Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels)

by Kurland, Michael

  Moriarty stared at him for a moment and then changed the subject. “Let us leave this room and go next door,” he said. “I would like to talk to that girl, Pamela, now.”

  “Whatever for?” Epp asked.

  “One never knows,” Moriarty told him. “Public school teaches you that.”

  [CHAPTER ELEVEN]

  PAMELA’S STORY

  A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems,

  a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia, and so on.

  A criminal produces crimes …

  [and] the whole of the police and of criminal justice,

  constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc.;

  and all these different lines of business,

  which form equally many categories

  of the social division of labour,

  develop different capacities of the human spirit,

  create new needs

  and new ways of satisfying them.

  —KARL MARX

  THE ROOM WAS SMALL AND TIDY. The walls were covered in light blue flocked wallpaper with a scattered pattern of pale yellow English primroses. It was furnished with a bed, a washstand, a plain pine bureau, a small table, and two wicker chairs. Pamela was sitting on one of the chairs in the far corner of the room, rocking ever so slightly back and forth as Moriarty entered, with Epp a step behind. The front legs of the chair rose as she rocked back and then landed with a slight bump as she went forward, a slow and monotonous beat like the thumping of the human heart. The gas mantle on the wall above the bed burned low, and the light spread cautiously about as though it didn’t want to intrude on the shadows.

  The girl had stopped sobbing and was staring out through the slightly parted window curtains with no sign of interest in what she saw. Her light brown hair was done up in an untidy bun held together by three red-lacquered Japanese chopsticks thrust through the bun in seemingly random directions. Her plum-colored silk robe was tied high under her small breasts. Her face looked bland and untroubled, so that one might suppose that her red eyes and the occasional tear that ran down her cheek were the result of some mild physical affliction.

  “Pamela,” Moriarty said, slowly crossing the room, “may we speak with you?”

  She gave no response, no sign that she had heard him or was aware of his presence.

  Moriarty stopped in front of her. “Pamela? Heather?” He slipped his pince-nez into his jacket pocket and squatted by her side. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  “Come now, gel,” said Epp sharply, striding across the room with great policeman’s strides and stopping next to the professor, “answer the gentleman’s questions. There’s a good gel.”

  Moriarty took the girl’s hand, and she neither resisted nor welcomed his touch. He pressed the back of her hand with his thumb and noted her lack of response. He took the magnifying monocle from his vest pocket and used it to peer closely into each eye. “Her mind is somewhere else,” he said. “Possibly in retreat from confronting whatever it was that she saw. I shall attempt to bring it back. Although perhaps I will not be doing her a kindness.”

  Epp watched Moriarty’s antics with resignation. His was not to reason why.

  Moriarty took a pocket watch from his waistcoat and held it before the girl’s eyes, letting it dangle from about six inches of chain. “Can you see the watch?” he asked, his voice soothing and gentle. “The silver face is engraved with a representation of the solar system. See this little dot here? This tiny orb represents the planet Earth. Here, I’ll move the watch back and forth, back and forth, like the solar system moving through the vastness of space. Watch it and relax and consider how meaningless and unimportant our life here is: tiny specks on a tiny orb circling a tiny sun—see, that’s the sun in the center—one of thousands, millions, of stars stretching for all of eternity.”

  “Cheerful!” muttered Epp.

  “I’ve always found that a consideration of the futility of life is most relaxing,” Moriarty said in the same soft voice. “It puts one’s problems in the proper perspective.”

  He continued the mesmeric induction for a while, gradually adding the phrases of instruction and command and repeating them over and over in a soft, compelling tone. “Listen to my voice … Ignore all other sounds but my voice … Concentrate on my voice and let it be your guide … You will answer my questions … You will not be afraid…”

  Then, finally, he tested. “Do you hear what I say?”

  There was no response.

  “You may speak,” Moriarty told her. “Do you hear my voice?”

  “Yes,” Pamela responded, her voice flat and low.

