The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

The Malady of the Mind Doctor Howard Halstead

My Dear Dr Watson,

I write to you in a state of perplexity – my days remaining on this earth will be few if this confounded confusion cannot be mastered. You see, dear fellow, I am accused of a hateful, abominable crime, one that suspends belief in the very virtue of mankind.

I have been boxed into this dark predicament. Although I have pleaded my innocence, my cries have not been heard amongst the clamour of the words “evidence” and “fact”. Justice, usually of fair complexion and even countenance, has resolutely turned her back on me.

I can barely dare to write these words, but I must steel myself to face the truth of them: I now reside in a prison cell and face the gallows, having been found guilty of murder.

I have met you only once, sir, during the aftermath of the Royal Society’s Special Lecture this June past. Although I am but a young man, you showed interest in my plans to set up a practice specializing in the treatment of nervous and brain disorders. I now know you by reputation to be a man willing to pursue truth even in the darkest corner. I can think of nothing else but to lean upon the kindness and good sense of yourself, and on the intelligence and curiosity of your dear friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes.

All I can offer you in terms of evidence are the pages of my sporadic diary, which reveal the episode as it unfolded. Along with this letter, the diary has been entrusted to Mr Richard Kennington for conveyance directly to your hands. I can trust no other man to perform this duty.

Read the pages carefully, sir, for I feel that the truth of my misadventure can be found amongst the scribbled lines, but I implore you to read them quickly. The apparatus of my death is already prepared.

What an evening this has been – though I am of scientific mind, it is an evening that proves beyond all doubt that the earth revolves with divine purpose.

It began as so many others have done since I returned from France: in an impoverishment not just of the pocket, but of the soul. I was sitting in this damnable, airless boarding room in Woolwich, counting coins enough for the train to town so that I could attend the Royal Society lecture, but not enough additionally to treat myself to a meal.

I decided against the lecture. What could Ernst Hechter say on the subject of neurology that I had not already learned from the lips of Jean-Martin Charcot, the most enlightened neurologist in Europe? What could Hechter divest on the topic of the ailing mind that I had not dissected, reconstituted and dissected again with my good friend Sigmund as we spent those months under Charcot’s tutelage? And yet, even as my stomach made its displeasure known through a rumble, I carried those coins with me not to the Swan Inn for one of Mrs Webster’s infamous pies, but to the railway station.

The lecture proved to be as dull as I had feared. Hechter may understand something of the malady of the mind, and he may realise that mental trauma can have a physical incarnation, but it was clear from his opening remarks that he has no understanding that such trauma may be eased by a cure of the mind, and not of the body.

As Hechter bored on in his heavily accented English, I divined that the only malady that this man was ever likely to cure was insomnia. I apologized to my stomach for my error of judgement, regretted the absence of the dubious pie, and let my mind wander. How I remember parting with Sigmund in Paris and our last words: a mutual vow to study and practise psychopathology. Although neither of us was yet to reach thirty, we agreed to stride forth separately and change all perception of the illnesses of the mind and their cure.

Even as I stood upon the railway concourse, shaking Sigmund’s hand, I had to push away the fear that I would never be in a financial position to set up a private practice. Those months with Charcot in Paris had all but exhausted the last of my longdeceased father’s bequest.

On returning to London, I threw myself upon the mercy of my guardian, Lord Kennington. I had promised never to return to his house or see his daughter again so I waited outside his club, White’s, and, as he was a man of regular habits, his carriage turned up at the expected hour. It had been more than a year since my aberration, but my guardian’s hatred for me remained as intense as ever. He had not forgiven me. He was clearly ill and weak, but his eyes were full of fierce hatred and he refused to speak one word to me. It was the last time I would ever see him. He would be dead within the week.

As Hechter droned on to his stupefied audience, I admit that I was overwhelmed by despair. A miserable room in Woolwich. A rumbling stomach. No prospect of setting up my practice. No possibility of redemption with the departed Lord Kennington. And no Eleanor. No, no chance of Eleanor.

