Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (41 page)

‘For all the gods,’ added Sefton.

‘He was hoping I’d realize, and in the end I did. Still . . . caring about me . . .’ She looked to Costain. ‘That was initially part of Holmes’s perfect disguise.
The Trickster played on it, though, made him get into a competition, made it an appeal to his sense of chivalry, made it all very Victorian and love-triangly. And deeply, deeply shit. When I saw
you . . . the person who I thought was you . . . pacing outside my hotel room, that obsessed, that Victorian . . . I realized it wasn’t you.’

Costain found he was smiling. ‘I didn’t find that story so difficult.’

‘You pissed me off, a few months back, by doing something you felt strongly about, against what I might have wanted. You took my choice away from me. But you didn’t try to manipulate
me.’

‘Do you feel Flamstead also manipulated you?’ He asked the question gently.

She paused for a moment, making eye contact with him, her tooth biting her bottom lip. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ she said finally.

Sefton made an ahem noise. Moving on. ‘It’s not just Flamstead who’s limited by his nature,’ he said. ‘Fake Costain—’

‘Couldn’t we just call him Holmes?’ said Costain.

‘He told me that Ross was the sun that went round his earth. I’m sure he wanted to set up those astronomical photos to point to the asteroid called Moriarty, but because it’s
emphasized in the books that Holmes knows nothing about astronomy, because none of his versions do, he would never have been able to get that right.’

‘You thought I didn’t know that about the sun?’ said Costain.

‘I thought . . . you’d stumbled over a romantic turn of phrase.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Why,’ said Quill, speaking up again, his hand shaking as he visibly tried to hold on to his point, ‘is Sherlock Holmes killing people? What’s the motive?’

Ross wrote ‘motive’ on the board and attached it to Holmes. They looked at it for a while.

‘What did Fake Costain
tell
you?’ said Costain. ‘He’d be as good an undercover as I was, so he wouldn’t have asked that many questions, unless he had an
in-character reason to do so, but what could you tell about what he
wanted
?’

‘He said,’ said Ross, ‘that the murders might continue after they’d run out of works by Conan Doyle.’

‘So that’s a lie, then,’ said Costain, remembering occasions as an undercover when he’d planted just that sort of misdirection. ‘He’s looking at the end of
the Conan Doyle stories as a finishing line.’

‘Or . . .’ said Ross, ‘there’s another obvious end point. Assuming he tries for another victim near Brook Street, then there’s the murder in “The Greek
Interpreter”, nobody dies in “The Naval Treaty”, so that’s the last one before Holmes is “killed” and brought back to life in “The Empty
House”.’

‘It could be either,’ said Quill. ‘If this was a real person . . .’ He ran a hand down his face and had to pause to control his breathing. ‘We’d say he was a
bit like me, wouldn’t we? That he’d had an
episode
of some kind, changed his character. ’Cos Sherlock Holmes, what does he stand for, above all else? Upholding the
law.’

‘In the books,’ said Sefton, ‘he often lets people off, if he thinks they deserve it. But, yeah, Jimmy, he doesn’t go the other way.’

Ross moved her finger quickly down the list of victims. ‘Wait a sec. We noted how most of these had criminal records, except . . . Lassiter, and you two.’

‘No amount of research could tell him I was a bit dodgy,’ said Costain. ‘At first, when I was his prisoner, Holmes spoke very politely to me, like this was an awful duty he
didn’t enjoy going through with. Then he suddenly went all cold. It was like he learned about me.’

Sefton looked awkward. ‘I think I said something about that when I talked to Fake Costain on the train.’

‘Oh, ta for that. Until then, I reckon he was planning to let me go.’

‘So Holmes prefers to kill criminals,’ said Ross. ‘But it was him trying to off Sefton that knocked us off this train of thought in the first place.’

‘Victorian values!’ said Sefton, a sudden realization. ‘Oh, you homophobic shit, Sherlock.’

‘
No
shit, Sherlock,’ said Costain. ‘That was a crime back in Oscar Wilde’s day, and of those inner Sherlocks, most of them are Victorian.’

