Free Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman by Tim Symonds

would on the English King.’
    â€˜And how is London?’ the Sultan added affably.
    Holmes replied, ‘From the point of view of the criminal expert, since the extinction of Professor Moriarty, the most dangerous and capable criminal in Europe, London is a singularly uninteresting city. When Moriarty was in the field, at every breakfast time my gazette presented infinite possibilities.’
    I recorded the abominable Moriarty’s much-deserved end at the Bernese Reichenbach Falls in The Adventure of the Final Problem . For those who have not read my previous annals, I should explain that Professor James Moriarty’s criminal network stretched from the Bentinck Street corner of London’s Welbeck Street to the Daubensee above the Gemmi Pass in the Swiss Alps. Holmes once described Moriarty without a hint of hyperbole as ‘the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.’
    â€˜Are you are certain the Arch-criminal is dead?’ came the Sultan’s query. ‘They speak of a resident of Bavaria by the name of Gustav von Seyffertitz who bears a remarkable resemblance. You say you disposed of him down the Reichenbach Falls but perhaps...?’
    It was clear the Ruler of the Ottoman Empire maintained an extensive and flattering interest in our cases.
    â€˜Moriarty is gone forever, unless you believe in reincarnation,’ my companion confirmed.
    â€˜Can you oblige me with a description of his end?’ asked the Sultan, leaning forward.
    Holmes recounted, ‘We met at a fearful Alpine place where a torrent pours over a curving precipice into a huge cauldron from whose black depths rises a cloud of vapour. We fought. We tottered together at some eight hundred feet above the cataracts. I escaped his long reach. Moriarty gave a horrible scream. He kicked madly for a few seconds, clawing the air with both hands, gawking over his shoulder at the rushing waters. At his doom. For all his efforts he could not recover his balance.’
    â€˜You could have saved him?’ the Sultan enquired.
    Holmes shrugged.
    â€˜Yes, but I had no intention of doing so. The moment I released myself from his grasp I had manipulated my opponent’s force against himself to ensure he fell a long way before striking a rock. His mouth opened and shut but his screams were obscured by the roar of the falls. His body bounded off a sharp outcrop, dropped hard on another many feet below, and then another, until at last he splashed into the water, vanquished.’
    While Holmes engaged the Sultan’s attention so deeply, I was able to take stock of the slight figure before us, the Emperor of The Three Cities of Constantinople, Adrianople and Bursa, and of Damascus and Cairo and an endless list of other townships and islands. Hardly a month went by without his sly, moustachioed face being featured in the latest Punch cartoon. The predominant feature, a great scimitar-shaped nose, shadowed a contemptuous mouth but he was by no means devoid of charm.
    At his full height the Ruler of the Ottoman Empire could not have been more than 5 feet 6 inches. His pale forehead was lightly tinged with brown. The decades of constant strain had robbed him of the last vestiges of youth. I estimated he was over sixty years of age. His hair and beard would have been already grey except for the constant ministrations of his thirteenth wife. To comply with the Koranic law forbidding a head of state and its religion to show signs of ageing it was said she plied his hair with a special concoction of coffee, gall-nuts and henna used to dye the tails of horses.
    The wildest rumours abounded about him. At the age of 25 Abd-ul-Hamid visited Louis Napoleon at the Tuileries during the final halcyon days of the French Second Empire. Rather than the reality of a short, thickset man in a simple scarlet fez and a plain blue frockcoat, Le Tout-Paris