by John Gardner
“Drink,” he called to Terremant, and the big man took another sip of the brandy as Moriarty lit a small candle on his desk and went through the business of heating and dropping scarlet sealing wax onto the flap of the envelope, then completing the matter by pressing his signet ring into the wax, leaving a clean impression of his personal seal—a flowery letter M topped by a coronet and a dagger running through the V of the M.
“There,” he said, walking over to Terremant, offering him the envelope addressed to Albert Spear with the words By Hand written in the top right-hand corner. “You are to put this into Albert’s hand and none other. He must read and act on the contents, which he will doubtless share with you. But he must act on the contents immediately. Understand? Immediately!” The word cracking like a whip.
Terremant finished off the brandy, took the envelope, and tucked it away in the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll do it all, Professor. Never fear. The Sheet Anchor off the West India Dock Road. I used to know it well. Half nine.”
“It’s been under my protection for some years now, The Sheet Anchor. Poplar, you’ll recall, is hard by Limehouse, where we once had our headquarters.” Moriarty smiled his grim grimace and nodded a curt dismissal. “Mind you’re not watched or followed, Tom Terremant. But go now and go well …Oh, and Tom?”
“Yes, Professor,” he said, just on the wrong side of surly.
“Don’t let your tongue start wagging. Keep a curb on it. Not a word about what I’ve been doing. Not yet. Understand? What I’ve been up to here, and before, in Vienna. It’s my business and it’s for the sake of our family. You must be aware of that. See?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Well mind it.”
“Shall I bring the lads back here, guv’nor?”
“Not tonight. I’ve got them rooms at Captain Ratford’s place off Leicester Square. They already know that and I’ve got a pair of lurkers watching for their arrival.”* He ran his thumb down his right cheek, nail against the flesh, tracing a line from just under the eye to the jawline. In fact the Professor had no such thing as a pair of lurkers watching. He had returned to London two weeks previously after an absence of several years to discover what he had long suspected: that his family of villains could no longer be completely trusted, just as he could not depend entirely on the close members of his so-called Praetorian Guard, and could depend only partly on his former mistress, Sal Hodges, mother of his son, Arthur James Moriarty.*
Terremant went downstairs to the little cubbyhole that he had set up as living quarters among what probably had once been the senior servants’ quarters near the spacious kitchens: sitting rooms for the cook or butler, he presumed, for the house had obviously been built for a significant family.
He had made the room as cozy as possible, with a comfortable bed, a small chest of drawers, a table, and an easy chair that the previous occupants had left behind. Once inside the room he closed and locked the door, for he had no wish for Moriarty to come in unexpectedly.
He took out the Professor’s letter and dropped it on the table, then lit a small candle and warmed the thin blade of a pocketknife he had bought when in Switzerland with the Professor. Once the blade was warm he wiped off any stains or soot and slid it into the envelope flap, directly below where Moriarty had sealed the packet with wax. His experienced fingers moved the blade along the flap, under the wax, then up to the top of the envelope.
Terremant was an expert at opening the coverings to letters, envelopes, and more exotic foldings. He had started his working life as a footman to a large family here in London. There were several young people, both boys and girls, in the family and he soon discovered that the master—a highly placed man in the Foreign Service—insisted that his butler spy on his sons and daughters. In turn, the butler instructed the footmen in the opening of notes and billets-doux from would-be lovers, which they did the year round for a small percentage of what the butler was given by either the master or, as often occurred, the young ladies and gentlemen who paid so that the servants would look the other way.
Sitting at the table, Terremant smoothed out the letter and, with his finger travelling from word to word and line to line and his lips moving as he slowly read what Moriarty had written, the big man digested the entire message that he was to take to Albert Spear. The job took several minutes, for Terremant was not the fastest reader in England, having learned to read and write at a comparatively late age under the tutelage of Albert Spear himself. But the deception was finally done, and when he had finished and tucked the letter back into its envelope Terremant nodded to himself, as though the whole thing made perfect sense to him, as indeed it did.
He put on his greatcoat—the dark one with the caped shoulders and the long skirts—and took from his pocket the Smith & Wesson revolver that the Professor had given him when they were in America, checking that it was loaded, cocked, and with the safety catch on, then returned it to his pocket. Then, putting on his somewhat battered hat, and picking up the thick, heavy stick with a knobbed head that he liked to carry when going abroad, James Thomas Terremant let himself out the door at the foot of the area steps that he climbed to the pavement and set out on foot, in the growing darkness, to start his lengthy journey to meet his three colleagues in Poplar.
He had almost disappeared into the murk of night as another dark shape detached itself from the blackness across the road and moved after Terremant with a sense of purpose and a silence borne of much practice and thick rubber soles on well-made boots.