I admit that it was underhand of me, but after the lecture, I followed some of the crowd into the reception held in Dr Hechter’s honour, even though the price of my ticket only covered admission to the lecture. I desperately hoped there would be some form of victuals, but there was only a rather aggressive red wine that turned my stomach to acid and soon made me light-headed.

A kind gentleman named Dr John Watson fell into conversation with me. Although a retired army man, he seemed to be a keen student of the mind and, to my surprise, was a little familiar with Brentano’s work and even von Hartmann’s The Psychology of the Unconscious. He claimed, though, that he had come across no greater practitioner of a form of psychological deduction than the esteemed detective, Sherlock Holmes.

I was so relieved to find a fellow traveller, and somewhat heady from the wine, that I unleashed some of my tale of woe upon the good doctor. He knew of Lord Kennington’s great wealth and had heard of his art collection, so he commiserated with me on being cut adrift by such a gentleman. I did not elucidate on the reasons for my fall from grace. He applauded my wish to begin my own private practice specializing in resolving illnesses, not least insomnia, that are a physical incarnation of a mental perturbation.

I think the wine may have helped me become surprisingly fluent on the subject. I noticed that nearby, in a poorly lit corner of the room, a gentleman with a large, drooping moustache and a tall, older fellow appeared to be listening intently. This made me giddier still as I perceived from the interest of this sample of the esteemed company that we were on the cusp of a new era of medicine and that I could become a torch bearer for the new age of reason. Foolish and arrogant, I know, but I felt so buoyant in that moment.

An hour later, I made to leave the Royal Society’s premises – having suddenly become aware that I had been battering poor Dr Watson’s ears for too long and that I was teetering on the precipice of being shamefully inebriated. Immediately as I stepped outside, I was approached by the attentive man with the drooping moustache. For the life of me I could not make out his name even after I asked him to repeat it. He was somewhat unusual in his bearing, and somewhat startling in his proposition.

The fellow had heard me tell Dr Watson of my desire to set up a practice and of my shameful pecuniary problems. He said he knew of a suitable property available for a limited time at a vastly reduced rent. Thus it was that at ten-thirty this evening, I was standing alone at the gateway to a goods yard in Mayfair, awaiting a property agent.

The agent turned out to be a cheeky young chap in a tightfitting suit with the peculiar adornment of a pale grey bowler hat that appeared to be too small for his head. It was strange business to conduct at that time of night, but the young man seemed eager to conclude the matter. The property itself was hardly salubrious – the office and occasional bedroom of the owner of a set of now defunct warehouses situated in the yard – but it had potential. I ignored all reservations I had about the agent’s attire and his chirpy manner, and, within two minutes, I found myself shaking his hand, thereby agreeing three months’ rental for what he assured me was less than a third of the market rate.

As the agent whistled down the street towards Berkeley Square, I remained standing in the yard, open-mouthed and giddy at the twist of fortune.

I now had premises comprising a furnished office and a bedroom. I had the means with which to begin my life’s work and fulfil my destiny. And I was less than fifty yards away from my former home, namely Kennington House, the current abode of Lady Eleanor Kennington.

Monday: The day that marks the beginning of the rest of my life.

Even though I say it myself, after all my efforts, the main room is clean and presentable. If it was not situated amongst the abandoned warehouse buildings, the new premises of Dr Trevelyan Blake might be something to behold. My advertisement, the sole one that I can presently afford, appeared in the evening newspaper on Friday:

I hope the troubled ladies of Mayfair will take advantage of the situational convenience. And I pray that Eleanor, dear sweet Eleanor, saw the advertisement and flushed with pride that I was making my own way.

I sat down at the desk at precisely nine of the clock and waited. The dark cloud that had threatened my days since my return from France had lifted, Woolwich was no more, and I would never have to run the gauntlet of eating one of Mrs Webster’s gristle pies again. I was too excited to sit still. I found myself twiddling the pocket watch that my father had bequeathed me. Then I stood up and looked through the grime of the window. People passed along Bruton Street, but none of them bore the appearance of the young ladies whom I thought were most likely to become my patients. Not one person even threatened to turn into the yard to make an appointment with the new doctor.

