Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (39 page)

At this hour, the city was illuminated only by the lights of the buildings themselves, rather than by the small representation of the sun that would have been visible on the wall of the chamber
for any daytime scene. The brake lights of tiny vehicles glowed on the streets. Tiny aircraft, stacked in spirals above Heathrow and Gatwick and London City airport, blinked red and green, while
orbiting sublimely through the heads of the team. The entire vision was full of movement. It didn’t display artefacts of artificial vision, flares and wobbles, like a camera view would.
Instead, it felt actual, alive.

Chartres flicked the air with his finger, and now they could see the grid displayed across the buildings. It was an indication of potentialities, of where things might happen. It was a mesh of
white lines, as was used in modelling buildings. In an area where only the normal laws of physics applied, it would be flat, the lines evenly spaced. In the midst of the sort of extreme
architectural problems that sometimes concerned the team, it could be warped into extraordinary shapes. Nevertheless, it was still vaguely based on natural geography. Therefore, looking only at the
grid, one would still have been able to tell where the Thames was, where the smaller rivers ran and the basic shape of the hills and valleys and underground features. Population density tugged on
it too, presumably because more people meant more buildings.

As the grid appeared this time, he felt the others react at the same moment he did. The grid was horribly stretched, like some enormous weight was pushing down on it. Everything was leaning
towards one particular point. ‘It’s like a whole new borough has moved into place,’ Chartres said, trying to sound merely interested. ‘Outside the map, but . . . influencing
it.’

‘That’s not possible,’ said Saunders calmly.

‘Of course. You’re right, obviously.’ He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. It was absurd, but he was actually getting nervous. He recalled his nightmare. What had the
man said? Something about the opposite of the placebo effect, that if you believe something bad will happen . . . he saw again his vision of the broken table, and the blood. He pulled himself
together. ‘Let’s see what’s at ground zero, shall we?’ He made a tapping gesture in the air, and London reared up at them again, and they were standing in a street in what
turned out to be Paddington, in the early evening dark.

People nearby were none the wiser about the team’s presence. They swarmed like ants between the station, the snack bars, the rows of cheap lodgings, the gleaming monoliths of the big
hotels. There were full litter bins, and piles of discarded cardboard outside cut-price electronics shops. There was a feeling of pleasurable expectation in the air. It would soon be Christmas.

‘We’ll approach the epicentre slowly,’ Chartres said, ignoring a man selling chestnuts as he walked through him. ‘If this is a real effect, and not some error in the
model, we’ll need to do something about it.’ And who better placed for that than the five of them, the quiet hands upon the rudders, from all five branches of the establishment?
Chartres calmed himself. There was nothing London’s hidden architects could not look into, define or fix.

They came to the central point where most pressure was being put on the grid. It was a pub at the corner of two enormous traffic thoroughfares. The pub itself was one of those deeply British
concoctions whose facade reminded one of so many cultural reference points: the keel of a man-of-war; a music-hall bill poster; a decorative cash register. So many signifiers, each one of them
pointing to another golden thread of British life. To look at a pub, to look at any building, was to see meaning made flesh. This pub was cut off from any neighbours, the buildings behind it having
been demolished. There was a wire fence round the brownfield site, and a sign announcing construction. In the sky above it, the grid was being tugged down in ominous, heavy arcs. Something huge was
waiting for them inside.

Like they owned the place, like they were really physically in this street, they marched in through the wall.

They found themselves in what could still be called a parlour. It contained photographs and items on the wall that genuinely belonged to the history of this building, rather
than having been chosen by some design office at the brewery because of their carefully meaningless eccentricity. Deep russet wallpaper, the gold highlights faded to black with old smoke.
Somebody’s trumpet with dents in it. The floor was swept clean, but the boards were old, and in places nails had come away, and there would be a creaking noise near the burnished golden-green
rail running along the bottom of the bar.

