Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [84]
'I suspected from the start that we had walked into a trap,' Holmes snapped.
'Is that why you accepted the drugged betel nut?' Bernice asked.
He gazed superciliously at her.
'I palmed the nut and feigned unconsciousness. I felt it was the best way to force their hand.'
'You were takin' a bit of a risk,' Roxton said admiringly. 'Hate to admit it, but I was taken in completely. Me head feels like a ruddy rugger ball after the International.'
Bernice leaned towards me.
'Do you believe him?' she whispered.
'Of course.'
'It occurs to me that your Mr Holmes is a bit of a showoff. Doesn't like to admit that he can be wrong.'
'He so rarely is.'
She smiled.
'How do you know?'
Leaving me with that thought, she walked off towards where Surd had fallen. For a moment it occurred to me to protect her from the sight, but I quickly realized that she would not thank me. She gave the impression of having seen a lot worse. I turned my attention back to Holmes and Roxton.
'It was Colonel Warburton's reappearance that alerted me,' Holmes was saying. 'I believe that our initial meeting with him on the Orient Express was accidental - he was, no doubt, in the process of winding down the overland transfer route for Maupertuis's troops - but our second meeting here was pre-planned. Either Maupertuis suspected that we would be following him or the mysterious hooded man back in England alerted him via some preternatural means. Either way, he sent Warburton to lull us into a false sense of security and reel us in, like a trout on the line.'
'This is all a bit above me head,' Roxton admitted. 'Where do we go from here?'
Holmes looked around.
'I would suggest a comprehensive sweep of the cavern for clues. I shall divide it up into areas, and assign each of you to an area. The process of searching is a painstaking one: I have often thought of writing a monograph on the subject. I shall give you all precise instructions on how to search, and what to search for. Until then, touch nothing and try not to move around too much.'
The thought of all of us scuttling like cockroaches across the floor of the cavern as Holmes tutored us in his hallowed techniques struck me as funny. I chuckled to myself. Holmes glanced over darkly.
'That young lady is having an unfortunate effect upon your dignity, Watson,'
he snapped. 'Perhaps you should remember your age, and act accordingly.'
I stifled an incipient fit of giggles. Holmes could be so terribly pompous if he thought he was being made fun of.
'Young lady?' Roxton asked, confused. 'What young lady?'
'It's a long story,' I replied.
A slight prickling at the back of my neck made me turn. Professor Moriarty was standing a few feet away. His deep-set eyes examined me as he might examine a simple but rather tedious problem in mathematics. Of course, most mathematical problems were simple and rather tedious to Professor Moriarty. He was, so Holmes had led me to believe, one of the foremost authorities in the world on asteroid dynamics, having derived a result for the three-body problem using the binomial theorem and gone on to generalize it to situations involving four, five and six bodies. The whole thing sounded rather distasteful to me, but Holmes assured me that it had been a bete noir of mathematicians and astronomers ever since the time of Newton. Apparently only three other people were capable of understanding the subtleties of Moriarty's work: two of them disagreed so violently over the implications that they had come to blows during an international conference and the third one had suffered a bout of brain fever following three sleepless nights checking the details.
I had once asked Holmes why, when he had international fame and presumably fortune in his grasp, Moriarty spent so much time indulging in criminal pursuits. Holmes had puffed away on his pipe for a few moments.
'For the same reason that I resort to cocaine,'