Sherlock Holmes (33 page)

“You’re lucky, old chap,” I told him. “Your trapezius muscle has taken a peppering, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers and a smear of antiseptic ointment can’t sort out.”

“If I were truly lucky, I wouldn’t have been hit at all,” Holmes replied. “As it is, I have you to thank, Watson. Your marksmanship threw Moran’s aim off. If you had been any less accurate, we would not be having this conversation. You are the hero of the hour. But look! The shikari stirs.”

Moran was rising to his feet. He made a bid to retrieve the shotgun, which he had dropped, but Lord Knaresfield beat him to it.

“Oh no you don’t, you mongrel!” his lordship cried, hefting up the gun. “You’ll stay right where you are, or you’ll regret it. Happens as I’m a dab hand with one of these on the grouse moors.”

“You don’t have the guts,” Moran sneered, nursing his right hand. I was not displeased to see that I had managed to blow his index finger clean off. The big game hunter would not be pulling any triggers again with that hand.

“We’ll see who has guts,” Knaresfield said, pointing the gun at Moran’s belly.

“The gruff, tough Yorkshireman. All bluster and wind. Go on then. I dare you. Shoot me.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

“Try me.”

They stared at each other for a span of seconds. Neither moved.

Then, with a cluck of contempt, Moran turned on his heel and made for the exit. “It’s a bit different when it’s not birds, eh?” he said.

He had read Knaresfield well. The newspaper proprietor was many things, but a killer of men he was not.

“Well, go on, Watson,” Holmes said. “Get after him.”

“Won’t you come too?”

“With this shoulder? I’d only slow you down.”

I rushed off in pursuit of Moran, passing Knaresfield as I did. He had lowered the shotgun and was scowling at his own faint-heartedness. I wanted to reassure him that he had done nothing wrong. It is no mean feat, taking another’s life. But there was no time for that. Moran was getting away.

I chased the shikari up the stairs to the ground floor. He was leaving a trail of blood drops behind him, the simplest of spoor to follow. He must have been in excruciating pain, and I did not think he would get far. He was unarmed, too, whereas I was not. All the same, I could not afford to be complacent. Even wounded, Moran was no pushover. He himself would doubtless have told me that the tiger is never more dangerous than when it is hurt and at bay.

He made it out of the University Galleries and down the front steps. He staggered along Beaumont Street to the corner where it met St Giles’. Sunday promenaders veered out of his path, alarmed by the sight of blood and the look of savage purposefulness on his face. Those who did not see him coming and were in his way, he shoved violently aside. One woman whom he barged into, narrowly avoided falling under the wheels of a brougham.

I gave chase doggedly, my revolver out. I knew I would corner him eventually and have a clear shot. He was losing blood. His footsteps were becoming more uneven, his gait unsteadier. He was tottering more than running.

He wove through the traffic on St Giles’, crossing to a lawned island in the middle of the road. There stood the Martyrs’ Memorial, the spire-like monument erected in honour of the three Anglican bishops – Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley – who had been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century for having the temerity to denounce the Church of Rome. Moran stumbled to the foot of its steps, where his legs gave way and he fell to a half-seated, half-lying position.

I closed in.

He gazed up at me, panting stertorously, his swarthy features flushed and glossy with perspiration.

“Do it then, you blackguard,” he growled.

I had him utterly at my mercy, just as I had hoped I would a couple of days earlier when fetching my gun from home. My vision of Moran defenceless before me had become a reality.

It would have been such a simple thing. Aim at his forehead. Pull the trigger. One less villain walking amongst us.

“You have it in you, I know that,” Moran said. “Unlike that lily-livered blowhard Knaresfield, you have the stuff. You’ve gone through that door, the one you can never go back out of again. Holmes too. It’s how we have to be, we men of adventure, we players of the only game worth playing. We have to be prepared to go further than mere civilians. We have to do whatever is necessary to accomplish our goals.”

“Don’t pretend I’m like you, Moran,” I said. “I am not.”

“No, you’re not. You’re worse. I am what I am. I am nothing but what you see, nor do I claim to be. But you – you’re a doctor. You save lives. Except when you do the opposite.”

