“Forge Wood,” Holmes said. His voice was both soft and imperious.
“Will that be the Big House, guv’nor?”
“It will, and there will be a generous tip if you make it there within five minutes, and further remuneration if you can tell me who else has made this journey earlier today.”
There was an initial, and surprising, silence from the driver.
“You see, it’s like this it is, guv’nor, one gent gave me an extraordinarily generous reward on the understanding I would say nothing about his direction of travel.”
“I will double it,” said Holmes, his words fired quickly as bullets from an army revolver.
“Well,” said the taxi man, slyly, “he was a toff—bowler hat like yours, guv’nor, that’s what he was.”
“And…”
“He had a broken nose, he did, like an eagle’s beak, a bald eagle he was too, beneath his hat, which he raised from his head when he bid me goodbye.”
“That’s our man, Watson,” Holmes whispered in Watson’s ear.
The Big House turned out to be a conference centre in deciduous woodland reserved exclusively for the Ministry of Defence.
Inside—and awaiting course leaders and guest speakers—was a gaggle of civil servants, including four men and two women suspected by Mycroft Holmes of betraying state secrets, including the whereabouts of the Tibetan master.
“Time was, Watson,” said Holmes, “when women knew their place.”
In my role as the detective’s assistant, I did not know whether to answer in my modern man married to a working woman incarnation or from the depths of my darker, unreconstructed, Victorian self.
I said nothing.
A ripple of applause greeted us as we entered the building.
“Good God, Holmes, they think we have come to lecture them.”
“Well, that’s your preserve these days, Watson, and you can tell them all about de Lassus and his Franco-Flemish school of polyphony.”
Half an hour later, after Holmes had given a meticulous account of the importance of mastery of both disguise and of foreign languages in the role of a spy, when the conference attendees, including Mycroft’s six suspects, were gathered in the refectory, my friend murmured in my ear in extremely muted tones, “I’ve been such a dunderhead, Watson.”
“What do you mean, Holmes?”
“I’ve been played for a fool.” The detective’s voice was full of regret, empty, all of a sudden, of ego.
“But, Holmes, he’s here, the bald man with the boxer’s nose, and he looks a suspicious cove, if ever I’ve seen one.”
“It’s true, Watson, he may well be a double agent, but that is of no concern to us now.”
Holmes rose to his full height, thanked the gathered men and women from the ministry, apologised for his impending and unavoidable absence, and rushed from the eating hall. I followed behind as if tied and towed by some invisible rope.
“Back to London, Watson, as fast as we can.”
“But Holmes…”
“It was something he said, Watson, something he said…”
On the return journey, Holmes was so distracted he sat down in a second-class carriage of the train.
He refused to say anything about the case in hand other than a handful of words to the effect that a switch was about to be effected and that there was so little time to prevent it.
He smoked a pipe of Balkan Sobranie tobacco until a guard appeared and threatened him with the transport police unless he extinguished his disgusting bonfire.
I stayed silent for the duration of the journey, lest my words should either offend my friend or disturb the depths of his thoughts.
“You can use that infernal telephone of yours now, Watson,” Holmes said at last as the train approached London Bridge. “Phone Inspector Lestrade at New Scotland Yard and tell him to meet us at the Diogenes.”
Outside the exclusive London club, I studied the police inspector closely, struggling to come to terms with my fragmentary memory of a previous lifetime over one hundred years ago.
Lestrade was short to Holmes’s tall, but both men were lean as racing whippets, both men’s eyes and brains restless, the policeman’s eyes shifty to the private detective’s deep and still pools of concentration.
I thought I recalled a case in which Lestrade turned up at a lodgings house in Baker Street with an apparently insuperable problem involving broken busts of the Emperor Napoleon. One sentence of the policeman’s ran around and around inside my head.
“Now, Mr. Holmes, you have got the facts.”
A century and more later, Lestrade was again providing Holmes with crucial information. I strained my ears but could not make sense from the stray words I heard.
Soon, Holmes was hammering on the front door of the Diogenes, arguing with the doorman attempting to prevent the entry of Lestrade, who was not a member of the club.
A flash of the police inspector’s credentials proved more effective than Holmes’s reasoning.
I followed the two men upstairs and into the heart of the Diogenes.
“To the Stranger’s Room, Watson, as fast as you can.”
Holmes’s voice provided encouragement to my tired limbs and overworked lungs.
“In there, Lestrade, quickly.”
Holmes was pointing at the door on the far side of the room.
The police inspector’s shoulder, however, proved inadequate to the task of breaking down the door. “Watson,” Holmes cried, “your extra weight should prove sufficient to the task.”
I doubted my strength but, nevertheless, ran full tilt at the locked door. The wood splintered and I fell to the bare floor of the room where once, in what seemed at least a lifetime ago, I had listened to Mycroft Holmes explaining the problem of the missing master.
The same pallid electric light leaked from a dirty bulb hanging from the ceiling but, seated in the centre of a circle of faint luminescence, was the bound and gagged figure of Mycroft Holmes.