‘What about Lassiter?’ Ross looked back to the man’s records on the PC. ‘His disability was chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that definitely wasn’t recognized
in Holmes’s day. Making him a malingerer and a scoundrel, someone taking money away from the deserving poor.’ She ran a line between all the victims and wrote the word
‘criminal’ beside it. ‘We have a new limiting factor. He tries for the location and circumstances of the original deaths, he needs victims who played Sherlock Holmes, and he
insists, in his broad definition of the term, on them being criminals.’

‘We still don’t know why,’ said Quill.

‘Then now we should summon Watson,’ said Sefton, ‘and ask.’

Sefton checked the many Sherlockian blogs and message boards, and found that everywhere now the outrage was the same. Although, to his surprise, a significant majority of fans
wanted at least one of the three current Watsons to die, a vast number of those following Holmes were horrified and furious. There were petitions. There were calls for the shows’ runners to
be hunted down and murdered. The calls for calm from more moderate sections of the fandom had only started a new cycle of horror and recrimination.

Many of the fans had already worked out, and this surprised him too, that the three production offices were behind what had been designed to be seen as leaks. That made them even more angry.
‘I think,’ he said, standing up from the wheezing office PC, ‘we’re on. Last time I tried this, I used a bit of an . . .’ He decided he didn’t want to mention
the details. ‘Easy sacrifice. This time’ – he looked around the group. He’d already decided that Costain, Quill and Ross had suffered enough – ‘it’s got to
be something more serious, and it’ll be me who does it.’

Costain watched as Sefton used chalk on the floor of the Portakabin to produce a new map of the boroughs of London, with certain features emphasized. Had Sefton, he wondered,
been pleased at him seemingly reaching out to him on that train journey? Holmes, with his perfect disguise, had obviously thought that wouldn’t seem outlandish. The moment of togetherness
he’d felt with the rest of his team was being undermined by something, though, something he noted whenever Ross or Sefton looked at Quill. Finally, he squatted down beside Sefton and
whispered. ‘Kev,’ he said, ‘you two know what’s getting to Jimmy, don’t you?’

Sefton stopped what he was doing. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘It’s something huge, right? Tell me. I’m back. I can handle it.’

Sefton hesitated only for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘it’s about Hell.’

Lofthouse stood outside her house. She had emerged, an hour ago, at the top of a circular stairwell on a disused platform of what had turned out to be Mornington Crescent
Underground station. She’d had to throw herself, many times, against a wooden shutter before it had broken, and had finally stumbled back into a corridor full of commuters who didn’t
look twice at this wreck of a woman who smelt of shit. The force of what the Sight had revealed all around her had staggered her, had become more and more overwhelming as she’d headed for the
surface.

She’d taken her warrant card from her bra and waved it to get her past the turnstiles. She’d managed to stumble out of the station and had had to wave her card again at the taxi rank
to make a driver listen to her. She had slept all the way home, despite there being no angle at which she wasn’t in pain. The psychedelic nightmare outside seemed muffled by the confines of
the taxi.

The door opened. Out stepped Peter, looking at first puzzled at her appearance, then shocked. He opened his mouth to ask some awkward questions, but before he could do so, she was in his arms.
The Smiling Man, it seemed, when it had ceased to be necessary, had stopped his cruelty. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve rather missed you.’

Costain was glad to know the truth. The other two had watched as Sefton had told him. Then he’d gone straight over to Quill and just bloody held him, and Jimmy had held
him back. They were that far gone now. Then he’d stepped back. ‘We’ll find a way to change things, right?’

‘Yeah.’ Sefton and Ross had nodded at once.

‘They’re saying we’ll sort it,’ said Quill, still askew, his gaze searching Costain’s face. ‘I don’t know.’

‘One step at a time,’ said Sefton, taking a scalpel from his holdall. ‘Starting with the job in hand. OK?’ They all agreed. ‘This is from a very London teaching
hospital. So.’ He went to his map and cut his thumb, then squeezed a dot of blood onto the major points he’d scrawled on the floor. ‘The way this works,’ he said, sounding
like somebody doing nothing more dangerous than building a train set, ‘is that the shape will demand the blood it needs, so I can start small and then, well, it might get serious.’

