by David Marcum
When Moriarty had been “in the field,” Holmes had described him without a hint of hyperbole as “the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.”
I threw down my napkin with an incredulous smile.
“Holmes, my dear chap! Surely you don’t suffer from a lack of excitement? Almost weekly we catch the froufrou of Cabinet Ministers’ and political dukes’ frock-coats as they clamber up our stairs to seek your assistance. Why, take our most recent case...”
“Watson,” came the wry reply, “the crisis once over, the actors pass out of our lives forever. I value your effort to console me with my notoriety, but I insist that every morning one must win a victory and every evening we must fight the good fight to retain our place, or else I must seek early retirement.”
I was about to console him with, “I have no doubt that very soon Inspector Lestrade will bang on our door to summon us to the scene of another baffling crime,” when we became aware a small tureen had appeared on our table, sitting apart from the magnificent silverware. I summoned the waiter. No, he replied. Absolutely not. He knew nothing about it.
Holmes pulled the vessel towards him and cautiously raised the lid. Inside lay an envelope marked “Sherlock Holmes, Esq.” He flicked it to me. It contained a single sheet of Trafalgar blue note-paper, upon which, in a scribbled hand, were written the words:
“Dear Holmes, I know you will welcome me back into the world of the living. I have given considerable thought to the person who put me in Dante’s Inferno (Seventh Circle) in the first place. I do not wish to put that person to great inconvenience but I wonder if he and I might arrange an encounter?”
My heart missed a beat. I had no need to read the initials at the bottom of the note. It was from the viperous Colonel Sebastian Moran, once the right-hand man of arch-criminal Professor Moriarty, whose criminal network had stretched from the Bentinck Street corner of Welbeck Street to the Daubensee above the Gemmi Pass.
Moran’s letter was a reminder how often he had sought revenge for the death of his erstwhile Paymaster.
He wrote, “It’s been far too long since we met and decided certain things. Three years before, I was consigned to gaol you thwarted me on the 4th and 23rd of January. Two years before my incarceration, you thwarted me in the middle of February. In my last year of freedom you were good enough to wait until the end of March. You will understand why I felt it necessary to launch an attack on you. For too long, Professor Moriarty allowed you, through your continual persecution, to place him in positive danger of losing life or liberty, with results we know well.”
Wittily, Moran penned, “Your compulsive urge to interfere in my life presents a hereditary tendency of the most diabolical kind.”
Holmes had sent Professor Moriarty plummeting to his doom in the Reichenbach Falls. With a deliberate reference to the rushing waters, Moran went on, “Given our mutual interest in cascades, I suggest we get together at the Old Roar Waterfall above Hastings, conveniently near your bee-farm in Sussex. I have looked in my memorandum-book for a date. Shall we say around two o’clock on the afternoon of the first Monday of the coming month? I shall await your attendance for the final discussion of those questions which formerly lay between you and Professor Moriarty, which now, in his enforced absence, lie between you and me.”
The Colonel signed off with a sardonic “Pray give my greetings to your Sancho Panza, Dr. Watson. The Doctor and his antique Service revolver will be most welcome to join us.”
The jibes were followed with an impudent, “Believe me to be, my dear chap, very sincerely yours, S.M.”
I folded Moran’s letter. A murderous rage took control of my senses. Colonel, I thought, this time you will meet your quietus. My comrade, or better still his Sancho Panza, shall rid this world of you once and for all.
The rage subsided. Soon Holmes and I would be seated in a train on our way to Hastings, my trusty Service revolver in a pocket, a great adventure in the air. My heart began to sing. The Old Roar Waterfall it shall be - on the first Monday of the coming month!
