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

Hundreds wandered by him, chewing gum and swigging from plastic bottles and chattering obliviously on their mobile phones. As with their clothing, there was nothing in the least bit formal about the way they went about their daily business. Nothing stern or upright or controlled or … well, or British. They had adopted to the last – at least to his eye – an almost Southern Californian attitude. The younger people even went so far as to address each other as ‘man’ or ‘dude’, and that offended him on the most basic level. What on Earth had happened to the denizens of his homeland?

A teenaged girl in scanty denim clothes with sequined patterns on them bumped into him accidentally, mumbled some form of vague apology that practically came out as a laugh, and then went back to texting on her iPhone as she wandered past. Good manners – it was apparent – had joined bowler hats in history’s refuse bin.

“Is anything wrong, Mr Holmes?” asked Detective Inspector Charlie Rooker.

A small crease appeared on the bridge of Sherlock Holmes’ prominent nose.

“Ah … why do you ask that?”

“You seem rather distracted, that’s all.”

The great detective thought that over, and then forced a weary smile.

“When you’re my age, Inspector, … hah … you get distracted rather easily.”

He turned his mind back to the case in hand.

They were stood before the broad front window of Perrington Whittleys of Bond Street, possibly the most high-class jeweller in the whole of Mayfair. Double-decker buses rumbled by in a constant stream on Oxford Street, to the north of here, whileto the south Holmes could hear the murmur of the dense traffic on Piccadilly. There was no broken glass around his shoes, and no alarms were sounding. Nobody was hurt or injured. But the place had been subjected, slightly more than an hour ago, to a most extraordinary armed robbery. All of the most expensive pieces had been taken.

When they went inside the staff were still in shock. They were being tended to by members of the St John’s Ambulance service, who had wrapped blankets around them and were handing them cups of weakly brewed tea and talking to them soothingly. None of them, not even the store’s manager, looked capable of being interviewed at present, and so Holmes directed his attention elsewhere.

“There is CCTV footage of the incident, I take it?” he asked, pointing to a camera in the ceiling.

Charlie Rooker nodded. “I’ve already looked at it myself. And I warn you, Mr Holmes, you’re going to find it pretty hard to believe.”

“You’d be surprised what I’d believe these days,” Holmes corrected his brand new companion.

Then he followed the man through to a concealed room at the rear.

The footage was, indeed, remarkable. Perrington Whittley dealt with the general public in the same way as most jewellers: you could not simply walk in from the street. The front door was permanently shut. There was another closed circuit camera above it, feeding to a TV screen inside the store. Anybody who wished to gain entry had to first press a doorbell, then allow themselves to be submitted to inspection. If the staff inside were satisfied with what they saw, a button was depressed, at which point the lock would buzz open. It reset itself automatically as soon as the prospective customer was safely inside.

But none of that had happened in this case. Holmes stared at the monitor with burgeoning bewilderment.

One moment, the inside of the store was empty save for its three members of staff. The manager was on the phone. One of his younger subordinates was polishing the top of a display counter while the other one was tallying receipts.

Suddenly, the criminal was there on the screen in front of everybody’s gaze. The door had not been opened, and he had appeared from nowhere.

“Are you sure this tape has not been doctored?” Holmes asked the inspector.

“It’s not a tape, it’s a recordable CD,” Charlie Rooker told him. “And no, absolutely not.”

He had seen stranger things the last few years, he supposed. Holmes returned his full attention to the monitor.

The reaction of the staff, quite predictably, was that they jumped with fright, then froze with terror. Holmes was of the strong opinion that – once they’d recovered from the initial shock – they could have overpowered this intruder very easily. There were three of them, after all. And the criminal was small and slight, a young Asian man with his hair cut into fashionable spikes. He was as casually dressed as anyone in London these days – jeans and trainers and a T-shirt with the legend ‘Coldplay’ on it. And he was not armed.

But here was the second very curious thing. He was holding out his right arm and the corresponding hand as though he were clutching a pistol. And the hapless shopkeepers … they were reacting as if he had one. Every time those curved-up fingers swung in their direction, they cringed and became submissive. Their bodies drew back and their raised hands shook.

There was no audio on this CD. The robber’s lips moved soundlessly. The shop staff nodded briskly and then hurried to obey his every last instruction. Within another half a minute, the best items of jewellery were being taken out from their display cases and loaded into a small backpack that the thief had brought along with him.

“They really thought he had a gun?” Holmes asked.

“They swear it, every one of them. A great big nickel-plated revolver, like a Magnum or something.”

Holmes squinted from several angles, but could still make out no firearm of any kind.

“The thief is a master of illusion, perhaps?”

“The thief is in our custody, like all the rest. He’s a master of precisely nothing, just an ordinary kid. And like the ones before, he’s claiming to remember nothing. I kind of believe him.”

It was the tenth case of this kind in less than a fortnight. Which was the real reason that the great detective was back in London. His home town was in the grip of a most extraordinarily peculiar type of crimewave.

And he had been summoned back by no lesser a personage than the Prime Minister himself.

Rooker drove Holmes back to the police station where the jewel thief was being held. It wasn’t a long trip, but it gave Holmes a further opportunity to study the city he’d inhabited for most of his earlier life. The traffic was snarled, the drivers aggressive, the gutters littered. Music blasted from car windows and open doorways, and the crowds on the pavements shoved past each other in a manner more befitting to New York. There was, nonetheless, a massive sense of energy about the place he could not help but be impressed by. The weather was currently pleasant, and the outdoor tables of every café and bar were crowded to overflowing. People were conversing energetically, thousands of notions and ideas being exchanged within the space of a bare few city blocks. People moved so quickly in this place these days because they were extremely busy. They were preoccupied because they had a lot of things to do.

Not so awful, really , he decided. Dignity, formality, civility might be extinct, but they had been replaced by industry and creativity on a truly vast, chaotic scale. Who knew what new wonders might emerge from such a seething cauldron of activity?

The place had become a melting pot as well. Charlie Rooker’s Ford Mondeo was passing by pedestrians of every imaginable hue and nationality. Some of them were visiting, but many of them lived here. And Holmes understood that that was a controversial issue, but he personally considered it a good thing. People from across the whole globe wanted to live in this vast and turbulent city, eager for the opportunities it gave them.