Death by Gaslight

by Michael Kurland

  When he entered the house, Professor Moriarty was in his study, reading a late-edition Evening Standard. “Ah!” Moriarty said, waving him into the room. “The wanderer returns. You look exhausted. Have you eaten? Take a glass of sherry.”

  “No, thank you,” Barnett said, dropping onto the leather couch and pulling off his shoes. “I haven’t sat down in, it must be, twenty-four hours. I confess, I don’t have much energy left.”

  “Not surprising,” Moriarty said. “You have been quite busy, although it has been the purposeless busy-ness of a headless chicken. You scurry here, you scurry there, you accomplish nothing.”

  “You’ve been having me followed!” Barnett accused.

  “Nonsense!” Moriarty responded. “But most of the places you’ve been, most of the people you’ve spoken to, are being covered by my agents, who are just about ubiquitous at the moment. I told you I’d have five hundred people on the street. In addition to the minions usually in my employ in such cases, every member of Twist’s Beggar’s Guild is now keeping his eyes open for Miss Cecily Perrine. I have offered a hundred pounds reward for any word. More would be counterproductive.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” Barnett said. “But what good will it do? How would they know her if they see her?”

  “Mr. Doyle, the sketch artist, was kind enough to do a portrait from memory, which I have had reproduced on a small letterpress.” Moriarty lifted a piece of paper from his desk and, with a flip of his wrist, skimmed it across the room to Barnett. “A good likeness, I think.”

  Barnett stared at the picture on the four-by-five-inch card. “Amazingly good,” he agreed, trying to ignore the lump that rose in his throat. “They should certainly recognize her if they see her, with the aid of this. But supposing they don’t?”

  “Always possible,” Moriarty said. “I have taken certain other steps which might lead to Miss Perrine. I don’t want to raise false hopes—”

  “What are they?” Barnett demanded. “Please tell me what you’re doing.”

  Moriarty shook his head. “They may lead to nothing,” he said. “But then, if so, I will think of something else. Perhaps some slender shred of information, some slight indication, will come in; that’s all I need, a slender thread. I have been known to accomplish wonders with a slender thread.”

  Barnett stared morosely at Moriarty, and then shook his head. “I know you’re trying to cheer me up,” he said. “And don’t think I’m not grateful. I am. I’ve never known you to go to such trouble before over someone else’s problem; and I know you probably consider it weak of me to be so emotional about it—”

  “Not to have emotions is to be less than human, Mr. Barnett,” Moriarty said. “The trick we British learn is not to display them. Perhaps I have learned that trick better than most. But you are not British. And your emotions are entirely understandable. You should not, however, allow them to cloud your reason, which will be of much greater use in actually recovering Miss Perrine.”

  “She may already be dead,” Barnett said, speaking aloud for the first time what had been preying on his mind for the past day and a half.

  “I doubt it,” Moriarty said. “If whoever abducted her wished her dead, he would have merely killed her. It is, after all, so much less trouble.”

  “Perhaps—” Barnett paused. “A fate worse than death…”

  “Don’t torture yourself, Mr. Barnett,” Moriarty said. “Besides, despite the Romantic writers, there is no fate worse than death. Any pain, indignation, or horror that Miss Perrine may experience at the hands of her abductors will fade away with time—and love. Death, Mr. Barnett, will not fade away.”

  Barnett sat up. “I suppose you’re right, Professor,” he said. “It’s doing nothing—at least, nothing useful—that’s driving me crazy. If there were only something I could do!”

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” Moriarty said. “Get your mind off this thing, at least as much as possible. I promise you that tomorrow you will start useful activity.”

  Barnett stood up and stretched. “Your word’s good with me, Professor,” he said. “I guess it has to be. I’ll do my best. Tonight I sleep. Tomorrow I follow your instructions. If the blisters on my feet allow me to walk at all.”

  “Have Mrs. H give you a basin in which to soak your feet,” Moriarty said. “She has some sort of concoction that works wonders on abused feet.”