I sat down and fell to despair once more. I was a fool to think that even one soul in London would seek reparation in this chamber. I resigned myself to sitting in the room, utterly alone and festering amongst my dwindling hopes, for each day of the three months of my tenure. Yet I could not help but jump to my feet and look through the window again, like a restaurateur standing desperately at the doorway to his failing concern.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. I jolted with surprise. I had seen no one turn into the yard. Perhaps my subconscious had conjured the noise. I, more than anyone, know what tricks it can play. But no – there was the knock again, impatient and insistent.

I collected myself, raising myself to my full height in the hope that I would impress the troubled young woman of my overactive imagination with the authority of my bearing. I opened the door and found myself looking up into the steady, deep-set eyes of my very first patient.

“Professor Moriarty.”

I wondered momentarily if I had met the man before. His tall, slim stature, his thin face and those sunken eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but his name was not, and surely I would have remembered his voice. He had a very precise, solemn but forceful manner of speech. He strode past me into the room and set out his terms before I even had the chance to speak.

“I will meet you here at precisely this time for one hour, once a week, but you must assure me of absolute confidentiality, you hear?”

I nodded. He was more fearsome than any of the esteemed professors I had encountered in my education.

He sat down on the armchair and I took my position behind the desk in an attempt to assert some level of authority. “What ails you, Professor?”

He looked at me steadily, his eyes piercing me. I felt like the little orphan boy I once was, mother dead in childbirth and father taken when I was ten, standing alone and knock-kneed in terror before the cruel vastness of the world. That was until Lord Kennington, God rest his soul, swept me up and fulfilled a promise to care for his close friend’s son. He had known enough hardship of his own – his own wife dead from a fever shortly after Eleanor’s birth. Eleanor was his only child, his favoured jewel, but he treated me as he would a son.

Professor Moriarty’s eyes seemed to soften slightly and he looked away, focusing on the bare wall. “I cannot sleep.”

“At all?”

“Not beyond two hours.”

I started to note the details of the case upon the foolscap. “For how long has the situation been endured?”

“Several years.”

I perceived the weariness behind those alert eyes. “And you have taken draughts?”

“Ha!” he exclaimed. “Do I look like a fool? Sleeping draughts are nothing but a veil that obfuscates the clarity of the mind. They dull the body to alleviate the symptom, but the cause is not of the body’s making. The cause lies in the dark folds of the mind. Do you agree with me, Doctor?”

“Yes, entirely.”

“Good. Then let us begin.” He clasped his hands together, leaned forward and pierced me with his stare once more. “Let us enter the darkness.”

A slight smile played upon his thin lips.

I stood outside Eleanor’s house again tonight, just to see if I could glimpse her through a window. Fortune did not favour me, but my imagination is so vivid that I could conjure her visage – every tiny feature from her elegant nose to the tiny mole that sits on her cheek immediately beneath her pupil, the shape of her ears, the curve of her eyelashes …

When did love come upon me so? For years I thought of her as I would a little sister. We shared stories and secrets, and giggled at the peculiarities of her father. I went out into the world to study at Oxford and Edinburgh, but I never found her ilk. I remember with unsullied clarity the day I returned home, having finished my training at the hospital in Edinburgh just in time to celebrate Eleanor’s twenty-first birthday. Lord Kennington was so pleased with my progress that he shook my hand and agreed to fund my prospective studies with Charcot so that I would not have to draw upon the last of my father’s money.

Amongst the commotion of the birthday celebrations, I found a moment to walk alone with Eleanor along the Upper Gallery of Kennington House. We stood in front of the painting of the windmill, just as we had stood together so many times whilst growing up. It is not as large, grand or famous as so many of Lord Kennington’s paintings – the van Eyck, the Memling, the Bosch or even the Greuze. It is a small, eighteenth-century work by an unknown Dutch artist, but the image of a farmhand and a maid standing with joyful expressions beneath the sails of the windmill had always entranced us so.

