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

Happily, the doctor quickly revived. He could not account for his collapse – although this correspondent notes the room was very stuffy and overheated with the press of people watching the tournament and the air thick with cigar, cigarette and pipe smoke. Dr Watson asked for his companion – whom he referred to as ‘the professor’ – but it seemed the man had slipped away. When the match resumed, Velikovsky won.

The professor. Dr Watson and Professor Moriarty together in a year when the good doctor believed Sherlock Holmes – and indeed Moriarty – to be dead? How did that come about? Watson, by his own account in his memoirs of his friend, Holmes, had never met or even seen Moriarty. What to make of this encounter?

A series of clues forming an incomplete narrative. How to complete it? Some might call it inspiration. Researchers – modest creatures on the whole – simply call it doggedness. Looking again at what is in front of you.

The Royal Astronomical Society has its library at Burlington House, along one side of the cobbled courtyard that leads to the Royal Academy. It’s a private library and a treasure trove of information about astronomy and astronomers. Its librarians have grown weary of requests from researchers for access to anything they have about or by Professor James Moriarty for the simple reason they have nothing.

However, Hampstead and Highgate have an amateur astronomical society that was founded in the early 1880s. Among the names of the founders the dogged researcher will find the name James Moriarty. Its papers are housed in the archive of Hampstead Library at John Keats’ House, just a walk away from the heath. Or, rather, they were housed there. As the library service is dismantled and the branches handed over to volunteers the archive has been deposited at the National Archives for safekeeping.

A good reason to visit Kew. Another relates to that death certificate from the hospital in Whitechapel. Signed by a doctor whose hand is as indecipherable as that of any other doctor. Medical directories from the Victorian era are available online but the London Hospital’s archive needs to be consulted by attending in person at Kew.

Kew it is then. There is a pleasant walk in summer along the towpath by the Thames from Hammersmith or Barnes Bridge to the National Archives but a researcher in pursuit of a mystery will use the quickest method: the tube to Kew station and a tenminute rush through quiet residential streets to the imposing building by the river.

Impatience can also be a virtue. But waiting for medical records and astronomical records to be brought up there are only so many cups of coffee a person can drink.

The astronomical records arrive first. A slim folder. Written in faded black ink on the cover: ‘Notes by Professor James Moriarty, January 25, 1892’. Trembling fingers untie the cord that secures the old file. Within are not astronomical tables or records of hours spent with an eye glued to a telescope, but a handwritten account of an encounter in Simpson’s chess rooms entitled: A Further Fragment of Memoir by Professor James Moriarty.

‘You can get help for your dystonia,’ the bluff, solid man said. He was wearing a waistcoat that could not conceal his stoutness but there was strength in his shoulders and in the beefy arms that packed the sleeves of his tweed jacket. He had a newspaper under his arm.

I put my finger to my chin and looked up at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Your dystonia.’ The man touched his moustache then pointed vaguely in the direction of my head. ‘The oscillation.’

I frowned. I don’t like people standing over me.

‘My head does not oscillate,’ I said. I examined him for a moment. ‘Do I know you?’

‘We have never met,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is EHT.’

‘I do not know the acronym,’ I said. ‘Why are you dressed for the country here on the Strand?’

It was his turn to frown, but not about my comment on his clothes.

‘Acronym? What is that?’

I tried not to sound supercilious, though everything about this open-faced man irritated me. I indicated the newspaper.

‘I thought you a man of letters. But clearly not initial letters. Acronym is a new word for a custom long known in linguistics but never before named. The custom of taking the initial letter of a series of words and making an abbreviation of them.’

‘I see,’ he said doubtfully.

‘From the Greek akros – topmost – and onoma – name,’ I said, relishing my pedantry. ‘You will recall Edgar Allan Poe used one in his unusually comical story “How To Write A Blackwood Article”.’

The man touched his moustache again.

‘Why are you here?’ I said.

He gestured into the room. ‘I am a fan of chess.’

I was sitting in Simpson’s chess rooms on the Strand. A game was in progress using the giant chess pieces in the middle of the room. I was sitting in a booth. As often when I concentrate I was unaware of the oscillation of my head. This strange man had diagnosed me correctly. I suffer from dystonic head tremor. Touching my cheek or, as now, cupping my chin in my hand, allayed the symptoms. I was conscious that my head was thrust forward – I had cervical or neck dystonia. A tremulous cervical dystonia is the correct term, I am told.

For a man so proud of his brain – and, believe me, my ego is merited – this thing that my intelligence could not control was irksome beyond imagining. A doctor called Stamford at the London Hospital was doing pioneering work. I intended to look him up.

Alcohol temporarily improves my condition. I took a sip of my wine. A Bordeaux. Indifferent – but then this was London.

He looked at me for longer than seemed polite then showed me the newspaper he had been securing under his arm. It was an old edition of The Times, the one that recorded the sinking of the ship Moran and I had been travelling on.

‘I thought you dead until I saw an account in The Times of the sinking of the SS Utopia and your name among the survivors.’

‘Do I know you?’ I said again, looking beyond him in case I needed help.

‘We have never actually met before,’ he said.

He slid into the seat opposite me in the booth – with some difficulty because of his paunch. I frowned.

‘If you are here for some kind of revenge for some real or imaginary injury I should advise you not to attempt to remove your service revolver from your pocket,’ I said.

‘If you have a weapon, you run the same risk,’ he said.

I gestured with one hand as I leaned across and touched his neck with the other. As he slumped I murmured: ‘My weapon is my knowledge of the workings of everything.’

I had seen stage hypnotists. They were the same as magicians in that they operated by misdirection. In the hypnotists’ case it was the pretence that their voice provided the magic when in fact it was the fingers of one hand pressed rapidly against the carotid artery, stopping the flow of blood to the brain, whilst the audience’s attention was on whatever flourish the other hand was making.

I reached over and checked his pockets. There were no identifying papers. He carried no service revolver. I looked over at the indifferent chess game. I ignored it and observed the man as he slept, wondering who he might be. I was disturbed when others came to the booth, concerned about him. I slipped away as they attended him.

There is no family history of tremor or dystonia. My two brothers – also called James by our ludicrous parents – suffer no symptoms. And with me it is only the head and only when I am standing. Lying down relieves it. There is no equivalent tremor of the hand, as is often the case.