Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (28 page)

Sefton walked on past; he had to stay away from that building, show no particular interest in it, look as if he thought it was one of the banks that was the target instead. Costain was in the
RBS building, further up the street, making a big scene of checking the walls for chalk, as if they feared one of the gang had got inside already. Ross was in the command van with DI Clarke, ready
to send forces rushing in to grab the assailants. A bucket of water and a window cleaner’s shammy were ready under Horner’s desk, the officers there bemused to be under orders to use it
on any chalk marks. The gang could get in, but would then find their expected retreat cut off.

Sefton heard the sound of a distant alarm down the street. The passers-by paid no notice, of course. Was there a Holmes actor they’d missed? It seemed possible, but unlikely. Besides,
today, every security guard, no matter what their thespian inclinations, was on alert. He heard another alarm, and another, and another, all from nearby streets, and from this one. The pedestrians
were noticing now, laughing and saying things to each other about an earth tremor setting them off. Not likely, but given how nervy Londoners were these days, who’d bet against the
foundations of their world starting to shake? Sefton called Ross.

‘Whole bunch of alarms going off. Team here thinks it’s some sort of computer worm,’ she said. ‘Costain’s called in. He’s going to run between several of
them, see if any of them represents a real situation, because the one at RBS doesn’t. Main team’ – that was the one with Horner: they didn’t want to say anything over the
phone that’d indicate they knew his name or building – ‘have nothing to report. You’re to check on the following . . .’ She gave him three potential targets. If this
was a feint, it would be good to indicate they were falling for it. Sefton jogged between two banks and a bonds-trading firm, and found, having gone inside and right to the door of the safe in each
question, no sign of a chalk door, nothing unusual.

He was running back towards the Fenchurch Street end of Lombard Street when he became aware that all around him, others were reacting and starting to move in the same direction. The
plain-clothes guys, it must be. He felt a buzz from his phone and found a single-word text from Ross: Home. That meant converge on Travail Ltd. By the time he got to Clement’s Lane, he was
part of a rush of uniformed and non-uniformed coppers.

He burst through the doors and was surprised to see Horner standing, his hands raised, puzzled by the attention. ‘Nothing going on down here,’ he said.

Ross and Clarke entered together, Costain just behind them. ‘But something is upstairs,’ said Clarke, looking at her phone. She led Costain’s team up to the first floor. There,
in the large Victorian room, stood the enormous door of the safe, magnificently decorated with brands and commendations. Beside it stood two of the plain-clothes officers who’d been stationed
downstairs and a handful of scared bank workers. The door of the safe was slightly open. ‘I . . . heard something from inside,’ one of the bank workers was saying. ‘So I opened it
and . . .’

Sefton went to the safe and opened the door further with the toe of his boot. Inside, not even filling the space, lay the body of a large man, his face turned away. On his head was a
deerstalker. On the back wall of the safe was drawn a window-sized chalk square. Costain stepped forwards, having donned evidence gloves, and gingerly removed the deerstalker. The back of the
man’s head had been smashed in, leaving a mess of hair, bone, blood and grey matter. The movement made the body fall to one side, and in that moment, they all saw who the victim was: Mark
Ballard.

Sefton had to turn away to restrain himself from kicking at a door that would have definitely injured his foot.

Dr Piara Singh Deb, forensic pathologist at St Pancras Mortuary, was not willing to be taken for a fool, and so he had promised himself that he would never again deal with DI
Quill’s team. This evening, he had been startled, therefore, to find that his boss had done some sort of deal with Detective Superintendent Lofthouse. Every case of theirs was to be brought
here until further notice.

Dr Deb had considered making himself unavailable as a protest, but his boss had taken him aside and said that these were good people, who seemed to be under a lot of stress, and who seemed to
have a high regard for Dr Deb’s skills. Dr Deb had remembered how they’d seemed last time. That couldn’t have been acting. They too must have been fooled, at that point, by the,
it must be said, incredibly similar corpse that had been provided in place of their friend and leader, James Quill. Surely they too must have been kept in the dark about whatever deep undercover
operation had led Quill to pretend to be dead.

