Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (15 page)

She took a moment to breathe properly. She looked down at a tug on her wrist. Her charm bracelet was being pulled towards the door by the key, which was pointing at it like it was
magnetized.

She took a look at the ordinary lock that hung like a phantom in front of her. No great security required, not here, with a guard on the gate. She looked right and left, then took the crowbar
from her briefcase, slipped it into the edge of the phantom door and threw all her weight against it. It took a lot of heaving, and she was sure she’d get reported to the gatehouse, but what
for, exactly? Madwoman, police officer, attacking a wall. Because as she saw with a step or two back, the door was only visible when she was close enough. She returned to her task, and the door
finally flew open, leaving the piece of paper hanging in the air in the revealed doorway.

She tried to look inside and found it sickening, then bloody made herself do it anyway. It was like looking at one of those Escher paintings through some sort of stereoscopic viewer. She was
seeing at least two things at once. The piece of paper, though, provided perspective. She got the feeling it was sorting out what she could see. She made herself step inside.

It was like falling asleep and starting to dream. Her conscious brain kept trying to haul one part of the room over to join with another part, to make sense, and that kept making her stumble,
like she was on a ship’s deck that was rocking from side to side in all possible directions. She was inside what looked like images of walls, floor, ceiling, objects, projected onto
whiteness, and not sorted properly, hanging askew from each other. Presumably this was the best the piece of paper could do in the face of . . . She could feel it, now she thought of it, a
tremendous power trying to erase this place from her mind. It wasn’t like being in one’s own dream, then, but like being in that of a giant, and it felt like he might at any moment wake
up. She looked over to the piece of paper and saw that its edges were starting to char. That must be a visual representation of that power getting to it, using up its resources. She had minutes at
the most.

She ignored how skewed her senses were and let her training take over. What sort of place was this? A rich person’s grace-and-favour apartment, small but tasteful, now lost to the world.
She felt she should recognize it. She must have been here. To think about that would make the paper burn more quickly; she felt that instinctively as her brain pushed at the idea. She dismissed
trying to remember. She had to quickly search the place.

Where first? The key on her wrist tugged her towards just one place: the desk. She swiftly followed the call. It was like a blown-apart diagram of a desk, inside out and back to front. She went
to it, found the drawers, didn’t want to throw the contents out for fear she’d lose them in the void. Just a few mementos. There was a locked drawer, with items inside: she could see
them inside the desk. The key was straining at the leash. She broke the desk open and really could see, in a way that she hadn’t before. Better. A sheaf of folded papers. The key swung about
them like a compass needle. This was all it wanted. She dropped the papers into her briefcase. That was it for the desk.

Was there anything around here the key would fit into? She couldn’t see any possibilities. The key was ancient and everything here was modern. There was a wall safe. The key wasn’t
interested – it had what it had come for – but she was. She went to the safe.

It was closed, a numerical tumbler. Her crowbar wouldn’t do for that, and if she had once known the combination, as it seemed likely she might, then she’d certainly be prevented from
remembering it now. It was a six-figure combination. Could she apply the same logic she’d used to find the door? The strange pressure she felt in this room seemed animal, blunt; it
didn’t feel like it could react strategically.

She thought of the first number, trying to remember it as if she’d forgotten it normally. One . . . two . . . There was the smallest jolt of resistance at the thought of three. She could
do this; it was like listening to the tumblers in a lock. If she had time. She would see it through. What was the worst that could happen, that she’d be trapped here? Then Peter would be
safe, at least, no need to hurt him if she wasn’t around to be threatened by it.

She quickly thought through the numbers for each digit, built up a combination of six of them in her head that hurt like an enormous buzzing, that would reach the point of actual pain in
seconds, if she kept trying to remember. She put her fingers on the dial, smelling burning paper, hearing the thump of a flame bursting into life. She spun the dial back and forth and heard the
clicks. She let each number go from her memory as she did. There would only be one chance at this. She got to the last number, felt the door give and flung it open.

