Sherlock Holmes (29 page)

I, too, was taken aback. Holmes was deliberately incriminating us? With Tomlinson right there to witness it, and Slater on hand to write about it in a national newspaper?

My friend maintained an air of placid composure. “Just input the question, professor, would you?”

Quantock tapped at the keys, looking marginally less surly than before, as if buoyed by the prospect of seeing Holmes and me exposed as lawbreakers.

“That’s all?” he said. “No m-more?”

“It should suffice,” said Holmes.

The Thinking Engine rattled heavily, calculations manifesting in audible form.

“It talks now, by the way,” Holmes told Knaresfield, Slater and Tomlinson. “Don’t be startled when you hear it. Professor Quantock has given his Pinocchio a voice.”

We waited on tenterhooks, until at last the Engine arrived at a conclusion.

“Elias Ashmole’s golden chain,” it said in its weird, arrhythmic approximation of speech.

“By gum!” Lord Knaresfield exclaimed, although I couldn’t tell whether it was the answer that shocked him or the phenomenon of words issuing from the voice cabinet’s amplification horn. It could have been both.

“There,” said a smug Quantock. “Puzzle solved. Not so imp-impossible after all. Even with only the b-barest of information to go on, the Engine comes up tr-trumps. Impressed, your l-lordship?”

“More than ever, professor,” said Knaresfield.

“That was the easy part,” said Holmes. “Making an assertion is one thing. Can the Engine prove it? That’s altogether another thing.”

“It had better prove it,” said Tomlinson, “although for my peace of mind as much as anyone’s, I hope that it cannot.”

Quantock typed. He looked confident now, utterly assured of his creation’s brilliance.

“Done,” he said.

Once again the Engine thought, and once again it spoke.

“Chain replaced with replica. Replica copied from portrait. Substitution may be confirmed by counting links.”

“Counting links?” said Slater.

As if in reply – though it was merely continuing its explanation – the Engine said, “Chain in portrait longer than chain on display. Several links removed from original in 1776.”

“Why?” said Holmes. “Ask the Engine why the links were removed?”

Quantock complied, saying, “You sh-should not try to catch the Engine out on l-local knowledge, Mr Holmes. There is little about Oxford that it is ig-ignorant of.”

“That is what I’m relying on.”

“Links stolen,” the Engine said. “Used as payment to landlord for board and lodging.”

“By whom?” Holmes pressed. “It was someone famous. Notorious, one might say.”

Quantock typed.

“By French revolutionary,” said the machine.

“His name?” Holmes demanded.

A pause, then the Engine said, “Moriarty.”

Tomlinson and I both gasped, I the more sharply.

“Th-that’s not r-right,” said Quantock. “A French revolutionary called Moriarty? Surely, if anyone, the Engine means Marat.”

“Why not ask it again?” said Holmes.

“I w-will.”

But the Engine offered the same name as before: “Moriarty.”

“There’s s-something awry,” said Quantock, flustered. “The voice cab-cabinet must be m-malfunctioning.”

“I would concur,” said Holmes. “‘Marat’ and ‘Moriarty’ begin with syllables that are not dissimilar sounding. It may be that the needle on the relevant cylinder is slipping, mispronouncing the second part of the name.”

“But that c-can’t happen. The syllabary system doesn’t operate that way. A single syllable cannot b-be rep-replaced by three.”

Quantock opened the voice cabinet’s glass front and began checking the phonographic cylinders.

Holmes, meanwhile, turned to the rest of us and said, “Now do you see? I never said that the puzzle could not be solved by the Engine. The machine has amply shown itself to be equal to that task. However, it has not been capable of elucidating the puzzle fully, as I predicted. It cannot supply the final telling detail, the surname of the infamous and ill-fated Jean-Paul Marat, one of the fathers of the French Revolution, who while practising medicine in England as a young man stole links from Ashmole’s chain to pay off a debt. The Engine has instead stumbled and named another.”

“But ‘Moriarty’?” said Tomlinson. “Why that name, of all names?”

I was asking myself the same thing. First, Colonel Sebastian Moran. Now the Engine had blurted out the surname of Moran’s deceased master. Could that be an accident? I sincerely doubted it.