That thought had made him feel rather better about having not been trusted with such secrecy, and so he had scrubbed up and gone down to the labs, and had proceeded to examine this latest
corpse. Now, he faced only three of Quill’s team, Quill himself apparently being on leave. He saw what his boss had meant. The intelligence analyst, so stricken with grief last time, now had
something cold about her, and there was palpable tension between her and the detective sergeant, who was leading the team.

‘Victim,’ he said, ‘was struck on the back of the head several times by a metal implement, smooth and with a sharp point. You can see here how this depression in the brain is
created by the point having slipped into the wound. The force used in the attack was considerable, but not wild. There are no wounds anywhere else on the body. This was a deliberate, precise
assault. Cause of death was sudden-impact trauma. He’d have been unconscious after the first or second blow, but his position doesn’t seem to have shifted, so he wasn’t in a
position to fall. I’d say he must have been tied up, but if he was, there’s no sign of rope marks. Also, there’s something unusual about the musculature. It was stiff long before
rigor mortis should have set in, because time of death, from the blood clotting, is only ten minutes or so before the body was found.’ He kept one eye on their reactions, hoping one day to
spot something that gave him some clue as to why this team in particular brought him such extraordinary cases. He wanted to ask them what they knew, because it was obvious what he was saying made
sense to them, had been expected even, in the way one expects the sky to fall. They had no obligation to answer any such question, unless he had a professional need for the answer. ‘You can
still see that rigor on the face: the muscles are tight, as are the leg and arm muscles. I think it’s possible he may have been suffering severe cramp immediately before the attack. No trace
of anything unusual in the blood, so that isn’t a result of that tribal poison you mentioned in the notes.’

‘Any indications as to nature of assailant?’ asked the analyst.

‘Strong, muscles like a sportsman, with a good aim. Taller than the victim, if that muscle locking indicates the victim as somehow standing up.’

‘Could he have been held by the others?’

‘It’s possible, but it strikes me that to hold someone so still that their muscles protest in this manner would take . . . well, too many people for one person to get such clear
access, or, if there were that few, they’d have to be incredibly strong.’

Once Deb had completed his report, the sergeant thanked him and he watched them go. Perhaps, he decided, he was glad to have in his life the highly unusual cases this team brought him, even if
they themselves made him want to take them home and feed them.

Ross had a full-on headache. She found herself looking at an ops board that now took up three A3 sheets of paper and covered the corkboard under it. Sidebars had stretched onto
the walls, fixed there with Blu-tack. She could imagine this case reaching a point where it covered the interior of the Portakabin like wallpaper, with no two data points seeming to relate to each
other. She was literally living inside chaos.

‘Ballard,’ she said, going over once again what she’d added to the explosion of fact, ‘used a fake ID to sign on as a security guard with a company who weren’t used
on any of the premises.’

‘The mere fact he was genuinely a security guard seems to have been enough for the ritual element of this,’ said Sefton. ‘He didn’t have to work there. This is so much
about rules and specifics, it’s like someone’s determinedly ignoring the emotional side of the power of London and is getting OCD about the details.’

‘He did that within hours of getting his freedom,’ said Costain, ‘like he was planning something new even while he was in custody. Him suddenly deciding to look into being a
security guard is a hell of a coincidence otherwise.’

‘It’s a hell of a coincidence that it was what suited our opponents,’ said Ross. ‘So I don’t think it is a coincidence. But I have no conclusions to draw beyond
that. The back of the safe, after a very thick wall and several security devices, all of which were knocked out by the same untraceable worm that set off those burglar alarms, leads to a storeroom
of the money-transfer company next door. What CCTV there was went down at the same time, but a chalk doorway of the same size was found there, and some blood splashes. It’s being forensicated
now, but I’m betting we’ll find that’s the murder room. So Ballard and assailants walked in there, either through the front door or using walkthrough, the chalk from which was
then rubbed away. On this occasion they had time to do that. Perhaps Ballard did think he was being consulted about a robbery, came along to help out. Having dumped the body, they must have walked
out of the safe using walkthrough, then out of the front of that building next door. Again, CCTV was down.’

