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

“And whilst there, I became involved in a most peculiar and unsettling case which involved women of the streets – well, of the windows in fact – and an extremely unpleasant bordello. It ended tragically, I am afraid, with someone who I quite admired getting hurt. And I resolved, once that had happened—”

“… that you would never again become involved any case that had to do with that particular trade. Yes, Holmes-san, I can perfectly well understand that.”

Sherlock Holmes was not the least bit used to other people finishing his sentences for him. He blinked angrily, but then decided to hold his tongue until he’d heard what Lieutenant Minoshi had to say.

“The love hotels are not bordellos, Holmes-san. They are where couples, even married couples, go to find some privacy.”

Holmes’ face dropped. He’d not been expecting anything like this.

“Tokyo is one of the most crowded cities in the world,” Minoshi continued calmly. “Space is at a premium. Apartments, even family ones, are generally tiny. The majority of people live on top of each other like – how should I put this? – spoons in a cutlery drawer, and most walls are thin. So when a couple wish to spend a romantic evening together, undisturbed and without being overheard, they often prefer to come here.”

He could scarcely believe it. “Are you serious?”

“Why should I not be, Holmes-san? It is a curious cultural phenomenon, for sure, but you are in a city famous for such things.”

Which was certainly the core truth of the matter. Holmes had witnessed many odd and puzzling things since coming here. But, satisfied by what Minoshi had explained to him, he put all that to one side and focused on the details of this particular case, far more interested in it now its setting had been put into a proper context.

“So the young couple in question … they were married?”

A brief smile lit up Lieutenant Minoshi’s compact features. She was pleased that she had managed to change Sherlock Holmes’ mind, and yet she carefully stopped short of looking overly self-satisfied.

“No, they were engaged.” Her tone had become businesslike. “Yukio Tanda and Niko Furugima. They were due to be wed next month. Their families, as you can imagine, are distraught.”

“And they were found dead inside a locked room in one of those hotels? The door locked from the inside?”

“Yes.”

“The windows …?”

“Do not open. There are no inspection panels inside the room either. I checked that myself.”

“And the manner of their slaughter?”

“They were burnt to death.”

“Good Lord!” Holmes shuddered. But then he had a thought, remembering various items on the news that he had seen down the long decades. “It couldn’t have been self-inflicted, could it? Some manner of protest or suicide pact?”

Haruko Minoshi’s head shook, her dark eyes looking very stern behind their spectacles.

“That was one of my first suspicions. Self-immolation is more common in the East than in the West. I had the lab check for accelerants. They found precisely nothing.”

Holmes sipped at his tea, but he could barely taste it by this time. His mind was whirring furiously, but was not arriving at a single sensible conclusion.

“There is only one thing for it, then,” he finally announced. “I’m going to have to take a look myself.”

When they returned, the pair of uniformed policeman who’d accompanied them were waiting for them outside the dim lobby of a medium-sized hotel. There was no sign of anybody going in or out … no sign of anyone in this whole place, in fact.

There was lettering above the doorway that Holmes could not understand. And so the lieutenant explained to him that this establishment was called the ‘Purple Cloud’.

“You’ve sent all the staff home, I presume?” Holmes asked her as they walked on through.

“No, that is not the case,” Minoshi told him with the briefest of faint grimaces. “There are no staff, not in this hotel nor many like it.”

And for the second time in less than half an hour, Holmes’ expression slackened with astonishment.

“I mean, there are cleaners, of course,” Minoshi continued, producing a plastic swipe-card from her purse. “And people who replenish the mini-bars. They work surreptitiously and quickly while the rooms are not in use. But as for doormen, porters, bellhops, staff at the reception desk … we are a discreet people, Holmes-san, and are easily embarrassed.”

She went on to explain that to maintain discretion and avoid unnecessary awkwardness, hotels such as this one were completely automated.

“Everybody knows why couples come here. To have to check in at a desk, it would involve a quite humiliating loss of face. And so you simply pay by credit card …”

She pushed her swipe-card through a slot.

“… you are assigned a room for a few hours or a night, and you never have to look another human being in the eye, not even for the briefest second.”

A metal door swung open ahead of them, revealing a bare lobby with a set of elevators at the far end.

“Quite remarkable!” Holmes gasped. “I’ve never seen the like!”

“Exactly,” Minoshi nodded. “I believe that it is unique to this city.”

Holmes already knew how keen on automation the Japanese were, and how marvellously advanced were their new techniques. But even he had never suspected they would go as far as this.

Everything looked very clean and rather sterile in the small lobby around him. The walls were a bluish-grey, as was the stiff carpet underfoot. The air was cool and had a filtered smell. And since you were expected to pass through here quickly, there was nothing to give you pause, and not a single place to sit.

Except he noticed an additional detail straight away.

“There are cameras,” he pointed out.

As he watched, a small one in the ceiling turned to focus on him.

“For security, yes, Holmes-san. It is sometimes necessary.”

“There are actually personnel watching the guests, then. And that causes no embarrassment or ‘loss of face’?”

“It is observation from a remote distance, rather than direct personal contact, and the two are seen as separate things. I’m sure that you can fathom the psychology behind it.”

Sherlock nodded. “And where precisely do these cameras go?”

“To the central depot of a security firm not far from here. They keep an eye on several dozen hotels in this district.”

“And they keep recordings?”

“For twelve hours only, but I have already seized the relevant disks. There’s nothing on them, Holmes-san. I have double and then triple-checked.”

They rode a gently humming elevator up. And when they stepped out into the corridor on the third floor, the silence started pressing in around Holmes like some giant set of weights. He had been in thousands of hotels since leaving London – none of them had been as quiet as this.

“Cameras, again,” he observed, glancing up. “I’m hoping that there are not more of them inside the actual rooms?”

“No, but of course not.”

Lieutenant Minoshi led him to a door marked ‘3009’. She used her swipe-card again to gain entry and, as soon as the door swung open, the sheer awfulness of what had happened here became horribly evident. The first thing that battered at Holmes’ senses was the ghastly smell. There was the overpowering odour of a recent conflagration, quite bad enough in itself to make the muscles in your throat clench. But mingled in with that there was a nasty, waxy, sickly stench … the smell of burning human flesh.

The bed was blackened. So was the ceiling above it, and some of the carpet around it. The poor victims had most probably rolled across the bare floor in their final, agonising death throes. The remainder of the room was smeared with soot, and everything in here was glittering with moisture.