Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? Read Free Page A

proprietary additives and reinforced with steel bars.
    One of Ballard’s artefacts had altered the flow of power through this building so that the noise and the vibrations didn’t reach the outside world, as Ballard had confirmed with some
delightful early autumn strolls round the block. Ballard had used his ‘white blanket’ rings to get the team in and out without being noticed. Tony was firm with the others, didn’t
allow any slacking, but didn’t strut around showing off his authority. Ballard appreciated that professionalism. That and the stoic suffering the man already seemed to be enduring made him
think he would actually try to hold out against the tortures Ballard had planned for him. Brilliant.
    ‘Wait a sec.’ Ballard went to the hole in the wall that had become so familiar and took the metal bracelet from his jacket. To him, its power was only a slight tingling, but that
tingle had led him to precious and powerful items at auction houses all over the world. Ballard placed the bracelet on his wrist and put his palm to the concrete wall of the bank. Alarms might even
go off at that slight contact, but such alarms were to be expected, weren’t they, when one’s bank was in the middle of a siege situation? The police would assume that the robbers were
now trying to breach the secure cell at the centre of the bank, but they would also assume that by controlling the siege they were controlling the robbery. He whispered the words that had been
written phonetically on a photocopied document that had come with the bracelet, words that he suspected weren’t actually from a language but were just precise noises, attuned to the shape of
the metropolis. He’d got both the bracelet and the document from the back room of an undertaker’s in Chesham that had a sideline in the dark stuff. They’d also, for a hefty price,
provided the sacrifices, small personal injuries like the cutting of gums and the pulling of nails, that gave him the power he was using today.
    There was a satisfying feeling of something huge moving around him, impacting on the wall, invisibly altering it. He felt his will change the world, again. He was pleased at the idea that Tony
might be actually seeing it. Ballard himself didn’t have the Sight, so everything he did using the power of London remained invisible, intangible, to Ballard himself, when for the Sighted,
he’d been told, it was about watching luminous tendrils do their work, being able to sense the presence of the supernatural, learning about an object of power simply by looking at it.
    Getting the Sight was a goal for the future, but not a tremendously urgent one. He was doing fine without it. Ballard suspected that what he was doing on this job was close to the intent,
centuries ago, of those that had formalized the power of London into a matter of holding particular items or making particular noises. He was now in the business of building and demolition, as had
been many of those practitioners. They had created a culture of architects that had kept these procedures a trade secret, formalized them and swiftly ceased to enquire further into how they worked.
They had merely repeated what had been done before, and been content to see it done again. Ballard felt that he was the last person who studied as a science something that had, years before, become
the mumbled repetitions of a religion.
    He realized his work was done, stepped back and waved for the drill crew to get to work. Tony consulted with Mitch and marked a place on the concrete. The engine started up, the drill bit surged
forwards, and the team lurched with it, having to steady themselves, surprised at how easy its passage had been. Tony looked over to Ballard and dourly nodded. Ballard allowed himself a grin in
return.
    PC Isla Staverton sat in the unmarked van on Reeves Mews, wondering about the intelligence analyst. Staverton’s job was to liaise between said analyst and the teams of
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