The Travels of Sherlock Holmes, page 2
I found London to be a peculiar place. The most obvious change from pre-war days was the almost total absence of young men, which gave the capital a strange, lop-sided look. And very many of the women were in some sort of uniform, or busy with work other than shopping. On my first day, I boarded a bus, and was surprised to find that my fare was collected by a very attractive young woman. Surprise turned to astonishment when, as I left the bus, I noticed that the driver was also a woman!
It was, to be sure, an interesting experience to see London under these conditions, unique in all my long and varied acquaintance with the capital, but the fascination of the place soon began to wear thin, and, after a very few days of wandering about alone, I had all but decided to cut my leave short and get back to work.
Before sending a telegram to the hospital to let them know to expect me back early, I went into the Long Bar of the old Cri for one last drink. As my readers will be aware, the place had some sentimental associations for me, for it was there that my acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes might be said to have begun. Even so, at first it had all the earmarks of yet another depressing recherché du temps perdu, such as my entire visit had thus far proved to be.
It was the lunch hour, and the place should have been crowded, yet it was deserted by comparison with the old days. There were, indeed, little knots of men here and there along the length of the bar, old dugouts such as myself, and younger officers who had managed to wangle some leave. They tried their best to be normal, cheerful, but their conversation was appalling to hear, a sort of forced gaiety, a hollow pretence that all was exactly as it had been.
I took the brandy and soda which the aged barman reluctantly handed to me, and moved to the far end of the bar, which was quiet and almost deserted. I had just raised the glass to my lips, when a familiar voice at my shoulder remarked, ‘Drinking alone, Watson? A most dangerous course of action, as you, a doctor, should be aware.’
‘Holmes!’ I cried, almost – but not quite – spilling my drink in my agitation.
Holmes – for it was indeed my old friend, looking not much different from the Holmes of former days – laughed in the peculiar noiseless way he had, and suggested that we sit down, ‘For,’ said he, ‘we have much to talk over.’
We found a table in a dark corner, and I sat down. ‘Holmes,’ I began severely, ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’
‘That sounds serious, Doctor.’
‘It is. You have lied to me, Holmes.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Indeed? And how, pray?’
‘The entire tale of your absence from London after the death – the supposed death, that is – of Professor Moriarty was pure invention.’
‘Indeed?’ he repeated calmly. ‘And how do you know that?’
‘I have recently read the journal of one Harold Dyce.’
Holmes’s brow furrowed in thought. ‘Lieutenant Dyce?’
‘Major,’ I said. ‘Or rather, he was. He gave me the journal by way of a legacy.’
‘Ah,’ said Holmes. ‘He was a good man, Watson. Did you have much talk with him?’
‘There was no time, I fear.’
‘You would have liked him; he resembled you in many respects. So, he’s dead, too? It’s a sad business, Watson. The best of us are going. What sort of a world will the poor relicts who survive find to live in, I wonder?’
‘Be all that as it may,’ said I, ‘Dyce’s journal shows a very different tale from the one you told me, the one which I – in all good faith, Holmes – passed on to my readers. To speak plainly, I am a little bitter, and more than a little hurt, that you should choose not merely to refrain from confiding in me, but indeed tell me a downright fabrication.’
‘Watson, Watson,’ said he. ‘Always Mr Valiant-for-truth! I assure you, Doctor, that it was quite essential that the full facts be kept from the general public, and your own forthright character would have prevented your acceding fully to the necessary deception. You have read the journal, you say?’
‘I have.’
‘Then you will already have begun to grasp something of the full story of those three years, and to realize that it was – then, at least – quite impossible that the true facts should be divulged. The implications for international relations would have been catastrophic.’ He sighed loudly. ‘Now, of course, anything which I can tell you could scarcely make things worse than they are, so I suppose I had better be honest, although it might be as well if you were to keep this to yourself, for the time being at any rate.’ He stood up. ‘Come along.’
‘Where are we going?’
Holmes laughed heartily. ‘Where do you think?’