A reflective note is in order here. Over the years I have come to realise the gods (more so the goddesses) play a remarkable role in our lives. During my military service in our Indian possessions, I often heard and repeated the word kismet in Urdu and Hindi, interpreted as Fate or Providence. Three “ifs,” both providential and fateful, led to my years as Sherlock Holmes’s chronicler, the happiest and most fulfilling period of my life. If the doctor in the village of my upbringing had not regaled me with stories of his time as a field surgeon in the Eastern War, serving with French and British armies at Sevastopol, I may never have had the ambition to become an Army doctor myself. If a ricocheting bullet from a hostile Afghan tribesman had missed me by an inch rather than thudding into my flesh (to stay there the rest of my life,) whereupon the Army left me, I would have served out my time on The Grim rather than being forced to return to England, with hardly more than a wound-stripe and a pile of Service chevrons to my name. And if I had had any family members in England other than a dissolute brother, I may not have found myself alone in London in 1881 in urgent need of diggings. In which case I would never have mentioned my search for accommodation to Stamford, my old dresser from Barts Hospital. He introduced me that same day to a young man also in need of bachelors’ quarters, bearing the unusual Old English Christian name of Sherlock.
Now, all these years later, a further “If” was about to intervene.
The first Monday of the month approached. My “antique” Service revolver was oiled and ready. Holmes and I planned our trek in every detail. Old Roar Waterfall was known to me only through a sketch a century earlier by the landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner, now at the Tate Gallery. The chalk and graphite depiction portrayed a wild gully set in a deeply cut, narrow, wooded valley above the isolated fishing village of Hastings. The gully enjoyed the clime and dense plant life of a tropical jungle, home to rare orchids, bird and insect species. There was only one path to the falls, through terrain ideal for an ambuscade. Our foe, as author of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas and Three Months in the Jungle, was no stranger to ambuscades. A hunter of iron nerve, he had once crawled down a drain after a wounded man-eating tiger.
Perhaps because we faced the possibility of death at the hands of a merciless assassin, there was considerable jocularity between Holmes and me as we discussed our plans. In “The Adventure of the Empty House”, Holmes lured the Colonel to his capture and incarceration by substituting himself with a remarkably life-like wax effigy, executed by Monsieur Oscar Meunier of Grenoble. The bust was placed in full view in our Baker Street window. Once in every quarter of an hour, our obliging landlady crawled in below window level to twist and turn the figure. Holmes now proposed I borrow the full-size wax figure of himself from Madame Tussaud’s to place like a ventriloquist’s dummy among the orchids and ferns at Old Roar Waterfall. The wax figure and I would sit where Turner sat, squatting up to our nostrils in ferns. I could, Holmes suggested, for the sake of auld lang syne, wear my “Shikar”, a favourite solar topee purchased at the Army & Navy Stores at a hefty 13/6d.
Holmes didn’t laugh often, but when he did it boded ill for a foe. After we had done chuckling, we turned our attention to the serious matter at hand. The Colonel would apply the expertise gained in his years hunting the Bengal tiger. He would carve out a machan among the ferns, mosses, and liverworts of the wet dead wood to pick us off before we as much as caught sight of him. We planned to play him at his own game - construct our own machans ahead of him and wait silently for our human tiger through the night and into the following morning.
The stakes were high. Moran notoriously never played by the Englishman’s unspoken rule of giving the other side a sporting chance. This time, neither would we. We would follow the diktat of natural justice. Colonel Sebastian Mora
n would soon trouble this world no more.
So engrossed were we with our preparations that it did not strike us for an instant that Moran’s challenge was a hoodwink. The stinging use of Sancho Panza, rather than chronicler, had made my blood boil. Ditto the deliberate mockery of my trusty Service revolver. There was the goading tone, the almost nostalgic choice of setting, echoing the far mightier, more majestic Reichenbach in the Swiss Alps. But Moran had no intention of facing us at Old Roar Waterfall. He was putting in place a plan as devilish as human wit could devise.
When Lestrade of the Yard apprised us of Sebastian Moran’s hideaway, he mentioned en passant how the Colonel had taken up raising bees. I dismissed this curious fact as mere coincidence and forgot all about it. Kismet was once more to intervene. If I had not retreated to a comfortable arm-chair after a decent lunch and a bottle of Albariño at the Junior United Service Club...
