How strange – indeed, how almost laughable – it is that both Holmes and I used the same incident to make our disappearance from the world; I, for the reasons I have described, and he …? Well, there is no satisfactory answer to that. It is clear though that Holmes had an agenda of his own, that he wished to hide away for the three years that came to be known as ‘the great hiatus’, and it was a constant worry to me that he would turn up again for I, almost alone in the world, knew that he had survived. I even suspected for a while that he might have taken the room next to mine at Hexam’s Hotel and that it was he whom I heard coughing in the darkness. Where did he go during this time and what did he do when he got there? I neither know nor care. The important thing was that he did not interfere with my plans and I was very relieved not to see him again.
All that was required now was a body to take my place, the final proof of what had occurred. I had already prepared one. That very morning I had come across a local man returning from the village of Rosenlaui. I had taken him for a labourer or a shepherd but in fact he turned out to be Franz Hirzel, the chef of the Englischer Hof. He vaguely resembled me in age and in his general physical appearance and it was with some regret that I murdered him. I have never enjoyed taking a life, particularly when the person concerned is an innocent bystander, as Hirzel undoubtedly was. My needs, however, were too great for any scruples. Perry and I dressed him in clothes similar to the ones I was wearing, complete with a silver pocket watch. I had myself sewn the secret pocket containing the coded letter which I had written in London. Now I dumped him in the water and hurried away.
If Athelney Jones had thought about it for one moment, it would have been extremely unlikely that Clarence Devereux would write a formal letter inviting Professor James Moriarty to a meeting. Word of mouth would have been safer – and why go to the trouble of inventing such a peculiar code? He might also have asked why Moriarty should have felt compelled to carry the letter with him all the way to Switzerland, why he had bothered sewing it into his jacket. It was all extremely unlikely, but it was the first of a series of clues that I was laying for the British police, to draw them into my scheme.
From the moment I met Inspector Jones, I knew that providence, which had for so long turned against me, was finally on my side. It would have been impossible for Scotland Yard to have chosen a better representative for the task I had in mind. Jones was so brilliant in so many ways, so obtuse in others, so trusting, so naïve. When his wife told me his story, his strange obsession with Sherlock Holmes, I could hardly believe my luck. To the very end he was completely malleable – and that was his misfortune. He was as much a puppet in my hands as the toy policeman he had purchased for his daughter on the way home.
Take that first meeting in the police station at Meiringen. He picked up every clue that I had deliberately laid out for whatever detective might arrive: the Pinkerton’s watch (purchased, in fact, from a pawnbroker in Shoreditch), the false American accent, the waistcoat, the newspaper brought from Southampton and prominently displayed, the labels on my case. As to the rest of it, he was hopelessly wrong. I had cut myself shaving in the poor light of a Paris hotel, not on a transatlantic crossing. The clothes I was wearing had been purchased deliberately for the masquerade and did not in fact belong to me, so the smell of cigarettes and the worn-out sleeve were completely irrelevant. But he made his deductions and I was suitably impressed. For him to believe in me, I had to make him think that I believed in him.
I told him about the letter and urged him on until he examined the chef’s body for a second time and found it. Using an extract from A Study in Scarlet was perhaps over-theatrical but at the time it amused me and I thought it might distract from the other improbabilities I have already described. I was impressed by the speed with which Jones deciphered the letter – of course I would have been ready to help had he not been up to the task – but in fact the code had been constructed in a way that made it fairly simple to crack: the quite unnecessary insertion of the word MORIARTY made the process straightforward.
