Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? Read Free

lift mechanical diggers, once their work was done, out of their
excavations. Then they’d realized that the cost-benefit analysis actually tipped in the direction of just finding somewhere to hide the digger and leaving it entombed in a wall, the company
sometimes going just a little bit beyond the planning permission they’d been given for the few days it took to do so. Ballard had slipped someone at City Hall some cash to get a look at the
plans and realized that, yes, the only place the digger could have been entombed was right up against the bank.
    Its presence, leading to structural weaknesses in the concrete, had made his team’s initial drilling a lot easier. He had, once again, found a little crack in reality and had grabbed it
and ripped it open like . . . well, like pulling apart a chicken. He often thought of the moment he’d really done that. He’d been fifteen, on some outing with a bunch of other kids from
‘deprived backgrounds’ or whatever the term had been back then. He’d needed to show the girl he was with what he could do. He’d climbed over the gate at a city farm, and had
grinned back at her, and had been quick enough to catch the chicken, and had hauled its legs both ways in a second. The shriek it had made had stayed with him. He’d known from that moment
that he was someone who could and would do
anything
.
    He wondered, as he looked up at the digger, what future archaeologists would make of these buried machines that had dug their own graves. They’d think of them as some sort of offering.
Ballard knew how the power of London worked. The buried diggers would, after a few years, create ripples in the currents of force that could make the impossible happen. To deliberately bury
something that would swiftly accrue stories from folk memory, as people in pubs told others what was down there . . . He wondered how many of London’s builders still knew what their ancient
guilds had taught. All those secrets he’d wheedled out of sloshed retired bastards in the right bars. He’d done it all himself, like always, the self-made man. He was here with only
four employees, the minimum needed for this job. He checked the news on his phone. There we go: first reports of a siege situation at Chilcott’s bank . . . quotes from texts of loved ones
within. Excellent. It was beautiful that that team had decided they’d dress up as stormtroopers. They’d put themselves into the role of action figures, as if they were going along with
how he thought about them. People never seemed quite real to Ballard, not real like he was. They were just a rather-too-small cluster of predictable reactions.
    ‘OK.’ He stepped forwards to where Tony was supervising the work crew. The tall black lieutenant looked up expectantly. He had that blank expression again. He was so fucking sad all
the time, so weighed down by something he never talked about. Still, he’d been an excellent find, a bloke with not just gang soldier experience, having been part of Rob Toshack’s crew,
but also someone who actually had the Sight. So he wouldn’t freak out when Ballard produced one of his little toys. When Ballard had asked how Tony had got the Sight, the man had just shaken
his head, the truculence of which had made Ballard think that maybe after this gig he’d take Tony out drinking and arrange for him to be carted off in a van to somewhere that Ballard and some
muscle could tease that secret out of him. Yeah, that was a pleasure to be saved for later, making a macho bloke squeal, and by the end of it, he’d get from him what he needed to know. Oh,
that would be satisfying.
    ‘Go for the bank wall, chief?’ asked Tony.
    Mitch had the drill at the ready. They’d been down here for a month, cutting past and through the digger, until they were now at the point where Mitch’s electric sensor indicated the
bank’s security system was threaded through what was surely much tougher concrete, mixed with