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

MY JACKET POCKET.

The man stood up and reached for my jacket. He withdrew an envelope. It was the money Holmes had paid me to be his watchman.

“No message?”

I did not reply. I waited until he had left. I fell into a sleep so deep it was like sinking into the cold fathoms of a lake.

Word began to trickle through the following afternoon, like the first thaw waters of spring from the crags, that Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis, Moriarty, were dead. Evidence of a struggle had been found at Reichenbach at midday, and a few artefacts belonging to the eminent detective. I had seen the falls once, when I was very young, and I had been cowed by its power and fury. If you were driven underground by that torrent of water, you would never surface again. But it had excited me too. That movement. That ceaseless thrashing energy.

I saw Dr Watson, bereft, exhausted, being ushered with his suitcase to the train station where he would begin his journey back to London. I wanted to offer him some crumb of comfort, but others more able than I were doing that job already, and so much better. After he had gone – I watched the puffs of steam from the locomotive dissipate like my own thought bubbles in the boiling Meiringen sky – Mother suggested I take to my bed for a rest. My fingers and toes exhibited signs of frostbite, and she thought it would be injurious to my good health to remain outdoors, but I was firm. I WISH TO SIT ON THE BALCONY. I would not be diverted. After a while, she gave up trying to change my mind and left me alone. I’m sure she was thinking that I might be abducted once more, but Moriarty was gone, and Tobias had replaced the rugged wheels on my chair with the original castors. I was unlikely to be making any more unscheduled trips again.

The storm hit Meiringen an hour later, leaden cloud bringing artificial night to the village. I watched the skin on my arms pucker, the hairs rise as if in supplication to the power swelling in the sky. This time I felt it, an echo of the fear I had known in Moriarty’s presence, as if he dragged its trickery around with him like a humour or a scent. Lightning flashed and the thunder it created was instantaneous. Rain dropped as if shocked out of the clouds by the sound; heavy, brutal, pummelling rain. I had never felt so alive and, for a moment, I was grateful that I could never utter the name of the person who had triggered that in me. Fear was survival. Fear was life. I could feel. I could FEEL.

In the hiatus after a second lightning flash, I saw something different in the scenery imprinted upon the darkness behind my eyes. A figure was standing still to my left beneath the awning of the bakery a little way up the road from the hotel. The flash of lightning. A refreshed scene in acid white: the figure now closer. There was something wrong with its physique.

Flash. Everything remained the same: the great mass of the mountains, the reach of the trees, the wet template of buildings known to me as intimately as the pattern of freckles on the back of my hand. And this figure. Closer yet. Bent over and buckled like a child’s model shaped from clay.

I tasted his name upon my tongue though I could not utter it. So much like some play upon the Latin phrase reminding us that we have to die.

Flash. A step nearer. Now I could see his face. The prominent lobes of his forehead split and bloodied. The cliff of his face blackened by bruises. An arm broken so badly it resembled a flesh scythe curling up around his back. Bone was visible in the soaked swags of his exposed skin, as if he were carrying some strange bag of splintered antlers with him, to ward off bad luck.

He looked at me with those massive gaping shadows deep in his face. In the next window of light, he had raised his good hand and let it fall haltingly, like a child’s representation of rain or, perhaps, the deluge of a waterfall.

When the lightning returned again, he was gone.

Spring 1911

‘I am a man of science. But I do appreciate art.’

The speaker was an elderly man. His face was long and thin, topped with sparse grey hair and there was a sharpness, a watchfulness in his eyes that suggested great intelligence.

The young man he addressed looked sideways at him. He wore a puzzled frown as though he had not quite understood what the other had said.

But the older man continued. ‘I think this work is particularly interesting. The look on the interrogator’s face. The innocence of the child. He has no idea what is happening and why the strange man is asking these questions but, in his naivety, he will likely tell the truth in an unwitting act of betrayal. The only thing he knows, even at his tender age, is fear. See how his sister weeps. She recognises the danger.’

A small smile played on the speaker’s thin lips as he turned his head to see his companion’s reaction. But he saw nothing. The shabby young man with the greasy dark hair was staring blankly at the large canvas, lost in the scene.

‘ And When Did You Last See Your Father? It is a strange title, don’t you think?’

The young man turned his eyes on the speaker. ‘Please. My English is not good.’

A flicker of recognition passed across the older man’s face. ‘I detect a German accent. You are German, mein Herr .’

The answer was a vigorous shake of the head. ‘ Nein . I am Austrian.’

‘How long have you been in Liverpool?’ The older man spoke in German, fluent and faultless as a native.

‘For four months only,’ the young man replied in his own tongue. He was in his early twenties and he fidgeted nervously with the sleeve of his threadbare jacket. His body was thin and gangling and he looked as if he was in need of a good meal. A controllable creature, the old man thought. He’d met his kind before: desperate for approval; desperate to belong.

‘You are an artist, I think,’ the old man said, noting the tense, paint-stained fingers.

The young man’s small eyes brightened at the question. ‘Yes, I am a very fine artist. But there are many who do not appreciate true talent. So many ignorant men who follow only the latest fashion.’

‘I know precisely what you mean. My gifts too have long been underestimated.’ The old man’s lips twitched upwards in a bitter smile.

After a short silence he turned his attention once more to the painting hanging before them on the gallery wall. The picture of the small boy in the costume of a seventeenth-century Royalist being questioned by a Parliamentarian soldier with a cunning gentleness calculated to extract the Judas betrayal from the guileless babe. ‘Could you paint something like this?’

The young man nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. I think so.’

There was a pause while the older man studied his companion more closely. What he saw obviously pleased him because he came straight to the point. ‘If I supply the materials, could you produce a replica of Yeames’s masterpiece? A close approximation good enough to fool the casual observer?’

He saw pride in the young Austrian’s expression and a visible straightening of his slouched spine. ‘I would enjoy the challenge.’ He suddenly frowned. ‘But I have nowhere to work on such a large canvas. My accommodation is cramped and …’

‘Do not worry. I have a large house where you can work. The only thing I ask is that you say nothing of the matter to anyone. Is that agreed?’

The young man nodded eagerly. ‘Agreed. I hope you will not think me impertinent, but why do you wish for this copy?’

The older man smiled, showing his small, yellow teeth. ‘That is none of your concern. I will pay you well and you will ask no questions.’

‘You will pay?’

The older man saw the greed in the other man’s eyes. Or maybe a desperation that had grown from poverty and rejection. He named a sum and saw the light of avarice flicker brightly.