This, then, is an account of the events that led up to the disappearance, and what transpired for a short time afterward. I was going to say a “true account,” but I refrained, because memory is faulty, and there were some facts that I was not privy to that might make a difference in the truth of what happened. It is, then, an account of the events as they appeared to me at the time.
It was on the evening of Wednesday, the 22 ^ nd of April, 1891, that Mr. Maws, my butler, ushered a man named Tippins into my study. A tall, thin, angular man wearing a black frock coat with red cuffs and pockets, and large brass buttons, he stood, top hat in hand, before my desk and peered at me through oversized gold spectacles. His nose, while not large enough to be truly grotesque, was the most prominent object on his face, possibly because of the web of red veins beneath the roseate skin. A brush mustache directly beneath the nose added character to the face, but it was not a character whose acquaintance I would have gone out of my way to make. “I have come to you from Mr. Holmes,” he began. “He requires your assistance, and has asked me to direct you to the secret location where he awaits you.”
I am not easily surprised. Indeed, I spend a good bit of time and effort making sure that I am not surprised. But I confess that, for a second, I was astounded. “Holmes wants to see me? Is this some sort of trick?” I demanded.
He considered. “Naw, I wouldn’t think so,” he said finally. “He’s much too stout to indulge in that sort of tomfoolery, I should think.”
“Ah!” I said. “Stout, is he? So it’s Mr. Mycroft Holmes who desires my assistance.”
“Indeed,” Tippins agreed. “Isn’t that what I said?”
“I thought perhaps his brother…”
Tippins snorted. “The consulting detective chap? What has he to do with foreign policy?”
“Foreign policy?” I inquired.
“Perhaps you’d best just go and find out for yourself,” Tippins suggested.
“To the Foreign Office?”
“Naw. Mr. Holmes don’t want it known that he’s meeting with you, so he has arranged for my services to get you to his, so-to-speak secret location.”
“Services?” I asked. “What sort of services?”
He tapped himself on the chest. “I’m a conniver,” he said.
“Interesting,” I allowed. “You scheme and plot for Her Majesty’s government?”
“I enable people to do necessary things in unusual ways, when the more usual ways are not available.” He smiled. “I occasionally perform services for Mr. Holmes, but few others in Her Majesty’s government have availed themselves of my services.”
“And what necessary service would you perform for me in your unorthodox fashion?” I asked him.
“Your house is being watched,” Tippins said.
I nodded. I had been aware of a steady watch being kept on my house for the past few weeks. “No doubt by that very consulting detective chap you were mentioning,” I said.
“Mr. Holmes did not want it known that he was to speak with you,” Tippins explained, “so he sent me.”
“I see,” I said. “How are you going to get me there unseen?”
“I have a carriage waiting outside,” Tippins said, unbuttoning his frock coat. “The driver knows where to go. You will leave here as me. I will await your return here, if you don’t mind. I have brought a book.” He took off the frock coat and handed it to me. “Put this on.”
“It is distinctive,” I said, examining the red pockets. “But I’m not sure we look alike enough, ah, facially, for the masquerade to work.”
“Ah! There we have the crux of the matter,” he told me. He reached for the gold frame of his glasses and carefully removed them from his face. With them came the red nose and the brush mustache. The face beneath was quite ordinary, and the nose was, if anything, rather small.
“Bless me!” I said, or perhaps it was a slightly stronger expression.
He smiled. “Simple but effective,” he said. “The watchers will see what they expect to see.”
I put on the glasses, with the accompanying nose and mustache, and shrugged into the coat.
“Here,” Tippins said, handing me his top hat. “It will complete the illusion.”
And indeed it did. Wrapped in Tippins’ frock coat and wearing much of what had been his face, I thrust the journal I had been reading into the coat pocket and left my house. I clambered into the waiting carriage, a sturdy but undistinguished hack, and the jarvey spoke to the horse, and we were on our way. I waited about ten minutes before removing the facial part of the disguise. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it off so soon, but I felt foolish enough in the coat of several colors without wearing that nose one moment longer than I had to. I kept a careful eye out the rear window, but as far as I could tell no one was following us or taking an undue interest in our passage.
After several turns designed to force anyone following us to come into view, the jarvey took a fairly straight course to Regent’s Park Road, turned off on a side street, and pulled to a stop in the middle of a block of flats. He hopped down from his perch and opened the carriage door for me. “That door there,” he said, indicating a brown door much like all the other brown doors along the street. “You’re expected.”
It crossed my mind that this might be a trap. There are people in London who would rather see me dead than steal a million pounds, and one of them might have been inside that door instead of the rotund Mr. Holmes. But I have an instinct for such things, and this was both too elaborate and too commonplace to be anything other than what it seemed. So I pulled up the collar of my borrowed coat against the chill wind, crossed the walk, and pulled the bell-pull at the indicated doorway.
No more than three seconds later the door opened and a short woman of immense girth dressed as a maid gestured me in. Whether she was actually a maid, or some employee of the Foreign Service in masquerade I cannot say. “This way, Professor Moriarty sir,” she said. “You’re expected.”
She showed me into a room that might have been the waiting room in some doctor’s surgery, or for that matter the outer office of the booking agent for a music hall. There was a wide, well-worn black leather couch, several large and sturdy chairs, a heavy table of some dark wood, ill-lit by three wall sconces with the gas turned low and a window with heavy light-green muslin curtains, which were drawn. A deep throbbing sound came faintly into the room; I could discern neither the location nor the function of its agent. Some sort of machinery? On the right-hand wall, leading to the back of the house, a pair of double doors were drawn closed. “Please wait,” she said. “ He will be with you shortly.” The timbre of her voice changed when she said “ He,” the added resonance giving the word importance, as though I were awaiting Aristotle or Charles Darwin himself. “Please don’t open the shades,” she added as she left the room.
I turned the gas light up in one of the wall sconces and settled into a chair beneath it, taking from my pocket the journal I had brought with me, Das Astrophysische Journal der Universitat Erlangen, and immersing myself in its pages. The Austrians Joffe and Shostak have advanced the theory that the nebulosities observed through the larger telescopes are not some sort of interstellar gas, but actually vast clouds of stars much like our own Milky Way galaxy, seen at tremendous distances. If so-but I digress.
After a while I heard the door open and close, and I looked up to find Sherlock Holmes standing in the doorway. “So!” he growled, looking down his thin, crooked nose at me. “It was one of your tricks after all!” He thrust his walking stick in front of him like a child playing at dueling. “I warn you that I am prepared for any eventuality.”
“How nice for you,” I said, folding my journal and putting it back into my pocket.
“Mr. Holmes,” said the broad maid from behind him. “Please be seated. Your brother will be down directly.”
Holmes stalked over to a chair in the far side of the room and dropped lightly into it. “We’ll see,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. He flexed his walking stick, describing a series of shapes in the air before him, and then laid it across his knees.
The door opened again, and the large shape of Mycroft Holmes loomed into the room. “Sherlock,” he said, “Professor Moriarty. Good of you to come. Join me in the next room, where we can talk.”
“You invited him? ” asked Sherlock, pointing a wavering walking stick in my direction. “What were you thinking?”
“All in good time,” said Mycroft. “Follow me.” He stomped through the waiting room and pulled open the double doors. The chamber thus revealed had once been the dining room of the house, but was now a conference
