Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (2 page)

‘Tell me who can open the safe deposit boxes!’ he yelled into her ear, back on script, trying to make it obvious that he was addressing her and not Kevin. He grabbed her throat,
which hurt like fuck. No, she wanted to say, not that hard. I can’t breathe! He remembered and let go enough for her to speak.

‘I won’t tell you!’ she shouted.

‘I can!’ Kevin insisted, pointing at himself.

The stormtrooper paused awkwardly again. He obviously had as little idea as she did what Kevin’s weird willingness to help was about. Lacey looked over her shoulder into those blank eye
sockets, willing whoever was under there just to follow his orders.

Kevin looked perplexed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘do you want to rob this bank or not?’

‘Don’t listen to him!’ Lacey gasped. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!’

One of the stormtroopers yelled from the front door, ‘Police! Fucking loads!’

The stormtrooper holding Lacey let go. He looked around as if making his mind up under pressure. He was, just from the body language, a terrible actor, but that in a stormtrooper outfit looked
somehow authentic. ‘All right,’ he finally yelled, ‘this is now a hostage situation!’

Lacey closed her eyes in sheer relief. That was what she had been told to expect. She had done her part. She, Kevin and the handful of other staff and customers were yelled at and rushed back
into the meeting rooms by the three stormtroopers, who shoved them into corners, told them to sit and slammed the doors on them. Through the big panel windows, Lacey watched as they started to
arrange the seating into a rough barricade, pulling out unfolding metal sheets from their backpacks to add to their defences. Presumably they weren’t worried about anyone thinking, at this
point, that they seemed to have come very well prepared for a siege they weren’t expecting.

‘They let us keep our phones,’ said a voice from beside her. It was, of course, Kevin. He still sounded strangely calm. ‘So hey, we can tell the world we’re in a
siege.’ He took his phone out and typed a very quick text that seemed to consist of a single word.

Few people knew that the private home that stood next to Chilcott’s bank on Park Street in Mayfair had two levels of cellars. In London, there were strict ordinances
about building upwards, so if one had no elbow room sideways and one wanted, say, a new pool, or, in this case, a new home cinema, one applied, with the aid of solicitors who specialized in that
sort of thing, for planning permission, hoping all the while that the underground railway wasn’t too close to the surface. Having got said planning permission, one got the builders in, and
they got the excavators in, and they started to chew downwards. Much too noisy to stay put during all that, of course, so one pissed off to one of one’s other houses, somewhere abroad, which
was where, Mark Ballard knew, the owners of this abode were once again, oblivious to what he was doing in the home cinema they’d had built several years ago.

What he was doing at this very moment was standing in a newly excavated area to one side of the cinema, looking up at an incongruous mechanical digger. It was standing part in and part out of an
excavated concrete wall. Some of it, where it had got in the way of what Ballard’s team were doing, had been sawn off and piled nearby. It was as if they’d unearthed a dinosaur.

It had been a news story about the presence of the digger down here that had first alerted him to the possibilities this building next to Chilcott’s bank had to offer. Big construction
companies, making millions on underground developments such as this, had initially gone to the bother of bringing in cranes to lift mechanical diggers, once their work was done, out of their
excavations. Then they’d realized that the cost-benefit analysis actually tipped in the direction of just finding somewhere to hide the digger and leaving it entombed in a wall, the company
sometimes going just a little bit beyond the planning permission they’d been given for the few days it took to do so. Ballard had slipped someone at City Hall some cash to get a look at the
plans and realized that, yes, the only place the digger could have been entombed was right up against the bank.

Its presence, leading to structural weaknesses in the concrete, had made his team’s initial drilling a lot easier. He had, once again, found a little crack in reality and had grabbed it
and ripped it open like . . . well, like pulling apart a chicken. He often thought of the moment he’d really done that. He’d been fifteen, on some outing with a bunch of other kids from
‘deprived backgrounds’ or whatever the term had been back then. He’d needed to show the girl he was with what he could do. He’d climbed over the gate at a city farm, and had
grinned back at her, and had been quick enough to catch the chicken, and had hauled its legs both ways in a second. The shriek it had made had stayed with him. He’d known from that moment
that he was someone who could and would do
anything
.

