He paused and considered Gordon expectantly. “And, in future years, should I ever need the intervention of a police officer would I be able to call on you?”
“Of course,” Gordon promised.
“Very well then.” Moriarty smiled. “I shall bid you farewell now and look forward to meeting you in the future, Officer Gordon.”
Gordon shook his head. “You have me wrong, Professor Moriarty,” he apologised. “Gordon is my first name. My surname is Lestrade.”
The Jamesian Conundrum
Jan Edwards
After the disastrous events at the Reichenbach Falls, I had returned to London a wretched man. My grief at the loss of my dear friend Sherlock Holmes was immeasurable and, at that time, in my mind, intolerable. That his sacrifice also saw the end of Professor Moriarty was small recompense. It was only the love and support of my darling wife, Mary, that enabled me to carry on with the everyday duties of my medical practice; and, at times, with the very act of breathing.
Indeed it was Mary who suggested I write an account of that fateful day, to refute the version of events reported by the professor’s brother, one Colonel James Moriarty. It was a splendid show of generosity on her part given the manner in which Holmes had treated both her, and my leaving Baker Street. His had been a mercurial mind of immense range and ability, ever questing after new facts and investigating anomalies. Yet his inability to accept change in real terms was one of his greater quirks among many.
My recounting emerged in the press as ‘The Final Problem’, and, as Mary had intimated, the writing of it had indeed been a cathartic process. The reception of it by the public at large was also quite gratifying.
Imagine my chagrin then, to receive a note some days later, from Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, asking that I visit him at my earliest convenience to discuss my ‘ill-advised publication of the facts’.
‘It’s all perfectly correct, Mycroft,’ I told him. ‘Nothing is written there that cannot be verified.’
Mycroft shifted his bulk, the better to gaze at me from the depths of a vast wing-back chair in the Strangers’ room of the Diogenes. He examined me minutely, as a toad might a fly that it considered consuming, and so complete was that image that when he finally opened his mouth to speak I very nearly started back to avoid the curled, sticky tongue I felt sure was about to envelope me.
‘Facts, my dear boy, are exactly the problem,’ he said. ‘It is patently obvious that you gave a true account. The whole of London is talking about it.’ He puffed ruminatively on his cigar, softening his jowly features in a haze of blue-grey fumes. ‘By and large that would not be a problem, except that Professor James Moriarty was not the only person to use that name.’
‘Colonel Moriarty?’ I said. ‘My recounting was in answer to his abominable attack on Sherlock’s memory. Also a James I believe?’
‘Some parents lack imagination, or else the elder was not expected to live.’ Mycroft laughed, a bubbling chuckle from deep in that cavernous chest. ‘No. I doubt that man is any keener to confront you directly than he would Sherlock. He is not a fighting man despite his rank. But you know the form. Eldest gets the title, the rest have politics, soldiery or the Church. There is … a younger brother.’ Mycroft took a sip from the brandy balloon at his side, savouring the gold-brown liquor for a moment before continuing. ‘In point of fact there are – were four brothers, but one seemed to have passed on some years ago. I am referring to the youngest, also James, though he calls himself Jacob.’
‘He took the cloth?’
‘No … The youngest of the clan is a humble stationmaster, would you believe, near the family home in the West Country.’
‘And what is he to do with all this?’
‘He is a wild card. Sent down from Oxford. Cashiered from the Dragoons. Bad lot all round. Disinherited in theory, though as his sainted father died before he arrived home from India who’s to say? The will is a matter of court record. The estate specifically excluded him from benefitting in any way but his siblings appear to have supported him nevertheless. Hence the railway appointment.’
‘In some isolated spot away from polite society?’
Mycroft snorted quietly. ‘I think the location has far more to do with its convenient links with … illicit sea-trading?’
I nodded. Tales of smuggling in that county were as old as the land itself. ‘You feel this Jacob Moriarty is liable to do me ill?’
