Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (29 page)

Five years ago

Rebecca Lofthouse had always been famously hard to wake up. Her husband said only duty could wake her, because when the phone rang in the middle of the night, only then would
she be instantly aware and reaching for the notepad she kept on her bedside table. It was a blessing for a copper, she’d always thought, that facility to switch off.

So this morning, when she woke to the sound of the alarm at six, felt Peter stir beside her, reached under the pillow and found something there, it seemed entirely plausible to her that what
she’d just laid her hand on had been placed there without her knowledge. She slid it out and looked at it.

It was a key, very small, with a hole in the fob. It was ancient, made of metal, smoothed by many hands over a long time, but its tiny teeth looked unaffected, viable. The overall impression was
that it was something from archaeology that had been put to modern use. To sharpen those teeth like that, surely that was doing damage to a relic?

Handling it, she suddenly felt the most tremendous déjà vu, but as always that feeling faded with the application of reason. She knew she’d never seen this object before. She
rolled over, the key balled in her fist, and embraced her husband. ‘What’s this?’

He made a questioning noise, and when made to wake up and focus on the key, he looked puzzled. He’d never seen it before, he said. With a slight sinking of her heart, she believed him. He
wasn’t one for romantic surprises.

That morning, as she dressed for work, she kept going back to the key, picking it up, looking at it, rolling it between her hands. It felt somehow . . . urgent. There was, of course, the matter
of how it had got under her pillow. Could she be sure it hadn’t been there when she’d gone to sleep? No. Was it something a cleaner had done, some sort of charm, a wish for good luck?
Nice thought, bit creepy. A conversation with her cleaner yielded only puzzled denials.

She put the key in her bedside drawer, but every time she went to bed, every time she woke up, and sometimes in the night when she’d been dreaming about something tense and violent and
woke up sweating, she could sort of . . . feel it there. So she moved it to the study, but still she could feel it. It was like it was demanding something of her. Some days she felt that she should
remember what this object signified, why it seemed so important to her. The feeling it gave her made her go to her doctor, nervous about the onset of some degenerative brain condition, but that had
been a red herring, thank God.

So, one day, she did what she did with everything that made her feel vulnerable: she brought it closer to her. She opened her old charm bracelet and slipped the wire through the hole on the key,
and damn well wore what worried her. ‘From now on, Sonny Jim,’ she said to it, ‘I’ve got you where I can see you.’

It turned out to be a good idea. Every now and then, when she was dealing with a case where a decision had to be made, she would suddenly feel the weight of her bracelet and note that the key
was swinging in one direction or the other. She always found that direction implied a particular choice.

For a long time, she fought off that conclusion about what was happening. It made her feel like a bloody ‘psychic’, like she was dowsing. In the end, however, after so many good
calls, she couldn’t deny the reality of it. She decided that
she’d
made the key into what it was, that it was just a focus for her concentration. After all, it didn’t have
an ‘opinion’ on every case, just a peculiar, seemingly random selection of them.

In the next year or so, the main focus of Lofthouse’s role as a detective superintendent started to be the pursuit of that most obvious and miraculously non-jailable of
gang leaders, Rob Toshack. One morning, she sat down with a blank piece of paper and started to plan an operation to finally have him: multiple undercovers, ‘strangers’ from up north; a
very long game. She’d need a solid London detective inspector to lead it, either Jason Forrest out of Belgravia, who she knew . . . God, no, just the thought made her feel ill, for some
reason. Why was she suddenly reacting like that? There was nothing wrong with Jason. She realized she could feel the key swinging at her wrist, but that emotional reaction that had come with the
movement, that was new. OK, then, what about someone she didn’t know, James Quill, who’d been recommended to her? What if she asked him?

Her heart leaped with something fierce that felt like love.

She grabbed the bracelet from her wrist and threw it onto the desk.

She stared at it in shock for a moment, then put it back on, ashamed of herself. She was blushing, and furious at the same time. She had no feelings for this complete stranger other than a
distant admiration. This feeling from the key had gone far beyond a hunch. This was like a bunch of cheerleaders had rushed into her brain screaming support.