3
Questions and Conversations
LONDON: JANUARY 15–16, 1900
THERE WERE NO two ways about it: Daniel Carbonardo was terrified, thought he was in extremis, thought he was going to die, and wanted a priest because if he died without benefit of one he would go straight to eternal damnation, or at best to limbo, where the un-baptized babies go. As a devout Roman Catholic this is what Daniel Carbonardo believed, and it terrified him enough to loosen his sphincter muscle.
The two men who took him out and back down the front steps of the Glenmoragh Private Hotel were none too gentle: louts, tough as a jockey’s backside, pugified and with no finesse to them, which was why he was frightened now. When you put a man to the question you did not usually want him to die, but there were sometimes accidents, and these brutes had not even the sense they were born with. With these two lumps of muscle—rampsmen, in popular jargon—an accident was waiting to occur. Daniel knew that he could sing his heart out and still end up very dead.
Outside, two hansoms were waiting, the cabbies alert, horses snorting, and he knew others from the hotel—two or three men, he thought—were going to the second while the pair of punishers bundled him inside the first cab, sitting themselves one on either side of him, holding his arms in steely grips. As he was entering the cab he caught a glimpse of someone outside, standing in the road, ready to grab him if he tried to leap from the far door. That at least was professional, the kind of thing the Professor’s mob would do without pausing to think, like soldiers at a drill.
The cab began to move, fast from the off, and the bully boys started softening him straight away, slinging a sacking hood over his head and clouting him to the face, making his brain whirl and his ears screech. They didn’t stop punching and slapping him for the length of the journey—he guessed about a mile, maybe a mile and a half. Rock-hard fists came at him, hitting his jaw, cheeks, mouth, and eyes, leaving him in a little mask of pain, with one eye closed, a lip split, and one tooth less, spat out inside the hood.
“Come on, out with you,” one grunted when they came to a final standstill, the cab rocking on its springs, the horse still frisky after its gallop.
“Out, you cunning bastard,” the other growled, close to his face. “Come on, you little Spanish bugger.”
He heard the door open, felt the chill night air, and was pulled so roughly that he went sprawling onto the pavement, banging his face hard, tearing his trousers, and skinning his knees.
Up more stairs, banging his shins, across a landing and stumbling, climbing again, a sharp turning of the stair and bare boards under his feet. They twisted his arms farther up his back, sending needles of pain through his shoulder blades, and one of them kicked him hard behind his right knee, almost bringing him down.
Then they tore off the sacking hood and started in on ripping off his ulster, tearing at his jacket and shirt until he stood bare-chested, breathing hard, his eyes swivelling about to see what he might see, which was nothing. He knew he was in a near-empty attic room, two dormer windows to his right and people moving among the shadows at the far end, which was very dark, illuminated by only two weak little candles standing on boxes on the farther side of a long, narrow bath, filled almost to the brim with water that sloshed around and looked as cold as the North Sea in a blizzard.
He felt both men place hands on his arms—one hand high above the elbow just below the shoulder, the other clamped around his wrist—then a hint of breath on the back of his neck and a further pair of hands closed around his head from behind, tipping him forward, his head going under the water.
Holding him down.
Struggle as he might, there was no way for him to break loose. His lungs were soon bursting, and the blood pounded in his head so that he thought it would explode. His whole world was shrunken now to a need for breath and the thundering of his heart in his ears.
Just as suddenly as he had been ducked into the water, so they pulled him out. No warning, just the harsh tug and he was above water, ears singing and chest heaving, mouth open as he sucked in air.
“Good,” said a voice. “Now you know how bad it can get. Professor Moriarty came to your house in Hoxton, a couple of days back. You thought he was the cabbie, Harkness, who always drove for him in the old days, but it was the Professor himself and you were taken back to the house he’s using near Westminster. Right or wrong?”
“Right,” Daniel heaved, still desperate for breath, the pain in his chest and the need for air overriding everything.
“What did he want, Daniel? You tell me or you’ll drown, lad. I mean it. You’re nothing to me.”
And down he went once more: hard under the water so that he was thrashing about, trying to turn his head from side to side, lungs on fire in need to be quenched by air.
Daniel was near certain that his interlocutor in the shadows was Idle Jack, whom he had glimpsed in the hotel bedroom when they had taken him.
Idle Jack was a coming man in the criminal fraternity, intelligent and with plenty of contacts, building his own family and not to be taken lightly: a barrister and a baronet whose nickname was easy to fathom for he was Sir Jack Idell, which he pronounced with stress on the first syllable—Eye-dell. So of course everyone called him Idle Jack.
