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Authors: John R. King

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BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
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Regis Bachman of Whitechapel died August 25, hanged in his apartment, an apparent suicide. He had no known family or occupation.
So, it was done. Susanna’s little five-word experiment had played itself out. Five words that brought down an empire of crime that had terrorized London. With the stroke of a pen, she had turned the murderers on each other and wiped away an entire underworld of extortion, drug trafficking, and flesh peddling. What Scotland Yard could not do with thousands of police, my wife had accomplished with five words.
“I’ve been thinking, darling,” I said to Susanna one chilly night in May of 1881, as we reclined by the fire, “that your five words should go down in history among the most potent pronouncements of all time. You’re overmatched only by Marie Antoinette, who destroyed a whole nation with four words—‘Let them eat cake’—and Frederich Nietzsche, who brought down heaven with three words—‘God is dead’—and God himself, who started the whole business with two words—‘I AM.’”
Susanna sighed. “I will not spend any time congratulating myself. In the vast annals of crime in London, I’ve only ended one chapter. The next has already begun. The networks I destroyed were all founded on human desire, and I have done nothing to remove that. The world cries out for whores and opium, and new criminals will rise to provide them like weeds rising from fallow ground.”
Footsteps came in the hall beyond, and a frantic knocking. I leaped up to answer, but before I could even reach the door, it flew inward, admitting none other than Edward Drake. His eyes were wide and black, his face the hue of a dinner plate. He gripped the doorknob as if to let it go would send him pitching over.
“What is it, man!” I said.
“It’s Rupert. It’s terrible!”
“What about Rupert?”
“He’s dead! Murdered!”
“What?”
“I’m the one who found him,” Drake said, staggering into the room.
I caught him and directed him to a chair. Then I splashed some brandy in a snifter and handed it to him.
He took it, swirled it in his jittering fingers, and dashed it back. “Throat cut ear to ear.”
As I crouched down beside the man’s seat, Susanna rushed to the rolltop desk to drag out her thesis. She flipped madly through the pages until she found the one she wanted. “Higgins,” she murmured. Her eyes moved feverishly over the numbers, her fingers tracing out the complex equations. “Are you sure it wasn’t … suicide?”
“I, well …” Drake began, panting, “well … it was such a deep cut—a vicious one. And … there was something else. In blood on the floor—there was a message written.”
“Was Higgins’s finger bloody?” Susanna asked.
“Everything was bloody.” Drake trembled and looked at me imploringly.
I clamped my hand on his shoulder. “Steady, man. Susanna—put away those dreadful equations. They have nothing to do with it.”
“It has everything to do with it.”
“Please!” I said to her, and then said to Drake, “What did the message say?”
He blinked, looking past me. “Just—just four words. ‘He points the way.”’
I sat back on my heels. “A message in blood. ‘He points the way.’”
Just then, nine-year-old Anna came stumbling out of her bedroom, fists twisting in her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” chorused the rest of us.
Drake pried himself up from the chair and staggered
toward the door. “I’d better be getting back. The police’ve already grilled me about it all, and they released me, but they said not to go far, or for very long.” Even as he said it, he swooned a little.
I grabbed his arm. “I’ll take you back. Susanna, get Anna back into bed.”
Susanna glared at me, her arm wrapped around Anna’s shoulders. “There’s something not right with all this.”
“Of course there’s something not right,” I snapped. “A man has been murdered!” With that, I guided Drake out the door. Susanna closed it and locked it behind us.
 
HOW MANY times I have played that moment over in my head and wished I had not charged out that door. What a fool I was! My pride cost me everything. Susanna had proven her powers to me. Why did I dismiss her fears in that most critical moment?
Drake and I walked down from the apartments and crossed the road and set out across Jesus Green, heading toward the college. We walked along in choked silence, but all the while my head was spinning. What could it mean—“He points the way.” Who points the way? Higgins or the killer? And points the way to what?
As we passed through the Jesus College gates and into the inner courtyard, we saw the police milling about beneath the dormitory door. One officer carried bedsheets stained in blood.
Points the way to whom?
“Susanna,” I said, suddenly breathless.
