Sherlock Holmes (30 page)

“Thank you, inspector. I have tried to behave rationally and not let resentment get the better of me.”

“What I don’t see is how Professor Moriarty ties in. And what the relevance of the Turk?”

“For the answer to that,” said Holmes, “we must look to the person here who would seem to be the most innocent of wrongdoing but is not. He knows perfectly well how Moriarty and the Turk fit in. Don’t you, Professor Quantock?”

“I b-beg your pardon?” Quantock blinked rapidly, his hands darting like spiders. He appeared flabbergasted.

“Let us consider your background,” said Holmes. “You came to Oxford from another, lesser university. I discovered its name from your book on Vandermonde’s Convolution. It so happens to be the same university where Professor Moriarty was a Fellow. You and he were contemporaries there. Edward Caird told me you had left the place ‘under a cloud’. So had Moriarty, and at roughly the same time. I wonder if the rumours of misconduct which became attached to you are similar to the ones attaching to him. I would not be surprised if they are.”

“Good Lord,” I said. “You mean he and Moriarty were friends?”

“Both mathematicians, at a relatively small provincial university. It would be highly unlikely they did not know one other, and that is confirmed by the dedication at the front of Quantock’s book. ‘To J.M.,
magister arithmeticae et animi mei
.’ Who else could J.M. be but James Moriarty? ‘Master of arithmetic and of my soul.’ The two of them may have forged a bond of mutual admiration, or else – and this is the scenario I lean towards – Moriarty made Quantock his willing thrall, as he did so many others. A strong, charismatic personality such as Moriarty’s would have easily overpowered that of a meeker, more hesitant man, to make him a fellow traveller in whatever shady habits he indulged in.”

“Then,” said Tomlinson, “Professor Quantock has been enacting a sort of revenge against you for Professor Moriarty’s death?”

“I believe that to be the case.”

“With Moran as his accomplice,” I said.

“And not the only one. Isn’t that so, professor?”

Quantock looked petulantly around at the rest of us. He had the air of someone under siege, harried, but far from defeated.

“Your silence is as good as a yes,” said Holmes. “Not only have you allied yourself with Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s thuggish second-in-command, but with another Moriarty too. A former soldier and colonel, like Moran himself.”

“The brother,” I said.

“That is my belief,” said Holmes. “Here is where the Turk comes in. That automaton, it transpired, was no such thing. The Turk is one of the greatest hoaxes of all time. It fooled princes, statesmen and chess grandmasters alike. The model of a human figure was merely a puppet. The so-called workings built into the table were in fact elements of the mechanism by which the chess pieces were controlled. This consisted principally of a set of levers that opened and closed the model’s hand and moved it to the desired location on the board, matching a second board set within the machine, in the manner of a pantograph. Clockwork sounds were manufactured so as to give the impression that the Turk was being driven by some intricate inner apparatus.”

“Whereas in fact it was not,” I said, the light dawning. “It was driven by a man.”

“A chess expert, hidden inside the table,” said Holmes. “There were at least five of them all told, at various different times. Wherever the Turk was exhibited, one of them would be operating it secretly from within, fostering the illusion of a machine with the mind of a human.”

“And the Thinking Engine – it is the same? There’s someone in there?”

From Knaresfield, Slater and Tomlinson there were expressions of astonishment, none of them feigned; from Quantock, just a shifty glance to the side and a hand flap that could be interpreted to mean many things or nothing at all.

“I can allege that with confidence,” said Holmes, “because there is no earthly way the Engine could have known of the theft of Ashmole’s chain
unless
there was someone inside it. This someone has been inhabiting it all along, like a hermit crab in its borrowed shell, and was here last night when Watson and I were discussing what we had just done. He overheard everything – exactly as he was meant to. He then, just moments ago, made the tactical error of revealing what he knew. He simply couldn’t help himself. The Thinking Engine could not betray ignorance, could it? It could not be wrong. Especially when, by being right, it could land Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in hot water.”

“Last night we were laying a trap for it?” I said. I thought back to our time in the British Museum all those months ago, and suddenly light dawned. “My God, Holmes,” I cried. “Are you saying that Houdini has performed the same trick and is living within the Thinking Engine, as he did the mummy? That Rubenstein sent him to aid Knaresfield in bringing you low?”

