Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (7 page)

‘The curious case,’ said Costain, ‘of the Watson who wasn’t there.’

‘Moriarty,’ said Ross, seemingly the instant the idea came to her. ‘Got to be suspect number one, surely? If you ask anybody the question “Who killed Sherlock
Holmes?”, that’s the answer you’ll get.’

‘Maybe,’ said Sefton. ‘Except that Moriarty isn’t as huge in the public imagination as Holmes is, and isn’t linked to a London location. I don’t think
he’d have a ghost.’

‘Wait a sec.’ Quill had been looking off into the distance, the photo still in his hand. He was breathing hard, as if he’d just finished running. Sefton watched as Quill
searched the desk beside the photo and found something else. ‘I think this was sent to him,’ he said. He picked up an empty envelope from the desk, compared the size of it to the photo
and showed them the card backing. The stamps on the front were modern, and carried a London postmark. The letter was addressed to Sherlock Holmes at the famous address.

‘He must get a lot of mail,’ said Sefton. ‘Some fictional characters do. I wonder where it’s kept.’

‘We need another word with that curator,’ said Ross.

‘Whoever killed Holmes,’ said Ross, ‘left a room full of deliberate clues. That’s a strike against Moriarty. His big thing was that you wouldn’t suspect he was a
criminal, wasn’t it? He took care
not
to leave clues.’

Sefton went back to the other side of the room, which held a bookcase containing volumes such as a reverse telephone directory, and several bound collections of Holmes’s own monographs.
Sefton opened one of them and was momentarily surprised to find the pages blank. These were, of course, like the letters, just props. There were some gaps in the rows of books. He looked on the
desk for them, then around the room. He couldn’t find them, and indicated that to the others.

Ross photographed the shelves and noted the placing of the gaps. ‘Why would someone nick fake books?’ she asked.

‘Maybe it was an opportunist, robbery gone wrong,’ said Costain. She looked incredulously at him, then realized he was joking and turned away, took a couple of steps away from him,
angry at him all over again.

Sefton watched Costain’s face fall; another small attempt to reach out, another indication that the connection between them had gone forever. He looked back to Quill, who was leaning on
the wall, his expression far away. It was like he’d had an idea but he’d lost it.

Sefton was suddenly angry, with himself and with them. ‘Don’t just – don’t
do
that!’ he yelled. The others all turned to look at him. ‘You’ve
stepped right back into going through the motions, filling your roles, and that’s great, that’s what we should be doing, but if we keep doing only that, we will run ourselves into the
ground, like you’ve already been doing for weeks now!’

‘Kev—’ began Quill, a sigh in his voice.

‘But look at this, look at it! It got to you when you saw that handwriting, I know it did! That’s Sherlock bloody Holmes lying dead right there! This is . . . This has to be a change
in how London remembers stuff, if he doesn’t just regenerate like a video game character or something like that. This is huge. Wait a sec.’ He checked his evidence gloves weren’t
torn, marched over, looked to Ross to check what he was about to do was OK, and, a nod from her confirming that it was, pulled the blade from the flickering ‘body’. He half expected
Holmes to flash back into existence and become once again what he must have been before, the wraith of an idea haunting these chambers, but he didn’t. Sefton straightened up and held the
murder weapon high in the air. ‘This is the ultimate murder mystery, and this room displays a ton of evidence. What more do you need to get excited about what only
we
do?! What more do
you need to bloody snap out of it, work together and be . . .
us
again?!’

Costain was grinning at him, he realized, obviously relieved by what had been said, but still, Sefton was immediately a bit embarrassed at having made the closest to a stirring speech that
he’d ever heard from anyone in the Met. ‘Kev—’

‘I mean it. Enough with the jokes from you.’

‘No, I agree, and that’s great, that’s the best thing, but I just looked at the BBC news page.’ He held up his phone. ‘Another body’s been found with
“Rache” written on the wall. Do you want to say it or will I?’

‘What?’

‘Mate . . . the game is
afoot
.’