‘I have reliable information that not only is he liable to cause you considerable harm but has plans afoot to do so.’ Mycroft leaned forward, the leather creaking beneath him, as loud as unoiled hinges in the quiet of the Diogenes. ‘My advice to you, Doctor Watson, is to take a little trip. I am told Scotland is quite lovely at this time of year. I believe your mother had connections there?’
‘How did you know …’
‘I know you have gone to some pains to hide that link, which is good. Few people know of it. Go. Find your roots. Take your good lady wife, and allow us to deal with James Moriarty the younger.’
‘I have never walked away …’
‘I am not asking you to walk away, my dear chap. I am strongly advising you to run. I will contact you when we have the situation under control.’
‘But how on earth … ’
Mycroft only smiled, before sealing his lips around his cigar and obscuring himself from my gaze behind fresh tobacco fog; a familial gesture that I knew too well. Argument would be futile.
That was not to say that I would do as bidden. Hiding like a child was not in my nature. I am a fair pugilist, perhaps not in Holmes’s class, but can make a good fist when required of me, and I was certainly the better marksman with pistol and rifle alike. Yet I had responsibilities. Mary should not be placed at risk, of course. I also had a thriving practice and patients who needed my expertise, or at very least a suitable stand-in to care for it all. It was this duty that delayed my departure. My damnable sense of duty and obligation.
So it was three days later that we, my Mary and I, were on our way to Euston Station to catch the sleeper train to Carlisle and thence on to my ancient family home. Accidents are not uncommon, and I had indeed requested the cabbie to hurry, as time was short. The first we knew of it were the shouts of the driver before that terrible impact.
It was a dream. A nightmare. Vague images of darkness and fire … sleet and rain had only added to the chaos of shouting men and screaming horses … and the sergeant major calling for stretcher bearers in the heat of the Afghan plains. Pain in my shoulder and leg and dizzying effects of blood loss … the cries of injured men, no, singular: a man, little more than a boy, or perhaps a woman. I was trying to crawl free, pulling myself across the wreckage, and gunfire … a gunshot …
I woke in a hospital bed – screaming – for my Mary. My poor darling. Gone. Dead. I knew that before I opened my eyes, because I remembered, even in my dreams.
Massive bruising and minor lacerations. All minor really. Only the wound to my head had been enough to render me unconcious. A severe blow, the young doctor told me. I knew otherwise. I had treated enough of them in my army medical corps days to know them.
I knew who was the cause. Witnesses told later that a dray had pulled across the street and shed a rim. Nobody could explain why the dray had no team attached, or who it had belonged to. I knew.
Mycroft had moved me to a private sanatorium after the accident and, to those who asked, I had died with my dear wife. Mycroft explained in great detail that there was an operation in progress to mop up the residue of Moriarty’s empire and that by the time I was recovered it would all be over. I did not bandy words with him. I had ideas of my own.
It was a month or more before I was able to slip away from my jailors. Protectors, Mycroft insisted. But I saw it otherwise. I left the sanatorium at the dead of night and was on the early train to St Ives before the nurses’ first rounds.
As always in such moments the question I had begun by asking myself was ‘What would Holmes do?’ Th
e answer would always be to examine the facts and deduce. And since I was unlikely to gain any help from Mycroft I had to rely on my own wits.
It took just a few enquiries at Waterloo to ascertain where James ‘Jacob’ Moriarty plied his trade. Lellantrock had once been a thriving village, but had become little more than a halt on an isolated section of the Cornish north coast. It had grown up around two tin mines, which had, I was told, ceased to be some twenty years before.
Not wanting to alert my quarry, I alighted at the next station and found lodgings at a local inn before hiring a horse to ride the coast paths. I had thought to pass myself off as a hiker, thinking that would have been the kind of ruse Holmes might have perpet rated, but my old injuries gathered in the Afghan campaigns would never allow me to hike the distances required. Horseback was the safer option, travelling the lesser byways. Not as a doctor but as a student of local customs and antiquity. Such persons asking questions and taking notes would, I reasoned, barely register in local minds. The preservation of the memory of arcadia was a near obsession in some quarters. As Holmes once said to me, ‘One can hardly move for historians in any country tavern you care to enter.’
