The Last Sherlock Holmes Story Read online

  By now I had recovered sufficiently to play my part.

  ‘But how do you know we went to Simpson’s?’

  Holmes smiled indulgently.

  ‘From your boots. And from that same regularity of character to which I have already alluded. My dear fellow, capriciousness is simply not one of your vices! You have but one newspaper, one club, one political party, one tobacco, and one tailor. Should you need to resort to a restaurant, you have but one, and it is Simpson’s. My conviction on this point is merely corroborated by the unmistakable traces on your boots of an interesting argillaceous loam, large quantities of which are at present inconveniencing pedestrians in the Strand due to the roadworks.’

  ‘Very well, Holmes, but the wine? You mean to tell me that you can tell one variety from another by studying the stain?’

  ‘I have no doubt whatever that it would be possible, but I have not undertaken any research on the subject. The British criminal is not enough of a wine-bibber for it to pay dividends. But it would be folly to order anything but beef at Simpson’s, and I happen to know that your gastronomical rule of thumb is “Beef on the bone, Beaune with the beef.”’

  ‘Amazing,’ I muttered, and ‘Wonderful,’ but I was actually trembling with relief. I had indeed dined out the previous evening, but not with Stamford. My companion had been Mary Morstan. Our engagement was proving rather trying. Quite apart from various tedious financial questions on which I need not dwell, I was practically speaking in the position of a man maintaining two households. True, Holmes had retreated from the position of extreme displeasure which he had adopted on learning of my intention to wed. But the matter was never spoken of between us – indeed, Mary’s name was never mentioned. I felt there was a tacit agreement that the whole question of my nuptials should simply be ignored at 221B Baker Street, and that it was only on this understanding that I was to remain persona grata there. So whenever Mary and I wished to meet, I had to slip away secretly. On the Friday in question, tiring of visiting her in Camberwell, I had invited Mary and her friend Mrs Forrester to dine with me, but it was not until I was sipping a pre-prandial B. and S. at the club that I realised I had forgotten to inform Mrs Hudson of my intentions. Having sent my wire I strolled along the Strand to the Lyceum Theatre, whose portico Mary and I used as a trysting-place, for sentimental reasons.‡ The three of us then drove to a rather entertaining little place in Mayfair recommended by Mrs Forrester. The wine was Chianti and the address that of Miss Morstan’s aunt, with whom she was to spend the weekend.

  Having recounted one of Holmes’s rare blunders, I should add that this sort of exercise was to him no more than a form of parlour-game. He was perfectly aware of the weakness of unsupported inference, and in any question of importance he used it merely as one weapon in his formidable intellectual armoury.

  Normal relations having been resumed, Holmes proceeded to favour me with that mixture of ironic observations, gentle chaffing and pontifical dicta which made up his conversation. Evidently he was in good spirits, and I felt this must spell some success in his investigations. What this might be I knew he would reveal in his own good time, and I made no attempt to question him. Having finished my meal I went to the fireplace to light a cigarette. As I blew out the match I heard Holmes groan. I looked up at the mirror. He was standing at the bay-window, facing out. His figure rose tall and dark against the sunlight streaming into the room.

  ‘What is it Holmes? What’s the matter?’

  He whirled around towards me. His features, I noted with a thrill of horror, were ashen and drawn. I turned to face him, deeply shaken by this sudden crisis.

  ‘Holmes!’

  His look was one of sheer desperation. He spoke steadily enough, though I could see it cost him an effort.

  ‘Can you spare an hour or so just now, Watson?’

  ‘Of course, but –’

  ‘Then get your hat and coat.’

  A few minutes later we were walking briskly up Baker Street and into York Place. Whatever had so dramatically affected my friend had presumably been visible in the street, but the scene about us presented no sinister or unusual aspect to my eyes. Holmes strode straight ahead, as if blinkered. At the corner of the Marylebone Road this attitude led to a collision with a passer-by, as a result of which Holmes dropped his stick. As he bent to retrieve it I was truly astounded to hear him utter an oath.

  ‘I say, Holmes! What on earth is –’

  ‘Not a word, Watson! But if you love me, stick close!’

  With that he rushed out into the street and hailed a passing cab.

  ‘Paddington Station, driver, and there’s a guinea for you if we are there in five minutes!’

  Duly impressed, the jarvey cracked his whip and we sped away, soon merging into the streaming traffic of the great highway. But no sooner had we reached the Edg-ware Road than Holmes sprang to the trap.

  ‘Driver! My friend was in error! The station we want is Euston! I’ll double the guinea if you can get us there in time!’

