The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

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!’

Holmes was, as always, correct. At midday precisely there was a knock on the door. Moments later, Mrs Turner showed a young man in a suit in to see us.

‘Arthur Chidlow, from the Home Office,’ he said, looking from Holmes to me and back. ‘Gentlemen, I am frankly honoured and awed to meet you.’

‘Please, let us set aside the needless compliments,’ Holmes said, although I knew that he was pleased at the fact that his reputation was still as strong as it ever was. ‘You are here to ask for my assistance in securing the effects of the late and unlamented Professor James Moriarty.’

Chidlow smiled, and shook his head admiringly. ‘News travels fast,’ he said. ‘As we should, given the circumstances. Do you have any thoughts as to how we should proceed?’

Holmes indicated the newspaper, where it lay on the table beside him. ‘The answer is in there,’ he said.

Chidlow frowned. ‘I read the newspaper on the train,’ he said. ‘Apart from the bare notification of the death of the professor’s other identity, I saw nothing.’

‘You saw,’ Holmes chided, ‘but you did not notice. Permit me to draw your attention to the announcements of “Births, Deaths and Marriages”.’ He glanced at me. ‘Watson, perhaps you could do the honours. What do you see there, apart from the particular item that I have circled – the one that announces the death of the professor under his assumed name?’

I picked up the paper and glanced at the page in question while Mrs Turner poured tea for Arthur Chidlow. Something did strike me, as I perused the announcements, and I went back to check to make sure.

‘Two items in particular catch my eye,’ I said. ‘They do not appear to be connected, but they are both in bold, and in the same font – a font that is not used anywhere else on the page.’

‘Indeed,’ Holmes said. ‘Be so kind as to read the first item out.’

‘“In memoriam: Maria Jostmery,” I read. ‘“Of Dutch parentage on both sides”.’ I hesitated. ‘Odd phraseology, I grant you, but I do not discern any hidden message.’

‘Neither do I,’ Chidlow said. ‘It seems innocuous enough.’

‘I would draw your attention,’ Holmes said, ‘to the fact that “Dutch parentage on both sides” could indicate that the unfortunate Maria Jostmery is double Dutch. “Double dutch” also means “nonsense”, of course, and if we rearrange the letters of her name to make more sense then we get “James Moriarty”.’

Arthur Chidlow hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘How stupid of me!’ he cried.

I felt much the same way, but I hid it better. ‘All that we have there is the professor’s name,’ I pointed out. ‘That tells us nothing.’

‘Look at the second entry in the same emboldened font. Read it out, please.’

I did so: ‘“Re: Tim and Sam Mirnlic. Rearranged funeral service at St Alkmund’s Chapel, Wimbledon: Tues, nine o’clock prompt.”’ I glanced at Holmes. ‘The name is unusual, probably Eastern European, and the use of abbreviated Christian names is regrettably casual, but that is a sign of the times, I fear. I presume, however, that we are not dealing with the deaths of two brothers of foreign extraction here?’

Chidlow had been scribbling notes on the back of his hand. ‘It’s another anagram,’ he said. ‘ “Re: Tim and Sam Mirnilc” can be rearranged, as the announcement suggests, into the words “criminal mastermind”.’

Holmes laughed. ‘A jibe directed at me, I suggest,’ he said. ‘The late professor knew that I would be keeping an eye out, and I have certainly described him in those terms often enough. Interesting that he had taken it so much to heart. He must have had his own agents ready and waiting to submit these items upon his death.’ He glanced at Chidlow, and then at me. ‘If we want to know more then I suggest we attend St Alkmund’s Chapel in Wimbledon tomorrow morning for the funeral service of Timothy and Samuel Mirnilc.’

After lunch, and a closer examination of the newspaper to little effect, Arthur Chidlow left for London, with an agreement that we would meet outside the indicated chapel at a quarter to nine the next day. Later that afternoon, a telegram arrived for Holmes from his agent in Greater Malvern, confirming that there had been nothing of interest in the professor’s cottage. Holmes spent the rest of the day tending to his bees, while I read and reread the newspaper, looking in vain for more hidden messages.