All right, she was going to test this. She’d been aware for a long time, had kept in her back pocket, that there was an intelligence analyst building a reputation up north who had a
personal connection to the Toshack family. Damaged goods, undoubtedly. Maybe even a mole for Toshack, because he had to be doing something incredible to keep avoiding jail. Should Lofthouse include
this person who’d named herself ‘Lisa Ross’ in her as-yet-unnamed operation? She put the question concretely to herself.

Yes, came the answer from the charm bracelet, in the form of a definite movement and a little frisson of pleasure, like the memory of a good day out with the children. She found herself feeling
tense at what she was about to do, but she did it anyway. No, she thought to herself, I can’t possibly do that. I
won’t
use Ross or Quill—

She burst into tears. The sheer despair that that decision had caused to explode inside her. She stumbled to the wall and leaned against it, sobbing helplessly.

Could it be this obvious? Why were the key’s reactions to this particular decision so much more intense?

OK, OK, so she was going to include Ross and Quill in the team . . .

Endorphins flooded her body. She fell back into her seat. Such immediate bliss, such release from pain.

She grabbed her handkerchief and angrily wiped her face. She ripped the bracelet from her wrist, put it down on her desk and actually spoke out loud to the key. ‘You bastard,’ she
said. ‘I know now, don’t I?’

She wasn’t going mad. This was real. This thing
wanted
her to choose Lisa Ross,
wanted
her to choose Quill. Somehow.

So when she’d gone to meet Ross, she’d gone with the same expectation she’d had when she met James Quill, that perhaps this person would know something about
the key. She’d played with it in front of Quill, as she asked if he felt he was drawn to this job. But he’d just been enthusiastic to get Toshack, in an everyday way. She’d
worried about the key making her behave ridiculously in his company, but it turned out as long as she was on the right track, as long as she
behaved
, it left her alone. At least its
conclusions about what was best for the operation seemed to match her own.

When she finally met Ross, Lofthouse found her much stranger than Quill. She looked like she’d seen some shit, with her nose askew and one eye a different colour to the other. Lofthouse
asked her if there was anything she felt she couldn’t tell her. Ross denied there was, but Lofthouse never quite lost the suspicion that she was lying, that here was someone who might have
seen some things as strange as her key.

Initially, she left the selection of the two undercovers to Quill, but, at the key’s prompting, again intervened about his choices.

When Toshack died in custody, Lofthouse waited until she was sure she couldn’t be overheard, then threw the charm bracelet against the wall. ‘What are you working towards?’ she
demanded. ‘Are you some sort of . . . curse on me? I will drop you in the sea! I will be free of you, because what use are you?’

She put a hand to her head, convinced she was going mad, but once again she forced herself to deny that possibility.

‘In the next few days,’ she said, ‘I’m going to come up with a new operation, and this time I want you to bloody sing along at the top of your voice, or you’ll be
taking a swim in the English Channel.’

Lofthouse woke the next morning with a genius idea fully formed in her brain. ‘This is genius,’ she said to herself in the bathroom mirror while brushing her hair.
‘This is absolutely brilliant.’ It took until she was brushing her teeth for her to realize the truth. She stopped, and stared at herself in the mirror, foaming at the mouth.
‘It’s not
my
idea,’ she said, looking to the bracelet on her wrist and the key on it. ‘I asked for your help and you’ve come up with something and you’ve
planted it in my head like it’s my own idea. And it’s
bollocks
.’

She tried to decide against it, and in consequence spent the morning wracked with such depression and fear that she couldn’t leave her office, until at last she told the key she’d go
along with it, and once more experienced immediate relief.

She stood nervously as the second undercover entered the hotel room where she’d gathered Ross, Quill and the first undercover, Costain. Kevin Sefton was his name, and he
reacted exactly as Costain had. He was terrified at his real identity being suddenly revealed to a whole team of people, certain she was mad. Now, however, Lofthouse felt she’d made her
choice.

