Free Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? by Paul Cornell

back here?’
    She felt like leaping up to embrace the most welcome stranger she had ever met. She did not. She slowly stood, one hand on the back of the chair to support herself. ‘You’ll have to
forgive me,’ she said. ‘You see . . . I’ve lost my memory.’
    The man’s name was David, he was the owner of the cafe, and they’d had a few conversations on the subject of her work, while never really becoming friends.
He’d wanted to talk to her about getting more police on foot through here. It had become a running joke between them. She’d stopped by often, until . . . Wow, it must have been five
years back; how time flies, he said. He was concerned about her condition, eager to help out. It took a desperately long time to get past reassuring him that she’d had medical attention.
She’d always sit in the window if she could, he said, watching the people go past. She’d always said she was here visiting friends. Nearby? He supposed they must be. She’d never
said who.
    ‘Oh, wait a sec, come on now . . .’ David put a hand to his brow. ‘You once left your stuff here, asked me to look after it, ’cos you’d forgotten something, left it
wherever you were visiting. You popped out, and you was back literally just a minute or two later.’
    ‘
A
minute? Or
two
?’
    He laughed at that, then stifled it. ‘More like two.’
    She went out into the street, looked at her watch and walked for ninety seconds at her normal fast pace. From what David had said, it didn’t sound like she’d run.
That gave her a radius. Then she looked again at her map and used her fingers to make a circle. She doubted she would have been visiting a shopkeeper. The only houses within that distance were a
cluster of upmarket apartments, a square of them on the map, behind the street here, set aside in their own bit of green. That sounded like the sort of place heavy-hitters like the people on that
list might live. She worked out where she had to go, rushed round a corner, and now she was trying not to run.
    She turned the corner and there the building was. It was a square of apartments, built round a courtyard, something of the 1920s about it. The lawn was well kept, and the trees that baffled the
wind and rain were neat. Lofthouse had visited homes like these before, grace-and-favour apartments given to the great and the good, retired civil servants who wanted to live in town. There was no
sign naming the place. That would have been gauche. She went to the main gate, which was open, cars parked inside. Wheelie bins of rubbish were neatly lined up beside a little pile of junk mail
with a brick on top of it. There was a security office, but it was closed at the moment; this wasn’t a gated community. She still half expected to recall something, but no. The erasure had
been complete.
    She put a hand, as she so often had in recent months, to the charm bracelet on her wrist. This was something else that she could tell nobody about. The key on her charm bracelet. The impossible
key that seemed to have a mind of its own. She was wondering if, now she was here, it would react. But no, she would have felt it by now. It wasn’t like she could shake it to get a reaction.
The key was the second powerful force that influenced her life. A positive one? Perhaps you could call it that. She’d come to trust it, anyway, and now it was silent.
    Stairwells were inset in each of the four walls. She chose one at random, went up it and walked the cloister-like corridors. She could see how something as scholastic as this building would
appeal to someone who’d, presumably, worked in the ‘temple’ at the Docklands site. Would all of them have lived here? No, not people as large in the world as that: they would have
had big lives in all sorts of places. She was looking for the home of one person. An old friend. Probably not someone, with an apartment as small as these must be, with a family living at home.
    She quickly walked all four