The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Good try. First, give me your coat, slowly … And you may do what you propose – without any blades.” Still holding the gun firmly and pointing it at him without ever wavering, she fumbled in her purse with her other hand and then threw him some small nail clippers. “These should suffice. And hands where I can see them.”

  While she was searching his coat, finding he hadn’t been lying about not having the manuscript on him, he began to work on the tough lining. It was slow going with the clippers. While he was working at it, he spoke: “You are the new king of the local underworld, aren’t you? Let me pay you my proper respects. But how have you come to it? And why Bolzano?”

  “My brother is not a bad philosopher but he’s a hopeless mathematician. He doesn’t understand most of his mentor’s legacy and cares not for classifying and publishing it. He kept it at home for a while. I used to read it, work through the theorems … It was I who helped him with homework and essays when I was still a child and he a student; who taught him so much – and what for? Though I loved the brain-work, I was expected to stay home and devote my time to searching for a prospective husband! I would have loved to become a mathematician, yet you cannot do that covertly if you want to succeed in the academic world. So I found myself another hobby.”

  “I understand you saw the importance of the lost manuscript for your … hobby as well as your original passion, but what made you think I would retrieve it?”

  “Get on with it,” she said harshly, observing his efforts with her nail clippers with dissatisfaction. “And don’t pretend you’re just a mathematics professor. Your reputation precedes you, Moriarty. Or have you not gained much of your current standing by … let’s say, very unofficial ways? It may have started as a means to pursue your academic career, but it has become much more since then, has it not? You and I seem to have a lot in common.”

  The lining was almost done now. “So that’s why you pretended to take a different kind of interest in me? Not just to observe my work, but to get closer to the fellow mathematical criminal, is it so? And may I just say, you need to work on that yet. You were overacting. It was all too obvious.” He shook his head. “You really overdid it today at your brother’s office. You went there to check on my work – whether I had found it already, yes? The excuse itself was believable, but your behavior … I don’t think any lady outside romantic novels would act that way.”

  The lady in question sneered in a very un-ladylike way. “Remind me to act properly ambivalently the next time. Oh, wait – you won’t be there for any next time.”

  He stopped, hands just above the torn lining. “Are you going to dispose of me? I cannot quite believe you’ve lured me here all the way from England just for one manuscript and then to kill me. That doesn’t make sense if you add the benefits, risks and costs.”

  “If you only found the manuscript and learned nothing more, you would return home freely. You must admit you’ve brought this fate upon yourself.”

  “But still – I could be a useful asset for your expansion abroad. If you had so high a regard of me and my ability to find the document, why stop with that?”

  Eva produced a sad little smile. “We both know the rules of this game. Or, rather, their lack. Sooner or later, one of us would betray the other. Knowing this, we’d both be compelled to be the first to do so. Our collaboration would be brief and unfruitful, if I’m anticipating this right. Well – give me the paper. Let’s not prolong this any more.”

  Moriarty opened the lining. There was nothing inside.

  Eva’s cheeks reddened with anger. “Fine! Should I shoot you in the knee first for you to suffer?”

  “If I tell you where it is, you’ll kill me. If I refuse to do so, you’ll kill me as well, if more slowly and painfully. It seems that if I cared about my well-being in my final moments, I should give you the document. But that would be in case I haven’t anticipated the possibility of this outcome and taken some precautions.”

  Given my note got delivered and he would come at this hour …

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  Moriarty risked a glance at his pocket watch. “We should be—”

  A knock on the door interrupted his sentence.

  “—expecting company,” he finished. “Come in!”

  Robert Zimmermann entered and froze just by the door. “Eva?! What’s going on?”

  The gun in her hand must have truly shocked him. Moriarty allowed himself a dash of relief that his assumption based on the facts known about them, namely that Herr Zimmermann knew nothing of his sister’s enterprises, had proven correct.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” he mumbled as he made a run for the door. Or better not.

  She did not shoot; one step and he was behind her brother and then outside the room. He could hear shouts and a hollow thud from there while he was running hard through the corridor and downstairs. An instant later, he heard her running after him. He only gained an opportunity to escape and a very small advance, but he would have to calculate with that.

  He burst out of the door. All contingency plans, all calculations of his precise mind suddenly seemed out of reach. He just ran.

  A gunshot barked behind him, loud and shocking in the quiet night.

  Moriarty urged himself to run faster. He had to, for himself and the work as well …

  He had thoroughly familiarized himself with the map of Prague, but now he found himself uncertain where he was heading.

  Another shot resonated through the empty street. He ran harder, almost out of breath now. She was a more capable pursuer than he’d anticipated …

  Ah, I know it here! There’s the way to the riverbank …

  He made a quick turn.

  Faster now, faster …

  The black water opened before him. On the very edge of the river, Moriarty turned around and ran quickly forward.

  Eva Zimmermann was right there, he could almost glimpse her finger closing on the trigger, and then he dodged, less than a second before it was too late …

  A shriek cut through the night a fraction before the loud splash.

  Moriarty staggered back to the riverbank but could see nothing on the black surface.

  Could she swim? Did she resurface somewhere? He couldn’t see.

