Further exploits of Sherlock Holmes

The Reichenbach Secret-1

The Reichenbach Secret

David Stuart Davies

‘Stand with me here on the terrace for it may be the last quiet talk we shall ever have.’ The words are those of my friend Sherlock Holmes. They were spoken to me on that fateful evening in August 1914 just after we had captured the German spy, Von Bork. You will find details of this adventure in His Last Bow, an account I penned myself but presented in the third person in order to achieve a more dramatic effect. As it turned out it was not the last occasion on which Holmes and I had a ‘quiet talk’. That occurred some two summers later.

I had heard little of Holmes since the capture of Von Bork and then, out of the blue, I received a note from a neighbour of his informing me of my friend’s failing health. Shocked at this news, I determined to travel down from London to his retirement cottage in Sussex to see him. I was aware that this was probably the last opportunity I would have to meet with my old friend – a last chance to say goodbye.

I wired ahead to ascertain whether my visit was possible and received an instant, impish response from Holmes: ‘Please come if convenient; if inconvenient, please come all the same.’ I travelled from London by train and hired a taxi cab from the local station to take me to his cottage. The cab dropped me by a dusty lane, at the end of which I saw a whitewashed cottage almost perched on the cliffs, overlooking the sea.

I found Holmes sitting in his garden in the afternoon sun, gazing across the great blue expanse of the English Channel. He wore a pale linen suit and a sand-coloured Panama hat and for all the world looked like a retired colonial. His face, however, was pale and gaunt and those bright eyes, although still sharp and piercing, had sunk deeper into their sockets. He rose to greet me and I found his handshake as firm as ever.

‘My dear, dear Watson, by all that’s wonderful, you are a sight for sore eyes,’ he said warmly. ‘Still practising a little medicine, I see.’

‘Why, yes,’ I replied in some surprise.

He grinned and pulled up a garden chair for me to sit on. ‘Iodine stains on the fingers and the telltale shape of a thermometer case in your top pocket.’

I chuckled gently. ‘You can still surprise me with…’

‘ … my little observations. I’m please to hear it.’ He leaned forward and rang a small bell on the table beside him. ‘I am sure that you would find a cup of tea refreshing after your long journey.’

In response to the bell, his housekeeper emerged from the cottage, took my overnight bag and set about arranging for the tea.

‘Martha is no longer with you?’ I asked when the lady had returned indoors.

‘Sadly, no. She has retired and returned to her native Scotland. ‘My old bones are not up to serving you any more, Mr Holmes.’’ he mimicked the faint Scottish tones of our redoubtable landlady.

It was a wrench to us both to lose her. She has served me well and truly.’

‘Served us both.’

Holmes paused and gave me a thin smile. ‘Served us both,’ he said softly.

How strong are the memories of that afternoon: Holmes and I sitting in the bright sunshine, drinking our tea, the faint breeze off the sea, the hum of the bees and the conversation. The conversation, which began with talk of the war but then drifted inevitably into discussions of our past cases. As is the way with old men, we relived our youth, talking of Milverton, John Clay, the Baskerville affair and countless other cases in which Sherlock Holmes and I joined together to counteract the forces of crime. Once again we were in our Baker Street rooms, hearing the distressed pleas of a desperate client or rattling through the streets in a hansom cab on our way to Paddington, Euston or King’s Cross to catch an express which would bring us to some great house in the shires where there was another mystery to unravel.

I felt pangs of sadness when we discussed the Agra treasure business, a case which brought me my own greatest treasure, Mary, my beloved wife. At first, Holmes seemed unaware of my discomfort but, as he moved on to discuss another of our adventures, he narrowed his eyes, gave me a brief nod and patted my arm.

As we talked, I felt my heart grow light and the spirit of adventure rise within my weary bones. I marvelled at the realisation of what we had done and achieved. To think that I was the companion of the man who had turned detection into an exact science.

Suddenly my friend laughed out loud. ‘The irony of it, Watson, the irony of it.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand.’

‘You remember how I used to rail at you about your overly romantic accounts of my cases that were published in the Strand Magazine?’

‘Indeed I do.’

‘Well, now I find my memory somewhat … unreliable, so that I have had to purchase a whole bound set of the magazine in order that I can bring to mind all the details of those cases.’

‘He burst out laughing and I joined him.

We sat conversing until the sun had almost set, sending warm, crimson fingers of twilight across the still, sparkling waters.

*

That evening we dined quietly. Holmes’ new housekeeper, Mrs Towers, a local lady who didn’t live in, provided us with a simple but appetising meal and Holmes had dug out a very good bottle of Beaune from his modest cellar. The cottage was illuminated by oil lamps, electricity not yet being available in such an isolated spot. There was also a small fire lit in the dining room to ward off the chill of an English summer evening; the flames added to the soft amber glow of the chamber which, in essence, reflected my own inner glow. Here I was with the best and wisest friend I knew, chatting amiably about old times. For the moment I felt cocooned in this pleasantly primitive dwelling against the harsh realities of the terrible war which was being fought across the channel whose blue waters we had been gazing upon that afternoon.