I left the Club’s handsome dining-room for the reading-room and was drifting into a nap behind a copy of The Times when an apparition from my long-gone days in Afghanistan appeared at my elbow.
“Why, it’s Watson, isn’t it?” a voice exclaimed. “Blow me down! Do you recognise me?”
For a moment I struggled to determine whether the figure was real or a figment of a reverie, until he leaned forward and clapped me on the shoulder. How could I forget! Surgeon-Major Alexander Preston had been with me in the thick of the Battle of Maiwand. His experience, gained through an earlier stint in The Crimea, served the Regiment well. Throughout the battle he bore himself with the traditional nonchalance of a British surgeon in a tight place, while around him our men were going down to a humiliating defeat.
Preston explained he was in London just for a day or two, restocking his supply of medicines. We reminisced about old times. He recounted the events after I was wounded and removed from the field. Ayub Khan’s officer corps had been strengthened by the large number of Sepoys who fled to his side after the failure of the Indian Rebellion. Nevertheless, Preston sensed the enemy was losing morale, despite their superior numbers, until the day was saved for Ayub by a young woman by the name of Malalai. Alarmed by her side’s mounting despair, she seized the Afghan flag and shouted: “Young love! If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!” Her cry rallied the Pashtuns to victory.
We reminisced further for a good while before I turned to the present and asked Preston where he was now practicing medicine.
“You say you’re in London only briefly,” I said. “Which means what? Where do you live now?”
Using the Sanskrit for the Hindu Kush, he replied, “Not in the Pāriyātra Parvata, I can tell you! I’m in the deepest English countryside. Miles from anywhere. After my time in Army Medical Service, life in the most primitive village in England suits me completely. A few cottages huddled around the tiny church of the Blessed Virgin and St. John the Baptist. No telegraph office. Just the one telephone, at the Railway Arms. Not much else. I deliver a few peasant women’s babies, treat the occasional marsh fever, even take out an appendix once in a while. The quietest place you can imagine.”
The Surgeon-Major paused.
“Mark you, something did happen only a few days ago... never seen anything like it. There’s nothing in the medical records nor anything on apiculture that I can find.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Apiculture?” I queried.
“Yes, bees, hives, that sort of thing.”
“I know the word,” I returned, “but what has that to do with your medical practice?”
He recounted how two sturdy walkers had decided to trek across remote marshes three or four miles from his surgery. Holding that signs in the countryside did not apply to visitors from London, they ignored the “Keep Out” boards.
“Then something very curious and inexplicable took place, Watson,” Preston said. “The hikers were passing a cluster of abandoned Maltings when a witness said a swarm of bees poured out like a sudden dark rain-cloud. Most bees are quite polite if you don’t disturb their nests. They don’t usually chase you for over half a mile if you’re rushing away as fast as your legs can take you. These bees did. Their ferocity was terrible. They attacked the two poor blighters relentlessly. In appearance, there was nothing exceptional about the bees. Possibly they were even slightly smaller than our familiar black honeybee. I estimate they inflicted two thousand stings on each of their victims. A bee stinger is barbed, like a harpoon. When you consider a human can die with just a hundred stings...”
My narrator threw up his hands.
“By the time the local farmer came to fetch me, there was nothing I could do. Both men died within minutes.”
He added, “The owner of the skeps must have worried the authorities would bring a charge of criminal negligence against him - as they should. That same night he upped sticks and disappeared, taking his bees with him.”
I sprang to my feet.
“Tell me, Preston,” I demanded, “where exactly do you have your practice? You say deepest countryside. Did this by any chance take place along the Stour, near a village by the name of Haddiscoe?”
My old Army comrade looked stunned.
“Why, my old friend!” he exclaimed, “You seem to have developed psychic powers! Heavens above, you’ll be excreting ectoplasm next. That’s exactly where the incident took place.”
