Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (19 page)

‘Well,’ laughed Lindt, with a lightness that sounded like it was born of bitter experience, ‘I am, kind of, you know, your boss.’

She looked shocked at him. ‘You said you’d never go there.’ She held up a hand to stop his protestations and turned back to Quill. ‘I guess he’s trying to protect
me. Or the studio’s investment.’

‘Alice, I would never think of you like—’

‘I get death threats, threats of rape every single frigging day. Shitheads who think they own Sherlock Holmes, who don’t think I should play her. This new threat? Same old same
old.’

‘Is it . . . Shirley Holmes in your case?’ Ross had read up on the respective series and had expressed the view on the way over that a young white woman these days being called
Shirley was so bizarre they might as well have stayed with Sherlock.

‘
Shy
, usually,’ said Lindt, ‘Shy Holmes. It sounds more contemporary.’ He indicated Cassell. ‘Can you believe it? She’s Shy.’

‘I’m a grown woman. I’m not running. OK?’

‘Good for you, Ally,’ said Speake. There was something a little Californian in the handsome middle-aged man’s accent, a weird transatlantic awkwardness to his East End tones.
In the movies, he was full-on plummy thespian. Presumably this was what he thought of as his authentic voice. It was as if he’d literally forgotten what a real British person sounded like.
‘Fuck ’em and their ways. We ain’t for moving.’

‘Well, given you two are so laid-back about it, I
so
completely disagree,’ said Flamstead. The others laughed.

‘What Gilbert means is that we understand the threat,’ said his PA, ‘and none of us wants to make your job harder. We’d all like to help.’

‘The show must go on,’ said Speake, as if he was coining a new truism.

‘Did any of you ever work with Erik Gullister?’ asked Quill.

‘Yeah,’ said Cassell, ‘just for a few days. He was a grieving father on
Dear Alibi
, about a decade ago. I was his daughter. Good actor. Never had any luck.’

Speake didn’t think he’d worked with Gullister, but said he wouldn’t necessarily remember. Flamstead just raised an eyebrow: as if. Ross confirmed that, as far as IMDb knew,
Cassell’s was the only connection. Quill asked if the name Dean Michael meant anything to them. It didn’t. Ross, saying it was a matter of form, asked for alibis from all three actors
for the times of the previous murders. Speake protested, saying he didn’t know he’d need his bloody lawyer present, thank you very much, chums, but Flamstead calmed him down.

‘You had to ask, didn’t you, Inspector?’ said Flamstead, actually giving Quill a wink. ‘In the old country, things are still done in the proper way and in the proper
order.’

After a lot of humming and hawing, Speake agreed to check his diary. Lindt and Cassell had to compare theirs on their tablets. ‘You had that thing,’ said Cassell, ‘with that
girl, on that night.’

‘She is not “a girl”.’

‘Hah! What do you mean she’s not? She’s very nice.’

Lindt’s smile grew more forced every second. He finally declared they’d worked out where Cassell was on every occasion and showed Ross the diary entries. There were a number of
people in every case who could confirm where she was every time.

Flamstead’s schedule, on the other hand, had a few holes in it. ‘You like walking, collecting your thoughts, don’t you?’ said his PA. Which included the first and second
murders, and he claimed to have been asleep in his hotel at the time of the Holmes killing. Ross hadn’t identified the victim in that case, of course, just that there was another incident the
details of which hadn’t been released to the media. That news made all the actors and Lindt nod seriously in a way Quill had only seen during charity telethons.

None of them could have been on the river for the death of Gullister. Speake turned out to have been in the same pub for all of the killings, which he only haltingly admitted. The faces of Lindt
and the other two actors betrayed only polite interest.

None of them had even heard of Stoke d’Abernon, and checks with Cassell and Speake’s companies confirmed that none of the productions planned to go there. All those involved agreed
to send lists of recent threatening messages on social media. ‘Good luck wading through mine,’ said Cassell.

‘I was just wondering, while we’re here,’ said Ross, and Quill noted that her tone was nowhere near as casual as her words, ‘if we could get a look at the set.’

Ross was glad to get the access she’d been after so easily. She and Quill followed the actors, Flamstead’s gorgeous PA and Cassell’s producer into the
enormous open space of the warehouse-turned-studio. A scene was being prepared in Holmes’s study. Ross and Quill were able to step past the cameras and the assistant director, who was
watching as a prop person checked every detail of the wall behind Holmes’s desk against a photo. ‘It’s not like in the Holmes Museum,’ she said.

