Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (38 page)

She squeezed the trigger. The Smiling Man was blasted off his feet.

He landed out in the water. The bottle landed with him. Something broke as he hit. The bottle, yes – that evil erupted, corrupted the water; there was no stopping that – but
something else broke, hard.

She’d broken his concentration. It wasn’t the shot that had done it, but the impact of what he’d fallen into. The Sight had rushed into a being who was so in control, who had
everything balanced on a knife edge. What had Sefton told her about erased memories? That it took enormous energy and concentration on someone’s part to keep people from remembering? She
could feel the letting go, the tremendous size of what he’d let go. It took a moment to fall from his grasp, to drop back into the world. Here was the shadow of it falling on her; here was
the enormity of it, coming at her—

She remembered.

Five years ago

‘Has it never occurred to you,’ said the smiling politician, ‘how odd a thing the placebo effect is?’

The crowd laughed. Chartres was there among them. He looked around, surprised. But he shouldn’t be surprised.

‘No, seriously! A doctor gives you a pill and, with all his authority, tells you it’s going to cure you. And simply because you believe that, it does. Even if it’s just
chalk.’

The crowd was now a little more quiet. Perhaps he was trying to reach for a serious point. They didn’t like that so much. Chartres nodded at the interesting conjecture.

‘That suggests a relationship between the mind and the physical world that should stagger you with its implications. But it doesn’t, because you’re used to it. Imagine that
applied to physics. The airliner you’re in is falling out of the sky, but the captain calls from the flight deck and tells you it’s not . . . and so, suddenly, it’s
not.’

The crowd looked questioningly at each other and waited for the politician to draw some sort of conclusion. But he just sighed at them, because they didn’t yet understand.
‘Thankfully,’ he said, ‘you’ve all got an appointment with me.’

Then he woke up.

Sir Richard Chartres, RIBA, KCBE, opened his eyes, sat up and started to laugh at the ridiculousness of his dream. He reached for his journal, contained in the old satchel he kept beside the
bed. In the old days, whenever the satchel wore out, he would purchase a new one of exactly the same design. But they’d stopped making those, so currently his satchel had holes in it and his
books kept falling out. When he’d finished noting down the dream, with some extra annotations concerning his own silliness, he went over to the window of his grace-and-favour apartment in
Golders Green. He was allowed to live here rent-free for life because, as with so many things, that was just how the world ticked along. He opened the curtains and looked out at another beautiful
sunrise in London. There was nothing at all to worry about.

He had an appointment this evening.

The meeting chamber stood at the end of the garden annexe, a hundred paces to the east of the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper in Rotherhithe. Everyone commented on how
different in style the chamber was to its parent building, but nobody, Chartres was sure, not even all the prize-winning architects who passed it while walking across the courtyard between the tall
shadows, could identify exactly what that style was.

It could have been a relic from when Rotherhithe was still proper docklands, when there were warehouses and pulleys and damp brickwork. But it would have stood out as looking old then too. It
was low and square, with a dome gleaming so white that it looked like it had never been rained on. That was because it hadn’t.

To get to the door of the meeting chamber, Chartres had to pass through the rest of the ‘Dessandarr’ building – these days, a nightmare of open-plan workspaces – and then
go out under the canopy, with its visible cable supports, into the ‘Space for Free Thought’, with its water feature and sundial. The chamber stood awkwardly at the end of all that, not
relating to it, but connected by a gravel path. Chartres, as a young man, had once felt part of the firm, merely seconded to this strange assignment. Nowadays, even as a full partner, this strange
assignment took up all his time, and the firm was something through which he was obliged to walk. To get into the meeting chamber, one had to be a member of the De Souza and Raymonde Continuing
Projects Team. Each member of the CPT had been given, by Chartres, a key to the meeting chamber, cut from his original, itself made smooth by centuries of handling.

It was Halloween tonight, Chartres thought as he approached the little building, the old key in his hand. What a lovely smell of winter in the air.