In the safe was a gun. An extraordinary gun. It was ornate, covered in decoration, shaped like a shotgun but with so much more—

She didn’t have time. She grabbed it, threw it into her briefcase and turned for the door. The piece of paper was on fire. It suddenly began to sing, the alarm call of a bird. It was
dying.

As in a dream, she found it hard to haul her feet across the floor towards the doorway. She could feel the room starting to react to her presence, now the licence the paper had given her was
vanishing. The giant was about to stop dreaming her. Her existence was about to vanish. She bellowed with the effort of it, and thought of nothing but Peter, and pushed herself through a roaring
gale of nothingness to the doorway. She grabbed it with one hand and heaved herself through . . .

To stumble a few steps out onto the walkway. The spectral door shut like thunder behind her. The ashes of a piece of paper fluttered into her face as she turned, sad birdsong fading with them.
She stood there panting. She’d done it. Hadn’t she? She was in the normal world again. She could feel the cold air on her face.

She looked into her briefcase. The gun and papers were still there.

She wanted to cry. She would not. She straightened herself up and went to find her car.

Night on the Thames. Costain was looking along the river from the deck of an unmarked vessel of the Met’s Marine Policing Unit. To someone with the Sight, the river was
like a cascade of emotions, a restlessness that continually woke all the moments of history and story along its banks, stirred them into loudly restating all the details of their existence. He
wondered for a moment why simple water did that, when actually it was only briefly of London, on a one-way trip from some underground aquifer far to the west and then out to the sea.

Oh no, Tony, you’re missing an important detail there, old son, he thought: you haven’t considered the rain. The water of the bodies of living Londoners evaporated upwards, became
clouds, fell back into that river, or into the ground to be absorbed into that aquifer.

Everything they’d found in the Docklands ruins said that the Continuing Projects Team, which had come before them, believed that buildings and other physical objects were mostly
responsible for the shape of the occult forces in the metropolis, but Costain’s lot, being coppers, knew that everything bad that happened was the fault of bloody people.

They had no idea tonight who they were facing, but it was a relief to, just for once, be one step ahead of the bastards. Since they’d got on to the lead about the
Lone Star
, the
team had started to work again, once more all having particular tasks to accomplish. Maybe if they kept that going, things would get better. Unfortunately, in the middle of that there was Quill.
There was something deeply worrying going on with him now. Sooner or later, they were going to have to confront him about it.

Costain looked over to Ross, in a life vest like he was, a shadowed shape on the unlit deck. He saw again the beauty of her face in silhouette, the awkward angle of her nose that was so
brilliant. He’d been looking at her too often. She’d said a couple of things to him in the last few days, directly to his face. He’d responded normally, because he didn’t
have the energy or the willingness to deceive her even slightly now. He might get back to a professional partnership with her by doing that, in time, but that wasn’t the way to get to where
he wanted to be with her. He needed to change, to really change, to deserve her respect. That was an end in itself. She wouldn’t take him back when he did, he knew that, though a part of him
really wanted that to be the case, like it was in the movies. If he could change, he could be free of needing her so much, they would both be people who stood on their own, and then perhaps she
could meet him again as that different person. That was the best he could hope for.

He would act on this. He would demonstrate change. He had a terrible feeling it might involve sacrifice, but OK. He would do this proudly, deliberately. He looked in the other direction, to
where the Met skipper, Sergeant Alex Petrovski, was in bemused conversation with Sefton. This hard-surveillance stop was going to be unlike any the sergeant had previously experienced, and Sefton
was making sure there was nothing about the vessel they were on that might give it away to a Sighted observer. That process had included quite a bit of sniffing and tasting.

Somewhere ahead of them, upriver, was the
Lone Star
, heading for the point where the attempted murder might happen. They’d heard from the Dutch police, using undercover assets in
the port of Ostend, that the ship had taken on a single crate there. Coming up fast behind it by now, showing as few lights as they were, should be a second police vessel, a fast-response Targa 31,
with an SC&O19 specialist firearms team on it, trained for tasked interdictions of commercial and private vessels, the vessel crewed and steered by the Marine Policing Unit’s Tactical
Response Team. The officers involved, from Inspector Patterson of the MPU on down, had expressed interest in being part of a raid organized by Quill’s mysterious little squad. Petrovski
picked up the radio again and hit the button. ‘Marine Four One to Marine Six Eight. Do you have target in sight? Over.’

