Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

We were never to find out. The next morning, Moriarty sent a message to his father and, within two days, the carriage came for him. He looked small, but almost dignified as he stood at the top of the steps, waiting out his last few moments. Alone among the staff and his fellow pupils, I joined him there, feeling it my duty not to let him leave without some sort of goodbye.

‘The world can be a lonely place,’ I said. ‘Especially for someone with gifts who does not yet know how to use them.’

‘Really?’ he said, adjusting his gloves. ‘Perhaps you have mistaken gifts for afflictions. Sir.’

‘Do you feel yourself afflicted?’

‘I have no need of your concern, sir.’

‘Then whose concern do you seek, Moriarty?’

He fixed me with his mud-dark eyes. ‘Concern, sir? I only seek freedom.’

‘From accusation?’

‘From the predictable,’ he said, ‘and from the tedious interferences of moral guardians whose own private lives do not bear close scrutiny.’ He smirked at me, as if mocking all I’d tried to do for him, and I felt my scalp prickle again with anger and shame.

Here was his carriage, coming through the gates with the same blank-faced driver whipping the horse dully. Moriarty descended the steps.

‘No matter how hard you try,’ were his parting words, tossed over his shoulder, ‘you can’t see inside people’s heads.’

And, with that, he disappeared into the dark chamber of his father’s coach and was gone. I looked up to see the head, watching through the common room window, his jaw working furiously as if he were chewing a tough piece of gristle.

At last he muttered, turned on his heel and marched back into his study. Thus I believe the head liked to think he had won the war, even if he’d lost every battle waged between them and had still to placate a furious patron.

The scandal was hastily buried and the school buckled down to a quieter – and perhaps a duller – routine. Having abruptly cut off my nascent relationship with Esther, I spent much of my time from then on in my room, reading, and considering wistfully the quality of a woman’s bare skin in the most hidden parts. I had not the courage to make reparation between us, to try to explain my sudden betrayal without revealing more than I thought I could bear, and so I lost her.

I heard reports now and then – Moriarty went to a smaller university, and at length went on to make his infamous reputation worldwide. I remained at the school for four years or so, before taking a post in a quieter provincial school, and am happy to say I never came across the likes of the boy again.

It was only last autumn, having heard of Moriarty’s fatal accident at the Reichenbach Falls, I found the memories of that dreadful time burst free as if from behind a dam. I called an old colleague, the chemistry tutor at the school, and from his enquiries discovered the whereabouts of the long-forgotten Esther and contacted her. She is now a ladies’ maid, not far from the school itself, and I paid her a visit.

Although I am now, of course, a man fairly on the brink of the winter of his own life, I found myself still trembling when I stood outside the house where she is engaged. She answered the door and my heart tripped just as it had when I’d first seen her, walking briskly and sweetly down the corridor outside the ballroom at the school.

Though her hair is paler and her skin has lost the shine and pink of a young woman, she is yet as beautiful, if not more so. We fell immediately into talk of the old place, the characters of the tutors and – inevitably – of the boy who had, even if indirectly, caused our separation.

‘Oh, it was an awful time,’ she said, her attention falling to the fire, which burned low and fitful in the grate. She prodded it distractedly, not meeting my gaze. ‘All that scandal, and – not seeing you. I just wanted to pack up and leave.’

‘I am most terribly sorry, Esther,’ I say, faltering over my words. I hold my hat in my lap and find I’m worrying the brim as if it were a string of rosary beads. ‘I felt that I could not—’

‘I know,’ she says, reaching out to lay a hand on mine. ‘It couldn’t be helped. We weren’t destined to be together. I cried myself to sleep for a month, you know,’ she said, a wry smile on her face.

‘Oh, Esther.’

‘Well, I was a girl, wasn’t I, Ernest? Just a daft lass, really. Worst of it was I’d lost my doll, even, imagine that!’

‘You’d what? I beg your pardon?’ The hair on my neck rose again, as if a cold breeze had swept into the room straight from the past.

‘I’d a dolly. I told you, I was just a girl. It was my mam’s, and she’d left it to me before she died. Violet, I called it. She had brown eyes and ringlets and little leather boots. I took her everywhere. Silly, probably, but I loved her. And then she disappeared, just at the time all the troubles broke out. And … What is it, Ernest? You’ve gone so still?’

‘Did you find it?’ I managed to grate the words out.

‘Yes, actually, I did. A week or so after I lost her. But she was beyond repair. She was lying face down out in the playing fields, just destroyed.’ Her voice was bitter, even now, as she described it. ‘All those beautiful ringlets, just muddy tails, and her head … Oh, it was like a gruesome thing, Ernest, I know it sounds ridiculous, but you know how one gets attached to things sometimes, and her head was all caved in … She was wax, you see, and it was like someone had dug a hole in the back of her head, it was all burst. Like the skull was bashed open with a poker or something. Just unnecessary. Those boys.’

She dug angrily at the fire, which spat sparks at her and refused to glow any brighter. I found myself unable to speak. I remembered Moriarty’s face, his wretched look as we searched his room. The infinitesimal glow in his eyes as I left him, like little fragments of crystal buried in his head, and the doll flung on the mattress, where the head had left her. And realised that I had, indeed, reader, been most gravely mistaken, after all.

The professor turned the visitor card over and over between his thin fingers. It was of common enough stock and cheaply printed: each of the letters a in the plain typeface was faintly smudged. Square-edged, no attempt at ostentation. Quite unremarkable. Except—

Moriarty placed the card against a wooden rule from his writing desk, nodding his satisfaction at the dimensions thus revealed. He allowed himself a thin smile; as suspected: the card – and the visitor still awaiting his pleasure beyond the study door – were so much more than both pretended to be. The professor took up the card again, using it to point at Hawes, who was silently awaiting his master’s command.

“Show him in.”

“Yes, sir.” The college porter bobbed his head and disappeared through the study’s only door. Moriarty reached for his desk lamp, angling the shade so that the greatest measure of its light fell upon the chair opposite. Settling against the tall back of his own chair he steepled his fingers. A moment later, Hawes reappeared, leading the intriguing visitor. He was tall, pale of complexion and eye; his hair a nondescript shade that tended towards neither blond nor brown. His beard was of a reddish hue, and cut in the imperial style. He was dressed in a simple grey suit, a hat of matching colour held in his left hand whilst a black stick dangled languidly from his right. In all, the figure aspired to the same degree of outward unremarkableness as his card; the professor was not fooled for one instant. Indeed, he felt mildly irritated that this sallow man considered him so easily foxed.

For his part, the visitor quickly surveyed the simple study with colourless eyes. He looked less than impressed by the surroundings – perhaps expecting something more lavish. His pale gaze paused briefly on the painting of a coquettish young woman, resting negligently on the floor to Moriarty’s right; his smooth brow puckered for the shortest time before continuing the careless scrutiny.