Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (6 page)

Quill stared at the body, as if this was some mad joke being played on him. He looked, if possible, more burdened than ever. Before Sefton could ask if something had happened, he was all
business. ‘Is he solid?’

‘No, Jimmy.’ Sefton demonstrated, sticking the toe of his shoe right through the body’s head. They all knew that the ‘ghosts’ formed by London
‘remembering’ a real or fictional character had varying degrees of solidity. This time, they couldn’t examine the corpse, couldn’t even turn it over. Sefton had already
taken a lot of photos, using his phone, then checked that, to a Sighted person, the body did show up in them. The image of the body was still multifaceted, changing as you looked at it, changing
with the angle. It was, Sefton had realized, a combination of all the different Sherlocks, all the different actors, including Speake, Flamstead and Cassell, loads he didn’t recognize, some
in modern dress, many wearing the deerstalker and cape, which thus had a regular shape compared to the flickering of the rest of the image, and also a sort of pencilled version, which Sefton
realized must be the strong memory created by the original illustrator of the Holmes stories, whose name Sefton couldn’t remember. That added a flavour that, after a moment, he realized
reminded him of an ancient A-ha pop video. That thought had led to him filming the body on his phone, until he was sure he’d caught the full cycle of incarnations as they flickered by.

‘No habeas corpus, then,’ said Ross, which might have been a joke except there was, as ever, no humour in her expression.

‘How is this even possible?’ asked Costain, who looked like he might have wanted to make a few dark jokes himself, but was, as always now, restraining every expression of who he was
for Ross’s sake.

‘Well,’ said Sefton, who’d had a while to think about this, ‘if you mean “How is there a Sherlock Holmes?”, then I think it’s obvious that there would
be, or was, in our version of London. London remembers things that happened, but like we saw with the “most haunted house” at Berkeley Square, it equally remembers stuff that was just
made up. Sherlock Holmes: a very popular fictional character with a huge link to London. A lot of people even think he’s real.’

‘There’s been “Holmesmania”, with the three versions filming at once in town, getting everyone thinking about it,’ said Ross. ‘It’s actually kind of
obvious he’d be one of our “ghosts”.’

‘If you mean “How do you kill a ghost?”’ Sefton continued, ‘you’ve got me there.’

‘Why haven’t we seen him before?’ Costain had stepped closer to the body.

‘Where’s he associated with?’ said Ross, a rhetorical question, talking to herself, though Costain had looked up hopefully for a moment at the thought she might actually have
addressed him. ‘Just this building. The ghost of Jack the Ripper was in Whitechapel. Every other place associated with Sherlock Holmes . . . Is it Dartmoor in
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
?’

‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘and there’s the Reichenbach Falls, wherever that is.’

‘Not in London,’ said Ross.

‘Yeah, I fucking knew that,’ said Quill, startling her. Then he visibly chided himself. ‘Sorry.’

Sefton found himself frowning. That wasn’t the Quill he knew. He’d hoped . . . but later for that.

Costain was shaking his head, like he fundamentally didn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘Ghost body, but not a ghost weapon.’ He gently tapped the dagger with the toe of his
shoe.

Sefton nodded. ‘To kill a ghost, you’d need a special weapon, and that’d have to be a real object. Makes sense.’

Ross stepped to the edge of the blood pool and, with a reluctance born of many tangible crime scenes, put her finger in the liquid. ‘Blood isn’t real,’ she said. She stepped
into it to squat by the blade, and waved aside the start of a warning from Quill. ‘We can’t disturb something that isn’t there. This weapon, though, is solid evidence.’ She
took out her phone to take some closer photos of what Sefton had initially taken for decoration, but now could make out as a tiny row of what looked like stick men, engraved on the blade.
‘There’s an obvious question here: is this coincidental to the
Study in Scarlet
murder, or some sort of weird copycat case, or is there a link?’

‘You said you felt like something had gone missing from London,’ Quill said to Sefton. ‘That Holmes came to you in a dream. Did someone do this? Is this murder?’

‘Now we’re wondering if ghosts commit suicide,’ murmured Costain, as if someone had to say it.

‘What do you mean, Jimmy?’ asked Sefton. He didn’t like that sound in Quill’s voice, familiar from his own experience. He was used to the voices of organized crime
network bosses, that edgy mix of authority and paranoia.