“There are some lives not worth saving. Yours, I reckon, is one of them.”

“Then stop shilly-shallying. Damn your eyes, man, just get this over with!”

Moran’s face was full of fury and defiance. He was genuinely unafraid.

I held the revolver steady.

A crowd had begun to gather around us. I was barely aware of them. I could hear a dim hubbub of voices, appalled gasps, the odd muted murmur of protest.

Moran’s life hung in the balance. His fate was mine to decide, and mine alone. The presence of eyewitnesses would not deter me. Had any of them known who Moran was, they would have been cheering me on. This was my opportunity to rid the world of a scourge.

I lowered the gun.

Moran grimaced.

Then a pair of uniformed constables appeared. They were all set to arrest me – and well they might, since I looked to be the aggressor in the situation – but then one of them recognised me. It was Briggs, the policeman who had been charged by Tomlinson with escorting Holmes and me to the Grainger house in Jericho. I swiftly explained who Moran was, and added that Inspector Tomlinson lay in the University Galleries, in dire need of assistance.

Briggs and his colleague blew their whistles.

Moran laughed.

“Seems I won’t be joining those martyrs after all,” he said. It was hard to know if he was relieved or disappointed.

“Not today,” I replied. “Not by my hand. But the hangman’s noose awaits you. You and Moriarty.”

“Ha! As if Sherlock Holmes will put his faith in the British justice system. I said he has the stuff, like you and me. He’s willing to do what it takes. You left him with Moriarty to come after me. Go back and see how that has panned out.”

I returned to the Thinking Engine chamber with Moran’s words ringing in my ears. The last I saw of the shikari that day, he was handcuffed and in custody, with the burly Briggs standing guard over him.

Lord Knaresfield and Slater were still in the main part of the chamber, and Tomlinson had joined them there. While Slater gingerly probed the shape of the large bruise behind his ear, his lordship put the finishing touches to the bandage he had been applying to Tomlinson’s leg. For that purpose, he had borrowed the theatre-mask tie given to Slater by his actress paramour.

Of Holmes there was no sign.

Then my friend emerged from the interior of the Thinking Engine, rubbing the palm of one hand thoughtfully with the thumb of the other. His expression was sombre, and I knew at once that Moran’s prediction had been borne out. Professor Moriarty was no longer amongst the living.

“He’s gone,” Holmes said. “Damnedest thing. He just stopped breathing and slipped away. The final thwarting of his plans must have been too much for him. In his enfeebled condition, he couldn’t take it. The last straw. His body gave out.”

I drew close to him and, speaking low so that only he could hear, said, “Holmes, I don’t suppose if I were to go inside the Engine I would find any indication that you had some involvement in his death.”

“Moriarty is no more,” Holmes stated. “That is all that needs to be said and all anyone needs to know. Feel free to go in there and see for yourself. In fact, I should be glad if you did. Official medical confirmation of expiry would be welcome.”

I re-entered the Engine. There was Professor Moriarty, his head tilted back as far as the wicker cradle would allow. His arm had been unfastened from the strap and laid out as before on the chair arm. Quantock was still slumped with his head on Moriarty’s lap, like some loyal supplicant.

I moved closer. Moriarty’s eyes, half-lidded, stared into space. The tip of his tongue protruded between his lips. He looked, all at once, vacant and dull-witted, robbed of the intelligence which had burned fiercely within him even in his crippled state and had driven him to unconscionable deeds.

I put my ear beside his mouth. There were no breath sounds. I felt for a pulse in his neck. There was none.

His skin was cooling, gaining a waxy pallor.

I took a step back. I could see nothing to contradict Holmes’s assertion that Moriarty had died of natural causes. The only thing at all suggestive of foul play was the restoring of the arm to its original position. But then, the limb could conceivably have slipped from the strap and flopped onto the chair arm of its own accord.

Holmes was right. All that needed to be said and all anyone needed to know was that Professor James Moriarty was finally, unarguably, incontrovertibly, dead.