Inside the chamber, the illumination came from a cubic lantern/window in the centre of the ceiling dome. When it rained outside, the light cascaded down the four walls like
those present were encased in a genie’s lamp.

The chamber smelt of the old books that were stored under the floor. The shelves were made of wood polished only by age, otherwise kept pristine by the precise climate inside the chamber. They
were accessed by tugging on a loop of rope to slam open a slab of the stone flooring, then cranking a metal lever fixed on a post. The wooden shelves would rise up out of depths, notch by notch.
The crank needed special oil to keep it running smoothly, which was kept in a special oil flask.

Files of maps and index cards were kept under other floor slabs, on great spindles that were eased out from underneath through a spinning action. The initial heave took some doing, but there was
a knack to it, rather like that of pulling on a bell rope. Chartres could send the stacks flying towards the ceiling with a ratcheting sound, and also stop them, at a touch of his elbow.

Each of the five members of the team had a place at the round stone table in the centre of the meeting chamber. The table top was etched so that each position had two fine diagonal lines leading
to it. The table had been made smooth by use, shaped by the hands of Chartres’s predecessors.

The floor was made of the same granite, and remained rougher than the table surface. The same pattern was inscribed under the table as was on it. Every chair was different, made of old oak,
fashioned in Rennes, specially to suit the body shape of each team member. The journey to Brittany on the Eurostar, to be measured and complimented on one’s posture, and fed fine wine and
cheese by those who knew of the debt the world owed to these fine upholders of tradition, was one of the perks of the job. Nobody would ever even mention money in connection to any of this.
Similarly, new members were first prepared with the right words and gestures made over them in this building, then taken deep under the earth, for a ceremonial procession through some picturesque
caverns that was, with typical melodrama, called ‘the ordeal’, before being baptised in the river of gold and silver, and thus given the Sight. There, words were said over them in
Latin. Chartres knew the linguistic meaning, but not the significance. That had been lost. The Sight was what made them special. The ceremonial pouring of a handful of water into their mouths and
noses gave them a sort of vague sixth sense, a slight difference in how they saw the world. More importantly, that gave them the ability to see what they were doing when they used word and gesture
to do miraculous things within London. The great book that stood in the barrow made the process look a lot worse than it was. It called the whole ceremony, ridiculously, ‘the drowning’.
The progress down there took so long that Chartres was glad he’d only ever presided over the blessing of one such newcomer. The Sight these days seemed a pale thing compared to what their
predecessors had described. Chartres put that nagging thought from his mind now. Perhaps it was just that in this modern age, there was less for the Sighted to see.

For most of its existence, which stretched back, under various names, over at least a thousand years, the Continuing Projects Team had assembled in this meeting chamber on one evening each week.
In the last six months, they had taken to meeting every night, but obviously that situation wouldn’t persist.

The team was not chosen by a human being, but by a protocol. When any member of the team died, usually of old age, the protocol was read out, which produced a name, in letters on small stone
tiles, taken from a bag, and a location. The chair of the team (since 1968 Chartres himself) then set off to find that person, who always turned out to be from the same field of expertise as the
former member. Then there would follow a somewhat difficult conversation, mitigated by an excellent lunch, whereupon the chosen one always, it was said, turned out to be interested in taking up the
post. They always turned out to be people of the right sort, with accents, manners and modes of dress that allowed them access to the corridors of power. Chartres knew from his reading that
centuries ago the bag had been given to a commoner, for them to pick the tiles, that some of his predecessors had said that those who held the bag influenced the identity of the candidate. That
didn’t seem to be a problem, though. The current system was working out excellently. Like so many things the team used, someone might once have known how that protocol worked. But theirs was
no longer to reason why. The interior mechanics of the ways of the world were often great mysteries, and their business was no different.