And so to the Café Royal. It was as if I had set out a series of stepping stones – the letter, the meeting, Bladeston House – each one leading to the next, and it was my task only to make the necessary connections. Perry arrived, dressed as a telegraph boy and pretending to be an emissary of Clarence Devereux. We acted out a scene that we had already rehearsed and he hurried out, but not too quickly, allowing Jones to follow. The bright blue jacket was quite deliberate, by the way. It ensured that Perry did not get lost in the crowd. For the same reason, he sat on the roof of the omnibus to Highgate rather than inside it. He did not enter Bladeston House. At the last moment, he hurried round the back, stripped off his blue jacket and lay on it, concealed behind a nearby shrub. Having lost sight of him, Jones assumed he must have gone in through the garden gate. Why would he have done otherwise?
Scotchy Lavelle would never have invited me into his home but the following day, confronted by a detective from Scotland Yard, he had no choice. We got past the manservant, Clayton, and met with Lavelle himself and though the two of us, Jones and I, seemed to have a common purpose, in fact we were diametrically opposed. He was enquiring about crimes of the recent past. I was preparing a crime that would take place in the immediate future. For, being inside Bladeston House, I was able to take stock of its defences.
‘Want to nosey around, do you?’ Lavelle asked.
I most certainly did. It was I who insisted on visiting the kitchen and continued from there down to the garden gate. I needed to see the metal hasp. Again, how fortunate to be a mathematician with a precise eye for measurements. I made a mental image of the position of the second lock so I would know where to drill when I returned. And once again, I played fair with you, my reader. I stated that I was the first to re-enter the kitchen and that I was briefly alone. What I failed to mention was that it gave me time to slip a strong opiate into the curry that would be served for dinner. Everything was now set for the next stage of my plan.
I returned just after eleven o’clock with Perry, who loved this sort of adventure. We picked the lock and drilled through the gate, then Perry climbed up to the second floor. Jones was right about that. We made no noise but we were reasonably confident that we would not be disturbed. Perry let me in through the kitchen door – I had told him where he would find the key – and then we set to work.
I am not proud of what took place that night. I am not a monster, but circumstances had compelled me to do monstrous things. First we silenced Clayton, the kitchen boy, the cook and the American mistress of Scotchy Lavelle. Why did they have to die? Simply because, had they been interrogated the following day, they would all have sworn that the telegraph boy never entered the house and, with nothing to lose, they might have been believed. If so, the entire scheme would have unravelled and I could not afford to take the chance. Perry committed three of the murders and I rather fear that he enjoyed them. I myself smothered Henrietta and then carried Lavelle downstairs, still deeply asleep. I tied him to a chair and woke him with cold water. Then I inflicted a great deal of pain on him. It was a disagreeable business but at that stage I did not know where Clarence Devereux could be found. Nor did I know what he was planning. To give him his due, Lavelle was courageous and resisted for quite some time, but no man can withstand the torment of a smashed knee when it is manipulated and from him I learned of the robbery that was about to take place in Chancery Lane. Lavelle also told me that Devereux was to be found in the American legation, but he did so with a certain bravado, for in his mind his master was out of my reach. I could not break into the legation and Devereux never emerged. I saw at once that, with his agoraphobia, my enemy was a true snail within a shell. How could I possibly winkle him out?
I let Perry cut Lavelle’s throat – give the boy a treat – and we left together. But first I wrote the entry in the diary for Jones to find the next day: HORNER 13. Just in case the clue was not obvious enough, I placed a bar of shaving soap in the same
drawer; an odd item for a man to have in his desk, you might think, but I hoped it would put Jones in mind of barber’s shops. I also left the invitation to the party at the American legation somewhere he would see it.
The horrible murders at Bladeston House were enough to galvanise Scotland Yard into action. With all the single-minded determination that I had come to recognise in the British police, they decided to set up a meeting and talk about it. Even so, I was pleased when Jones told me that I was to be included. My one great concern was that Jones, or one of his colleagues, would decide to contact the Pinkerton Agency in New York, in which event I would be exposed at once as a fraud. It was for this reason that I asked about the telegraph room. It would take days to send a message abroad and perhaps days for the reply but that still left me with a sense of unease and little enough time to bring my plans to fruition. Then, when Inspector Lestrade insisted on contacting the agency personally, I decided I would have to take action. Before I left the building, I knew exactly what I had to do.