  The hansom swung smartly around in the teeth of the oncoming vehicles, and in another instant we were rattling back the way we had come. But if I thought that Holmes’s repertoire of surprises was now exhausted, I was sadly mistaken. When we were better than half way to our destination, the cab happened to be held up for a moment by a blockage of traffic. With a cry of ‘Come, Watson!’ Holmes leapt into the road. Ignoring the cabbie’s shouts, I followed suit, and after a narrow escape from being crushed under a brewer’s dray I reached safety just in time to see my friend disappearing into the Portland Road railway station.§ After thirty-five smelly and noisy minutes underground, we emerged into the light of day once more on the Embankment. Holmes now led me at an unrelenting pace through a maze of alleys and passages. We entered a prestigious hotel through the front door and left via the kitchens, and then reversed this procedure with an equally famous military club. After a long sequence of this feinting, we finally came to rest in the pastoral serenity of St James’s Park.

  If Holmes wished to calm his nerves and regain his composure, he could have chosen no more suitable place. St James’s Park is, without doubt, the most reassuring place on earth to an Englishman. There one sits in what resembles nothing so much as a bigger and better garden of childhood, surrounded by ducks and trees and quiet walks, walled in by the massive edifices lining Whitehall and the Mall – and ever calmly conscious of the great house to the west, from which the Empire’s supreme parent keeps watch over the doings of her scattered family.

  ‘You are a stout fellow, Watson, and a true soldier,’ said Holmes at last. ‘Nothing is as valuable as a friend who is content to follow without asking the reason why. You realised, no doubt, that we were being dogged.’

  ‘I thought as much. But by whom?’

  ‘Can you not guess?’

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘His tradename, as he himself puts it, is Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘Holmes!’

  I was stunned. A hundred questions sprang up at once in my mind, demanding answers. How had Holmes identified the killer? Who was he? Why had the police not been informed? What dire purpose had he in following us about London?

  ‘You saw him, then, through the window?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But where was he, Holmes?’

  ‘Have you noticed that one of the houses almost opposite our rooms has been standing empty for some time? He was there, at the first-floor windows. I happened to glance over, and there stood the very man who was at that moment uppermost in my thoughts. It was, as you may imagine, an unpleasant surprise. He was watching our rooms, Watson! He must know that I am on his trail. It is a major setback. I had hoped to have the advantage of him – to know, and not be known. No doubt it was a vain hope with such a man. But I shall have to watch my step very carefully from now on. We are dealing with one of the three most dangerous criminals in Europe.’

  ‘But who is he?’ I broke out impatiently. ‘Who is Jack the Ripper?’
/>
  Holmes was silent for a moment. Then he shot a glance at me.

  ‘You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!’ he laughed bitterly. ‘The man pervades London, and no one has ever heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. In those annals, eminence is measured not by how many people are aware of one, but by how few. Notoriety is a sure sign of incompetence. It is a point which is generally missed by the public and the press alike. Mention great criminals and they think of such men as Palmer and Peace.¶ But Palmer and Peace were hanged. The truly great criminal remains unknown. His deeds float free of him, unattached, like natural events. The perfect crime exists, Watson, but a necessary concomitant of its perfection is that we do not know who committed it. If we did, we should recognise behind many perfect crimes the hand of the perfect criminal – Professor Moriarty!’

  ‘What has he done, then?’

  ‘His career has been extraordinary. He is of good birth and excellent education, endowed by Nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Chair of Mathematics at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearance, a brilliant future ahead of him. Then, quite abruptly, he resigned his post and vanished into a carefully cultivated obscurity.’

  Holmes paused, as if to marshal his thoughts into a suitably cogent form. I waited in silence, knowing better than to try and prompt him.

  ‘For some years now,’ he began, ‘I have been conscious of some power behind the common criminal – some complex organising intelligence. It revealed itself in many ways, most of them seemingly insignificant, but together forming a quite remarkable pattern. One would come across a gang of low-class roughs executing a robbery which they could never have planned. A convicted murderer, hours away from the hangman, steadfastly refuses to yield up the information that would implicate others, and his widow later receives a large sum from an anonymous benefactor. Another criminal is induced to “peach”, and the whole gang is taken; not one escapes the net, and yet the informer is found floating in the Thames a few days later. As soon as I perceived this pattern, and read its meaning, I bent all my energies in the attempt to identify and bring to justice the mysterious agent behind these diverse effects. Only then did I appreciate the skill with which he had woven his web. It is a masterpiece of duplicity, Watson! He has created a nightmare world that parallels our own, but where paths lead nowhere, words mean nothing, and no one is what he appears! Do what I would, I could not get the evidence to convict the Professor in a court of law. You know my powers, and yet in this man I had to acknowledge my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.

  ‘Then, two months ago, the situation changed once again. As abruptly as he had withdrawn from academe, Moriarty now withdrew from the London underworld. You are aware of course that no one knows that world as I do, and at the beginning of August I became conscious of a great absence. The guiding hand was gone, and the machine it had built was falling asunder. Moriarty had wound up his operation and had once again disappeared from view. His house stood untenanted; his associates dispersed; chaos and old night descended once more upon the criminal scene. I was mystified. Nothing in the Professor’s nefarious career puzzled me so much as his abandoning it at the height of his success, unthreatened even by me. It seemed completely inexplicable. Here in London the richest pickings in the world were his. “What a place to plunder!” the Prussian said,|| and Moriarty had taken him at his word. No other scene could have offered him more. What, then, had become of him?’