I do not know how it happened. I made an uncontrollable leap into impropriety and suddenly my lips were upon hers. She did not resist. I swore my love for her, took her into my arms and kissed her again.

I felt the strike of Lord Kennington’s cane across my shoulders and turned to see the deep hatred in his eyes. I knew from that moment on that the world would never be the same. I was banished from the house.

Soon a letter arrived from Eleanor’s only cousin, Richard, who had long been a familiar presence in Kennington House. For such a brusque man, he took care to deliver the blow with some kindness. Eleanor had instructed him to implore me to douse my desire and, to save her from shame, to promise never to meet her again. My heart was broken, but I made that promise and I have kept it ever since.

Tonight, when I stood on that pavement in Berkeley Square, I wondered if she was looking at that windmill, thinking of me.

Professor Moriarty is a conundrum. He decreed that we should delve into the darkness of the mind, but it has become clear that for him the mind is an intellectual and not an emotional property. To cure his insomnia I must seek out the root of the disturbance, to unearth some event from the past that first triggered the imbalance. Yet he resists memory. I attempt to make him reveal episodes of darkness and guilt, but in return he elucidates a theory that guilt can only come from regret and he has none. He talks of Malthus, the English scholar, and says that darkness must necessarily exist. For fear that the Earth cannot cope with the load of mankind, the population is naturally repressed, being kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice. Therefore, he said in his cold, sober voice, how can one feel guilty about committing a crime?

I despair. I see only one way forward to recover the dark, troubled memories that sit at the heart of his condition: hypnosis. Only then will I uncover the truth of the man.

Richard Kennington has responded to my letter informing him of my new practice. My dear cousin, as I call him even though we are not related by blood, has continued to be my one strand of communication since Lord Kennington and Eleanor turned their backs on me. It was he who informed me of the death of Lord Kennington, and that no provision for either of us had been made in the will: the entire fortune was left to Eleanor. I had expected as much, but Richard, as the only other living Kennington, felt due some level of fortune. In truth, the good Lord had long been appalled by his sometimes foolhardy gambling.

The words in Richard’s latest letter conveyed a new unhappiness to my own troubled soul. Eleanor is to marry a marquess of whom I know nothing at all. A cold wave swept through me and I had to steady myself as I read the missive. Her extraordinary wealth had made inevitable marriage to some esteemed yet impoverished aristocrat, but before I read those words there was just a sliver of a chance that one day … What a miserable fool I am!

I am ashamed to say that I have been standing in the dark on Berkeley Square again, staring up at the lit windows like a desperate voyeur.

When I returned home, a plump fellow was standing in the yard. It was clear that he was in a state of high agitation, tapping his cane upon the ground, fiddling with the brim of his hat and checking his pocket watch, all within the few seconds it took to notice me walking towards him.

“Are you the good doctor?” he said in a peculiar, high-pitched voice.

“Dr Trevelyan Blake. Is there some sort of emergency?”

“Yes. No. Well, yes there is.”

“Where is the emergency?”

“It’s here, Doctor, standing before you.”

Within a minute, he was sitting wedged into the armchair of my room, his long, ginger mutton chops quivering with agitation, his belly testing the buttons of his colourful striped waistcoat and his top hat squashed down on his collar-length, virulent orange hair.

“May I take your hat, Mr … ?”

“Goodness me, no.” He touched the brim again. “One never knows what might fall from above.” He laughed nervously throughout the sentence. “Smithington Smythe.” He proffered his card.

“How can I help you, Mr Smythe?”

“Ah yes, yes.” He started searching the pockets of his waistcoat and jacket in a flurry of commotion and finally produced a small cutting from a newspaper. “It says here that you offer treatment for uneasiness of the mind. Private and confidential. Yes, yes?”

I offered affirmation. He then stuttered and sweated his way through an explanation of his ailment, intermittingly singing snippets of what appeared to be that irrepressible ditty “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring” as he did so. I abhor The Mikado but a man should not be condemned solely upon his taste in music.