He wondered, as he looked up at the digger, what future archaeologists would make of these buried machines that had dug their own graves. They’d think of them as some sort of offering.
Ballard knew how the power of London worked. The buried diggers would, after a few years, create ripples in the currents of force that could make the impossible happen. To deliberately bury
something that would swiftly accrue stories from folk memory, as people in pubs told others what was down there . . . He wondered how many of London’s builders still knew what their ancient
guilds had taught. All those secrets he’d wheedled out of sloshed retired bastards in the right bars. He’d done it all himself, like always, the self-made man. He was here with only
four employees, the minimum needed for this job. He checked the news on his phone. There we go: first reports of a siege situation at Chilcott’s bank . . . quotes from texts of loved ones
within. Excellent. It was beautiful that that team had decided they’d dress up as stormtroopers. They’d put themselves into the role of action figures, as if they were going along with
how he thought about them. People never seemed quite real to Ballard, not real like he was. They were just a rather-too-small cluster of predictable reactions.

‘OK.’ He stepped forwards to where Tony was supervising the work crew. The tall black lieutenant looked up expectantly. He had that blank expression again. He was so fucking sad all
the time, so weighed down by something he never talked about. Still, he’d been an excellent find, a bloke with not just gang soldier experience, having been part of Rob Toshack’s crew,
but also someone who actually had the Sight. So he wouldn’t freak out when Ballard produced one of his little toys. When Ballard had asked how Tony had got the Sight, the man had just shaken
his head, the truculence of which had made Ballard think that maybe after this gig he’d take Tony out drinking and arrange for him to be carted off in a van to somewhere that Ballard and some
muscle could tease that secret out of him. Yeah, that was a pleasure to be saved for later, making a macho bloke squeal, and by the end of it, he’d get from him what he needed to know. Oh,
that would be satisfying.

‘Go for the bank wall, chief?’ asked Tony.

Mitch had the drill at the ready. They’d been down here for a month, cutting past and through the digger, until they were now at the point where Mitch’s electric sensor indicated the
bank’s security system was threaded through what was surely much tougher concrete, mixed with proprietary additives and reinforced with steel bars.

One of Ballard’s artefacts had altered the flow of power through this building so that the noise and the vibrations didn’t reach the outside world, as Ballard had confirmed with some
delightful early autumn strolls round the block. Ballard had used his ‘white blanket’ rings to get the team in and out without being noticed. Tony was firm with the others, didn’t
allow any slacking, but didn’t strut around showing off his authority. Ballard appreciated that professionalism. That and the stoic suffering the man already seemed to be enduring made him
think he would actually try to hold out against the tortures Ballard had planned for him. Brilliant.

‘Wait a sec.’ Ballard went to the hole in the wall that had become so familiar and took the metal bracelet from his jacket. To him, its power was only a slight tingling, but that
tingle had led him to precious and powerful items at auction houses all over the world. Ballard placed the bracelet on his wrist and put his palm to the concrete wall of the bank. Alarms might even
go off at that slight contact, but such alarms were to be expected, weren’t they, when one’s bank was in the middle of a siege situation? The police would assume that the robbers were
now trying to breach the secure cell at the centre of the bank, but they would also assume that by controlling the siege they were controlling the robbery. He whispered the words that had been
written phonetically on a photocopied document that had come with the bracelet, words that he suspected weren’t actually from a language but were just precise noises, attuned to the shape of
the metropolis. He’d got both the bracelet and the document from the back room of an undertaker’s in Chesham that had a sideline in the dark stuff. They’d also, for a hefty price,
provided the sacrifices, small personal injuries like the cutting of gums and the pulling of nails, that gave him the power he was using today.

