The Lord, his sister and Veronica all exhaled audibly. It was now Holmes’s turn.
Rupert thrust the barrel against the detective’s ear and fired. I could not watch. A few seconds of silence in which you could hear a pin drop, and then again an empty click.
There now were only three bullets left. The likelihood that the next one would be deadly was growing.
Holmes must have had nerves of steel. He was still motionless, his tension evident only in his damp brow.
The nobleman meanwhile was drenched in sweat. His hands shook and he brought the revolver to his head reluctantly.
“Rupert,” the lady whispered, “I think you should stop playing.”
“But I like this game,” said the detective wryly. “It is exciting, fair, and impossible to cheat. It is decided by fate and luck.”
Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut.
“Well if you like it so much you can take another round,” Rupert cried, removing the revolver from his head and again pointing it at the detective. “We will see what your luck is like!”
“But it is not fair!”
“The world is not fair,” said Rupert.
“Shoot!” cried Alice.
He fired.
The deadly bullet remained in the cylinder. There were only two shots left.
Holmes grew pale. I feared for his heart.
“You are a coward who does not even play by his own rules,” said Holmes.
Rupert stood as though turned to stone, firmly gripping the handle of the revolver. He had no choice. If he did not want to lose face he had to play the next round.
The odds were not favourable.
But he was saved by his stepsister, who abruptly ended the game.
“Enough foolishness!” she cried, ripping the gun from his hand and throwing it on the floor. It clattered on the stone floor and slid to the door to the corridor. “This will not get us anywhere. We need to find out where that old fool has run off to and retrieve our documents, not get ourselves killed!”
My eyes were fixed on the discarded revolver.
“You are right as always,” said Rupert, exhaling.
“Leave everything to me,” said Alice, caressing his face as though he were a little boy. “Your sister will take care of it, you just relax.”
She controlled him like a puppet. Rupert looked uncertain, but then nodded his head obediently and shuffled to his chair, where he began biting his fingernails.
“You have stolen something from me that I need, Mr Holmes,” said the lady. “I shall have to break your fingers.”
She walked off and returned with a heavy hammer.
“No! I hate violence,” Rupert cried.
Among other things his mind obviously struggled with schizophrenia.
“Turn around then,” said the lady.
She faced Holmes and looked at him apologetically.
“Forgive me, his degenerated blue blood is to blame. Sometimes he does not know what he is saying.”
She grabbed the detective’s left hand, pried apart one of his fingers, and placed it on the table. With one hand she kept it motionless while with the other she swiftly brought down the hammer.
There was a crunching noise and blood spurted.
Though his spirit was unbreakable my companion could not bear the pain. He cried out.
“Has your tongue finally loosened?” said Alice.
“Never!” he cried.
I could not let her torture him any further. While Alice bent over him and chose another finger I leapt from my hiding place, bounded down the steps, and ran for the revolver. Before they could notice me I was standing between the doors to the dining room, aiming the weapon in front of me.
They froze.
Lady Alice straightened and blinked with surprise.
“Well well,” she said. “Dr Watson”
“Lay down your weapon!” I ordered. “Nice and easy, slide it towards me!”
She reached inside the pocket of her skirt and removed the pistol. She slid it along the floor, but not towards me as I had ordered, but somewhere behind her, where it ended up behind a wardrobe.
Holmes, whose injured hand was bleeding, looked at me with troubled eyes. He must have been in a lot of pain, but it had not broken him.
“You should have run away,” he wheezed.
“He’s right,” said the lady. “Clearly you have not taken into account the laws of mathematics.”
I knew what she meant.
There were three adversaries before me. And the revolver contained only one bullet.
XVI: Professor Moriarty’s Legacy
In those few seconds I aged a few years.
As I stood in the entrance to the dining room, pointing the revolver at the Darringfords and their murderous assistant, I realised that my desire to save Holmes from the clutches of our enemies had prevailed over common sense. My rash conduct was of little help to the detective. Indeed, I had put myself in danger and risked returning the documents which we had obtained so laboriously.
Then the suffragette Veronica resolved my dilemma of which of the three targets to take aim at first.
She ripped open the hem of her skirt and leapt with a terrible roar onto the fully laid table. She kicked aside the decorative placemats and ran across the table.
Her outstretched hands with their sharp fingernails and her bared saliva-coated teeth were rapidly approaching me.
I later often wondered about and regretted my actions, but at that moment my fingers responded instinctively.
Veronica was moments from hurling herself at me.
But the second-to-last chamber in the revolver was the deadly one.
It went off in my hands and the shrapnel projectile left the barrel with a loud roar. It hit Veronica in the face. The bullet immediately shattered and made her already ugly face even uglier. In short, it ceased to exist. It turned into mincemeat, just as Rupert had said.
Her body hit the floor with a thud, followed by shreds of skin and flesh. One of the dead woman’s size five shoes, which in Venice had put us on her trail, flew off and landed near Holmes’s chair. Alice’s brother laughed madly, but did not move. I opened my mouth and lowered the weapon.
Alice’s hand fell limp and the hammer dropped to the floor. Holmes alertly kicked it out of her reach. The noise brought her back to her senses and forced her to act. She shuddered and pushing past the seated detective crossed the dead body of her servant with disgust and jumped right in front of me. I was too surprised by what I had done to be able to resist, but fortunately she did not want to fight.
She shoved me contemptuously and wrestled away the tube containing the documents.
“Who is this scarecrow we have here?” she laughed.
I was powerless to stop her. She took the precious tube from me as though I were a small child. Then she took the documents that were under my waistcoat. She hissed something and ran away.
“Stop her! She must not get away!” cried Holmes attempting to rise from the chair. He clutched his paralysed hand to his body and stumbled after her.
“Rupert, take care of them!” Alice cried, while she feverishly searched for the pistol behind the wardrobe.
Rupert leapt out of his chair, growled like a wild animal, and blocked our path. He turned up the sleeves of his shirt, clenched his fists and assumed a boxer’s stance.
My friend and I formed a phalanx around him, hoping that our numerical superiority could overcome his massive fists.
But this was not the case.
Though we hurled ourselves at him it was like two bugs going after an elephant. While I jabbed weakly at his face and dodged his mighty swings, Holmes jumped on him from behind and tried with his good hand to lock him in a half nelson. As this made him a greater danger to Rupert than my pitiful thrusts, the lord diverted his attention from me and turned to the detective.
Alice had meanwhile located the gun, but she did not dare fire while we were wrestling with her brother. Instead she ran off with the documents and disappeared among the columns in the hallway.