Holmes was, as always, correct. At midday precisely there was a knock on the door. Moments later, Mrs Turner showed a young man in a suit in to see us.
‘Arthur Chidlow, from the Home Office,’ he said, looking from Holmes to me and back. ‘Gentlemen, I am frankly honoured and awed to meet you.’
‘Please, let us set aside the needless compliments,’ Holmes said, although I knew that he was pleased at the fact that his reputation was still as strong as it ever was. ‘You are here to ask for my assistance in securing the effects of the late and unlamented Professor James Moriarty.’
Chidlow smiled, and shook his head admiringly. ‘News travels fast,’ he said. ‘As we should, given the circumstances. Do you have any thoughts as to how we should proceed?’
Holmes indicated the newspaper, where it lay on the table beside him. ‘The answer is in there,’ he said.
Chidlow frowned. ‘I read the newspaper on the train,’ he said. ‘Apart from the bare notification of the death of the professor’s other identity, I saw nothing.’
‘You saw,’ Holmes chided, ‘but you did not notice. Permit me to draw your attention to the announcements of “Births, Deaths and Marriages”.’ He glanced at me. ‘Watson, perhaps you could do the honours. What do you see there, apart from the particular item that I have circled – the one that announces the death of the professor under his assumed name?’
I picked up the paper and glanced at the page in question while Mrs Turner poured tea for Arthur Chidlow. Something did strike me, as I perused the announcements, and I went back to check to make sure.
‘Two items in particular catch my eye,’ I said. ‘They do not appear to be connected, but they are both in bold, and in the same font – a font that is not used anywhere else on the page.’
‘Indeed,’ Holmes said. ‘Be so kind as to read the first item out.’
‘“In memoriam: Maria Jostmery,” I read. ‘“Of Dutch parentage on both sides”.’ I hesitated. ‘Odd phraseology, I grant you, but I do not discern any hidden message.’
‘Neither do I,’ Chidlow said. ‘It seems innocuous enough.’
‘I would draw your attention,’ Holmes said, ‘to the fact that “Dutch parentage on both sides” could indicate that the unfortunate Maria Jostmery is double Dutch. “Double dutch” also means “nonsense”, of course, and if we rearrange the letters of her name to make more sense then we get “James Moriarty”.’
Arthur Chidlow hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘How stupid of me!’ he cried.
I felt much the same way, but I hid it better. ‘All that we have there is the professor’s name,’ I pointed out. ‘That tells us nothing.’
‘Look at the second entry in the same emboldened font. Read it out, please.’
I did so: ‘“Re: Tim and Sam Mirnlic. Rearranged funeral service at St Alkmund’s Chapel, Wimbledon: Tues, nine o’clock prompt.”’ I glanced at Holmes. ‘The name is unusual, probably Eastern European, and the use of abbreviated Christian names is regrettably casual, but that is a sign of the times, I fear. I presume, however, that we are not dealing with the deaths of two brothers of foreign extraction here?’
Chidlow had been scribbling notes on the back of his hand. ‘It’s another anagram,’ he said. ‘ “Re: Tim and Sam Mirnilc” can be rearranged, as the announcement suggests, into the words “criminal mastermind”.’
Holmes laughed. ‘A jibe directed at me, I suggest,’ he said. ‘The late professor knew that I would be keeping an eye out, and I have certainly described him in those terms often enough. Interesting that he had taken it so much to heart. He must have had his own agents ready and waiting to submit these items upon his death.’ He glanced at Chidlow, and then at me. ‘If we want to know more then I suggest we attend St Alkmund’s Chapel in Wimbledon tomorrow morning for the funeral service of Timothy and Samuel Mirnilc.’
After lunch, and a closer examination of the newspaper to little effect, Arthur Chidlow left for London, with an agreement that we would meet outside the indicated chapel at a quarter to nine the next day. Later that afternoon, a telegram arrived for Holmes from his agent in Greater Malvern, confirming that there had been nothing of interest in the professor’s cottage. Holmes spent the rest of the day tending to his bees, while I read and reread the newspaper, looking in vain for more hidden messages.
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 starte
d 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.
A man whom I took to be of Italian extraction, based on the width of his lapels, stood up and walked to the front of the chapel. ‘Let me see that thing,’ he said, pointing to the disc.
Another man – swarthy and unshaven – stood up and said: ‘If you try to touch that, I’ll cut you – I swear I will.’
The Italian turned and stared at him. ‘Sit down,’ he said quietly, ‘or I’ll slice your throat open and pull your tongue through the hole like a necktie.’
