The Empress of India Read online

  Moriarty took the pocket watch from his dresser and clicked it open. “A hair’s-breath before nine,” he said. “They’ve shown admirable restraint. Or perhaps they had trouble getting a cab.” He adjusted his cravat, slipped into his gray jacket, and started down the stairs with a measured tread. The knot of angry men awaiting him in the hallway below glared upward with an intensity that would have done him severe damage if the claims of several prominent psychics were true, and mental power alone could have a physical effect. The professor seemed unmoved by the almost palpable anger of those below. He paused on the landing to survey the group. “Inspector Gregson,” he said. “Inspector Lestrade . . . Dr. Watson . . . and you must be Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft—the resemblance is quite evident, despite the difference in your, ah, girth,” he said. “You wish to speak to me?”

  “Yes, sir, we do!” Mycroft Holmes affirmed, his voice filling the narrow hallway.

  “Wish to speak with you?” Dr. Watson screeched, and then fell silent, in the grip of some powerful emotion, unable to continue.

  “Very good, then,” Moriarty said, and continued down the staircase.

  The men parted grudgingly for him as he reached the ground floor and passed between them. “I believe I know why you’re here, gentlemen,” he told them, opening the door to the left of the stairs. “Please step into my office.”

  Dr. Watson was unable to contain his feelings. “Know why we’re here?” he moaned, stalking into the room behind Moriarty. “Damned right you know why we’re here!”

  “Quiet, Watson, control yourself,” Mycroft murmured, gliding into the room behind the doctor. The two detectives, bowler hats in hand, tramped into the office after Mycroft and closed the door.

  Moriarty rounded his desk and lowered himself into his heavy oak desk chair. “Seat yourselves, gentlemen,” he said. “I think you’ll find that armchair by the window particularly comfortable, Mr. Holmes.” As he spoke, Mr. Maws opened the door and silently entered behind the glowering quartet, taking his place against the wall in case he was needed.

  The four men advanced to the front of the desk, rebuffing or possibly merely ignoring Moriarty’s suggestion that they sit down. Watson clamped his walking stick between his left arm and his body. Palms flat down on the well-polished desktop, he thrust himself over the desk, his jaw tight, his face rigid with barely restrained rage. Lestrade stood stiffly to the side of the desk, twisting his hat about in his hand, looking uncomfortable but determined. Gregson pushed himself belligerently forward, holding his reinforced bowler as though it were a billy club and he was restraining himself from using it. Mycroft Holmes kept his imposing bulk slightly back from the desk and glowered down at Moriarty, his chin firmly tucked into the great tartan scarf which wound several times around his neck.

  Moriarty leaned back in his chair and surveyed his guests one at a time. Whatever emotion he might be feeling was not evident in his face or posture. With his high, domed forehead over a prominent nose and deep-set eyes that seemed to see more than ordinary mortals are permitted to see, the professor resembled a great bird of prey. Once, in the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, an Egyptian dragoman leading a small tour group had come upon Moriarty by surprise and, convinced that he was seeing the hawk-faced god Horus incarnate, crossed himself twice, spat three times, and handed an elderly clergyman back the wallet that he had just filched from his jacket pocket.

  “All right, Moriarty,” Mycroft Holmes’s booming voice shattered the silence, “where is he?”

  A trace of a smile crossed Moriarty’s face. “I said I knew why you’d come,” he told them. “I didn’t say you were right in coming.” He closed his eyes for perhaps twenty seconds and then opened them again. “It was predictable that, given Holmes’s inane insistence that I have been responsible for every major crime committed on these islands since the murder of Thomas à Becket, his friends would hold me responsible for his disappearance. A lie, if repeated often enough, attains the semblance of truth.”

  Moriarty took a newspaper clipping from his pocket and put it on his desk facing his guests. “I am just back from my establishment at Crimpton-on-the-Moor,” he told them. “This was in this morning’s Gazette. Is it essentially accurate?”