There was a satisfying feeling of something huge moving around him, impacting on the wall, invisibly altering it. He felt his will change the world, again. He was pleased at the idea that Tony
might be actually seeing it. Ballard himself didn’t have the Sight, so everything he did using the power of London remained invisible, intangible, to Ballard himself, when for the Sighted,
he’d been told, it was about watching luminous tendrils do their work, being able to sense the presence of the supernatural, learning about an object of power simply by looking at it.

Getting the Sight was a goal for the future, but not a tremendously urgent one. He was doing fine without it. Ballard suspected that what he was doing on this job was close to the intent,
centuries ago, of those that had formalized the power of London into a matter of holding particular items or making particular noises. He was now in the business of building and demolition, as had
been many of those practitioners. They had created a culture of architects that had kept these procedures a trade secret, formalized them and swiftly ceased to enquire further into how they worked.
They had merely repeated what had been done before, and been content to see it done again. Ballard felt that he was the last person who studied as a science something that had, years before, become
the mumbled repetitions of a religion.

He realized his work was done, stepped back and waved for the drill crew to get to work. Tony consulted with Mitch and marked a place on the concrete. The engine started up, the drill bit surged
forwards, and the team lurched with it, having to steady themselves, surprised at how easy its passage had been. Tony looked over to Ballard and dourly nodded. Ballard allowed himself a grin in
return.

PC Isla Staverton sat in the unmarked van on Reeves Mews, wondering about the intelligence analyst. Staverton’s job was to liaise between said analyst and the teams of
SC&O19 specialist firearms officers standing by in unmarked vans on several side streets. She herself was SC&O19, number two to Sergeant Tom Stennet, who was Bronze leader on this
operation, in charge of the third tier of the organizational structure, and also waiting in one of those vans. The analyst, whose name was Lisa Ross, had seemed, at the initial briefing, to be
narked at the standard structure of an op like this to the point of being all eye-rolly. Typical bloody specialist, looking down on your everyday lid, simply because she was from this weird unit of
just four people that everyone in the canteen talked about but about which nobody really knew anything.

Ross was here to record the timeline of what went down as it happened, her laptop open and an i2 Analyst’s Notebook application ready on it, displaying a colourful diagram of the organized
crime network they were aiming to bring down today, with ‘Operation Dante’ in red at the top. Staverton had at least hoped that the analyst’s narkiness wouldn’t extend to
Ross attempting to give her orders. The analyst technically outranked the PC, but she’d never met a copper who’d accept that situation. As it turned out, the analyst had been silent and
distant to the point of rudeness, not just focused on her task but staring into space in the long stretches between. Something that was normally there in a person seemed, in her, to have been
switched off. She displayed none of the anticipation Staverton had felt around officers on the verge of a major score. At least, as had every other analyst Staverton had met, she hadn’t
objected to Staverton using her first name rather than calling her ‘ma’am’. Let her try and see how far that got her. Staverton got the feeling that party girl here just
didn’t react to much anymore. God, what sort of trauma had made her like that? The analyst’s DI, James Quill, who was Silver leader for this operation, and about whom Staverton had
heard happier stories, had also seemed pretty out of it at the briefing, curt and angry at any question. Only Lofthouse, the detective superintendent, Gold leader for this op, had seemed
straightforward and professional.

Now, Ross looked up from her phone, which had just got an alert for an incoming text, as she was typing. ‘That was a text message from second undercover, saying, “Siege.” So
the bank robbery team are sticking with Ballard’s original plan and haven’t been lured away from it by the promise of easy money.’

‘I’ll relay that to the front-of-bank team.’ There was a van of specialist firearms officers parked directly across from the bank in case the stormtroopers had opted to ignore
their chief’s plan, open a few tasty safe deposit boxes and scarper before, they thought, the police had got there. To take them in a prepared bottling at the front of the bank had been
judged by Lofthouse to be less dangerous than letting the full plan play out, so they’d been offered this temptation by the second undercover.