The Return of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  But now the boy, which is to say Watson’s beloved stepson-to-be, had been abducted.

  “It had to happen now of all times,” Holmes said.

  Watson’s eyes widened as he leaned on his cane. “Is there ever a good time for an innocent child to be snatched off the street?”

  Sensing he had hurt his friend’s feelings, Holmes hastened to explain. “This is clearly the work of our old friend Professor Moriarty,” he said. “He’s taken the lad because he’s got wind of the fact that I’m on the verge of putting paid to his plans to bankrupt the world economy.”

  “But what the blazes are you talking about, Holmes?”

  The great detective set about bringing his dear friend up to speed. What he had to say took in the way Black Friday, back in March, had brought down all the major banks and all but crippled the nation, as well as the rest of the world. He hardly needed to tell Watson that bankers and businessmen had jumped out of office windows, leapt into the Thames, or blown their brains out all over London, from Cheapside to Hampstead, and from Hoxton to Chelsea, since the capital was rife with stories of such dire ends. And who else was behind all this misery other than the fiendish Moriarty?

  Holmes went on to explain how he had dedicated his every waking hour since Black Friday to trying to save the planet. Having rightly assumed that Moriarty must have hit upon some near-infallible equation which, when applied to the workings of the economy and the stock market, would enable him to drain the nation, and indeed the world, of its monetary wealth, Holmes promptly set about seeking first to discover what such a formula might entail, so that he could then find its “antidote” in the form of a second equation that would work to counterbalance and right the wrongs wrought by his archenemy.

  And just when Holmes, who had gone ninety-six hours without sleep, felt himself to be near to solving the puzzle, Moriarty had come up with his latest dirty trick in a heinous bid to distract him.

  Having heard Holmes out, Watson said, “But why the blazes should Moriarty have wanted to go messing with the world economy?”

  “For the same reason that has prompted him to perform all the other evil deeds he has blighted our paths with down through the years—for the hell of it, Watson.” A slender, quixotic figure, he puffed on his clay pipe, so that his intelligent eyes became torchlights in a mist as he gazed at the doctor. “The man is easily bored and his genius needs to perform evil acts in order to enable him to assuage the ennui that would otherwise pitch him into despair.”

  “Do you mean to say the blasted fellow only does these things to keep himself entertained?”

  “Why else?”

  Watson thumped the table with his balled fist. “Little Leroy’s such a wonderful fellow that I really can’t bear the thought of what’s happened, Holmes,” he said. “It really has got the better of me.” He set about drying his eyes with his handkerchief, but to no avail. “He’s just an innocent child. Who would do such a thing?” His big eyes appeared to stare deep into the abyss, where he no doubt fancied Moriarty had contrived to set himself up in business. “The dear boy’s a great footballing talent, you know,” he said. “Performs all sorts of fantastic tricks with a ball at his feet.” The tears were streaming silently down his face. “Has quite a sense of humour, too. Cheeky little chappie, he is. When I asked him once how he does all these tricks with a ball, he had the gall to tell me it was all quite elementary, my dear Watson.”

  Holmes knew better than to laugh, and indeed the next moment his dear friend began to sob his heart out. “Don’t worry, dear chap, we’ll get him back.”

  “But how?” the doctor wailed through his tears.

  “Moriarty won’t have taken him for nothing. He’s sure to get in contact before very long.”

  “So do you mean all we have to do is wait until he does?”

  Holmes nodded. “Well, you do,” he said. “And in the meantime, I have work to do.” He poured his friend a stiff Scotch, and helped himself to a snort of cocaine to calm his nerves, before he went back to his computer and applied himself once more to the search for the missing x that had denied him any sleep these past few days, and which went some way toward explaining the dark patches under his eyes that stood out in gross contrast with his ghostly pallor. And the line of cocaine that he had snorted may or may not have helped him along the road toward reaching the longed-for eureka moment.

  “I say, Holmes, I fail to see how you can be so insensitive as to sound happy, and even celebrate, at such a terrible time. I swear I love that dear lad with all my heart.”

  “But I’ve cracked it, Watson.”

  “Cracked what?”

  “The economy will live to fight another day, and the world will be dragged back from the brink—don’t you agree that such news is cause for celebration?”

  “But what about poor Leroy?”

  Before Holmes could reply, his mobile rang. He stared at it for a moment as if it were a rattlesnake, and then he snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Indeed…and it is with Professor James Moriarty that I have the pleasure of speaking, I assume?”

  “Who were you expecting, Doctor Livingstone?”

  “Now you’re going to tell me you’ve got the boy.”

  “And you’re going to tell me you’ve found a way to stop me destroying the economy.”

  “Am I, indeed?”

  “Yes, and you’re going to tell me the equation you will have devised to prevent me from putting my scheme into action—or you will if you want to see the boy again alive.”

  Holmes wondered briefly how such things might be valued: the life of a single beloved child against the nation’s, or indeed the world’s, economy. But there was only ever going to be one winner. “You shall have my equation,” he said, “once we have the boy back safely.”

  “Okay, so this is the way we’re going to do it.”