The next morning, while still at home, Lofthouse got a call from Costain to go over the events of the previous night, and to ask her to help them get an in on what had now
become the ‘
Study in Scarlet
murders’, plural. Lofthouse had called up the DI on that operation, Anita Clarke, and, with much more ease than would previously have been the case,
got Quill’s team folded into the op. She wondered why Quill hadn’t called her himself, but this morning she had other things to worry about, things she had kept secret from everyone. It
was time for her to take action, but, above all, she had to do it without being noticed.

She’d already made her first move by checking out her own bank accounts online. It had been a lot more stealthy to do that than to make an appointment to go and see her accountant, who
held the paper versions. She’d had to contact the bank about seeing the older statements, and that had been more risky, but she’d now seen all the transactions from seven years ago,
adding a margin of error to the five years Sefton had mentioned. She’d checked through them by area, looking for businesses and cashpoints in places she didn’t usually go.

She’d realized something was wrong with her memories at the instant Quill’s team had told her about her own name being on that empty folder recovered from those ruins in Docklands.
She’d been primed to discover something impossible, because just before she’d left . . . No, she didn’t want to think about that terrible moment, about the first appearance in her
life of the awful threat that still hung over her.

It was strange to speak of ‘gaps’ in one’s memory, because surely one’s memory was mostly gaps: one forgot almost everything one experienced, unless one made an effort to
remember. That was why police officers kept records. If she had understood what Quill’s team had told her about their experiences correctly, however, the process by which the memory of the
Continuing Projects Team had been erased from the minds of all who knew them extended to people not being able to perceive records of the erased persons’ existence. Quill and his people could
see the ruins of the CPT’s former headquarters, and a document that listed their names, with photos beside them. She herself, not having the Sight, of course could see neither. The sounds of
their names, however, when read out to her, immediately haunted her. She
knew
she’d known them, she was
sure
of it, but there was simply no information in her mind to back up
that gut feeling. The names seemed apt for them, but imparted no further layer of meaning: Sir Richard Chartres, RIBA, KCBE; Patrick Kennet-Fotherington, LLB; Felicity Saunders, permanent
secretary; Adam Fletcher, senior producer current affairs; Rev. Michael Watson.

Even if she hadn’t been got at before going down to Docklands, she would have been sure at that moment that to restore the memories of those people to her mind was the most important thing
she could do to help Quill’s team. However, got at she had been, so she had to do what she had to do now without Sefton’s help. She so wanted to talk to him, to any of them, about what
she was going through. Instead, she’d made the decision to keep up her poker face, to help them as she felt called to do, but also not to risk the most important thing in her life. The power
that was watching her didn’t seem to mind her helping Quill’s team. That was frightening in itself.

Her bank accounts were not direct records of the existence of the forgotten people, so presumably hadn’t been erased from all human memory. Therefore, she’d hoped they might provide
her with indirect evidence of where she might have met with those people. She had been both troubled and excited to see that there were indeed two places in London where she seemed, five years ago
and before, to have often been, without now remembering anything of it. Before she’d made that discovery, she’d made a few, limited, excursions to other places where she might have met
people who matched those names, places to which it was not extraordinary for her to go: the Houses of Parliament; the BBC; the Inns of Court. She had walked randomly, hoping to find some clue, some
smell even, that might ignite her memories. That slightly strange behaviour had been what the MI5 people had noticed. Her more fearsome watcher, however, didn’t seem to have.

One of the odd places her bank accounts said she’d spent time in was Docklands, which was obvious. If she’d known the CPT, she’d have visited their headquarters. The other . .
. the other was where she was going to go today. She left her house, raised a hand to her husband, who was standing at the window, a shadow on the glass, and headed to the car she’d
ordered.

She got in and greeted the driver, let him pull out of her driveway and head for the M25. She looked carefully out of the windows, then turned urgently back to him. ‘All right,’ she
said, ‘we’re not going to the meeting, and you’re
not
going to call ahead to tell them I can’t make it. OK?’