  They leaned forward to read the clipping.

  RENOWNED CONSULTING DETECTIVE DISAPPEARS

  Sherlock Holmes’s Whereabouts Still Unknown

  Foul Play Feared

  Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the noted consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, whose exploits over the past decade as a private enquiry agent have been recounted to the British reading public by his friend and companion Dr. John H. Watson, has not been seen since his sudden and

  unexpected disappearance on Wednesday the 15th of February last. The police have commenced enquiries into his whereabouts.

  Clothing identified as that of Mr. Holmes was found in the possession of Bertram Claymer, a currently unemployed horse groomer who lodges in Keat Street, Whitechapel. Claymer stated to the police that he found the apparel on Saturday the 8th in a dustbin in Newgate Street. The area for several blocks around the dustbin was immediately searched by the authorities, and several articles of apparel that might or might not have belonged to Mr. Holmes were found.

  Anyone having any information as to the current whereabouts of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is requested to communicate with Scotland Yard.

  A summary of Mr. Holmes’s more notable cases will be found on p. 17.

  Mycroft was the first to straighten up. “Those are essentially the facts as we know them,” he affirmed.

  “And on the basis of that you come storming into my house and accuse me of . . . Exactly what is it that you are accusing me of doing—spiriting Holmes away, denuding him, and throwing his clothes into a dustbin?”

  Watson took two steps backward and dropped into a chair. His gaze rose to look Moriarty searchingly in the face, and then fell. “What was I to think?” he asked. “At first, after the accident, I thought Holmes was dead. But then when they found his clothes . . .”

  “What accident?” Moriarty demanded.

  “Before we continue,” Inspector Lestrade interrupted stolidly, “I must ask you formally, Professor James Moriarty, do you have any knowledge of the present whereabouts of Mr. Sherlock Holmes? I warn you that anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence against you.”

  Moriarty took his pince-nez glasses from his jacket pocket, polished the lenses carefully with a large piece of flannel from the top drawer of his desk, and then fitted them on the bridge of his nose and turned to his questioner. “I’m ashamed of you, Giles Lestrade,” he said severely, a grammar-school master lecturing an unruly pupil. “After all we’ve been through together, you and I; and, yes, Sherlock Holmes, too. We have averted several major tragedies, with his help, and solved several perplexing crimes. And was I the ‘master criminal’ in those cases? No! Even Sherlock Holmes had to admit that it was so, though the words came grudgingly from his lips. You know that he’s been accusing me of major crimes for most of the past decade. You also know that he has never been able to prove one word of these accusations. Not one word!”

  Lestrade twisted his hat between his large hands. “That’s so, Professor,” he acknowledged. “None of Mr. Holmes’s accusations have ever been proven, not so’s you could take them to court. But, between us, it’s always seemed to me that there were a few drops of truth in the mix. Now, I don’t know how many, and I don’t know how much of what Mr. Holmes claimed about you was true, but in some cases it always seemed to me that it was nothing but sheer luck and your own deuced—excuse me, Professor—cleverness that kept you out of the dock.”

  Moriarty stood up. Gregson, who was the only one still leaning across the desk, bolted backward as though he were afraid the professor was going to stick a pin in him. “Between us, is it?” Moriarty asked. “All right, then. Just between us, just in the confines of this office, I will admit that the mores, morals, and laws of this time in which we fin
d ourselves living are not ones that I adhere to gladly. I will further admit that I find Sherlock Holmes’s incessant dogging of my footsteps to be a bit . . . tiring. The man has set watch on this house disguised as an out-of-work navvy; he has followed me about in the guise of an itinerant bookseller or a bargee on holiday or even, once, a professor of philosophy. Indeed, his ability to adopt different disguises at a moment’s notice is quite remarkable.”

  “I have not seen Holmes in any of the costumes you mention,” Watson protested.