“It’s Moriarty,” Holmes hissed.
“It was Moriarty,” his elder brother insisted, once the gag of rags had been removed from his mouth. “His disguise was impeccable.”
“It was something he said…”
“Even I thought he was me,” Mycroft exclaimed.
“He called me Holmes,” the great detective said, “and you never do that, Mycroft, you always call me Sherlock.”
I watched, still uncomprehending, as Holmes beat his breast.
“Oh, I have been the king of fools, Mycroft.”
I saw a sly smile spread across the wizened face of Lestrade, watched as the smile was folded away by the policeman, as Holmes turned to him for help.
“We must close all the ports, all the airfields, Lestrade, we must not let them get away.”
“Indeed, Mr. Holmes, indeed.”
Now it was my turn to smile as I understood the proper relationship between Holmes and Lestrade, of master to apprentice, had been restored.
“Yes, hurry, do, Lestrade,” said the real Mycroft Holmes. “Moriarty and Songtsen Gampo intend to rule and ruin the world, and I believe that, with the professor’s evil genius and the tulku’s Tibetan magic, that is a real possibility.”
“Watson,” said Holmes, “we must return to Sussex, where I suspect a man with a bald head and a broken nose may lead us to our prize.”
In a Rolls-Royce borrowed from Mycroft Holmes, and with a chauffeur seconded from the Metropolitan Police, Holmes and I sped south through Surrey and Sussex toward the conference centre near Three Bridges.
“You recall Professor Moriarty, of course, Watson?”
It was as much a challenge to me as a question, a throwing down of a gauntlet, a test and a trial of my credence of reincarnation.
I felt my head nodding in assurance.
; “You’re lying, Watson.”
“Sorry, Holmes, it’s all been such a whirl of events, it’s been difficult to deal with the philosophy at the same time.”
“It’s memory, Watson, that’s all it is.” Then the dark clouds of Holmes’s face cleared and were replaced by the sunshine of a rare smile.
“I’m sorry,” the detective said, “I’ve been expecting too much of you too soon, my friend,”
“Who was he, then, Holmes, this Moriarty?”
“Who is he, Watson?” Holmes permitted his eyes to savour the contours and the living colours of the passing countryside. “Moriarty is the only man with talents worthy of my own, Watson. He killed me once, and I killed him, yet here we are both alive once more.”
“I do recall now…”
“He must be stopped, Watson. At all costs, he must be stopped.”
The car slewed to a halt in the conference centre’s car park.
“Come, Watson, come.”
There was no other vehicle parked on the tarmac.
We raced toward the building, flew through an open door that flapped in the breeze, and Holmes called out, “Police, ho!”
The response was a silence so deep it might have swallowed the world.
“There’s no one here, Holmes.”
“He’s here,” Holmes whispered, “the man with the broken nose.”
“What is he?”
“He’s the link, Watson, the link between civilisation and chaos, and he has betrayed the former in favour of the latter, and we can only trust he will see the error of his ways before it is too late.”
“How do you know all that, Holmes?”
“Keep quiet, Watson, and listen.”
Still, though, the only sound was silence.
“If he’s not here, Watson, he will be at the airport.”
Returned to the Rolls-Royce, Holmes issued directions.
“How can you come to these conclusions, Holmes?”
My voice was reverential.
“I noticed a private airfield behind the woods as we approached the conference centre.”
“I didn’t see…”
“No, Watson, you were asleep.”
“I was not, Holmes.”
“All people, Watson, who are not awake, are asleep,” he said. “Over there, driver, that’s right.”
I was hurt by my friend’s jibe but still understood this was not a time to cling to resentments.
On the field ahead of us was a Cessna jet, crouched and ready to fly.
“The old Watson,” Holmes said, as we began to run across the field, “would have had his service pistol loaded and ready to fire.”
I heard a manic laugh escape from my friend’s throat, and understood it as the thrill of the chase.
“At least, I’m here, and I’m ready to help,” I said, gasping for breath as I tried to keep pace with Holmes.
“And I’m glad of it, Watson, so very glad indeed.”
Shots rang out from the direction of the Cessna, bullets flew past our heads, and a low, red sun hung in the Sussex sky.
To me, it did, indeed, feel as if the future of the world hung in the balance.
“Take cover, Holmes.”
“No time, Watson.”
We were at the foot of the steps leading into the belly of the plane.
The Cessna’s engines roared like a wounded animal.
I found my right hand in Holmes’s as the detective hauled me deep inside the pit of the beast.
“And so we meet once more, Mr. Holmes.” Moriarty’s voice was sly as sin and his Glock .22 pistol was pointing at the great detective’s head. “It is so good to see you again.”
“You too, Professor,” Holmes said with understated irony.
“You may take us up and away now,” Moriarty instructed the pilot, his eyes never leaving Holmes for a second. “Mr. Holmes and his friend, Dr. Watson, will be leaving us once we reach twenty thousand feet.”
