Free Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by David Thomas Moore (ed) Page A

a snow-white Cadillac.
    Even from the airport, the roads were crowded with cars and pedestrians, and the crowds grew and grew as we approached our destination. Lowe gazed out the tinted window at the people sobbing, clutching flowers and records.
    “Mr Holmes,” he began, but Holmes just shook his head. The car parted the throng of people, waved through by the policemen in their helmets and sunglasses. The white iron gates opened for us, and we proceeded up the drive to the columned entry of the mansion. A suited guard opened the car door and we walked in solemn silence, past the flowers arranged into bouquets and guitars, into the marbled-floored foyer of the house.
    The coffin lay under a crystal chandelier. The man lying inside it wore a white suit and a blue shirt. His hair was as dark and gleaming as it had ever been in life. To my left, I heard Kevin Lowe gasp. I sensed rather than saw him stagger and I caught him and offered him the support of my arm as we were ushered from the house. Hardly a single minute had passed since we had been admitted.
    Holmes did not speak until we were back in the car, driving out the gates of the mansion, with the glass panel closed between us and the driver.
    “Was it yours inside the coffin?” he asked.
    Beside me, Lowe was trembling. “It was mine,” he said. “That was my waxwork, sure as anything.”
    “And so now you have your answer,” Holmes said. “They burned the other waxworks so that no one would suspect that the goal of the robbery was to take only one. It was unfortunate for you, to be sure. But I think you can see, Mr. Lowe, and appreciate, the need for confidentiality in this matter. If it is to work—if such a man, hounded by the press and his fans, is to find peace in this world—no one must know he is still in it.”
    “I understand, Mr. Holmes,” said Kevin Lowe in a hoarse voice. “I won’t tell anyone. He... he deserves some rest, after all he’s given the world. But all these people...” He wiped his eyes as we drove through the crowds, even larger now than they had been on our way in.
    “It’s a necessary path, but one which may give one’s friends pain,” said Holmes, and he caught my eye.
    I nodded, remembering my own pain, and understanding at last the reason for my friend’s melancholy over the past several days. At times, Sherlock Holmes appeared to be no more than a calculating, deducing machine. In moments like this, I knew otherwise.
    “Still,” resumed Holmes, “take heart, Mr. Lowe. Your work was chosen because of its quality, because of its absolute adherence to current fact. You’re an artist, and you were chosen by an artist, in his last, most desperate hour. I hope you will remember that.”
    “I will,” Mr. Lowe said. “I will never forget.”
    In the silence, I could dimly hear the car’s radio playing Heartbreak Hotel.

The Rich Man’s Hand
Joan De La Haye
    “Alright,” said Joan to me, when I cornered her at a convention, “but it’s apt to be a bit... twisted.” Joan de la Haye’s a razor-sharp, brutal young South African horror author, and she wasn’t kidding. ‘The Rich Man’s Hand’ is a bleak, sun-baked glimpse of life in one of the tougher corners of her native Pretoria that nudges at the boundary of the impossible.
    S HERLOCK H OLMES WAS on the verge of a relapse and needed a distraction. The Nigerians would be showing up on our doorstep soon to collect on the debt he accrued on his last bender. I’d already searched his office and flat for the little packets containing crack and found one hidden in the toilet cistern. He’d glowered at me while I emptied the rocks into the toilet bowl and flushed it. Thankfully, we’d received several emails asking for help since the success of our last case was smeared across the Pretoria News and on News 24.
    The sensationalised case of the farmer and the lion had originally been thought of as an average farm murder by the local police, but had turned out to be