So, clad in country tweeds and riding one of the local moorland ponies, I trotted into the village, pausing first at the post office.
‘Because in the country there is nothing like a postmistress and the publican for knowing all there is to know,’ Holmes had maintained. And, as ever, he was correct. Under the guise of gathering additional information for the Ordnance Survey, I asked casual questions about the village and its byways and, as currency for my visit, asked for a book of postage stamps.
‘The railway station is used still?’ I asked. ‘Now that the mine is closed there can’t be a great deal of use for it.’
‘I often think that myself,’ the postmistress said. She was a handsome woman of middle years, her dark hair, paling at the temples, pulled into a nest chignon and fastened with plain silver combs. Her dress was of the immaculate kind that you would expect of an educated woman. High-necked dress in a plain dark green with just a hint of cream lace around the neck and cuffs. An educated woman, yes, but one all too eager to chatter on about her neighbours and neighbourhood. ‘The village is half the size it was. But then there’s some folks always get what they want.’
‘Local squire is not fond of industry?’
The postmistress glanced each way, though I was sure she knew the room was devoid of all others but the two of us. ‘The old squire turned the mines into a good living. He was a devil, but he worked hard. His son’s a different kind of demon. Never seen up at Lellantrock House. He’s always away up in Lund’n with his sciency ways. But funny you should mention the railway.’ Another quick glance to right and left before she leaned across the counter and said in muted tones, ‘It’s that one down there. He’s the one as says what’s what.’
‘Really?’ I feigned surprise that would have made Holmes proud. ‘Who would that be, Mrs …’
‘Saxby. Gertrude Saxby, sir. And I means smugglers.’
‘Smugglers? Here?’
She leaned back to stare at me, a probing stare that saw all there was. ‘Not local are you?’ she said at last. ‘Down from Lund’n yourself?’
‘Well … yes. That is where our offices are.’
Mrs Saxby nodded. ‘You’d be excused for not knowing. This coast’s got a long tradition for the Gentlemen. Mostly local, and mostly brandy and stuff. Harmless really. My uncle George wasn’t past bringing the odd barrel ashore. But him down that railway! He’s not like any of the Gentlemen I ever met.’ She sniffed, derision in every nerve. ‘But then he’s a bad’n. Educated man, but a bad’n. Too much learning’s not always a good thing for some. Meaning no offence, sir.’
‘None taken.’ I leaned towards her a little. ‘So this chap is a bit of a villain is he?’
She flushed around her neck and her gaze flickered towards the door. I noted the muscles in her jaw tightened as what I was certain was her natural tendency to gossip fought with … fear? ‘Doesn’t do to gainsay,’ she murmured. ‘Not with Jake being the squire’s kin.’
‘I never divulge my sources, especially a good woman such as yourself,’ I added. ‘But smuggling? It all sounds very exciting.’ I smiled. ‘You should not tempt me with such snippets, ma’am.’
She blushed once more, her plump cheeks cherry red and I felt a little guilty at my deception. ‘Well, sir, I can’t say as I know much. ’Tis common talk all those Moriarty boys are a bad lot. Their poor mother would be mortified. Alice, my own mother’s cousin, nursed her ladyship at the end.’
‘Ladyship? I was led to believe the gentry here were not titled.’
‘Her ladyship was the last one. James Moriarty the elder was an engineer. He turned a dying estate around, but it didn’t make life easier for all of us.’ She leaned close, so that stray hairs escaping her cap brushed my forehead. ‘Folk’ve gone missing, sir. Local lads. Half a dozen at least.’ She scowled. ‘My cousin Mave’s boy, George, just last year. Vanished. Told his mother he was going across to Redruth for a few days’ work, carting, and never came home. Good lad, always looked after Mave after her Percy was lost at sea.’
‘Singular,’ I said. ‘For a family man to vanish.’ I smiled at her. ‘You said “them”. Do I take it this Jake has an accomplice?’