‘Not Baker Street?’
‘Where else?’
‘But – surely – you were retired, Holmes, to Surrey or some such rural backwater, as I understood it.’
Holmes smiled at my bewilderment. ‘Close enough, and the old rooms were let to a young man.’ The smile faded. ‘However, he, like many of his brothers, has no further use for the rooms, so I was able to acquire a familiar pied-à-terre for as long as the present unpleasantness might last. Come.’
Chapter Two - Mr Sherlock Holmes Explains
We set off towards Baker Street, walking briskly, for it was a chilly autumn day. I remarked upon the fact that Holmes, who set a good pace, seemed as fit as ever.
He turned those wonderfully penetrating eyes upon me, and said, ‘I am, praise be, Watson. But if you should think of publishing any further accounts of my work – my work before the onset of the present business, I mean to say – before the present business is quite finished, you would oblige me by suggesting that I am now wholly retired. Possibly you might even mention that my health leaves much to be desired.’
‘If you wish it, Holmes. But why?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Because, Doctor, my enemies at the moment are even better organized, possess more resources, and are, if possible, even more unforgiving than Professor Moriarty or Colonel Moran ever were.’
‘Indeed? And just who –’
‘It would therefore be of the greatest service to me, and I may venture to say, to the country we both love, if they believed me to be quite out of things these days. So, if you should happen to be cajoled into contributing one of your sensational accounts to the popular press – something as to the arrest of Von Bork, perhaps, would catch the popular mood at present – then please do not be afraid to exaggerate the effects of time. Suggest that rheumatism prevents my getting about too briskly these days, or something of the kind.’
We halted before the old familiar door, and Holmes, after rummaging for some time through his pockets, gave a little grunt of annoyance. ‘I appear to have lost my key,’ he said. ‘Would you oblige me by touching the bell, Watson?’
I felt acutely embarrassed for him, particularly after his recent remarks as to his being impervious to the passage of time, for the Holmes I had known of old would never have done anything so inconsequential as forget a key. But it would have been most impolite to draw attention to it, so I said nothing, merely contenting myself with ringing the bell.
The door was opened by a middle-aged woman of the landlady class, attractive enough in an overblown fashion. ‘Yes, sir? Oh, it’s you, Mr Holmes. Forget your key, did you?’
I glanced at Holmes, who stood a little way behind me, and was astounded to see that he was absolutely convulsed with that silent mirth of his. But he merely produced a key from his coat pocket, and held it aloft. ‘I thought that I had done so, Mrs Wiggins, but I find I have it here after all.’
‘Mrs Wiggins?’ said I, looking from one to another of them. ‘Nothing to do with young Wiggins, the little captain of irregulars, surely?’
‘Why sir,’ said Mrs Wiggins, beaming, ‘I’m his wife.’
‘Good Lord!’
‘Yes, Doctor,’ said Holmes, laughing aloud now at my astonishment, ‘the inexorable passage of time affects us all alike.’
‘Nor he ain’t all that young, these days, nor yet that little,’ added Mrs Wiggins. ‘Begging your pardon, sir.’
‘No, no, I suppose he isn’t. But I last saw him when he was fourteen or so, and went off to look for honest work, do you know, and so I suppose I remember him as he was. Is he in, or – no, he would surely be just too old for any sort of duty?’ said I.
Mrs Wiggins cast what looked like an apprehensive glance at Holmes.
‘He was well enough when I left him,’ said Holmes, in a low tone.
‘You mean –’
‘Later, Doctor, later.’ Holmes led the way inside, and I followed, up the seventeen most famous steps in all London, and into the old rooms.
I stood in the doorway, and gazed affectionately round. The row of scrapbooks stood on its accustomed shelf, the mantelpiece was invisible under its litter of pipes and envelopes – though I was pleased to observe that there was now no sign of a hypodermic syringe amongst the detritus.