I turned from Drake and, without another word, dashed back the way we had come. I tore across Jesus Green and reached the street beyond and angled down it to our walkup and vaulted up the stairs and saw the door bashed in and saw
Susanna lying in a pool of blood on the floor and saw the killer with straight razor in hand and shoulder bashing against the locked bedroom door. He did not see or hear my approach, so intent was he on breaking down Anna’s door and so deafened was he by her terrified screams. I hurled myself at the assassin, snatched the razor from his dangling hand, and wrenched the blade up to the man’s throat.
“Goddamn you, Jeremy Bachman! You were supposed to be an artist!”
I ripped the razor deep through his scrawny neck and sent him sprawling to the floorboards. He kicked for a moment, trying to right himself, but his throat was a fountain, and he soon slumped facefirst in the gore.
I meanwhile crossed to Susanna and knelt beside her and rolled her over. Her whole face was painted in blood, but her skin otherwise was yellow. I clamped my hand on the slit on her throat, but it was too late. Already the blood had stopped flowing.
“No! No! Susanna!” I clutched her still-warm body to me, but she was gone.
Only then did I see that one of her fingertips was red. I cast a bleary gaze out across the floorboards and saw these words:
“Take care of Anna.”
At last, I could hear my daughter behind the door, screaming.
CALCULATIONS
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
 
I
gently laid Susanna on the floor and bent to kiss her bloody lips. “Good-bye, my darling,” I said, glancing again at the message she had written on the boards. “I will take care of Anna.”
I rose from my wife’s dead body and went to Anna’s door. She still screamed. I tried the door, but it was locked. “Anna. It’s Father. Please stop screaming.” She did not. “It’s Father! Father!”
She fell silent, listening. Then, in a tremulous voice, she said, “What about the man?”
I glanced over my shoulder. “He’s dead. I killed him. Now, please, unlock the door.”
“What about Mum?”
I drew a long breath. “Your mother … she … she asked me to take care of you. Unlock the door, now, Anna, please. It’s all right.”
I heard the bolt grate slowly from its bracket, and I stepped back as the knob turned. The hinges keened open.
Anna stood there, face white and streaked with tears. She stared at me.
I was soaked in blood from fingertip to fingertip. Cringing, I turned away, nearly falling over the body of Jeremy Bachman. The dark pool beneath him had merged with the dark pool beneath Susanna.
Anna screamed.
I reached for her, dragged her into my arms, and held her tight. “Stop screaming. I’ll take care of you. Stop screaming!”
“Mum! Mum!”
Footsteps came at the door. A man bolted to a stop, gripping the frame, and stared in horror at me. He stumbled away, shouting, “Murder! Murder!”
Anna continued to scream. It was deafening to hold her, but I held her. I had promised Susanna. I held her and didn’t let go until the police came.
 
THE POLICE read it all wrong. They saw a girl screaming in terror and a man clutching her in a bloody embrace and two corpses with throats slit just like Rupert Higgins’s had been. With a shout, they rushed us and ripped Anna out of my arms and clubbed me to the ground. A big black boot planted itself on my spine. My arms were wrenched up behind me, and iron shackles bit down on my wrists.
“In the name of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Victoria, you are under arrest for three murders,” barked the man with the boot.
Meanwhile, another officer—beefy and smiling—knelt beside Anna and wrapped her in his arms. She quieted. In the sudden silence, I could hear the officer say, “You’ll need to be rounding up your clothes, my dear.”
“Why?” she asked tearfully.
“Well, you can’t stay here. We’ll take you to a nice place—the Brooks Street Home for Wayward Children.”
“An orphanage?” I shouted. “No! You can’t! She’s mine. My responsibility. My daughter.”
The man glared at me. “With all that you’ve done here, sir, you’ve orphaned her, and no mistake.”
“Not the orphanage,” Anna pleaded. “Please. Let me go to my grandmum.”
“Your grandmum?” the officer asked.
“Yes. Please,” I said. “Her Grandmother Mulroney lives at the Red Gables Boardinghouse on Charles Street.”