Mrs Towers served us pudding, assured my friend that she would attend to the washing up in the morning and bid us both good night. By the time Holmes and I were tackling the brandy and coffee, we were in a very relaxed mood indeed.

Holmes lit his pipe and stared at me quite sternly for some moments. ‘I think the time is right to confide in you a secret that I have held close to my chest for a long time – something I wished I could have told you many years ago. I tell you now, my dear Watson, so that I can ask your forgiveness.’

I looked at my companion in surprise. ‘Surely, there can be nothing…’

He held up his hand to silence me. ‘Pass judgement when I have finished.’

‘Very well,’ I said, somewhat sobered by Holmes’ change in demeanour.

‘You will remember with great clarity the Moriarty case.’

‘Certainly.’

‘The way his thugs sought to kill me and how he visited me in my Baker Street chambers to warn me off? How I fled to Switzerland and he followed me? How we fought on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls? How he fell to his death in the roaring torrent and I escaped? You remember all that?’

‘As though it were yesterday.’

Holmes paused and swirled the brandy in his glass before taking a drink. ‘I was fooled, Watson. We all were. I did not actually meet Professor Moriarty for the first time until a month after the Reichenbach incident.’

‘What! But you told me that he came to see you in London.’

Holmes shrugged. ‘I believed that he did. I was a gullible fool. Someone came to see me. He told me that he was Moriarty and he bore a close approximation to the description that I had been given of the scheming professor – a description which also turned out to be false. In truth, the man who came up the seventeen steps of 221B was an impostor hired by Moriarty. Had I my wits about me at the time, I should have realised that. The great man was not going to place his own person in such danger by visiting his arch-enemy in his lair. He could not know what I would or could have done. Moriarty did not take those kinds of risks, so he sent along a consummate actor to play him. The message was genuine: it was the messenger who was a fake.’

‘I cannot believe that you were taken in by this charade.’

Holmes shook his head sadly. ‘But I was, my friend. The phrase is ‘hook, line and sinker’, I believe. But the fellow played his part well. Even now my flesh begins to creep when I consider that encounter. The trick worked beautifully, as Moriarty knew it would. He had a powerful intellect and created his own certainties out of mere possibilities. One more brutish attack from his agents and I came to realise that my best plan was to leave the country until Scotland Yard moved in on the Professor’s organisation.’

Holmes smiled. ‘And what a pleasant time we had of it – until we reached Rosenlaui.’

‘But you were aware of the shadow cast over our sojourn.’

‘Yes. I tried to protect you from it, but I knew that your sensibilities would alert you to the danger we were in. It was I who arranged for the boy to bring you the message about the dying Englishwoman at our hotel. I knew your stout heart could not refuse such a patriotic summons.’

‘You wanted me out of the way.’

‘I wanted you out of danger. I believed I was about to face my nemesis by the Reichenbach Falls. I feared the worst. But what I didn’t know – what, as a detective, I failed to deduce – was that we were being trailed by trained assassins in the pay of Moriarty, under the leadership of Colonel Sebastian Moran. And not, as I assumed, by Professor James Moriarty himself.’

I took a gulp of brandy. My mind and my senses were now clear and alert. All feelings of drowsiness and inebriation had been expelled by my friend’s narrative. Although these revelations were shocking and new, they only presented a fresh interpretation which was frighteningly plausible.

‘Where was Moriarty?’ I asked at length.

‘That comes later. Suffice it so say that he too had left London for the safety of foreign shores. You see, he was far more concerned about preserving his own life and salvaging what he could of his organisation than dealing with an irritant like me.’

‘More than an irritant, surely? It was your work which brought about the collapse of his empire.’

Holmes grinned broadly. ‘You still have a way with words and the use of a telling phrase, Watson. You are correct, of course, but Moriarty was far too intellectual to lower his sights to personal revenge. I must be removed, there was no uncertainty about that, but for a long time it was not a personal vendetta. That would be too…’

‘Emotional – and emotion clouds the intellect.’

‘Yes. You see we were twins – of a kind.’

I leaned forward on the table and gazed at my friend for some moments before I spoke. ‘Then who… who did you meet on the path above the Reichenbach Falls?’

For an instant, Holmes seemed to be overcome by a strange emotion. He closed his eyes and lowered his head. ‘In truth,’ he replied at length, ‘I do not know. He was yet another agent of Moriarty. Not the same man who visited me in Baker Street but of similar appearance. At the time, I really believed that this was the Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, but he was not. However, I soon discovered that this fine fellow was skilled in martial arts. Never have I fought so hard and so desperately as I did on that precipitous ledge overlooking that yawning chasm. Our struggle was exactly as I reported it to you in your consulting rooms on my return to London three years later.’

‘With your knowledge of baritsu you managed to overbalance him and he fell over…’

‘That terrible abyss,’ he mouthed my own words back at me.

I did not smile.

‘You see why I found it hard to tell the truth.’

‘But these are lies upon lies. You kept me in the dark for three years – three whole years – believing you to be dead and now you are telling me that you never met Moriarty at all and did not bring about his death.’