  “And only my voice?”

  “Only.”

  “And you will listen to my voice, only my voice, and follow my instructions?”

  There was a pause while she, even in her trance, thought this over.

  “No harm will come to you, I assure you,” Moriarty told her in the same calm tone. “My voice will lead you through the pain and the harm, and bad things will not touch you. I will protect you. My voice will guide you.”

  “All right,” she said.

  Moriarty nodded and put the pocket watch back in his waistcoat pocket. “I want you to go back in time, go back to when you were just a little girl. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” she said and nodded her head abruptly up and down.

  “You’re a little girl now, and nobody has hurt you and you’re not afraid.” He turned to Epp and added in a low voice, “I’m taking a chance with this. God knows what her childhood was like.”

  “I wouldn’t choose to return to mine,” Epp said. “Much of it, anyway. Ipso facto.”

  Moriarty returned his attention to the girl. “Tell me your name,” he asked.

  “Pamewa,” she said. “Pamewa Dilwaddy, so it please your worship.” Her voice was the voice of a little girl, hesitant and singsong.

  “How old are you, Pamela?”

  “Seven years old and two months, so it please your worship.” She made a gesture as though she were attempting to curtsey without rising from her chair.

  “Where are you, Pamela?”

  “In the cottage.”

  “I see. Where is the cottage?”

  “It’s where me and my mum live.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Epp declared. “Get on with it.”

  Moriarty cast a mild but reproachful gaze on Epp and then turned back to the girl. “Are you happy here, in the cottage?”

  “Happy?”

  “Yes. Do you feel happy?”

  Epp snorted.

  “I ain’t never thought about it, your worship.” The little girl’s voice held a hint of wonder. “I don’t feel bad, anyways. Not about most things, anyways.”

  “That will have to do,” Moriarty told her. “Now you will keep feeling just that way—not bad about most things—and let us move ahead in your life until you’re just a little older. Let’s say sixteen. You’re sixteen now. It’s your sixteenth birthday. Can you take me to your sixteenth birthday?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good. Now what’s happening?”

  She held out her hand, palm up, and then squeezed it into a tight little fist. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “That’s rightly kind of you.”

  “Who are you speaking to?” Moriarty asked.

  “The gent what just gave me this,” she replied, raising her clenched fist higher.

  “What have you got there?” Moriarty asked.

  “Three bob,” she said. “What this gent just gave me. Just for doing it. And on a bed. And he says I can stay the night, the room’s paid for.”

  “A nice man, is he?”

  Pamela nodded. “Ain’t many of them about, I can tell you.”

  She began to get up from the chair, and Moriarty put a restraining arm on her shoulder. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Got to sponge out,” she said. “Can’t take no chances.”

  “Blimey!” said Epp.

 
“The day is over now,” Moriarty told Pamela, gently pushing her back into her seat. “All that is done and time has passed. You’re at Madam Mollie’s house now.”

  “I am?” Pamela looked around, her mouth opening in what might be surprise.

  Moriarty refrained from asking her what she was seeing.

  She examined her arms for a long moment and then parted her robe to stare down speculatively at her legs. “I’m clean,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Epp complained.

  “You are very clean,” Moriarty agreed.

  “Mollie makes the girls wash all over.” She raised one leg to take a closer look. “Even our feet!”

  “It’s supposed to be very healthful,” Moriarty said.

  “Some of the gentlemen,” Pamela said, wrinkling her nose, “aren’t so very healthful. Them we bathes first, if as how they let us. Most of them do.”

  “I imagine so,” Moriarty agreed.

  Pamela giggled. “What gentleman don’t like having two girls in their chemises going at him with soap and sponge whilst he’s tubbing? None that I’ve seen.”

  Epp made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a snort. “Get on with it, man!” He told Moriarty in a hoarse whisper.

  “Impatience is not regarded as a virtue,” Moriarty said, “even in our hasty society. Do you want speed or do you want results?”

