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

‘In some isolated spot away from polite society?’

Mycroft snorted quietly. ‘I think the location has far more to do with its convenient links with … illicit sea-trading?’

I nodded. Tales of smuggling in that county were as old as the land itself. ‘You feel this Jacob Moriarty is liable to do me ill?’

‘I have reliable information that not only is he liable to cause you considerable harm but has plans afoot to do so.’ Mycroft leaned forward, the leather creaking beneath him, as loud as unoiled hinges in the quiet of the Diogenes. ‘My advice to you, Doctor Watson, is to take a little trip. I am told Scotland is quite lovely at this time of year. I believe your mother had connections there?’

‘How did you know …’

‘I know you have gone to some pains to hide that link, which is good. Few people know of it. Go. Find your roots. Take your good lady wife, and allow us to deal with James Moriarty the younger.’

‘I have never walked away …’

‘I am not asking you to walk away, my dear chap. I am strongly advising you to run. I will contact you when we have the situation under control.’

‘But how on earth … ’

Mycroft only smiled, before sealing his lips around his cigar and obscuring himself from my gaze behind fresh tobacco fog; a familial gesture that I knew too well. Argument would be futile.

That was not to say that I would do as bidden. Hiding like a child was not in my nature. I am a fair pugilist, perhaps not in Holmes’s class, but can make a good fist when required of me, and I was certainly the better marksman with pistol and rifle alike. Yet I had responsibilities. Mary should not be placed at risk, of course. I also had a thriving practice and patients who needed my expertise, or at very least a suitable stand-in to care for it all. It was this duty that delayed my departure. My damnable sense of duty and obligation.

So it was three days later that we, my Mary and I, were on our way to Euston Station to catch the sleeper train to Carlisle and thence on to my ancient family home. Accidents are not uncommon, and I had indeed requested the cabbie to hurry, as time was short. The first we knew of it were the shouts of the driver before that terrible impact.

It was a dream. A nightmare. Vague images of darkness and fire … sleet and rain had only added to the chaos of shouting men and screaming horses … and the sergeant major calling for stretcher bearers in the heat of the Afghan plains. Pain in my shoulder and leg and dizzying effects of blood loss … the cries of injured men, no, singular: a man, little more than a boy, or perhaps a woman. I was trying to crawl free, pulling myself across the wreckage, and gunfire … a gunshot …

I woke in a hospital bed – screaming – for my Mary. My poor darling. Gone. Dead. I knew that before I opened my eyes, because I remembered, even in my dreams.

Massive bruising and minor lacerations. All minor really. Only the wound to my head had been enough to render me unconcious. A severe blow, the young doctor told me. I knew otherwise. I had treated enough of them in my army medical corps days to know them.

I knew who was the cause. Witnesses told later that a dray had pulled across the street and shed a rim. Nobody could explain why the dray had no team attached, or who it had belonged to. I knew.

Mycroft had moved me to a private sanatorium after the accident and, to those who asked, I had died with my dear wife. Mycroft explained in great detail that there was an operation in progress to mop up the residue of Moriarty’s empire and that by the time I was recovered it would all be over. I did not bandy words with him. I had ideas of my own.

It was a month or more before I was able to slip away from my jailors. Protectors, Mycroft insisted. But I saw it otherwise. I left the sanatorium at the dead of night and was on the early train to St Ives before the nurses’ first rounds.

As always in such moments the question I had begun by asking myself was ‘What would Holmes do?’ The answer would always be to examine the facts and deduce. And since I was unlikely to gain any help from Mycroft I had to rely on my own wits.

It took just a few enquiries at Waterloo to ascertain where James ‘Jacob’ Moriarty plied his trade. Lellantrock had once been a thriving village, but had become little more than a halt on an isolated section of the Cornish north coast. It had grown up around two tin mines, which had, I was told, ceased to be some twenty years before.

Not wanting to alert my quarry, I alighted at the next station and found lodgings at a local inn before hiring a horse to ride the coast paths. I had thought to pass myself off as a hiker, thinking that would have been the kind of ruse Holmes might have perpet rated, but my old injuries gathered in the Afghan campaigns would never allow me to hike the distances required. Horseback was the safer option, travelling the lesser byways. Not as a doctor but as a student of local customs and antiquity. Such persons asking questions and taking notes would, I reasoned, barely register in local minds. The preservation of the memory of arcadia was a near obsession in some quarters. As Holmes once said to me, ‘One can hardly move for historians in any country tavern you care to enter.’

So, clad in country tweeds and riding one of the local moorland ponies, I trotted into the village, pausing first at the post office.

‘Because in the country there is nothing like a postmistress and the publican for knowing all there is to know,’ Holmes had maintained. And, as ever, he was correct. Under the guise of gathering additional information for the Ordnance Survey, I asked casual questions about the village and its byways and, as currency for my visit, asked for a book of postage stamps.

‘The railway station is used still?’ I asked. ‘Now that the mine is closed there can’t be a great deal of use for it.’

‘I often think that myself,’ the postmistress said. She was a handsome woman of middle years, her dark hair, paling at the temples, pulled into a nest chignon and fastened with plain silver combs. Her dress was of the immaculate kind that you would expect of an educated woman. High-necked dress in a plain dark green with just a hint of cream lace around the neck and cuffs. An educated woman, yes, but one all too eager to chatter on about her neighbours and neighbourhood. ‘The village is half the size it was. But then there’s some folks always get what they want.’

‘Local squire is not fond of industry?’

The postmistress glanced each way, though I was sure she knew the room was devoid of all others but the two of us. ‘The old squire turned the mines into a good living. He was a devil, but he worked hard. His son’s a different kind of demon. Never seen up at Lellantrock House. He’s always away up in Lund’n with his sciency ways. But funny you should mention the railway.’ Another quick glance to right and left before she leaned across the counter and said in muted tones, ‘It’s that one down there. He’s the one as says what’s what.’

‘Really?’ I feigned surprise that would have made Holmes proud. ‘Who would that be, Mrs …’

‘Saxby. Gertrude Saxby, sir. And I means smugglers.’

‘Smugglers? Here?’

She leaned back to stare at me, a probing stare that saw all there was. ‘Not local are you?’ she said at last. ‘Down from Lund’n yourself?’

‘Well … yes. That is where our offices are.’

Mrs Saxby nodded. ‘You’d be excused for not knowing. This coast’s got a long tradition for the Gentlemen. Mostly local, and mostly brandy and stuff. Harmless really. My uncle George wasn’t past bringing the odd barrel ashore. But him down that railway! He’s not like any of the Gentlemen I ever met.’ She sniffed, derision in every nerve. ‘But then he’s a bad’n. Educated man, but a bad’n. Too much learning’s not always a good thing for some. Meaning no offence, sir.’