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

“It’s the eyes, the nose, the mouth, sir. You can’t make a pig’s ear from a silk purse—”

“Thank you, Mrs Hudson.” Holmes broke in upon this learned disquisition. “It is the opposite, I believe, despite the intended compliment. And yet, as you say, there are aspects of the human physiognomy that will always distinguish one individual from another, even one monozygotic twin from his identical fellow. Now, if you’d be so kind as to pour the tea.”

Mrs Hudson did as she was asked, then left us alone.

“Darned woman,” Mycroft said, breathing in deeply, then hissing out the words.

“She is correct, however, as Doctor Watson, Thomas Carlyle or Charles Darwin would inform you, Mycroft. Genetikos . There’s no getting away from it. Each man is the sum of his constituent parts. That is the point of a disguise, by the way. You must appear to be what you are not by nature.”

“What a strange world is this!” Mycroft laughed. “I came here with exactly the same thought in my head. I dressed to dissemble, as I was telling you, but how am I to know that the man, or men, who are watching me, are not equally cleverly disguised?”

“Cleverly?” Holmes remarked. “In your case, Mycroft, I would dispute the adverb. Your talents are vast, but hiding your true self is not one of them.”

At this point I decided to intervene. When the brothers Holmes began to dispute about the niceties of any subject, the argument was likely to be examined in all its multifarious aspects. In a word, we might have been there for many hours.

“Why are you being followed?” I asked.

Mycroft looked left and right, as if there might have been someone else in the room.

“Foreign spies,” he said quietly. “They are literally everywhere since the signing of the Convention of Constantinople last March. Unchecked maritime passage through the Suez Canal may be all well and good in peacetime, Watson, but not during war. I was strongly opposed to the agreement, I can tell you.”

“Is a war about to erupt?” I asked in alarm.

Holmes stepped in before he could answer. “What have you to do with the Suez Canal?”

Mycroft examined the tea tray, as if there might be spies lurking behind the sugar bowl. “Hush-hush, dear boy. Don’t ask, because I cannot tell. Of course, the only way to guarantee safe passage through the straits is to tighten up security. I have had a hundred thoughts about the best measures to be taken, then wondered whether a less conventional approach, such as yours, might help.”

“Is there anything more conventional than logic?” Holmes fired back at him. “Forgive me, Mycroft, I know the crushing strain that working under the wheels of government occasions. You wish to identify some means of monitoring the passage of persons, as well as ships, through the Suez Canal. Very well, though there is, I believe, a more universal principle behind the specific case, with which I shall be happy to engage. I will need a couple of days. Shall we meet again towards the end of the week?”

“Thursday next?” Mycroft replied, and so it was agreed.

While Mycroft left the house in the guise of Sherlock Holmes, ten inches shorter without his towering fez, his large ears hidden beneath the flaps of an untied grey tweed deerstalker, his bulk constrained within a narrow-cut trench coat, his brother and I stepped into Baker Street but a short time afterwards.

We made a strange pair, I am sure, myself ‘disguised’ as the doctor that I am with a bowler hat on my head and a brown leather surgical bag in my hand, while the man who accompanied me wore a large black beard that was evidently false, a fez that added greatly to his height, a Bakelite pince-nez that kept slipping down his aquiline nose, and a winged cloak like a Eurasian nomad’s tent, which might have accommodated a family of five.

True to his role – and aping Mycroft, I fear – Holmes ploughed forward through the crowd, scattering ladies and gentlemen left and right, trampling children, cocker spaniels and careless nursemaids beneath his feet with equal unconcern.

“The French authorities may well be right,” said Holmes. “England is too small to contain a criminal intelligence such as Professor Moriarty. What Mycroft says perplexes me, however. What possible interest could the Napoleon of crime have in the Suez Canal?”

“It is difficult to imagine,” I said without thinking. “A narrow strait through which the greater part of the world’s trade passes, carrying goods from India and South-east Asia to Britain and France. If a ship, or ships could be boarded and captured, just think of the contraband, the ransom.”

“That may be it, Watson.”

We headed north on Baker Street. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“A short way up the road,” the Mad Mogul at my side replied.

At 55–56 Baker Street, we turned into the photographic studios of Messrs Elliott & Fry, estab’d 1863 , and climbed the stairs to the first floor. The premises consisted of an ample waiting room fitted out with red leather chesterfields and large glass chandeliers, a swinging double door, which marked the entrance to the Portrait Parlour , another one marked Strictly Staff Only , while a third door bore a legend that caught my eye immediately: Ladies Dressing Room . Far wider than the other doors, it had been designed to accommodate the enormous crinolines and bustles that had been so fashionable only twenty or thirty years before.

A pert young woman stepped forward from behind a desk to greet us.

“I would like to arrange a sitting,” said Holmes.

The young woman looked troubled. “Are you in town for long, sir?” she asked, glancing at his bizarre outfit, perhaps wondering whether he had arrived in Baker Street by camel or seated on a flying carpet, and might be returning to his country of origin by the same means of transport within the hour.

“I would like to do the thing as soon as possible,” Holmes replied.

While the receptionist went to check her appointments book, then disappeared into the Portrait Parlour , we took the opportunity to look at a vast display of photographs of the Great and the Good that were hanging from the waiting-room walls.

“What’s all this about, Holmes?” I asked. “I cannot imagine for an instant why you would wish to be photographed in that get-up.”

“It’s the perfect opportunity to test a principle, assist the French and help my brother,” Holmes replied.

“Which principle?” I said.

I could see no sense in dressing up as someone else to have one’s picture made.

“Lombroso’s,” he replied. “I was in Hatchards, Piccadilly, the other day, when I chanced upon the new, illustrated edition of his published treatise, L’Uomo Delinquente . Have you seen it? It posits the most ridiculous Positivistic theory about criminals. I quote: ‘The brain and the intelligence are inversely proportional to the size and the weight of the stomach, muscles and bones.’ Just think of Mycroft! He is the very opposite. He may be extra large, but his brain is unequalled in all the realm. Lombroso talks of atavism, as if the criminal were a throwback to primordial predatory instincts. Hm! Nothing could be so far removed from the man who published The Dynamics of an Asteroid in his youth, confounding the greatest minds in the field of pure mathematics …”

“You mean Professor Moriarty?”

“Who else?” said Holmes. “Lombroso has hit upon a method without considering the secret at the core of it. He illustrates his notions by reference to photographs of criminals he has examined. Well, Watson, let’s see what Messrs Elliott and Fry will make of me. I have a corollary notion of my own – though Shakespeare beat me to it – that ‘clothes maketh the man’. Dress up a murderer as a lord; he may be convincing, yet he remains a murderer. If we know him only as a lord in white ermine, there is no way of predicting what he may eventually do.”