I walked round to the front of the pub and entered just as a few men had managed to push the body aside and force open the door. As the hue and cry for the police went up, I took a seat near the German and tugged ever so slightly on my goatee. He looked at me and gave me a small nod of acknowledgement, but not of betrayal.
“What’ll it be, sir?” asked the barmaid.
“Nothin’,” I replied, my Irish-American accent plain. “I’ve changed me mind.” I nodded in the direction of the German: “Good evening to you, fine sir,” and took my leave.
For a short while, the local constabulary were very much mystified, especially when they discovered the old clothes and the American revolver, but they were used to drunken Irishmen murdering each other, and quickly lost interest in the case, and so I made my way across the Irish Sea and on to London without further incident. The next day, I was back on the South Downs, among my bees, making some observations upon the segregation of the queen.
Sussex, July 1914
It did not surprise me when Martha announced Mr. Mycroft Holmes. By rights, I ought not to have received him. That such a conniving mind could comfortably reside within such a portly and indolent exterior… I realized that, not for the first time, I had underestimated my own brother.
It had been, I had to admit, sheer genius on his part to insinuate me into the Irish-American underworld of Birdy Edwards’s own hometown, and send me to the one person who could have successfully infiltrated me into the mob. But how did he know she would? I took the letter, stained with her blood, from my billfold and, smoothing it out, laid it flat upon my study table. “Show Mr. Holmes in,” I said.
“Sherlock!” he exclaimed, as if he had half-expected never to see me again. He extended his hand, but I let it dangle, as we said in Chicago.
“I brought this back to you,” I said, gesturing toward the letter. “Full circle.”
For a moment, my brother was something he almost never was: nonplussed. The sight of the blood-her blood-on the letter, I believe, unnerved him. But he quickly regained his composure.
“We had had our eye on the girl for some time,” he began. Was there a hint of apology in his manner? “Ever since the tragedy of Birlstone, in fact. After the death of her father, we sent her small anonymous remittances and made sure our agents looked in on her from time to time. In fact, it was we who suggested the alias, McParland, to protect her from the Moriarty gang’s American henchmen. A most conflicted, troubled young woman. A tragedy.”
I said nothing. My silence was remonstrance enough.
“Damn it, Sherlock, what could I do? If I had told you what His Majesty’s Government was about, you would have refused outright, Asquith or no Asquith; after all, you’d already turned Grey down. And I knew that your love of a mystery would keep you in the Great Game, as it were. And you have done brilliantly. I am very proud of you.”
At last, I found my tongue, and it was all I could to tame it. “All of this-for what? For me to ‘keep tabs’ on a few Fenians? And at what cost?” I felt myself growing hot under the collar. “If His Majesty’s government cannot watch a few sad-sack revolutionaries in Dublin, then what hope is there for it?”
Mycroft looked me up and down, as if I were still his younger brother, playing with tin soldiers and hobbyhorses in our bedroom so many years ago. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said at last.
At this point I must confess that I lost my temper. “What is there to understand?” I cried, clutching at the letter. “Your own words condemn you!”
His eyes shuttled back and forth inside his head, and not for the first time was I reminded of the very strong affinity, intellectually speaking, between Mycroft Holmes and the late Professor Moriarty. Both of whom now had the blood of the McParland family on their hands. I looked down at the letter, her red bloodstains fading, the paper already taking on the appearance of parchment, receding into history along with what was left of my heart.
“We-I-trusted her to do the right thing. And so, it appears, she did. Read it aloud, please.”
My hands were shaking as I looked at the epistle. “‘My dear Miss Edwards: The gentleman who bears this letter is the man who both saved your father from the gibbet and yet condemned him to death. He is in need of a redemption that only you can provide. Do with him as you will.’”
There was nothing further to read, but the letter’s contents did not end there. At the bottom, instead of a signature, there was simply a mark: a triangle within a circle. Her blood had swamped this bit, rendering it a dark brown stain, like the brand I had seen on Birdy Edwards, and the corpse at Birlstone. Like the brand I now bore on my back. The Trinity and Eternity. The solution to the final problem.
I let the missive flutter to the ground. At last, I understood.
“This has nothing to do with the Fenians, Sherlock. Or the Irish. It was always about the Germans, who mean to have war, and war they shall get. They would never have trusted an English turncoat, especially not one of recent vintage. Furthermore, although you were retired, we needed you out of the country, that the memory of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and the South Downs might fade. But an Irish-American named James McKenna… ”
“Is dead,” I said. “And dead he shall stay.” My promise to Maddie overrode everything, even my loyalty to the Crown, even my blood ties to my brother. Sherlock Holmes’s undying loyalty was and always would be to England, but Jim McKenna would never betray her. There was another sort of loyalty, that which Maddie had taught me, and if that were the higher, then so be it.
“Very well, then. May he rest in peace. But there is now a nobleman of the Hun persuasion in fact, who very much desires to meet with you. In fact… coincidentally… he is living not far from here. I think you take my meaning.”
I smiled, reflecting the memory of her last smile, a memory that would never leave me. Where Mycroft was concerned, there was never a coincidence; in the chess game of life, he was always two moves ahead. “What is this Junker’s name?”
Mycroft exhaled in relief. “Von Bork. Funnily enough, a colleague of your friend, von Herling, whom you encountered in Skibbereen. You shall enter his service on the morrow.”
So Maddie had not died in vain. For King and Country, and for the United States of America, she would always live. “Agreed,” I said, my nostrils flaring. Truth to tell, I was looking forward to a second encounter with the sneering Prussian and his agent in my country.
Business settled, he rose to leave. “One last question,” Mycroft said, on his way out the door. “If James McKenna is dead, by what name shall you call yourself?”
“Altamont,” I replied.
MORIARTY, MORAN, AND MORE: ANTI-HIBERNIAN SENTIMENT IN THE CANON by Michael Walsh
Michael Walsh, the former music critic of Time magazine, is the author of the novels Exchange Alley, As Time Goes By (the prequel/ sequel to the movie Casablanca), and And All the Saints, a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards for fiction. His latest novel, Hostile Intent, was published in September 2009 by Kensington Books. Under the name “Michéal Breathnach,” he contributed “The Coole Park Problem” to Ghosts in Baker Street. For good measure, he co-wrote with Gail Parent the 2002 hit Disney Channel movie Cadet Kelly.
Few figures embody both a place and an era like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fewer still conceal such a welter of internal contradictions beneath such a confident-but deeply misleading-exterior.