A confirming voice came from the other end of the channel. ‘ETA to interdiction approximately three minutes.’

There were two other MPU officers with them, in uniform, ready with the specialist equipment that would enable Quill’s team to board. Costain glanced over to Quill himself, who was pacing
the deck, on edge as always now.

Ross stepped forwards to address him as much as the crew. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘For the third time . . .’ One of the crew made a humorous clearing of the throat, but that was
the extent of the protests. ‘The crew of the
Lone Star
on this particular voyage numbers eight, all of them American citizens, three of them with criminal records for crimes ranging
from GBH to armed robbery, all of those three plus two more with connections to the Ku Klux Klan.’ That detail was as in the story. Whether or not their opponents had the almighty powers
imagined by Quill, they certainly had an extraordinary reach in the everyday world to arrange things like that. ‘We think they’re planning a drowning tonight. We suspect their potential
victim is being kept in a crate secured to the deck, as observed by the plain-clothes units we’ve had trailing the vessel. We don’t know where they plan to throw that crate overboard.
We think they’re now heading for deep water, and perhaps for a moment when river traffic is light.’

‘There.’ Petrovski was pointing downriver.

Costain picked up the binoculars he’d brought along. The
Lone Star
was a beaten-up-looking sea-going freighter, with a low deck, still running with all the correct lights. There
didn’t seem to be any activity on deck as yet, but, and this was worrying, he couldn’t see the crate, not in the location reported by the last contact from the plain-clothes officers
watching the vessel. He reported that to Ross.

Ross took up her own binoculars. ‘Hopeful assumption: they must have moved it ready to chuck it. If they’d already done so, I think they’d have scarpered back to open
sea.’ Petrovski relayed the news to the other police vessel.

Costain hoped she was right. He couldn’t imagine the plight of the poor bastard inside. He couldn’t feel anything of the Sight about the vessel. They continued heading towards the
Lone Star
. In a few moments, they would be level. The radio buzzed again in the skipper’s hand. He listened for a moment, then looked back to Quill. ‘Inspector Patterson is
asking for go or no go.’

Quill looked relieved to be doing something. ‘Go,’ he said.

Petrovski relayed the order, increased his own boat’s speed and started swiftly turning the wheel, as the crew members readied the boarding gear. They were now closing with the
Lone
Star
, coming alongside . . . Costain found himself tensing, waiting for someone on that vessel to notice, horribly aware that he had an urge to prove himself, the sort of thing that got
soldiers heroically killed. He desperately wanted to make himself right by reaching for something beyond himself. He would. He would.

They came alongside, and at that exact moment, powerful searchlights blazed from the other side of the
Lone Star
, illuminating the deck as the loudspeaker of the other Targa blared into
life. ‘
Lone Star
,
Lone Star
, armed police officers, armed police officers. Switch off your engine, heave to and prepare to be boarded.’ At the same time, metal ladders
were flung over the opposite rail, and the black uniforms of armed officers in flak jackets and helmets leaped over, taking immediate firing postures and trying to acquire targets. Their aim,
stated in the briefing, was to dominate and shut down, with the purpose of making the bridge surrender and bringing the ship in to the nearest dock. Suddenly, bright light erupted from the cabin,
with a cracking sound like popcorn. One of the uniforms ran for cover; another fell and rolled away, shouting in pain.

Fuck. Fuck.

Costain just had time to look over to where their Targa’s crew were pulling hard on ropes, throwing their own boarding ladder over. Quill hadn’t bothered with ordering his team to
follow, and he clearly wasn’t waiting for the armed police officers to secure the ship; he was running for the ladders, because he must have already seen what Costain saw now: that towards
the bow of the vessel, in shadow, oilskins were being swiftly pulled from a crate that stood right beside the rail.