Holmes and I caught the milk train to London before sunrise the next day, and at the appointed time we were at the chapel: a small church of grey stone located in the middle of a row of grey houses. Arthur Chidlow was already waiting for us, wrapped up in an overcoat and in a state of some agitation.

‘I have seen a large number of men enter the chapel,’ he said. ‘Several I recognised as being members of the various criminal gangs that currently vie for control of London and the Home Counties.’

‘No Eastern European relatives then?’ I asked facetiously. ‘At least this isn’t a real funeral service.’

‘To my certain knowledge,’ he went on as if I had said nothing, ‘there are representatives of the Yiddishers, the Hoxton Mob, the Bessarabian Tigers, the King’s Cross Gang and the Watney Streeters in there – it’s like a villains’ League of Nations! What’s going on?’

‘I suspect we are here for a cross between the criminal version of the reading of Professor Moriarty’s will and a treasure hunt,’ Holmes said darkly. ‘Everyone in there wants Professor Moriarty’s list of current and future blackmail targets, and possibly his guide to conducting criminal operations as well. The only question is: what will the professor be asking them to do for it, from beyond the grave?’

‘Most of them sent their bodyguards or followers in to search the place first,’ Chidlow continued. ‘I presume they wanted to make sure that the professor did not intend settling some old scores from beyond the grave by means of a well-placed bomb.’

‘That is not the professor’s style,’ Holmes said. ‘I think they are projecting their own blunt methods upon him.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but if you recognise them, can’t you just arrest them and save yourself a lot of trouble?’

Chidlow shrugged. ‘I wish I could, Doctor. I may know who they are and what they have done, but I have no real evidence. No court of law would believe me.’

‘Exactly the problem I have had with Professor Moriarty all these years,’ Holmes pointed out.

We entered into the chapel. It was small, with barely ten rows of pews. At the front, in the midst of the area set out for the choir, was a table. On the table was a wind-up gramophone player.

The pews were nearly filled with a ragtag selection of humanity’s worst representatives. Some were well dressed and some not so much, but they all bore marks of violence such as scars, flattened noses and cauliflower ears. One man, of Maltese extraction I believe, had twin letter ‘H’s carved into his cheeks. I wasn’t sure if that was a mark of belonging to some gang or the sign that he had displeased someone with a sharp knife.

Everybody turned to look at us as we entered, but nobody seemed willing to dispute our reasons for being there. We slid into three spaces at the end of a pew. I found myself sitting next to an elderly man with a wizened face and a mane of white hair. His head projected from his old-fashioned wing collar like that of a tortoise from its shell. He glanced briefly at me and nodded, then looked away. I couldn’t help but wonder which criminal fraternity he was associated with. Perhaps he had just wandered in to warm his old bones.

I checked my watch. It was very nearly nine o’clock, and a flurry of excitement ran through the cold, draughty chapel as a man walked in from the vestry towards the record player. He was holding a shellac phonograph of the same kind that Holmes used to listen to music. The man was nondescript – in his early forties, perhaps – and expressionless. He wore spectacles with round, smoked lenses. Without looking at his audience, he bent over, placed the phonograph on the gramophone player, lifted the stylus and placed it at the beginning of the disc, and then wound the gramophone up and started it going.

A crackling sound filled the chapel. We listened expectantly and, after a few moments, a voice started to speak. It was rough and distorted, but I recognised it as the ash-dry voice of Professor James Moriarty.

‘I predict that there will be a reasonably large audience for this, my final declaration,’ he said. ‘I will not bore you with any preamble, any list of my accomplishments or any attempt to have the final word in the various verbal disputes I have entered into over the years. That will gain me nothing now, and you would not be here if you were not already familiar with my history. As I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Deity of any kind, I can only assume that my consciousness, my genius and all my memories have now dissipated into the random motion of atoms and mol ecules. All that I leave behind is this recording, my various published works of a mathematical or scientific nature, and the unpublished manuscript of my philosophical and practical dissertation on crime, with descriptions of practical examples.’ He paused momentarily, leaving a silence broken only by crackles and pops from the phonograph. I had never credited Professor Moriarty with a sense of humour, but he did seem to be pausing for effect. ‘It is the latter,’ he went on, ‘for which I presume you are all here.’