Shamefully, I tumbled to the floor of the jet as the Cessna began to accelerate down the runway. I was distraught at my fall. I had hoped somehow to throw myself in front of Holmes and take the impact of any bullet meant for my friend’s heart or head. Now I was on all fours like a dog. When I tried to raise myself, Moriarty commanded me to stay where I was and not to move on pain of death.
Holmes was as silent as the grave.
The Cessna was in full flight, its destination unknown to me, unknown too, in all likelihood, even to Holmes.
“Where is Songtsen Gampo?”
At last, the private detective’s question broke the silence the way a stone splits the surface of a lake.
“He is safe, Mr. Holmes.”
“And where is the man with the boxer’s nose?”
“Safe too.” Moriarty’s voice was hypnotic, soothing yet sinister.
“I think not,” said Holmes, and his voice was cold as time.
Behind Moriarty, I could see the man with the flattened, crooked nose, his arm raised, baseball bat in hand, held hard above the evil professor’s head.
Too late, the master criminal turned.
What happened next I struggled to recall when I returned home to our flat in Islington.
Mary was all questions and I was all forgetfulness.
It was as if my determination to come to terms with the ramifications of reincarnation had obliterated all else from my mind.
“Holmes will be here shortly, Mary.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow.
“He will explain everything,”
In fact, within the hour, a party had gathered in our compact living room.
Holmes led the way, followed by his brother, Mycroft, and by Lestrade and his Tibetan companion, Songtsen Gampo.
One moment later, another knock upon the front door, brought the arrival of a man with a bald head and a beaten-up face and broken nose.
“Well, well,” I said, “if only Moriarty were here, we would be complete.”
No one laughed, no one even smiled at my feeble attempt at humour. It was ever thus, I thought, and resigned myself to wordlessness as my part in the proceedings. I guessed it would be the great detective who broke the silence, and I was not disappointed.
“Thank you, Mary Morstan,” Holmes said, and his eyes sparkled as he spoke. “Thank you for permitting the loan of your husband in this enterprise, in this adventure to cap all adventures.”
I had rarely seen my friend so flirtatious, and my stomach tightened in preparation for battle against my old enemy.
“As it turned out, Watson was an invaluable ally, in spite of losing consciousness at the climax of the affair in midair above the coast of Normandy.”
I looked shame-faced and my wife squealed with delight and amusement at this information.
“For your benefit, then, Watson, what happened after our brave and noble boxer here bashed Moriarty over the back of the head, was a sequence of events, one tumbling over another, the sum of which was a narrow avoidance of descent into the North Sea, the arrest of a revived Moriarty by Lestrade, and the delivery of our Tibetan friend to a hospital where his stomach has been pumped clean of the noxious drugs administered to him by the Professor of Evil.
“And here we are, Watson, enjoying the coffee and company provided by your delightful spouse.”
“But, Holmes…”
“I know, Watson, like your predecessor, the medical doctor, you will wish to write up these events, to secure their publication, and their pride of placement alongside the volumes bequeathed to you by your grandfather.”
“And, in order to do so, I shall require some further elucidation of some points concerning this adventure…”
“Of course, Watson, your questions will be most welcome once we have all recovered from this ordeal.”
I looked across the room for support and encouragement from my wife.
“Go on, John,” said Mary, “you know you’ve always longed to write something a little less dry as dust than your studies of de Lassus,” and Watson’s beautiful wife blew a kiss across the room at her beloved husband, who could not fail at that moment to smile a smile that would have charmed the gods from their heavens.
“Holmes,” he said, “I shall begin immediately, and you must come and see me again to review my progress, to correct any errors in the narrative, to fill in any gaps in my knowledge due to my inadvertent and unfortunate failure of my duty to pay full attention to events.”
“Remember, though, Watson,” Holmes said, “to be kind to all the characters in your story.
“My brother here deserves great praise for his work in saving both our nation and our world, and Lestrade here is surely the finest detective in all of modern London, and the saintly tulku, Songtsen Gampo, who will return now to his homeland and work for peace with China, and, not forgetting our heroic friend, who wishes fervently to remain anonymous, the man with the boxer’s nose who saved us all from the loss of our current lifetimes.”
“You are always welcome here, Holmes,” said Mary Watson.
“Thank you, my dear,” said Holmes, “and, when I return, there may even be further adventures, further crimes to solve, and these I would wish most ardently to share, with your permission, with my brave friend, Watson, who may yet prove to be as good a writer, and as good as a detective’s apprentice, as I’m sure he is a husband.”
The Pale Reflection
By L. C. Tyler
“This is a monstrous imposition!” I exclaimed. “Do you see what I was handed in the street, just now, right by your front door? Look at it! Does everyone who comes to visit you receive one of these?”
Holmes glanced up from a half-completed monograph on the secular music of Lassus, which he had been working on for some days. “Monstrous? It is scarcely more than a slight inconvenience,” he said. “Do you think that I need to explain to my readers the difference between a sonnet and a sestina?”
The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 24