  ‘I suppose he might have been taking a holiday. August is the traditional month, after all.’

  Holmes stared at me intently for a moment.

  ‘Watson’, he said quietly, ‘I never get your limits. Never.’

  I glowed with pleasure at this unwonted praise. Holmes looked around us on all sides before continuing, but the park was deserted.

  ‘As I was saying, Moriarty’s absence puzzled me sorely. Then these murders intervened, and I had other things to think about. It was only recently that I began to consider the possibility that these two mysteries might be connected.’

  Flushed with my earlier success, I spoke up again.

  ‘But surely that should have been obvious, Holmes. Moriarty vanished in August – the very same month that these terrible killings started. I would have thought that –’

  ‘No, Watson, it was not obvious!’ Holmes’s tone was sternly reproving. ‘Moriarty, as you perhaps heard me say, was an organiser merely. He was, so to speak, the Napoleon of crime. You do not expect to find Napoleon leaving his maps and spy-glass to carry a sabre in the line. Moriarty was a man who acted indirectly for the purpose of gaining power and wealth. The Whitechapel killer acts in the most direct manner imaginable, but for no apparent purpose whatsoever. The two cases could hardly be more sharply contrasted.’

  ‘Then why –? I mean, how –’

  ‘Not so obvious now, eh Watson? Nevertheless, I think we can arrive at a fairly accurate notion of what it is that has induced this Bonaparte to start ripping flesh apart. Consider his university career. There, too, he found himself in an unrivalled position, enjoying an absolute and unclouded success. To be sure, various dark rumours circulated at the time of his resignation, but I have been able to show that these were started by none other than the Professor himself, as a smoke-screen to cover his withdrawal. We are therefore forced to the conclusion that there is something in Moriarty’s disposition which abhors absolute and unclouded success. He has a strain in his blood which craves challenge as other men crave drugs. No sooner has he mastered a profession than he abandons it in disgust. His book The Dynamics of an Asteroid was so abstruse that no one could be found who was competent to offer an opinion upon it. Thereupon, he turned his hand to crime. But here again he soon proved himself hors concours. Even I, the foremost criminal agent in Europe, could not overthrow him. So once again he changed his tack. But this time he made sure. He chose the most dangerous trade of all – murder!’

  ‘You mean to tell me this beast kills merely to keep himself amused?’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘That he murders and mutilates to stave off ennui?’

  ‘Partly, yes! Certainly in undertaking these hideous crimes his first thought, I believe, has been to bring into being a set of circumstances he cannot stabilise; a situation of ever-increasing personal danger. Formerly he ran no risks. He might as well have been director of a limited company. Whatever came to pass, Moriarty was untouchable. But these killings are another matter. Public opinion is galvanised, and each time the killer ventures out his path is fraught with greater peril. But there is more to it than that. For one thing, Moriarty has clearly determined to make these murders the occasion for a duel to the death with me.’

  ‘With you!’

  ‘Yes, Watson, I am his intended opponent. Of that there can be no doubt. The man wishes to test his mettle. Lestrade and his bobbies are clearly incapable of that. A man like Moriarty might murder the entire female population of London for all the police could do about it. But I have crossed his path, Watson! I have incommoded him. He has felt my check. A lesser man might have been warned off, but not Professor Moriarty. He has thrown down the gauntlet, and from now on we meet face to face. It is an encounter from which only one of us will come away alive.’

  ‘Then these women he kills –’

  ‘Pah! They mean no more to him than counters on a board. He uses them as he uses everyone with whom he comes in contact. Previously it was live thugs; now it is dead drabs. Moriarty sees no difference. He is concerned only with furthering his dread design.’

  ‘His design?’

  Holmes nodded grimly.

  ‘I said there is more to these killings than a mere desire for stimulation. To overmaster me is part
of his plans, but I fear they go further still. What he intends is nothing less than the overthrow of civilisation as we know it.’

  ‘The man must be mad!’

  ‘If only he were. But he is as sane as myself, and as capable.’

  I shook my head emphatically.

  ‘That I cannot believe, Holmes. I saw what he did to that woman in Aldgate. No sane man could have wielded that knife. And then you say he dreams of overthrowing civilisation. Why, what is that but the raving of a maniac!’

  Holmes greeted my outburst with quiet laughter.

  ‘If only Moriarty could hear you! You would make him very happy, for you think exactly what he wishes people to think. How brilliantly he has contrived to make all the world believe that he is insane! With what consummate artistry he prompts the vox populi! No one knows better than he the emotional value of gore and garters. It is a combination the British find absolutely irresistible.’

  ‘But to disembowel a woman’s body –’

  ‘Bleat, my dear Watson! Bleat unmitigated and absolute! How many times have you worked at the dissecting-table, your arms bathed in blood and –’