The interview which appeared in the
Illustrated London News
a fortnight later was not the hatchet job one might have anticipated. Far from it. Archie Slater composed a balanced, broadly favourable portrait of Holmes, describing him as “enigmatic” and “quixotic” and referring to “complexities of personality” but otherwise merely quoting Holmes’s answers to his questions verbatim, with next to no authorial interpolation.

By a gentlemen’s agreement between Slater and Holmes, the subject of the Thinking Engine was not raised. If, from this, one were to infer that Slater’s abrupt
volte-face
towards Holmes was in any way related to Holmes agreeing not to divulge the part Slater had played in the events at Oxford, one would not be far off the mark.

Lord Knaresfield’s name did not crop up in the article at all. His lordship did at least honour his commitment to the wager with Holmes and privately sent my friend a cheque for £500. His public support for the Thinking Engine melted away to nothing, and his newspapers did a good job of denouncing the late Professor Malcolm Quantock as a fraud and a charlatan who had come close to inflicting a great ill upon the world through his collaboration with the equally late Professor Moriarty. Other rival papers called the whole affair a debacle and vindictively rubbished Knaresfield. His skin, I imagine, was thick enough to withstand it. Wealth is a great insulator.

Another element missing from the article was our theft of Elias Ashmole’s golden chain. Holmes had duly returned the original to its rightful place, and Inspector Tomlinson had declared himself satisfied and said there would be no prosecution. The custodians of the University Galleries remained unaware the chain had even been gone, so in that sense, could it be said that a crime was even committed?

At Holmes’s request I read the interview out loud to him, while he busied himself extricating shag tobacco from the toe of the Persian slipper on the fireplace mantel at 221B and tamping it into his briar pipe, which he then lit and smoked ruminatively. When I was finished, I laid aside the copy of the
News
and enquired whether he believed Slater was done with him.

“He feels he owes us a debt of gratitude for rescuing him from Moran,” Holmes said. “The sinner hath repented, as far as his dealings with me are concerned, and I doubt we shall hear anything adverse from him again.”

“And Moran himself? We can expect never to hear anything from him again too?”

“If through some vagary of the law he somehow escapes execution, he will almost certainly be transported to the colonies. I consider half a world to be a safe enough distance between us. It’s queer, though, Watson.”

“What is?”

“Everything began with the Rubenstein Collection and dear old Pharaoh Djedhor, the unquiet mummy, in one museum. And how did it end? In another museum, with another emperor who should have been dead but was not, hidden within a different kind of sarcophagus. An intriguing symmetry there.”

“Moriarty, at any rate, unlike Djedhor, will never rise from the grave again. You saw to that.”

A cloud of smoke swirled about Holmes’s face. He waved it away.

“You cannot prove it,” he said.

“Nor do I wish to. The coroner’s report was unambiguous. There was a quantity of morphine in Moriarty’s bloodstream but it was consistent with prolonged and repeated use of the substance. The cause of death was spontaneous respiratory failure. In a body as frail and severely impaired as Moriarty’s was, that would not be unlikely. The main thing is that there were no signs of third-party involvement, such as, say, a fresh injection mark and empty phials of morphine discovered lying around at the scene.”

“As if anyone would leave such obvious traces of malfeasance.”

“No, a shrewd person would have injected the morphine via a pre-existing pinprick and carried the used syringe and empty phials away concealed about his body. A shrewd person would also have helped Inspector Tomlinson out of the Engine before returning on some pretext or other to administer the overdose.”

“So you are happy to go along with the coroner’s findings?”

“I am.”

“And are you happy that you did not shoot Moran, even when you had the opportunity?”

“It is a question I have asked myself many times over these past few days,” I said. “All things considered, the answer is yes. My conscience would not have let me rest if I had just gunned him down in cold blood.”

“Then we are both of us shrewd people,” Holmes said. “And,” he added, puffing on his pipe, “both of us quite at peace with our consciences.”

I’d like to thank Nick Tucker for his support for my Holmesian endeavours and the loan of some precious bound copies of
The Strand
; Nick Landau and Vivien Cheung for being such excellent publishers; and Dr Stephen Harada DDS for being a wonderful cheerleader, even if he does occasionally send me the wrong emails.