Then I recalled coming across Holmes in this chamber after we had become separated the previous night. With hindsight, it occurred to me that he had not simply been standing static beside the Engine. He had been carrying out some sort of furtive activity, which he had completed just as I entered.

He had been tampering with the voice cabinet.

Professor Quantock arrived at the same conclusion. He rounded on Holmes, eyes flashing. A wax cylinder was in his hand.

“This is n-not one of my cylinders!” he said hotly. “Someone has interfered with my Engine.
You
have, sir. It must be you.”

I thought Holmes might at least try to deny the accusation, but he actually seemed pleased to own up to it.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “I availed myself of the services of a phonographic supplies shop on Cornmarket Street. I hired a recording machine for an hour and etched a cylinder of my own, repeating the same collection of sounds – ‘iarty’ – over and over until there was no space left. That was my voice you heard. When Watson and I were treated to the first public demonstration of the Engine’s voice, I noted which cylinder was called into use when the syllable ‘at’ was required. Number seventeen. That was the one I replaced last night with my own cylinder.”

“But… wh-what for?”

“All to produce this effect, the utterance of the name Moriarty.”

I had to marvel at Holmes’s ingenuity, even while wondering why he had not taken me into his confidence about this particular aspect of his plan. No doubt he had wanted me to be as awestruck by his little
coup de théâtre
as everyone else in the room. How he loved to pull the wool over people’s eyes, strangers and bosom friends alike.

“But why Moriarty?” said Tomlinson. “I presume it’s a reference to your erstwhile nemesis, who now lies dead and has, I am sure, been judged in the hereafter according to his deeds on earth.”

“To show that I know the truth of what has been going on,” said Holmes. “You see, I have for some time harboured the suspicion that there is more to the Thinking Engine than meets the eye. I am minded to compare it to the Turk.”

“The Turk?” said Lord Knaresfield. “What in blazes are you jabbering on about now? What Turk? Is there some Turkish person hereabouts?”

“Don’t you remember? It wasn’t so long ago. Built in 1770, the Turk was a miracle of mechanical engineering, an automaton that could play chess against grandmasters and win. It could also perform the knight’s tour, a vexing puzzle which requires the player to execute a sequence of moves with the knight so that the piece visits every square on the board once and once only – more a mathematical problem than anything. In short, the Turk was every bit as clever as the Thinking Engine.”

“I dis-dispute that,” said Quantock.

“As well you might, professor. The Turk could even be regarded as the Engine’s forerunner, more so than any of Babbage’s creations.”

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” said Slater. “It was a model of a turbaned Levantine seated at a boxed-in table, yes? And it shunted the chessmen about with its hand. But wasn’t it revealed as a—?”

“The Turk,” said Holmes, butting in, “convinced many people that its Hungarian creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, was some kind of engineering genius. It was shown all around the world and defeated several notable chess aficionados, including Frederick the Great of Prussia, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The front of the table could be opened up to show off the complex workings inside, yet some who saw the Turk in operation were convinced it was not a machine at all but possessed by some supernatural entity. So lifelike did it appear that ladies in the audience were known to faint as it moved. I imagine one would find it eerie, watching this mysterious metal figure nod twice when its opponent’s queen was in danger and three times when its opponent’s king was in check. Emperors and nobles were very taken with it. Just as a member of our own nobility, none other than Lord Knaresfield, has been taken with the Thinking Engine.”

“What of it?” said his lordship. “The Engine is an amazing thing.”

“But that wasn’t all that attracted you, was it? That isn’t why you agreed to put your considerable clout behind it.”

“I distinctly recall telling you that I regard the Engine as potentially a powerful tool for the advancement of journalism. It could be the way forward for my industry in the twentieth century. Hence my advocacy of it.”

“I don’t doubt that. But you also wished to exploit it as a weapon against me.”

“Against you, Mr Holmes?” Knaresfield gave vent to a chuckle which, to my ears at least, sounded hollow and sly. “Why ever would that be? I have no beef with you – not until now, at any rate, when you’ve started to level wild accusations.”

“You yourself hold no grudge against me,” said Holmes. “The same cannot be said for a transatlantic counterpart of yours, Mr Wallace Rubenstein, one of America’s foremost newspaper proprietors.”

