was talking and talking. It was time to move away from detail and get to people. ‘We want to be the law for you lot. We know how much you used to hate us. And “used
to” for you lot takes a long bloody time to go away. But’ – she gestured around her at the increasing size of the crowd, the rising feeling of panic – ‘you know now
how desperate the situation is. You need someone to be a respected and recognized authority that you consent to, that you want in your lives. And we need you in return.’

‘That’s a nice speech—’ Tock began.

‘Yeah.’ She stepped into his face, desperate now. ‘Yeah it was.’ He was, she was sure, one of these blokes who needed to be able to say he liked people who stood up to
him, when that was just his mechanism to save face when he lost. She had to give him that way out.

‘We don’t like being told what to do. We don’t like someone having a hold over us.’

‘That’s not how policing works. Police should be answerable.
You
should have some hold over
us
.’ She realized as she said it that her own needs and the needs of
her team had just at that moment come together. The size of what she could grab here staggered her. She ploughed on, kept talking. ‘You reckon you’re going to spread a little bit of
happiness among this lot? How far will that go, compared to guaranteed Hell? Wouldn’t you rather have a friend in law enforcement who’s working the crime of the afterlife?’ She
looked him in the eye, hoping against hope that this was going to come down to being about
people
. ‘Wouldn’t you rather I owed this whole community an enormous debt?’

He thought for a long moment. Then he reached into his jacket. Of course he’d have it on him.

He took out her happiness in a small clear bottle with a gold cap. He held it up in front of her. He taunted her with it. ‘You’re going to owe us big time,’ he said.

She held out her hand. ‘That’s always the deal,’ she said.

He made her feel it, that enormous hole in her life, for a second more. Then he gave her the bottle.

She didn’t look at Costain or Flamstead. She had no idea what her colleague would think of her speaking for the entire Met like that, but she had meant what she said. At least this was a
debt she was prepared to repay. She unscrewed the top of the tiny bottle. She fixed her lips carefully round the top. She poured the liquid onto her tongue. Suddenly, there was much more of it than
could fit into her mouth!

It erupted, not out of her, but into her, into her head and her body. She sucked on the bottle like a teat, feeling it, oh, feeling it, the difference, so much! She drained it. She lowered the
empty bottle. She stumbled.

She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

She started to laugh.

As soon as he got the call, Sefton went over to Quill’s place. Sarah opened the door for him, a woman she introduced as her sister, Laura, with her. It was close to one
in the morning, but as Laura said, nobody was likely to be getting any sleep.

Sefton went into the lounge, to find Quill drinking very carefully from a cup of tea, his hands shaking. He looked up, nodded, hesitant to do more, as if Sefton might not be real. Sefton marched
across to hug him, but then jumped at a sudden movement in the air between them. ‘What is
that
?’ He was looking at a dark, somewhat hunched individual who’d leaped into
existence as he crossed the room. Its beady eyes were sizing him up.

‘My Moriarty,’ said Quill, without humour.

‘I should think,’ said Sarah, ‘you’ll want a cuppa yourself?’

Slowly, Quill managed to talk about everything that had happened, both in Hell and since he’d fled. Sefton asked questions like this was an interview, and Quill seemed
calmed by the process, allowed himself to be led. Sarah and Laura listened, the latter sometimes holding on to her sister’s hand, Sarah sometimes trying to restrain her tears, sometimes
failing.

The idea they were all going to Hell was too big to deal with. It seemed slight and distant, almost, compared to Quill’s pain. Still, every time they got back to that, they fell into
silence. Quill took his story back to what they could use in their current operation, and Sefton tried to make that as easy for him as possible. ‘All those clues at the murder scene,’
Quill whispered. ‘I worked them. They worked me over. They all have to mean something. Don’t they?’

Sefton wondered if he could safely answer that. They were in professional mode, though, so he felt he had to. ‘I’m not sure, Jimmy, but I think maybe most of them were put there
deliberately to distract us from looking for what wasn’t there: Watson.’

‘An orgy of evidence. That’s what my old boss used to call a crime scene like that, a room that had too much in it.’ Quill sounded like he’d just been slapped around the
face. ‘It was all for . . . for
nothing
!’ He realized he’d shouted. He put down the cup of tea. His hands clasped the arms of the chair. He tried to control his breathing,
his eyes closed. ‘What about that cyclist?’

‘I think some bolshie courier carrying a package that might have looked like a cosh . . .’

‘Oh fuck,’ said Quill. ‘Oh fuck.’