  “I’ll do that,” Barnett said. He pointed to the Evening Standard that Moriarty was holding. “I read about the great mystery,” he added. “Two tons of precious jewelry disappears from a locked goods wagon. The mystery sensation of the age. I was part of it, Professor, and I confess that I have no idea of how you managed it.”

  “Let us hope that the authorities remain as puzzled as you are,” Moriarty said. He reached to the side of his desk and picked up a small bronze statuette that Barnett had never noticed before. “May the luck of Uma stay with us.”

  “Uma?” Barnett asked.

  “A Hindu goddess,” Moriarty told him. “Consort of Shiva. A fascinating, complex religion, that.”

  “That’s not part of the, ah, loot, is it?” Barnett asked, looking alarmed.

  “Never mind,” Moriarty said. “It’s not important. Go to bed.”

  “Tell me how you did it,” Barnett said.

  “Did what?”

  “The robbery. Tell me how you removed two tons of jewelry from a locked wagon while it was surrounded by armed guards.”

  Moriarty considered. “Briefly,” he said.

  Barnett nodded.

  “Like most things that seem impossible,” Moriarty said, “it was actually quite simple. I’m afraid that telling you will ruin the effect.”

  “Please, Professor,” Barnett said. “After all, I was part of it.”

  “True,” Moriarty admitted. “And a very important part, although you knew not what you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “The problem was,” Moriarty said, “to get someone into that sealed wagon.”

  Barnett nodded. “That was indeed the problem,” he agreed.

  And you did it,” Moriarty said.

  “I did?”

  “With a brilliant bit of misdirection. You see, I already had an agent in place: one of the Indian porters was my man. He arranged to be among the crew who carried the third treasure chest into the wagon.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, while you drew the momentary attention of everyone with your clever little wager, he merely stayed behind in the wagon while the others left.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Barnett said. “Lord East inspected the wagon after it was loaded, and there was no place for anyone to hide. The walls were even covered with fabric.”

  “Indeed,” Moriarty said. “And an interesting quality of any such solid-color material is that from more than two feet or so distant, you cannot tell how far away you are from any piece of identical fabric without an external referent.”

  “What does that mean?” Barnett asked. “I confess that you’ve lost me.”

  “Picture a table, placed, let us say, five feet in front of a fabric curtain,” Moriarty said. “You are staring at the table with the curtain behind it. Wherever you look you see the curtain—above the table, to the right of the table, to the left of the table, between the legs of the table. Correct?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I know, it sounds too obvious to be worth stating. But now, supposing I take a piece of fabric that is identical to the curtain and fasten it between the back legs of the table, from the rim of the table to the floor. When you look at it, you’ll think you see the back curtain, but in reality you’ll be staring at a piece of fabric that is five feet closer to you.”

  “I see,” Barnett said.

  “And between that fabric and the actual curtain,” Moriarty said, “I could hide a man, a donkey, a small cannon, or anything else that would fit, and you’d be willing to swear that you could see the whole area clearly,
and there was nothing there.”

  Barnett thought this over. “So that’s how you did it,” he said.

  “That’s how you did it,” Moriarty replied. “You distracted the crowd for long enough for my agent to drop a fabric curtain that he had rolled around one of the carrying bars for the chest. There he was, crouched down, in the supposedly empty area between the chest and the wall. Lord East thought he could see the far wall, but he couldn’t.”

  “So the wagon was sealed with the man inside.”

  “Just so.”

  “But how did the man get the treasure out?”

  “One piece at a time.”

  “And the guards?”

  “It was invisible to the guards.”

  “You mesmerized them?”

  Moriarty chuckled. “Listen, and I shall describe the rest of the operation,” he said. “The agent in the goods wagon waited until the train was in motion. Then he pried up a one-foot-square section of the sheet-metal floor with a device that I had fabricated, which looks a great deal like an oversized tin opener. After which he took a small keyhole saw and leisurely cut out the underlying boards. For this task he was allowed two hours.