When Anna began to wail again, the man relented. He took her in hand and escorted her two blocks to the boardinghouse. Meanwhile, the three other officers hoisted me to my feet, hustled me into a paddy wagon, and drove me to the Cambridge police station. There, a brutal interrogation began. A parade of different officers asked me the same questions for hours. At the end of the ordeal, my captors flung me into a holding cell—without even letting me wash away my wife’s blood.
There I sat for four days.
It was Anna who finally saved me—Anna and Edward Drake. They told the police that I had been at home during the murder of Higgins and had been out during the murder of my wife. Anna described the man who had kicked in the door. She told how she ran for the bedroom, how her mother slammed the door and shouted for her to lock it, how the next sound she heard was a thud, like a body hitting the floor. Anna screamed, of course, and then the killer tried to break the door down. She kept on screaming until I came and killed the man and saved her.
It was a horrifying account, tearfully delivered. At last it convinced the police. They released me from my shackles and cell. I went straightaway to the undertaker, only to discover that Susanna had already been cremated.
“She wouldn’t keep,” he said in explanation, “not in May.”
“I want her ashes.”
He stared stupidly at me.
“I demand that you bring me the ashes of my wife!”
The man grabbed an urn from a nearby shelf, went to the
incinerator, and scraped ashes from the trap. He returned with the jar brimming.
“These are my wife’s ashes?” I asked. He shrugged. They might be the remains of my wife or those of Jeremy Bachman. I took the urn and smashed it to the floor and stormed out.
I spent most of that night walking the streets of Cambridge, terrorized by all that had happened. At last, my legs and my grief were exhausted, and I staggered up the stairs to my apartments near Jesus College.
It was a dreary homecoming. The door to our flat hung loose, the latch broken out of it. I swung the door inward, and the cupric tang of blood hit the back of my throat. A few more steps brought me to the twin black pools where my wife and her killer had died.
I filled a bucket with water, got a rag, and knelt to scrub away the last remnant of Susanna. The blood would not come up. Bucket after bucket turned red, but still the stains remained.
At last, I surrendered. I drew up a bath, stripped to my skin, tossed my clothes into the stove, and cremated them. Then I bathed until every last smear of blood was gone.
That was her funeral: a shattered urn with someone else’s ashes in it, buckets made red with her blood and the blood of her killer, and the noisome smell of burning wool.
I was a broken man. After my bath, I lay naked upon our bed and let the tears stream down. How could she be gone? How could these horrible things be true? She had calculated every contingency except one—that Jeremy Bachman had a heart of murder after all. His father’s suicide had brought Jeremy back from the Continent, had set him on the trail of the messenger who had delivered the note, had driven him to Susanna … .
Eventually, no tears remained. I dressed and went out, picking my way down the dark streets until I reached the Red Gables Boardinghouse where Mrs. Mulroney and Anna lived. The windows were black, and I glanced up at the gloaming sky to determine what time it must be. Perhaps four A.M. Surely the scullery staff would be awake. I knocked on the door and waited. No answer. I knocked more loudly.
To the door came an old woman with squinting eyes and hair like a white rag on her head. She spoke in a querulous voice: “Who is it?”
“Professor Moriarty. I’ve come for my daughter.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I suppose it is around four in the morning.”
“Three-thirty, in actual fact.”
I dipped my head and lifted my hat in apology. “Sorry, mum, but I’d lost track of time—what with having just been released from jail and having found my wife cremated without my permission and having spent the last hours scrubbing her from the floor of my flat … . One does lose track of time.”
“I’ll wake her.” The woman vanished within the dark doorway, making sure to shut the door behind her. She left me standing on the stoop. Nothing moved in the street except for a tumbling newspaper, sketching out the invisible path of the wind.
The door opened again, and Mrs. Mulroney stood there. Her pruny face was pinched tight, but fear sparkled in her eyes. “Professor … you’ve been released.”
“I’ve been cleared. I’ve come for Anna.”
“Please, Professor. Let the child sleep.”
“I’ll pay you, of course—three times your usual rate for the past four days—”
“Thank you, sir, but I would have done it for free—the poor girl.”
“And I want you to continue on with your daytime duties. Anna will need a female presence all the more now.”