The pub was mostly filled with office workers, young men and women in suits, who had seized every table after having got out of work early for the weekend. They were still coming in, shrugging
water off shoulders, folding umbrellas, pushing their way towards the bar. Chartres noted Eastern European construction workers, an Indian man and his wife eating either a very late lunch or an
early dinner.

Chartres’s people split up, moved as phantoms between the customers. It was Watson who first noticed something unusual. He called them over to where he was studying a photograph on a wall.
It was of some explorers, sometime at the turn of the previous century. They looked happy and shaven, with piles of provisions and equipment on the dog sleds behind them, every inch the sons of
Empire about to set off into the wilderness. Watson put his finger on the picture.

‘Watson,’ he said, touching the chest of one man. The name was indeed written in longhand, in faded ink, under the picture together with all the other names. He slid his finger down
diagonally to the left. ‘Fletcher.’ Across the middle row to the right. ‘Chartres.’ Up diagonally to the left. ‘Kennet-Fotherington.’ Then down diagonally to the
bottom. ‘Saunders.’ He turned to look at them and met their astonished gazes. Under the picture was written one word, in the same longhand.

History.

‘Does it mean us?’ whispered Fletcher.

Chartres felt a knot in his stomach. ‘This isn’t about architecture,’ he said. ‘This is enemy action.’ He headed back into the middle of the pub and the others
followed. He was about to say something else, to try and find the words to calm his rising panic—

But then he bumped into someone. The man’s glass went flying. It hit the ground and shattered. The man spun and stared at him in shock. Chartres looked round and saw everyone in the pub
was staring at them. They looked afraid, terrified. They started to yell, to scream, to back away.

‘They’re seeing us as ghosts . . . as the sort of things we prevent!’ yelled Fletcher.

‘The protocol,’ said Saunders. ‘It’s been . . . What’s that word?’

‘Hacked,’ said Chartres. ‘The protocol’s been hacked.’ He didn’t like the way the fear was building all around them. They were now contributing to what they
had always previously merely observed. Where was all this fear
coming
from? It was like there was a reservoir of it lurking somewhere underneath everything, something that they had never
dealt with.

History.

Chartres made a quick series of gestures, half expecting them to fail . . .

But they didn’t. They were out of the pub instantly, and thankfully standing above London once again, looking down at it. In the same moment, they saw the grid burst upwards from that pub,
like a trampoline being released. It was their being there that had set it off. Ripples raced out from it in concentric circles. Those ripples hit other waves within the grid and rebounded, set up
interference patterns that bounced off the nearby buildings. There would be worse things out there tonight. Poltergeists and terrible ironies and bedroom visitors. But now . . . now all clearly
motivated by an enemy. It was like a tune suddenly appearing out of white noise. Or maybe it was a voice.

This had never happened before. Or it had been happening for a long time and they had failed to notice. Chartres waved his arms. He kept waving and waving until they were higher and higher above
the city, watching as the ripples and pulses within the grid resolved themselves into lines of coincidence and impossibility flashing outwards in a great star shape, building with every interaction
. . .

‘That’s impossible,’ said Kennet-Fotherington. ‘Energy declines; it doesn’t increase!’

‘Oh,’ said Watson, ‘science. I had been thinking maybe one day we should employ a scientist.’

‘Our enemy is pushing the wheel,’ said Chartres, ‘somehow adding energy to this. Whatever “energy” means in this case.’

He dropped his hands and they were back in the meeting chamber. They stood round the stone table.

‘Do you think that photo in that pub is really there?’ asked Saunders.

‘I suspect,’ said Chartres, ‘that it’s only there in this model of ours. Our enemy, whatever it is, has placed it there, as a sign that they have interfered, with this,
and with who knows how many other protocols of ours.’

They stood silently, horrified by those implications. There came a noise from outside: that same high laughter. Chartres went to the intercom and called security. There was no answer. He turned
back to the others. ‘I had a dream—’ he began.

Something slammed against the door.

