Professor Moriarty Omnibus

by Michael Kurland

  The butler, Lemming, was standing in the middle of the street in his shirtsleeves, his eyes wide, breathing like a man who has just been chased by ghosts. An older woman with a coat misbuttoned over a hastily donned housedress peered from behind him.

  "Please," Lemming said, "would you come inside with us?"

  "If I am needed," Alberts said, taking a firmer grasp of his nightstick. "What seems to be the trouble?"

  "It's 'is lordship," the old woman said. " 'E just come in, and now 'e won't answer 'is door."

  "His lordship arrived home a short while ago," Lemming explained, "and immediately retired to his room. Mrs. Beddoes was to bring him his nightly glass of toddy, as usual."

  " 'E rang for it," Mrs. Beddoes assured Alberts, "as 'e always does."

  "But the bedroom door was locked when she arrived on the landing," Lemming said.

  "And 'e don't answer 'is knock," Mrs. Beddoes finished, nodding her head back and forth like a pigeon.

  "I'm afraid there's been an accident," Lemming said.

  "Are you certain his lordship is in his bedroom?" Alberts asked, staring up at the one lighted window on the second story of the great house.

  "The door is secured from the inside," Lemming said. "I'd appreciate having you take a look, Constable. Come this way, please."

  P.C. Alberts followed Lemming up an ornate marble staircase and down a corridor on the second floor to his lordship's bedroom door. Which was locked. Alberts knocked on the polished dark wood of the door panel and called out. There was no response.

  "Has his lordship ever done this before?" Alberts asked.

  "His lordship has been known to secure the door on occasion," Lemming answered. "But he has previously always responded to a knock, even if it was only to yell, 'Go away!' "

  P.C. Alberts thought for a second. "We'd best break it in," he decided. "Lord Walbine may require assistance."

  Lemming sighed, the relief at having someone else make the decision evident in his face. "Very good, Constable. If you say so."

  The two men applied their shoulders to the door in a series of blows. On the fourth, the wood around the lock splintered. On the sixth it gave, and the door swung inward.

  Alberts entered the room first. It was a large bedroom, dominated by a canopy bed. The Right Honorable the Lord Walbine, twelfth baron of that name, was lying quietly in the center of that bed in a fresh pool of his own blood. Sometime within the past ten minutes his throat had been neatly sliced from clavicle to clavicle.

  TWO — THE MORNING

  Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

  — Sherlock Holmes

  Benjamin Barnett opened his Morning Herald, folded it in half, and propped it against the toast rack. "There's been another one," he said, peering down at the closely printed column as he cracked his first soft-boiled egg.

  "Eh?" Professor James Moriarty looked up from his breakfast. "Another what?"

  "Murder," Barnett said. "Another 'mysterious killing among the gentry,' " he read with evident satisfaction.

  "Don't look so pleased," Moriarty said. "It might lead one to suspect that you had done it yourself."

  " 'The third outrage in as many weeks,' according to the Herald" Barnett said, tapping the headline with his egg spoon. "The police are baffled."

  "If we are to believe the newspapers," Moriarty remarked, "the police are always baffled. Except when inspector Gregson expects an early arrest.' Sometimes the police are 'baffled' and 'expect an early arrest' in the same paragraph. I can only wish that you journalists had a wider selection of descriptive phrases to choose from. It would certainly add an element of suspense to newspaper reading that is now grievously lacking."

  "There's enough suspense in this story to keep even you happy," Barnett said. "A police constable broke down the victim's bedroom door, which was locked from the inside, to find him lying on his bed in a pool of his own blood, with his throat so deeply cut that the head was almost severed and the blood still flowing from the gaping wound in his neck. How's that for suspense?"

  Moriarty sighed and shook his head. Taking off his pince-nez glasses to polish them with his linen napkin, he focused his water-gray eyes myopically on Barnett across the table. "Actually it's quite distressing," he said.

  "How's that, Professor?"

