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

I raised the pillow to stare at that face. Those eyes were wide and staring. Looking at me and yet not. I did not need to feel for a pulse to know he was dead. And at my hands – I who had sworn an oath to protect all life. To treat. To heal.

There was a slight scuffing from across the room and I turned rapidly, the pillow dropping from my nerveless fingers, to see Alice Dench in the doorway, watching me with a shrewd gaze.

She advanced, setting the jug of hot water on the washstand before asking, ‘How is the patient, Doctor?’

Her expression held the paucity of emotion employed by all our profession. Had she seen what I had done? I had no way of knowing. Indeed I hardly believed it myself.

‘Gone,’ I whispered.

‘I thought as much.’ She pulled the cords from the drapes around the bed and sat in the bentwood chair at the dresser. ‘I suggest you render me unable to raise an alarm. Doctor Watson, isn’t it?’

‘How do …’

She motioned to the door and held a finger to her lips. ‘Young Mr Jacob has been studying your likeness, and your good lady wife’s for many a month. Ever since Mr James here was brought home,’ she murmured. ‘He holds you to be a part of Mr James’s illness. He already knows you are here in Cornwall. He said as much not half an hour since. And now? He will kill those dear to you. That is what Jacob does.’ She sighed, her hand going to her throat. ‘Leave, quickly. Save her.’

I closed my eyes and shuddered. ‘I should stand judged for what I …’

She touched her lips lightly once again. ‘You only hastened what the Good Lord and our own medical man had predicted. He had days at most. And the world will not miss him. Praise God their dear mama did not live to see what her boys have become. I would not be here, but for her memory.’ She blanched at a strident voice from the main hall. ‘Go, Doctor. Go back the way you came. But …’ She held up the cords. ‘Bind me. That way at least I may survive.’

I hesitated, for the smallest of moments. Guilt was far harder to overcome than she might wish. But I thought of Mary and her awful fate and knew I could not fail her memory now. I took the silk rope and sat her in the chair, and bound her hands behind her. I raised the fine scarf she had around her neck to gag her mouth, noting the scars that it revealed, and was only able to wonder what dire circumstance had led to them. I gave a final tug at the ropes to see that they were loose enough not to cause pain but sufficient to appear real.

I gave one last lingering look at the cooling body on the bed and hardened my resolve.

I crossed to the window balcony and looked out. The ivy covering the wall was as neglected as the rest of the garden and thick enough to take my weight. It went against all I held sacred to leave a woman in peril, and to leave a crime of my doing unacknowledged. But Mary … The garden on this side seemed empty still and I swung myself out on to the green ladder to swarm ground-wards with all speed that my old injuries allowed.

I ran for the wall, very much aware of the furore breaking out in the house behind me and scaled it in good order. Another time I might have been proud of that, but all I saw was open space to where my horse was secured.

The garden was full of noise: voices and gunshots and yammering of dogs. No time to plan. Just to run. I set off across the grass, keeping to what small cover there was, until I reached the mine, the noises of pursuit loud in my ears. I skittered into the yard. My horse was there, exactly where I had left it, but not as I had left it.

The poor creature lay in a pool of its own blood. Its throat had been slit and belly slashed. Death would have been rapid at least. My pity for the animal was short-lived as I was forced to take stock of my own situation. My human and canine pursuant alike were closing fast. Perhaps a half-minute behind. The mill’s door was firmly secured still, and the windows barred so there was no chance of seeking refuge within the building itself, and thus the mineshafts that lay beneath.

I ran through the yard and out into the cliff path beyond. The trackway lay open to left and right for some distance. Too far for a wounded old soldier to even consider sprinting. And even had I been as lithe of limb as I had been before my war service, I could never have outrun the dogs.

I scurried to the edge of the cliff, looked down and swallowed hard. The tide was in, with white-foamed waves surging against the rock face. Time slowed, lending added grace to the wheeling gulls over the sea, and gazelle-like spring to dogs and men who closed in from the landward side. At the head of the pack was Jacob Moriarty, his face impassive and implacable. I had seen that face before on old comrades charging into battle. The very visage of death.

Another glance towards the water and the foaming waves, with no way of knowing what obstacles lay beneath. Yet even as I made the decision to jump I was hit amidships by a flying mass of solid muscle. I felt myself topple, arms flailing, felt the wind in my hair, my ears, felt the impact with the water hard as iron … and then I hit the water, which felt every bit as solid as the ground above, knocking the breath from me as a hammer blow. Waves wrapped themselves around me as the current sucked me down and the light faded. I wondered in that moment if this was what Holmes had felt in his final moments at the falls.

Then I felt myself being pulled upwards. I kicked hard to propel myself through the water, and found myself being hauled none too gently into the bottom of a lobster-fisher’s skiff. I made to sit up and was kicked soundly by a sea-booted foot.

‘Stay down,’ a voice growled. ‘We’ll be landed soon enough.’

I did as I was bid, curling low in the bottom boards amongst the spare pots and ropes and debris. My lungs ached, as did a dozen abrasions and bruises that I dared not investigate. I was chilled through to the bone despite the sun, but I was alive. Against all odds, I had survived the drop. ‘I thank you, sire.’ My voice was hoarse and I found myself coughing up saltwater, retching frothy bile into the bilge.

The fisherman watched me with no comment or emotion and only when I lay back exhausted did he make comment. ‘I’ve to take you along the coast,’ he said. ‘The gent from Lund’n has an agent waitin’.’

‘What gent …’

The man looked down to me and tapped his nose. ‘Not fer me to say. So don’t you ask.’

‘But who?’

‘A friend. I was set to watch fer you. An’ just’s well. You’d be fish bait, else. Quite a tumble you took.’

‘I was pushed …’

‘Argh, you were’n all. Big dog it were. Gorn now.’ He said no more, hand to the tiller and gaze fixed on the shore. He seemed of a kind, familiar and yet not. I was fairly sure we had not met, and equally sure I would never see him again once we reached the small harbour. I stepped ashore to find a package awaiting me.

My own valise with a change of clothes and money, and a single sheet of paper with a few curt sentences written upon it:

“A foolish move that was wholly expected. I will be waiting for you at Baker Street. Go there and await my further word. I have news that will be of great interest to you. M.H.”

I did not think to argue. Indeed I doubt that I could have, had my life depended on it. Instead, I lay in the gently rocking embrace of my rescuer’s chariot, gazing up at the sky and contemplated what the ‘other’ Holmes might have in store.

There is no question that the Diogenes Club is superior to all other gentlemen’s clubs in London. While the younger Mr Holmes may refer to my fellow members, including his own brother, as the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town, he also rightfully praises it for comfortable chairs, the selection of periodicals and, most importantly, its silence. While a member might clear his throat in outrage at some bit of nonsense in the afternoon papers, he wouldn’t grip the pages and give them an irate snap as Colonel Moran does now to his magazine as he sits in my chambers.