It was I, of course, who ordered the attack on Scotland Yard the following day. Although everything I subsequently said was designed to make Jones believe that he was the intended victim of the explosion, it was in fact the telegraph room – a fortunate coincidence that it was next to his office – that was the real target, ensuring that Lestrade’s irritating message would not be sent for some time to come. Perry carried the bomb into the building while Colonel Moran waited for him in a brougham. Just before the explosion, I went through the charade of drawing attention to them, even risking my life beneath the wheels of an omnibus. It was important that Jones should see that they had come in a brougham – I had chosen that type of carriage on purpose – for I knew that he would use every means at his disposal to track it down. Perry and Moran told the driver to take them to the American legation but, just as at Bladeston House, they did not in fact go in. It was enough that they had been close by.
I was quite surprised that Jones so readily agreed to ignore the sanctity of diplomatic immunity and to place his career at risk by entering the legation in disguise, but by this time we were such close friends and he was so determined to find Clarence Devereux – particularly following the loss of life at Scotland Yard – that he would have done anything and it was he who unmasked Coleman De Vriess. I expressed the necessary amazement but in fact had very quickly guessed as much myself.
From this point on, Jones took charge of the investigation and I had little to do but to follow, dutifully playing Watson to his Holmes. We had visited the Bostonian together and it had been interesting for me to meet Leland Mortlake for the first time. However, the real advantage of the raid was that it had allowed me to plant yet another clue. The Scotland Yard detectives had been singularly incapable of working out what HORNER 13 meant, even when I had reminded them of the shaving soap and had suggested that it might refer to a druggist or some similar establishment. No wonder Holmes so frequently walked all over them! I had therefore picked up an advertisement for the barber’s shop which I slipped amongst the magazines in Pilgrim’s room, even as I pretended to examine them. Jones found it and once again the game, as he would have put it, was afoot.
His unravelling of the Chancery Lane business was, I have to say, quite masterly, worthy of the great detective himself, and I had no argument with the trap that he devised at the Blackwall Basin. If only Devereux himself had come to inspect the plunder that John Clay had supposedly removed from the Safe Deposit Company, how much more easily the whole thing would have ended. But he did not. Edgar Mortlake slipped through our fingers and Devereux remained out of our reach; I realised that he would need further goading, another setback, before he would deliver himself into my hands.
The arrest of Leland Mortlake provided exactly that. It was a little sad, but not surprising, that Jones should leap to the conclusion that a blowpipe had been used, when the poisoned dart was discovered in the back of Leland’s neck. He had, of course, been witness to a similar death, described by Watson in ‘The Sign of the Four’. In fact, I had been carrying the dart all the time and simply slid it into my victim’s flesh as I steered him away from an overzealous waiter when we were leaving the club. The tip was covered with anaesthetic ether as well as strychnine, so he would have felt nothing. I would have liked him to suffer more. This was, after all, the man whose loathsome company Jonathan Pilgrim had been forced to endure. But his death was a provocation, nothing more. And it most certainly worked.
I could not have foreseen that Devereux would respond by kidnapping Jones’s daughter. Even I would never have stooped so low, but then, as I have said, we played by different rules. What was I to do when Jones came to my hotel with the news? I saw at once that to accompany him would place me in the gravest danger but at the same time it was clear that the game was reaching its climax. I had to be there. Once again, luck was on my side. Perry happened to be in my hotel room. The two of us had been in conference when Jones arrived. I was able to tell him of this latest development and to make arrangements for my protection.