  Moriarty held up the thick paperbound volume that rested beside his plate. "This came in the first post this morning," he said. "It is the quarterly journal of the British Astro-Physical Society. There is more of mystery and suspense in these twelve-score pages than in ten years' worth of the Morning Herald."

  "That may be, Professor," Barnett said, "but your average newspaper reader is not interested in what's happening on Mars, but in what's happening in Chelsea. He'd rather have a mysterious murder than a mysterious nebulosity any time."

  "You are probably right," Moriarty said, laying the journal aside and replacing his pince-nez glasses on the bridge of his nose. "There is, nonetheless, some small comfort, some slight gleam of hope for the future of the human race that can be derived from current scientific theory. I read my journals and they comfort me."

  "What sort of comfort, Professor?" Barnett asked, feeling that he had lost the thread of the conversation.

  "I find solace in the theories expounded by Professor Herschel, among others, concerning nebulae," Moriarty said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the large silver samovar which squatted at one end of the table. "They would suggest that the universe is larger by several orders of magnitude than previously imagined."

  "This comforts you?"

  "Yes. It indicates that mankind, confined as it is to this small planet in a random corner of the universe, is of no real importance or relevance whatsoever."

  Barnett put his spoon carefully down on the side of his plate. He knew that Moriarty indulged in these misanthropic diatribes at least partly to annoy him, but at the same time he had never seen any sign that the professor was not totally serious about what he said. "I don't suppose you'd care to do a piece for my news service on that general theme, Professor?" Barnett asked.

  "Bah!" Moriarty replied.

  "I could probably get a couple of hundred American newspapers to carry the piece."

  "The prospect of having my words read eagerly over the jam pot in Chicago is, I must confess, one that holds no particular charm for me," Moriarty said. "Having my phrases mouthed in San Francisco, or my ideas hotly debated in Des Moines, has equally little appeal. No, I'm afraid, my dear Mr. Barnett, that your offer will not entice me into a journalistic career."

  "I'm sorry about that, Professor," Barnett said. "The world lost a great essayist when you chose to devote yourself to a life of, ah, science."

  Professor Moriarty looked at Barnett suspiciously. "When I plucked you from a Turkish prison almost two years ago," he said, "you were as devoid of sarcasm as you were embedded with grime. I no longer detect any grime."

  "Touché, Professor." Barnett smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  -

  Benjamin Barnett had first met Professor James Moriarty in Constantinople almost two years before, at a moment when the professor was being chased down the Street of the Two Towers by a band of assassins in dirty brown burnooses. Barnett and a friend came to the professor's aid, for which he thanked them profusely, although he regarded the assault as a minor annoyance from which he could have extricated himself quite easily without assistance. Which, Barnett came to admit when he got to know the professor better, was most probably true.

  Moriarty had reciprocated by rescuing Barnett from the dank confines of the prison of Mustafa II, where he was being held for the minor offense of murdering his friend and the major indiscretion of spying against the government of that most enlightened despot Sultan Abd-ul Hamid, Shah of Shahs, the second of that name. Both crimes of which he was equally innocent, and for either of which he was equally likely to be garroted at any moment at the whim of the Sublime Porte.

  But Moriarty
had exacted a price for his rescue. "What I want from you," he had told Barnett, "is two years of your life."

  "Why?" Barnett had asked.

  "You are good at your profession, and I have use for you."

  "And after the two years?"

  "After that, your destiny is once again your own."

  "I accept!"

  It had seemed like a good bargain at the time. And even when Moriarty had smuggled Barnett across the length of Europe and they stood face to face in the professor's basement laboratory in the house on Russell Square, it continued to seem so. Moriarty claimed to be a consultant and problem-solver, but he was strangely vague about the details. After extracting an oath of silence in regard to his affairs, he had put Barnett to work. Barnett had been a foreign correspondent for the New York World, living in Paris, when he had gone to Turkey to report on the sea trials of a new submarine and ended up in an Osmanli prison. It was his skills as a reporter that Moriarty wished to use. With Moriarty's assistance, Barnett opened the American News Service, a cable service to United States newspapers for British and European news. This gave Barnett a cover organization to investigate anything that Moriarty wanted investigated. To the surprise of both men, the service quickly began to make money, and soon took on a life of its own as a legitimate news organization.