Indeed, very little, if anything, seemed to have changed, save that the dust seemed to have ossified in places around some of the relics of Holmes’s cases, which looked for all the world like an assortment of fossils displayed in a section through the carboniferous limestone.
‘Did the previous tenant take the rooms furnished, then?’ I asked innocently.
‘Oh, Mycroft volunteered to look after many of my souvenirs temporarily, and he is even more careless in the matter of housekeeping than I am,’ said Holmes in an offhand fashion, handing me a more generous measure of whisky than any I had seen since the outbreak of war, and waving me to a chair.
‘Imagine young Wiggins married,’ I said. ‘And a father, no doubt?’
‘Eight fine children,’ said Holmes.
‘Good God.’
‘Wiggins is currently acting under my directions,’ Holmes went on, ‘and rendering the government sterling service. But we will return to that later, with your permission.’
‘Very well. And now, Holmes, I have had something approaching an apology for having been misled, and an assurance that it was strictly necessary for the good of the international situation, both of which I am in a mood to accept,’ I said. ‘But what I have not had is a true account of what really took place.’
‘No, and it is long overdue. First of all, Watson, you must surely have had some doubts concerning the events surrounding my disappearance and supposed death in 1891, to say nothing of my near-miraculous reappearance three years later? There were too many loose ends to satisfy a writer of your calibre, I imagine?’
‘At the time, events were moving so rapidly that one had no time to think about things,’ I told him. ‘And then later, what with believing you to be dead, and then my wife – you understand –’
‘Quite so,’ said Holmes, in a soothing tone. ‘But later?’
‘Oh, later, there were a good many questions left unanswered. But so long as I was actively associated with you in your work, then the case we had in hand at the time was usually so exciting that I quite forgot about the earlier ones.’
‘Yes, they were stirring times, were they not?’
‘However, some of my readers did not forget, and I used to get all sorts of letters from people with time on their hands and nothing better to do with it, asking why I had put such-and-such a case in a year that was manifestly impossible, and the like. Still do get them. Damned impertinent nonsense! For some reason, clergymen seem particularly prone to that sort of quibbling,’ I added reminiscently.
‘What was your reply?’ asked Holmes, his eyes twink-ling.
‘Well, doctors are notorious for their bad handwriting, so that, together with laying much of the blame at the printer’s door, usually serves.’
‘I see. A fascinating insight into the tricks of the writer’s trade. But I imagine that you yourself were not quite so easily satisfied?’
‘I may have had occasional doubts,’ I said. ‘And yet I knew that I had lived through those stirring times, as you call them, and that my accounts were, broadly speaking, correct. If any minor details were not quite right, I assumed that it was due to my being so busy at the time that I had misread the situation, or to a trifling lapse of memory since the events took place.’
‘I have often thought,’ said Holmes, ‘that you are the ideal colleague for a man in my profession.’
‘Indeed?’ said I, my artless pride at the compliment mixed with mild astonishment, for Holmes was seldom bountiful with his praise.
‘Indeed. You are so single-minded in your pursuit of the obvious that anything even slightly off the main track comes as a glorious surprise to you.’
‘Ah.’ He had not, I realized, changed in the slightest.
‘You will, I am sure,’ he went on, ‘not easily have forgotten the late Professor Moriarty?’
‘The famous scientific criminal, the – what was it you once called him – the Napoleon of crime?’
Holmes nodded, and laughed in his peculiar silent fashion.
‘Indeed I have not forgotten him, Holmes,’ I went on. ‘The only foeman worthy of our steel? The – I quote from memory again, here – the organizer of half that was evil and almost all that went undetected in London? Or he was, until – until what, exactly, Holmes? For Dyce’s journal tells a very different tale from what you had led me to believe.’
