Sherlock Holmes (31 page)

Otherwise, my knowledge of Moriarty’s physical appearance came solely from Holmes, who had described a high, domed forehead – not unlike his own – along with puckered, deeply sunken eyes, pale skin, and rounded shoulders. There was also the sinister detail of the reptilian manner in which Moriarty held himself, oscillating slowly from side to side as he stood, like a cobra hypnotising its prey. Sidney Paget’s illustrations in
The Strand
had captured his likeness well, so Holmes told me, but could not hope to convey the aura of sheer malice he exuded. “To be in the presence of Moriarty,” Holmes once said, “is to be confronted with the chilling possibility that there is no such thing as decency or humaneness. They are artificial constructs. There is only a howling pit of darkness, intrinsic to every one of us, which most do their best to disavow but which is our true nature. In Moriarty, it is not suppressed. It is not repudiated. It is given free rein.”

The man seated within the Thinking Engine did not, at first sight, strike me as worthy of this reputation. For one thing there was precious little of him to look at. He lacked one arm, lost at the shoulder, and both legs from the knee down. He was fastened into a sturdy iron chair, his torso secured by leather straps. His head rested in a cradle of padded wicker which kept it upright and facing forwards. Not only was he deprived of limbs but he was quite clearly suffering from quadriplegic paralysis, mostly likely the result of a fracture of an upper cervical vertebra and the consequent severance of his spinal cord. His remaining arm displayed the flaccidity that is a common indicator of such an injury. The hand lay motionless on the arm of the chair, fingers splayed, like some hideous dead insect.

His head still had some range of motion, and as we came in he swivelled it towards us to fix us with a look. His eyes, in their wrinkled recesses, glowed like twin moons. The shape he pulled his mouth into might have been intended as a grin, an ironic gesture of welcome, but it resembled just as much the rictus of someone in dire agony.

Quantock took up position behind him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I h-had to bring them in, James. I had no ch-choice.”

Moriarty rolled his eyes up to Quantock, then back to us.

Beside me, Holmes had gone rigid, as though he was seeing a ghost. In a sense, he was. The revolver hung loose from his grasp. He seemed to have forgotten he was holding it.

“I watched you fall,” he said in hushed tones. “I overpowered you. I toppled you from the pathway and saw you strike the rocks several hundred feet below and vanish into the water. No one could have survived a fall like that. No one.”

“And y-yet James did,” said Quantock, patting Moriarty with a mixture of affection and veneration. “Such is his will to live. He survived when his body was so b-battered and broken, the pain alone would have killed a lesser man. Which reminds me. It’s t-time for your medication, James.”

There were shelves inside the Engine laden with medical paraphernalia – syringes and drugs, mostly – and also glass jars of water and tinned foodstuffs. Books sat within easy reach of the chair, works of reference such as almanacs, encyclopaedias and histories.

We watched as Quantock loaded a syringe with a quantity of morphine from a phial, then rolled up Moriarty’s sleeve and turned his forearm over to expose the underside. He did this with the tenderness of a nurse dealing with a favoured patient. The skin of the arm was stippled with tiny red dots, constellations of pinpricks. Quantock was poised to administer the injection when Holmes stopped him.

“No. Stand back.”

“But J-James is in constant pain. He needs relief from it.”

The gun came up. “He deserves none. Step away from him.”

Quantock grimaced but did as Holmes said.

Moriarty’s eyes blazed.

“I would like to know how you managed it, Moriarty,” Holmes said. “How you cheated death.”

“Oh, I c-can tell you h-how,” said Quantock.

“I want to hear it from his own lips. Can he not speak?”

“Only… with… difficulty.”

It was a wisp of sound, each word pushed out on a gasping breath with a rapid inhalation between. I added a crushed larynx to the litany of terrible injuries Moriarty had sustained. I still felt no pity for him whatsoever.

“But… I… would… prefer… to… use… the… voice… Malcolm… has… lately… given… me,” he croaked. “More… articulate. Less… effort.”

His hand moved. The nerve damage from the spinal break was not total and he retained some control over the appendage. It crawled to a panel mounted on the end of the chair arm. There sat a stenotype keyboard of the kind used by stenographers to record court and parliamentary proceedings. It had been cunningly modified so that it could be operated one-handed. Moriarty arranged his fingers over the spindly, fanned keys and began to tap out sentences.