It took me a moment to place the name. Rubenstein, of course, was the owner of the collection of antiquities to which Pharaoh Djedhor’s mummy had belonged.

“Mr Rubenstein and you,” Holmes continued, “are acquaintances. I might go so far as to call you friends. I unearthed a record of your relationship in the archives of
The Oxford Times
. You have made several trips overseas to be a guest of him and his wife at their summer residence in New Haven, Connecticut. He, in turn, has stayed with you in Yorkshire. You boasted to me the other day about the advanced printing presses you intend to buy and the new typesetting and photogravure techniques you wish to introduce for your stable of publications. You said they are American in origin, and it takes no great stretch of the imagination to deduce that you came upon them courtesy of Rubenstein. It may even be that he is the one from whom you will be purchasing them.”

“Those are facts,” Knaresfield admitted. “They cannot be gainsaid. But so what? What bearing do they have on the present situation?”

“You know full well the answer to that. Earlier in the year, Watson and I caused Rubenstein some embarrassment – mostly of the financial kind. We obliged him to pay out compensation to certain individuals whom he had incommoded. I imagine Rubenstein was keen to enact retribution and ensure that I got my comeuppance. He recruited you as an intermediary, asking you to act as his proxy in Britain, his right hand. You agreed to it, not wishing to jeopardise your future business ventures with him. Opportunity arrived in the shape of the Thinking Engine, a machine that might outwit me. You put money behind it, in the form of a handsome wager which brought the Engine to my notice and that of the wider world. You have since been using your newspapers to promote the device and trumpet its successes at my expense.”

Knaresfield seemed set to refute this, but his pride would not let him.

“All right,” he said. “Well done. I can’t deny it. You’ve rumbled me. It’s nothing personal, of course. You do know that? Just business.”

“Which is why I feel no great animosity towards you, your lordship. You are a businessman to the core. Love of profit runs through your veins. To you, helping an attempt to engineer my downfall has been a transaction, nothing more. A deal. The same goes for Mr Slater.”

“What? Me?” said the journalist.

“I would say that your days at the
Illustrated London News
are numbered. Your tenure there is coming to an end. You are barely clinging to your position as it is, given your insalubrious habits and the use of blackmail against your editor. How much longer can you hold on? Your mother’s consignment to an insane asylum is a drain on your purse, which is already depleted thanks to your gambling. Your actress mistress must be costing you a pretty penny as well. Lord Knaresfield has money. You need money. You are, I would suggest, already covertly on his payroll. That or he has offered you a well-remunerated post at one of his many papers, yours to take up once your role in this Thinking Engine business is discharged.”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“I don’t care tuppence what you think, Slater,” Holmes said. “You and his lordship have done well, acting as though you are strangers to each other. All the while, at his lordship’s behest, you have been penning articles that add to the weight of opinion against me. You have never been an admirer of mine. Lord Knaresfield gave you the incentive to develop that into a full-blown
ad hominem
mania.”

Slater continued to protest, but Knaresfield silenced him with a mid-air slash of the hand. “Slater, the game’s up. Holmes has us bang to rights. The manly thing to do is accept it. Don’t you understand the implications here, you daft beggar? We thought all we were doing was ruining a reputation. It seems, though, that we have been a party to something far more heinous. There have been deaths. The Engine wasn’t solving them. It has been instrumental in
causing
them. We, whether we like it or not, are complicit in that. We bear some small part of the guilt.”

Slater acknowledged this with a tight-lipped shrug. “I regret nothing.”

“No, because regret implies a conscience, and that is an attribute you signally lack,” said Holmes. “But I feel no great animosity towards you, either. Like his lordship, you are a victim of your personality. You are not evil, just pragmatic, a creature comprised entirely of self-interest and necessity. Whatever suits you best, you do, and the consequences be blowed.”

“Now hold on a minute, Mr Holmes,” said Inspector Tomlinson. “I think I’ve followed this so far. His lordship has waged a campaign of sabotage against you, with the connivance of Professor Quantock and the assistance of Mr Slater. You are being admirably sanguine about that, for which I commend you.”