room key with some instruction. He retrieved Mr Holmes's meagre baggage from the manager's office and shuffled up the staircase. Sherlock Holmes started to follow the porter, but then turned around to us. 'If you'll just wait for me in the dining room, I won't be a minute. I have to get a fresh handkerchief from my valise.'
Strickland and I walked over to the dining room where we were at a small table in a corner of the room. Obviously, the United Services College Old Boys' (with ladies) reunion dinner had not ended, for the centre of the hall was lined with large banquet tables and occupied by the formally dressed ladies and gentlemen who earlier in the evening, had received such a rude shock from our dead friend. Needless to say, the banquet did not appear to be a particularly cheerful one. As a turbaned waiter in white livery silently filled our water glasses, Mr Holmes stepped briskly into the dining room, laughing silently in his strange way as he seated himself and unfolded his napkin.
'It is most piquant. Can you guess which room I have been given?'
'Surely not…' I cried in amazement, but I was anticipated.
'Yes, 289.'
'By Thunder!' exclaimed Strickland' 'It must be that smirking manager. Let me take him down to the thana and I'll make him talk, as quick as Jack Ketch's gibbet.'
'Hold your peace, Strickland,' Sherlock Holmes held out his hand in an imperious fashion. 'I assure you that I anticipated this very move. Furthermore, we have no proof of the manager's
complicity in this business. Anyhow, whoever it is, we mustn't scare him off at this initial stage of the game.'
'But your life, man! Surely you're not going to sleep there tonight?'
'My very intention. Nothing will happen in that room tonight, my dear fellow. I am staking more than my poor reputation on it. And now let us not vex ourselves any further with these conundrums. Ah, this Solferino soup and roast chicken a la Moghul is the very thing. Could I propose a bottle of Montrachet to celebrate my…umm, somewhat eventful arrival onto the shores of the Indian Empire?'
3 Sherlock Holmes Reminisces
Over coffee Mr Holmes told us the story of the great deception he had performed on the world.
Over 'You have by now heard of Professor Moriarty,' said Sherlock Holmes, pushing his chair away from the table and stretching his long legs.
'The Times of India carried an article about his criminal empire simultaneously with your obituary,' [7] I ventured.
'We received information from London about the Professor and his gang,' Strickland said. 'I also read quite a lively story about the whole business in the Strand Magazine!
'That would be my friend Dr Watson's account of what he thought had happened,' Holmes remarked thoughtfully as he filled his pipe. 'In this entire business my only regret is the unnecessary alarm and distress I have caused him. But that couldn't be helped, I suppose. The stakes were too high, and Moriarty's minions too desperate.'
'Ay, there was a genius,' said Mr Holmes, puffing on his pipe. 'The greatest criminal mind of the century, but no one had heard of him. There lay the wonder of it. No doubt you have read the more lurid details of his career. In fact he was a man of most respectable origins. From a very tender age he displayed a precocious mathematical faculty which an excellent education developed to phenomenal heights. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a thesis on the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities. He is also the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid-a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it. Unfortunately a criminal strain ran in his blood which was exacerbated and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London. [8]
'For some years I had continually been conscious of some sinister and ubiquitous organising power behind the criminal world of London. For years I worked to uncover this conspiracy, and at last the time came when my researches led, after a thousand cunning twists and turns, to the late Professor Moriarty of mathematical renown. He was the organiser of nearly all that was evil and undetected in England, and possibly beyond. He sat motionless like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web had a thousand radiations, and he knew well every quiver of each of them. He did little himself. He only planned. But his agents were numerous and splendidly organised. This was the dark domain that I discovered, gendemen, and which I devoted my whole energy to expose and break up.
'But the Professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal, if not superior. But I persisted with my investigations until one day the Professor made a mistake. It was a small mistake, I will grant you, just the merest oversight; but it gave me my chance. Starting from that point I wove my net around him.'
It is not necessary to relate here the full story that Sherlock Holmes told us about the brilliant way he managed to expose and trap the Professor and his organisation; and how Scotland Yard through its bungling allowed the Professor and some of his top henchmen to slip out of Mr Holmes's net. The reader will undoubtedly have read that special issue of the Strand Magazine where the entire story, including the subsequent meeting of Professor Moriarty and Mr Sherlock Holmes was excitingly related; and also, where, to the grief of an Empire, the mistaken conclusion was drawn that the great detective had perished in the thundering waters of the Reichenbach Falls.
Strickland and I listened entranced as Sherlock Holmes told us of his final moments with the professor.
'I had littie doubt, gentlemen,' continued Mr Holmes, sipping his brandy, 'when the somewhat sinister figure of the late Professor loomed ahead of me, at the end of the only narrow track that led to safety, that I had come to the end of my fruitful career. His grey eyes were set with bitterness and malicious purpose. But he greeted me civilly enough. We had an interesting but brief conversation, and he gave me a sketch of the methods by which he had confounded the police force. I reciprocated with a few details of how I had managed to unearth his organisation and activities. I then obtained his courteous permission to write a short note for Dr Watson which I left with my cigarette case and my stick. I walked along the pathway, Moriarty still at my heels, until I reached the end. Before me the thundering waters of the fall plunged deep down into a dreadful cauldron of seething and swirling foam. I turned around. Moriarty drew no weapon, but the mask of his calm exterior visibly began to break down. The great bulge of his forehead throbbed like a live thing. His eyes flashed a dreadful hatred, the like of which I had never seen before, and his mouth moved incessandy, no doubt uttering some curse for the damnation of my soul, but which I fortunately could not hear for the noise of the waterfall.
'Then with a snarl he hurled himself on me. He was like a madman and had the strength of one. Physically I am equal to most, but the fury of the Professor's charge initially confounded me. His long cadaverous fingers seized me by the throat, and proceeded to thrtftde me in a most alarming manner. His mouth, distorted with revengeful hatred, trickled with foam like a rabid dog.
''Die, Holmes. Damn you! Die!' he screamed, spraying my face with his vile spittle. We teetered together on the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of bujitsu, [9] which includes the Japanese system of wrestling, and which has more than once been very useful to me. Gripping him firmly by the collar and applying a judicious foot against his stomach, I rolled over on my back throwing him clean over me. [10] With a scream he fell over the precipice. But the desire to live is a strong and desperate one in all beings. When I got up, rather shaken, I perceived that the Professor had managed to grip the edge of the precipice and somehow arrest his fall. He lay dangling over the dark furious chasm, his fingers scrabbling desperately to maintain a hold on the edge of the cliff. His eyes, wide with fear, met mine.
' 'Help me, please,' he croaked.
'At that instant I lost my sense of animosity towards the wretched man. I moved a step forward, not suspecting the base treachery that lurked in his heart. His right hand snaked towards my leg, nearly getting a grip on it. That was his undoing. His other hand, unable to bear his full weight, lost its grip. After a momentary effort to restore his hold, he plunged down the chasm. I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounded off, and splashed into the water.
'For a while I was unable to move. Many men have hated me, but the implacable malevolence that Moriarty had
