Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (8 page)

‘
A
minute? Or
two
?’

He laughed at that, then stifled it. ‘More like two.’

She went out into the street, looked at her watch and walked for ninety seconds at her normal fast pace. From what David had said, it didn’t sound like she’d run.
That gave her a radius. Then she looked again at her map and used her fingers to make a circle. She doubted she would have been visiting a shopkeeper. The only houses within that distance were a
cluster of upmarket apartments, a square of them on the map, behind the street here, set aside in their own bit of green. That sounded like the sort of place heavy-hitters like the people on that
list might live. She worked out where she had to go, rushed round a corner, and now she was trying not to run.

She turned the corner and there the building was. It was a square of apartments, built round a courtyard, something of the 1920s about it. The lawn was well kept, and the trees that baffled the
wind and rain were neat. Lofthouse had visited homes like these before, grace-and-favour apartments given to the great and the good, retired civil servants who wanted to live in town. There was no
sign naming the place. That would have been gauche. She went to the main gate, which was open, cars parked inside. Wheelie bins of rubbish were neatly lined up beside a little pile of junk mail
with a brick on top of it. There was a security office, but it was closed at the moment; this wasn’t a gated community. She still half expected to recall something, but no. The erasure had
been complete.

She put a hand, as she so often had in recent months, to the charm bracelet on her wrist. This was something else that she could tell nobody about. The key on her charm bracelet. The impossible
key that seemed to have a mind of its own. She was wondering if, now she was here, it would react. But no, she would have felt it by now. It wasn’t like she could shake it to get a reaction.
The key was the second powerful force that influenced her life. A positive one? Perhaps you could call it that. She’d come to trust it, anyway, and now it was silent.

Stairwells were inset in each of the four walls. She chose one at random, went up it and walked the cloister-like corridors. She could see how something as scholastic as this building would
appeal to someone who’d, presumably, worked in the ‘temple’ at the Docklands site. Would all of them have lived here? No, not people as large in the world as that: they would have
had big lives in all sorts of places. She was looking for the home of one person. An old friend. Probably not someone, with an apartment as small as these must be, with a family living at home.

She quickly walked all four quarters, on both levels. At times she held up the key, hoping it would oblige her with a inclination in one direction or the other, but got no reaction. A part of
her had hoped this building might provide the solution to another mystery: was there a lock somewhere her mysterious key fitted? Perhaps in one of these doors? It didn’t seem likely, given
their relatively modern design. The key looked ancient, rounded by so many fingers, though its teeth were miraculously sharp.

She returned to the gatehouse, frustrated. Now there was a caretaker inside, reading the paper. She knocked on his window, showing him a forced smile and her warrant card. He looked alarmed as
he came to the door, but she quickly calmed him. ‘Just background on a case – nothing to worry about. Could I see a list of your tenants, please?’ The proffered list didn’t
include any of the names she was after; of course it didn’t: the records of them had been erased from the world, James had said. But . . . hold on.

‘There are eight corner apartments and four apartments along each side of each floor, right? So why are there only thirty-five flats on this list?’

The caretaker shrugged. ‘That’s all we have. I should know.’ He looked complacent about it when, in any normal situation, that would have been the cue for an interesting fact,
a demonstration of his familiarity with the building.

Lofthouse was seized with sudden hope. She went back into the courtyard. She would walk each corridor again, counting doors this time. She headed for a stairwell, again passing the rows of
wheelie bins. A thought struck her. A caretaker wouldn’t take it upon himself to spare any apartment its junk mail. What had James told her about this process of forgetting? That it seemed to
leap from mind to mind across everyone who knew about the thing that was being forced out of the public consciousness. So, an automated process, once it had started up . . .