“‘Uneasiness of the mind.’ That’s exactly what my wife says I have. I have a young grandchild, a beautiful little girl, and there’s so much danger, Doctor – rogues and vagabonds, carriages in the street, runaway horses, sharp knives at the dining table, rivers to drown in, uneven paving stones to trip over, masonry falling from the sky. The world is full of danger, Doctor. My wife says I am imagining it all and upsetting everybody, not least my little grandchild, who has picked up my agitation and screams every time she sees me. Please, Doctor, I beg you to help me to stop imagining all this evil.”

He then made a strange request that he would come to me in the later evening at ten of the clock every Tuesday. He was indisposed at a more suitable time due to his important business in the shipping industry and his wish to spend the early evenings with his family. In exchange, he would offer me treble my fee, as long as I felt that I really could cure him.

I gave him my assurance that I could and he seemed much cheered. And, what is more, I truly believe that I can help him. As he left, he seemed much taller than I had realized on first impression: such is the power of the mind over the physical being, he had seemed to grow inches upon my assurance.

A second patient then. I will have enough to cover my weekly rent and to eat well. If a third patient emerges, perhaps I will even be able to purchase a picture to adorn these bare walls.

It has been a momentous morning, one that will be forever seared into my consciousness. I have broken through the barrier – indeed, I have smashed it to smithereens – but the land behind that barrier proved to be dark and terrible. I wish I had never glimpsed its horrors.

Already aware of the work of the great Mesmer, I became a devotee of John Baird’s researches into hypnotism while I undertook my medical learning in Edinburgh. Then, in Paris, Sigmund and I discussed hypnotism at great length and I became the master of self-hypnotism. I felt sure that I could use hypnosis to help any patient recover the occluded memories of events that had caused a disturbance of the mind.

With his resolute refusal to discuss his darker memories, I had decided that Professor Moriarty should be the beneficiary of my first foray into the hypnotism of a patient. Yet, as I fingered my gold pocket watch and studied his severe, angular face, his high-domed forehead and stony countenance, I faltered. Never in my life had I encountered such a fiercely intelligent and obdurate gentleman, one who was hardly going to allow himself to be put under another’s spell.

However, to my surprise, he leaned forward and said, with that curious small smirk upon his almost lipless mouth, “Stop playing, boy, and do whatever it is you feel you must do.”

I arranged proceedings so that we were sitting opposite each other and I carefully followed Baird’s process. I held the pocket watch a fixed distance from the professor and asked him to stare intently at it. Five minutes of complete stillness and silence passed, but there was no change in the professor’s demeanour. He stared fixedly, barely blinking, but the light of keen, conscious intelligence never left his deep-set eyes.

I was about to give up and return the pocket watch to my waistcoat when I noticed there was some delicate shift in his stare. I now seemed to be looking into the eyes not of a wise and cynical old man, but of an innocent boy.

I trod carefully at first, asking him to describe the world of his childhood in minute detail. In a sober, even voice, with his gaze still fixed upon the watch, he described his mother’s bedroom and his father’s study with a devotion to detail that I believe is beyond fully conscious memory. Then I asked him to describe some event that took place in his father’s study, and that is when the darkness began.

The young Moriarty had allowed Indian ink to stain some linen and his father summoned him to the study, but, under questioning, Moriarty blamed his brother. Thereupon, while Moriarty watched, his protesting brother’s bare legs were beaten with a cane, stroke after stroke after stroke, his father laughing manically all the while. It was only when blood ran freely down the back of the boy’s welted thighs and calves that the punishment ceased.

There then, I thought, we have arrived at the likely root of the insomnia so quickly. Guilt, that emotion of which the professor is so dismissive, has disturbed his mind to the point that his body is in revolt and will not allow sleep, for the terrible occurrence no doubt haunts his dreams.

I was ready to coax the professor back into the present, but first I thought I would try to invoke a more recent memory to see if I could understand the depth of the professor’s predicament. I asked him to describe his own study, which again he did in detail, and to picture himself seated at the desk. Was there anything that had taken place in that room that filled him with unease?