  Gradually it dawned on Barnett that Moriarty's ideas of law and morality were at variance with those of the rest of Victorian society. Moriarty, to put it bluntly, was a criminal. Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant consulting detective, considered Moriarty one of the most reprehensible villains in London as yet unhanged. This was, perhaps, an exaggeration. Holmes had been trying to catch Moriarty at some nefarious scheme or other for nearly a decade, and had yet to succeed. He had foiled one or two of the professor's plans, and apprehended a henchman or two; but he had never managed to link the crime in question to the quondam professor of mathematics now living in Russell Square. This had undoubtedly led to a certain pique, and a tendency to see Moriarty under every bush and a sinister plot behind every crime.

  Professor Moriarty was not a simple criminal any more than he was a simple man. He had his own morality, as strict as or stricter than that of his contemporaries. But it differed in tone as well as in content from that smug complacency with which Victoria's subjects regarded "those lesser breeds without the law" unfortunate enough to be born in Borneo, or Abyssinia, or Whitechapel.

  Moriarty had kept Barnett isolated from most of his criminal activities, finding Barnett more useful as an unbiased gatherer of information. As a result, Barnett had only hints of the organization that Moriarty commanded, or the activities that he directed. Barnett did know that whatever money Moriarty made from his activities, beyond that necessary to keep up his household, went into supporting his scientific experiments. Moriarty thought of himself as a scientist, and his other activities, legal and illegal, were merely the means of financing his inquiries into the scientific unknown.

  -

  Barnett stared at the tall, hawklike man across the breakfast table from him. Moriarty was an enigma: an avowed criminal, he had the highest intellectual and moral standards Barnett had ever known; an evident misanthrope, he quietly supported several charities in the most miserably poor sections of London; a confirmed realist, he showed an irrepressible inclination toward the romantic. It might not be that he sought out adventure; but however he might hide from it, it unerringly sought him out.

  "You've always been interested in puzzles," Barnett said, breaking off his chain of thought as Moriarty noticed his fixed gaze. "Doesn't the image of a man murdered inside a locked room appeal to you?"

  Moriarty thought over the question for a moment. "Not especially," he said. "I'd need more information than is given in the Morning Herald before I find it puzzling. The way they leave it, there are too many possible answers only because there are too many unasked questions."

  "For example?"

  "What of the windows, for example?"

  "Locked. It says so."

  "Of course. But what sort of locks? There are gentlemen, I believe, who can open a locked window from the outside."

  "And then leave through the window, locking it after them?"

  "In some cases, yes, depending upon the type of lock. Or, for example, the murderer could have concealed himself in a cupboard, or under the bed, and not left until after the body was discovered."

  "I hadn't thought of that," Barnett said.

  "I can list five other ways in which the supposed 'locked room' could have been circumvented," Moriarty said.

  "I take it back," Barnett said, laying the newspaper face down on the table next to the chafing dish. "There is no puzzle. I was mistaken."

  "There are, however, several items of interest in the account," Moriarty said.

  "What items do you find interesting?"

  "Ah!" Moriarty said. "More examples are requested. There is, for example, the question of motive. There are five motives for murder: greed, lust, fear, honor, and insanity. Which was this?"

  "Scotland Yard is of the opinion that Lord Walbine was killed by a burglar."

  "Greed then," Moriarty said. "But surely we have a most unusual burglar here: one who goes straight to the master bedroom when there are cupboards full of silver in the pantry; one who lays his lordship full length out on his bed and slashes his throat instead of giving him a friendly little tap on the head with a blunt object. And then one who disappears in a locked room."

  "You just intimated that you knew several men who could have done it," Barnett said.

  "Ah, yes. But again we come to the question of motive. Why would a burglar have gone to the additional trouble of closing the room after him? Why not just go out of the window and down the drainpipe?"

  "I don't know," Barnett replied.