‘I mean, maybe it’s London saying something to us. Maybe this is, you know, symbolic.’

‘That’s the first time I have ever heard you use that word,’ said Costain. He was looking as uneasy as Sefton was, trying to find some banter here.

Quill slowly shook his head. ‘The death of Sherlock Holmes? He’s deduction; he’s the idea you can . . . you know, pick apart something that’s happened, find meaning to
it, solve it. Maybe we’re getting to the end of that being possible. Maybe soon nothing’ll mean anything.’ He suddenly, artificially, laughed, as if he’d realized how unlike
his old self he sounded. ‘Cheerful thought, actually. Then we can retire. Go somewhere nice.’ His smile faded again.

Ross made an audible clicking sound with her tongue, as if adding an annoyed full stop to an idea she wasn’t willing to entertain. She got out her notebook. ‘I’m going to start
recording all the details,’ she said, as if Quill hadn’t spoken. ‘What about the rest of the room?’

Sefton was glad of her moving things on. He took the evidence gloves from his pocket and put them on, which made Costain and finally Quill do that too. They examined the crime scene. Sefton had
taken it to be undisturbed, but they swiftly found quite a few worrying changes to what the guidebook photo indicated was the norm. It was hard to see, but on one of the walls was drawn, in chalk,
an upright rectangle, as if someone was planning to build a doorway there. ‘Look at this,’ said Costain. ‘Like Ballard used to get into the bank.’

‘So other people have something that can do that,’ said Sefton. ‘That speaks of a suspect leaving the scene. Oh, wait a sec.’ He made a phone call and checked quickly
with some bemused officers on night shift, finding that Ballard was still in his cell and his piece of chalk was safe and sound in evidence. No, he hadn’t drawn anything on the cell wall.

‘The things,’ sighed Costain, ‘we have to worry about.’ They went back to work.

In front of the grate of the fireplace, there was a strange, rather theatrical shoe, bigger than anyone could comfortably wear, with faded blue, gold and red details, the toe of which was
upturned. There was a hole in it, and from its side had poured a trail of what, with a sniff and the withholding of a sneeze, Sefton identified as tobacco. A pile of the stuff, beside it, had been
formed into a spiral shape.

‘Bloody spiral,’ said Quill, sounding suddenly like he’d solved the case.

Ross immediately came over and said it didn’t look anything like the spiral patterns the witch Mora Losley had left behind her in their first case together, and besides, those had been
made of soil. She sounded like she wanted to add that Quill should have already noted those things.

‘That’d be a Persian slipper,’ said Costain, looking at the guidebook and diverting Quill from Ross’s glare.

The hole in said footwear looked like it had been cut. Sefton took a picture. As he did so, he glanced up and noticed something else. On the mantelpiece above the fireplace, there was a drawing
of a woman in Victorian costume. There was something about her eyes. He stood and looked more closely. They’d each had the tiniest of pinpricks made in them. It made it look like the
woman’s gaze was following you, but in a disturbing, askew way. Under the drawing was a caption: ‘Irene Adler.’ Sefton pointed the holes out to Ross, who was now writing at high
speed. ‘The woman in Holmes’s life,’ said Costain.

‘You ever read any of the stories?’ asked Sefton.

‘When I was a kid. She’s in a lot of the films and TV shows, isn’t she?’

Beside the photograph, a large knife was embedded in the mantelpiece. It had caught Sefton’s gaze on his first inspection of the room, but it was pictured in the guidebook, so he gathered
it was a feature of the room as it should be. It held a bundle of letters, with the 221B address at the top of the first one. Sefton leafed through them and noticed something. ‘Here, look at
this.’

The others gathered round. Only the first two letters were complete, the top one being an appeal for help from someone who’d lost their cat, the second one a letter from someone
complaining to Holmes about the noise of his violin playing. Both of them had a series of tiny holes punched in them, sometimes cutting out letters from words, sometimes not. The holes were also
present in the blank sheets that made up the rest of the pile, not going through from the letters above them, but cut out in different patterns, after which they must have been put back under the
knife.