The professor uttered a short, dry, staccato laugh that seemed out of keeping with his induced state, but he continued in his solemn voice. The toneless delivery of the words soon proved an ill match for the horrors they described. With no more bidding, the esteemed professor conjured images of such vileness that my stomach turns to think of them. A specialist in astronomy, he described a universe of dark intrigue in which he was the sun and his criminal subordinates and “soldiers” were the stars, some linked into constellations, others orbiting alone upon his governance. He portrayed himself issuing command after command from the desk, arranging for burglary, deception, forgery and worse – murder and assassination! Politicians, lordly gentlemen and gentlewomen, shopkeepers and beggars: no one was immune from the evil effect of his communications, not even children. The river of stories was shoaled with the corpses of the innocent.

I was dumbfounded and a-trembling. At first I thought about running to the nearest constable. But it was then, in a moment of clarity, that I deduced that his tales were not true. As if this professor could possibly be running a network of the most damnable of criminals! No, the problems lay in the theories of Mesmer and Baird, and now I believed not one word of their supposed scientific reasoning. The hypnotized state was not a gateway to memory and truth – no! It was a mere portal to the vilest of imaginings that in the conscious world we can suppress and control, thank goodness. My ridiculous games had merely forced the venerable professor unwittingly to unleash a terrible fiction that had nothing to do with reality.

The professor had finally fallen silent and I saw that the keen intelligence had returned to his eyes once more.

“Remember, Dr Blake, that you promised complete confidentiality.”

And, with that, he swept from the room, humming “Three Little Maids from School”, which was somewhat incongruous to my state of confusion. Everyone in this city seems to be humming those insufferable Gilbert and Sullivan ditties.

It has been a sobering day. My understanding of hypnosis and recovered memory is in tatters, and I have no semblance of an idea how to proceed with the professor’s treatment.

At least tomorrow I can look forward to the rather simpler case of Mr Smithington Smythe.

It was nearly midnight, just half of an hour ago, when my door was nearly taken from its hinges with the banging. I had only just retired to bed, but had immediately fallen into a deep sleep and awoke in a state of high confusion. I stumbled my way out of the bedroom, into the consultation room and towards the noise. The door was shuddering with each determined blow.

“Who is it?” I shouted, trying to control my hands as I lit a candle.

“It is the Metropolitan Police. Open the door.”

My thoughts immediately turned to Professor Moriarty. Was it possible that his words were not a fiction and the police were now investigating his manifold crimes?

If only that were so.

When I opened the door, I was looking up at a tall, portly man in a peaked cap who was accompanied by a uniformed officer.

“Are you Dr Trevelyan Blake?”

“Indeed.”

“I am Inspector Bradstreet of Scotland Yard. There has been a vicious knife attack, doctor, not fifty yards from here.”

“I will get dressed and come immediately.”

“That won’t be necessary, Doctor. The victim is beyond all help and the police doctor is at the scene.”

“Then why have you awoken me?”

“I believe you know the victim, Doctor. Lady Eleanor Kennington.”

I felt the candle drop from my fingers and the world went black.

A few minutes later, which was as soon as I could gather my senses, I said that I must go to Eleanor and made to leave immediately, even though I was in a nightshirt and my feet were still bare.

The inspector barred my way with a strong arm.

“It is not a sight you would like to see, sir. The dear lady has been cut …”

“Disembowelled,” added the constable.

“… in the manner of a medical man. You are a medical man, are you not, Doctor?”

“Of course I am. What are you saying?”

“Nothing at all.”

Over the next ten minutes there ensued the most awful conversation I have ever been forced to endure. No doubt armed with gossip from one of the Kennington servants, the inspector intimated that he knew all about my fall from favour with the deceased Lord Kennington and Eleanor’s rejection of me.

“You are well acquainted with Lady Eleanor Kennington’s house in Berkeley Square, and you are familiar with the precious artworks in the Upper Gallery, five of which have been cut from their frames. And you are also well acquainted with Lady Kennington’s habits, are you not?”

“Well, yes. All that is true,” I said, while still trembling at the thought of my poor, pure Eleanor’s mutilated body.