Everyone stopped and looked in that direction. The impact came again, the door bulging inwards.

‘My God,’ said Fletcher.

They backed into the chamber, looking around for something to help them. Chartres stared at the door. He knew now that this had all been part of a plan, that whatever was out there, it
wasn’t children or criminals. Could the door hold?

The door burst off its hinges and fell into the room. Through the doorway strode a figure. It seemed to grow as it came, its feet treading imperiously on holy ground. It was only half formed.
There were parts of it he couldn’t see. It demanded something of him, wanting to be filled in. He tried to stop himself from filling in those details, because they were too terrible.

Saunders tried a defensive protocol, one not used in centuries. But what she was trying to say failed . . . or she got it wrong.

Chartres couldn’t think of a single word to say. He had been told all of this in his dream, he realized, and yet had still come here.

The shape solidified for him, against his will. It was a smart, well-off-looking young man. Of course it was. He was smiling all over his face. Of course he was. He raised his hands into the
position that caused the model on the table top to spring into life.

They were suddenly amid London again, and zooming in, zooming in, to Rotherhithe. To the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper.

‘No,’ said Chartres. ‘This is one of those things tradition tells us we must never do. We must not look at ourselves. We must not ever be part of what we observe. There
isn’t anything, when you look too closely, don’t you understand? There isn’t
anything
!’

But the model kept expanding. They flew towards the meeting chamber. Straight down at it, faster and faster.

‘It’s not about the map,’ said Saunders, and with a start Chartres realized that she was saying words their enemy wanted to be said, with something like the same voice
he’d heard in his dream. ‘It’s about what’s underneath it. The time of abstractions is past. Time itself is nearly over. What’s inside the people you looked down upon
from a great height is enormous, and it’s terrifying, and you missed it. All things now tend towards
me
.’ She raised a hand to point towards the smiling man.

The man started to laugh. It turned out his laugh was the same high laugh as that of the youths outside.

Chartres felt that he was participating in a dream again, someone else’s dream. All the history and information and power and tradition that his team had represented was about to
vanish.

Their vision of London sped them into the wall of the meeting chamber . . . and through it, and there they all were. They were now standing among themselves. They couldn’t help it; they
looked. Chartres looked at himself, who was looking at himself, who was looking at himself. Those selves vanished to a terrifying collapsed point in the distance, a hole that he realized could look
right back into him and—

He had a thought, just before the moment when all thought would be dragged out of his body and sent somewhere terrifying. That thought was about his duty. He had no hope. So it was time to
activate the final protocol, the one that had been drummed into him by the last chair of the CPT, from his deathbed.

He put his hand into his satchel and found his key. He remembered the syllables he repeated every Thursday teatime and spoke them aloud, while making the gestures with his fingers. Suddenly, he
was spinning gold thread from the air. He wrapped it swiftly round the key, a bundle of it, containing everything of the team, the pattern and the shape of them, a description of what the five of
them did, how they fitted together, the news about what had happened tonight. It was a crude, desperate attempt to preserve their legacy.

He threw his hand open, and to his amazement, he made a solid thing vanish. The most he had ever done, right at the end. The key was gone.

Then he was overwhelmed, and made to see the entirety of himself, and was put in his place and made to halt. The nothing that he was now swallowed him.

Judgement passed over the building.

The Smiling Man stood at the centre of London. He spread his hands wide and drew his people and his monsters in from the darkness in which they had been exiled. The real London
was coming back, alongside poverty and tuberculosis and history. The civilized consensus was over. The future was not going to happen. Tonight was just the start. He would have to do this many
times, to keep the wheel turning backward and backward, widdershins. He opened his hands again, and for the first time in centuries, they were free.

The next morning, when the shadows were still short, people arrived for work in the courtyard between the high buildings. The cleaners arrived first, then the new shift of
security people, who heard of nothing to report from the old shift, and then the workers themselves, and the visitors, some of whom looked across to the garden annexe and saw . . .