  “He maintains rooms in several locations about the city for the purpose of donning and discarding one or another of these disguises,” Moriarty told him. “I know of two, but there are probably more. He is a thorough and persistent pest.”

  “Really!” Watson said.

  “But if he has any effect on me or on my plans,” Moriarty continued, “it is only to make me more aware, more careful, more precise. If I can avoid the attentions of a bloodhound like Sherlock Holmes, then I can assuredly avoid the notice of the simpleminded bulldogs—your pardon, Lestrade—of Scotland Yard.”

  “What are you saying, Professor?” Mycroft asked.

  “I’m saying, Mr. Holmes, that I would find a world without your brother in it to be a most dreary place indeed, and that I would never willingly be a part of any effort to remove him from it.” Moriarty dropped back into his chair.

  “So you say,” Watson said, his voice more under control but the strain still showing in the exaggerated pauses between his words, “but he’s gone and you’re here.”

  “Yes,” Moriarty agreed. “And I would like to think that, were the situation reversed, I would have a cadre of loyal friends assaulting 221B Baker Street and demanding to know what had become of Professor Moriarty. But he would be forced to answer, as I do, I have no idea. I repeat my question, Dr. Watson: What accident?”

  Watson looked over at Mycroft, who shrugged his shoulders perhaps a quarter of an inch.

  “Come, come,” Moriarty said. “If I am guilty of what you suspect me of, then surely I must already know. If I am not—perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

  Watson considered for a moment and then spoke. “Holmes was down a manhole into the central drains when it happened,” he said. “We spent much of the morning looking for the right manhole, and when he located it, he removed the cover and dropped into the tunnel. I awaited him on the street by the entrance, and he went some distance into the drain. He’d been down, I would judge, some fifteen minutes when a great rush of water flowed through the tunnel. It might have been a release from some reservoir, I don’t know. Holmes whistled for help and that—that was the last I heard from him.”

  The silence stretched on for a second, and was interrupted by the office door opening. Mrs. H., Moriarty’s housekeeper, bustled in with a folding table, which she set up in front of the desk. A serving girl came in behind her with a great silver tray of pitchers, cups, saucers, plates, and silverware, and placed it carefully on the table.

  “Coffee and tea, gentlemen,” Mrs. H. said. “You may serve yourselves.” Then she sniffed and bustled out of the room, pausing at the door to turn and add, “As though Professor Moriarty would harm one hair of that ungrateful man’s head,” and closed the door with exaggerated gentleness behind her.

  The gentlemen did help themselves, except for Gregson, who stared suspiciously at the teapot and then turned away.

  “What was Holmes doing down a manhole?” Moriarty asked.

  “What’s that?” Watson looked up from pouring cream into his coffee. “Oh. Investigating a possibility.”

  “A possibility of what?”

  “I don’t know, and I can tell you no more than that. I can’t discuss the case he was working on.”

  “Fair enough.” Moriarty paused to consider. “So at first you thought he was washed away?”

  “Yes. We found the police whistle he had been carrying set on a shelf, but no other sign of him.”

  “Until Mr. Claymer turned up wearing Holmes’s clothing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly what items of Holmes’s apparel was he wearing?”

  “His inverness,” Watson began, “and, ah—”

  “Jacket, trousers, waistcoat, inverness, hat, and shoes,” Mycroft said, dropping down into the comfortable chair by the window. “All of which showed the effects of being submerged in water for some time.”

  “Fairly complete outfit,” Moriarty commented. “Shirt?”

  “No.”

  “Anything in the pockets? Any of Holmes’s personal belongings?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Claymer might have pawned them or sold them,” Moriarty suggested.

  “We questioned him thoroughly on that. He says he didn’t. Offered him five pounds if he could produce any personal items of my brother’s or tell us where they could be found. He was quite sorrowful that he was unable to collect.”

  Moriarty went to the window and stared out. “Several things come to mind,” he said.

  “I must warn you again,” Inspector Lestrade began, “that anything you say—”

  “Oh, be quiet, Lestrade!” Mycroft bellowed. “Let the man talk.”