  He couldn’t see …

  Two days later, sitting safely on a train approaching London, James Moriarty was reading the newest issue of Prager Tagblatt, a certain valuable manuscript safely tucked inside his jacket’s inner pocket, and a faint smile flickering across his lips. A capable observer would nevertheless notice traces of sadness in his expression.

  The very night of the unfortunate pursuit, he retrieved the manuscript from the cache near the railway station where he’d hidden it, and caught the first westbound train. He changed his startling unkempt appearance in Leipzig, and traveled further still to the British Isles without any incidents. In Hamburg, he managed to find and purchase a copy of Prager Tagblatt, and found some news of interest. The disappearance of a young lady and a strange attack on her brother, who claimed to have lost all memory of it, made quite a splash in Prague society. The sudden confusion in the criminal community was less apparent but noticeable from the news if one knew what to look for.

  He had a lot to think about. Especially Eva Zimmermann. He had to admire the woman, even though she had tried to kill him. No other woman had ever tried before … I wonder if she survived. Shall we meet again in that case?

  She had built a truly remarkable little empire, albeit a short-lived one. He always thought that if he attempted something like that, he’d wait until he had more experience and money – yet her example refuted these concerns.

  But Eva Zimmermann did not wrap herself in enough shadows to remain at a safe distance. He should consider it a cautionary tale – not the usual moralistic kind, but a practical one. The fact that she’d heard about him also disturbed him greatly. He should be even more careful from now on. Who knew who else might have got some idea concerni
ng him …

  I should remain truly unseen, my hands clean and reputation impeccable. But if I engage in any kind of criminal activity, I’m still taking the risk of exposure. How can I avoid that? It’s not like I could advise others in crime and stay clean myself …

  He froze.

  That’s true, there is perhaps no specialized criminal adviser in the world … An empty niche.

  Safe and profitable. Ideal for my equations.

  Consulting criminal.

  The corners of his mouth twitched in an amused smile.

  Yes; this sounds good.

  The Last Professor Moriarty Story

  Andrew Lane

  It seems to me, as I look back over the landscape of my life, that the impression I will leave behind is that I have spent most of it chronicling the exploits and adventures of someone else – my close friend Sherlock Holmes. I do not regret this for one moment, but it does seem passing strange to me that my time as an Army doctor in Afghanistan and elsewhere, my ill-advised period of medical practice in San Francisco, my years of service as a general practitioner in London and my many and varied marriages have faded into the shadows, while the image of me sitting in a smoke-filled room on the first floor of a house in Baker Street listening to Sherlock Holmes expound on the differences between various species of grasshopper, or playing his violin with such beauty or such crassness that I was reduced either way to tears, is chiselled into the granite of history. Perhaps it is always the way that we are remembered – if we are remembered – for something other than we believe should be the case.

  I find that my thoughts are consumed more and more with mortality these days. Gone are the times when I could spring to action, revolver in hand, in support of my friend while he was investigating some bizarre case. My arthritis precludes me springing anywhere these days. Holmes does not move as quickly as he used to either, and his tall frame is stooped now as he moves around our shared living room, but his mind is as sharp as ever.

  We left Baker Street behind some years ago. London had changed for the worse, what with the gradual replacement of horse-drawn carriages by motorised vehicles and the legacy of the bombing raids carried out by the kaiser’s infernal rigid dirigibles during the war that has been described by others as ‘Great’, although I feel it was anything but. I am unsure now which of those two innovations eventually caused us to leave, but after a period apart, I was invited by Holmes to join him in his Sussex cottage, where I could spend my time cataloguing some of his (I do not dare say ‘our’) past cases that, for various reasons, had gone unrecorded at the time. Mrs Hudson had long since retired to live with her sister in Liverpool, and it is a local lady, Mrs Turner, who now looks after our needs. Sometimes, while staring at the pile of paper beside my typewriter, I do think about writing my own life story, setting down some of the adventures that I have had without Holmes by my side, but the desire soon fades away. I know full well that my place on this Earth is to record for posterity the life of Sherlock Holmes. He provokes an interest in people across the world that I do not.

  Holmes, by now, is acting more in a consulting role than as a detective in his own right – partly for those members of the police who still remember him and partly for those secretive areas of government that his brother Mycroft had set up and left behind on his death. We also find that more and more academics from our great universities are seeking him out, not for assistance in solving a mystery, but to interview him about the criminals and crimes of that era, long gone now, that has been given the designation ‘Victorian’.

  One visitor did, however, cause some disruption in our lives – a visitor connected to a past that we thought was firmly behind us.

  It began with the newspaper that was delivered to our cottage one summer’s morning. Mrs Turner brought it in with our breakfast. The sun was shining and, looking out through the window into the garden, I could see Holmes’s bees forming a cloud around their hive as they left and arrived. Holmes had recently been conducting an experiment whereby he planted different varieties of plants in flowerbeds at set distances from the house, then covered certain ones up, to see whether the bees had any preference and what the effect was on the pollen they collected. For myself, I was firmly in favour of the honey produced after they had visited his lavender flowers. A spoonful of that honey mixed in with a warm glass of whisky was, I found, a tonic for most ailments – and I say that as a medical man.