‘I cannot help,’ Holmes whispered, ‘admire a man who refuses to drop a participle, even in death.’

‘Money is of no use to me now,’ the professor’s voice continued, ‘yet I do not wish to just give my life’s work away to the first person who can get to it and fight the rest of you off. My observations over the past few years depress me: there is little intelligence and even less creativity in English crime now. From the continent has come a flood of clumsy protection schemes and drug rackets, whilst from America has come intergang warfare conducted by means of machine guns and “concrete boots”. I confess to wishing that someone with even a fraction of my wit could weld all of this rough material together and hew it into the kind of organisation that could control crime across entire continents. The problem, of course, is that most criminals these days have a one-track mind – excessive violence is the only solution. Solving this mystery will require more than a single-track approach.’

‘A frightening thought,’ Chidlow murmured.

‘If you are worthy, then this recording is all you will need in order to find my manuscript. I mean that literally – you need consider nothing else in this chapel but the phonograph you see revolving in front of you. My agent, who is standing before you, knows absolutely nothing. His sole instructions have been to be here at a certain time, to play this recording as many times as you require and to take it away and smash it when you have exhausted its possibilities. If you try to take the recording away with you then he is instructed to smash it anyway. I cannot wish you good luck, for luck is nothing but mathematical probabilities resolving themselves in a favourable manner. Nevertheless, I do hope that at least one of you can solve the mystery and prove to me that my work will go on.’

The professor’s voice fell silent, leaving only clicks and pops behind as the stylus circled endlessly in its final groove. A murmur filled the chapel as the various criminals and gang members discussed what they had heard.

The man with the carved ‘H’s in his cheeks stood up. ‘Play it again,’ he ordered in a gruff, accented voice.

The man staffing beside the gramophone nodded. He lifted the stylus from the phonograph and moved it back to the beginning.

We sat there, silent, as the professor’s voice echoed around the chapel again, repeating everything he had said previously. Some in the audience – perhaps I should say ‘congregation’ – made notes, while others strained to hear if there was anything in the background, any other noises that might give the location of Moriarty’s baleful manuscript away. Holmes leaned back against the pew, eyes closed, his fingers moving as if he was conducting an orchestra.

A man whom I took to be of Italian extraction, based on the width of his lapels, stood up and walked to the front of the chapel. ‘Let me see that thing,’ he said, pointing to the disc.

Another man – swarthy and unshaven – stood up and said: ‘If you try to touch that, I’ll cut you – I swear I will.’

The Italian turned and stared at him. ‘Sit down,’ he said quietly, ‘or I’ll slice your throat open and pull your tongue through the hole like a necktie.’

The swarthy man sat down, muttering, and the Italian man held out his hand. Moriarty’s agent took the phonograph from the gramophone and handed it across. The Italian examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his hands.

‘No label,’ he said eventually.

‘What about the other side?’ someone called from the back of the pews. ‘Play that!’

The Italian held the disc up so that everyone could see it. The reverse side was smooth. ‘Nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s single-sided.’

‘Again!’ an East End thug said. He looked as if he would be more at home in a boxing ring than in a chapel. ‘Play the damned thing again, and louder this time!’

In all, we listened to the professor’s voice say the exact same things fourteen more times. By the end of the final recital I could have repeated his speech word for word, with all the gaps intact.

Some of the criminals had left after a few replays. Judging by their expressions they were disappointed and angry that Moriarty’s final secret had not been revealed in a more obvious manner. Others huddled together in small groups, comparing notes and attempting to descry whatever hidden clues Moriarty had left behind – if, indeed, this entire performance hadn’t been a charade intended as a final insult from a dead master criminal. All the while, Moriarty’s agent had moved to one side when it became obvious that nobody wanted to hear the recording a sixteenth time. The table, the phonograph and the gramophone he had left behind. A small group of criminals had gathered around it and were examining the record, turning it over in their hands and looking for some hidden message. Others were arguing with Moriarty’s agent, trying to get him to talk, but he kept shaking his head, saying nothing.

The elderly man beside me had listened to each reply, head thrust forward and eyes closed. Eventually, he too shook his head, made a ‘Tch!’ sound, stood up and pushed past the three of us. When he got to the aisle he turned and shook his fist at the gramophone player, his lips moving silently. He shuffled out.

