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

It is too late to stop me, sir. And please do not feel sad for me, since it’s the lonely and bereft who ought to be most pitied and – once that this is done – I might become a lot of things, but thankfully not that.

But what did she mean by this? What did she plan to do?

Holmes looked up, and saw there was another laptop – with a floral cover this time – at a small desk in the corner of the room. Its screensaver was busily at work, but when Holmes touched the mouse, the site came up that Gertrude had been looking at.

There was simply a symbol of a purple crescent moon, no other features at all save for two words at the top: ‘For women.’

All the breath went out of Holmes’ lungs. How had she even known? Either she had not been altogether honest with him, and had looked at Pieter’s laptop after all. Or else … They had been married many years, hadn’t they? Whole decades, in fact. And so … perhaps simply the instincts of a loving and devoted wife?

Blinking, Holmes crossed over very slowly to the window and peered out at the surrounding houses. Their outlines began swimming as he stared at them, and he took in the fact that his own gaze was filling up with tears. An unshakable pall of misery was settling over him, filling him and penetrating him right to the very deepest core.

He decided – in that dull, extended moment – that he did not wish to remain in this city after all. He had best be on the move again.

But where?

Yes, indeed, he did watch modern movies.

And now it appeared that he had wandered into one, the movie in question being Blade Runner , which was what the Shinjuku district of central Tokyo most closely resembled.

They were walking down its central byway, Yasukuni Dori, ‘dori’ meaning ‘avenue.’ There were four of them in total: Holmes himself, two uniformed policemen, and the plainclothes detective who was in charge of the case. The sidewalks here were crowded to overflowing, but the throng parted quickly for the little group and let it pass.

Holmes was uncomfortably aware of people gawping at him. He had been in the Far East a good number of times before, but here in Japan people were more technically advanced than in much of the rest of the region. They were constantly on the internet. They kept up with the world’s news and its daily gossip. And so it was that he was being recognised, perhaps a dozen times a minute. Mouths dropped open. Eyes went wide. Every few seconds, he would see a camera flash.

Sherlock Holmes himself was far more interested in his surroundings. He had never seen the like of this beyond the curious imaginings of Mr Ridley Scott. Everywhere he looked, above street level, he could see gigantic moving electronic screens. And on those screens was advertising, much of it of an unfathomable nature. Beautiful young oriental women beamed at him and batted their eyelashes. Scenes of tropic paradises would appear for a few seconds, but then fade away again. Japanese lettering, called ‘kanji’, would appear in bright primary colours. Then an image of a mobile phone or a camera would replace them.

But the genuinely remarkable thing was that the vast majority of the people around him – and they were mostly young folk – were ignoring all of that. They had apparently become accustomed to it many years ago, and it was no more interesting to them than a single pine tree might be in an entire forest of them. That was the problem with advertising, wasn’t it? It was so ubiquitous that it got ignored in the end.

Yasukuni Dori was not simply a street of giant screens, though. It was a street of restaurants as well, of cafés, bars, snack joints and clubs. It was one of the nightlife centres, obviously, of this great city. And on a weekend evening such as this, the place was packed.

But gradually the crowds began dropping away behind him, and the great detective and his three companions found themselves on quieter streets. Startlingly quiet, in fact. When they left the main drag and progressed down a far narrower avenue, there were no other pedestrians in the slightest to be seen.

Which was puzzling in itself, since this appeared to be a hotel district. In every direction that he glanced, Holmes could make out modern buildings of that nature, each of them several storeys tall. Except that he could make out not a single doorman or a porter, nor a single clerk behind a desk. The entranceways to these establishments … they were peculiarly dimly lit, he noted.

As for the lighting on the upper storeys? It was there when he stared hard, but was remarkably diminished. All the windows around here seemed to be made of darkly tinted glass. Holmes couldn’t understand it.

Lieutenant Minoshi noticed where the great detective’s gaze was going and said, “These aren’t ordinary hotels, Holmes-san. These are Tokyo’s famous ‘love hotels’.”

Which got a startling reaction from the Englishman. His eyeballs rolled back in their sockets and he emitted a loud, piercing groan. One hand went to his forehead, clutching at it. He looked dazed for a few seconds, like he’d suffered a blow to the skull. But then finally, his eyes cleared and he shook his head, and fiercely too.

“Not again!” he uttered, very loudly. “No, not this again! I’m sorry, lieutenant, but I will not take this case!”

And turning smartly on his heel, he marched away, leaving the scene of the recent crime to languish in oblivion behind him.

He was almost back to Yasukuni Dori when a hand grabbed at his sleeve. And he was already in such a foul, unhappy state of mind that being manhandled in such a way provoked him. His temper boiled over and he whirled around, prepared to give the culprit a tongue-lashing. Except that it was Lieutenant Minoshi who had done that thing. And when he looked at the expression on her tiny face, his anger dissolved and his mood calmed down.

“Holmes-san,” she said, “please don’t walk away. I think you’ve got this wrong. The love hotels are not what you’d suppose. Let me explain them to you.”

And it wasn’t just her round face that was tiny. Detective Lieutenant Haruko Minoshi barely stood a complete five feet tall. Her limbs were as thin as breadsticks and she had the body of a child. She had put Holmes in mind – when he had first been introduced to her – of some rather feeble little bird.

She was dressed in a very smart – designer, perhaps – dark blue suit, its jacket partly covering a white silk blouse. The shoes she wore were flat ones, and she had black-rimmed spectacles perched on the bridge of her small nose. Her hair was tied up in a bun, and she spoke perfect English, with only a mild – and rather pleasant – accent. Holmes already knew that she had lived in Cambridge for a while, where she’d acquired a BA and Masters.

She was not even in her thirties yet, but had already risen to an elevated rank. How a figure such as her achieved that in a patriarchal country like Japan still was, Holmes wasn’t sure. But he decided that it might be worth his while to hear her out.

They wound up at a little place she knew, a teahouse you could only get to down a narrow alley. It had bamboo walls, and low tables with cushions round them. Holmes and Haruko Minoshi squatted down facing each other while a steaming pot of greenish tea was brought.

“Would you like some sushi with this,” the lieutenant enquired, “or sashimi?”

“Raw fish? How disgusting! Good God, no!”

And then the great detective tented his fingers underneath his chin.

“Allow me to explain my position to you, lieutenant. I was recently in Amsterdam.”

Minoshi nodded.