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Yet I had no evidence. If I went to the police with only an unsolved page of code, I too would have been marked for death. I resolved to engineer Moriarty's fall in secret. So I wrote anonymous letters to key figures in his university town, hinting at shady dealings. The vile rumours spread, and soon Moriarty resigned his chair, retiring to London to become an army coach.
I thought the loss of the professorship would have taught him a lesson, but I was wrong. Instead, he built a veneer of self-effacement after his resignation, and became supremely cautious. I wonder what hand I had in his perfection as a criminal mastermind?
Reverend Dodgson stopped there, and I poured him another cup of tea. "Why didn't Arthur tell someone? Or write a letter detailing what he discovered?" I asked.
"Moriarty would have silenced anyone who knew. Written declarations might have been found and destroyed. I suspect the forgery of my name was the only clue left intact," said Dodgson.
"And still unsolved, I gather," I said.
"You have it, Doctor Watson," agreed Dodgson. "I was hoping we could solve the key together."
I was about to suggest enlisting Mycroft's aid, but young Arthur Doyle had meant the message for Dodgson, so it must draw upon the Reverend's personal knowledge. Perhaps all he needed were my insights into the problem, as wrong as they might be, to help him arrive at the right answer.
"The misspelled name, Carlool. Was that the key word?" I asked.
"No. It has to be a long text, as Moriarty said, to foil simple decoding."
"Could the code be based on Wonderland or Looking Glass?"
"Doubtful. Moriarty used the notebook while he was writing his dissertation, which was years before I wrote those books."
What would Holmes say? He'd ask me how I'd send a message to a mathematician. With numbers, I'd reply.
And there was the answer. "The point of departure from your nom-de-plume comes after Car. It isn't lool, but one-thousand and one!" I cried triumphantly.
Dodgson's eyes widened. "I never thought of that."
"Moriarty used Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night as his key, then," I said, remembering Dodgson's list of Arthur's books.
"But that was published in 1885, years after Arthur's death. He would only know of Burton's travel writings," argued Dodgson.
I thought about it further. "Poe write a story called The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade? Not an exact match to one-thousand and one, and I'm certain it was published in 1845. Didn't Arthur have a copy of Poe on his shelves?"
"Books? Wait, Arthur read Leibniz!" said Dodgson excitedly. "Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary number system. In binary, one-zero-zero-one is the number nine. Also, one-thousand-and-one is the product of three consecutive prime numbers: seven, eleven, and thirteen. They would be consecutive odd numbers but for the conspicuous absence of the number nine. Arthur hid that number twice in plain sight!"
"But how would nine be the key?" I asked.
We wrestled over the new question. My thoughts kept drifting back to Holmes. What would he consider next? He'd be fascinated by that violin, of course-
"The violin!" I cried. "It's no accident that the note was hidden in it; it's the missing clue. Moriarty loved music, didn't he?"
"He did," said Dodgson.
"If he wanted to remember a passage as a key, the lyrics of a song might be easiest to remember," I suggested. "And there's one symphony set to lyrics."
"Beethoven's Ninth, Ode to Joy!" he exclaimed. "Friedrich von Schiller's poem set to music, in the original German. That's why Moriarty was confident that a Kerckhoffs statistical analysis of his key would fail. Letter frequencies differ from language to language."
We immediately set about deciphering the page using Ode to Joy as the key. It took many tries to determine how the key aligned to the code, but we barely noticed the passage of time. At last, Dodgson finished deciphering the entire page.
"What does it say?" I asked, breathless.
"It alludes to Moriarty's triumphant murder of his mentor, someone who was as devilish as he was." Dodgson handed me the coded page and its solution. "Alas, the name does not appear on this page, but the rest of the notebook should reveal who made Moriarty what he was, how he died, and why."
"And perhaps other crimes, other accomplices," I added. Now that we had the right key, we would learn at last about Moriarty and the trials that shaped him. "I'll let Mycroft Holmes know. Thank you, Reverend."
"No, thank you for restoring a man's good name, Doctor Watson. Holmes would be proud," said Dodgson. "At long last, we've put Arthur Doyle's ghost to rest."
Merridew of Abominable Memory by Chris Roberson
Chris Roberson's latest novels are Three Unbroken, Dawn of War II, End of the Century, and Book of Secrets, the first in his Nekropolis series. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies, such as The Many Faces of Van Helsing, FutureShocks, and Sideways in Crime, and in a variety of magazines, including Asimov's and Interzone. He is a wi
William Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." The past is always with us, the only guide we have for judging how we should act in the present and in the future. And yet our understanding of even our own pasts is gravely limited by our memory. Many people would likely be shocked to be confronted with just how unreliable their memory can be. Eyewitness testimony is often hopelessly confused, and many i
The old man reclined on a chaise-longue, warmed by the rays of the rising sun which slanted through the windows on the eastern wall. In the garden below, he could see the other patients and convalescents already at work tending the greenery with varying degrees of attention. The gardens of the Holloway Sanatorium were the responsibility of the patients, at least those tasks which didn't involve sharp implements, and the nurses and wardens saw to it that the grounds were immaculate. Not that the patients ever complained, of course. Tending a hedge or planting a row of flowers was serene and contemplative compared to the stresses which had lead most of the patients to take refuge here, dirty fingernails and sunta
No one had asked John Watson to help tend the garden, but then, he could hardly blame them. Entering the middle years of his eighth decade of life, his days of useful manual labor were far behind him, even if he wasn't plagued by ancient injuries in leg and shoulder. But it was not infirmities of the body that had led John here to Virginia Water in Surry; rather, it was a certain infirmity of the mind.