  “The next step was to stop the train at a precisely predetermined point.”

  “A snap,” Barnett commented.

  “Indeed it was,” Moriarty agreed, “if I correctly interpret that barbaric expression. Especially a ‘snap’ if you consider that the engine driver was almost certainly not going to overrun a danger signal on the semaphore repeater. And if you consider that the railways use a ‘positive’ system of signaling, which assures that the normal condition of the signal arm will be ‘danger.’ This means that if any natural misfortune occurs to the semaphore apparatus, it assumes the ‘danger’ position rather than the ‘safety’ or ‘caution’ positions.”

  “A natural misfortune?”

  “Correct. In this case, a severely corroded cable accidentally snapped. The maintenance division must be sternly spoken to. A ‘snap,’ as you say. There are substances known to chemists which can incredibly speed up the corrosion of any metal object.”

  “And the signal swung to ‘danger’?”

  “Just so. And the engine driver of Lord East’s caravan stopped the train. What else was he to do?”

  “And then?”

  “A hatch opened between the metals—what you would call the rails—in the track bed. Carefully disguised as two wooden sleepers and the space between, the hatch covered a specially constructed chamber buried in the embankment. The hatch was so placed as to be directly beneath the hole in the floor of the wagon when the train halted at the signal.”

  “That simple?” Barnett marveled. “And the treasure was just handed out?”

  “No, no, the stop would not be nearly long enough for that,” Moriarty said. “I estimated three minutes. As it happened, they took seven, but even that would not have been nearly long enough for the transfer of that bulk of boodle. No, Mr. Barnett, what happened at this carefully prearranged pause was that certain materials were handed up into the wagon. And then a second man joined the one who was already there.

  “This second man was an expert in the ancient craft of reproducing seals. And he brought with him the needed equipment—to wit, a spoon, a candle, and a loaf of bread.”

  Barnett sat back down on the couch. Moriarty had obviously succeeded in his attempt to distract his assistant from his troubles, at least for the moment. “A loaf of bread?” Barnett asked.

  “The best way to duplicate a wax seal in anything like a reasonable length of time,” Moriarty said, “is to take an impression of it with moist bread which you have kneaded between your palms. Done by an expert, it’s as effective as any other method. What the expert does in this case is to use a hot wire to separate the seal from the treasure chest, first making a bread impression of it in case it breaks while being removed.”

  “Yes, but why bother?” Barnett asked. “Why not just break open the chests?”

  “It adds an extra element of confusion,” Moriarty said. “It is my experience that a crime should be either so simple that there is no place to look for a solution, or so confusing that there are too many places to look. In this case, I chose the latter.”

  “How do you mean, Professor?”

  Moriarty thought for a second. “In a simple crime,” he explained, “you know all the elements, but they take you nowhere. A man is hit on the head, and his purse is taken. When he comes to, there is nobody around. You know everything that happened, but unless he recognized his assailant, it is virtually hopeless to try to recover the purse.

  “In a complex crime, there are so many factors to trace down that much time is lost before you find out which are pertinent. The seals are broken on the chests, and they are found to be empty. But you don’t know when the treasure was removed. Before the chests were loaded on the train? After the train left Plymouth? After it arrived at Hampton Court? Each of these must be investigated. It confuses things, you see.”

  “What did happen?” Barnett asked.

  “After the train started up again, my agents opened the treasure chests, removed all the baubles, and closed and very carefully resealed the chests. Then, immediately after the train passed through Hampermire Station, they spread newspaper on the floor, and carefully immersed each article in a basin containing an oily solution, with just a hint of creosote, which dyed the item a dingy brown. Then they tossed it through the hole. The jewelry was spread over six miles of track, and quite invisible unless you were looking for it. Even then it would be easy to miss.”

  “You were at Hampermire,” Barnett said.

  “True. And Toby was waiting for me.”

  “Toby?”

  “A hound I borrowed from a friend. Quite a nose, Toby has. I believe he could follow the scent of creosote through a windstorm in a peppermill.”

