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

“We need a boat!” Holmes insisted.

Alden Greaves was looking more confounded with every second that passed, but he deferred to his companion and began to hunt for one.

And luck was on their side, at last. An old codger with a fishing rod was pulling up to the quay in a twelve-foot dinghy that was powered by an outboard motor. Greaves waved his badge at the fellow, shouting, and then commandeered the craft.

And before much longer, both detectives were headed out across the bay, going towards the centre of it.

Seawater sloshed hollowly against the thin sides of the dinghy. It was a genuine pea-souper out here; the lights of the receding city and the smaller lamps on the vaulting bridges were reduced to no more than a glow-worm’s muted brilliance. The world around them had become a ghostly after-image of its former self, and the sounds that reached their ears were dull and flattened ones.

They seemed to be utterly alone in the impenetrable gloom. Alden Greaves was trying to peer ahead, with no success.

“You can’t moor a ship out here,” he pointed out. “So is it on the move?”

Holmes glanced back in the direction of the mainland. And it was completely lost from view by this stage, not a single point of brightness showing, like a bleached grey curtain had dropped down across it.

“I’m assured it will be very soon,” he answered.

Then he suddenly became aware of a vibration that had started out of nowhere. It ran right up from the hull of the dinghy into the soles of his shoes. And it appeared to be coming from the waters of the bay itself.

Holmes and the lieutenant peered over the side. The waves had died away. The brine around them had become almost entirely flat. Except it looked like it was trembling slightly, at the same pitch as that strange vibration.

Holmes started to hear a peculiar noise, a bare few seconds after that. Terribly faint, initially. But it appeared to be … a throbbing of some kind … a queer, mechanical or possibly electric pulsing. The kind of sound that you’d expect to find emerging from a power station. There were none of those out in the middle of this bay.

Was it growing louder, or were they simply getting nearer to it?

Then he saw a light, and not like anything they’d left behind them. This was a peculiar greenish-yellow, and was pulsing too. And it was coming from beneath the water.

Alden Greaves let out an oath, but Holmes only frowned tightly, seeing he’d been right. Where else in this city could you hide a ship as large as the one that the dark-haired man had intimated? Why, it had to be the bay, of course!

The fog ahead of them had grown so dense that they could only make the glow out very dimly, and they could not even tell how far away it was.

“We need to get much closer!” Holmes demanded.

Greaves, who had been charged with handling the outboard, rapidly complied.

The great detective moved up to the front of the small dinghy. Either the pulsating light was already nearer than he’d thought, or else its source was very large. As he watched, it started to grow brighter. Then he spotted ripples spreading out from that direction, and he could see what the truth was.

The light wasn’t gaining in intensity. Whatever was producing it was pushing upwards to the surface.

There was an abrupt slapping and hissing sound, the noise of water being parted. For the briefest instant, Holmes could see that there was not one single greenish-yellow light, but thousands of them, closely knit. He had barely the time to hang onto that single image.

And then the lights all blurred. They shot upwards with incredible speed. And – between one heartbeat and the next – they’d vanished altogether.

The dinghy began to be rocked by a series of large bow-waves, caused by the disturbance to the surface of the bay. And the fog ahead was swirling too, disturbed in the same way.

“What the …?” blurted Alden Greaves

When Holmes looked back at the lieutenant, the poor chap’s mouth was hanging wide open and his features were utterly colourless and slack.

“What the …?” the man said again, in a whisper.

It seemed to be the only thing he could say, at that moment.

Holmes went back, reached past the dumbstruck fellow and switched off the outboard briefly.

Over the sound of the bow-waves, he could now hear splashing, and a man shouting for help.

“Joel McMartin, I presume,” he nodded.

“Someone dumped him out here?” Greaves managed to stutter.

“No, lieutenant. Someone liberated him. And we’d better go and fish him out, before he drowns.” Holmes listened again and then pointed. “Over there.”

Greaves started powering them in that direction.

“Faster, lieutenant,” Holmes insisted. “I’m sure our Mr McMartin will be very anxious to run this new story in his paper, once we’ve got him back to dry land. The only problem is …”

And Holmes smiled wryly.

“What sensible person would ever believe it? A clear example of a bad boy crying wolf, is it not? Ah, the irony is practically delicious.”

It was a room with no windows, and only one door in and out, which was steel reinforced and had been firmly locked.

An absolutely classic case , Holmes thought. How utterly perfect.

The Vanderbruck apartment stretched around him, its corridors aglow with tasteful opulence. In fact, ‘apartment’ was too small a word for the place. It took up the entire top two levels of a twelve-storey block on the Upper East Side, and was accessed by a private elevator, which was always guarded. There was a separate elevator for the staff and all deliveries, and that was guarded too. The Vanderbruck family had made its fortune long ago, from a combination of banking, investment and property development. As well as this place, there was a mansion in the Hamptons and a winter home in the Antilles. Holmes had done his research.

He could hear the faint murmur of traffic from Park Avenue, below them. It had been a while since he’d been in New York.

Holmes examined the heavy mahogany door. It had already been dusted for fingerprints, and he could not detect the slightest mark on its polished woodwork.

“You say the lock is electronic?” he asked his new associate, Detective Lieutenant Mary Ascento of the NYPD.

“That’s right. To get in you have to punch a code.” She indicated the keypad. “So any recent entries are recorded. And according to those, this door hasn’t been opened in the last thirty-six hours.”

Peter and Phyllis Vanderbruck – the owners of this place and the victims of the theft – gazed at Holmes unhappily, obviously wondering how he could help them. They were a gentle-looking couple in their mid-sixties, and had a look of deep dismay on both their faces.

Holmes looked away from them and gazed into the room in question. To say it was empty was to miss the point. The place looked hollowed out. Around its walls were ninety-seven settings which had, until today, housed one of the world’s finest collections of Fabergé eggs. But every single one was gone. The place looked like a candy store after a horde of kids had rampaged through it.

“Electronic surveillance?” Holmes inquired, looking around for a closed circuit camera.

“Not in here,” Peter Vanderbruck chimed in. “The elevators, yes. But they show only the usual people coming in and out.”

“And the key code is known to precisely whom?”

“Myself. My wife. Thomas Mason, who is in charge of security and has been with us for twenty years. And that is all.”

Holmes had already met with Mason, and the man had struck him as unanswerably trustworthy and reliable.

“And are there any other ways in from outside? A terrace, perhaps?”