  “I doubt there are any results to be had,” Epp replied testily.

  “We’ll see,” said Moriarty. He turned back to the girl. “I want you to think of Rose now. Can you do that?”

  Her face tightened and her chin quivered.

  “Not as you last saw her,” Moriarty continued, “but as you remember her. Your friend. Your good friend. You’re back with her now.”

  “Rose,” Pamela said softly.

  “Your good friend,” Moriarty suggested.

  “She’s the best,” Pamela agreed.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We stay together,” she said. “We go to the shops together. Of a time we see gentlemen together, when the gent wants such. Of a time we sleep together and hold each other when the one of us is sad or otherwise upset or hurt.”

  “Do you ever go to plays or entertainments?” Moriarty asked.

  Epp gave an exasperated sigh and stepped over to a wooden chair across the room and sat down.

  “We go to the music halls,” she said. “The Palace, and the Empire, and the Alhambra. We get all dressed up and fancy, we do.”

  “Fancy indeed!” Epp mouthed.

  “Like regular ladies,” she said.

  Epp snorted.

  “Well, now we’re going to go to the day at the end of the week before when you were hiding in the closet and Rose got … hurt,” Moriarty told her. “But you’re not really going to be there. You’re going to be looking down at it from a distance, as if it were a performance at the Alhambra. It can’t affect you. You’re just a spectator. It’s just a play.”

  “In the audience,” Pamela whispered.

  “That’s right—just in the audience.”

  “Just a play.”

  “Just so. The play’s beginning now. What do you see?”

  After a long wait, Pamela said, “Heather is hiding in the wardrobe.”

  “Wait a sec,” said Epp, leaning forward. “That’s her name, ain’t it? When she’s, um, working.”

  “Yes,” Moriarty agreed. “She’s looking down at herself and that room from a safe height.”

  “Interesting,” Epp admitted. “Verbum sap.”

  “Why, Pamela?” Moriarty asked the girl. “Why is Heather hiding in the wardrobe?”

  “It’s a game we plays with the baron,” she said. “When I don’t have a gentleman of my own I hides in the wardrobe, and then when Rose and the baron have been at it for a while, I sneaks out and comes up next to the bed. The baron always acts as like he’s surprised. Then he says, ‘My two flowers,’ or something of the sort, and I joins them.”

  “And this night?” Moriarty asked. “This last night? You are—Heather is—hiding in the wardrobe when the baron comes in?”

  The line of her mouth tightened and turned down, and she clenched and unclenched her fists.

  “You’re in the audience, Pamela, watching the story unfold,” Moriarty told her. “Just in the audience. Just watching.”

  “I see it,” she said. “Rose and the baron is coming in, and Heather is squatting in the wardrobe peeking through the keyhole.”

  “Then what?”

  “The baron sits on the side of the bed, and he says, ‘Come here, my little princess,’ like always. Well, it’s always something of the sort. Sometimes ‘little duchess,’ and once it was ‘my slender rani.’ I remember that one because I had to go ask what it meant. Mollie says it’s like an Indian princess. So I says to Rose that she should ask the baron if he’d ever been to India.” She looked down, and her voice changed to a husky vibrato. “But she never did. Never did.”

  “So the baron said, ‘Come here, my little princess’? And Rose went over?”

  “She dances over to him,” said Pamela. “Dances. Kind of, you know, twisty-like. What men like to watch.”

  “Does the baron like it?”

  “Seems to. He gets this silly smile on his face, and his little mustache starts twitching like it does when he’s pleased. Very pleased, if you see what I mean.”

  “I do,” Moriarty told her. “Then? What happens next?”

  Pamela’s eyes grew wide, and both hands came up to her mouth. A soft, high-pitched keening sound began somewhere deep inside her thin frame and slowly got louder until it filled the room.