‘Because,’ said Flamstead, coming to stand beside her, ‘they
so
precisely depict what Holmes’s study would actually be like.’

His tone of voice seemed to tend towards irony. She found herself reacting to him. He was a very pretty bloke. He moved in real life like he did on screen, such expressive hands. His presence
made her sad, though. Her feeling horny without happiness, without a smile, that was a bit grim. If she was with anyone now, what would that be like? Mechanical, functional. There would be no love
without happiness. Unless she could get it back.

She made herself concentrate on what she’d come here for. She’d wanted to get a look at the production team, to find out if any of them had anything about them that drew Sighted
attention. Beyond that, though, the deductive part of her wanted to get immersed in Sherlock Holmes, to be able to walk in his (or her) shoes, to add that perspective to the ops board. She was now
playing against someone extraordinary, and she needed data. ‘So,’ she said, ‘tell me about your Holmes.’

Flamstead looked pleased by the question. ‘As with all Sherlocks, he’s a mess of emotions and loves human companionship.’

The gorgeous PA literally stuck her head into the conversation. ‘By which Gilbert means the opposite, of course.’

‘My network still worries about that,’ said Cassell, ‘six seasons in. They want Gregory House, but
nice
.’

‘They do not—!’ Lindt stopped himself, and just held up a hand, excusing himself.

‘Charmingly eccentric,’ said Speake, as if he was the one who’d been asked. ‘He can only do romance by rote, like Holmes does all socializing. He’s somewhere on the
Asperger’s spectrum, but he knows how to
use
emotions; he has mental lists of things he can do to get a result from other people. That’s the heart of how I portray the character.
Nothing like me. That’s what they call acting, mate. Actually, if the Internet is anything to go by, the autism thing really excites a section of my audience. The section living in their
mother’s basements, I mean. Isn’t that a dreadful Yank expression? But so true.’

‘He’s much more at home in disguise,’ said Lindt, having regained the power of speech. ‘He can be all these other people with different lives absolutely
perfectly.’

‘He?’ said Cassell.

‘I am talking about—’ And Lindt had to force himself, once again, not to continue.

‘Well, that’s so not the case with Shy,’ said Cassell. ‘So I don’t know which Holmes he’d rather be working on.’ Lindt just shook his head, keeping his
smile fixed. ‘She loves her life; she’s at home in her own skin. Her big problem is trying not to keep intervening in dear Watson’s love life.’

‘Some sort of Watson is about the only thing our three versions have in common,’ said Speake. ‘She’s just started shagging her Watson . . .’

‘In the
show
.’

‘They know that,’ said Lindt.

‘. . . because “will they? won’t they?” has become “yes, they do” – immediate gratification, thank you – and as for us two Sherlocks, we’re
both shagging—’

‘Irene Adler?’ said Flamstead. ‘I deny everything. Goodness, dear old Irene Adler, such an underused character in the modern media.’

‘She’s not used very
well
,’ said Cassell, pointedly.

Flamstead grinned as if this was the most charming thing he’d ever heard. Speake just shrugged.

Flamstead looked back to Ross. She wasn’t just imagining this, was she? He was checking her out. She was pretty sure she didn’t have anything to compare to the sort of Hollywood
stars he must hang about with. Not even to his PA.

Ross found herself needing to look away, to Cassell. ‘Are all of you still into this, or do you feel the urge to play Sherlock kind of . . . dying away?’

Flamstead moved deliberately back into her eyeline. ‘Far from it. I have a very straightforward relationship with the viewing public. I adore them.’ The other two were busy loudly
indicating that they still loved playing the part. It sounded like they, at least, meant it, to whatever degree they usually meant things. Lindt was looking at Cassell with something approaching
relief.

‘You’re all much darker than the Conan Doyle, aren’t you? Even your movies . . .’

‘Conan Doyle got damn dark,’ said Speake.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Cassell. ‘I look at those movies of yours and think, Kids can get in to see that? But I think that about everything in modern cinema.’

‘You’re just saying things that are true,’ sighed Speake, ‘as if they’re important.’

‘You have to give the audience what they want,’ said Flamstead. ‘And these days, what the audience most wants is gritty realism that says something about their lives, inhabited
by people like themselves.’