My companion shook his head, a familiar look of condescension on his face. “No, no, Watson. We have already ascertained that while Knaresfield and Rubenstein took advantage of the Engine’s existence, they are not the prime movers in this case, merely the enablers.” He waved a dismissive hand in Knaresfield’s direction. “And consider, our friend Mr Houdini is skilled in physical feats and showmanship but this endeavour required a great mind, one the equal of the late unlamented Professor Moriarty.”

He drew himself up to his full height. “We were indeed laying a trap for the man inside the Thinking Engine. A man who shares the blood – and the mind – of the Napoleon of crime. His brother, Colonel Moriarty himself. The man who took it very hard when I exposed his older sibling as the head of the vilest and most extensive criminal organisation this country has ever known. He and Quantock have been collaborators in a monstrous fraud, while a third member of their unholy trinity, Moran, does their dirty work.”

A loud
crack
made me jump. The cylinder which Quantock was holding, fragile like all of its kind, had shattered into a dozen pieces in his grasp. He had gripped it too tightly. Now it lay in fragments on the floor.

Quantock looked down at his hands. A couple of his fingers, lacerated by the shards of cylinder, were bleeding. Seemingly untroubled by the pain, he looked up again, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a terrible, leering grin.

“Not bad, Mr Holmes,” he said. “Not b-bad at all. There’s only one problem.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“Right surname,” said Quantock. “Wrong Moriarty.”

There were times when it was hard to gauge Sherlock Holmes’s reaction to an unexpected development or a reversal of fortune. Usually he would respond as anyone might, with a flinch of surprise and perhaps an oath. Occasionally, however, he would go blank, his face taking on a flat affect, as though a part of him had shut down, screening itself off from the world. A stage curtain would descend, as it were, obscuring the theatre of his mind.

This was one of those occasions. Quantock’s words seemed to freeze him, rendering him immobile and mute. They stunned him just as effectively as a blow from a cosh might have.

On me they weren’t much less incapacitating, although I did manage to splutter out a sentence or two. “There’s another Moriarty. A third one. Some cousin, some nephew we’ve not heard about before.”

I said it more in hope than expectation, and Quantock’s slow head-shake told me I was destined for disappointment.

“There is only one,” the mathematician said. “Only one M-Moriarty that matters. The original. The inimitable.”

“But he is dead!” Tomlinson objected. “We’ve been assured of that. He perished at the Reichenbach Falls, by Mr Holmes’s hand, with his criminal organisation in smithereens.”

“You b-believed Holmes himself to be dead,” said Quantock. “Yet he stands before you t-today, large as l-life. If he survived their encounter, why could the same not be tr-true of his archenemy? Professor Moriarty, after all, is ev-every bit his equal.”

“Am I missing something here?” said Lord Knaresfield. “There’s a man inside that machine, and he’s some professor friend of Quantock’s who is supposed to be dead but isn’t. Is that about the long and the short of it?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, your lordship,” said Tomlinson. “Professor Moriarty is no ordinary man. He’s a legend amongst criminals – their god-king, their Alexander. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

“The name rings a bell, but I’m not always up to date on current events. I print the news, but that doesn’t make me an expert on it.”

“In the East End, people still talk about him in hushed tones,” said Slater. “I’ve a couple of underworld contacts I use for tip-offs and information. Even to this day, four years after Moriarty was last seen or heard from, my snitches are wary of mentioning him. They’ll take the Devil’s name in vain but not his. That’s the kind of awe he held people in.”

“Oh well then, that’s the explanation,” said Knaresfield. “It’s London stuff and I’m a northerner. No wonder I don’t know so much about it.”

“And now, allegedly, he’s here,” I said. “But it’s preposterous. I don’t credit it for one moment. Professor Moriarty is inside the Thinking Engine? Come now, Quantock. You’re bluffing. It’s wishful thinking on your part, that’s all. Holmes may have come back from the dead but he never actually fell into the Reichenbach Falls, whereas Moriarty assuredly did. No man could survive that! Your old friend is gone but you’re desperately trying to resurrect him somehow, keep his memory alive. It’s a nice try. We’re all shocked, just as you hoped. But it’s
Colonel
Moriarty in there, not Professor. Don’t you agree, Holmes?”