Sherlock Holmes put the tips of his fingers together, and stared at the ceiling with a dreamy expression in his eyes. ‘The first thing to bear in mind,’ said he, ‘is that my investigations had hit Moriarty hard. There can be no doubt whatever upon that score. He was rattled when he came to see me in the April of 1891, rattled a good deal more than he dared admit, even to himself. Why should he, who had built up an enormous criminal empire in secret – an empire whose very existence depended upon total concealment – show his hand so openly in that way, had that empire not been shaken to its very foundations? I am convinced – for remember that we had never met before that day, though I had observed him from a distance – I am convinced that he thought me nothing more than a run-of-the-mill private detective, a man who could be bullied or bought with not the slightest difficulty.’
‘But your reputation, Holmes?’
‘Based on newspaper reports? Remember that at the time, you yourself had published only two accounts of my work, and –’ he hesitated.
‘And neither had done particularly well?’ I asked.
‘Well, let us say rather that the public did not appreciate a good thing quite as soon as they might have,’ said Holmes. ‘But the fact remains, the bulk of the references to my work had appeared in the popular press, which is very often far from trustworthy.’
‘And Moriarty, having realized his mistake when he tried to threaten you, then resorted to trying to kill you?’
Holmes nodded. ‘He had evidently not taken the possibility that I would resist his threats or blandishments into account, for he had made no proper plans to have me eliminated. That is clearly shown by the three very
amateurish attempts on my life, a runaway van, a brick dropped from a rooftop, and what have you. If Moriarty had believed that his threats would be unsuccessful, he would have had Moran waiting outside this house in a cab, his air-gun at the ready.’
‘And yet you were shaken by those three attempts, amateur though they may have been, when you visited me the same day,’ said I. ‘I’ll swear to that.’
‘I was, Watson. You see, threats having failed, the only possible course left open to Moriarty was to ensure that I did not appear as a witness against him. The evidence was so complex that, without me there, a clever barrister could gain an acquittal without much difficulty.’
‘As happened with Moran?’
‘Exactly as happened with Moran. And some other high- placed members of the gang, Moriarty’s most trusted lieutenants. Had I been at the trial, there is not the slightest doubt that Moran and those others would have hanged. I knew that, and Moriarty knew that. The first bungled attempts on my life having failed, I was frightened lest Moriarty, grown desperate, should make more elaborate plans that might succeed. Not that I was frightened for myself, or at any rate not more than any sensible man would have been, but I saw the entire case, years of work, being destroyed, utterly wasted by my death. My needless death at that, for by going abroad for a week or so – and I had originally intended no longer a stay than that – I could remain out of danger until the police had done their part.’
‘Hence the apparently motiveless journey?’
‘Just so.’
‘One thing puzzles me,’ I said. ‘When we had evaded Moriarty at Chelmsford, or wherever it may have been, you said you thought he would get on to Paris, and watch our luggage, which we had abandoned on the train. Did you then expect him to return to London, to face arrest?’
Holmes raised an eyebrow.
I went on, ‘I ask not because I ever thought anything of it myself, but because I had a most unpleasant half hour with a very large, very irascible old man in Simpson’s, ten years or so ago now. Was he really expected to believe that Moriarty, the criminal genius of the age, a crook with the intellectual capacity of Sherlock Holmes, would behave in so idiotic a fashion, and so on and so forth? I couldn’t eat my chop in peace. Fellow kept poking me in the chest, demanding an answer.’
Holmes flung back his head and laughed. ‘And you had no answer to give him? Poor Watson. No, when I said Moriarty would “get on to Paris,” I meant to say nothing more than that he would contact his agents in France, and they would do the watching. I knew he was in the process of extending his operations to the Continent, if he had not already done so.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Indubitably. The dates he had quoted to me, as recorded by you in the account which you somewhat theatrically entitled “The Final Problem”, demonstrated that fact quite conclusively. No, Moriarty himself dared not leave England, for he was busy trying to save what he could from the coming storm. He had a contact – and perhaps more than one – in the official police. I had long suspected that, and tested my theory when he spoke to me, by the very simple expedient of mentioning that the police would act on the following Monday. He never turned a hair, and later in our talk he spoke of it in terms which clearly showed that he already knew before ever he called upon me.’