The swarthy man sat down, muttering, and the Italian man held out his hand. Moriarty’s agent took the phonograph from the gramophone and handed it across. The Italian examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his hands.
‘No label,’ he said eventually.
‘What about the other side?’ someone called from the back of the pews. ‘Play that!’
The Italian held the disc up so that everyone could see it. The reverse side was smooth. ‘Nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s single-sided.’
‘Again!’ an East End thug said. He looked as if he would be more at home in a boxing ring than in a chapel. ‘Play the damned thing again, and louder this time!’
In all, we listened to the professor’s voice say the exact same things fourteen more times. By the end of the final recital I could have repeated his speech word for word, with all the gaps intact.
Some of the criminals had left after a few replays. Judging by their expressions they were disappointed and angry that Moriarty’s final secret had not been revealed in a more obvious manner. Others huddled together in small groups, comparing notes and attempting to descry whatever hidden clues Moriarty had left behind – if, indeed, this entire performance hadn’t been a charade intended as a final insult from a dead master criminal. All the while, Moriarty’s agent had moved to one side when it became obvious that nobody wanted to hear the recording a sixteenth time. The table, the phonograph and the gramophone he had left behind. A small group of criminals had gathered around it and were examining the record, turning it over in their hands and looking for some hidden message. Others were arguing with Moriarty’s agent, trying to get him to talk, but he kept shaking his head, saying nothing.
The elderly man beside me had listened to each reply, head thrust forward and eyes closed. Eventually, he too shook his head, made a ‘Tch!’ sound, stood up and pushed past the three of us. When he got to the aisle he turned and shook his fist at the gramophone player, his lips moving silently. He shuffled out.
There were barely half of the original attendees present by then. Holmes gestured to me and to Chidlow that we should join him at the back of the chapel. When he got there, in the relative shadows, he turned to us. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I am at a loss,’ Chidlow said. His expression was grim. ‘I am hoping that you, Mr Holmes, have managed to spot something that I have not.’
‘Watson?’ Holmes asked, turning to me.
‘Assuming that the Italian gentleman is correct, and that the phonograph has no label affixed to it, then the only thing I can think is that there is something scratched into the shellac itself.’ I nodded towards the front of the chapel. ‘I suspect, however, that the gentlemen up there have been examining it for exactly that.’
‘And such a clumsy means of hiding information would be beneath the professor’s dignity,’ Holmes pointed out. ‘This is his final problem. He will not have made it easy for his putative successor.’
‘Does nothing occur to you, Mr Holmes?’ Chidlow asked despondently. ‘I cannot help thinking that one of the criminals who has already left has picked up on a clue that has passed the rest of us by.’
Holmes stared at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows. ‘I seriously doubt,’ he growled, ‘that any of these people has spotted a clue that has evaded my attention.’
‘Then you have spotted no clues yourself?’ he pressed.
Holmes looked away. ‘There are some indicative factors,’ he muttered. ‘But nothing definitive. Let us take our own look at the gramophone and the phonograph. Perhaps we may see something that the others have missed.’
Holmes led the way to the front of t
he chapel. There were eleven men still there, standing around and looking uncertain. One or two were talking together, but most of them appeared to have decided that they would operate alone.
Holmes went straight to the gramophone. As he approached it, Moriarty’s agent took a step forward. He watched to make sure that Holmes didn’t try to remove the disc. I noticed a bulge beneath his jacket: he was armed, and presumably willing to use force to ensure that the professor’s instructions were followed to the letter. His face was as expressionless as ever, and his eyes were invisible behind his shaded lenses.
Holmes picked up the phonograph and checked it minutely. ‘No label, as we were told,’ he murmured, ‘no recording on the other side, and no extra information scratched into the material. I am beginning to think – hello, what’s this?’
‘Something of interest?’ Chidlow pressed, moving closer. Several other men from the congregation moved closer to listen.
‘Ah, it is nothing,’ Holmes said dismissively, and handed the phonograph back to Moriarty’s agent. The criminals moved away again, disappointed.
‘What if,’ I suggested in a whisper, a thought having struck me, ‘the clicks and pops on the recording that we were meant to assume were caused by scratches were actually some kind of introduced code!’
‘That’s it!’ Chidlow said excitedly.
‘Alas, no.’ Holmes shook his head. ‘Your suggestion is plausible, but it had already occurred to me. During the fifteen repeats of the message, I timed the occurrence of the apparently extraneous sounds using my heartbeat as a guide. I discerned no regular pattern – they occurred randomly, as far as I could tell.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I did detect something else, however, which I will tell you about in a moment.’
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 38