“She is running out of fuel,” Holmes cried suddenly, not taking his eyes off the triplane.
“But she has not been in the air long,” he added. “It appears you are a fine shot. You hit the fuel tank!”
The machine was nearing the jagged boundary of the horizon until it presently disappeared. But not for long. It took us a few minutes before we reached the valley, at the bottom of which lay the long narrow lake with high rocky shores. Against the background of the silvery water we saw the last moments of the flight of the yellow triplane.
With its fuel drained the machine was no longer able to stay in the air. It all turned out as Holmes had predicted.
Lady Alice’s plane hit the water. Though it at first barely skimmed the surface, the force of the impact tore off the undercarriage and wheels. The airplane skipped a few times on the surface, like a flat stone tossed by a child. Then it turned a few cartwheels and the propeller fell away and sank in the water. It was a terrifying sight.
The valley echoed with the sound of the cracking hull.
The wings snapped off and ripped into pieces, lifting a wall of spray. There was an ominous splash. The geyser of water enveloped the machine and its pilot before our eyes. We were too far away to help. The despair that I felt was boundless.
Waves formed on the surface of the water. For a moment air bubbles popped to the surface and then there was a long, heavy silence. We watched Alice Moriarty, like her father before her, swallowed by the cold water, never to be returned.
XVIII: The World Does Not Stop!
It began to rain and I cried with the heavens.
Holmes was mournful as well, though he did not share my grief over the death of the beautiful criminal. He was thrown into despair rather by the definitive loss of the strategic plans for the defence of England and the many important documents whose originals had burned. Many ingenious inventions thus ended at the murky bottom of Loch Ness.
It was not until the following summer that the future would in its way still find the path.
After the crash of the airplane we drove down to the banks of the lake and hired a boat. We searched the surface thoroughly, but found only bits of debris. We remained there until nightfall. In the first hours we still hoped that Alice had managed by some miracle to escape from the sinking wreckage and survive. But the water was cold, the weather unfavourable, and as time went by it was increasingly clear that our hopes were in vain. Due to her intransigence and pride, Lady Moriarty, just like the heavy fuselage of the triplane, was at the bottom of Loch Ness.
The next day Mycroft’s people began to arrive. Together we searched the banks of the lake. But we did not find any traces there either. In Glinney, meanwhile, a second team arrested Alice’s servant, who was grieving by the side of Rupert’s remains among the rubble of the burned down castle.
We returned to London with one arrested person and reported to Mycroft. But we could only boast of a partial success: we had prevented the secret war documents from falling into enemy hands. But we had not succeeded in returning them to the King.
I must admit that Mycroft valued our achievement more than his despondent brother.
“Although we do not have the patents to the war machines, neither does Wilhelm,” he said. “That is more than enough.”
In any event, they had long been working on new strategic plans for the defence of the country. The risk of a breach had been far too great.
The suffragettes led by the Pankhurst clan continued to be a pressing social problem. But with the dispersion of their militant comrades we had nevertheless succeeded in declawing them. Nevertheless, they continued to promote their objectives in their own way.
As for Luigi Pascuale, his work in the factory of Vito Minutti did not last much longer after the end of our case. Mycroft sent his Italian counterpart an unofficial message full of exceedingly interesting information, which divorced Luigi not only from his lucrative position, but also for a while from his freedom.
Meanwhile Holmes and I took a several-week-long rest.
The case had been a great burden on my friend’s weakened heart. I judged that if he had continued to exert himself thus just a little while longer he would have suffered another coronary. His injured hand also required care, particularly the crushed finger. With the help of experts from the clinic we succeeded in saving that too, although the detective never quite fully recovered all feeling in it.
But this was a small price to pay compared to what would have happened had I not intervened.
Unfortunately, Holmes saw it differently.
To tell the truth, since we got back to London he hardly spoke to me. He blamed my foolhardiness for the loss of the documents. For a long time he did not allow me to explain that I had only acted impulsively when I could no longer bear to witness his suffering.
We reconciled shortly before his return to Fulworth.
“Cherchez la femme,”[24] he said to me by way of farewell, as we embraced on the platform before he boarded the train. “Never forget it, my friend.”
The phrase hung in the air as I gazed through clouds of white steam at the departing train.
Epilogue
At the end of the case I did not suspect that for the next two and a half years Holmes and I would not see each other at all or even keep up a correspondence. He did not answer my letters and I was too busy and too proud to travel to his farmstead uninvited. At first I suspected that he was simply angry at me, but the truth was actually much more prosaic. Shortly after his return to Cuckmere Haven he was visited by the minister of foreign affairs and the prime minister himself, who embroiled him in the case of a German spy named von Bork. The work occupied Holmes for more than two years and took him all the way to the United States and Canada. It all finally ended - once again with my assistance - just a few days before the Great War.
Yes, that war, which Miss Moriarty helped bring about in revenge for the death of her father and from which she sought to establish her powerful, radical offshoot of suffragettes as the rulers of an industrial empire. Our efforts, however, had not been in vain. We had delayed the conflict by a whole three years and had given England precious time to prepare. Only in our worst nightmares could we imagine the evil which threatened to destroy the world thanks to the inventions and patents for the war machines that Lady Alice wanted to build for Tankosić and other wicked men. Although Sherlock Holmes had stopped her, the new chemicals and technologies of the Great War brought death to countless thousands.
Without Holmes everything would have unfolded differently and Britain may have been reduced to ashes.
And so by way of conclusion allow me to paraphrase what the detective said at one of our last meetings just after von Bork’s arrest in August 1914, when war was irreversibly at our doorstep.
“There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”[25]
I will never forget his words.
My friend was a wise man and it was always an honour for me to be by his side. Let his words, which I have attempted to reproduce in my literary work as faithfully as possible, continue to inspire each new generation.
Afterword
Holmes before the Battle