She went to the pile of letters and took the brick away. They were all from apartment 23. She ran back to the gatehouse, grabbed that list off the caretaker again, looked up and down it. No
apartment 23. She returned the paper to him, but was suddenly sure there
must
have been one, so she took it back and examined it again. She found the names and addresses sliding away from
her gaze in a way that made her eyes hurt. She couldn’t see what was being concealed, but she could just about perceive the concealment itself, now she was deliberately seeking it. She handed
the list back again to a now thoroughly bemused caretaker and jogged over to the appropriate stairwell.

Lofthouse walked the corridor past apartments 22 to 25 without noticing anything strange, then swore out loud and walked back, this time making herself stand in front of each flat in turn. It
was as if this power sent her brain into the mode where one is doing something one does every day, and so finds oneself thinking consciously of something else and can’t remember the familiar
action in the gap. Now she purposefully walked past apartment 22 and made herself stop before she got to 24, and yes, she could feel . . . something, as she turned to look in what must be the right
direction. The feeling was very powerful, now she focused on it, but it was very localized. It was like finding an enormous wind blowing through a tiny crevice, like something one read about on the
science pages, a force inside the smallest spaces of the universe. She still couldn’t sense anything between these two apartments, but she was just about aware now of something buffeting her
mind aside, getting between the light in her eyes and her knowledge of it. She made herself step forwards and reach out. Her hand stretched further and further into nothingness. She didn’t
know what she was hoping for. It was impossible, she knew, for her to be aware of encountering a door.

The key on her charm bracelet jerked urgently. She didn’t know if that was in anticipation or warning. It was enough, though, to make her halt.

She moved quickly aside, suddenly afraid that, should she stay here too long, pushing against this power, the one who had set it here would notice.

OK, she’d achieved something. She knew where her target was. She’d known there was a hole in the world, but now she had experienced it herself. That was terrifying, but so was what
had pushed her to come here. Now she had to get back to where she should be and work out her next move, work out some way to get through a door she’d couldn’t perceive.

On the way out of the apartment block, Lofthouse decided upon another experiment, to check in with the more positive of the two powers that were ruling her life. Would the key
react as it had in the past, to push her in one direction or the other? Time to find out. She started to deliberately consider the idea that, having come this far, she would go no further, that
this discovery had been enough. She
felt
the key on her charm bracelet react, and had a moment to brace herself before the wave of depression and misery hit her. She stumbled, had to put a
hand on the wall beside her to steady herself. No, she thought; actually, I’m going to pursue this to the end. I’m going to get inside that apartment and find what’s hidden. The
torment left her like a chemical reaction, and she breathed deeply for a moment, enjoying the rush of freedom from pain. The key was certain about what it wanted. Though she still had no idea why
it wanted anything.

She made her way back to Paddington Green and arrived for the end of the meeting, saying she’d just popped in to make sure there was nothing urgent that would surprise
her in the briefing notes she’d be sent later, got reassurances that this was the case, then, having thus made sure she’d killed off almost all possibility that comment would be made
about her absence, exited like she’d been there all the time, switching on her iPad and phone as she did so. She had a different driver on the way back to Gipsy Hill, thank God.

She’d been expecting him to appear, but it was just as big a shock as it always was. As she was reading the
Telegraph
on her iPad in the back of the car, he walked into the frame of
the tablet, that familiar face with a look of slight suspicion on it. A few months ago, on the face of the man himself, she’d have taken that look to be teasing, joking. Now it made her
stomach tense up and her face freeze.

‘Been anywhere nice?’ he asked.

‘The regular meeting.’ The driver would assume she was using FaceTime. She knew from previous experience that others couldn’t see or hear him.

‘You don’t normally switch off your gear in the meeting.’

‘I wanted to get away from you for a few minutes. Or can’t I do that now?’ The driver would now be assuming they were having a row. She understood where MI5 had come by their
suspicions, though she didn’t like their implied penetration of her security. Still, she had bigger problems.

‘You can do whatever you like, as long as you’re willing to accept the consequences.’ With a familiar little nod, he headed off the page again, and she wanted to bellow, to
kick the floor, to throw the iPad aside. She did none of those things.

‘Could we stop at my house?’ she asked the driver.