  Holmes listened as Moriarty gave him directions; then the evil professor hung up.

  “Come on, Watson.” Holmes put on his tweed jacket and deerstalker. “Don’t just sit there crying into your drink.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “To get young Leroy back.”

  They took a taxi down to the embankment, out past Twickenham, and presently a helicopter came into view. “Here he comes,” Holmes said. “If I say shoot, then do so without hesitation.”

  “Of course.”

  No sooner had the helicopter landed on the lawn next to the Green Man pub than Holmes hurried over to it. “Give me the boy,” he yelled, in an effort to make himself heard over the sound of the craft’s engine and rotor.

  Moriarty gestured for him to climb up into the cockpit.

  So it was an exchange the man was after. It made sense: with Holmes out of the way, Moriarty would be free to do his worst quite unhindered. Holmes had little doubt that this rat of a man was doing his utmost to scupper his own attempts to curb global warming, and he suspected that the rapid melting of the North Pole, while also caused to a degree by the effects of mankind’s carbon footprint and other factors, had been helped on its way by the evil professor.

  Right now, though, Holmes was in no position to bother about such matters, and had no alternative but to climb up into the helicopter. No sooner had he done so than he felt the cold barrel of a gun pushing against the back of his head.

  At that point, sensing the need for action, Watson took out his gun and fired at the evil professor, but his shot went astray and ricocheted off the body of the helicopter.

  Holmes urged little Leroy to jump down out of the helicopter and run to safety, but the lad seemed not to want to listen. Just then, Moriarty fired back at Watson, and as he did so Leroy spotted the opportunity to come to Holmes’s aid by biting the evil professor’s wrist.

  Moriarty cried out in pain and dropped his gun, which fell out
of the helicopter and landed on the grass; then Holmes hit the evil professor on the nose with a real whopper of a punch. Sensing that the professor had lost the upper hand, his pilot applied himself to the controls and the helicopter left the ground; then, realising that it was now or never, Holmes grabbed Leroy’s hand and they both jumped from the craft.

  They landed awkwardly on the wet grass, and by the time they clambered to their feet, the helicopter was already heading back over the river, carrying Moriarty off to safety. “There goes the most evil man in the world,” Holmes said, in the manner of a man who is talking to himself.

  “All I know is that his clothes smelt of mothballs and he has bad breath.” No sooner had Leroy said this than he ran over to Watson, and, seeing that his benefactor was wounded, the lad began to cry in alarm; but Holmes soon established that his dear friend would live to fight another day, the bullet only having got him in the arm.

  “We’d better get you to a hospital, old bean,” Holmes said, taking out his iPhone, and he dialled 999.

  “We sure showed him,” Watson said hours later, when he came round after the bullet had been taken out.

  “Yes, Leroy, and the world economy have been saved.” The skin over the great detective’s forehead, which appeared to be stretched tight as a drum, creased in a frown. “Now all we have to worry about is the melting ice caps.”

  Leroy came and threw himself on his beloved Watson once more, the lad’s emotions having got the better of him. The doctor chuckled fondly and said, “Now, how’s the next Messi doing, then, eh, what?”

  “I was worried about you,” the prodigy sobbed.

  “No need to worry about me,” Watson chuckled. “It was only a scratch.”

  “Anyway,” Holmes said, “I had better get going.”

  “Not without me you don’t.”

  “But you need to stay here and recuperate, and I have no time to waste.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Watson said. “They’ve dressed the wound and put my arm in a sling, so I can’t see the point in hanging around here any longer.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Always did hate hospitals.” He was now changing out of his pyjamas and into his day clothes, which had been neatly folded and placed in the bedside cabinet.

  Holmes wondered if his friend were really in a fit state to go with him in search of the evil professor, but Watson assured him that he had never felt better. “I want to help you find that blasted snake if it’s the last thing I do. Some causes are worth fighting for, even dying for, after all—and the apprehension of Moriarty is just such a cause.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Holmes concurred. “It was he, after all, who was behind all the meddling in the last American election that you will have read about in the Times. The crippling of the banks is really just another branch of his overall plan, which is to bring the Western democracies to their knees.”

  “Yes, I seem to remember you saying one time, Holmes, that you thought Moriarty was behind the introduction of that awful punk rock, which so blighted the music industry back in the seventies, too.”

  Holmes nodded. “It was he who coached that cad Sid Vicious to sing ‘My Way’. ”

  “I rather liked old Frank Sinatra’s version, back in the days before he lost his voice. Whereas that Vicious fellow made a right pig’s ear of it, if you ask me.”

  Holmes, whose toleration of music stretched only to certain works of Scarlatti and Handel, and even then only in the smallest and most infrequent of doses, eyed his friend with a mixture of disbelief and something like alarm. “Anyway, we don’t have time to stand here talking about music.”

  Little Leroy asked them to wait for him. “But you need to stay here until your mother comes to pick you up,” Holmes told the lad. “She’s on her way.”

  “No, I want to go with you.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “But you need me.”

  The two men appeared mystified as they gazed at him; then Holmes asked the boy what on earth he meant. “You won’t find Moriarty in the North Pole,” Leroy said, “you can be sure of that.”