  “Ah!” Barnett said.

  “The rest is obvious,” Moriarty said. “The two in the wagon cleaned up, leaving no trace of themselves, and tossed the detritus onto the track, where other agents immediately removed it. Then they themselves went into a carefully prepared hole when the train was forced to stop for a herd of cows which had unaccountably broken through their fence and wandered onto the track. They pulled a specially prepared metal patch over the hole in the floor and, by igniting a thin strip of magnesium which came out the bottom, caused it to solder itself into place.”

  Barnett thought this over for a while. “Very neat,” he said. “They’ll never catch on to it. It will be one of the mysteries of the century.”

  “I doubt that,” Moriarty said. “The authorities will, sooner or later, discover how it was done. Especially if, as I suspect, they call in Sherlock Holmes. But by the time they figure it out, the back-trail will be so cold that all their leads will peter out into dead ends. Your little bit of misdirection, I believe, will elude even Mr. Holmes.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” Barnett said. “I have developed a distinct aversion to prison food.” He got up and, taking his shoes in his hand, hobbled out of the study and started up the stairs.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TETE-A-TETE

  “He knows that I know, and I’m sure he knows that I know he knows. But for all of that, can I assume that he knows I know he knows I know he knows?”

  “I don’t follow that,” the baroness replied. “And I wish you’d stop; you’re giving me quite a headache!”

  D’ARCY ST. MICHEL

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Sherlock Holmes was at the front door of 64 Russell Square, yanking on the bellpull. “Tell your master I wish to see him,” he announced when the butler opened the door.

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Maws replied, bowing and stepping aside in a parody of butlerian stiffness. “Alone today, are you, sir? Please follow me into the study. The professor is expecting you. I shall inform him that you’re here, and he will be down directly.”

  “Expecting me, is he?” Holmes asked, stalking into the stu
dy and glaring around at the furnishings.

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Maws said. “So he told me, sir.”

  Ten minutes later, when Moriarty came downstairs and entered the study, he found Holmes crouching in front of the desk, unabashedly going through the third drawer down. “Looking for something?” Moriarty demanded, reaching around his desk and slamming the drawer.

  Holmes jerked his hand aside. “Always, Professor,” he said. “And someday I’ll find it.” He retreated to the black leather armchair on the other side of the desk. “I have this insatiable curiosity about you, Professor Moriarty. Every little thing you do is of interest to me. Every little scrap of paper in this room helps, in some small way, round out my picture of you and your activities.”

  “Would you care to go through the bottom drawer?” Moriarty asked. “I assume you’ve already been through the upper two.”

  “Very kind of you,” Holmes said. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  Moriarty settled into the chair behind his desk and regarded Holmes unblinkingly. “You have lost all shame, Holmes,” he said. “It was but a few weeks ago that you and a squad of cloddish policemen went through this house from attic to sub-basement, examining the contents of every drawer, scratching furniture, bending lampshades, ripping curtains, breaking porcelain, and no doubt stealing the silver. After that farce it will be a long time before you get any judge to issue you another warrant against any of my property. And yet here you are again, going through my desk.”

  “Your butler had me wait in here,” Holmes said mildly. “I was merely amusing myself while I waited.”

  “I admit I should have locked the drawers and cabinets before you arrived,” Moriarty said. “But I keep forgetting, Holmes, that you are capable of such appalling manners.”

  Holmes chuckled. “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted. “But only in my dealings with you, Moriarty. I assure you that when it comes to the rest of humanity, I am considered urbane and civil, and my manners are irreproachable. There is something about our relationship that brings out my worst qualities. I think it is, perhaps, the fact that every time I see you sitting there in your sack coat and your striped trousers and your impeccably knotted cravat, with a painting worth ten thousand pounds hanging on your wall and a library filled with rare books and a wine cellar filled with rare vintages, I cannot help reflecting that were there any justice in this world, you would be wearing gray cloth and occupying your time by walking the treadmill at Dartmoor.”