There were barely half of the original attendees present by then. Holmes gestured to me and to Chidlow that we should join him at the back of the chapel. When he got there, in the relative shadows, he turned to us. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘I am at a loss,’ Chidlow said. His expression was grim. ‘I am hoping that you, Mr Holmes, have managed to spot something that I have not.’

‘Watson?’ Holmes asked, turning to me.

‘Assuming that the Italian gentleman is correct, and that the phonograph has no label affixed to it, then the only thing I can think is that there is something scratched into the shellac itself.’ I nodded towards the front of the chapel. ‘I suspect, however, that the gentlemen up there have been examining it for exactly that.’

‘And such a clumsy means of hiding information would be beneath the professor’s dignity,’ Holmes pointed out. ‘This is his final problem. He will not have made it easy for his putative successor.’

‘Does nothing occur to you, Mr Holmes?’ Chidlow asked despondently. ‘I cannot help thinking that one of the criminals who has already left has picked up on a clue that has passed the rest of us by.’

Holmes stared at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows. ‘I seriously doubt,’ he growled, ‘that any of these people has spotted a clue that has evaded my attention.’

‘Then you have spotted no clues yourself?’ he pressed.

Holmes looked away. ‘There are some indicative factors,’ he muttered. ‘But nothing definitive. Let us take our own look at the gramophone and the phonograph. Perhaps we may see something that the others have missed.’

Holmes led the way to the front of the chapel. There were eleven men still there, standing around and looking uncertain. One or two were talking together, but most of them appeared to have decided that they would operate alone.

Holmes went straight to the gramophone. As he approached it, Moriarty’s agent took a step forward. He watched to make sure that Holmes didn’t try to remove the disc. I noticed a bulge beneath his jacket: he was armed, and presumably willing to use force to ensure that the professor’s instructions were followed to the letter. His face was as expressionless as ever, and his eyes were invisible behind his shaded lenses.

Holmes picked up the phonograph and checked it minutely. ‘No label, as we were told,’ he murmured, ‘no recording on the other side, and no extra information scratched into the material. I am beginning to think – hello, what’s this?’

‘Something of interest?’ Chidlow pressed, moving closer. Several other men from the congregation moved closer to listen.

‘Ah, it is nothing,’ Holmes said dismissively, and handed the phonograph back to Moriarty’s agent. The criminals moved away again, disappointed.

‘What if,’ I suggested in a whisper, a thought having struck me, ‘the clicks and pops on the recording that we were meant to assume were caused by scratches were actually some kind of introduced code!’

‘That’s it!’ Chidlow said excitedly.

‘Alas, no.’ Holmes shook his head. ‘Your suggestion is plausible, but it had already occurred to me. During the fifteen repeats of the message, I timed the occurrence of the apparently extraneous sounds using my heartbeat as a guide. I discerned no regular pattern – they occurred randomly, as far as I could tell.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I did detect something else, however, which I will tell you about in a moment.’

Chidlow frowned. ‘What about the gramophone itself? Is there something about it that might provide a clue?’

Holmes shook his head. ‘Moriarty himself clearly said: “this recording is all you will need in order to find my manuscript. I mean that literally – you need consider nothing else in this chapel but the phonograph you see revolving in front of you”. I think, under the circumstances, we have to take the professor at his word.’

We stood there silently for a while, as the last few criminals drifted away. Eventually, we were alone in the chapel with the gramophone, the phonograph, the table and Moriarty’s agent. He looked at us, his face still impassive, then nodded towards the gramophone – enquiring, I suppose, whether we needed it any more. Holmes shook his head, and the man busied himself with slipping the phonograph into a cardboard sleeve, then lifting it and the gramophone off the table and carrying them away.

‘We can talk now,’ Holmes said. ‘Everyone else has left – either disappointed that the professor wasn’t being any clearer or because they think they have detected his hidden message and are currently following whatever clues they think they spotted and everyone else missed.’ He paused, smiling. ‘I can guarantee that none of them have spotted the real clue.’

