Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons

by James Lovegrove

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “When did you find out that your stepbrother was not just a mathematical celebrity but something altogether worse?”

  “This may seem hard to believe, Watson,” replied Mortimer, “but it was around the same time that you did. Before then, I knew there had been some form of disgrace which had obliged him to resign his university chair and move to London to set up as an army coach. James, however, had me convinced that he had been the victim of malicious gossip, nothing more. Jealous rivals had forced him out. He was my beloved brother; who was I to doubt his version of events? When he died in ’ninety-one, like everyone else I accepted the official line that he had been killed in a climbing accident. He had disappeared near Meiringen in the Swiss Alps, so what else could one assume but that he had fallen to his death while attempting to scale some precipice?”

  “That was the story my brother Mycroft worked hard to promulgate,” said Holmes. “Likewise, for my protection and that of others such as Watson, he and I allowed the world to think that I was dead too.”

  “I grieved for James sorely and tried to get on with my life,” said Mortimer. “However, I could not.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “For one thing, rumours had begun to swirl regarding James’s involvement in certain nefarious enterprises. That was a bitter pill to swallow, discovering that the stepbrother whom I had loved and admired, who was my hero, was not so heroic after all. For another thing, James had always been a cerebral rather than a physical man. The most exercise he ever did was a gentle stroll. He was not the sort to sally forth to Switzerland and go up a mountain just for fun. I decided I could not let this incongruity lie. I went to Meiringen and started digging around. Gradually I unearthed the truth of James’s final hours. The picture I pieced together was at odds with all I had been led to believe. I knew, now, that James and you, Holmes, had been mortal enemies and that he had died at your hand.”

  “It was then, late last year, that you wrote letters to the newspapers defending your stepbrother and casting aspersions on me,” said Holmes.

  “You wrote them, Mortimer?” I said. “Not Colonel James Moriarty?”

  “There is no Colonel James Moriarty, Watson,” said Holmes. “There never was. It was merely a pseudonym Mortimer used.”

  “I always thought it a bit rum,” I admitted, “two brothers sharing the exact same name.”

  “I don’t think Mortimer really thought it out. Did you, Mortimer?”

  “Not really,” said Mortimer. “The pseudonym made a kind of sense, I suppose. Colonel James Moriarty, former military man, now in the respected position of station master – the epitome of integrity. I changed my own name slightly, and there it was. It never even occurred to me that it might look strange. But then, I was angry. I was lashing out. Sherlock Holmes was no longer alive but that would not stop me from publicly setting the record straight.”

  “Which you did in a rather offensive manner, regardless of the fact that I was ‘dead’,” said Holmes. “Clearly the old adage about ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum ’ means nothing to you.”

  “Those letters prompted me to retaliate in my own way,” I said.

  “Yes, by publishing your ‘Final Problem’,” said Mortimer. “That was when…”

  He was seized by yet another coughing fit. This one left him choking and gasping, his mouth filled with so much blood that he was obliged to spit it out into a bucket.

  “Not long left,” he said, sounding more rueful than frightened. “Not long at all. There isn’t much more to say, anyway. You returned to the world, Holmes, in April of this year. There you were, blithely going about your business again as if nothing had happened, as if my beloved stepbrother’s blood were not on your hands. Imagine how badly I wished to settle scores with you.”

  “Even though you were fully aware of the extent of Moriarty’s wrongdoing.”

  “Even so.”

  “And since Mrs Stapleton was all set to embark on her own campaign of vengeance against Sir Henry, one which would almost inevitably draw Watson and myself into its ambit…”

  “Why not merge our goals? If nothing else, it would cement the bond between me and her. A shared project would be the soil in which our love could blossom.”

  “A project to inflict misery and death,” I said.

  Mortimer shrugged, as if this made little difference to him.

  “But how,” Holmes said, “were you proposing to get even? Not by killing me, it would seem.”

  “By besting you,” Mortimer replied simply. “By ensuring that you failed. I am not a murderer.”

  “You are an accessory to murder.”

  “True, but I could never have committed the actual deed myself. It is not in my nature. Beryl had that streak within her, that necessary lack of conscience, but not I.”

  “You seemed ready enough to kill Suarez with that scalpel not so long ago,” I said.