Both Perry and Colonel Moran were outside the Joneses’ home, waiting in a hansom, when we left that night. You may recall that when I stepped into the street, I called out, as if I were addressing the kidnappers. In fact, my words were intended for Moran, letting him know our destination and giving him time to reach it ahead of us. So when we came to Dead Man’s Walk, he was already there. He saw us knocked unconscious. He and Perry followed us to Smithfield meat market and, although it was a close call, they managed to find us just when it mattered most. It was when I was face to face with Devereux, by the way, that I came closest to being unmasked. He had guessed that Jonathan Pilgrim had been working for me and that he was not a Pinkerton’s man at all. He began to deny that he had ever written the coded letter that had begun all this and, had I not interrupted, the truth would surely have come out. I threw myself at Devereux for that simple reason – to bring any further discussion to an end – even though it cost me the injuries that I subsequently received.
I am almost finished. Another drop of brandy and we will get there. Now … where was I?
All my efforts had been directed towards extracting Clarence Devereux from the legation and when we arrived for our interview with Robert Lincoln, both Colonel Moran and Perry were already in place, one on a nearby rooftop, the other in the street, now disguised as a costermonger. They have, all along, been superbly efficient. It is true that Moran is interested only in the money that I pay him, while Perry is highly disreputable, an underage sadist, but even so I could not have chosen two better companions.
And Jones! I think by the end he had actually guessed – perhaps not who I was, but certainly who I was not. All along he had been aware that something was wrong. His problem was, he simply couldn’t work out what it was. His wife had been right about him. He was not as clever as he thought and that was to be the undoing of him. Ironically, she had been the wiser of the two for she had mistrusted me from our first meeting and even, at the very end, voiced her suspicions out loud. I feel sorry for her and for her daughter, but there could be no alternative. Jones had to die. I pulled the trigger, but I wish even now that it could have ended another way.
He was a good man. I admired him. And although in the end I was forced to kill him, I will always think of him as my friend.
TWENTY-TWO
A Fresh Start
I took out my own gun. Jones looked at me and I think I saw shock, dismay and finally resignation pass through his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and shot him in the head.
He was killed instantly, his body falling sideways as his walking stick tumbled to the ground one last time, rattling against the paving stones. Everything had to happen very quickly for I knew that there were many Scotland Yard men nearby. I climbed down from the curricle and walked the few steps to the Black Maria which had stopped in the middle of the road. Both the driver and his companion were dead. The constable who had been positioned at the rear
was still clinging onto the door as if it was his duty to keep it shut. I shot him in the back and watched him crumple. At the same moment, Colonel Moran fired a third time and the policeman standing next to Perry spun round and fell. I saw Perry scowl. It was one less person for him to kill.
I climbed onto the Black Maria, pushing one of the dead men out of the way. I was vaguely aware of pedestrians pointing and screaming but of course none of them approached. They would have been mad to try and I had counted on their fear and panic to give me time to make my escape. Perry hurried over, wiping his knife on a rag, and climbed up next to me.
‘Can I drive?’ he asked.
‘Later,’ I said.
I whipped on the horses. They had already calmed down – but then the police would have trained them to make their way through noisy protests and hostile crowds. With Perry beside me, I directed them a few yards up Victoria Street, then pulled on the reins to force them into a tight turn. This was another mistake that Athelney Jones had made. He had deployed his men along the route that would take us to Scotland Yard, but I had no intention of going that way. As we completed the turn, Colonel Moran appeared in a doorway, his face flushed, the Von Herder airgun already returned to the golfing bag that he carried over his shoulder. He climbed onto the back of the Black Maria, as we had agreed.
Another crack of the whip and we were hurtling past Victoria Station and down towards Chelsea. There were more crowds at this end of the street and they were aware that something had happened but could not tell what it was. Nobody tried to stand in our way. We rattled over a pothole and I heard Moran swear. Part of me wondered if he would still be there when we reached our destination and I have to say it rather amused me to think of him being hurled off in one of the suburbs. At the same time, I wondered what our passenger must be thinking. He would have heard the shots. He would have felt the carriage turn. It was quite likely that he had guessed what had occurred but the doors were locked and there would be nothing he could do.