‘The muscle-locking business is interesting,’ said Sefton. ‘I reckon some sort of artefact was used on Ballard, maybe one of his own, to hold him in place, maybe force him to
act out being Holmes. Ballard followed the news like anyone else, and knew of our interest in the Holmes murders, so he wouldn’t have done that willingly.’ He let out a long breath.
‘Shit, he would have reacted as soon as he saw the deerstalker.’

‘Upon which there is no trace of anything but Ballard,’ sighed Ross.

Rebecca Lofthouse hated that she was going to be out of touch with both Costain’s team and with the continuing efforts to find James. Her own task this weekend, however,
was, in the end, more important.

She’d confided about her ‘affair’ to Sally Rutherford specifically because she was the organizer of a conference in Coventry this weekend. That had seemed at the time Lofthouse
had decided on it to be an opportunity to dig deeper into the mysteries of her own past, but now the date had come around, it was actually a chance to go even further. She’d called Sally from
a payphone and told her a ton of romantic nonsense about the man who was going to take her away from her cruel husband. They were going off to Paris together, when Lofthouse was meant to be in
Coventry. If anyone asked, would she mind . . .? Sally agreed, with only slight and required protest, to be her accomplice. The powers of the entity that was possessing her husband, Lofthouse
reasoned, only extended as far as London’s boroughs, and certainly not to Coventry.

Having set up her cover, when she was supposed to be heading for the train, she actually went to a supplier of caving equipment and put the manager of the shop through a swift interrogation.
Working from a position of complete ignorance, because she hadn’t been able to research this beforehand, she quickly discovered exactly what she would need. She left with a rucksack full of
equipment and a how-to book. She’d had to dress this morning to suit a meeting, so she bought a change of clothes as well, aware all the time of how weighed down she was going to be.

Finally, as the first late-afternoon gloom set in, she headed for Tower Hill. At the end of a street that was rather wonderfully called Petty Wales, along from the Tower of London ticket office,
she found the little brown turret of a building. Stern lettering round it declared, ‘London Hydraulic Power Company, Tower Subway, Constructed AD 1868’.

There were a great many tourists wandering past, many of them stopping at the ice-cream van that, even this late in the season, stood nearby. The power company in question had bought the tunnel
under the Thames when Tower Bridge had opened just downstream, making this subway unprofitable. The company had closed the system in 1977 and had itself been put up for sale. Its right to dig up
London streets made it attractive to Mercury Communications, a cable company. They’d become part of Cable & Wireless, then been bought out by NTL, then sold on to NPower. Lofthouse had
arranged a visit to NPower’s London offices on the pretext of addressing their security concerns in light of recent fuel-poverty demonstrations. Once inside, she’d gone to the toilet
and passed on the way back a little office, the door of which was open. Inside it hung a particular bunch of keys. Those were now in her handbag.

She walked up to the little tower like she owned it, used the keys on the multiple locks and, once inside, locked the door behind her.

The circular stairway smelt of metropolitan engineering and damp. It was lit with tiny bulbs in cages. It led by way of a short flight of steps to a narrow tunnel, alongside
which ran the rubbery bulk of enormous cables.

She walked quickly along, looking at the opposite wall for the access point she sought. She took out the piece of paper with the drawing on it that she’d found in the intangible flat. Her
researches, conducted in snatched moments in libraries and never online, indicated that what she had in her hand might connect to the world . . . right here. She was looking at a door-sized metal
plate in the floor, bolted down. She’d expected something fixed by ancient decay, but those bolts looked . . . greasy, with silver in the black, recently used.

Now she’d found it, she took the opportunity to change into boots, trousers and pullover, and pack up her work clothes. Then she took her tools from her bag and got to work on those bolts.
She felt the key on her charm bracelet start to react. She was doing the right thing. Thank God. As she worked, she thought of how she’d got that damn key, of all the hurt and wonder it had
brought into her life.