I'm sorry, it is crime all over again people.
IV. BLACK FEBRUARY
"By the middle of February I was seriously inconvenienced by you."
By the time they knew someone was reading their messages it was the 5th of February and Moriarty didn't remember what had happened the 23rd of January; he made an effort, traced back the days in Monday, Tuesday, Wednes… mode, until he remembered Connelly. Who was Connelly?, why (if he was) was he setting him a trap?, what was his link with Costa?, or the police perhaps. They had to tiptoe around him; any obvious tentative to silence him, or know who was behind would only be providing more evidence to incriminate Moriarty. Joshua Burns had the honor to receive instructions directly from the head because Moran was gone: he had to figure out all about Connelly.
Now, how was Moriarty supposed to communicate effectively with Moran?, letters were slow, there was no chance of proving which telegram was genuine from one that this impostor could send, sending codes by telegram was risky because it screamed "crime" to all telegraph operators, and it wasn't even guaranteed that whomever had cracked their most common code wouldn't crack a more difficult one; Moriarty had to send one last instruction:
"Negotiate, appease, do what you think is right".
Unfortunately, for Moran to cede anything at all wasn't part of negotiating; he was hot-tempered and rancorous, and "do what you think is right" for him could easily mean igniting a war; besides, Holmes sent all the information he had to the authorities in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, with the names Alfie Gray, Mathéo Oliver, Mario Rossi, Michele Costa and Angelo Marino there; so Moriarty wasn't losing henchmen only to the guns of the rival gang in the unofficial war of the criminal empires, but they were also being arrested, or in suspicion of being persecuted running away and out of the scope, his whole operation in "the continent" disintegrating already by the middle of February.
'What was Moriarty to do without Moran?', Holmes asked himself; he followed Moriarty in a disguise but Moriarty wasn't so unsuspecting anymore; he took turns, lost him sometimes, had several messengers and he changed from post office, used different names to get in touch with Joshua Burns, with him by letter, which he wrote right in the post office, sealed it there, and so Holmes missed that.
The notification about a second letter arrived to him, and Holmes, not having prevented this one, not even being sure of the value of its contents, sent only an irregular to pick it from his pocket while he walked by the street before he burnt it once in his house. He saw the scene from behind the corner, it happened around the middle of February: His irregular picked it professionally and Moriarty turned on his heel, trapping his wrist (Holmes's eyes widened). – "Who are you? !" He screamed at the boy, looming dangerously over him. – "Who sent you? !" Nothing occurred to Holmes but screaming: - "Help! Police!", and the three of them spread running in different directions before Moriarty realized there hadn't been any police around.
Either way, Holmes hadn't gotten the letter and Moriarty now knew himself permanently observed. He knew his business and he could only conclude Sherlock Holmes had finally found him. He respected him, out of respect, and as a daring too, he would go after him unless there came a time when Holmes finally had the opportunity to get conclusive proofs against him, which he doubted.
The letter was Joshua Burns reporting there was nothing to Connelly.
V. THE ATTACK OF THE GUM
"At the end of March I was absolutely hampered in my plans."
Moran came back in the middle of March, feverish, having taken a bullet in his shin and with the scar of a knife wound where his liver would be; he wasn't likely to take his place as an intermediary anytime soon. Cautiously cut off as he was, Moriarty didn't know of his return until next day, after Joshua Burns had gone to see Moran. Now Holmes was following Burns and all the hits in London being predicted even if he didn't have proof of Moriarty ordering them; by the end of March the gang stopped making all minor moves because Joshua Burns was arrested.
The gang was in temporary disarray but they had laws and by the end of the first week of April it reassembled with new leaders. Who were the new leaders wasn't much of a mystery to Holmes; those two weeks of following Burns had also meant he had gotten to study the gang well, all members until then eliminated he yet knew who followed in rank.
A crime they were planning was much too sophisticated, the hand of Moriarty clear in it because it was along the lines of carefully concealed fraud: Documents with ciphers about the received interests from big and small loans were to arrive on Monday 27th of April to the bank, all together in a bunch; they were going to falsify the documents with distorted numbers and terms and steal the exceeding amount. The variability of the rate, the different individual conditions offered and the fact that they had no tight control over small loans (even when the joint amount was of course greater than that of some big loans), would make it easy for the alterations to remain unnoticed for a long time if not for forever.
For a while Holmes didn't know Moriarty was planning it, because it had proved futile and when effective horribly dangerous following him; but in the planning of one such crime was where he committed the actual "trip", related with the "flaw" about not being able to keep isolated. Moriarty had been informed about the future documents before his infiltrated in the banking system had fallen down with everyone else in March. It was a genius idea; Moriarty was one of the very few people who could have known the future nature of those documents, the problem was that he still needed to recollect some of the data, and when two of his toughs didn't bring him everything that he needed, he lost his furious head and so one night he sneaked himself into the bank.
Holmes didn't know what he was stopping when he knew some of their henchmen were supposed to replace some papers for others posing as post office employees in Ireland and he was there to recover the originals; that was on the 19TH of April and Moriarty was blanching with all kinds of negative emotions when he heard the ill news. Holmes was back in London the 22nd and immediately went to the bank where Moriarty's infiltrated used to be, looking for a trace and to his very pleasant and great surprise finding it: a very small piece of Moriarty's personal paper from the college stuck to the floor with a bit of gum; he had Clarkie come to testify about his finding before unsticking it to keep it as evidence. That same day he sneaked into Moriarty's - at the moment empty - residence with another officer, so it could be testified that a shoe was found there with a piece of equal type of paper stuck to its sole with the same kind of gum… they took the shoe as evidence too.
Moriarty arrived home and went to bed, then woke up and realized his shoe was gone and all Holmes had done unveiled in a second before his eyes: He realized with dismay that it was then impossible stopping the papers (the real evidence of their crime now) from arriving the 27th to the bank unless he wanted to implicate himself in other crimes that would anyway be discovered, and the only way to solve his problems was: 'I'll have to do away with Holmes.'
And that is why Moriarty showed in Holmes' rooms, taking him by surprise the 23th of April of 1891.
For those who care Watson will be here in our next chapter; for those of you who were liking all about crime, I'm sorry, Watson will be here in our next chapter.
