Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (40 page)

Nothing. Just bare pavement. Where there now actually stood a ruin. People were already walking among it like there was nothing there. It, and the people who once worked in it, had been
forgotten.

Lofthouse couldn’t move with the shock of the huge mass of new information that was suddenly inside her head. She had remembered everything, so much, so fast. She felt
like she wanted to write it all down, but no, she didn’t need to, she knew it. The whole history of her time advising the Continuing Projects Team . . . those were proper memories, those had
happened to her. She remembered being charmed by his culture, and worried by how amateur the organization he ran seemed to be.

The new memories in her head, though, what she’d just seen, events she had not been present at, those were what had halted her. She found herself stumbling towards the barrow as the weight
of it hit her. Where had this knowledge come from? From the key. She’d seen Chartres send it to her at the end, with that final gesture. It was that key on her charm bracelet, the one that
had appeared that very same night under her pillow. It had been supposed to tell her all she needed to know, but then that attack on the Continuing Projects Team had erased them from
everyone’s memory. She’d been left only with the feelings the key gave her, a subconscious urge to create a new team to take their place.

There was a noise from behind her. She turned to see that the Smiling Man, the creature who, she now knew, had slaughtered her old friends, was rising slowly from the water. His smile remained
fixed. She made eye contact with the thing. She wanted to say she and Quill’s team would find a way to stop whatever its plans were. She wanted to say she was going to do whatever it took to
bring justice to its victims.

Before she could say anything, the Smiling Man raised his hand in mocking salute and then vanished.

Lofthouse sagged with relief. She put the gun back into her bag. What had been in those cartridges? She might never know. She had to get back to the surface, to find out about Peter. She now
remembered Chartres telling her of an easier route back up, of a flight of many steps. The ordeal, slight as it had been for his initiates, was meant to be over at this point.

Slowly, she hauled her pain-wracked body off across the beach towards one of those other entrances.

Tony Costain looked slowly around the Portakabin. The others had first taken him to see the doctor at Gipsy Hill, then, at his insistence, back here. He didn’t want to go
home and be alone and recover. He wanted to hear what had happened, to be with his colleagues again. They’d been putting food and drink in his hands since he’d emerged, blinking, into
the light of Brook Street.

The man who’d kept Costain prisoner, who looked exactly like him, hadn’t let slip any information about who he was or why he was doing this, although he had asked him a load of
questions about Quill’s team. Costain had refused to answer. He’d spent his time in captivity feeling weak, unable to summon the strength to fight back when his captor had taken him
from his makeshift cage, put a pad of what must have been an anaesthetic over his face and dragged him to a waiting vehicle. The next thing he knew, his neck had been in a noose, and, miraculously,
his friends had come bursting in. He couldn’t offer any clues as to where he’d been kept. His captor had been meticulous.

‘Yeah,’ said Ross now, ‘you’d kind of expect that.’

‘Holmes can drive?’ said Sefton.

‘He can learn new skills very rapidly,’ said Ross, ‘and now there’s the Internet.’

‘If only we could put out a description,’ said Sefton, ‘for a bloke with a changing appearance who can do perfect disguises.’

‘I’ll tell them to throw uniforms into the area around Brook Street,’ said Quill, ‘and go house to house, get everyone aware of empty properties, who’s doing what
and where. It might slow Holmes down, at least.’

Costain still couldn’t get his head round it. ‘So I was held prisoner . . . by Sherlock Holmes?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ross, going to the ops board. ‘So what is up here is a fuck ton of lies.’ She started unpicking images and erasing lines. ‘He gave himself away not by
any specific clue, but by . . . how he behaved. Specifically towards me.’

‘What?’ Oh God, had he hurt her?

‘Later for that. That was enough to bring a whole lot of odd little details colliding together in my head, after Flamstead hinted to me that I already had all I needed.’

‘What, Gilbert Flamstead, the actor?’

Ross gave him a sad smile. Which was the greatest thing. ‘You’ve missed a lot.’

‘Yeah.’ Costain turned to find Quill had sat down, calming himself by muttering something under his breath, Moriarty beside him. He looked across the way to see Sefton had gone to
the kettle to make tea for them all. ‘Thank you,’ he said, loudly, ‘all of you.’

