Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (12 page)

‘Oh. I note this interview isn’t being recorded.’

‘Damn right.’

Ballard considered for a long time. Longer than anyone would really consider anything. Sefton took that to be a good sign and allowed himself a smile that slowly grew. Finally, Ballard let out a
long breath that was almost a laugh. Yeah, he was going to take the offer. Of course he was. ‘I’ll need to talk to my brief about this. For that, I need you to make a formal offer that
anyone reading it who’s not involved in our world isn’t going to baulk at.’

‘We’ll get that sorted. Right now, give me something I can tell my chief, a show of good faith. Something about the dagger, something about the chalk.’

‘Isn’t the chalk obvious? You saw how it worked at the bank.’

Sefton kept a poker face. Ballard sat down again and picked up the dagger. It had already been examined for fingerprints. They’d only found glove marks. Similarly, the envelope and photo
had yielded nothing meaningful. ‘This is made in London, of course.’

‘Yeah, we can read.’

‘“Wilkinson and Son, Pall Mall, London,”’ Ballard read out loud. ‘The company that became Wilkinson Sword. This is a bowie knife, dates from around 1840 to 1860,
fake-ivory grip, in very good condition. If you had the original leather sheath, this would be worth a small fortune, but a copper could retire on this as is.’

‘We really wanted a bit more detail than you’d get on
Antiques Roadshow
.’

‘The stick men carved into the blade aren’t an original feature; they look to have been added recently. Nothing supernatural about them, but there is much of interest about the knife
itself. I don’t have the Sight, but I suspect this object feels meaningful to those that do.’

Sefton carefully didn’t confirm or deny his own status. ‘Why do you suspect that?’

‘Because look at the notches on the grip here. Very small, but each of them will have been cut with a sacrifice and lined with blood. This is a “fetch kettle”, an object
that’s been modified, long ago, to host a particular “spiel”, a way of keeping useful sound and gesture handy without having to replicate it yourself. This being a knife,
I’d say the effect would probably be activated when it was stabbed into something.’

That was more detail than Sefton had ever previously heard about hidden London, framed in a language of professional use that went far beyond anything his unit had ever come up with. It was,
obviously, the tip of a dirty great iceberg of data. He kept his expression steady. So the knife might well have had some sort of ghost-killing power imbued into it, be a ‘ghostkiller’,
as the coded inscription named it. ‘What effect would that be? In detail.’

‘Ah, no.’ Ballard laid the knife carefully back on the table. ‘Get that paperwork sorted.’

‘And about the chalk?’

Ballard shrugged. ‘Not much to tell. I’ve seen two or three sticks of it in my time . . . pretty rare, but not unique. Don’t know where it comes from, just that, with the
proper gestures, it works.’

Sefton decided to go with another tack that he’d considered in advance. ‘OK, we’ll get into that. In the meantime, as a show of good faith on our part, is there anything about
unseen London
you’d
like to ask
us
?’

Ballard didn’t look incredulous, thank Christ. He considered for a moment. ‘It’s changing, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Sefton wished he could have a straightforward conversation with this guy. Maybe before long they would. ‘We think something major changed about five years
ago.’

‘When the old law went away, right. But what about since?’

Sefton had already considered what he was going to reveal. ‘Our investigations point to events moving in a particular direction. A worrying direction.’

‘Yes.’ Ballard waited to hear more, then visibly realized he wasn’t going to. He sighed. ‘I’d really enjoy having the time and space to work with you. But only
after I get my deal.’

Ross had gone to see Ann Stanley, assistant curator at the Holmes Museum, at home at her parents’ house in Rickmansworth. She’d been given leave while the museum
was a crime scene, and she didn’t like it at all. ‘It sort of feels like I’m meant to be in shock, or that I did something wrong,’ she said, handing Ross a cup of tea.

‘There’s no reason to think that,’ lied Ross.

The museum had shown the main investigation their post room, an office downstairs with a dedicated secretary who answered all the letters that came in to 221B. A standard reply was printed on
stationery that bore the detective’s profile in silhouette, complete with a pipe and deerstalker cap. As if Holmes would have allowed the use of those symbols in ‘real life’. The
form letter thanked people for writing and fobbed off requests for help with the phrase ‘In his own words, Mr Holmes has given himself up entirely “to that soothing life of nature for
which I had so often yearned during the long years amid the gloom of London”.’ Certainly, a sentient Holmes with an interest in his own mail, assuming he had the power to come
downstairs and to lift things, could have found a specific parcel and taken it back to his study.

