Epilogue [8 August 2010]
They could be anyone's shoes, sitting in the centre of the room, which would otherwise be empty. They haven't changed much in twenty two years – their laces are still pristine as if they were just laced up, when in fact the soles are worn in a way that suggests the owner ran a lot. Anyone who didn't know the owner of the shoes might say he was a short-distance marathon runner, or a sports player, but if you knew Carl Powers you would also know that he was a hunter. The shoes are worn with miles of running after quarry.
And if someone asked you to guess, you might say that the fact that his name was written inside them in faded black marker suggested loving parents who made sure his shoes wouldn't go missing. In this instance you would be forgiven, because even people who knew Carl didn't know about his parents. The fact that they have new laces might imply that their owner loved the shoes, and not that, in fact, they were the only pair of trainers he owned. Their perfect condition after all this time would understandably make you think that they were remakes of vintages, not that they had been kept in vacuum packed storage since the eighties because they were a trophy.
Yes, you could be forgiven for mistakenly assuming a lot of things about Carl Powers' trainers.
Jim takes a few steps backwards and looks at them admiringly – the pièce de résistance of his meticulously structured plan. They are so ordinary, so plain, that it's hard to believe they are the last remaining objects from that day at the swimming pool. Of course he has never done anything but admire them with the kind of reverence often reserved for religious iconography, or extreme beauty, but that is enough. He doesn't admire them, specifically, but rather what they represent. The shoes might as well be a watch, or a hat, or some other kind of unremarkable everyday object. But the fact that he owns them makes them all the more important, because he took them from the scene of the crime as a final victory against the boy who had ruined his life.
Ah, but is that so? If Jim thought hard enough about it, he would finally concede in saying that all of his success had been due to Carl Powers shaping him, making him realise his full potential and strive to reach it. Before coming to Brighton, he'd faded into the walls of classrooms in Dublin, destined to be entirely ordinary but for his unnerving sadism. His cleverness made him a pariah, not a profiteer. A black raven surrounded by brown sparrows, too big and too majestic for his mundane surroundings, but forced to live under their control out of lack of conviction about his own abilities.
Then the Idea had come, creeping to him in a library of all places. The simple and undeniable moment where he realised how easy it would be to kill Carl and, more importantly, get away with it. His life was the perfect storm – the culmination of an ignorant teacher and an oblivious parent and boys who deserved to die; a sequence of events leading to murder. How many times had he stood in the kitchen and looked at the cutlery drawer, acutely aware of how he could pick up a carving knife and stab Eva with it? How often had he been walking in the street and passed a stranger who, with one quick shove, Jim could rid the world of?
Everyone has that moment, or Jim has to give them enough credit and assume that they do, when they realise how everyone's lives are in their hands. Would it degrade him too much to guess at what dense thoughts preoccupy their dull little minds? Or could he switch of his burdening cleverness for a few moments, silence the constant deductions that he makes, and make himself blind to the things he spots, just so he could live in their world? Drugs had been a dead end – being slightly out of touch with the world hadn't been the answer. It had just put him out of reach of his normal abilities and been very disarming. Since his experimental drug taking at thirteen, he hadn't tried it again. But Jim wants so badly to see what they see, only if for a few minutes. Would it be a little like putting blinders on? He imagines it to be a little like going from HD to terrestrial TV, because from what he's gleaned from observing, ordinary people wonder through their world like sheep.
St. Augustine says there is nothing to be called evil if there is nothing good, and Jim's pursuit of a normal experience is a little like that. He doesn't want to stay stupid, but he wants to see what it's like just so he can compare. He figures that he'd view his superiority in a far more realistic light after seeing the other side of the spectrum.
Of course, he can't do that. For all his wishing, even Jim Moriarty can't make himself be something he's not. Sure he's built several false identities over the years, and has memberships in no less than three Great Lodges of Freemasonry across the globe. He carries five passports wherever he goes, and can fake an accent or a stutter at the drop of a hat. Where one niave person would try to take him to court, Jim has ten disposable people who would swear under oath they agree with his abili. And then seven more people beyond that who would shoot the idiot who dared say anything against him. He doesn't like to get his hands dirty anymore. But, for all this, Jim still remains himself. His false identities are masks that he occasionally dons when the situation calls for them, not that it often does, but underneath that he's still Jim, with his painfully raw experience of the world and his enviable intelligence and the accent they mocked him for at school.
He's begun to bore himself. How do people live with themselves until they die, Jim wonders. Though he would never admit it, he's jealous of their trivial little lives. They're all so unaware that it allows them to exist with their thoughts every day. How can he face that seemingly endless amount of time, knowing that he will never have a moment of silence? Always, always, always, there will be words buzzing in his head. He won't ever not be thinking, not for a single second. The idea that he won't be able to shut his own brain up for another sixty or so years is so awful that Jim doesn't contemplate it much. It's an undeniable fact of existence that his only constant companion will be himself, and Jim is certain he'll end up shooting himself in the head just to get some peace.
With the same passive expression that he always wears, unless an event demands that he pull some face or put on a charade, he pulls out a phone from his blazer pocket. His posture doesn't change from its lax careless stoop as he taps the keys with a kind of bland carelessness that is difficult to explain. One expects people to react to even something as normal as texting – they hold the phone tightly so that texting will be easier, or their eyes light up as they think what to write, or they stand a little straighter to make themselves more comfortable. Not Jim. The best way to describe his stance is lethargic. It's as if he's being held up by strings or propped up by something invisible. A gentle breeze would knock him over, and he wouldn't stop it, because it wouldn't bother him. He's putting no effort into standing up at all, nor is he showing any of the regular signs that someone shows when they are alive.
Once he's opened the camera on the phone, he raises his arm and takes a photograph of the shoes and the dank room they're in. It doesn't matter that what he's doing is uninteresting and familiar, because he could very well be watching someone be stabbed or mugged – as he has done – and his expression wouldn't change. Though this trope of Jim's lack of interest has been reiterated throughout the chronology of his life, it needs to be emphasised because it is so very important and alien. The concept of someone completely incapable of feeling or even mild interest is so abstract that it requires constant repetition to be understood.
But that's not what's so shocking. It's not that Jim takes little to no interest in anything he does, it's that he still continues to do what he does. He takes the photograph which he will soon send to the as-yet unheard-of Sherlock Holmes, along with three beeps (which is a subtle nod to the K.K.K. who, in 1891 used orange pips to count down the number of days a person had left to live). This will begin a game in which Jim hopes three people will die. Or not, if the consulting detective solves the case before the bombs go off. Jim will then pocket the phone and throw it in the Thames as the crosses the Millenium Bridge, so it can't be traced, before pulling out another and calling his people. They will be stationed undercover at various points throughout the city, watching Sherlock Holmes and his lapdog and reporting back to Jim of his progress.
It's all a game to him. A way to stave off the boredom and capture his interest for only a few days, eating away his time with the planning and setting up and then, finally, the playing out of his crimes. He wonders if Sherlock Holmes gets as bored as he does, and hopes that at last he's found his equal in the world, the one person who can understand what it's like to be haunted by yourself and hate being alive because it's so boring. He can't wait to meet him.
Jim stops at the threshold of 221C, turning back to look at the shoes. This is without a doubt the last time he will see them. He smiles emptily, and considers saying something. Then he shakes his head and pulls the door closed withput saying a word. What would be the point? He let go of Carl Powers a long time ago, and to say anything at all to acknowledge his old enemy would be cliché and stupid. They're just trainers after all, and he was just a boy who got in Jim's way.
The End