Outside, the voice cabinet relayed his words, translating type to speech.

“Took precaution before departing for our assignation. Put on hidden armour of own devising. Plates of shellac reinforced with whalebone. Worn like leotard beneath clothing. To absorb blows to body.”

“I did feel an unusual undergarment on your person as we fought,” said Holmes. “At first I took it for a hernia truss, but then a corset seemed more likely.”

Moriarty greeted the jibe with a baleful glare.

“Had we boxed rather than wrestled,” my friend added, “I daresay it might have made a difference.”

“Armour still served useful purpose during fall,” Moriarty said. “Afforded some protection upon impact. Internal organs were undamaged. Bones not. Entered water and nearly drowned. Limbs useless. Thrown about in turbulence of whirlpool. Floated to surface eventually. Carried along by river current for some dist[ ].”

“‘Dist’?” I said.

“He m-means distance,” said Quantock. “Cylinder s-seventeen is missing, remember? That restricts his vocabulary. Certain syllables will inevitably drop out.”

“So the Thinking Engine has a speech impediment too,” said Tomlinson.

Quantock looked daggers at him.

Moriarty continued depressing the keys.

“River shallowed, flattening out. Fetched up on mud bank. Lay helpless. Stranded. Was discovered in evening by goatherd. Carried to [ ]el.”

“Hovel, I think that w-word was,” said Quantock.

“Goatherd and wife tended. Looked after. Money in wallet. Swiss francs. Within days, arranged to be taken to hospital in Lu[ ].”

“Lucerne,” said Quantock.

“We guessed that,” said Holmes tersely. “So you were saved by a goatherd and treated by Swiss doctors, who are amongst the best in the world. Your arm and legs were, I imagine, beyond salvaging.”

“Twisted. Shattered. Risk of gangrene setting in. Required amputation. Recovery lasted months. Meanwhile feigned amnesia. Assumed by local authorities to be hiker who slipped and fell. Then tr[ ]ferred to sanatorium in Geneva. One whole year before healed enough to be discharged.”

“By which time you had become aware that you no longer had any assets in England to speak of. Your organisation was destroyed. Everything you had built up over the course of your criminal career was now as useless to you as your body.”

“Yet brain intact,” Moriarty declared via the voice cabinet. “Brain the source of power. Greatest weapon in arsenal. Returned to England using contingency funds deposited in Zurich bank account. Lay low. Began to re-establish contact with few re[ ] ing associates.”

“Including m-me,” said Quantock. “I was the f-first he got in touch with. A b-bolt from the blue, but not an unwelcome one. I had not forgotten James. We had been so close before he l-left for London and I found a post at Oxford. I had resigned myself to life without h-him, and then all of a s-sudden he was back. How c-could I refuse his pleas for help? How could I not take c-care of him in his hour of greatest need?”

“That was nearly three years ago,” Holmes said to Moriarty. “All this time you have been brooding, scheming, trying to work out how best to strike back at me.”

“Not
all
that time, surely,” said Tomlinson. “You were ‘dead’ until last year, Mr Holmes, don’t forget.”

“As far as the rest of the world was concerned, yes. But Moriarty would have known I was not. Watson fancied that he was the last person alive to see me before my supposed demise, but in fact that honour went to Moriarty.”

“Not dead but not visible,” said Moriarty’s disembodied voice, which was also Quantock’s voice – a weird symmetry, reflecting the weird intimacy between the two men. “Knew you were in hiding. Knew you would re-emerge sooner or later. Once you felt safe. Sherlock Holmes could not shun limelight forever. Too much the glory hound.”

“And s-so we bided our time,” said Quantock, “and sure enough, early last year, who sh-should prance back onto the p-public stage but the man himself?”

“Heard Mor[ ] tried to kill you in London.” It seemed to frustrate Moriarty that he couldn’t sound out Moran’s name properly. “Informed by contacts of failed assassination bid. Reached out to Mor[ ] while in custody. Arranged escape. Reunited.”

“The old firm, back together,” I drawled. “With a new lackey, Quantock.”

“Lackey!” the mathematician snorted. “I have been every bit as much of a p-participant in this business as James or the c-colonel.”