‘What sort of mail did Sherlock Holmes get?’ Ross asked.

‘People asking if he was real, or if he’d run for president in the US. Sometimes they had mad theories about the books they wanted him to confirm. Some of them were written like . .
. like a kid believing in Father Christmas. Sort of half thinking of him as real and half not. Like people you’d think were completely normal write to characters in
Coronation Street
.
They asked him to solve crimes too. A lot wanted him to find Bin Laden. That’s a bit sick, isn’t it?’

Ross didn’t express an opinion. ‘Were there any ghost stories about the museum?’

Stanley looked puzzled. ‘Well, no, but . . . it was me on the evening shift a lot, clearing up after the day, and . . . you heard things. Other people did too. Like there was someone
moving around. And things got moved. Small stuff. You’d put something back where it was supposed to be and then it’d be somewhere else. That sounds stupid. You’re not writing that
down, are you?’

Ross had been. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘That’s all useful information.’

When she got back to the Hill, Ross found that Sefton and Costain had returned too. Quill seemed to have spent the time staring at the ops board and making tea. They all
listened to each other’s stories, and Ross felt she could now just about support the idea of at least a mobile and perhaps a sentient Holmes who might have taken the envelope from the post
room. She went to the ops board and added a suspect line between the three murders and ‘Dean Michael’, which she kept in speech marks to indicate a possible alias.

Ballard’s deal was in progress, Quill having put a request in with Lofthouse. Enquiries to the Sherlock Holmes Society and the Baker Street Babes podcast had revealed that Conan Doyle
hadn’t been terribly precise about what Holmes kept on his bookshelves. Ross suspected that, despite her warnings about secrecy, being contacted by the police for expert advice in the midst
of the ‘Rache’ killings would result in a few stray tweets of glee from those organizations. Of the few book titles named in the stories, none was missing. The museum didn’t
regard anything as being missing. They had the same number of blank prop books as their records said they’d had before. Recent pictures from visitors to the museum, as seen on Facebook, right
up until the day of the Holmes ‘murder’ also revealed nothing that shouldn’t be in the museum, no astronomical charts on the walls, the standard number of books all shoved up next
to each other with gaps only left at the end of the shelves.

‘Is it . . . just us that can see this stuff?’ asked Costain. They went to have bacon sandwiches in the Gipsy Hill canteen and awkwardly showed a photo of the astronomical map to a
lid, who, looking puzzled at them, said that he liked to stargaze sometimes, like.

‘So,’ said Sefton, bewildered, ‘did this sentient and mobile Holmes . . . set up his rooms differently after everyone went home, like something out of
Night at the
Museum
?’

‘That does sound like him,’ said Quill, weakly, as if he felt he ought to contribute something.

Ross went back to the ops board and tried to sum that grey area up in a couple of added notes.

After they’d got back to the Portakabin, Quill took a phone call from the main inquiry and reported to them the results. ‘So, Bates’s girlfriend confirms that she’s been
seeing him lately, didn’t even try to conceal the fact, because he’d told her he was out.’

‘Which,’ said Sefton, ‘using Occam’s razor, puts him right back in the frame, whatever story he’s telling us. He had the opportunity, and with the chalk he had the
means.’

‘Which is why,’ said Quill, ‘I felt obliged to share the first of those details with the main investigation. Not that I could tell them
how
he got out. Still,
that’ll cause havoc at Wandsworth.’

‘He had a frigging staggering lack of motive,’ said Costain. ‘Nothing was stolen from those two murder scenes, and what’s he got to do with killing Sherlock
Holmes?’

‘Maybe he was working for someone else?’ said Sefton.

‘So whatever mastermind put together this baffling mystery was stupid enough to hire Albie Bates?’ asked Costain.

‘Bates was lying about not knowing anything about the Holmes stories.’ Ross hated replying directly to him, but at the same time she now felt weirdly able to. It was like Costain was
so caught up in the case now he’d stopped having artificial reactions to her. ‘His mum’s Facebook page includes pictures of him aged eight, in the deerstalker, in his
primary-school production of
Hound of the Baskervilles
.’

