Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? Read online

  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.

  ‘Noted. I’m now texting back that second undercover should work on Fitzherbert.’ Staverton remembered from the briefing that Lacey Fitzherbert was the junior manager who’d been turned to the dark side through family pressure. She’d passed on to Ballard’s people the list of which safe deposit boxes belonged to which customers. Her testimony, it was said, would help in making sure the charges against the patron stuck, though Staverton was still puzzled that the weird little squad feared they might not. Ballard was here personally, wasn’t he, actually supervising a drilling team? He was being that stupid. What sort of conjuring trick did they think he was going to pull? At the briefing, they’d been told how this operation had come about. One of the undercovers, a detective sergeant, had his previous criminal life maintained by SC&O10, with contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses with someone always briefed to answer correctly at the other end of them. He’d thus been approached by one Mark Ballard, who’d been a suspect in the funding of a couple of high-end robberies. The DS, now the first undercover in Operation Dante, had met with Ballard, who had offered the DS certain subcultural cues about the nature of which DI Quill had been strangely vague. That contact had been spun, by this incredibly small team, whose lack of official mission statement must mean they were something to do with intelligence, into Operation Dante.

  ‘OK, Lisa,’ she said, noting a new message on her own laptop. ‘I just got an email from Silver saying they’ve given the order to start moving in the cordon, putting all the expected details of a siege situation in place, so Ballard’s going to hear all the right things from the media.’

  ‘Noted,’ she said. The tone in her voice was not an invitation to conversation.

  ‘Why the stormtrooper thing, do you reckon?’ asked Kevin.

  Lacey knew stress affected different people in different ways, but she was now wondering what she’d done in a previous life to meet, at this point of sheer terror for her, someone who reacted to it by getting laid-back and chatty. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’re into Star Wars.’

  ‘I think it’s something you could sell to the media,’ said Kevin, ‘as a thing a group of experienced bank robbers might do. It sounds kind of smart, because we’ve all seen those guys who make their own stormtrooper outfits out and about, collecting for charity. They can just walk into a bank carrying guns and nobody blinks an eye.’

  ‘But . . . ?’ There was something about the sheer calmness of him now that was deliberate, wasn’t there?

  ‘But they’re also memorable,’ Kevin continued. ‘SCD7 – sorry, that’s the Serious and Organised Crime Command – will be able to fill in the CCTV trail of how they got here with witness testimony. Also, how many of those costumes exist? The hobbyist community and specialist shops would be able to trace all the buyers within, let’s say, two days.’

  Oh God. Oh God, who was he? ‘Well, we already know this lot are a bit shit, don’t we? They panicked and went into siege mode when—’

  He shook his head and sighed. ‘Don’t do that, Lacey. Don’t lie to me. You’re no good at it.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘They turned down my kind offer of a guided tour and folded at the slightest resistance from you. They could have used me to get at least a couple of specific items on their shopping list and got out before the first marked cars arrived. That’s what almost any gang would have done.’ Lacey felt a horrible tightness in her guts. She hoped he knew all this because he read a lot of true crime. ‘We think this lot are either being paid a great deal of money to take some jail time or they’re expecting to get out of here in some extraordinary way.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You realized I was a copper a few moments ago, but you didn’t call one of the stormtroopers over to blow my cover.’ Lacey felt her breathing get faster at the thought that just by sitting here she’d made a decision, a decision to let down the people who could hurt her mum and dad. She tried to keep her expression steady. ‘That’s a good sign. You probably haven’t been paid to take a fall.’ Lacey closed her eyes and shook her head. She wanted to scream. She was being crushed between enormous forces she hadn’t summoned. ‘So you’re doing this out of love – we get that.’ She was going to snarl at him that he had no idea when she felt his hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that he was offering her his phone. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘text your mum.’

  Lacey saw a text balloon already on the screen, just a ‘Hello?’ She recognized her mum’s number. ‘How—?’ she began.

  ‘She and your dad are heading for an undisclosed location, in the back of a heavily armoured police van,’ he said. ‘I think she could use some moral support.’

  Ballard watched as Tony and the team quickly shovelled enough of what remained of the wall out of the way to let him pass. Tony straightened, nodded to him. Go on, mate, crack a smile, while you still can. No? No.

  Ballard walked to the metal edge of the vault itself, took the chalk from his pocket and drew the shape of a door there. He stretched out an arm, felt a terrible dreamy need to close his eyes, as if an adult shouldn’t see things like this, and pushed his way through into what now felt to him like soft fronds of . . . Christmas. The inside of the wall of a bank vault smelt of Christmas. Perhaps that was just the associations in his head, ideas of plenty and panto scenes of Aladdin’s cave, when to the Sighted, well, who knew what extra dimensions such an experience held for them? That was all he had time to think before he was pushing his way out of the other side and calling for the others to follow. Ballard opened his eyes to see Tony coming through immediately, at a run. The other three took longer, and the look on their faces was deeply scared. They’d seen something that made them wonder about the fundamentals of the world in which they lived. Ballard would have lied to them, given them a cod-scientific explanation, but he wanted them to stay in awe of it. If he was doing this by mere gadget, their thoughts might have gone, then it must be the most valuable gadget in the world, and why were they bothering about a bank when he was right there and vulnerable, and they could raid him instead?

  Ballard took a look around. The interior of the space was lit by motion-sensor lights, which were now just coming on. Literally every alarm in the building would be silently blaring. The vault interior, as he’d known from pictures he’d bought from a source at the architect’s, resembled nothing more than a high-end self-storage facility, metal boxes on shelves, all requiring two keys. Inside each was a further locked casing that would slide out as a drawer. There were metal boxes with ladders leading to them, and a handful of metal boxes that could be walked into as small rooms. ‘Targets,’ he said. The team had each memorized two numbers, and had all seen the plans. They headed off towards their targets and Ballard followed. He’d left the biggest target for himself.

  Lacey looked up from the phone and rubbed the tears from her eyes. ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ she said.

  ‘We know,’ said Kevin, if that was his real name. ‘Your family are safe now. You can be too. We can keep people safe. I’m proof of that, OK? I’ve been half a dozen different people, all around the country, but I’m still here.’

  There was something incredibly reassuring about him, now he’d dropped the acting. It was like he’d s
een terrible things but was still hanging on, still a nice guy. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘We know who’s behind this. He’s in the building now. Once we’ve got him into an interview room, we need to be able to threaten him with your testimony on an honest basis, because—’ He was silent suddenly as one of the stormtroopers ran past, grabbed a desk, then ran back to add it to the barricade. ‘Because he might be able to tell if we’re lying.’

  ‘What?’

  Kevin waved that aside. ‘But we’re hoping this won’t come to court. We’re hoping to turn him, and if we can do that, then even if they could ever find you, you’d have nothing to fear from his organization.’

  Lacey had heard a tone of relief in her mum’s texts, that this was over. Even if her father was yelling and denying everything, like he so would, he’d still got into the back of that van. She looked up to where the stormtroopers were now lined up behind their barricade, aiming at where police would come crashing through the doors.

  The phone on one of the desks rang. ‘Right on time,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Is that a negotiator?’

  He just smiled in response, watching for what happened next. The leader of the stormtroopers had gone to the phone and was awkwardly looking between it and a CCTV camera.