Lofthouse strode out of Golders Green Underground station at speed, feeling as off piste as she’d ever gone, a prey animal who had got away from the hunter. She spent a
moment looking around, past the bus station, with its rows of double-deckers, to the clock tower and the three-storey shops. It was drizzling; a welcome cold was on the breeze. She’d hoped to
recognize something. She did not.

She found the two different cashpoints from which she had made withdrawals, in that unknown dreamtime. There was nothing memorable about them, of course. Nor was there, and this had been a
greater hope, about the two restaurants where she’d paid for meals. She went inside both, looked around, was asked by staff, who bloody obviously wouldn’t remember a single customer
from a single occasion five years ago, if she wanted an early lunch. She walked out in both cases without replying. She got out her map, wishing she could use her iPad, and worked out where the
boundaries of the suburb could roughly be said to be. She headed north on the Finchley Road, all suburban houses and gardens. She was going to walk the leafy avenues, as far as it was possible to
do so, in disciplined squares.

She had no idea what she was looking for. She’d asked James once or twice what having the Sight was like, and just from his descriptions of it, she felt blind now, blind and desperate. She
was throwing the dice every moment she was here. Though she had no obligation to be there, the regular intelligence-sharing meeting she was meant to be attending right now might have already
decided that it was unlike her not to show up and called her nick, who would call her mobile, which she of course had to keep switched off, and then, worried, call home. She could not, however,
call the meeting to make excuses, or have anyone else in her circle call them. It was like one of those nightmares in which one was running with one’s legs bound.

She looped eastwards towards the park, and after a while realized everything was becoming more Hampstead, and turned back towards the centre again. She marched up onto Golders Hill Park and
looked down on the suburb, sheltering under a tree as the rain started to really come down. Meaningless green. Suburban nothing to do with her. There was something nearby, the map told her, called
Leg of Mutton pond. Surely she would remember that? She didn’t.

She went back down and headed off along Golders Green Road itself, towards Brent Cross. She was getting more and more afraid, more certain every moment that she was going to be caught. She
should run to Quill, or at least to Sefton, burst in on them and say they had to help her. But no, they would only have seconds to do so, because her unexpected arrival would be noticed. She
couldn’t take that risk. Every time she thought about the threat that had been made, she reeled inside at the idea of what she could lose.

Stop, Rebecca. Don’t think about the fear. Continue what you’re doing. Just a bit longer. You’re a professional and you do not allow yourself to be a slave to fear.

She stopped at a cafe in a side street and sagged into a chair. She ordered a pot of tea without milk or sugar, and left the teabag to stew while she checked out on her map which places around
here she hadn’t gone to yet. Hopeless, hopeless.

‘Superintendent!’ She looked up to see a man she didn’t know, who’d just walked in carrying a greengrocer’s box full of fruit. He was smiling at her. ‘Long
time no see!’ He put the box down on the counter and came over, rubbing his hands on his apron. ‘What brings you back here?’

She felt like leaping up to embrace the most welcome stranger she had ever met. She did not. She slowly stood, one hand on the back of the chair to support herself. ‘You’ll have to
forgive me,’ she said. ‘You see . . . I’ve lost my memory.’

The man’s name was David, he was the owner of the cafe, and they’d had a few conversations on the subject of her work, while never really becoming friends.
He’d wanted to talk to her about getting more police on foot through here. It had become a running joke between them. She’d stopped by often, until . . . Wow, it must have been five
years back; how time flies, he said. He was concerned about her condition, eager to help out. It took a desperately long time to get past reassuring him that she’d had medical attention.
She’d always sit in the window if she could, he said, watching the people go past. She’d always said she was here visiting friends. Nearby? He supposed they must be. She’d never
said who.

‘Oh, wait a sec, come on now . . .’ David put a hand to his brow. ‘You once left your stuff here, asked me to look after it, ’cos you’d forgotten something, left it
wherever you were visiting. You popped out, and you was back literally just a minute or two later.’