The car pulled into the driveway. Lofthouse got out, with as much calm as she could project, and marched to the door. She fumbled with keys, managed to get the damn thing open,
stepped inside.

‘In here,’ said the familiar voice. Oh, thank God. She found him in the kitchen, the person she’d seen walk onto her iPad, the most familiar person in the world to her, her
husband, Peter. He was standing in the kitchen with his hand in a pan of water, which was sitting on the hob. Now he calmly reached over and switched on the heat. ‘I wonder how long
it’ll take,’ he said, ‘before this body starts feeling the pain.’ He had done something similar just before she’d gone over to see Quill’s team in Docklands
– walked into her office unexpectedly, carrying a pair of shears from the garden, and put them round his little finger. Whatever had literally possessed him had quickly convinced her that it
was a genuine threat, that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on Peter’s part, by letting Peter go for a few moments, resulting in her husband asking her why he was at her
workplace. Then the possession had resumed. Her remaining doubts had been swept aside when she recalled the bizarre element that had entered her life already in the form of the key, that
impossibility to which she’d already become accustomed.

She could see now that Peter’s brow was sweating, that somewhere inside there was the man she loved, despite this control by something alien, despite the smile on his face.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ she lied.

‘I think you’ve been thinking about doing something.’

‘I have, but I haven’t done anything!’

‘Hmm.’ He was sizing her up. He had all of Peter’s mannerisms, but she wasn’t sure if she could guess what he was thinking in the same way she could with her husband. She
had come, since Quill had told her about the impossible things that he and his team had experienced, to associate this evil spirit with what Quill called the Smiling Man. Perhaps they were one and
the same. He certainly kept a grin on Peter’s features most of the time.

‘I wouldn’t do anything to let you hurt him. I wouldn’t.’

He considered, then decided. ‘Kneel,’ he said. ‘Beg.’

Without a moment’s hesitation, Lofthouse knelt and started to ask piteously for no harm to come to Peter. In the back of her mind, she kept repeating to herself the address that could save
her husband. The spirit let her keep going until the sound of bubbling was audible from the pan, then finally, with a familiar little laugh, lifted his hand from it. It was reddened, but not yet
scalded. ‘Amazing,’ he said, ‘what you’ll do for him. I really must experiment further.’

Quill watched as the other three examined this new crime scene. Following Sefton’s call to arms, they seemed to have a new energy about them. It was Sherlock
Holmes’s writing that had done it, that urgent tone. The ultimate crime, which they had to solve. Had that got the ghost ‘killed’? Had he been murdered when he got too close to a
solution? Why all the clues? He deeply wished he could share in the energy of his team, in the urgency of Holmes. He wasn’t concentrating enough, knew he was missing something.

The same thought kept rolling round and round in his head. Assuming nights in a hotel didn’t count, and he was now making that assumption based on the fact that when he’d been in
Hell, he’d met relatively few people who didn’t have London accents, then the only person he knew he could save from damnation was Sarah’s sister, Laura, who’d never lived
in the capital. How, though? How could he persuade her not to do something as seemingly harmless as move here? How could he do it without telling her what her sister and her sister’s child
were already sentenced to? His body’s continual fear that something would leap out at him was making him physically tired, what felt like a literal weight around his shoulders, arms and
chest. It was wearing him out. He couldn’t imagine what would happen when he was worn out.

He’d decided, at Baker Street, that surrendering the scene to a crime scene examiner might well yield new data, so he’d asked Costain to call it in to Lofthouse, getting Anita
Clarke’s
Study in Scarlet
investigation involved on the basis that someone seemed to have purposefully vandalized the Holmes Museum, leaving deliberate clues that were perhaps relevant
to Clarke’s investigation. He hadn’t met Clarke before, but when she turned up, he found her to be smart and straightforward, and was pleased to be able to let her people deal with the
representatives of the company that owned the museum as they arrived at the start of a working day. ‘What have your lot found?’ she’d asked.