  “Did I? It was pure pretence. I am too squeamish ever to have delivered a fatal cut. No, all I wanted from this whole enterprise was the chance to prove that I was better than the vaunted Sherlock Holmes and, for that matter, than his doughty associate. I would be doing what my stepbrother had not done, and by that means I could lay James’s ghost to rest. But it turns out that it was all in vain and I am the one who has been bested. I am the one who has failed. Perhaps I should have known that I could never be the equal of my stepbrother, let alone his superior. If even he could not win against Sherlock Holmes, then what earthly hope had I?”

  “It was ambitious of you, certainly,” said Holmes.

  “How did you know that James and I were affiliated?” Mortimer asked. “What gave it away?”

  “I had already verified that there was no such person as Colonel James Moriarty,” my friend said. “Having learned of his ‘existence’ last year, while I was still allegedly dead and roaming the world in various disguises, I made some enquiries through the auspices of my brother Mycroft. It was a simple matter to ascertain that no railway station in the West Country, or indeed the entire country, had a station master by the name of James Moriarty. He was obviously a fake. I reasoned that the person responsible for the letters to the newspapers was merely some prankster and left it at that. Only when you and I became reacquainted, Mortimer, did I begin to notice certain things about you. Although you are not a blood relation of Professor Moriarty, you exhibit various traits which you must have picked up from him during your shared youth. A tendency to oscillate your head from side to side, for instance, when you are considering something. The frequent use of the phrase ‘dear me’, a habit of Moriarty’s. Then there was the marked similarity between the name James Mortimer and that of the pseudonymous letter writer James Moriarty. Once I knew you were Mrs Stapleton’s collaborator, I began to look for reasons why that might be – beyond any passionate feelings you harboured for her, that is. The connections began to mount up until I could no longer deny them.”

  “Dear me,” said Mortimer, with knowing irony. “How transparent I have been, when I thought I was so artfully opaque.”

  More coughing left him fighting for breath and too weak to continue. Holmes withdrew. I ministered to the dying man for another three hours. His final moments were not pretty, and I shall not recount them here. The end came as a mercy, that is all I will say.

  With some relief I joined Holmes, Sir Henry, Harry, Grier and Suarez up on the steamboat’s deck. Ramón had the helm. Sir Henry stood at the prow with Harry, an arm around the boy’s shoulder, Harry’s head resting against his hip. Father and son were talking together in low tones. What confidences they were sharing, I do not know and would not repeat even if I did. They were the present and future of the Baskerville dynasty, and they were proving a comfort to each other, and that should be enough.

  Grier, meanwhile, was in some discomfort from a sprained shoulder, a legacy of his Samsonian feat back at the mansion, but was putting a brave face on it. As I came up, I heard him say to Holmes, �
��My shoulder hurts like the blazes, but it’s worth it to know that at last, after all this time, you called me Mr Chimneysweep.”

  “I referred to ‘a chimneysweep’, Grier,” Holmes replied. “I did not prefix it with ‘Mr’.”

  “Close enough. I said you would use the name in the end, Mr Scarecrow, and you did.”

  “Let us agree to disagree. Ah, Watson.” Holmes turned to me, his eyes begging a question.

  In answer, I solemnly shook my head.

  “Then it is done,” said he. “Any last words from Mortimer?”

  “A request that someone should look after Galen for him once he was gone. That is all.”

  Holmes aimed a glance at Harry Baskerville. “I can think of a certain young shaver who would be more than willing.”

  “Willing?” I said. “He would be overjoyed.”

  “And then there would be a new Hound of the Baskervilles,” said Holmes. “A far friendlier one than the last.”

  “It might even symbolise an end to the family curse.”

  “Who knows, Watson?” my friend mused, with the slimmest of smiles. “It might at that.”

  The river stretched before us, winding its way through the steaming forest, wide, brown and serene. The sun was at our backs, its heat and light rapidly diminishing. The trees were hung with shadows, and the darkness that lurked between their trunks was fearsome and impenetrable – as fearsome and impenetrable as the darkness that lurks within the hearts of some men.

  James Lovegrove is the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Odin. He was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1998 and for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2004, and also reviews fiction for the Financial Times. He is the author of Firefly: The Magnificent Nine and of Firefly: Big Damn Hero with Nancy Holder and several Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books.