“So you would have known that, as usual, the lady would be alone, reading in the library at about thirty minutes past ten this evening, exactly the time the dear lady was murdered.”

“What on earth are you saying, man?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” The inspector paused. “But where were you, Doctor, between ten and eleven this evening?”

I stared at the inspector in disbelief. “I was here.”

“Alone, I dare say?” The man had a gleam in his eye.

“No, Inspector. I was in the company of Mr Smithington Smythe, a very respectable man of some importance, for the entire hour.” By now I was in a state of anger. I ripped open a desk drawer and handed Mr Smythe’s card to the inspector. Even in my torment at the news of Eleanor’s death, I felt some satisfaction at seeing the gleam leave his eye. He looked thoroughly disappointed and turned to leave.

“Rest assured we will speak to Mr Smythe.” The inspector stuck out his huge chest and stood in an imposing manner in the doorway. “You will not leave the city in a hurry now, will you, Doctor?”

And, with that, the policemen left me to myself, and to the fullness of my deep and terrible grief.

I write this in the shadow of the noose. My dear cousin Richard has brought me a pen, ink and paper, and the warder has allowed me to write what may be the last entry to be appended to my diary, as well as a letter to Dr Watson. Richard has been a friend to the last. He has been the only person to visit me in gaol. When I told him of my final, desperate plan to attract the attention of Sherlock Holmes, he at first said it was futile and told me to resign myself to my fate, but once he knew of my determination he took it upon himself to pursue the matter. He has managed to extract the diary from my few possessions still held at Barrel Yard, and he will take those pages, along with this final entry and the letter, to Dr Watson.

And so I must return to the events of three months past.

The end, when it came, came swiftly. In the early hours of the morning after the murder of dear Eleanor, I went to Berkeley Square. I wanted to grasp some final part of her, to say goodbye to her, to make her awful, sudden absence more comprehensible. An officer of the law guarded the doorway to the house and so I turned away and wandered the streets for some hours, twisting and turning, not knowing to where I was going until my feet took it upon themselves to bring me back to my rooms. I fell upon my bed and wept once more.

There was another knock on the door. I was tear-stained and somewhat dishevelled but I was beyond such care. There, standing before me once more, was Inspector Bradstreet of Scotland Yard, this time accompanied by two constables.

The inspector pushed me back into the room.

“Doctor Blake, I put it to you that you have been seen staring up at Lady Eleanor Kennington’s house on an almost nightly basis.”

“I …”

“I put it to you that Lord Kennington cut you out of his will, and that Lady Kennington refused your advances.”

All this was true, but I protested. His assemblage of the facts was skewed and inappropriate.

“I put it to you that you murdered Lady Eleanor and stole from her five paintings.”

I was seared and discombobulated by his accusation but I stood my ground and retorted, using his own ridiculous language. “And I put it to you, sir, that I can prove it was not me. Mr Smithington Smythe …”

“Mr Smithington Smythe! The address on the card you handed to me was for Wilson’s funeral parlour in Clapham.”

My knees weakened.

“No one has ever heard of this Smythe. There has been no sight or sound of him in either Mayfair or Clapham, and his name is not recorded in any ledger. He simply does not exist. Between quarter past and half past ten of the clock yesterday evening, you were not in these rooms, sir, sitting with Mr Smithington Smythe. You were stealing through the gardens of Kennington House to prise open a window that you knew would give access to the library. You then strangled and stabbed …”

“Disembowelled!”

“… Lady Eleanor Kennington and stole the pictures from the Upper Gallery.”

By then I had collapsed to my knees.

“Search the premises, Constables.”

Within a minute, one of the constables had returned from the bedroom. “This was under the bed, sir.”

Held outward, taut between his hands, was the small Dutch painting of the windmill that Eleanor and I had stood before so many times, back in the days when the world was wonderful and so full of promise. I looked on, dumbfounded and defenceless, caught in a web beyond my comprehension.

I have pleaded my innocence every day since. I have even broken my vow of confidentiality and talked of Professor Moriarty’s mysterious universe of crime, but I am looked upon as one would a madman.

Not one soul believes a single word I say.