The five members of the team represented the five foundations of civilization: academia, law, government, the media and the Church. The longest-serving member was always the chair, who, as a
partner in the firm, had to at least pass muster as a professional architect. Apart from him, the current team included: Patrick Kennet-Fotherington, LLB, a criminal defence lawyer from a firm in
Chancery Lane; Felicity Saunders, the permanent secretary at the Home Office; Adam Fletcher, senior producer of current affairs at the BBC; and Rev. Michael Watson, chaplain of King’s
College, London.

The team also regularly consulted with people on the ground, in the various London institutions, who knew the truth about what they did tangentially, in smaller or larger doses depending on
their prestige or position. They had a particularly useful connection in Scotland Yard. Chartres had shown the officer in question, one Rebecca Lofthouse, whom he regarded as a friend, around the
meeting chamber. He had demonstrated their equipment and operational approaches to her. She had kept visiting, here or even at his home in Golders Green, bringing leads to anything inexplicable
from her own line of work. She seemed to prefer to do it in person, not wanting a paper trail. She was, he suspected, hoping to glimpse something of the unseen world. It was a pity that since she
was not a member of the team, he couldn’t gift her with the Sight.

He sat down at the table in the meeting chamber and laid out his pens and notepad, as he always did. Before the others arrived, he used the Lud Vanes to check on how everything was ticking over.
The Diana Prime felt like it was pumped impossibly high, while only yesterday all had seemed fine. He next tried the Vanes over a map and found the DP was hitting the Apollo Prime head-on at the
Eye . . . whatever all that actually meant.

What it amounted to was that there would be mummified cats whispering up chimneys tonight. There would be telephone calls from the dead. There would be fatal collisions between long-lost twins
driving the same model of car. This sort of thing had been happening quite often lately. It was irritating. Never before had they had to sort out so many inconveniences at once. At this time last
year, the biggest problem had concerned the Wetherspoons chain buying up another old pub, renaming and redeveloping it, and even that had been a simple matter of balancing things based on the
standard layout of the new building. Until very recently, the ‘terrible things’ that were supposed to be ‘out there in the dark’, if they existed at all, had stayed there.
(The majority of the team had always said they believed such things to be metaphors for the consequences of bad civic planning.) But perhaps now that was changing. It would have been enough to make
any lesser man slightly worried. Chartres now put the Vanes away, and as the others arrived, he made sure to look calm and methodical. He called the meeting to order, and they sat down at their
designated places round the table.

As he looked at the steady, wry faces of his team, a little amazed that they were back here yet again tonight, Chartres blinked at a sudden mental image: a surgeon, with hands wobbling,
something going wrong in the middle of the operation, blood spilling on the stone of the table. They were his hands and his shakiness. He even saw the table split in two.

He managed a smile. What was he thinking? There was no credible record of anyone ever having any sort of foreknowledge about events in London. Whatever was going on, they could deal with it. He
called for order again, just for form’s sake. But, as he did so, there was a sudden sound from outside. A muffled crash and then childish laughter. Sniggering arrogance. For the third night
in a row, youths were hanging about in the courtyard between the skyscrapers. ‘Penny for the guy’, that would be their latest excuse. Security hadn’t so far been able to apprehend
anyone.

Chartres sighed. ‘Let’s look at London tonight, shall we?’ He went over to the wall and inclined his head slightly. The light changed as the lantern/window in the dome above
moved into the correct position. Chartres moved his hands into a pleading shape to match with the new angle, as he had so many times before, and vast shadows flapped across the walls as something
huge and real settled across the room.

An instant later, it was laid out on the stone table, the greatest privilege his team enjoyed: the entirety of the two cities of London and Westminster, and all the surrounding boroughs of
Greater London, wrapped round the river, and standing solid on the stone. This display was produced by a ‘rare visual protocol’. The records gave no indication of what
‘rare’ meant, but the vision portrayed the real thing, the actual place, at this very moment. Chartres, or any of them, could reach down with a finger, and make the buildings grow huge
around them, and pass right through them. They could only observe, however, using this protocol, not make anything happen.