  "And if it was indeed an interrupted act of burglary, what of the murder of Isadore Stanhope, the barrister, last week? Or the Honorable George Venn before that? All with their throats slit; all in their own bedrooms. One with his wife asleep in the adjoining bedroom, the other with a faithful hound lying undisturbed at the foot of the stairs. And nothing of value missing in any of the crimes. A singular burglar indeed!"

  Barnett put down his spoon and stared across the table at his companion. Moriarty had not so much as glanced at the morning newspapers. Further, Barnett was willing to swear he hadn't seen a newspaper in the past three weeks. Moriarty scorned newspapers, and seldom opened them. One of Barnett's jobs was to keep a clipping file of current crime stories and other items that might interest the professor, but the last three weeks' clippings lay in a box, un-sorted and unfiled, on Barnett's desk. Yet somehow Moriarty knew the details of the three linked murders, as he seemed always to know all that was happening in London and most of what was happening throughout the world.

  "You have another theory, then?" Barnett suggested.

  "One should never theorize with insufficient facts," Moriarty said. "It is a practice most destructive of the mental faculties. As I said, there are some obvious questions that should be asked. The answers should give one a clear picture of the murderer and his motive."

  "Such as?"

  Moriarty shook his head. "I don't understand your fascination with this," he said. "A mundane series of murders with nothing to recommend them to the connoisseur. Reminiscent of Roehm in Düsseldorf a few years back, or the notorious Philadelphia Fox murders in '78. The only mystery in such cases is how the police can be so inefficient."

  "As I remember," Barnett said, "they never caught the Philadelphia Fox."

  "My point exactly," said Moriarty.

  "If the investigation were in your charge," Barnett asked, "what would you do?"

  "I resist the answer which springs to my lips," Moriarty said, with a hint of a smile, "as the language involved is rather coarse. However—" The professor removed his pince-nez lenses once again and began polishing them with his napkin. As he did he stared absently across the table at the Vernet which hung above the si
deboard, a three-by-five-foot oil entitled Landscape with Cavalry.

  Barnett watched with interest as the professor polished his lenses and stared unseeingly across the room. He was watching Moriarty think, as impressive an event to Barnett as watching Norman-Néruda play the violin or watching W. S. Gilbert scribble. Something incredible was happening right there in front of you, and if you were very lucky there was always the chance that some of whatever it was would rub off on you.

  "The question of motive," Moriarty said, readjusting his pince-nez on his nose, "would seem to be the most promising. Of the five I cited, we can eliminate but one: insanity. I would concentrate on the backgrounds of the three men to establish what they had in common, to try to find a common denominator for our killer."

  "I don't know, Professor," Barnett said. "The way those three were killed seems pretty crazy to me. Slitting their throats in their own beds, then sneaking out past locked doors and sleeping dogs."

  "Slitting their throats may be an action of insanity," Moriarty said, "but it seems to me that the subsequent innocuous departure was eminently sane."

  Mr. Maws, Moriarty's butler, appeared at the dining-room door. "Beg pardon, Professor," he said in his gravelly voice, "but there is a gentleman to see you. An Indian gentleman. I took the liberty of placing him in the drawing room."

  Moriarty pulled out his pocket watch and snapped it open. "And nine minutes early, I fancy," Moriarty said. "No card?"

  "None, sir. He did mention the lack, sir. Apologized for not having one. Gave his name as Singh."

  "I see," Moriarty said. "Tell the gentleman I shall be with him in a few moments."

  "Nine minutes early?" Barnett asked, as Mr. Maws withdrew to reassure their visitor.

  "It is nine minutes before ten," Moriarty said. "This also came in the first post." He extracted an envelope from his jacket pocket and flipped it across the table to Barnett. "What do you make of it?"

  The envelope was a stiff, thick, slightly gray paper that Barnett was unfamiliar with, as was the paper inside. The address on the envelope, James Moriarty, Ph.D., 64 Russell Square, City, was done with a broad-nibbed pen in a round, flowing hand. The handwriting on the letter itself was more crabbed and angular, written with an extremely fine-pointed nib.