  Holmes turned immediately to the personal advertisements, as was his wont. His bushy eyebrows twitched as he scanned through the small print, gaining some insight into the lives and the foibles of the people who had placed them. Once or twice he frowned, as if his sensitive antennae had picked up on an anomaly therein.

  Having read through the personal advertisements, Holmes then turned to the ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’ announcements – a section that fascinated him more and more as the years passed. Suddenly, I heard a ‘Hah!’ from where he sat. I glanced over to see his face mobilised by an expression of excitement that I had not seen for some time.

  ‘We shall be receiving a visitor,’ he said. ‘Please tell Mrs Turner to prepare a light lunch.’

  ‘There is something in the newspaper that you will be consulted over?’ I asked, an old but familiar tingle running through me. ‘A crime of some kind – insoluble and baffling?’

  ‘Alas, there are no decent criminals any more,’ Holmes replied. ‘The crimes I see reported in the papers every day are bereft of creativity and audacity. Violence has replaced intellect as a means of gaining financial advantage. The war has brutalised the criminal classes as it has brutalised society as a whole.’

  ‘What then?’ I asked.

  ‘Professor Moriarty has died,’ he said simply.

  I felt a strange mixture of relief and bereavement well up within me. Professor Moriarty had been such a part of our lives for so long that I had assumed he and Holmes would either live forever or die simultaneously. The world had, of course, been told once before that they had died together – many years ago, at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. It had taken fully four years for Holmes’s survival to be revealed to me and to the world. Professor Moriarty’s survival had taken a little longer to come to light, but since then Holmes had seen his hand in numerous crimes, both here in England and abroad, and had confounded his plans on several occasions. For a variety of reasons I had not publicly chronicled their clashes after the Reichenbach Falls incident, although I have kept copious notes, which I have been gradually expanding into publishable form for posterity. The professor had, however, been notable by his absence from crime for several years, and my assumption was that he had gone into semi-retirement in the same way that Holmes had done. To find out now that he had died was strangely like hearing that some venerable elder statesman or dignitary had passed on.

  ‘Where has he been?’ I asked. ‘What has he been doing?’

  ‘The good professor was living out his old age quietly in the Malvern Hills under an assumed name,’ he said. ‘He has provided some consultancy to the next generation of criminals, as I have to the next generation of detectives, but he has devoted most of his remaining time to compiling a vade mecum of crime, a comprehensive guide to the planning, preparation and execution of a variety of carefully thought out, nefarious and illegal activities. Blueprints for the perfect crimes, if you like.’

  ‘And how did he die?’

  ‘According to the obituary in the newspaper, he – or, rather, his alter ego – suffered a fall while walking in the hills. He never regained consciousness.’

  I had not been an associate of my friend for so many years without picking up a few tricks of my own. ‘And you fear that there will be some fight to obtain this document of his before it is destroyed or lost.’ I paused for a moment, thinking. ‘Ah – more likely, you believe that you will be consulted by the police or the government in the hope that you can find this document before anybody else does.’

  ‘You have hit the nail solidly
upon the head,’ Holmes said. ‘The document itself is likely to be of very little use to anybody – as I indicated earlier, today’s criminals have replaced intelligence and finesse with explosives and guns. However, as an addendum to his magnum opus the late professor has spent his twilight years gathering together material that could be used to blackmail not only the current crop of politicians, diplomats and industrialists, but also men who are still at Oxford or Cambridge and who have been marked for great things in the future.’ He snorted. ‘It is typ ical, sadly, of our society that mistakes made in youth can come back to haunt us in adulthood. It is typical of Professor Moriarty that he can store up this compromising material for many years on the assumption that it will eventually prove useful.’

  ‘And this is the object you think will be attractive to other criminals?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed.’ He paused momentarily. ‘I have had an agent in Greater Malvern for some years now, keeping an eye on the professor. He has instructions in the eventuality of the professor’s death to gain access to the cottage quickly and search for both documents: the vade mecum and the repository of blackmail material.’

  ‘Then the problem is solved, surely!’ I exclaimed. ‘You have the professor’s material, and so all that remains is for us to have a decent lunch with whoever the police or the government send to ask for your assistance.’ A thought struck me. ‘I shall retrieve a bottle of Beaune from the cellar, I think.’

  ‘Not so fast, old friend,’ Holmes said. ‘The Professor had lost none of his cunning over the years. I anticipate that he will have secured the material somewhere else – possibly even abroad. My agent will not find it, although one should never fail to conduct the obvious activities for fear of missing something.’

  I opened my mouth to make a further observation, but Holmes held up his hand to stop me.

  ‘I know exactly what you are going to say. You are about to tell me that if the professor’s material is hidden somewhere then it is beyond the reach of other criminals anyway, and so our job is done for us. I wish that were true. No, I suspect that Moriarty has left clues that would enable a worthy successor to find what he has left as his legacy. The clues will be hard enough that no common criminal can follow them, but not too hard to deter everyone who might try. A fine line to walk, in fact. Now – no more! I have work to do before our visitor arrives!’