‘Kev—’ began Quill.

‘This is the least I can do. So let me handle my speciality, OK? OK.’

They let him. He finished the map. He got them to each stand at one of the main points of the compass; then he started to call to the points in between, listing London locations, many of them
completely obscure to Costain.

As Costain watched, the map started to become alive, to take on aspects of London itself, to bloom with greenery and moving people. Sefton started to call to the streets around Baker Street;
then he listed the buildings of Baker Street itself, then 221B; then, his voice sounding more demanding, he called out for Dr John H. Watson. He called him in the name of all the online communities
he’d got thinking about the man, in the name of some of the most outrageous commentators, who in their horrible passion had demanded real suffering for a fictional character. He named them
all. He offered his own blood aloud and then winced as some more of it was obviously taken into the map. They had to stay where they were, Costain realized, too far from him to help.

Sefton made a final effort. ‘I break the bonds that hold you, which were inexpertly made, made by device, when here I call by blood.’ He yelled as the map bloomed once again, and
then, suddenly, a figure stood on the space where Baker Street was drawn.

He was flickering, like Holmes had been, between so many actors and drawings, but this image seemed to have a little more stability than the one of Holmes. There was so often a moustache that
this image had one, and the face stayed humane and friendly. ‘My friends . . .’ he said, and his voice was similarly odd, modulated across so many different accents at once, ‘for
I may, I think, call you that, have you saved me from imprisonment?’

‘I don’t think we can do that permanently,’ said Sefton, sounding like he knew he couldn’t keep this going for very long. ‘We’re police officers. Please,
quickly, tell us all you can.’

The figure looked around the room. ‘You will have to forgive me. I am not used to discourse with . . . anyone, entirely. My friend Sherlock Holmes and I have lived in a sort of . . . I
suppose you would call it a dream world, a vague existence without the detail and volition I experience in this, what I can only imagine must be the . . . real world? I gather we were . . . it
taxes the mind even to say it . . . fictions? This we never imagined.’

‘When did that change?’ asked Ross.

‘A few short weeks ago. I still do not have a clear idea of time. There came a moment of . . . awakening, when the world around us suddenly gained undreamed-of clarity and solidity, and my
thoughts were suddenly not those of a fever but . . . my own, jumbled and unexamined as they are. Every time one seeks to consider one’s own . . . being, one finds such a muddle now, as if
the exterior has been clarified to exactly the same extent that the interior has . . . become confused.’ His expression was anguished, though, with clear effort, he was keeping his voice
steady. ‘Holmes quickly understood our situation, pointed out many extraordinary differences between this new world outside our window and the one we had inhabited. He made forays downstairs,
then outside. He solved some cases, extraordinary as it may sound, at a distance, simply through his reading. He provided the police, anonymously, with solutions to several major crimes.’

‘No wonder the Met’s been doing so well lately,’ said Ross.

‘Holmes also realized something else, however. To his vast surprise, he discovered, in his close examination of the modern city into which he had awoken, the existence of the supernatural.
In my memory, he usually has no truck with theories of that sort, although, sometimes I feel that . . . Forgive me, my memories of him are confused also. It took time for him to convince me of it,
but convince me he did. He read so much, so fast. He used the devices in the office downstairs to move through page after page of information, searching and cross-referencing, making conclusions at
a lightning pace. He communicated with many in distant parts; he set up deals using monies that he found he had at his disposal. He became the spider at the centre of a web of . . . I feared for
him when he spoke one night of the sort of people he was employing. He began studying how to make best use of what he discovered about London. He brought to our rooms objects and books. He . . .
experimented. Awful sacrifices. Animals taken from the street. This was against everything he stood for or believed in. This was not
him
. I
begged
him to stop. I used every iota of
moral certainty that I had to tell him this was wrong. When he wanted to go further, I even threatened him with force. He finally gave way and ceased.’

‘You’re his conscience,’ whispered Quill. ‘No wonder he had to lock you up.’

‘He finally made . . . an individual . . . appear in his study. I think, though I hesitate to say it, this individual must have been . . . that being which our culture and religion has
always known as Satan.’

‘Description?’ Ross now had her notebooks out and was writing at speed.