Watson is, perhaps, within his rights to laugh. He knows, after all, what a great amount of bad news I receive in correspondence; the writer of this note, in his eyes, could no doubt do with more specificity. He may assume that, for he does not recognize the script: it is the hand of Fred Porlock. Whatever else that may mean, it is clear at once that I have gravely erred.
What, then, can be the error? Porlock has three times served me with as much faith as one might expect of such a man. He led me not astray, but direct to the prize.
Perhaps the suspicion he feared has claimed him – perhaps this is some forgery, meant to announce that my inquiries into the network of James Moriarty have become known. Whatever else, it is certainly clear that they are known. Yet the antecedent I propose is dubious: first, that one such as Moriarty would have allowed a span of sixty days between suspecting and dispatching a traitor in his rank; second, that one so cautious as Porlock would keep any sign that he had been corresponding with me; and to combine the two together makes a ludicrous hash.
Has Porlock himself been recast by fear? I believe his is a temper inclined rather to break in the fire, but there is always room for doubt. But what, then, would be the purpose of this letter? For if he were helping his master to move against me, silence would be better than words, and if he hoped merely to drive me from the trail for fright, he would therefore lack a rudimentary understanding of my pursuit. These possibilities are more hopeless yet.
Very well: let us return to the supposition that the hand is forged, by Moriarty or some close confederate and addressed to the man who has received his intelligence – for this note is too subtle to gauge by ordin. Porlock, then, must have met the death he dreaded – but I find I operate under an assumption. I assume that his last correspondence was genuine.
Can that be a safe assumption to harbor? No, indeed. This note has been written to convey some meaning: some meaning that would be known to me from a previous correspondence. There are few enough matters it may refer to. There is Birlstone, there is Uffington, and there is the Griddle Barge. Unless he has written since the Birlstone affair, which seems unlikely in the extreme, particularly since I have not been at further liberty to bribe him, then that is the last letter he sent.
Would not such a dramatic retirement be fit to concur with – to follow – his demise?
How can I not have previously considered this? Would any man, so fearful of being caught out in conspiracy that his hands shook with it, send a letter to explain himself to his co-conspirator in the very next post after Moriarty stands with raptor's eye at his very desk? Would his silence not be as eloquent?
Would that not be blunder enough for a year? But it does not cover the scope. I had noted, prior to Uffington, Porlock's carelessness in matters of cryptography. These errors were such as one with experience in decryption would discern. But if the last cipher were meant to conceal its meaning from his master – that is the advantage of a cipher over plain speaking, or silence – it would fail at once. Douglas and Birlstone:any man concerned with the crime would know the words for what they signified, as indeed Inspector MacDonald did. Am I some hermit on a mountain, seated so far above the common throng that I cannot discern a common stumble from a stumble that no man alive might make?
Watson is busying himself with the paper, no doubt with only a scant eye to the stories, waiting in his politic way for me to exit the brown study and speak my thoughts. It was not six months ago that I asked him to guard me against my overconfidence. Not that I can fault him for his failure. I am to him a steady producer of marvels, and however he quibbles points, at bottom he trusts me, because it is the generally reliable way. It takes a like mind to tell when another mind is making an uncharacteristic stumble.
Edwards, perhaps, might have broached the point.
I must consider all possibilities. What loose ends dangle from Uffington, and Griddle Barge, and Birlstone, that might be judged to discomfit me? (For there is no other mood that Moriarty might have meant to inspire by this.)
I can think of one only.
It is high time I viewed the Birlstone affair – not merely the initial formulation, but the whole unfolding of it – from the set of facts available to Moriarty.
He has recently accrued a new set of tools: these Scowrers. Rough tools, easily replaced, but they will serve any number of turns. To complete their initial aim he dispatches Baldwin, that long red crowbar of them. Once that work is done – the sole work in which the brute was personally vested – Baldwin disappears without a trace. That is treachery, and must be answered. But so twisted about is the evidence that it requires a careful study, and the site of the crime has produced sufficient excitement that no one can breathe for lawmen. His capacity to start from the head of the trail is obviously limited.
And so he turns, through a channel secretly purged, to co-opt a discerning eye that will pass muster: mine.
Can he have arranged the impersonation of Porlock in time for the morning post? That is the same as asking if there is a wire from Tunbridge Wells to London. Can he have expected me to solve the cipher? How far a misjudgment would that have been?
I will grant, I would have gone to Birlstone, whatever he had done. MacDonald saw to that. But had MacDonald not come, and Porlock's letter crossed my desk, I would have gone still.
By the shipping schedules, Edwards ought to have arrived in Cape Town the day before yesterday. I cannot say how the blow may have fallen, or whether on sea or on land: for one does not send wires from the sea. I cannot say how the murder may have been devised, but I can say without doubt that one month's court martial is ample time to devise it. That was my contribution.
That he thought to use me merely as the arm of his internal enforcement, not as a tool for the murder itself, is cold comfort when I think on Edwards and his notes.
As a policy I keep sentiment at arm's length. It enfeebles the mind, and if my state of mind last January is any representative, further damage may render me utterly useless. But keep it where you please: sentiment is there. It is infuriatingly particular, never concerned with Man, always concerned with individual men, perfectly unreasoning.
There is, perhaps, some good in it. Such feeling is, after all, the general operation of the human race. A man employed in the business of justice, however finely honed his specialty, cannot afford to forget his function, which is to serve that operation to the best good. But he must, all the same, keep it at arm's length.
This taunt of Moriarty's would indicate he thinks himself the sole summoner. MacDonald, in his eyes, never entered into it. Very well: neither White Mason nor MacDonald are sources for his information, or were not last January. He has no reason to suspect a second summons where one would do.
He might not have cause even to imagine a second summons. He and I have fundamentally different vantage points. Mine is the eye that discerns what has happened; his, the hand that is the cause of events. Where his machinations bring things about, and there is no interference, what need is there for further inquiry?
Neither will he be the only one to have a wire from Cape Town. Of that I am sure.
What, finally, is the purpose of this epistle? It is to show me my shame and complicity, and that, it has done. It is to induce my surrender, and that, it will never do as I breathe. But it has also shown me Alec MacDonald, who came to me honestly for the same counsel Moriarty asked in deceit, and got more counsel than he bargained for. It has shown me that my enemy does not account for everything.
He has put me to shame. It would be wise to act accordingly. To duck my head, turn away, and operate more subtly, for a span, staying beneath the surface until at last I rise up beneath his very foundations.
I only wish a more precise formulation would come to me.