Moriarty

All that was required now was a body to take my place, the final proof of what had occurred. I had already prepared one. That very morning I had come across a local man returning from the village of Rosenlaui. I had taken him for a labourer or a shepherd but in fact he turned out to be Franz Hirzel, the chef of the Englischer Hof. He vaguely resembled me in age and in his general physical appearance and it was with some regret that I murdered him. I have never enjoyed taking a life, particularly when the person concerned is an innocent bystander, as Hirzel undoubtedly was. My needs, however, were too great for any scruples. Perry and I dressed him in clothes similar to the ones I was wearing, complete with a silver pocket watch. I had myself sewn the secret pocket containing the coded letter which I had written in London. Now I dumped him in the water and hurried away.

If Athelney Jones had thought about it for one moment, it would have been extremely unlikely that Clarence Devereux would write a formal letter inviting Professor James Moriarty to a meeting. Word of mouth would have been safer — and why go to the trouble of inventing such a peculiar code? He might also have asked why Moriarty should have felt compelled to carry the letter with him all the way to Switzerland, why he had bothered sewing it into his jacket. It was all extremely unlikely, but it was the first of a series of clues that I was laying for the British police, to draw them into my scheme.

From the moment I met Inspector Jones, I knew that providence, which had for so long turned against me, was finally on my side. It would have been impossible for Scotland Yard to have chosen a better representative for the task I had in mind. Jones was so brilliant in so many ways, so obtuse in others, so trusting, so naïve. When his wife told me his story, his strange obsession with Sherlock Holmes, I could hardly believe my luck. To the very end he was completely malleable — and that was his misfortune. He was as much a puppet in my hands as the toy policeman he had purchased for his daughter on the way home.

Take that first meeting in the police station at Meiringen. He picked up every clue that I had deliberately laid out for whatever detective might arrive: the Pinkerton’s watch (purchased, in fact, from a pawnbroker in Shoreditch), the false American accent, the waistcoat, the newspaper brought from Southampton and prominently displayed, the labels on my case. As to the rest of it, he was hopelessly wrong. I had cut myself shaving in the poor light of a Paris hotel, not on a transatlantic crossing. The clothes I was wearing had been purchased deliberately for the masquerade and did not in fact belong to me, so the smell of cigarettes and the worn-out sleeve were completely irrelevant. But he made his deductions and I was suitably impressed. For him to believe in me, I had to make him think that I believed in him.

I told him about the letter and urged him on until he examined the chef’s body for a second time and found it. Using an extract from A Study in Scarlet was perhaps over-theatrical but at the time it amused me and I thought it might distract from the other improbabilities I have already described. I was impressed by the speed with which Jones deciphered the letter — of course I would have been ready to help had he not been up to the task — but in fact the code had been constructed in a way that made it fairly simple to crack: the quite unnecessary insertion of the word MORIARTY made the process straightforward.

And so to the Café Royal. It was as if I had set out a series of stepping stones — the letter, the meeting, Bladeston House — each one leading to the next, and it was my task only to make the necessary connections. Perry arrived, dressed as a telegraph boy and pretending to be an emissary of Clarence Devereux. We acted out a scene that we had already rehearsed and he hurried out, but not too quickly, allowing Jones to follow. The bright blue jacket was quite deliberate, by the way. It ensured that Perry did not get lost in the crowd. For the same reason, he sat on the roof of the omnibus to Highgate rather than inside it. He did not enter Bladeston House. At the last moment, he hurried round the back, stripped off his blue jacket and lay on it, concealed behind a nearby shrub. Having lost sight of him, Jones assumed he must have gone in through the garden gate. Why would he have done otherwise?

Scotchy Lavelle would never have invited me into his home but the following day, confronted by a detective from Scotland Yard, he had no choice. We got past the manservant, Clayton, and met with Lavelle himself and though the two of us, Jones and I, seemed to have a common purpose, in fact we were diametrically opposed. He was enquiring about crimes of the recent past. I was preparing a crime that would take place in the immediate future. For, being inside Bladeston House, I was able to take stock of its defences.