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

Sherlock Holmes put his elbows on the desk between them, and rested his chin on both his knuckles.

“When I first saw you, I observed that you were a good Christian man. So tell me, what do you suppose is the good, Christian thing to do?”

By crack of dawn, Pang had all his tugboats far out in the harbour. He and the detective stood together on the quayside, watching as they worked. They were dropping large tangles of debris into the grey water – tangled girders, rusted frames and even some large metal shipping crates. They were depositing them all in the same spot, far away from the route that the Goliath used, and buoys were being moored in place to warn off other shipping.

“Do you think he’ll recognise it as a brand new dwelling place?” Pang asked.

“He has survived this long, so he is not without a crude kind of intelligence,” Holmes answered.

“And you think that this will stop the attacks?”

“There’s no guarantee, but it ought to satisfy him.” Holmes drew in a long, deep breath of sea air. “It is our castle. It is where the heart is. Every creature needs a home, and is quite miserable without one.”

He had not intended them to – had only meant them as a casual remark – but the words he had just spoken, they resounded through the great detective’s thoughts. His own words seemed to actually wound him.

He looked around at the foreign skyline, the clustered junks, the Chinese script on banners above the restaurant, and it struck him forcefully that he himself was very far from home.

And since he considered his true home to be not merely a city but a bygone age, he realised that he always would be.

“Bees, you say?” Sherlock Holmes could scarcely mask the plain exasperation in his tone. “I am a consulting detective, sir, not pest control.”

His host – ex-Colonel Harris Masterton – went flushed about the cheeks at that, and looked unsure how to reply. So Holmes took in his new surroundings.

The Gold Valley Safari Lodge was in the deepest heart of Kenya. There were no towns of any size around here for at least a hundred miles. Acres of African bush spread out around him for as far as the eye could see – which was not too far, admittedly, because it was already night.

In the absence of any light-pollution, the sky was a jewel-studded, velvet canopy above him. Holmes could make out several major constellations, although they were not in their usual places. Indeed, the moon itself – newly risen – looked like it was lying on its side, resembling a pale and slightly pinkish gondola adrift on a sea of glittering blackness.

Holmes had never been in this part of the world before.

Somewhere off in the far distance, he could hear a lion roar. And it set the fine hairs on his neck prickling gently.

He and Masterton were sitting across from each other at a glass-topped table on the broad veranda of the lodge. The space around them was constructed of hardwood and bamboo, and the same thing went for the whole building. Holmes had come here, landing at Nairobi and then travelling the remainder of the journey in a considerably smaller plane, after numerous pleas for help, each of them promising an excellent fee. The details of the case had not been properly spelled out but, living for as long as he had done, Holmes was troubled by a constant need for money, and could not afford to think of turning down the fine sum that was being offered.

Bees, though? What was he supposed to prove … that they were being motivated by a lust for making honey?

Harris Masterton – in his sixties, burly, florid-faced and with a reddened nose – cleared his throat and then attempted to explain things better.

“It’s the way that they’re behaving, Mr Holmes. They only go for hunters.”

And seeing as he had come so far to be here, Holmes took it on himself to listen patiently while his new host outlined the situation.

The Gold Valley Lodge had been in business since the 1930s. Holmes had already been inside the lobby and the sitting room, and seen the framed photographs there. One was of Ernest Hemingway. Another was of the abdicated King and Wallis Simpson. And there were not merely photographs, but mounted heads of every large wild animal that this continent had to offer. The place had been a bona fide hunting lodge in earlier stages of its incarnation.

“Very little call for that, these days,” Masterton grumbled. “Most of the people that we get these days, they want to shoot wild animals, for sure. But only with a camera.”

Holmes was glad to hear that. He could not see any slightest logic in the act of ending some poor creature’s life purely for the sake of the act, the thrill of it. In fact, it struck him as barbaric.

“But you do still get the occasional enthusiast?” he hazarded.

And Masterton brightened slightly. “Yes, indeed! Rich men, mostly. You’d be surprised what some of them are willing to pay for the chance of bagging just a common buffalo.”

“A lot of rich men tend to be quite ruthless types,” Holmes pointed out, “more in touch than most with their animal instincts.”

Which took Masterton slightly aback. He absorbed what the detective had said, and then peered at Holmes slantwise, perhaps beginning to suspect that he was dealing with some kind of anarchist.

“If you say so. But the fact is, since the end of last year, that side of the business has gone totally pear-shaped. And the reason is the bees. They’ve begun attacking every hunter we try to take out.”

There had been four of them so far. A Cypriot billionaire. A Saudi oil-sheik. The owner of a large American chain of discount stores. And a lord of Sherlock Holmes’ own realm, a familiar figure to the readers of the society pages. Holmes had come across that item in the news. The unfortunate fellow had been stung halfway to death and was, apparently, still recovering.

He found his interest rising gradually as Masterton outlined the rest of the details.

“Am I to understand they leave the others completely alone?”

“The snappers and the gawpers? Yes, exactly. No least harm has come to anyone we’ve taken out into the bush, except the ones with rifles.”

Holmes turned that piece of information over very solemnly. He tried to examine it from whatever angle that he could, but every single time he found himself being forced back to the same conclusion. And it became plain to his way of thinking that the adage he had always worked by remained the correct one: ‘When you have eliminated all that is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

Which meant that …?

Masterton was staring at him fixedly, obviously wondering what he was taking such a long time over.

So Sherlock Holmes looked up at him and smiled a thin, dry smile.

“Then it’s obvious that these bees of yours … they are under the control of some form of intelligence.”

There were few guests at the lodge at this time of the year. They were entering the rainy season, which meant the herd animals no longer congregated round the waterholes, and so the predators that hunted them were more widely dispersed and much harder to find.

Holmes was given the most comfortable room. There was a huge soft bed with a mosquito net, a bamboo headboard, a dresser and a nightstand of the same material, and even a drinks cabinet, from which the great detective took a shot of rum before retiring. It still took him a good long while to fall asleep. What he’d told Masterton – that strange conclusion he had reached – played heavily on his mind. There was no other explanation that made any sense, and he was quite certain of that. But how could what he’d arrived at be true?