Tony Richards - The Astonishing Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-First Century

He was on Jarvistown’s main street. There were the usual shops, but few of them were designed for tourists, since they rarely ventured this far in. Holmes’ gaze went towards the seaward side of town. There was another main drag off in that direction – he already knew – that was almost wholly occupied by bars and restaurants and souvenir shops. It was there that the visitors to this isle gathered, those that were in town at all. Many of the big hotels – the Neptune and the Regency included – were half a mile or more outside it.

Holmes hovered thoughtfully for a brief instant. Then he swung around on his heels and began walking away purposefully, forcing his companion to hurry to keep up.

“Mr Holmes,” poor Blessed Williams protested, “you are going in the wrong direction.”

But the great detective shook his head.

“No, sir. I most certainly am not.”

He was heading north. Away from the seafront, into the narrower streets behind the main one, where the majority of this island’s locals dwelt. Captain Williams strode along beside him with a puzzled air, but he had the sense to hold his tongue.

The buildings around them became progressively smaller, older, slightly shabbier. But the two men were, by no stretch of the imagination, entering a shantytown. Santa Augustina had done very well for itself from its tourist trade. Holmes doubted there were many people around here who were unemployed or poverty stricken.

There were gaily-coloured curtains at the windows. Lunches being cooked in several of the houses that he passed. Little cars and mopeds parked beside the kerbs. And some of the homes had wooden balconies – there were grandmothers sitting on them, or healthy-looking children leaning out across the railings. Several of them waved down to Holmes as he walked by.

A cheerful and contented place, then. He was pleased to see it.

But was rather less delighted to see something else.

Next to a couple of the porches that he passed, a small bowl of assorted fruits had been left out in the open air. Why leave good food to spoil that way? And in one case, there was a small candle burning at the centre of the curious fruit salad.

Symbols had been chalked beside the doors of other houses. They were faded with age, so that only an extremely sharp gaze would have picked them out in the first place. But they were curious representations, almost like the geometric faces that you saw on ancient masks.

In a couple of cases, too, a bunch of feathers – cockerel feathers – hung suspended from a length of twine above a hearth. Holmes’ gaze darted, very briefly, to the single one in Williams’ hat.

He was done exploring in a few more minutes.

“What exactly were you looking for?” his tall companion asked.

“Nothing in particular.” Holmes favoured the man with a tightly compressed grin. “I was simply trying to establish what kind of place this really is. And now I think I know.”

It was two hours later on that afternoon, and Holmes – to the naked eye at least – was doing absolutely nothing. He was seated by a glass-topped table on the poolside terrace of his own hotel, the Carib Royal, gazing out towards the shoreline and the sea beyond. A pina colada sat by his right elbow, brought to him by a friendly member of the hotel’s staff.

There was no need for any hat, since a huge blue and white parasol was spread out to its full extent above him. And he wore no sunglasses, since he disliked the way that they distorted one’s vision. But, just like Captain Williams, he’d refused to relax his standards of attire too much. He was wearing proper shoes and socks, lightweight linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt.

Which was more than you could say for any of the holidaymakers round him. It was one of those changes in attitude that – despite the decades that he’d lived through since he’d left the Victorian Age behind – he could never quite get used to. He could see the sense of it while swimming, yes. Those old-style bathing costumes of his day were utterly impractical, for sure.

But the people around him – and there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them – went practically naked nearly all the time. There was no topless bathing here, for it was not allowed. But some of the men nearby wore skin-tight briefs and nothing more. And some of the younger women were clad in costumes that amounted to very little more than postage stamps, fastened with thin twine.

That latter fact left Holmes feeling extremely disturbed … and strangely fascinated.

Many of these folk were supine. They were lying on recliners, either around the pool or out in long rows on the white sands of the beach, their bare skin gleaming with oils and unguents, their eyes closed and their bodies utterly relaxed. But others – and not only the children – were at play. Fully-grown adults, in fact, were playing!

Every time he saw it, it astonished him. But they had beach balls, rubber rafts and Frisbees and badminton rackets. And were splashing in the surf or jumping down into the pool behind him, shouting and laughing like overly excited toddlers.

Would the Empire have ever been created at all if the adults of his day had behaved in this fashion? Would there even have been an Industrial Revolution, or any real progress to speak of?

But the more that he watched these cavorting people, then the more Holmes thought he understood their motivation. He had been to cities like New York, and knew how hard their regular and daily lives were. For most of fifty weeks of every year, these folk arrived in their workplaces quite early, laboured until early evening at the very least, and often later. And they took work home. Or else they had some menial job they hated, and they couldn’t wait to be away from it.

But for these two weeks of every year, they could escape from that routine. Yes, they could stop being responsible and put aside their sense of duty. And revert … the more Holmes turned the idea over, then the more it fascinated him … they could revert to being like carefree infants.

There was practically a reference that was Biblical here. For two weeks of the year, these happy souls could strip off their clothes and, in a sense, return to Eden. When he’d first thought of this place as Paradise, he’d been more accurate than he had guessed.

He could only glean so much, though, from observing at a distance. A true investigator ought to get in closer. And so Holmes downed the final dregs of his pale yellow cocktail, then got up casually and started wandering through the more crowded areas of the poolside terrace. He had the ability, while doing things like this, of making himself seem smaller, less significant, so that he could get up close to people without them genuinely noticing him. And so he passed among the gleaming bodies like some pallid ghost.

Many of these sunbathers were married couples, some of them with progeny in tow. But Blessed Williams had been right – others were single, and there were romances springing up between them. Most of those were in their early stages, merely defined by bright chatter and a great deal of eye contact. But he passed a man and woman who were sharing the same sun-bed and were wrapped around each other.

That apart, contentment was the feeling that he most got from his fellow guests.

“I’ve been coming back here every year for twelve years now,” he heard one woman with a strong Chicago accent tell her neighbour.

And he couldn’t blame her. What could match this, if you wanted rest and a romantic setting?

But, just like in the Bible, even Paradise came to an end. When he wandered back into the plush, enormous hotel lobby, a party of several dozen was about to leave. A coach was sitting in the courtyard, waiting to ferry them back to the airport. Their suitcases were packed. And they were fully dressed again.