Moriarty

He shook it briefly. ‘Lestrade,’ he said and his eyes glinted. ‘I would welcome you to our little gathering, Mr Chase, but I’m not sure welcome is the right word. These are queer times. This business at Bladeston House … very, very bad. I am not sure what it portends.’

‘I am here to give you any help I can,’ I said, heartily.

‘And who is it that most needs help, I wonder? Well, we shall see.’

Several more inspectors had entered the room and finally the door was closed. Jones gestured at me to sit next to him. ‘Say nothing for a while,’ he said, quietly. ‘And watch out for Lestrade and Gregson.’

‘Why?’

‘You cannot agree with one without antagonising the other. Youghal over there is a good man but he is still finding his feet. And next to him …’ He glanced at a man with a high-domed forehead and intense eyes who was sitting at the head of the table. Although he was not one of the most physically impressive men in the room, there was still something about him that suggested great inner strength. ‘Alec MacDonald. I believe him to have the best brain in the business and if anyone can steer this enquiry in the right direction, it is he.’

A large, breathless man lowered himself into the seat on the other side of me. He was wearing a frogged jacket which was stretched tight across his chest. ‘Bradstreet,’ he muttered.

‘Frederick Chase.’

‘Delighted.’ He took out an empty pipe and tapped it on the table in front of him.

Inspector Lestrade began the meeting with a natural authority that seemed to outrank the others in the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Before we get down to the very serious business that brings us here today, it’s fitting that we pay our respects to a good friend and colleague whom we have recently lost. I refer, of course, to Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was known to many of us here and, by reputation, to the public at large. He helped me in no small way on one or two occasions, I will admit, starting with that business at Lauriston Gardens some years ago. It is true that he had a queer way about him, spinning those fine theories of his like gossamer out of thin air — and although some of it may have been no more than guesswork, none of us here would deny that he was often successful and I’m sure we’ll all miss him following his unfortunate demise at the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Is there no chance that he could have survived?’ The speaker was young and smartly dressed, about halfway down the table. ‘After all, his body has never been found.’

‘That much is true, Forrester,’ Lestrade agreed. ‘But we have all read the letter.’

‘I was at that dreadful place,’ Jones said. ‘If he fought Moriarty and fell, I am afraid there is very little chance that he could have been saved.’

Lestrade shook his head solemnly. ‘I’ll admit that I’ve been wrong about one or two things in the past,’ he said. ‘Particularly where Sherlock Holmes was concerned. But this time I have looked at the evidence and I can tell you without any doubt at all that he is dead. I would stake my reputation on it.’

‘We should not pretend that the loss of Sherlock Holmes is anything short of a catastrophe,’ the man sitting opposite me said. He was tall with fair hair and as he spoke, Jones whispered to me, ‘Gregson.’ He continued: ‘You mentioned the Lauriston Gardens affair, Lestrade. Without Holmes, it would have gone nowhere. Why, you were about to search the whole of London for a girl called Rachel when in fact it was Rache, the German for revenge, that the victim had left as a final clue.’ There were quite a few smiles around the table at that and one or two of the detectives laughed out loud.

‘There is one silver lining to the cloud,’ Inspector Youghal said. ‘At least we’ll no longer find ourselves being caricatured by his associate, Dr Watson. I was of the view that his scribblings did our reputations no good at all.’

‘Holmes was a damned odd fellow,’ a fifth man exclaimed. As he spoke, he rubbed his eyeglass between finger and thumb as if he were adjusting it to better see the others in the room. ‘I worked with him, you know, on that business with the missing horse. Silver Blaze. A very strange individual. Sherlock Holmes, not the horse. He had a habit of speaking in riddles. Dogs that bark in the night, indeed! I admired him. I liked him. But I’m not at all sure I will miss him.’

‘I was always suspicious of his methods,’ Forrester concurred. ‘He made it all sound easy enough and we took him at his word. But is it really possible to tell a man’s age from his handwriting? Or his height from the length of his stride? Much of what he said was unsound, unscientific and occasionally preposterous. We believed him because he got results, but it was not a sound platform for modern detective work.’