Moriarty

I guessed that Holmes would have to visit that dreadful place. It was in his nature. No tourist, not even a man in fear of his life, could pass by without gazing down at the rushing waters. I made my way there ahead of him, walked the narrow path and knew at once that I had the setting I required. It would be perilous. Of that there could be no doubt. But I like to think that only a mathematician could survive what might seem to be a suicidal plunge into the rapids. Who else could so carefully calculate all the necessary angles, the volume of the water plunging down, the exact speed of descent and the odds of not drowning or being smashed to pieces?

The next day, when Holmes and Watson set out from the Englischer Hof, everything was in place. Colonel Moran was concealed, high above the falls, a necessary safeguard should anything go amiss. Perry, who had perhaps thrown himself too strenuously into the part, was disguised as a Swiss lad. I myself was waiting on the shoulder of the hill nearby. Holmes and Watson arrived and Perry produced the letter, supposedly written by the landlord, summoning Watson back to the hotel. Holmes was left alone. It was at this point that I presented myself and the rest, one might say, is history.

The two of us exchanged words. We prepared for the end. Do not think for a minute that I was entirely sanguine about the chances of my success. The water was pouring down ferociously and there were jagged rocks all around. Had there been any alternative, I would gladly have considered it. But I must seem dead, and with that in mind I naturally permitted Holmes to write his letter of farewell. I was a little surprised that he felt a need to record what was going to happen but then I had no idea that we were both, in fact, preparing to fake our own deaths, a situation which in retrospect strikes me as slightly bizarre. However, it was his testimony that I most needed and I watched him leave the note close to his alpenstock before we squared off and began to grapple like a pair of wrestlers at the London Athletic. This was, for me, the most disagreeable part of the experience for I have never been fond of human contact and Holmes reeked of tobacco. I was really quite grateful when he brought his bartitsu skills to the fore and threw me over the edge.

It nearly killed me. Such a strange and horrible experience to be plummeting endlessly as if out of the sky and yet to be surrounded by water, barely able to breathe. I was blind. The howl of the water was in my ears. Although I had worked out exactly how many seconds it would take me to reach the bottom, I seemed to hang there for an eternity. I was vaguely aware of the rocks rushing towards me and actually touched them with one leg, although very lightly, for otherwise I would have shattered the bone. Finally, I plunged into the freezing water, all the air was punched out of me and I was swirling, turning, almost being reborn in a sort of life after death. Somewhere within me I realised that I had survived but could not break surface in case Holmes was watching. I had instructed Colonel Moran to keep him busy, to distract his attention by hurling small boulders in his direction, and it was while this was happening that I swam to the shore and crawled out, shivering and exhausted, into a place of concealment.

How strange — indeed, how almost laughable — it is that both Holmes and I used the same incident to make our disappearance from the world; I, for the reasons I have described, and he …? Well, there is no satisfactory answer to that. It is clear though that Holmes had an agenda of his own, that he wished to hide away for the three years that came to be known as ‘the great hiatus’, and it was a constant worry to me that he would turn up again for I, almost alone in the world, knew that he had survived. I even suspected for a while that he might have taken the room next to mine at Hexam’s Hotel and that it was he whom I heard coughing in the darkness. Where did he go during this time and what did he do when he got there? I neither know nor care. The important thing was that he did not interfere with my plans and I was very relieved not to see him again.