  “Let us create a chain of inductive reasoning,” Moriarty said, “and see where it leads us.”

  “Go on,” said Mycroft Holmes.

  “Either Holmes intended to disappear or he did not intend to disappear,” Moriarty began. “If he intended to disappear, would he not have left my friend Dr. Watson at home, or at least in a more comfortable place than sitting atop an open manhole? And would he not have said simply, ‘Watson, I plan to be away for a few days’?”

  “We figured that out for ourselves, Professor,” Inspector Gregson said, trying not very hard to suppress the sneer in his voice. As far as he was concerned, Moriarty was a crook, and all the fancy houses and cultured accents and strings of letters after his name couldn’t change a thing.

  “Ah! Did you?” Moriarty asked mildly. “Then we must proceed with our inferences and see how far they take us. If Holmes did not intend to disappear, then his disappearance was the result of something that happened while he was down in the sewer tunnel. And what we must consider is whether the disappearance was voluntary or involuntary.” He looked politely at Gregson. “As I’m sure you’ll agree, Inspector.”

  “Yes,” Gregson said. “Of course.”

  “Let us examine the two scenarios separately,” Moriarty said. “If Holmes’s disappearance was voluntary, then after a ‘rush of water’ which may have soaked him, or even carried him away, he recovered, left the sewer at some point other than the one at which he entered it, took his outer clothes off, and vanished. Why did he take his outer clothes off? Well, quite possibly because they were water-soaked. Why, then, did he throw them in the dustbin? Could they not be washed and ironed and returned to serviceability?”

  “Perhaps someone else disposed of them,” Inspector Lestrade suggested.

  “Again, why?” Moriarty said. “We must close our eyes and imagine possible answers to these questions.”

  “I have been doing so,” Mycroft affirmed.

  “To what effect?”

  “None, yet. The first thought was that the clothes were too soiled to wear, but I examined them and that was not so. If my brother disposed of his clothing himself, the reason eludes me.”

  “Then let us look at the other possibility. It could be that Holmes’s vanishing was involuntary; that someone removed him from the sewer tunnel, took his clothes off, and spirited him away.”

  “It was that possibility that brought us here this morning,” Mycroft observed wryly.

  “Yes,” Moriarty said, “but consider what that implies. First, that someone, some enemy of Holmes’s, knew that he was planning to investigate the sewer system. Second, that this unknown person knew which entrance to the tunnels Holmes would use; a fact that Holmes himself didn’t know, according to the faithful Dr. Watson. Then this person would have to know which way Holmes
would turn when he entered the tunnel, and know just where to lie in wait for him.”

  “That’s so,” Watson agreed.

  Lestrade looked from one to the other of his companions. “But that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” Mycroft offered. “If he knew what my brother’s object was, that is, what he was investigating, then he might be able to surmise where Sherlock would probably appear.”

  “True,” Moriarty said. “Or if he were keeping a watch on the object of Holmes’s interest, Holmes might have stumbled into a situation he couldn’t control.”

  “Even so,” Mycroft agreed.

  “But then,” Moriarty continued, “the question remains. Why did Holmes’s captors remove his outer clothing? And why did they put it in a dustbin, where it had a good chance of being found? Why not burn it? Why not, for that matter, kill Holmes, if he stood between them and the object of their underground attention? Why bother capturing him at all?”

  “That thought had also occurred to me,” Mycroft said.

  “Have you checked the medical schools and teaching hospitals?” Moriarty asked.

  “First thing we did, Professor, of course,” Lestrade said. “Mr. Holmes hasn’t been admitted to any hospital in London. We are having hospitals farther away checked by the local authorities.”

  “I assumed that,” Moriarty said. “What I meant—”

  Watson sat back, looking startled and almost spilling his coffee. “My God!” he exclaimed. “What a distressing idea. Still, I should have thought of that!”