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

But neither of those things were present in this hotel’s lobby.

Superintendent Hoek’s wife was, however

When she got up from the sofa she’d been seated on, it became obvious that she was waiting for him.

It turned out that her name was Gertrude. Her voice was as soft and refined as her features, and she was smartly dressed, with not the slightest hint of flashiness or poor taste. Holmes bowed to her politely, and they both sat down. Why exactly had she come here when her husband was in such a state?

“He’s getting worse,” she told him when he asked. “He’s getting violent and unmanageable, like all the rest.”

Her face was a mask of woe, her pale eyes glittering on the verge of tears, and yet she had the strength of will to keep herself from breaking down completely. When he’d first seen her with her stricken husband, it had been obvious that she adored him, and so Holmes could not even imagine quite how badly she was suffering inside.

In spite of which she was sitting up entirely straight with her palms folded in her lap. This was a woman of enormous dignity, and Holmes admired that greatly.

He couldn’t help but notice, though, she had a laptop by her side. And by the label fastened to its lid, it appeared to be her husband’s.

“I have no choice but to accept the fact,” she continued quietly, “that I’m never going to get Pieter back. The only course I can now take is help find out what happened to him. And so far as I can see, that means assisting you.”

“And I’m wonderfully grateful for that, dear lady,” the detective assured her.

“Pieter and I have been very close for all the years we have been married. His work apart, we’ve barely left each other’s side. We have the same interests and share the same tastes. I have always thought of us as soul-mates, and yet …”

At which point, she faltered, her head turning down.

Sherlock Holmes could guess what she was trying to say, and felt desperately sad for her. It was something he had come across a thousand times, a story of human weakness as old as the hills. And he struggled to think how he could make this easier for her, but came up with nothing.

Her face lifted again, stiffening with resolve.

“Soul-mates isn’t always good enough for men, now is it? When the flesh begins to falter, and when intimacy between a couple starts to wane? Pieter is a good man, sir, please be assured of that. He is kind and generous and brave. But even good men fall foul of temptation sometimes. And he …”

At which point, her attempts to remain calm finally crumbled and she looked away from him, tears streaming down her face.

Holmes was on his feet in an instant, grasping her hand tenderly with one of his, offering her his kerchief with the other.

“Dear lady,” he said softly, so as not to attract any attention to her. “For heaven’s sake, do not distress yourself so.”

She mopped at her eyes, then gave her head a brisk, stiff shake.

“I’m all right, Mr Holmes,” she told him. And indeed she was already getting herself back under control. “I simply never thought I’d go through stressful times like these.”

Holmes told her that he understood.

She flicked her gaze towards the laptop.

“Is not that where men go, these days, when they seek to stray? I couldn’t bear to look at it myself.”

“And there is no reason why you ever should. Many thanks indeed for bringing it to me. You are a fine, strong woman.”

“I’m an ageing woman, Mr Holmes,” she replied, standing up. “But if there’s one more thing I need to do before I reach the end, it is to get an understanding of all this. Pieter might well have succumbed to temptation, but it must have been a mortal and a fleeting thing, and he did not deserve what happened to him.”

She looked at him directly in the eye before departing.

“Promise me you’ll find who did this, Sherlock Holmes.”

A man is found in a catatonic state, remains in that state for a few days and then begins to become increasingly fractious and violent? Holmes knew what that sounded like. It sounded remarkably like drug addiction, and the horrible effects of being deprived of such substances. Yet no narcotics had been found in any of the victims.

In his room, he set the laptop down upon his writing desk, which was before the window. He paused a moment before getting seated. The full blood moon could be seen clearly through the windowpane. It struck him again as being like some watching eye, and yet he knew that that was merely his imagination.

Powering the laptop up, he started going through Hoek’s temporary files until he found the kind he wanted. Yes, poor Pieter Hoek had visited a few sites of quite dubious repute. But there was nothing remarkable – far from it – about any of them.

Then he came to a page called ‘Vermillion Moon’.

And it contained only that. Only a picture of the same moon that was staring at him through the window, but a great deal redder. Its background was entirely blank and white. There were no pornographic images, no promises of risqué pleasures. Nothing in the slightest, apart from that single image.

Holmes moved the cursor to it, clicked, then double-clicked, then did the same thing with the right-hand button on the mouse. And nothing happened.

Curious. He’d supposed that these actions would allow him to ‘enter’. But there was no indication how that might be done.

And then he had a thought.

He forgot the mouse altogether, reaching carefully out and touching the red moon with the tip of his long index finger.

A sudden flash went through his head, a bright red one. His body seemed to freeze in place. Next second, however, he got the distinct impression he was floating in a lightless void. Except a voice was speaking to him, a female one that had a languid, dulcet air about it.

“What are you doing here?” it asked him. “You’re not interested in the pleasures that I have to offer.”

It seemed to pause for thought, after which its tone became a little sharper.

“I know who you are! You’re that Sherlock Holmes! You’re trying to find me, aren’t you?”

And it laughed out loud.

“You can hunt for my house all you like! You’ll never, ever track me down!”

The next instant, Holmes was back in his hotel room.

The great detective wobbled slightly and then shook his head to clear it. My word, what a curious experience, somewhat reminiscent of the occasion when he had confronted that curious entity which called itself the ‘Other’.

His hand had fallen from the laptop screen by this time, so he put his finger back where it had been, to no result.

The connection had been broken, and deliberately too – that much was obvious. But now he knew how Pieter Hoek and all the rest had been seduced. If you were interested in the ‘pleasures’ offered and you touched that image of the moon, the voice had to tell you where you ought to go to get them. It had not sounded in the tiniest bit mechanical. But on the other hand, neither had it sounded one hundred percent human.

‘House,’ it had said. ‘You can hunt for my house all you like.’ And had it meant a house of ill-repute, or was it being far more literal. Why not ‘place’, or even ‘home’?

Holmes stood up again and stared across Amsterdam’s roofs. There was a great flat tide of them stretching away in every direction he could see. And under merely one of them was something supernatural and deadly, the strange creature he was looking for. But which one was it?

The owner of the voice had sounded utterly assured, absolutely certain it would never be discovered. Which most likely meant the place in question was a perfectly ordinary residence, with no distinguishing features whatsoever … and what use to him was that?