My friend was still inert, although I sensed calculation in his eyes, his brain rapidly running through permutations. His gaze was fixed on the Engine. It was as though he was trying to pierce it with his vision, see through the external layers of mechanism to the interior, where resided a human being, the chess expert within this elaborate Turk.

“Mr Holmes knows I am t-telling the truth,” said Quantock. “What do I have to gain at this point in the proceedings by l-lying? Our scheme stands revealed. I am making cl-claims that can be verified with little effort. The Thinking Engine is a gr-grand charade, and I am one of its architects. The other architect l-lurks within, and after all this time I think h-he would like to be f-formally reacquainted with the man who d-did his utmost to end his life but failed.”

At last Holmes spoke. “Open it up.”

Quantock chuckled. “There. The great consulting detective w-wants to see for himself. He knows, but knowing isn’t en-enough. He will only acc-accept the evidence of his own eyes.”

“Open it up,” Holmes repeated, more vehemently this time. “Damn you, man, do it!”

“I c-could. Or I could simply savour the moment. I don’t foresee many pleasures in my f-future, so I should t-take whatever ones I can st-still find.”

Holmes lunged towards me and snatched the revolver from my pocket. He moved so fast, I could not have stopped him even if I had wanted to.

He covered the ground between him and Quantock in three swift paces and lodged the barrel of the gun against the mathematician’s head.

“Open it up or I shall open up your skull. Do not mistake that for a threat. It is a statement of fact.”

“No n-need to be that way. Of c-course I shall open it for you.”

“And no tricks,” Holmes said as Quantock moved to the left-hand side of the Thinking Engine’s front. “I wouldn’t put it past you to have installed booby traps, or to have some form of weapon concealed nearby, in case of emergency.”

“Then y-you have misread me, Mr Holmes. I n-never anticipated that I would be compelled to unlock the Engine. Thus I never anticipated th-that defensive measures w-would be required.”

Having wrapped a handkerchief around his bloodied fingers, Quantock manipulated one of the columns of dials on the Engine. He turned them until he had lined up a set of numbers. These clearly acted like the combination on a safe, as I heard unseen bolts retract.

“The first ten primes in order,” he said. “It’s the most elegant and b-beautiful number sequence there is.”

As the last bolt clunked back, a section of the Engine’s front broke clear, swinging outward on hinges. Quantock pulled on this door, which fitted into the face of the machine like some fantastically intricate jigsaw piece. Its edges were not smooth but rather an arabesque lattice of moving parts that meshed perfectly with their neighbours when the door was shut. You would never have realised it was there unless you had known.

The opening of the door conclusively gave away the lie of the Thinking Engine, showing that what we had been led to believe was a solid block of machinery was in fact hollow. The device consisted of a shell a couple of yards thick all round, walls constructed from components that were so densely integrated one could not see through them. The Engine gave the illusion of computational activity, but an illusion was all it was. The wheels and cogs revolved at random, having no purpose other than to convey activity and make noise – the proverbial sound and fury signifying nothing.

Quantock invited Holmes to step across the threshold. I went too, as did Tomlinson.

“Be careful,” I warned my friend. “If it really is Moriarty in there…”

“Regrettably, James is in no position to p-pose any direct danger to you,” said Quantock. “He is no longer quite the man he w-was.”

In a space no bigger than a garden shed, enclosed on all four sides by a great brass-and-steel sham, we came face to face with the Napoleon of crime.

Or rather, what was left of him.

Up until that moment, I had never seen Professor Moriarty at close hand. As related in “The Final Problem”, hitherto I had had but a single distant glimpse of him. That was when I had spied him striding along the hill path to his rendezvous with Holmes in Switzerland, a black figure outlined against the green of the Alpine landscape. At the time, I had not known who this solitary walker was, and nothing about him had struck me as incongruous or noteworthy, other than the unusual energy with which he moved. Afterwards I would realise that this had been the purposeful gait of a man who had scores to settle and murder on his mind.