  “Now, now,” Moriarty said sharply. “You’re outside the event looking in. It may be hard to look at, but you’ve no part in it. You’re sitting with me in the audience! The two of us together looking at the scene as though it were on a stage.”

  “Looking,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “From the orchestra.”

  “If you like. Or we could be in the balcony, or in a box.”

  The keening stopped. “It’s a frightful thing, it is,” she said. “A frightful thing. All sudden-like, and it don’t make no sense.”

  “Tell it to me,” Moriarty said. “Describe it to me as it happened. We’ll sit here together in the audience, and you’ll tell me what you see.”

  “Bam!” she said. “Like that. Bam! The door throws open and these two men jumps in like. All in black they is. And the baron, he cries out, ‘What the…,’ and starts to leap out of bed. But the tall, thin one, he coshes him across the head, and the baron falls down like a sack. Then Rose, she starts in to scream, but before it can come out of her mouth, the other one, he coshes her, too, and she falls flat on the bed.”

  “Can you describe the two men?”

  “The tall, thin one is … tall. Even taller than the baron, and thin. He moves like a—” she thought about it for a second. “Like a cat—all sort of smooth and slicket and pleased with himself. The other was shorter, but not real short or nothin’, and thick and wide and sort of solid-like. He had this thin, wide mustache as well.”

  “What happened then?” Moriarty asked.

  Pamela turned her head sideways and cast her eyes up so that she was looking at the ceiling. She said nothing.

  Epp, who had been standing aside for most of this, came and bent over the girl. “Come on, now!” he said sharply. “What did you see? What happened next?”

  Pamela’s mouth formed into an O. Of astonishment? Fear? Horror? It was impossible to tell.

  “Describe it for me,” Moriarty said, “what you see happening up there on the stage. Remember, you and I are here, and the stage is way up there. Very far away. And nothing happening on it is real. It’s just playacting.” He paused and then said, “What do you see?”

  “They drags in Mr. Fetch and pushes him under the bed. I guess they must’ve coshed him too, ’cause he was all loose-like.”
r />   “What happened next?” asked Moriarty.

  “Then the shorter one, he goes over to the door. And the taller one, he goes over to the bed, and he takes out a knife…” Her eyes got large and round, her face turned white, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “And he laughs … giggles … like sumfing funny was happening—” She choked up and began gasping for breath. “And—”

  “That’s enough,” Moriarty told her. “Really, it’s all right. That will do. We won’t watch what happens anymore. Let’s go past that to what happens next.”

  After a pause her breath became regular, and a few seconds later she was able to raise her head. “Next?”

  “After the tall one finishes with … what he’s doing on the bed. What happens next?”

  Pamela thought it over for a few seconds, and a look of great pain passed over her face before it became once again impassive. “Next,” she said.

  “Yes,” Moriarty agreed.

  “Next what happens is the thick one, he pushes the window open and sticks his head out,” she said.

  “Ah!” Moriarty said. “The window. I should have thought of that.”

  “Thought of what?” Epp demanded, sounding aggrieved.

  “The window. If the, ah, baron was not the perpetrator of these horrors, and it looks now as though he was not, they, whoever they are, had to get him out, didn’t they? And without chancing being seen.”

  “So they just flung him out the window?”

  “I fancy they used a rope of some sort.”

  Pamela nodded. “A rope,” she said. “They tied a rope around his middle and lowered him out the window. Him in his silk underdrawers.”

  “Did they say anything, these strange men? Anything at all?”

  “The shorter one. He says, ‘Feet, feet!’ a couple of times. The taller giggles a bit more, but he says nothing.”

  “Feet, feet?”

  “‘Feet, feet!’ he said. Then he said again, ‘Feet, feet,’ and that’s what all he said.”

  “Interesting,” said Moriarty.

  “Nonsense!” said Epp.

  “Let us just look at the taller man—at his face. Can you see his face?”

  She nodded.

  “All right. Look at his face. Pay no attention to what he’s doing. It doesn’t concern you now.”