Sefton looked over to Sarah. This was so hard on her. Sefton almost didn’t want to vocalize his next thought, because it felt like it might lead Quill the wrong way, but it also said that
not everything he’d done was meaningless. ‘But I also think some of the clues you found
did
mean something.’ Quill’s eyes snapped open and he looked afraid at this
sudden hope. Like devils were going to rush in. ‘For a start, that blade really did have the weight of something Sighted about it. It probably does have a “spiel” attached. Some
of the other stuff you worked out, that was the old Jimmy Quill brain still doing its best—’

‘Don’t!’ snapped Quill. Then, a second later, more calmly, ‘Just tell me.’

‘Missing Room Ltd, that really was a reference to a rock band called Moriarty. Which might be an amazing coincidence if not for Dean Michael, which also genuinely points that way, his name
being the first names of two famous Moriartys, one fictional and one an actor. Putting those two names that way round seems deliberately chosen to cue us towards thinking it wasn’t a real
name, because he could equally have called himself Michael Dean, and there are probably loads of those. I would also agree about the astronomical photo, except that, like Sarah said, it
doesn’t show the right bit of the sky for the asteroid named after Moriarty to be on it. What that means I don’t know, but still . . . I think someone sorted out that room to firstly
set us off on a lot of wild goose chases – which had a terrible impact on you – and then, as we got deeper, to get diverted into suspecting Moriarty.’

‘Just the sort of thing I would do,’ chuckled Moriarty.

Sefton looked at him in shock.

Quill looked over at his new friend. ‘I didn’t know you could talk.’

‘I heard it too,’ Sefton quickly said to Sarah and Laura, to reassure them. ‘He’s sitting right there.’

‘So relieved,’ said Laura.

‘I think I’ve worked out what he is,’ said Sefton. ‘Jimmy, you’ve said you started to believe you were being followed.’

‘I started to believe a lot more than that. I thought someone was watching me from the end of the close here. Then I thought it must be Moriarty, and then when I had a near miss with that
cyclist . . . in the right place . . . I was so sure. I ended up being followed across London by—’ He had to stop for a moment. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can still feel it.
It’s like I’m going to slip back into that. I will, you know. I’m sorry when I do.’

Sarah sat down with him, held him.

‘You’re doing better now, though,’ said Sefton, ‘and I think I might know why.’

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Quill, pointing to Moriarty.

‘I think so. You put all that belief into an image of Moriarty in your head, belief that London fed on. Like when all those extra versions of Losley appeared, because people thought she
was everywhere. So for those of us with the Sight, this Moriarty became real. You
made
him.’

Quill couldn’t say anything.

‘How does that help?’ asked Sarah.

‘In two ways, I reckon. First, all of Jimmy’s paranoia is standing right there, and he looks to us a bit, well—’

‘A bit stupid,’ said Quill.

‘You’ve actually given your pain not just a name but a face, a body, dialogue. While he’s over there, he’s not in there.’ Sefton pointed to Quill’s head.
‘Secondly, I think this might give us a way forward. You made Moriarty by getting obsessed with him, by focusing on the clichés about him. Maybe you could do that with yourself. Jimmy
Quill, all the stories they tell about him. The more you can make up who you are, healthy and happy, the more you can project that at London, the more London might go along with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Sarah quickly. ‘Yes, and we can help with that.’

They all tried, talking deliberately about Quill’s previous exploits, Sefton deliberately inflating them until Quill told him to stop, said he’d never find himself if what he was
after wasn’t true. In the end, with Laura and Sarah’s help, he reduced what he wanted to remember to a couple of whispered sentences, which he repeated over and over. ‘It’s
helping,’ he said finally, ‘a little. Just enough to . . . keep me anchored here. I can feel it. I just have to try and believe in . . .’

‘In yourself,’ said Laura. ‘In who you really are.’

‘It’s not just you, though,’ said Sarah. ‘We all believe in Jimmy Quill.’

Sefton didn’t want to watch his boss start to sob, so he went into the kitchen and made them all tea.

Ross sat down in the middle of the car park. She looked around, pleased at all the people out here, delighted at how newly multifaceted her feelings towards Costain and
Flamstead were. A bit too big to deal with, honestly. Pain in there too, which she’d been protected from because it had been wrapped up inside happiness. But never mind that now! She felt the
future ahead of her. There it was. There were tough times ahead, but the sudden rush of possibilities, of hope, had smashed into her like a river bursting through a dam. This was what people lived
in, all the time, and it was so brilliant!