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Authors: Paul Cornell
Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?
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WHO
KILLED
SHERLOCK
HOLMES?
PAUL CORNELL
TOR
For Deborah Stanish
PROLOGUE
Christopher Lassiter pinched the top of his nose and closed his eyes. Quiet desperation is the English way. This situation had taken him by surprise. He’d never imagined
that he could be seen as a scrounger. God, hadn’t he paid his way? Wasn’t that the bloody idea, that you paid your way, then if you fell on hard times, they helped you out? Yet here it
was, open on the table in front of him, a form asking him about his ‘fitness for work’. The language used wasn’t so much cold as downright harsh. He’d almost called the
phone number on here right away – there must be some mistake – until he’d realized it wasn’t free to call, and of course they’d keep you hanging on listening to
Mumford & Sons, while some Indian call centre watched the clock tick away before finally deciding they’d squeezed you enough and would deign to—
He carefully put down the form. He’d been in the RAF, damn it – that’s what he wanted to say. He hadn’t been an actor all his life; he’d done something useful, for
a jolly long time, before the chronic fatigue syndrome. His journalism had been useful after that too, before the BBC had decided that they could make up news broadcasts from press releases on the
Internet. Being in this bloody chair was not his fault. Having a spare bedroom, in which was piled everything from a life that had been too big for this tiny flat, well, he was going to be blamed
for that now too, wasn’t he? You should get a Polish lodger in, squeeze him like we’re squeezing you! Where was he supposed to
put
everything? Did they think he could afford
storage? Wasn’t the totality of his life, his character, worth more than a mere collection of data points?
The sudden headache made him wince. It was that that had finally done him in, so he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t develop a train of thought, couldn’t present to camera
without making the viewers aware of pain, couldn’t remember his lines. The pain had taken his ability to make money, and now here they wanted everything else, wanted him to work for nothing,
even. Where would he live? He wouldn’t mind getting out of London, the way the place was going, but his only social life was the pub round the corner. He was all right here, tucked away,
though you sometimes got kids wandering around the side streets, drunk, on their way home from the Brixton Academy. There was even a bit of green nearby if you inclined your head at the kitchen
window at just the right angle. Didn’t he deserve these small, last comforts? These days, every comfortable shape you felt you could lean on just seemed to have fallen away.
The ring on the doorbell came as a blessed relief. It also surprised him. Who would that be? Some arse with a collecting tin. He’d ask
them
for money. He wheeled himself over to the
answering device and saw a shape behind the frosted glass. He pressed the button. ‘Who is it?’
‘Old friend of yours!’
Chris was sure he recognized the voice, but couldn’t put his finger on where from. He hit the other button and in strode . . . Oh, what a welcome sight!
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what brings you here?’
Christopher Lassiter’s body was found eight days later. With the warm early autumn weather, it had taken that long for Mr Peng, who owned the shop beside the flat, to
notice the smell, and to realize he hadn’t seen Chris coming and going. The door was knocked upon by Jackie Dorney, a community support officer from Coldharbour Safer Neighbourhood Team, and
finally opened with a duplicate key provided by the landlord, who’d been bloody elusive.
She found Lassiter lying beside his wheelchair, his face contorted in agony. He’d obviously been dead some time. She took one long, careful look at the room, then stepped back out of the
flat without touching anything, closed the door behind her, took out her Airwave radio and called it in as a suspicious death. The civilian Metcall centre worker went through her script as she had
for all the more ordinary times Jackie had contacted her, finally told her to wait there, and she acknowledged. She made herself stay standing upright, though she wanted to lean against the wall in
shock, because she was aware of passers-by starting to look. This had to be a murder. There’d been no sign of any wounds on the body, no blood near it, except . . . the memory of it got to
her only in some deep way that let her conscious mind stay calm above it . . . except the walls had been daubed with blood, a single word written in it above the corpse, a word that wasn’t in
English, but that, even so, Jackie found weirdly familiar.
Within a few minutes, local uniforms and CID arrived to secure the scene and make initial enquiries. Within an hour, crime scene examiners and detectives from SC&O1, the
Homicide and Serious Crime Command, had arrived, and Jackie was questioned at the scene, then released to write up her notes, which would become a witness statement. She saw the story on the news
that night. A man in his sixties had been found dead, they said, and police were seeking witnesses who’d seen anyone calling at the flat in the past two weeks. So there couldn’t have
been any useful CCTV footage of his front door. The circumstances of his death were suspicious.
Jackie felt she now understood her job a little more. All the horror she’d seen in that room was regularly reduced to words like that. She worried for the coppers who encountered such
things on a regular basis.
That same day, a detective constable on the Major Investigation Team talked to a reporter off the record and soon the resulting story was all over the media. They were still
waiting for the post-mortem and the toxicology tests, but the lack of any other apparent cause of death suggested Lassiter had been poisoned. The blood on the wall wasn’t his, but that of an
as-yet-unidentified third party. The simplest research had revealed that the word that had been written there was an obvious reference, but that didn’t mean other possibilities as to what it
might mean were being ruled out. That word had now been seen by the world, in a grainy long-lens photo taken through the window of Christopher Lassiter’s flat, when, for reasons perhaps
influenced by money, someone inside had just for a moment pulled aside the curtains.
