Read Online Holmes and Watson End Peace: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes by David Ruffle - Free Book Online

why?”
    â€œPins and needles in them, it’s making me think that the skin of my hands is in constant motion. Damn! I will just close my eyes again, to gather my thoughts, Holmes.”
    â€œOf course, my friend.”

Interlude
    â€œHow’s your Spriggs fellow, Polly?”
    â€œStill sprigging!”
    â€œSomeone should sort him out.”
    â€œOh, he’s harmless enough, Lucy.”
    â€œHe’s a man... he is far from harmless.”
    â€œOh shush now, he must be ninety!”
    â€œStill a man. I know these things, I am a nurse.”
    â€œNot for long if you carry on the way you are.”
    â€œWell I won’t care either way when Elwyn whisks me away to marry him.”
    â€œIf his wife will let him without breaking your legs first!”
    â€œOh, you can be so catty, Polly Harrison! And jealousy will get you nowhere; it never does for old married women.”
    â€œI am happy as I am thanks, why don’t you go and see to your Mr Travers. You are more likely to see action with him than with the dishy doctor!”
    â€œCan’t help having S.A. can I darling? If you know what that is of course.”
    â€œKnow and have it, more than you ever will. Right, duty calls, Lucy, have fun with Mr Travers.”
    â€œI will go and look in on Dr Watson again. I think he may slip away from us tonight and I would like to think he knows that someone is near.”

Chapter 7
    â€œThis is such a long night, Holmes. It is still night, yes?”
    â€œYes it is. How are the pins and needles?”
    â€œEverywhere now, but the blessed pain I have been suffering with has all but disappeared. May we talk some more?”
    â€œYes, Watson, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
    â€œTell me, for I have often wondered, how long were you aware of the presence of Moriarty?”
    â€œI had my suspicions that there was a great orchestrator at work long before I mentioned the man to you. He was an elusive shadow in those days, a will-of-the-wisp who constantly evaded my clutches. I could not even put a name to the man, yet I knew there was someone there who was the great organiser of crime in London, the controlling brain. For years I tracked him through often the smallest of crimes, but all of them bearing a certain hallmark. The Silvertown robbery, the scandal at the Tankerville club, the despoiling of national treasures at the British Museum, the Bishopsgate jewellery theft, the bogus laundry affair; all these disparate crimes bore the signs of having one man behind them and I was determined to devote much of my energy into finding out just who that man was.”
    â€œThe task must have been exceedingly onerous.”
    â€œIt was a long, slow process in which for every step forward I fell back an equal amount. Occasionally, I was given great hope by information which came to me through that network of informers that you became only too familiar with, only for those hopes to be dashed. There were times that I cursed my caseload for I could not devote enough time to what I saw as the most important case I would ever handle.”
    â€œI only got to know of Moriarty shortly before the events that I chronicled as ‘The Final Problem’, but for how long then had you been chasing this shadowy, elusive figure?”
    â€œFor a good few years. It took me some time to observe the pattern, but when I recognised there was a power at work in the background and once I had got the measure of this unknown adversary then I was able to identify those cases where he had unwittingly left his mark.”
    â€œYou once said to me that you recognised Moriarty’s work in undetected crimes. If these crimes were undetected then it begs the question, how did you detect them?”
    â€œPerhaps I should have said instead, crimes that were not investigated fully. Although I detected such crimes from the singular autograph left upon them by their author, I was not always