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

He had a lot to think about. Especially Eva Zimmermann. He had to admire the woman, even though she had tried to kill him. No other woman had ever tried before … I wonder if she survived. Shall we meet again in that case?

She had built a truly remarkable little empire, albeit a short-lived one. He always thought that if he attempted something like that, he’d wait until he had more experience and money – yet her example refuted these concerns.

But Eva Zimmermann did not wrap herself in enough shadows to remain at a safe distance. He should consider it a cautionary tale – not the usual moralistic kind, but a practical one. The fact that she’d heard about him also disturbed him greatly. He should be even more careful from now on. Who knew who else might have got some idea concerning him …

I should remain truly unseen, my hands clean and reputation impeccable. But if I engage in any kind of criminal activity, I’m still taking the risk of exposure. How can I avoid that? It’s not like I could advise others in crime and stay clean myself …

He froze.

That’s true, there is perhaps no specialized criminal adviser in the world … An empty niche.

Safe and profitable. Ideal for my equations.

Consulting criminal.

The corners of his mouth twitched in an amused smile.

Yes; this sounds good.

It seems to me, as I look back over the landscape of my life, that the impression I will leave behind is that I have spent most of it chronicling the exploits and adventures of someone else – my close friend Sherlock Holmes. I do not regret this for one moment, but it does seem passing strange to me that my time as an Army doctor in Afghanistan and elsewhere, my ill-advised period of medical practice in San Francisco, my years of service as a general practitioner in London and my many and varied marriages have faded into the shadows, while the image of me sitting in a smoke-filled room on the first floor of a house in Baker Street listening to Sherlock Holmes expound on the differences between various species of grasshopper, or playing his violin with such beauty or such crassness that I was reduced either way to tears, is chiselled into the granite of history. Perhaps it is always the way that we are remembered – if we are remembered – for something other than we believe should be the case.

I find that my thoughts are consumed more and more with mortality these days. Gone are the times when I could spring to action, revolver in hand, in support of my friend while he was investigating some bizarre case. My arthritis precludes me springing anywhere these days. Holmes does not move as quickly as he used to either, and his tall frame is stooped now as he moves around our shared living room, but his mind is as sharp as ever.

We left Baker Street behind some years ago. London had changed for the worse, what with the gradual replacement of horse-drawn carriages by motorised vehicles and the legacy of the bombing raids carried out by the kaiser’s infernal rigid dirigibles during the war that has been described by others as ‘Great’, although I feel it was anything but. I am unsure now which of those two innovations eventually caused us to leave, but after a period apart, I was invited by Holmes to join him in his Sussex cottage, where I could spend my time cataloguing some of his (I do not dare say ‘our’) past cases that, for various reasons, had gone unrecorded at the time. Mrs Hudson had long since retired to live with her sister in Liverpool, and it is a local lady, Mrs Turner, who now looks after our needs. Sometimes, while staring at the pile of paper beside my typewriter, I do think about writing my own life story, setting down some of the adventures that I have had without Holmes by my side, but the desire soon fades away. I know full well that my place on this Earth is to record for posterity the life of Sherlock Holmes. He provokes an interest in people across the world that I do not.

Holmes, by now, is acting more in a consulting role than as a detective in his own right – partly for those members of the police who still remember him and partly for those secretive areas of government that his brother Mycroft had set up and left behind on his death. We also find that more and more academics from our great universities are seeking him out, not for assistance in solving a mystery, but to interview him about the criminals and crimes of that era, long gone now, that has been given the designation ‘Victorian’.

One visitor did, however, cause some disruption in our lives – a visitor connected to a past that we thought was firmly behind us.

It began with the newspaper that was delivered to our cottage one summer’s morning. Mrs Turner brought it in with our breakfast. The sun was shining and, looking out through the window into the garden, I could see Holmes’s bees forming a cloud around their hive as they left and arrived. Holmes had recently been conducting an experiment whereby he planted different varieties of plants in flowerbeds at set distances from the house, then covered certain ones up, to see whether the bees had any preference and what the effect was on the pollen they collected. For myself, I was firmly in favour of the honey produced after they had visited his lavender flowers. A spoonful of that honey mixed in with a warm glass of whisky was, I found, a tonic for most ailments – and I say that as a medical man.

Holmes turned immediately to the personal advertisements, as was his wont. His bushy eyebrows twitched as he scanned through the small print, gaining some insight into the lives and the foibles of the people who had placed them. Once or twice he frowned, as if his sensitive antennae had picked up on an anomaly therein.

Having read through the personal advertisements, Holmes then turned to the ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’ announcements – a section that fascinated him more and more as the years passed. Suddenly, I heard a ‘ Hah!’ from where he sat. I glanced over to see his face mobilised by an expression of excitement that I had not seen for some time.

‘We shall be receiving a visitor,’ he said. ‘Please tell Mrs Turner to prepare a light lunch.’

‘There is something in the newspaper that you will be consulted over?’ I asked, an old but familiar tingle running through me. ‘A crime of some kind – insoluble and baffling?’

‘Alas, there are no decent criminals any more,’ Holmes replied. ‘The crimes I see reported in the papers every day are bereft of creativity and audacity. Violence has replaced intellect as a means of gaining financial advantage. The war has brutalised the criminal classes as it has brutalised society as a whole.’

‘What then?’ I asked.

‘Professor Moriarty has died,’ he said simply.

I felt a strange mixture of relief and bereavement well up within me. Professor Moriarty had been such a part of our lives for so long that I had assumed he and Holmes would either live forever or die simultaneously. The world had, of course, been told once before that they had died together – many years ago, at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. It had taken fully four years for Holmes’s survival to be revealed to me and to the world. Professor Moriarty’s survival had taken a little longer to come to light, but since then Holmes had seen his hand in numerous crimes, both here in England and abroad, and had confounded his plans on several occasions. For a variety of reasons I had not publicly chronicled their clashes after the Reichenbach Falls incident, although I have kept copious notes, which I have been gradually expanding into publishable form for posterity. The professor had, however, been notable by his absence from crime for several years, and my assumption was that he had gone into semi-retirement in the same way that Holmes had done. To find out now that he had died was strangely like hearing that some venerable elder statesman or dignitary had passed on.