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

Holmes and I caught the milk train to London before sunrise the next day, and at the appointed time we were at the chapel: a small church of grey stone located in the middle of a row of grey houses. Arthur Chidlow was already waiting for us, wrapped up in an overcoat and in a state of some agitation.

‘I have seen a large number of men enter the chapel,’ he said. ‘Several I recognised as being members of the various criminal gangs that currently vie for control of London and the Home Counties.’

‘No Eastern European relatives then?’ I asked facetiously. ‘At least this isn’t a real funeral service.’

‘To my certain knowledge,’ he went on as if I had said nothing, ‘there are representatives of the Yiddishers, the Hoxton Mob, the Bessarabian Tigers, the King’s Cross Gang and the Watney Streeters in there – it’s like a villains’ League of Nations! What’s going on?’

‘I suspect we are here for a cross between the criminal version of the reading of Professor Moriarty’s will and a treasure hunt,’ Holmes said darkly. ‘Everyone in there wants Professor Moriarty’s list of current and future blackmail targets, and possibly his guide to conducting criminal operations as well. The only question is: what will the professor be asking them to do for it, from beyond the grave?’

‘Most of them sent their bodyguards or followers in to search the place first,’ Chidlow continued. ‘I presume they wanted to make sure that the professor did not intend settling some old scores from beyond the grave by means of a well-placed bomb.’

‘That is not the professor’s style,’ Holmes said. ‘I think they are projecting their own blunt methods upon him.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but if you recognise them, can’t you just arrest them and save yourself a lot of trouble?’

Chidlow shrugged. ‘I wish I could, Doctor. I may know who they are and what they have done, but I have no real evidence. No court of law would believe me.’

‘Exactly the problem I have had with Professor Moriarty all these years,’ Holmes pointed out.

We entered into the chapel. It was small, with barely ten rows of pews. At the front, in the midst of the area set out for the choir, was a table. On the table was a wind-up gramophone player.

The pews were nearly filled with a ragtag selection of humanity’s worst representatives. Some were well dressed and some not so much, but they all bore marks of violence such as scars, flattened noses and cauliflower ears. One man, of Maltese extraction I believe, had twin letter ‘H’s carved into his cheeks. I wasn’t sure if that was a mark of belonging to some gang or the sign that he had displeased someone with a sharp knife.

Everybody turned to look at us as we entered, but nobody seemed willing to dispute our reasons for being there. We slid into three spaces at the end of a pew. I found myself sitting next to an elderly man with a wizened face and a mane of white hair. His head projected from his old-fashioned wing collar like that of a tortoise from its shell. He glanced briefly at me and nodded, then looked away. I couldn’t help but wonder which criminal fraternity he was associated with. Perhaps he had just wandered in to warm his old bones.

I checked my watch. It was very nearly nine o’clock, and a flurry of excitement ran through the cold, draughty chapel as a man walked in from the vestry towards the record player. He was holding a shellac phonograph of the same kind that Holmes used to listen to music. The man was nondescript – in his early forties, perhaps – and expressionless. He wore spectacles with round, smoked lenses. Without looking at his audience, he bent over, placed the phonograph on the gramophone player, lifted the stylus and placed it at the beginning of the disc, and then wound the gramophone up and started it going.

A crackling sound filled the chapel. We listened expectantly and, after a few moments, a voice started to speak. It was rough and distorted, but I recognised it as the ash-dry voice of Professor James Moriarty.

‘I predict that there will be a reasonably large audience for this, my final declaration,’ he said. ‘I will not bore you with any preamble, any list of my accomplishments or any attempt to have the final word in the various verbal disputes I have entered into over the years. That will gain me nothing now, and you would not be here if you were not already familiar with my history. As I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Deity of any kind, I can only assume that my consciousness, my genius and all my memories have now dissipated into the random motion of atoms and mol ecules. All that I leave behind is this recording, my various published works of a mathematical or scientific nature, and the unpublished manuscript of my philosophical and practical dissertation on crime, with descriptions of practical examples.’ He paused momentarily, leaving a silence broken only by crackles and pops from the phonograph. I had never credited Professor Moriarty with a sense of humour, but he did seem to be pausing for effect. ‘It is the latter,’ he went on, ‘for which I presume you are all here.’

‘I cannot help,’ Holmes whispered, ‘admire a man who refuses to drop a participle, even in death.’

‘Money is of no use to me now,’ the professor’s voice continued, ‘yet I do not wish to just give my life’s work away to the first person who can get to it and fight the rest of you off. My observations over the past few years depress me: there is little intelligence and even less creativity in English crime now. From the continent has come a flood of clumsy protection schemes and drug rackets, whilst from America has come intergang warfare conducted by means of machine guns and “concrete boots”. I confess to wishing that someone with even a fraction of my wit could weld all of this rough material together and hew it into the kind of organisation that could control crime across entire continents. The problem, of course, is that most criminals these days have a one-track mind – excessive violence is the only solution. Solving this mystery will require more than a single-track approach.’

‘A frightening thought,’ Chidlow murmured.

‘If you are worthy, then this recording is all you will need in order to find my manuscript. I mean that literally – you need consider nothing else in this chapel but the phonograph you see revolving in front of you. My agent, who is standing before you, knows absolutely nothing. His sole instructions have been to be here at a certain time, to play this recording as many times as you require and to take it away and smash it when you have exhausted its possibilities. If you try to take the recording away with you then he is instructed to smash it anyway. I cannot wish you good luck, for luck is nothing but mathematical probabilities resolving themselves in a favourable manner. Nevertheless, I do hope that at least one of you can solve the mystery and prove to me that my work will go on.’

The professor’s voice fell silent, leaving only clicks and pops behind as the stylus circled endlessly in its final groove. A murmur filled the chapel as the various criminals and gang members discussed what they had heard.

The man with the carved ‘H’s in his cheeks stood up. ‘Play it again,’ he ordered in a gruff, accented voice.

The man staffing beside the gramophone nodded. He lifted the stylus from the phonograph and moved it back to the beginning.

We sat there, silent, as the professor’s voice echoed around the chapel again, repeating everything he had said previously. Some in the audience – perhaps I should say ‘congregation’ – made notes, while others strained to hear if there was anything in the background, any other noises that might give the location of Moriarty’s baleful manuscript away. Holmes leaned back against the pew, eyes closed, his fingers moving as if he was conducting an orchestra.