‘Biscuits,’ said Sefton, and threw the packet over.

Costain caught it. ‘What did he do when he was pretending to be me?’

‘He played us,’ said Ross.

He so wanted to talk to her. Just the two of them. Now wasn’t the time. He went over to the board, where she was now writing frantically, and the others joined him there.

‘He faked his own death,’ she said, ‘to remove himself from suspicion. He created that orgy of evidence to distract us, not only from Watson, but from the idea that he might
not be dead. He also planted clues so that if we saw beyond that, we might get diverted into the blind alley of thinking our prime suspect was Moriarty.’

Moriarty made an impatient noise and flounced away.

‘You know,’ said Costain, ‘that’s going to get on my nerves.’

‘At that point, he’d already committed two murders, in disguise as a friend of Christopher Lassiter, and then as Albie Bates, having been Dean Michael when setting Bates up as first
a patsy, then a victim.’ She went round the walls, angrily ripping down the notes from the extra boards. ‘He killed the latter in the guise of the short killer from the novel, showing
just how perfect his supernatural power of disguise is.’

‘In the books,’ said Sefton, ‘he fools his best mate, who’s looking right at him. The memory of London thinks of this ghost as being able to impersonate
anyone
, so
he can. The knowledge of character isn’t perfect like the disguise is, though. Holmes didn’t realize Costain had read the stories, for instance, and covered that up by saying he’d
got bored.’

‘Then he set us up with the
Lone Star
– the organization of which took immense planning – had Erik Gullister killed, kidnapped Costain and planted himself among us as
him. He’d obviously aimed this . . . exquisite, amazing, brilliant plan . . . at us from the start, anticipating what we’d do and using us to do things like get Albie Bates out of jail.
I suspect the idea to use us might have come from Holmes realizing during his preparations that we were based at Gipsy Hill and thus could bring Bates to where he needed him to be. Holmes knew once
he’d messed with us, we’d get after him, that we might surprise him, so part of the plan was for him to hide among us, to allow him to keep an eye on us, to react to what we did and
change the details of what he was doing should he have to.’ She looked to Costain. ‘I should have realized it wasn’t the real you so much sooner.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I mean because he treated those supposed wounds of his on the deck of the
Lone Star
, away from us. He joined in when we got the idea about the victims all playing Holmes because he
knew we’d have got it anyway. In his Tony Costain guise, he arranged the handling of the contents of the ship, and I guess still had some goons handy to take the crate with you in it away a
couple of hours later.’

‘Oh, I thought you meant because he didn’t share my charm.’

She brushed straight past that. ‘The first thing he did was to try to distract me, big time, to get me interested in going after my happiness again, to get me lost in irrelevant detail
outside of my speciality on the eve of his big score. I suppose I ought to be flattered.’

‘That Sherlock Holmes doesn’t want you in the game?’ said Costain. ‘Damn right.’

This time there was an awkward smile. Which then vanished. He was so pleased that she could do that again now. ‘I think he tried to distract the rest of us too,’ she said.

‘Didn’t need to in my case,’ whispered Quill.

Costain was amazed and horrified by the change in him. They needed to talk one-to-one too.

‘He got me to talk about my work,’ said Sefton. ‘On the train. Everything I’d learned about the London occult shit. Maybe he picks things up fast, like you said, the king
of Google, but he didn’t know anything about that.’

‘Then,’ Ross continued down the new board she was swiftly sketching, ‘he tried to kill you, having set you up in another typically showy Holmes disguise as that old lady. He
killed Danny Mills . . .’

‘He said he’d stayed at my bedside,’ said Sefton, ‘but if we asked the hospital staff, I bet we’d find out he was away for hours.’

‘. . . and when he and I went to talk to Ballard, I reckon he must have said something to him when I wasn’t there, made a private deal . . .’

‘Probably didn’t have to break character to do it,’ said Costain, before anyone else did.

‘. . . because Ballard then went out of his way to tell me that the blade that we thought killed Holmes had a spiel on it that could kill a ghost. So I doubt that was true. It was just to
keep us certain in our belief that Holmes was dead.’

‘He was telling the truth before then, though,’ said Quill. ‘The bit about the fetch kettle.’