What followed was like a nightmare unfolding itself into the waking world. Quill and his team uncovered a serial killer who became known to the media as ‘the Witch of
West Ham’. Like Toshack, Mora Losley seemed capable of impossible escapes. When Losley suddenly appeared somewhere that didn’t fit with where Quill’s team had just encountered
her, Lofthouse forced herself to face the possibility that if Losley really
was
a witch, then perhaps Lofthouse really did have a key that wanted input in the planning of operations. That a
key was interested in catching a witch indicated a whole unseen world of possibilities.

Whether or not that meant Quill and his team had any knowledge or experience of the impossible stuff, or whether the key had just put together some ordinary coppers to bring
down Mora Losley was a question Lofthouse asked herself every day. She kept failing to find a safe moment to ask them questions that would make her sound insane. The key, annoyingly, seemed
satisfied with how things stood.

Then, weeks after the end of the Losley case, Lofthouse heard that Quill and his team were exploring an empty area of Docklands. The key screamed at her to go and see.

Something that looked like her husband walked onto the screen of her computer. He started to tell her she was indeed connected to impossible events, and that the one thing she must above all
never do was to try to remember.

Quill couldn’t quite remember how he came to be watching the sun set with his back against the door of an access stairwell, on the roof of a tower block, somewhere in
Docklands. This was a bit like being drunk. Everything in his head was in a different place. His memory was here somewhere. He couldn’t find it. Just . . .
being
felt like hard work,
all the time. It tensed his muscles; it made his heart race; it made him breathe too fast. He shook his head, kept shaking it, until the clarity was gone. He was angry, almost all the time. He was
sitting here, panting, and he didn’t know why.

He could just about see what had been following him. He
could
see him. He stood over there; yes, that wasn’t a shadow now; that was a figure standing outside the shadow of that air
vent. He was watching Quill. The silhouette had a top hat on, and a long coat. He had his hands together in front of him. All cleverness was in that figure. He was whole and satisfied and
comfortable. He had arranged everything so Quill was not.

He had to stop Laura from moving to London. That was why he’d come up here. How that fitted together . . . he didn’t know, but he might remember. There was a long list of connections
that made that plan work, somewhere.

He slid up the door, until he was upright, leaning on it, then let his weight tip him forwards, until he was standing. He was in a warm coat. He didn’t know where he’d got it. It
smelt terrible. How he smelt now was not important.

He pointed at the figure. ‘Hoi! You! Moriarty! I got your number, sunshine!’

No response from the silhouette. Quill took a step towards it. It didn’t move. He was getting angry again, too angry to speak.

He ran at it.

It was gone. Had he gone straight through it?

He was at the edge.

He scrambled to a halt. He was teetering. There was London below, Hell below, all the old buildings growing among the new, over the new. He watched the tiny people below, the damned, between the
toes of his boots. They wouldn’t see him up here. He could piss on them. He could join them.

No, fuck Sarah. Fuck Jessica. What help had they been to—?

He was crying again. The tears got in the way of him seeing where he was. He lurched. He couldn’t find anything to grab.

Oh, he could feel that sod behind him now. So he’d reappeared? That was the plan, was it? He spun suddenly, trying to take him by surprise. He landed on the gravel of the rooftop, and for
a moment wondered if he’d landed on the concrete below. No, there was that familiar air vent again.

There was the figure again. Moriarty. Quill smiled, pleased at how in control he was now. Oh yes.

Ross attached a new victim thread from Ballard to their enormous horizontal range of suspects. It was dark outside now. ‘Clearly,’ she said, ‘our attempts to
set a trap for the suspects have now also been used by said suspects to further their aims.’

‘Fucking
clearly
,’ said Sefton.

‘Hey,’ said Costain.

‘Sorry.’

Ross felt it like they were all feeling it. Everything they did seemed to be part of the plans of their enemies. It made them feel small, and compromised. As if their actions were now actually
making things worse. Nothing helped. She was fucking a god and
that
was not helping. Quill was gone; Lofthouse was completely absent. Their backs were against the wall and soon now the Met
mainstream would start asking questions about their startling lack of success. Clarke would take some of the heat, but she wasn’t a charity that helped weird units with questionable budget
allocations.