"Then why do you wear the dummy?"
"It gives me stature," Tolliver explained. " 'Ow would you like to go about being barely four feet high all the time?"
"Bah!" Holmes said.
"Exactly the way I feels about it," the Mummer agreed.
Three hours later, Holmes, having found nothing of official interest, gathered his minions about him in the front hall and prepared to leave.
"I hope you are quite satisfied," Mrs. H said, her voice frigid.
"Not entirely," Holmes told her. "But then, we are not yet done with the investigation."
"What now?" Barnett asked. "Are you going to tear the house down brick by brick?"
"Not at all," Holmes said. "We are done with this house. But I have a second warrant, which I am now going to execute. I was, as you see, prepared for this!"
"What are you talking about?" Barnett asked. "What second warrant?"
Holmes pulled another piece of official-looking paper from inside his jacket and flourished it. "To search the premises and outbuildings of Moriarty's holdings on Crimpton Moor!" he exclaimed, a note of triumph in his voice. "Didn't think I knew about that, did you?"
"In truth," Barnett said, "the question had not occurred to me."
"There is a special train awaiting us at Paddington to take us to Crimpton," Holmes said. "We should be there at dusk. And if we have to spend the whole night and all of tomorrow searching, why then we shall do so." He turned and stalked out the door, followed closely by the Baker Street regulars.
Barnett turned to Mrs. H as the door closed behind the last burly man. "The professor is not going to be pleased," he said.
TEN — DRAWING THE COVER
On approaching a cover, one whip should go on in advance and station himself on the lee side
of
it, where he may often see a fox steal away as soon as the hounds are thrown in.
— E. D. Brickwood
Sherlock Holmes studied the map of Devon which lay open across his knees as the special police train sped west. In the orange-yellow beam of a bull's-eye lantern borrowed from one of the constables to counter the approaching dusk, he peered through his four-inch glass at the web of black lines and crosshatches on the stiff paper. Inspector Lestrade, who had joined Holmes at Paddington, contented himself with sitting silently in the opposite corner of the carriage.
"Bah!" Holmes said finally, casting the map aside. "This is useless."
Inspector Lestrade stirred himself and eyed Holmes. "Useless?" he asked. "I could have told you that before you opened the map. What do we need a map for? We know where we're going."
"As you say," Holmes said. "But you have your ways and I have mine. I would give five pounds right now for a large-scale ordnance map of the area."
Lestrade viewed Holmes tolerantly. "Professor Moriarty's holdings are at Crimpton-on-the-Moor," he explained patiently, as one would to a bright eight-year-old. "For which we detrain at Mossback Station. The only possible confusion is with Grimpon, a hamlet on the other side of the moor, which one gets access to through Coryton Station. The house is called Sigerson Manor locally, apparently after the family which build the house and occupied it for some two hundred years. The last Sigerson passed on some fifteen years ago, and the property stood deserted until Professor Moriarty took it over."
He smiled a smile of quiet satisfaction, and added, "We research these things at the Yard."
"I know all that," Holmes said.
"You know?" Lestrade leaned forward and tapped Holmes on the knee. "Your obsession with Professor Moriarty is quite impressive," he said. "You must spend all your spare time and money following him around. I tell you, Mr. Holmes, I only hope you're right this time. You have made us look foolish before, acting on your accusations."
"I have known of Sigerson Manor all my life," Holmes told Lestrade. "The Sigersons were distant relations of mine. I knew of Moriarty's purchase of the property when it happened five years ago. And as for what you call my 'obsession' with Moriarty" — he paused to blow out the lantern—"the fact that that man is not breaking stone at Dartmoor right now instead of living in luxury in a town-house in Russell Square and a country estate at Crimpton-on-the-Moor is testimony to his genius, not his honesty. Moriarty is everything foul, Lestrade; inside that vulturelike head is the mind of a fiend incarnate. And I am his nemesis."
"That's all very well, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade said. "But you can't prove a word of it. We found someone murdered in an empty house, and you muttered, 'Moriarty!' But it wasn't. A girl was kidnapped, and you would have had us clap the professor in irons. But it was some Russian did it, not the professor at all. Now, the professor may be everything you say he is and more, but I, for one, am getting extremely tired of apologizing to him. If you can't get him convicted of a crime, Mr. Holmes, if you can't even get him held on suspicion, then don't it make good sense to just leave him be?"
Holmes folded up the map and moved over to the window seat, where he stared out at the bleak Devonshire countryside. "I cannot," he said. "As I am his nemesis, so he is my passion, the focus of my energies. Without Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes is merely a detective." He raised his right hand and balled it into a fist. "But mark this: without Sherlock Holmes to dog his steps, to intercept his secret communications, to apprehend his henchmen, to deduce his intentions and thus to foil his plans, Professor James Moriarty would by now control the largest criminal empire the world has ever seen. He would make the infamous Jonathan Wild look like a bumbling amateur!"
"So you say, Mr. Holmes. So you have been saying for the past seven years. And yet the fact is that if you were to say the same aloud in any public place, Professor Moriarty would have an action of slander against you. And if your friend Dr. Watson were to write one word defamatory of Professor Moriarty in any of the accounts of your cases that he has been writing for the magazines, he could be held for libel."
"No fear of that, Lestrade," Holmes said. "I have requested the good doctor not to so much as mention Moriarty in any of his little cautionary tales during my lifetime, unless it is to record his immediate sojourn, at her majesty's pleasure, in some penal institution."
"Well, let us hope that this is the time," Lestrade said. "When you were acting on your own, so to speak, as an unofficial detective, running about dogging the professor's footprints was your affair. But now you are acting with official sanction, and that brings Scotland Yard into it. The Home Secretary is not going to be pleased if a distinguished scientist brings an action against the Yard for false arrest or harassment."
"It was the Home Secretary who brought me into the case," Holmes reminded Lestrade. "He cannot hold the Yard culpable for my actions."
"Home Secretaries have very selective memories," Lestrade said. "If you succeed in apprehending the killer, he will be very pleased with himself for having appointed you. And the press and the House will hear, in detail, how clever he was. If you fail, he will certainly vocally reprimand the commissioners for their laxness in this important matter."
"A policeman's lot," Holmes quoted, "is not an 'appy one."
"That is so, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade agreed. "And it ain't the felons which make it so, but the sanctimonious bloody politicians."
"Very insightful, Inspector," Holmes said.
"Thank you, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade replied. "You learn a few things in twelve years on the force."
The sun was still above the horizon when the special pulled into Mossback Station. The local constable, who had been alerted by telegraph, had managed to assemble three open wagons to transport Holmes, Lestrade, and the fifteen plainclothes constables from the Yard. The wagons, ancient vehicles that had certainly conformed to some standard pattern of design at one time, had, over decades of hard use and random repair, taken on unique characters. They sat on the road outside the station like a trio of rustic old drunks, clearly willing to do whatever was required of them, but doubtful as to whether they could negotiate the first bump under any sort of load.