Chidlow stared at Holmes with something close to awe in his eyes. ‘You did hear something! What was it?’

‘Did you remark upon the fact that the professor made reference to this very place?’ Holmes asked.

Chidlow frowned. ‘I believe he did mention it. You used the phrase just now.’

‘He said,’ I recalled, ‘ “you need consider nothing else in this chapel but the phonograph you see revolving in front of you”.’

‘No, he said “church”, not “chapel”,’ Chidlow corrected me.

‘I am fairly sure he said “chapel”,’ I countered.

‘In fact,’ Holmes interrupted, ‘he said both.’

Chidlow and I stared at one another. ‘How is that possible?’ the Home Office man asked.

‘I memorised the entire recitation the first time it was played,’ Holmes replied. ‘Moriarty clearly said “chapel” then. On the subsequent fifteen repeats, he said “chapel” eight times and “church” seven times.’

‘But …’ My brain was turning over and over in confusion. ‘But there was only one recording!’

‘Not so,’ Holmes explained triumphantly. ‘The phonograph contains not one spiral groove into which the professor’s words have been encoded by means of vibration, but two, each running alongside the other. Whether the stylus falls into the first groove or the second one when Moriarty’s man places it on the shellac is up to chance. Each groove contains the same message with one crucial difference – in one he uses the word “chapel” and in the other he uses the word “church”.’

‘He told us,’ I whispered. ‘He actually told us. He said: “Solving this mystery will require more than a single-track approach”. He was right! We needed both tracks!’

Chidlow nodded thoughtfully. ‘That has to be significant,’ he mused. ‘Chapel and church – but what could it mean? Is his manuscript here, in the building – close by for us to find?’

‘Certainly not,’ Holmes said. ‘Take those two words and ignore the rest of the message. “Chapel” and “church”. Ignore the common letters – this gives us the apparently meaningless “apel” and “urch”. Now remember Moriarty’s fondness for anagrams, as demonstrated in yesterday’s newspaper. Swap around the initial vowels and we get “uple” and “arch”. Rearrange “uple” and we get “Lupe”, which is an administrative region in the centre of France.’ He smiled. ‘Being of French descent on my mother’s side, I recognised it instantly. I would suggest that if you travel to the small region of Lupe you will find a decorative arch, commemorating the Great War perhaps, or as the entrance to some public building. Professor Moriarty’s legacy will be there, buried at the base of the arch like the treasure at the end of a rainbow!’

‘Incredible!’ Chidlow breathed. ‘Mister Holmes, you are a marvel – a true marvel. I must arrange travel immediately. Are you gentlemen happy to make your own way home if I leave you here? Be assured, you have provided your government with a great service.’

‘You must go, of course,’ Holmes said, patting the Home Office man on the shoulder. ‘Send us a telegram when you have found the professor’s manuscript, and the list of potential blackmail subjects.’

‘I will!’ he called back over his shoulder as he sprinted down the aisle.

I shook my head. ‘Holmes, you continue to amaze me, even now.’

He smiled. ‘There will be no telegram,’ he said, as we heard the door at the front of the chapel slam.

‘You don’t think he will find the manuscript?’

‘Oh, I am quite sure he will find it. The problem is that his name isn’t Arthur Chidlow, and he does not work for the Home Office.’ He cocked his head to one side and raised his voice. ‘Does he, Professor?’

The Professor’s agent stepped out of the shadows. The smoked glass of his round spectacles made his eyes look like two dark holes in his face. He reached up and removed them. Underneath, his eyes were a watery and faded blue, and they seemed to have dark rings all the way around them. Abruptly, he pulled the hair from his head, revealing it to be a wig covering a bald, liver-spotted pate. He reached behind his head with both hands and pulled forwards. His entire face seemed to sag as he peeled it off. Underneath were the lined features and querulous expression of a man I had seen several times before in my life. Professor James Moriarty.

I could feel my heart beating rapidly in my chest, and the stone floor of the chapel seemed to lurch under my feet. I took several deep breaths to calm myself down. At my age, shock is something that should be avoided whenever possible.