‘Fake Costain realized Ballard hadn’t played that bit well,’ said Ross, ‘so he pointed it out afterwards, used it to build up my sense that Costain was the real thing. He
also used the occasion to find one of Ballard’s lock-ups. Plans within plans, the brilliant bastard.’

‘So the spiel on the blade must have been designed to do something else,’ said Sefton, ‘like, for instance, to create an image of Sherlock Holmes for the Sighted and broadcast
a message to me about his death.’

‘Then he went with me to the auction,’ said Ross, ‘and felt able to pull out one of his own teeth, which now I think about it might be because that was just a bit of his
disguise.’

‘Sometime around then,’ said Sefton, ‘he must have gone to find Ballard again, to set him up for being found in a bank vault. He got Ballard to sign up to be a security guard,
maybe by making some sort of offer concerning another bank job. Then, when Ballard shows up at Lombard Street, ready to scope out the target, he’s forced to put on a deerstalker and play
Holmes, before being held still to be smashed across the back of the head. Holmes set up the computer worm—’

‘Sherlock Holmes can
code
?’ asked Costain.

‘We’ve seen,’ said Sefton, seized by a sudden idea, ‘if that image he left of himself at Baker Street was accurate, that this Holmes is
all
of them, every version,
including all the modern ones. He doesn’t have to learn how to drive or code; he just knows!’

Ross pointed at him, correct, and erased a line of her new scribbles.

‘He’ll be up for the supernatural too,’ said Costain, ‘with Conan Doyle in the mix. He believed in fairies.’

‘But,’ said Quill, and him speaking up made them all stop, ‘I reckon that’d be a problem, because everyone knows Holmes didn’t. Put that and Conan Doyle in the same
body, put all these different versions of Holmes in the same body and . . . something’s got to give.’

They all took a moment to think about that. Quill sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

‘Holmes had time alone,’ Ross finally continued, ‘to get Ballard out of wherever he was stashed, probably in a vehicle, and into that room beside the bank, where he was
killed.’

Sefton nodded. ‘I reckon then Fake Costain raided Ballard’s apartment, maybe had even been given a key, or just got it off him, though they’d have let him in as easily then as
they did afterwards when we both went over. He’d heard Ballard had a device to find anyone, which would be a major threat to him if we got hold of it, but it wasn’t there. Not being
Sighted, he didn’t find the list under the bed. He just came away with the “bastard scourge”, whatever that is. When we did find the list under the bed, I think he had a quick
look at it and was relieved there was nothing on it that would make us immediately go after the stuff. That night, though, he got there first, more as a box-ticking exercise than anything else,
because there was nothing that could help him much either, thank God. Otherwise we’d be playing against Sherlock Holmes armed with tons of exciting devices.’

‘No wonder he looked knackered by the time we went to the conference,’ said Ross. ‘No wonder he couldn’t use the blanket spiel to hide his identity. I wonder why the ones
who checked him out didn’t realize who he was.’

‘If they’re looking for a copper, he isn’t one,’ said Quill.

‘And if it goes deeper than that,’ said Sefton, ‘I doubt it comes back with a name. You’d just get a feeling of something like him being a complicated private eye, which
wouldn’t have set off the alarm bells like police presence would. Or if there was a flavour of Victorian to what they found out, then from what we’ve seen, that would have reassured
them.’

‘At the conference, Flamstead arrived to play against him,’ said Ross. ‘He put the sort of pressure on Holmes that would have got to any Victorian gentleman, pushed him so hard
that his perfect disguise started to crack. I’m going to say a few difficult things now, Tony, OK?’

He was pleased she’d asked him. He nodded. She proceeded to fill in the details of how she’d had a fling with this bloke, this God of London. All Costain could think was that it was
a pleasure to have been asked if this was OK to talk about, that he liked how she and him were being with each other now. He took care to nod along.

‘I think Flamstead . . . let’s call him the Trickster . . . got . . . involved with me in response to Holmes trying to distract me,’ said Ross. ‘He offered me a . . .
shit, a very simple, calming relationship, in which he encouraged me, and pushed me towards the finish line of getting my happiness back a lot faster than Holmes wanted. He couldn’t tell me
outright about Holmes. That seems to be against the rules for the God of Lies.’