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

“Yes, of course.”

Holmes followed the couple through the hushed, echoing corridors until they reached a set of French windows that led out into the sunlight. There was a great billow of greenery off in one direction – Central Park, the baroque outline of the Sherry Netherland in another, followed, in the background, by the high, rearing shapes of far more famous structures still. However much Holmes missed London, he was forced to admit that New York was a truly splendid city.

The terrace was large enough to play a game of tennis on and still have room for the spectators. The great detective paced the length of it, glancing over the parapet occasionally and inspecting the contours of the building’s roof. There was no sign of anything out of place. Additionally, there were little laser beam projectors set about the edges of this area. Which, when he inquired, were switched on at night, precisely when this theft had taken place. If the beams were broken, an alarm went off. And so the thief had most probably not gained entry by means of this terrace.

He wandered back to Mary Ascento and then drew her to one side.

“Any ideas, sir?” she asked him quietly. She was short but pugnacious-looking, in her late thirties with dyed blonde hair, an upturned nose, and thick dark eyebrows.

“There’s no need to call me ‘sir’. And ideas are generated by facts and evidence, and there are none of those. The eggs are gone … that is the only thing we genuinely know. How they were reached, how they were removed? There’s not the slightest way of telling.”

The lieutenant grunted. “So where do we go from here?”

“You have contacts in the underworld, surely? The sudden appearance on the black market of almost a hundred Fabergé eggs will certainly excite some comment. At the moment, I would say that that is your best hope.”

“If you don’t mind me remarking,” Mary came back at him, “I was hoping for a little more than that from someone with your reputation.”

Holmes stared down pensively at his shoes for several moments, and then shrugged and tried to force a smile.

“I know how you feel,” he told the woman. “Indeed, so was I.”

Holmes tried not to let it bother him too much. There had been cases in the past which had appeared to be indecipherable at first, and he had always come up with an explanation. He took a long walk through the park to clear his head, had an early supper at a steak house on 58th, then decided to take in a show. Theatre had certainly come on a lot since his day, with its tricks of lightning and mutating stages and the acrobatic skills of its performers. But he couldn’t keep his mind on it, and left before the end.

His head was down as he trudged back to his hotel.

Not a clue. He had found not a single shred of evidence inside the Vanderbruck apartment; not a stain, nor a hair, nor even an awkward sideways glance from any of the household staff. And Mary Ascento had been correct about his reputation. He had come to think of himself in the same way as the general public did, as something of a clue magnet. He only had to stand there, usually, and evidence came rushing up to greet him. But in this case, there had been none.

Which led him to wondering. What manner of thief, exactly, got into an apartment like that and out again without leaving the slightest trace that he had ever been there?

The more he turned it over, then the more he saw it had to be an inside job. But in which case, done by the hand of whom?

He didn’t watch his TV that night, and slept fitfully. And was woken, at one-thirty in the morning, by the telephone ringing by his bedside.

It was Lieutenant Mary Ascento once again.

There were a dozen squad cars in attendance when his cab pulled up. The sidewalk and store windows of 47th Street were awash with flashing red. Mary spotted him, came towards him through a sea of dark blue uniforms, and led the way into the establishment in question.

Willem’s was one of the largest diamond traders on an entire block of them. There was the kind of security that you would normally expect in such a place – heavy grilles and cameras and alarms. And all the merchandise was tucked away into a safe with a timed lock when there was no one present. But it was not the ordinary stones that the thief had been after. Mary led Holmes into a small vault tucked away at the rear. At the centre was a raised plinth. And on the plinth there had been, until very recently, four large blue diamonds called the Capetown Sisters.

They were, naturally, no longer there, although the glass case covering them was still in place.

“An alarm’s supposed to go off when you lift it,” Mary pointed out. “It didn’t. And we checked it, and the thing does work. There’s no one tampering with the electronics here.”

Then she drew Holmes’ attention to a camera pointed at the plinth.

“It’s remote. A security guard in another building was watching this vault the entire time. One moment, the jewels were there. And the next, they were gone.”

“Security guards can be notoriously lax,” Holmes commented. “He was doubtlessly engrossed in some magazine. Or he might have even been visiting the bathroom.”

But then he stared around. The vault’s door was six-inch thick titanium steel, and on a timer too. And when he pushed down through his shoes against the vinyl-looking floor …

“Pressure pads,” Mary confirmed. “You can’t get in or out of this room, or move anything, without bells ringing.”

“And yet they did not,” Holmes mused.

Forensics people had begun working around them, dusting for prints and vacuuming for DNA. But Sherlock Holmes was willing to bet they would find nothing.

Perhaps the very lack of clues was the real evidence here? It was an approach to crime he’d never adopted before.

But the more he thought about it, then the more he saw that it was worth considering.

He asked to see the video recording from the camera, naturally. He and Mary watched it in stunned silence. One moment, the four diamonds were there. And the next they weren’t, with nothing intervening.

It wasn’t even tape. It was an electronic record.

“We’ll certainly get it checked and see if it’s been tampered with,” Mary assured him.

But – once again – he was convinced they would find nothing. Holmes curled an index finger, pressed it to his chin. And kept it there a good long while.

“Something coming to you?” Mary asked him, her thick eyebrows lifting.

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Holmes grinned back at her awkwardly.

But he had lived by one simple adage the entire time he had worked as a consulting detective. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

It was impossible for any man to get inside here without setting off the numerous alarms. It was impossible for any man to steal the diamonds without the event being recorded by this camera.

And so …

That was when he saw that he was going at this whole case from entirely the wrong angle, and he almost cursed himself.

Holmes didn’t sleep for the remainder of the night. There was an internet facility in his room and – much though he loathed the damned fiddly thing – he made thorough use of it, researching deeply into a good number of subjects. He had all the information that he needed by seven in the morning, and put a call through to Lieutenant Ascento, who was still awake as well and sounded rather cranky.

“I need you to arrange something for me,” he informed her.

“Okay. Name it.”

“I believe it’s called colloquially ‘the Met’. Your Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art? It has a special exhibition showing at the moment.”