My blood chilled. All was now clear. The invitation to a showdown at the Old Roar Waterfall was a red herring, designed to engineer Holmes’s absence from his orderly rows of hives. From his Stour Valley remoteness, our enemy had hatched the most cunning, deadly plot ever devised against us. While we crept our way through the undergrowth to the waterfall, Moran would be on the Downs preparing a deadly trap for us. He would switch Holmes’s tractable apis mellifera mellifera, at home in Britain since the last Ice Age, for the breed of hideously dangerous African bees, which stung the unfortunate London visitors to death. Holmes was known to walk between his rows of hives without veil or gloves. The moment we returned from our futile trek to the waterfall, we would suffer the same fate as the hikers on the Suffolk marshes. The postcard of the Sussex cricketer, K.S. Ranjitsinhji, in the farmhouse indicated Moran had already reconnoitred the area. At this very moment, he and his deadly skeps might be within striking distance of Holmes’s own bee-yard, tucked away in secondary woodland which had quickly recolonized my comrade’s sheep-free land.
I said a rapid goodbye to my Regimental friend and hurried to the telephone. “Moran, you cunning, cunning fiend!” I repeated time after time.
Although Inspector Lestrade was often out of his depth and chronically lacked imagination, on this occasion he became a man of action and authority. He pointed out that Moran would have his henchmen watching our every move. The Colonel would unfold his plot only if he was assured we were well away from the bee-farm. One glimpse of our presence on Holmes’s bee-farm on the day, and the effort to catch Moran in flagrante delicto and kill or return him to gaol would fail. In no uncertain terms, we were ordered to continue with our established plan. Lestrade telegraphed Tobias Gregson, the policeman who was keeping an eye on Holmes’s bee-farm, to ask him to make rapid enquiries. Gregson replied the same day. Mysterious lights, more often seen over graveyards, had been spotted at Holmes’s Hodcombe Farm, resulting in rumours of will-o’-the-wisps. Locals were giving the spot a wide berth.
By now the deadly skeps would be on their wooden bases for ease of transport, the entrances filled with loose grass to allow the bees to breath but prevent their exit. Reluctantly, we agreed to make our way to Old Roar Waterfall. Our departure for Hastings should be as conspicuous as possible. While Lestrade had logic and sense on his side, it was a bitter blow to know we would not have a direct hand in our adversary’s fate.
In the meantime, Lestrade, Gregson, and a dozen armed police set up their ambuscade. They
would lie in wait on the Downs. If Moran surrendered, our foe would be returned to gaol to serve out the remainder of his sentence. If he resisted... every one of Lestrade’s squad was a marksman.
On the Monday, Holmes and I took the train to Hastings. We made our way to Old Roar Waterfall on foot and set about constructing two hides in the heavy undergrowth. Two p.m., the appointed time for our dénouement with Moran, came and went. We set off on the return journey to the bee-farm, eager to learn the outcome. Several police marksmen lay at ease, spread-eagled among the bushes. Lestrade was pacing up and down on Holmes’s veranda, staring out across the Downs. There was no sign of a captive or corpse. It was clear from the Inspector’s demeanour he was not relishing our return. Something had gone badly wrong.
We were a cricket pitch’s length from the house when a shaken Lestrade turned and came hurrying towards us, ashen-faced. He stopped short, calling out, “It’s no good your scowling, Mr. Holmes. We did our best. This time Moran was just too tricky for us.”
With a heavy shudder he cried, “He was there, right in front of us, and then he wasn’t. It was as though he possessed some supernatural power!”
It was to remain forever an unfathomable mystical experience in Lestrade’s mind. Like the Cheshire Cat, our prey had appeared and disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a baleful snarl and an Italian revolver dropped in his hurry. Was the normally stolid Inspector right to believe he had come up against some supernatural power invested in Moran from his tiger-hunting days or - more likely - was it mere bungling? Had some sixth-sense warned the Colonel at the very last minute, even as he approached Holmes’s hives? Or was one of Scotland Yard’s marksmen now lolling on the grass a surviving member of Professor Moriarty’s old guard?