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

Besides which he had already concluded there was nothing more that he could learn by stopping here.

The offices of the International Inquisitor were located on O’Farrell Street where it curved up towards Geary. And were remarkably small, given the success of the paper. There was McMartin’s own cramped office, another one which dealt with mail, several cubby-holes for those members of staff who worked on advertising and subscriptions. The rest of the reporters had to make do with a single, rather cluttered newsroom.

Glancing around McMartin’s office, Holmes could see how accurate his wife’s description of the man had been. This was not the workplace of a dilettante. The desk was strewn with photographs and jotted notes, the in-tray crammed. Holmes picked through as much of it as he was able, but could find no commonality in anything he saw.

Then – Alden Greaves assisting – he gathered the entire staff together to discuss recent events. When they were told their boss was missing, they looked saddened to the very last. Which told Holmes that the man had been a good employer.

“According to his wife, he had become obsessed with something. I’d suggest a recent story. Did he tell any of you what it was?”

Faces went blank and heads were shaken. Which exasperated the detective.

“Joel was the kind who always kept his cards close to his chest,” a fellow in his mid-thirties with curly reddish hair explained. “He never discussed stuff like that till he was sure that he had all the facts.”

“And he kept all the best stories to himself,” a woman of roughly the same age added. Except she said it without any hint of rancour. McMartin had definitely been popular with his staff.

But ‘facts’? ‘Best’? Their choice of words astonished Holmes. The Inquisitor churned out piffle, and these people – who were in no way stupid – had to understand that. Maybe they could only maintain any sense of worth by telling themselves the work they did was real.

He was reduced, in the end, to asking for back copies of the paper. Then he shut himself in McMartin’s office and studied them assiduously, Greaves watching across his shoulder.

“Uh … what exactly are we looking for, sir?” the lieutenant ventured.

“Ask yourself this question,” Holmes responded, without looking up. “A man disappearing without any explanation, that is one thing, yes. But why a fire? McMartin did not smoke – there are no ashtrays in his house. As for some kind of decorative candle? Look at this office, lieutenant. It is quite Spartan and businesslike.

“No,” the great detective continued, “the blaze was started quite deliberately by the same people who abducted the man. Their sole purpose in doing so had to be to cover something up. To destroy evidence.”

“But what?” a startled Greaves demanded.

Holmes rattled the newssheet he was poring through.

“Do you suppose I’m reading this bilge for my health?”

He went on at his appointed task, although with no great sense of satisfaction. ‘MONSTER SEEN OFF SAN DIEGO COASTLINE’, read one headline. ‘SEXUALLY ABUSED BY GHOSTS’, another. There were blurry photographs of UFOs. Outings of several celebrities the Inquisitor claimed were gay. Stories about cultists who indulged in orgies, and of B-list movie stars who did the same.

‘THE MAN WHOSE ARM GREW BACK.’

‘MY BABY DAUGHTER IS A BRIDE OF SATAN.’

There was even an accompanying photograph of the unfortunate child, with airbrushed carmine eyes.

Sherlock sighed despondently. He supposed it was the same in any epoch mankind had inhabited, but why were people even vaguely interested in dismal fantasies like this?

He went from the front page to the back one of every single edition he’d been handed, without finding anything that aroused his interest the tiniest. The answer had to be that it was something Joel McMartin had been working on, but which had not seen a single word in print as yet.

He rummaged through the man’s desk drawers, unfortunately with the same lack of success.

But then he stopped. Something that he’d recently been told came back to him. ‘Always kept his cards close to his chest,’ a staffer had explained. Which meant McMartin was a secretive man by nature. And people who were that way … they had hiding places.

There were several of the paper’s most strident front pages, framed in glass and hanging right here on the back wall of this office. Holmes stood up and went across to them. And when he moved the second one aside, he found a safe.

“We can get a locksmith in,” Lieutenant Greaves suggested.

“There’s no need for that,” Holmes informed the man. “If I could have absolute silence?”

Then he pressed one ear against the metal door, and began turning the dial slowly.

It was an agonising and impatient wait, especially for Alden Greaves. But they were back on Market Street again as dusk began to set in. Most of the shoppers had departed, and the avenue was far less busy than it had been. And, as the sky above them started to take on deepening shades of gloom, the mist began to reappear, drifting in from the direction of the bay. Indeed, as the last glimmers of light flickered out on the horizon, it showed every sign of thickening into a full-blown fog.

Holmes and his companion consulted the photograph they had recovered from the safe, for possibly the hundredth time.

“You’re sure that you don’t recognise this alleyway?” the great detective asked.

The sole response that Greaves could give him was a shrug.

“It could be any of a hundred.”

It was only by means of the accompanying letter that they’d known that it was here on this particular byway.

“And there’s no guarantee,” Holmes pointed out, “that the same venue is used each time.”

“No guarantee, either, that this photo isn’t fake.”

But that notion had already occurred to Sherlock Holmes and, after examining it from every reasonable angle, he’d decided to discard it. There was too much that was deeply troubling about this case – too many dead bodies and missing ones – for this to simply be a hoax. He peered warily through the haze-filled gloom.

“Either way, we have to – how do you chaps put it? – check it out. And I suggest that we split up, and keep in contact by means of our mobile phones. Which direction would you like to go, lieutenant? Left or right?”

“I’ll take right,” the police lieutenant said. “You’re new here, and the Tenderloin can be a pretty scary place past nightfall.”

“Nonsense,” Holmes smiled tightly. “I have been in this world far longer than you, lieutenant, and survived much worse.”

And, before the fellow had the time to stop him, he had headed off in the direction of Tenth Street.

The further along Market he progressed, then the seedier his surroundings became. There were various establishments he’d come across in other parts of the United States, there to provide men with the realisation of their basest fantasies. And there were ugly-looking characters hanging around in darkened doorways. The great detective could feel hostile gazes battening on him as he went along. And he was carrying no gun this evening.

But what he’d told Alden Greaves was true. If he could survive a one-way trip down the Reichenbach Falls, then he could deal with practically anything. Additionally, in the course of his extraordinarily long life, he had picked up many marvellous new talents. That included learning martial arts from Shaolin monks in the Far East.

And yet the most important thing, he understood, was bearing. It was how you held yourself, how you projected your own image to those looking at you. Show no tiniest hint of fear and only a madman would approach you. So he progressed through the Tenderloin with his head held high and his gait steady, just like he was on a brisk and pleasant evening stroll through Regent’s Park.