“She needs more than that,” Mrs. Mulroney said, but then dipped her eyes. “She needs you to be a true father.”
“I am her true father.”
“A loving father. One who cherishes her, who dotes on her.”
“I do not dote, Mrs. Mulroney.”
“You doted on Susanna.”
I stiffened, and my hand half rose to strike the woman.
She went on fearlessly, “You did, master, in the most beautiful ways. You watched her, smiled when she came by, sought out her counsel, called her ‘darling’ and ‘genius.’”
“She was my one true love. I had no room for another.”
“You have room now.”
I did not dare to speak for fear I would break down entirely.
“Your daughter cannot replace your wife, Professor, but half of her is your wife. It’s even in her name—Anna is half of Susanna.”
“Half is not enough.”
“The other half of Anna is you.”
I relented. “Let her sleep. That’s what a loving father would do.” I stepped down off that stoop.
“I’ll bring her by after breakfast,” Mrs. Mulroney called after me.
She was right, of course, this nanny that Susanna and I had selected—this nanny turned governess by the stroke of a razor. When she and Anna arrived at the flat at nine-thirty, I was waiting with a bouquet of wild roses I had plucked from the banks of the Cam.
“Red roses are the flowers of love. I gave them once to your mother, and now I pass them along to you. It is your inheritance.”
Anna took the blooms, yelped a little, and set them on the table. Her hands were pricked and bleeding, but she stared with dawning hope at those vicious flowers. “For me?”
“Always and forever, now, they are for you.”
 
I DID what Susanna asked: I took care of Anna. I also did what Mrs. Mulroney asked: I became a real father. Anna would not be orphaned as her mother had been, nor would Anna have to say the word
father
with sarcasm and disdain. I would make sure of it.
But how can a father repair nine years of neglect?
I began by doting. The day after the wild roses, I brought Anna a box of truffles. A little girl’s heart can remain resolute against roses, but chocolates make it dissolute. Anna actually thanked me and bit into a cherry cordial, experimenting.
Next morning, I brought her a kitten. The animal was, of course, another calculated bribe, but he was also a living thing—warm and loving. He was a fuzzy ambassador from the once-cold Fatherland. Anna named the cat Merlin after the wizard of old, and I quietly lured Merlin and Anna into my oaken heart.
It took a full year before Anna began treating me like a real father, before I was feeling like one. She began to wait by the windowsill to see me march up the street below. She ran to meet me on the stairs and wrapped her arms around my waist and told me that she loved me.
The first time I heard those words, they shocked me. The second time, though, I was ready with a reply: “I love you, too.”
I had never spoken those words to anyone but Susanna, and they passed my lips now with the power of a prayer. I was repenting all the wrongs I had done to this poor child. I was adopting Anna into my heart.
No more bribes. Now, I determined to give Anna the greatest gift I could give—an education. I bent my mind to teaching her Greek, Latin, French, and Italian; maths, physics, geometry, philosophy; biology, botany, astronomy, geology; art, literature, history, and … music. I was especially keen to discover whether she could hear the note of transfiguration. It had been my awakening, and Susanna’s, too. In time, Anna also heard that note, and she tuned her mind to it.
How like this was to teaching her mother! Both young women had been abandoned, both had lived in a nightmare of brutal men, and for each of them, a Prince Charming had appeared to whisk her away into the palace of knowledge.
Soon Anna had become my new favorite student, pacing the floors and reciting Shelley and Keats or naming the constellations or describing the Peloponnesian War. All the while that she paced, her young heels wore away those twin bloodstains on our floor, and every night after she went to bed, I swept up little piles of rust-colored dust.
When Anna was fourteen, I began to bring her to my classes. Just like her mother before her, Anna was at first disparaged for her gender, and then was envied for her mind, and at last was prized for her help with assignments. And as before, I chased off any boys who tried to hatch other plans for her.
It was a blissful time for us, those seven years as father and daughter, before the horrors of the world intruded again. But intrude they did.
It all began as I walked down Newmarket Road on Valentine’s Day in 1888. I had just bought a box of chocolates for Anna when I chanced upon a paperboy crying out the headline: “‘Extortion Ring Foiled!’ Read all about it!”
BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
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