“You’ve certainly fulfilled your remit as the public face of the Thinking Engine,” said Holmes. “Those stunts you pulled – wandering through busy traffic on St Giles’, squatting atop the clock tower of St Mary’s, getting into a spat with Edward Caird – they got everyone’s notice, didn’t they? Now you were known to Town as well as Gown. The police had your name on their books. You even came to Tomlinson’s attention.”

“That was inevitable, and it s-seemed advisable to have the city’s senior-most police detective right where we could see him, under our n-noses, so that we could keep an eye on the status of his in-investigations and if n-necessary make sure he d-didn’t get too close to the truth. I’d heard on the gr-grapevine that he was an admirer and a correspondent of yours. The simple fact that the two of you were on c-cordial terms was, we felt, an added inducement, another reason why you would not be av-averse to travelling to Oxford.”

Tomlinson clapped hand to forehead. “I was used. Oh, Mr Holmes, I am sorry! I had no idea. I would never have knowingly been a part of this intrigue. You must realise that.”

“It’s quite all right, inspector,” said Holmes. “Knaresfield’s wager alone was impetus enough to draw me here. Our pre-existing rapport made no difference in that regard.”

I nearly spoke up to remind my friend that he had included Tomlinson on his list of potential suspects for Moran’s master, but it did not seem appropriate at that moment. I was glad, though, that the official’s innocence now lay beyond question. Tomlinson, like Knaresfield and Slater, had been peripheral to Moriarty’s scheme, a satellite pulled unheedingly into the orbit of evil.

“It does seem, however,” Holmes continued, “that defeating me has not been the sole object of the exercise. I put it to you, Moriarty, that you have an ulterior motive. As originally envisaged, I should by now be an abject wreck, sunk in a slough of despond, redundant, while you gallop on towards a wider, greater triumph.”

“Too true,” said Moriarty. “Once spider in centre of web. Destined to be spider again. In centre of much larger web.”

“Yes. I see it now. This has all been about the promulgation of the Thinking Engine. You foresee a future with Thinking Engines everywhere, dozens of them, hundreds, in newspaper offices, police stations, who knows where else. A network extending to every corner of the land, apparently independent and automated but in fact artificial. All of them joined together, feeding back to you.”

With a quivering forefinger Moriarty pointed to a display board mounted before him at eye level. It consisted of rows of slots, each with a letter wheel inside. The wheels currently sat so that, in order, the letters in the slots spelled out the last question which Quantock had typed in: Holmes’s demand for the name of the French revolutionary.

“All enquiries from outside would appear here,” he said. “Window on world.”

“Enabling you to run the other Engines remotely, telegraphically,” said Holmes. “It would make you the governor of police records, of news reports, of the dissemination of information.
That
has been your ambition. So much more than mere criminality.”

“Circumstances altered, therefore strategy altered. Cut coat to suit cloth. Hard to run empire as before when so crippled. Multiple Thinking Engines become extensions of self. Each a branch line stemming from here, the central terminus.”

“At the police stations you could wipe a crook’s slate clean,” said Holmes. “You could mislead investigations.”

“Also stay abreast of police ac[ ]ity. Thus minimise risks to self. Cannot walk but always one step ahead.”

“At the same time, access to n-newspapers would enable James to exert an influence over public per-perceptions,” said Quantock. “He could subtly sway journalists, m-manipulating reportage to his advantage. In turn, that means government policy could be his to bias. The outcome of general elections could be his to decide. That is p-power!”

“In time your Engines would become trusted as the font of all wisdom,” said Holmes. “Everything they said would be regarded as gospel. I shudder to think what our world would be like with Professor Moriarty guiding it, the sole arbiter of truth.”

“Truth whatever Moriarty makes it,” said Moriarty. “Truth the sole province of Moriarty. Moriarty sees all. Moriarty runs all. Moriarty rules all.”

“A chilling vision,” I said.

“But one that shall not come to pass.” Holmes levelled the revolver at Moriarty. “I can end it with just a pull of the trigger, and finish what I started at the Reichenbach Falls. It would be granting you a mercy, Moriarty, terminating this miserable half-existence of yours.”

“Go ahead, Mr Holmes,” said Tomlinson. “Don’t let me being here stop you. If ever there was a time for a copper to turn a blind eye, this is it.”

Moriarty gazed straight at the pistol, remarkably unperturbed. His hand picked out a single syllable on the stenotype keyboard.