  “And what makes you so confident of what you’re saying?”

  “I heard him say where he was going.”

  Holmes’s eyes narrowed as he tried to decide whether to believe the boy. “Why would he have spoken of such matters in front of you?”

  “I suppose he could hardly have expected me to be fluent in Lingala, now, could he?”

  “In what?” Doctor Watson demanded to know.

  “One of the languages spoken in the Congo region of central Africa,” Holmes set his friend straight, without taking his eyes off the boy. “Professor Moriarty is a master of numerous tongues, among other things.” He said this as if even his archenemy’s great skills as a linguist could be taken as further evidence of his inveterate evil. “What strikes me as odd is that you should also speak it, Leroy.”

  “Mum first met my father in the Congo, when she was over there working on her doctorate,” the lad explained. “Then afterwards she decided it was only right to teach me my father’s language.” He shrugged. “I suppose she reckoned it would give me a better sense of my roots.”

  “Yes, quite.” With that Holmes and Leroy proceeded to speak in Lingala, until Watson demanded to know what the blazes the pair of them reckoned they were about. “We were merely talking in Leroy’s father’s native tongue, Watson.”

  “All sounded Greek to me.”

  Holmes might have launched into a detailed disquistion on the differences between Lingala and Greek, but there really was no time for such nonsense. Addressing himself to Leroy, he said, “So what did you hear Moriarty say?”

  “That he was heading for the Congo.”

  “Is that a fact?” Watson said. “Blazes, so we’d better get ourselves over to central Africa on the double, then.”

  “Indeed,” Holmes assented. Then to Leroy: “Did he say exactly whereabouts in the Congo? It’s a big region, after all.”

  “He reserved a room in the Hotel Relax, in the capital, Kinshasa.”

  “That’s useful to know.”

  “Does that mean I can go there with you?”

  “Most certainly not,” Watson said.

  “I’m sure I would be of great help to you, with my knowledge of Lingala,” Leroy said, looking at Holmes.

  The great detective considered the lad’s proposition for a moment. While his own grasp of Lingala was pretty good, it was certainly the case that it suffered in comparison with his command of Swahili and Yoruba, not to mention any number of other languages. In truth, his Lingala was a little rusty in places, a fact that was scarcely surprising since he had not set foot in the Congo since he had gone there some fifteen years ago, when he was busy investigating the case of the missing emeralds. Young Leroy’s command of Lingala, on the other hand, was much more assured. For this reason, it seemed to Holmes that the lad was right in what he had said: he might be a great help to them, were they to take him along. “All right, Leroy,” he said. “You can come with us, so long as you do just as I say.”

  “But of course.”

  With that, the trio left the hospital, and Holmes waved down a taxi and told the driver to take them to Heathrow. “And there’s an extra twenty in it for you if you can get us there in less than fifteen minutes.”

  Having landed in Kinshasa, they hired a Range Rover and had little trouble in finding the Hotel Relax. “Now what, Holmes?” Watson wanted to know.

  “We wait here and see if the professor comes out.”

  Which he duly did some forty minutes later, and they trailed him out into the brush along a road that soon became little more than a dirt track. Seeing Moriarty’s jeep pull to a halt up ahead, Holmes stopped, too, and just hoped the evil professor hadn’t realised that he was being followed. By now it was pitch-dark, and no sooner had the three of them
climbed out of their vehicle than they found they were surrounded by a number of natives armed with spears.

  Meanwhile, Moriarty had turned his jeep around and was now driving over to where they were being held. The evil professor climbed out of his vehicle and barked orders in a Lingala that Holmes could not help but admire for the precision of the speaker’s accent and grammar, even if the sentiments behind his words were far from praiseworthy; for Moriarty had just ordered the natives to take their captives and boil them up for dinner.

  Holmes ignored Watson’s enquiring gaze, since he realised that informing him as to the meaning of Moriarty’s instructions would only cause his friend to worry unneccesarily. Knowing the doctor as he did, Holmes knew just how outraged the man would be, were he to discover Moriarty’s plans for the three of them. He could just imagine how Watson would hold forth on his being an Englishman and a gentleman, and how it was not an Englishman’s place, or a gentleman’s for that matter, to end up as anyone’s dinner.

  Holmes was an Englishman, too, of course, but he was an altogether different version of such an article, and rather than waste his time by mouthing pointless oaths, he asked Moriarty what his intentions were. “While you are being dined upon by my jolly friends here,” the evil professor replied, “I shall be launching my laser bombs.”

  “I assume the destination of these laser bombs is the North Pole, Professor?”

  “How bitter is knowledge that cannot be acted upon, Mr. Holmes.” Moriarty permitted himself an ugly, bitter laugh. “Once the laser bombs sink into their target, they will send out rays of heat that will melt what ice remains at the Pole within minutes,” he said. “That in turn will have the effect of sending massive tsunamis in all directions, I am most happy to say.” He laughed again. “New York and Washington will be history by midnight—as indeed will the whole of the East Coast of the United States. Needless to say, your beloved London will be sunk, too, as will most of the rest of the civilised world.”