The word was
Rache.
Three imperial stormtroopers strode into Chilcott’s bank on Park Street in Mayfair, brandishing their weapons, ‘The Imperial March’ playing from concealed
speakers somewhere on their person. They got a chuckle from the three or four people sitting in the foyer, waiting to go back into the meeting rooms. One broad-shouldered chap in an expensive suit
saluted them with his designer cup of African coffee, but Lacey Fitzherbert, through her own fear, could feel the awkwardness. Chilcott’s was not Barclays on the high street. This marble and
teak foyer was more like the entrance of a hotel; nothing so infra dig as tills for a bank as rah as Chilcott’s. It smelt of some sort of polish that Lacey had only smelt otherwise at stately
homes. Someone, these customers would be thinking, was going to have to tell these fine fellows they’d find no opportunity for a charity collection here, not from the rich. Unfortunately, the
customers’ thoughts were irrelevant, because Lacey knew exactly what was about to happen.
The stormtroopers turned slowly, checking where everyone was. Oh God, this was it; this was what they’d paid her for; this was what her dad had begged her about at the kitchen table.
‘Nobody will ever know,’ he’d said. ‘We would never put you in danger unless it was . . . It’s just that they . . . they came to us, and . . .’
She was suddenly very aware of the new guy standing beside her. What was his name? Kevin, that was it. He had a concerned look on his face. She’d noticed him as soon as he’d arrived,
a week ago, those rugby-player muscles under his jacket, and she had a thing about black guys. He set off her gaydar a bit, but these days who didn’t? She stepped away from him, just a little
closer to the desk she’d been hovering near all morning. Now she thought about it, she’d noticed him glancing over at her a few times.
‘What are they—?’ he started to say.
The lead stormtrooper swung round, pointed his gun at a corner of the room with no people in it and fired a burst. A piece of modern sculpture exploded into fragments. It was the loudest noise
Lacey had ever heard. ‘Stay fucking put!’ he bellowed, his voice amplified and distorted by what must be a microphone under his helmet. His two mates had swung to cover the customers
with their weapons, and the fine ladies and gentlemen had leaped up and were shrinking back, screaming, their hands in the air. One of them, the woman nearest to the door, was hesitating, Lacey
noticed. Had the stormtroopers seen that she was thinking about going for it? Should Lacey say something? Suddenly, she kicked off her shoes and ran.
Lacey shouted – she didn’t know who to – and half put up a hand to prevent herself from seeing what was about to happen, or stop it from happening, or something. The loudest
possible noise roared again, but as she looked, the door was slamming back against its frame. The woman had made it.
‘You do
not
do that!’ the lead stormtrooper bellowed again at the customers. ‘If anyone else tries that, I will fucking kill
all
the rest. Do you understand? Do
you understand?!’
There were nodded assents. One of the stormtroopers was running to the door, where he started quickly and expertly locking it.
‘Why didn’t they do that on the way in, do you reckon?’ said Kevin. He sounded really bloody calm about all this.
The lead stormtrooper swung his gun in Lacey’s direction, and Lacey knew, horribly, that she’d already disobeyed; she’d already left it too long to do what she had to. She
jerked out her hand and found the silent alarm button under the counter.
‘What are you fucking doing?’ The lead stormtrooper marched over, snatching up his gun to aim at her head. She thought of her mum and dad, and hoped desperately that she wasn’t
the victim of some huge lie. He was about to grab her round the throat, shove his gun to her head. That was what she’d been told he’d do. She’d thought about it many times, but
she hadn’t had that enormous sound in her head and stomach then. Still, she was going to let it happen.
But then Kevin moved between them. Dear God, no, was he going to try to be a hero?
The stormtrooper swung his gun away from her to cover him. ‘Step away.’
Kevin raised his hands, looking concerned and careful, not taking any risks. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s no need for anyone to get hurt. You’ve come for the safe
deposit boxes, right? That’s all we have of value here. Well, I can show you where they are. I know where the two sets of keys are. I can even get you the list of who owns which
box.’
The stormtrooper paused.
Lacey felt panic start to take over. What the hell was Kevin talking about? Why would he lie? Only staff of her level of seniority could get hold of that list. That was one reason she was in
this mess. She’d already given that list to her parents, to pass on to whoever was behind all this. To get the keys, you’d need to be a couple of pay grades higher. Today, that would be
only . . . No, looking around the staff here today, she couldn’t actually see anyone else she knew: it must all be guys from the other shifts in today, which was weird, now she thought about
it. Her thoughts snapped back to the here and now. Not only was Kevin putting her family’s life in jeopardy with this mad offer, so was the bloody stormtrooper by thinking about it. She had
to demonstrate her willingness to go along with the plan, to show them that her hesitancy about the alarm hadn’t been deliberate. She pushed her way past Kevin and lunged at the stormtrooper,
falling into him, the bravest thing she had ever done. She hoped it looked like she was having a go at getting his gun or trying to escape or something.