‘What the living fuck?’ said Costain. He was shaking his head. He checked the guide again, but couldn’t find any reference to this being something from one of the Holmes
stories. Sefton let his gaze drift to the right and realized that what he’d thought was a globe of the world was something entirely different. On top of another cabinet in the corner, beside
lots of objects that were souvenirs of particular cases, sat what had once been – he took the guide from Costain and checked – a wax bust of Holmes’s head. However, it was now
just about unrecognizable. The features had been melted, the eyes now streaks of colour down the pale face, the nose a stalactite connecting to the wood below. Sefton reached out and found no heat
near it. Raising a hand to keep the others back, he put a finger on the wax itself. It wasn’t even warm.

‘We can get an expert opinion on that cooling,’ said Ross, ‘get a time frame.’

‘The curator,’ added Sefton, ‘said everything was normal at eleven p.m. That’s the last time she looked in here. I had that dream . . . maybe five minutes later. I was
here by midnight. Maybe the dream was actually the moment Holmes . . . “died”? He seemed to be desperately asking for help.’

‘Over here,’ said Ross, moving on. She was pointing to a series of bullet holes in the wall, above a pile of books beside Holmes’s desk, which formed the letters
‘V.R.’ ‘I think
that’s
an original feature.’

‘It is,’ said Sefton, consulting the guide.

‘But this isn’t.’ She was pointing at a series of thin red lines that connected several of the holes, sometimes crossing each other. ‘Looks like biro, not blood.’
She moved lights to photograph the lines clearly. Her brow had furrowed into a look Sefton appreciated. She had seen several patterns now, and, though that brought her no pleasure, for both her and
the rest of them that was equivalent to her having seen a lock to which she would surely subsequently find keys.

‘What’s he pointing at?’ said Quill, who had kept glancing back at the body.

Indeed, now Sefton looked closely, the outstretched hand was flickering through some gestures that resembled pointing. He looked up in the same direction as Quill and found the smaller desk in
the corner opposite, with pictures of two men above it, one in military uniform, the other a man of proud appearance with white hair whipped back from his brow like a mad composer.

‘General Gordon, a contemporary of Holmes, died in a siege in the Sudan, and Henry Ward Beecher, an American anti-slavery preacher,’ said Costain, consulting the guidebook.
‘Or, as I suppose we can now refer to them, suspects.’

‘What was he working on?’ Quill had wandered to Holmes’s own desk, to the left of which was pinned a map of the night sky, a diagram of the solar system and an astronomical
photo of lots of stars.

‘He wasn’t
working on
anything,’ said Ross; ‘he’s a fictional character in a museum. His ghost might have
looked
like it was working on something, but
nothing remembered by London has . . . agency, volition.’

‘And yet,’ said Quill, ‘those charts and that photo aren’t in the guidebook. And you just made an assumption based only on the limited amount of shit we’ve
seen.’

Ross looked relieved to be corrected. She glanced to Sefton. This was definitely more like the Quill they knew. ‘Yes, boss.’

Quill unpinned the astronomical map, diagram and photo, and inspected them more closely. On the back of the photo was something that made him call them over to see. In an elegant, precise hand,
there was written:

The ultimate crime. I must solve it.

‘That,’ said Sefton, ‘would be a motive for murder. Holmes got too close to something.’

‘Considering all the books and stuff,’ said Costain, ‘what would he think of as “ultimate”?’

Ross was looking annoyed again. ‘I can’t get used to the idea of him “thinking”,’ she said. ‘If he was, that’s such an anomaly it must mean
something.’

‘Maybe a ghost like Holmes
would
work on crimes,’ said Sefton. ‘That’s what he was remembered for.’ He checked the handwriting on his phone against what
Google could find. ‘Quite a few people have had a go at doing Holmes’s handwriting. They all look a bit like that, but we sort of know what his writing would look like, don’t
we?’

‘Where’s Watson?’ said Costain.

Sefton wanted to smack himself on the forehead. The sheer density of information in this murder room made seeing what was right in front of you bloody difficult. ‘Yeah, good point. If
Holmes was well known enough to be a ghost, and pinned down to this location, wouldn’t Watson be too?’

‘Probably,’ said Ross. ‘Damn it. I
hate
“probably”.’

They all took a closer, Sighted look around the room, Sefton remembering what Costain had said to him about how hard to find some of the Ripper victims’ ghosts had been. Of Watson,
however, there was no sign.