“And what do you call your damned symphony?” I found myself shouting.
“Oh, I would have thought it was fairly obvious, old fellow,” said Holmes, as cool as the proverbial cucumber. “Moriarty’s Unfinished Symphony.”
“But very soon to be finished, gentlemen — and way beyond your pathetic power to stop, Holmes. This will not be some unseemly scuffle in the middle of nowhere. You are dealing now with forces as elemental as the human psyche. Your common man in the street — the supposed object of everyone’s good intentions — is fundamentally a fool. He wants what I provide for him and he will want what I am about to provide — once he gets used to it. The process is so inevitable and irreversible that I don’t mind your knowing about it. In fact, I always intended that you should …”
“But there has been murder here tonight,” I said and even as I spoke the words they sounded strangely irrelevant even to my own ears.
“Murder, ah yes, so there has. Was it not you yourself, Holmes who spoke so eloquently of the ‘scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life?’ But murder? I would prefer the term ‘execution’—the execution of an incompetent. The first, I fear, of many such.”
“But I’m afraid that when they come to investigate this ‘murder’, all Inspector Lestrade’s men will find are a series of culs-de-sac. So many strangers have had the run of the house and after all, who can tell where the hired help comes from these days?” And he gave Holmes a lopsided smile. “How can one be sure they are even who they say they are? No, my own opinion — which I shall be sharing with the world in tomorrow’s Clarion — is that this whole unfortunate affair may be laid at the door of the international terrorist conspiracy that is polluting so much of the free world and which this government is clearly powerless to stop. And I think you will find that people will see things my way.”
“Was it not my fellow American, Mark Twain, who observed that despite the best efforts of Britain’s preachers and statesmen to draw the two countries together in friendship and mutual respect, the newspapers ‘with what seems a steady and calculated purpose’, I seem to remember him saying — ‘discourage this’—I love the ‘steady and calculated purpose’! ‘The newspapers,’ he concluded, ‘are going to win this fight.’ And who am I to argue with Mark Twain?”
“You see, my dear Holmes, this time nobody will listen to any accusations you may try to bring. They will prefer my plot. The world has changed around you but you have not changed with it, because you do not choose to comprehend the forces that have been unleashed. I no longer need to eliminate you. The winds of change will blow you out of my path like a dead leaf. In some strange way I have to confess that I have always felt our destinies to be somehow linked. It is simply my sense of dramatic symmetry that requires me to have you there to witness my triumph.
“But I must not delay you further. Thank you for attending my opening night.”
Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, Humpty Dumpty was gone. One moment there were multiple images of this grotesque egg-shaped figure, for all the world like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. The next, we were alone. I imagine he must have used some hidden door in one of the mirrors but all I know is that his disappearance — like his arrival — was an illusion that would not have disgraced the great Maskelyne. I looked at Holmes. Instead of concern I saw what I can only describe as excitement. The man was enjoying this bizarre and deadly game. His eyes were positively afire as he hurried me from this Hall of Mirrors.
“Come, Watson. Time for Act Two, I think …”
CHAPTER NINE
“What do you mean — Act Two?” It was the following morning and I was becoming more than a little frustrated with Holmes’s lack of communication. Often in the past he had gone off into a brown study when a case was reaching its crisis. Nonetheless, I still found his attitude lacking in consideration. Did he not think after all these years that I could keep my own council?
Events had proceeded very much as predicted after our return from the Chester Square party. As we left the atmosphere was very different from the one I had found. Guests were leaving in dribs and drabs after what I suspected was some fairly perfunctory questioning by Lestrade and his men. We knew, after all, who was responsible for the Home Secretary’s murder but it was still necessary to be seen to be going through the usual routine procedures. Finery that had looked so cheerful and gay a few short hours ago now clung to the departing revellers like so many bedraggled feathers.
The moment we regained the warmth and safety of Baker Street, I threw my own costume in a corner, fastened my favourite smoking jacket firmly around me and settled into my chair for a comforting pipe of Arcadia, while I tried to make sense of all I had seen and heard.
Holmes — as I had known him do on so many occasions in the past — sat curled up in his own chair, his head wreathed in the smoke from his favourite black clay pipe. Every now and then those aquiline features would emerge like a graven image, only to fade again. I was reminded of one of those psychic manifestations the papers had been debating lately. Then I realised that this particular manifestation was speaking.
“Do you not find it curious, Watson, that criminals of talent — even of the genius, which I feel we must allow to Moriarty — can never seem to avoid the compulsion to annotate their plans?
“As part of my duties as the Professor’s admittedly temporary butler, I felt it incumbent upon me to tidy the desk in his study. Oh, and by the way, I see he still cannot bear to part from his Greuze — you remember that oil of the girl with her head on her hands? A pretty piece, totally wasted on him. Anyway, there in the locked bottom right hand drawer — a hiding place I seem to remember he favoured in his previous incarnation — I found his Journal. So many people seem doomed to be creatures of habits — for which, I suppose, the consulting detective must be duly grateful.”
I looked around the room as he spoke. There was the old Persian slipper crammed with his favourite tobacco, the cigar in the coal scuttle, the jack knife transfixing unanswered correspondence to the mantlepiece with the engraving of the Reichenbach Falls above it, the commonplace books that appeared random but on which he could lay an unerring hand in a moment … all of the artifacts of a life that had remained untouched (and if he had had his way, undusted) even throughout his enforced absence. If anyone was a creature of habit it was Sherlock Holmes!
Holmes interrupted my reverie by taking a scrap of folded paper out of the pocket of his dressing gown. “I’ll even wager he’s using the same mathematical code. Once a mathematician, always a mathematician …”
He picked up a pad and pencil from a nearby table and began to jot down a series of notes while consulting the paper. I thought I heard him mutter under his breath something about it being an insult to a man who had written a monograph identifying a hundred and sixty separate ciphers to be given this child’s play. Finally, he sat back in his chair, tapping his right forefinger against his mouth thoughtfully.
“Mycroft is right, old fellow, we are sailing into stormy waters indeed. Even a cursory examination of these annotations is enough to indicate that Moriarty is in close contact with some highly dangerous people, none of whom wish our country well. In the last two weeks alone he appears to have had several meetings with both ‘IZ’ and ‘HvB’. Now, unless I miss my guess, Watson, ‘IZ’ stands for Ilya Zokov, the notorious Russian Nihilist on whose head the Czar has put a price that would keep you in comfort to a ripe old age and allow me to retire and keep bees. And ‘HvB’ is even more interesting. Heinrich von Bork, a rising man in German Military intelligence, currently Imperial Envoy and close to Kaiser Wilhelm. Uncomfortable bedfellows at first glance. I very much fear that in their different ways both Mycroft and Moriarty are right in predicting that Europe and very possibly the rest of the world is drifting towards some sort of cataclysm. Perhaps the most we can hope to do is to delay that progress until this country has time to prepare. And to do even that we shall have to strain every sinew.”