Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(58)

No. Better to cross the street and catch a cab going in the opposite direction. With this traffic, anyone following him could not turn in less than a mile or so.

He arrived at Peter’s house without seeing the taxi with the blue advert. Had he imagined it? He was becoming neurotic. What if this giraffe was nothing more than it seemed: a much-loved toy?

Then why ransack a hotel room? And who was Maria Waterman?

He was welcomed with some relief, even though Sarah and Peter seemed to have been getting along rather well, playing dominoes, at which Sarah was surprisingly good. She told Marcus that she had won twice.

Her eyes lit up with pleasure when she saw Raffa and she hugged him tightly before telling him gravely that she was sorry they had to unpick him, but she promised to sew him up again afterwards, and it wouldn’t hurt.

“You will be careful, won’t you?” she asked a little self-consciously. She knew perfectly well that Raffa was a toy, but they had shared many secrets, and right at the moment, he was the one fixed point in her universe.

“Of course I will,” Marcus promised. “And we will stitch him up again straight away.”

She nodded, then stood still, biting her lip as she watched Marcus take the nail scissors from Peter and very carefully snip the threads that held Raffa’s middle closed.

Gradually he pulled out the tightly packed stuffing. More and more was piled upon the table. There were no packets of powder, no bags of diamonds, nothing but white, fluffy cotton, or kapok.

Sarah was watching him, her fear palpable in the air. Could this be some hideous joke—a warning that next time it would be a living creature, not a toy? He found himself hating these people with an intensity he had not felt in years.

Then his fingers touched something hard. He felt round it. A battery of some kind? It was small and flat, like one of the dominoes they had been playing with.

He looked up at Peter, watching him. Then he pulled it out.

Peter let out a sigh of relief. “That’s a flash drive.”

“What?”

“A flash drive,” Peter repeated. “It can have masses of information on it. You can put entire bookshelves on one of these things. Reams of pictures.” He glanced at Sarah. “May we read it, please? I think it is what the men who took your mother are looking for.”

She nodded, her eyes never leaving the small piece of plastic.

“Thank you.” Peter walked over to his computer and put the flash drive into the slot. He clicked the icon that came up on the screen, and in a few moments, a picture appeared.

It was a still from the classic film, Casablanca, black and white, Bergman and Bogart. To Marcus, the perfect movie. With all the millions Hollywood spent these days, all the action, the color, the special effects, no one had ever come close to it. Superb supporting actors, inspired lighting, brilliant sets, great quotes: “Play it, Sam.” “In all the gin joints, in all the towns . . .” Even the soundtrack, “As Time Goes By”?

“It doesn’t look right,” Peter said quietly.

Marcus brought his attention back to the present, and looked more closely. Should there be buttons down the front of Bergman’s dress? He had seen the picture scores of times and he did not recall them. Of course, he had always concentrated on her face, the calm lines and the inner turbulence of spirit, but these caught his attention. They never had before.

Experimentally, Peter put the cursor on the top one and clicked. Nothing.

He tried the next one—and to Marcus’s amazement, the scene faded and something quite different appeared.

It was one column of names and then several columns of numbers. Some appeared to be dates, and recurred several times, others were in a column headed by the abbreviation for Swiss francs. The second column appeared to contain numbers that were never repeated. The last one was letters and numbers intermixed.

“How’d you do that?” Marcus demanded.

“Remember that friend of mine who coached you on computers?” They’d been doing one of their rare non-Sherlock films together, about a computer hacker. “Well, he’s a good friend.”

Marcus peered at the screen. “Are those bank accounts?” A hell of a lot more valuable than a giraffe filled with heroin, if the numbers were to be believed. “There’s hundreds of millions of pounds worth here.

“And the account passwords.” He and Peter stared at each other.

“Is this important?” piped up the child, forgotten at his knee.

“This is very . . . important indeed.” He did not want to spell it out in front of Sarah, but for this kind of money there were people who would take a life—any number of lives—without hesitation.

“So we can give it to them? And get Mummy back?”

Marcus looked at Peter, then put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Yes.”

“We have to give it to them, Sherlock.” There was a bitter humor in Peter’s voice. “But I think we should make a copy of it first.”

“It won’t show, will it? I wish we could make it just burn up, as soon as this thing is over.”

Peter frowned, his thoughts faraway. “What if we could make it self-destruct, one piece at a time?”

Marcus looked at him. “What are you thinking, Pe—Watson?” he corrected himself at the last minute.

“I can give it to my friend, who will know what to do with it. And he was telling me about a program for a self-destruct, say ten percent at a time, that can be triggered from a distance. When we do that, we stitch it back in Raffa, and give Raffa to them, in return for Maria Waterman. If they want to bargain, or double-cross us in any way, we have a tool to bargain back with. We’ll delete it.”