His hand rubbed across his face in a gesture of fatigue, but for the briefest fraction of an instant his eyes slid sideways to meet mine with a spark of hard triumph, and then his hand fell away from features that were merely bone tired and filled with defeat. He leant back in his chair with his long, bony hands spread out on the table before him and gave a tiny shrug.
"I have no questions, Miss Donleavy."
The gun wavered for a moment. "No questions! But of course you have — " She caught herself. "Mr. Holmes, you needn't try to irritate me. That would be a waste of our precious time. Now come, surely you have questions." Her voice had an edge to it, and a flash of memory came, of a time when I had failed to make a logical connexion that ought to have been obvious, and her voice had cut deep. In perfect counterpoint came the voice of Holmes, fatigued and slightly bored.
"Miss Donleavy, I tell you, there are no questions in my mind regarding this case. It has been very interesting, even challenging, but it is now over, and all the significant data have been correlated."
"Indeed? Pardon me if I doubt your word, Mr. Holmes, but I suspect you are playing some obscure game. Perhaps you might be so good as to explain to Miss Russell and myself the sequence of events. Hands on the table, Mr. Holmes. I have no wish to cut this short. Thank you. You may proceed."
"Shall I begin with the occurrences of last autumn, or of twenty-eight years ago?"
"As you wish, though perhaps Miss Russell may find the latter course of some interest."
"Very well. Russell, twenty-eight years ago I, not to mince words, killed Professor James Moriarty, your maths tutor's father. That it was self-defence does not contravene the fact that I was responsible for his falling to his death over the Reichenbach Falls, or that it was my investigation into his extensive criminal activities that was the direct cause of his seeking to kill me. I found him out, I exposed his network of crime, and I was the immediate cause of his death.
"However, Russell, I made two mistakes at that time, though how I might have anticipated events I cannot at the moment think. The first was that my subsequent three- yearlong disappearance from England allowed the scattered remnants of Moriarty's organisation to regroup; by the time I returned it had succeeded in extending itself internationally, with little structure left aboveground in this country. My second mistake was to allow Moriarty's family — the existence of which was one of his better kept secrets — to disappear from my view. His wife and young daughter left for New York, never to be seen again. Or so I had thought. Was Donleavy your mother's maiden name?" "Ah, so you do have a question! Yes, it was."
"Minor lacunae, Miss Donleavy, and hardly worth the effort of pursuit. What does it matter, whether the hair you left for me to find was your father's? or, which room in the warehouse across the river the marksman was in before shooting at Miss Russell? or indeed, was it you or some minion who prematurely triggered the bomb that killed Dickson? Peripheral matters left unanswered make for an untidy case but hardly affect its basic framework."
"An interesting statement, from a man who bases his investigations on minutiae," she commented, with some justification. "But we'll let it pass. Yes, it was my father's hair, from the days when he wore it down to his collar. My mother kept it in a locket. This locket I wear, in fact. And yes, my friend with the accurate rifle was indeed in the warehouse, although I understand that Scotland Yard is still looking for the launch. How they can imagine that anyone could aim from a boat en water and achieve any degree of accuracy — And as for Dickson, he knew the risks when he signed on. I was angry with him, for making such a mess of the bomb that incapacitated you, and it made him clumsy. I was generous with his family's compensation, you will give me that."
"What price a man's life, Miss Donleavy? How many guineas is recompense to a widow, three fatherless children?"
His voice hardened. "You killed him, Miss Donleavy, yourself or one of your hired thugs, who heard your anger and took it as command. You intended him dead when you opened the New York bank account from which he was paid, last November. And he is now dead."
We sat in utter silence, and my heart beat ten, eleven times before she responded, with grudging admiration and a touch of amusement, and sounding again like herself.
"Mr. Holmes, how generous is the urge to Christian forgiveness in your soul, to perceive the man who nearly killed you and your two closest associates as a poor fellow whose widow and children weep for him."
"John Dickson was a professional, Madam, an artist with fuse and explosive. He never killed, and only once injured, in his entire career, until you brought him out of retirement. I can only assume you held something over him, some threat to his family, I imagine, to force him to engage in wholesale slaughter. Do not play games with me, Madam, with your accidents and your shows of pique; my patience has its limits."
The room's silence was so heavy I was sure she would hear my heart rate accelerate when I saw the end of the gun sag slightly away from me. He had her complete attention now. In a minute her voice came from the dark corner, flavoured with what sounded like respect.
"I can see that with someone like you about a person would never become complacent. You are quite correct: I suppose I did want him dead and tidied out of the way.
His affection for those poisonous children of his was a weakness, and he would have exposed me when he had the chance. Ah well; introspection has never been one of my strong points. I have an unfortunate tendency to overlook side issues when I have a goal before me. As Miss Russell could tell you, I think."
The silver muzzle was again aimed directly at me, and I willed my muscles to relax, cursing inwardly. We were all silent for a long minute, two, and when she started again I knew that Holmes had miscalculated, that his successful gambit had, instead of distracting her, only driven her more strongly into asserting her domination over him. I could have told him, but he could not have known. Her counter move was vicious and calculated to take him at his weakest point, where pride met aloof independence. "I believe," she said slowly, and again she had flue-tuated into that slightly "off" manner that made me feel as if I did not know her in the least. "I believe that I shall call you Sherlock. An awkward name, that. What was your father thinking? Nonetheless, we have had such an intimate relationship — admittedly one-sided up to now — for so many years, I believe it is time to make it reciprocal. You will address me please by my Christian name."
Before she reached the end of this bizarre little speech I knew what the strong sense of wrongness was that I had sensed in her. When I had known her at Oxford, she had struck me as a person whose frustrations with the demands of University life would cause her, before too long, to make a break with the University and go elsewhere to exercise her considerable abilities. Indeed, that is what I had half assumed had taken place when she did not return for Hilary term. It was now clear that the break had taken place, but internally: The tightly controlled impatience she had always exhibited had broken free, and the knowledge of her superiority had progressed to a sense of supremacy.
Eccentricity had flowered into madness.
It was an almost textbook illustration of dementia, but I needed no book to tell me what my crawling skin knew: The woman was more dangerous than her gun, as volatile as petrol fumes and malignant as a poisonous spider.
My frantic thoughts could find no option to grab hold of, could conceive of no way to calm her, or even distract her. I could only sit, still and unimportant to one side, and leave the field to Holmes' vast experience.
"Madam, I can hardly think that — "
"You ought to think very carefully, Sherlock, before you choose."