‘Off and on. Mostly off. He’s not so liable to taunt the Excise when the squire’s up in the house. He’s back home from foreign parts. My aunt, Alice, got called back there to nurse him like she did his mother before him. Mortal ill I heard, though I’ve not seen Alice for a month at least.’
‘Is that so?’ I looked, my heart pounded, a miasma descended across my senses as I digested the import of her words. I moistened my lips and looked down, searching my watch pocket for a coin or two as a ruse to hide my shock. Had I heard correctly? That Moriarty lived? When my dearest friend had perished? I had come to avenge my wife; convinced that Moriarty the younger was responsible. But this changed all things. I could not doubt that if Professor Moriarty lived then it would be he who had ordered my assassination, and that of my wife. The fuzz of anger subsided and I forced myself to smile lightly and listen to what else the woman had to say.
‘Yes, indeed,’ the postmistress was saying. ‘Nothing much goes on in these parts that doesn’t get talked of by someone. And I tell you that …’
A cart rumbled past the shopfront, heading up hill, and slowed as it drew level. From the dark of the shop interior, it was easy to see the outside quite clearly and I watched as the man seated next to the driver stared at my horse tied to the post outside and then towards the post office. His massive head, held low between his shoulders as though his thin neck struggled to support it, swung towards me. He was a thin man, though in no way puny, more rangy like a wolfhound, and with something of the wolf in his gaunt features. I was reminded with a jolt of the time I had seen a face very like that. He clutched a shotgun across his knees, which he caressed thoughtfully as he peered towards the shopfront.
I doubted they could see much of the dimly lit interior but nevertheless the postmistress stopped short at the sight of him. Her face had turned such an ashen white that as a medical man I was concerned for her.
‘Miss? Are you feeling well?’
‘What? Oh. Yes … My goodness look at the time. There’s last post to sort. I can’t stand chatting all day. That is a shilling for your stamps. If there’s nothin’ else you’ll be wanting, sir?’
‘That fellow seemed very interested in my livery horse. Who was he?’
‘Mr Moriarty, sir. That was Jacob Moriarty.’ Her face was devoid now of all its animation of the previous moments, guarded and wary. Yet she was a good woman at heart because, with a glance to the window to be sure the cart had moved on, added, ‘He does not welcome incomers or visitors. If you are a wise man, and I think you are, then leave here. Now.’ She leaned across the counter to touch my arm. ‘Please, sir. Go back to where you came from and h
ope that evil young pup does not choose to hunt today.’ She turned away and hurried into the next room. The conversation was plainly at an end.
Yet I had heard enough. Jacob Moriarty was every bit as much a villain as his brother, if on a lesser scale. That the lawful squire of this backwater estate was none other than the professor himself, and that the arch-enemy of my closest friend; perhaps even the nemesis in its truest sense as the cause of his demise. That the greatest villain of all time was living still. I felt inordinately proud of gaining that information with relatively little effort. Though I could not help feeling these were facts that the elder of the Holmeses could have furnished me with in far shorter order. I did not imagine Mycroft was not very aware of the professor’s survival, and it explained his insistence that I go into hiding until the threat had been overcome.
Mycroft was quite certain that Moriarty – one or both, or perhaps all three, because I could not ignore the existence of the military Moriarty – were planning to do me harm. To kill me, in fact. I could not deny that I had helped Holmes in his various skirmishes with Moriarty so perhaps some kind of revenge was to be expected. Be it a trained brigade or a pack of brigands, in times of conflict one took sides and one fought and hoped that you had might and right on your side. But I knew a deal of good men who had perished in various conflicts and any assertion that right was might could not be relied upon.
There was a great deal to consider. My first instinct was to fly to Mary’s tender embrace; except that Mary’s arms were no longer embracing, or tender. She was gone, and it seemed to me that running was not the answer in any event. If Moriarty wanted to find me then he would, and the postmistress had been quite sure about his imminent mortality. My answer lay in dealing with him whilst he was still vulnerable. How that could be done I had yet to ascertain, but I was suddenly resolved to do what I must. I am a medical man first and foremost, but also a military one. Running went against everything I had been brought up to.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 41