‘
Sure
they do,’ said Speake.

Ross also felt that, once again, the twinkle in Flamstead’s eye said he was saying the opposite of what he meant. She didn’t quite know what she was working towards. There was
something in Flamstead’s expression that seemed to be leading her on, in more ways than one. ‘How does deduction work for a modern Holmes? In Victorian London, maybe it was true that
there were tight social rules, so you could tell what someone’s job was by, I don’t know, an ink mark on their hand, but these days that might just mean the suspect had an ink
fetish.’

‘You still can sum people up by a collection of facts about them. That’s what predictive marketing does. That’s what every quiz on Facebook does,’ said Cassell. ‘Oh
God, are you saying we’re getting it wrong?’ She gestured to Lindt. ‘Listen to her – this is a detective!’

‘
We
have detectives—’ began Lindt.

‘Don’t you think,’ said Flamstead, interrupting, ‘that character is more important than clues?’

‘A lot of Holmes’s deductive methods still hold up,’ said Speake, as if personally affronted by that idea they might be getting it wrong. ‘As Conan Doyle said,
“When you have eliminated the impossible . . .”’

Ross sighed. ‘Let me stop you right there.’

‘“. . . whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What’s wrong with that?’

She didn’t want to say that for her unit, eliminating the impossible was the tricky bit. ‘After you’ve eliminated the impossible, there are still loads of possible things left,
and some of them won’t be true, so what does that even mean?’

Speake frowned, then looked around, as if there might be another gorgeous PA handy who could take her off his hands. Ross knew she wasn’t being fair. She didn’t know what she was
working towards here. She looked back to Flamstead, who gave her that secret smile. Even if he was trying to encourage her in some way, him fancying her, or trying to impress her, or whatever it
was didn’t help with anything.

‘Question,’ said Quill. ‘Same thing I asked the wife. Tell me the first thing that comes into your head. Who killed Sherlock Holmes?’

Flamstead looked around for a moment, found his target and pointed. ‘He did.’

Ross and Quill turned to see a pleasant-looking middle-aged actor in a tailcoat approaching. ‘Who’s this?’ asked Quill.

The man extended a hand, a wry smile on his face. ‘Professor Moriarty,’ he said.

This
Alexander
Moriarty, it turned out, was a Victorian investment banker, part of some sort of global conspiracy, played by an actor called Patrick White. Something in
the back of Quill’s brain was itching. He listened to the actor saying that originally in the stories, Conan Doyle had given the name James to Moriarty’s brother, but then had forgotten
that detail and given it later to Moriarty himself. So their version had it that that had been part of a complicated scheme of multiple identities on the professor’s part. ‘My Moriarty
loves leading Holmes astray,’ White said, ‘planting clues, leaving little hints.’

‘Mine too,’ said Cassell. ‘He’s a serial killer, so he’s an intellectual and leaves puzzles, of course.’

‘And also mine,’ said Speake, ‘though in my case, the clues and puzzles are all a bit more fun. Despite,’ he added, seeing Cassell’s raised eyebrow, ‘all the
horrible murders.’

‘Unlike the original Moriarty,’ said Ross, ‘who tried to leave no clues at all.’

Cassell, hearing once again an expert opinion, threw another accusing look to Lindt, one that made him spread his hands in final, utter disbelief.

Quill suddenly realized that he knew what had been troubling him. His heart started beating so quickly he had to turn away, to try to control his breathing. It was so big he didn’t want to
say it out loud. Ross finished her tour of the facility and took him aside to tell him what he already knew, that there was nothing particularly of the Sight here. He nodded, eager to get moving.
He shook his head when she asked him what was wrong. This wasn’t something he could share with her, not yet.

He shook the hands of all the Holmeses and the producer and the PA and that blessed Moriarty, and when they got out of the warehouse and onto the street, told Ross to go home, said he’d be
fine, realized she hadn’t asked, had to stifle a laugh and headed for the Tube station. He looked back and saw her staring after him, concerned. Understandable. He went on his way for a few
moments, then stopped, letting the Southwark early evening commuter crowds pass around him. Then he looked quickly over his shoulder. Yes. Someone had ducked back round that corner just as
he’d looked. ‘Onto you, sunshine,’ muttered Quill, and, at a more careful pace, headed once more for the Tube.