The baronetcy had been inherited from his father, Roderick “Roister” Idell, who had been a career soldier, distinguishing himself at the battle of Inkerman—the third great battle of the Crimean War. Shortly after Balaklava, and the famed charge of the Light Brigade, on the night of November 4, 1854, Major Roderick “Roister” Idell of the 68th Durham Light Infantry led a reconnaissance party below the heights at Inkerman, where the British and French armies were established, and reported their strength and disposition to his commanding officer, Sir George Cathcart.* Later in the battle, Idell saved the life of the son of a courtier to the queen, which was the true reason for the baronetcy—that and the Idell millions that came from the flourishing slave trade. The Idell millions, if we are talking facts, were mainly mythical, or eaten away in the upkeep of the house and estate in Hertfordshire and the town house in smart Bedford Square, which had cost Sir Roderick a fortune to start with, and by the time of his death, in 1892, was so run-down and threadbare that Jack’s inheritance—title, houses, land, debts, and all—was more of a burden than a boon; indeed, some said that Idle Jack had little option but to go into a life of crime, which the wits said he’d already done being a barrister at law.
A collage of vivid thoughts concerning Idle Jack swamped Daniel’s brain as they pulled him out of the water again, retching, reaching for air. Gasping, trying to see into that dark patch at the end of the room, where he knew there were people.
The commanding voice again. “What did he want of you, Daniel, the Professor? Did he give you orders? If so, what were they?”
“Yes.” He could hardly get the word out, lunging for more air to feed his starved lungs. “Yes. Yes, he gave me instructions.”
“Tell me, and maybe I won’t let them duck you again.”
He told it all: how he was to go to the hotel, bribe the boot boy, discover how long Mrs. James would be there and in which room she was to be lodged.
“Mrs. James?” It was definitely Idle Jack. In the back of his head Daniel had the picture of him, there next to the bed, grinning his wolfish grin.
Hello, Daniel, we have need to talk.
“That’s what she called herself.”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
There was a pause, maybe the space of two beats, then the hands were on him again and he was submerged once more, fighting for his life; and this was the worst yet, making him urinate in his trousers, brought to a fever of fear. He seemed to be out of air for longer than he could remember, taking a great gulp of water in, choking, and finally suffering the red mist, then the darkness as he hit unconsciousness.
“That’ll teach you to play the old soldier with me, young Daniel,” Idle Jack said, his voice hard as a grindstone.
Carbonardo vomited water back into the bath, his lungs wheezing with the dregs still remaining.
“Who was this Mrs. James, Daniel? Tell me everything now, and tell me true.”
“Sal Hodges: the woman in charge of Moriarty’s girls, the whores and the dollymops, the perfect ladies and nightwalkers, those in his knocking houses.”
“He had many such houses?”
“Some ten in the West End and several smaller shops elsewhere, places of sixpenny sinfulness. In the suburbs mainly.”
“Really? He should count again, I think. The Professor has been away too long and when the cat’s away, the mice … Well, you know how it goes, Daniel.”
Nearby, somebody chuckled.
In his mind, Daniel Carbonardo could see the man, Idle Jack, whose father had been called “Farmer Idell” because of his ruddy complexion, the loping walk as though he tended a plough, and his slack-jawed face. Indeed, Punch, the 3d-a-week comic magazine, had once published a cartoon of him as “Farmer Idell catching flies as he speaks to his farm labourers.” The drawing showed Roderick Idell—old “Roister” himself, mouth drooping as he harangued a group of politicians over whom he held much sway. The son, Jack, was very like his father, and he exploited the somewhat foolish expression of his face by pretending to be “sixpence to a shilling,” as the wags called it. He was, of course, sharp as a needle and dangerous as an angry adder.
“If you should see Moriarty again—which I would not advise—I’d tell him to take a good look at some of his pleasure houses. They don’t all pay their profits to him anymore. Now, what did he want with Mrs. James, Danny?”
“He was after intelligence. He thinks someone near to him has committed treachery, supplying an enemy with hard facts about him and his plans.”
“So, what has this to do with Sal Hodges? He and Sal were as close as wax.”
“I don’t know. He had suspicions. Said Sal would know who the traitor is.”
She’ll know, Daniel. Sal Hodges’ll know, mark me.
“And you were to squeeze the juice from the plum, eh?”
“Them were my orders, yes.”
There was the sound of shuffling from among the people at the end of the room, as though they were acknowledging some kind of truth.
“Good. You’re a sensible man. Far more sensible than I expected from one who takes orders from the Professor.”
Daniel was about to try and speak, but he prudently changed his mind.
Idle Jack continued, quietly, “Will you take some advice from me, Daniel? Will you?”
He nodded, and Idle Jack roared, “Will you, Daniel?”
“Yes,” he croaked.
“Take yourself out of London, then. Take yourself into the country and hide yourself away. Get a job in some country school, maybe, as fencing master or in teaching calisthenics in a school for young women. Just disappear. You follow me?”
“I follow you, sir. Yes.”
“I warn you, Carbonardo, if you don’t get lost and away from Moriarty and his mob, I’ll hunt you down like the hound of heaven and next time I’ll let my lads hold you under forever. And don’t go near the Professor. The Professor’s had his day. Finished!”
And at that moment there was a freak change in the weather. Though it was almost freezing outside, an enormous double lightning flash lit the sky, sending a few seconds of clear light in through the dormer windows.