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

Huddled in the doorways of the strip joints and the topless bars were small gaggles of pretty, skinny women, many of them obviously drugged and forcing unconvincing smiles.

It reminded him of Whitechapel back in the Victorian times. How could such as this exist today? He’d always thought of Paris as a quintessentially romantic city. But in this district, romance had been done away with in favour of something considerably more sordid.

Several of the barkers spotted him, identified him immediately as a foreign visitor, and tried to approach him. But all it took was a single severe glance from the great detective’s penetrating eyes, and they changed their minds on that score.

Holmes reached the alleyway he’d been directed to. The gendarmes that were guarding its entrance had obviously been told to expect him, and they waved him through.

Fontaine was waiting inside. And there was another mangled corpse. But this time, there was a weeping teenaged girl as well, being comforted by a uniformed policewoman.

Holmes stared at the lifeless body first, then at the living one of the young woman. She was a brunette, very shapely for her age, and clad in a manner which suggested that she did not make her living on a chair or on her feet. There was a livid bruise on her right cheek.

“I take it that the so-called ‘victim’ is another scoundrel?” Holmes sighed, prodding at the limp cadaver with the toe of his boot.

“Pierre Malliot,” Inspector Fontaine nodded. “An infamous, particularly vicious pimp. The girl – Marie Le Pays – belonged to him. A runway from Avignon, originally.”

Holmes’ face tightened. He would be surprised if she had seen her sixteenth birthday yet. How could human bodies be regarded as so unimportant that they could be traded for a small handful of cash? He peered at the poor girl more closely and saw that, apart from the obvious bruise, there were choke marks around her throat.

“The charming Pierre was roughing her up, I take it?”

Fontaine’s own mouth pursed. “She’d not brought in sufficient income. He was about to cut her with a straight razor – his trademark punishment – when our vigilante intervened.”

He was about to tell the rest to Holmes, but the detective preferred to hear it from the only actual witness. So he stepped across to the girl, and began addressing her in perfect French.

Marie dried her eyes, becoming slightly calmer in his presence.

“Pierre had the razor to my neck, m’sieu,” she told him. “Lord, I was so scared. But, out of nowhere, this other man appeared. And he saved me from him.”

“Describe this other chap?” Holmes asked.

She thought about it.

“Very large.”

“Yes.”

“Crouching.”

“And …?”

“And nothing more. It is too dark in here.” Which was perfectly true. There was no source of electric lighting. “And it all happened so fast. One moment, Pierre had hold of me. The next, he did not. There were a few seconds of scuffling. Then my saviour was gone.”

Holmes took note of that word, ‘saviour’. Then he glanced back at the mangled corpse.

“This other fellow … he did all that damage in a bare handful of seconds?”

And Marie fell silent, unsure how to answer him. So Holmes looked across at the inspector.

“Was anyone apart from these two observed entering or leaving this alley?”

“No one.”

Holmes stared off in both directions for a few moments. “And there’s only one way in or out. So which route did our avenger take?”

His gaze went to the guttering above them. It was five storeys up, a drop of almost sixty feet. And there were no ladders or window ledges.

He and Fontaine were walking back along the boulevard ten minutes later, trying to ignore the vast, unseemly din around them.

“You are suggesting,” the inspector asked, “that someone jumped into that alley, then jumped out again? Or perhaps scaled the vertical walls?”

A thoughtful air overtook the policeman. Except it was replaced, after a few more seconds, by a slightly humorous one.

“Perhaps we are not looking for a man at all? Perhaps, a cleverly trained great ape?”

Holmes smiled at that, recognising the work of fiction the inspector was referring to.

“No,” he demurred. “This is no invention from the mind of Mr Edgar Allan Poe. It is a man who is responsible for what we’ve seen. But something rather more than just a normal one.”

And Fontaine was about to ask him what he meant by that when his mobile phone went off in his pocket.

It was the Rue St Denis this time, another red light district, not as openly offensive as the Pigalle, but notorious for its great clusters of street girls come the evening time. It was a grubby little hotel off behind the street, in fact. A room on the top storey. And four more villainous-looking characters were lying dead in it, their bodies crushed to pulp.

The room’s window had been smashed, woodwork and all. And Holmes could see immediately from the way the shattered glass was laying that it had been broken through from the outside.

He went across and stuck his head out. There was no fire escape this time. The only way in here was, once again, from the high roof.

“And where are the real victims,” he inquired, “since I’m sure they are not these?”

In the next-door chamber, two young women no older than eighteen and both tearful and distraught were being spoken to by a translator. They were both blonde and attractive, and Holmes could not help but note that one of them had had her clothing torn.

“They are Ukrainian,” Fontaine explained, “and were tricked into coming to this city with the promise of hotel jobs. The men who brought them here were, in fact, part of a gang of human traffickers.”

Holmes stiffened severely. He had heard already of this horrid trade, and the idea of it genuinely appalled him. Why, the people of his good grandfather’s generation, they had fought so hard to do away with slavery. Only for it to re-emerge in this repulsive and inhuman form.

Fontaine was consulting with the translator. He nodded several times, his expression growing angrier. And then he turned to Holmes again.

“Just before our vigilante struck, the thugs, they were about to violate these two. It is the method that these gangs employ to break such girls into a life of prostitution.”

Holmes had heard of that as well, and liked it not one little bit. And a small, satisfied glint appeared in the depths of his hawk-like gaze.

“I never often say this about killers,” he remarked, “but I’m really quite beginning to admire this one.”

Then he began speaking to the Ukrainians through the medium of the translator.

The story was the same as last time. They were terrified by their circumstances, and they thought that all was lost. And then a huge figure had come hurtling straight in through the window. The lights went out at that point, and massive confusion followed. And then, mere seconds later, their potential rapists were all dead. And the fellow who had saved them … he was gone.

“God bless him,” one of the girls added. She was clutching a small silver crucifix about her neck. “It was as if he was sent to answer our most urgent prayers.”

Which set Holmes thinking along some lines that he had not, until this point.

“We need a high vantage point,” he told Fontaine the following evening.

But the French inspector had not thought it would be anything like this.

Both men were now standing on the very topmost level of the Eiffel Tower. The wind moaned around them, and the city stretched below them like some impossibly enormous jewel. The normal sounds of traffic and of crowds were lost to them up here. It was like they had detached themselves from everyday reality.