‘Oh, well then, case closed!’ said Costain. Ross was amazed he was talking back to her. Pleased, honestly. Maybe they could work together after all. ‘Listen, can you imagine
our first victim, Christopher Lassiter, even if he was the most un-racist person on earth, answering the door to complete stranger Albie Bates and then immediately having a cuppa with him? Albie
doesn’t have the gift of the gab.’

Quill had been listening, looking increasingly frustrated. ‘Not a good fit, I grant you, but maybe he forced his way in, ordered the victim to make a cup of tea.’

‘Instead of grabbing his DVD player and running?’ asked Costain. ‘Come on, what’s in it for Bates? Why leave a word on the wall that isn’t in his vocabulary? Bates
isn’t who did this; Bates is who gets sent down for it when they can’t find anyone else, and you know it. Is that what we do now?’

Quill looked for a moment like he was going to bellow at Costain, had to visibly control himself. ‘Of course it isn’t.’

‘So,’ said Sefton, moving on, ‘if we
assume
Bates is innocent, we should focus on this guy, our new prime suspect.’ He pointed to a piece of paper on the board
with only a name written on it. ‘Dean Michael. If he’s real, he could have used the same item, gesture or sound to hide himself from the prison authorities and to create, on that CCTV
camera, and possibly for anyone watching, the illusion that he was Bates. That’s well within the bounds of what we know to be possible. We didn’t see anything of the Sight about Bates
on the ladder, but we’ve seen that people in the know can hide from us.’

‘The name Dean Michael isn’t in the databases,’ said Ross. ‘Google offers a number of individuals called that from around the world, but none with any of the indicators
associated with our line of work or with London.’

‘Say he’s pretending to be in the prison system,’ said Costain, ‘to set Bates up, which, if you can walk through walls, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Individual
prison officers see inmates come and go all the time – they don’t know who’s supposed to be in the mess hall unless they’re called upon to make a count – and as a
remand prisoner, he’d be in his own clothes.’

‘He didn’t use this “walkthrough” to enter either of the first two crime scenes,’ said Quill. ‘Just at 221B.’

‘Because, in the first case, he had to obtain the victim’s trust to use the poison. In the second case . . . well, Lisa noted that means of entry was bizarre. What if he did it that
way in order to get his illusion seen by the CCTV camera, in order to fit up Bates?’

Quill nodded. ‘Let’s get Bates in here with the PRO-FIT software, get a photofit of Dean Michael we can show around.’ He called Clarke’s office again and requested that
Bates be brought over to the Hill tonight, so they could interview him in the morning. ‘Another long day,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it there for now.’

Ross tried to hang about, after Sefton and Costain left, to have a word in private with Quill. He’d done so much for her in the past. Whatever he was dealing with on his own, she wanted to
help. When Quill saw her hanging back, however, he just tossed her the keys and curtly told her to lock up, then was away to his own car. Ross watched him go. She wondered if there was something
somewhere in Quill’s life that might give him a lead on what was weighing him down. She hoped desperately that he could find it.

Since getting the Sight, Quill had found the drive home from work really bloody difficult. He’d put the radio on, try to screen out the horrors London offered. Sticking
to the same route had, to a degree, made those horrors routine, but only to a degree. He would always wave, for instance, to the same forlorn figure standing in the graveyard near his home. Lately,
he’d been making himself do it, because after Hell, he had to make himself do so many small, routine things.

Tonight, however, the drive home was different. It took him a while to feel it, through the thoughts about Laura and Sarah and Jessica that he kept rolling round and round in his head. He
gradually became aware that the Sight was trying to tell him about something. Something was behind him, occasionally to one side. He looked in the mirror, couldn’t see anything unusual. The
feeling persisted all the way home. He parked outside his house, locked the car, then hesitated for a new reason, looked slowly around the leafy housing estate close.

The Sight was giving him a strangely generalized warning. It was very vague, on the edge of being nothing, close to the anxiety that these days infested his every waking moment. He found he was
looking at the corner at the end of the close, the pavement in the longer shadows of approaching autumn. He thought yet again, as he looked, of the pavements he’d tramped in Hell. He tried
yet again, as he often did, to take comfort in the mere existence of physical objects around him, in being basically comfortable and free from pain, in the weather, even. They were all just sheets
draped over what was true. Was that shadow on the corner getting longer? Was someone standing just around there? Quill watched and waited. Eventually, he became uncertain. The length of the shadow
had changed with the light.