‘His true name is Jon Paulson,’ Moriarty said in the same dryas-dust voice that I had recently heard on the phonograph. He placed the wig and the mask – made from some kind of guttapercha, I suspected – on the table where the gramophone had been. ‘He is, perhaps, the closest I have to a rival in the criminal fraternity. Unlike his rivals, he is a clear thinker, able to plan and execute the most complex of operations. There are numerous fake paintings hanging in galleries around the world in place of those he has stolen, and I would also recommend that the Bank of England checks all of the gold bars in its vaults for purity. Some of them are merely lead covered with a thin gold film. I presume it was his shoelaces that gave him away?’

‘That,’ Holmes said calmly, as if discussing the weather, ‘and the knot in his tie.’

Moriarty gazed at Holmes in curiosity. ‘What gave me away, Mister Holmes?’

‘Your neck seemed older than your face,’ Holmes replied. ‘That, and the slight but noticeable extra muscular development of your neck muscles due to that habitual nervous tic you have exhibited for so long.’

Moriarty nodded. ‘It is now under control, thanks to recent developments in pharmaceutical products. I should have worn a neck prosthesis, as well as the mask.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Ironic, is it not, that you have spent so many years made up to resemble various older people, whereas it is left to me to disguise myself as someone younger?’

My brain was slow to catch up with the apparently casual conversation that the two of them were having. ‘So Arthur Chidlow wasn’t Arthur Chidlow at all, but a career criminal named Jon Paulson?’ I shook my head. ‘And he retained Holmes’s services to help solve the final mystery of your legacy, which turned out not to be your legacy at all? But why go through this elaborate charade?’

‘Mister Holmes?’ Moriarty murmured, raising an eyebrow.

‘The professor was simply eliminating his closest competition.’ He raised his own bushy eyebrow at the professor. ‘What will he find, Professor?’

‘A bomb, I presume?’ I muttered.

Moriarty shook his head. ‘I abhor the kind of casual violence that the criminals such as the ones gathered here today exhibit. No, the manuscript is there, as promised. The problem that Mr Paulson will find is that the crimes so meticulously described have several major flaws in them. If he tries to replicate them then he will fail, catastrophically and embarrassingly.’

‘If he is as intelligent as you say, he may spot the flaws,’ I pointed out.

‘That would be a distinct possibility if the pages of the manuscript had not been coated with a chemical that I have distilled from ergot fungus. It will render him … highly suggestible and subject to strange hallucinations. He will believe what he reads without question.’ He smiled – a stricture of the mouth that had no humour in it, and made him look momentarily like a venomous snake. ‘If he does try to “adjust” my instructions whilst under the influence of the ergot derivative then I will be intrigued to see how close to surrealism crime can get.’

‘And the blackmail information,’ Holmes asked. ‘Completely false, I presume?’

‘Indeed. It should prove most entertaining if he tries to make use of it.’

I glanced from Holmes to Moriarty and then back again. ‘Surely,’ I started, ‘we should …’

‘We should what?’ Holmes asked. ‘Stop one criminal from rushing off to find a fake manuscript left as a trick by another criminal? Why is that something we should concern ourselves with? Arrest either of these criminals for breaking a law? Which laws have either of them broken to our knowledge? Somehow raise concerns that the professor here has faked his own death? The newspaper announcement was not a legal notification and, besides, it mentioned a name belonging to no real human being, as far as we know.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘Well played, Professor. Well played indeed.’

‘Believe it or not, your praise means a great deal to me, Mister Holmes. Thank you.’ His head moved slowly left and right: a nervous habit now, I presume, rather than an actual physical problem. ‘You and I are living fossils, Mister Holmes, like the horseshoe crab. The world has evolved around us, leaving us behind, stranded on the beach of time. I have spent the last few years regretting this, and I have decided – reluctantly – to do something about it. I am coming out of retirement, Mister Holmes. Thanks to the pharmaceutical industry I expect I have a good few years left in me, as have you. I give you fair warning that I am planning something that will rock this nation to its very foundations. Stop me if you dare, Mister Holmes. Stop me if you can.’

Holmes gazed at the professor for a long moment, then turned to me. He seemed to be standing straighter, and his face, although still lined and old, was alive with fierce intelligence.

‘Professor,’ he said firmly, ‘it will be my pleasure.’