The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  The traitor had to be one of them. After an absence of almost three years, he had known it from the moment he stepped back onto English soil from the packet at Dover and boarded the train for London’s Victoria Railway Station. The four men had been the only people in the world who knew when he was to return—even Sal Hodges, who had come back ten days earlier than he, did not know. Yet the moment he arrived at the bottom of the gangway he knew that he was watched by shadowy figures, lurkers almost as good as his own.

  Men and women, some half recognized, flitted around him, many like spectres, floating along the platform or passing among the passengers in the boat train’s corridor. Surely, Moriarty thought, I am not paranoid, this new term for those who almost fear fear itself; those who live in dread of being discovered in even the mildest of actions. God knew, he, James Moriarty, had huge sins to hide, considering his final actions against his brother alone; surely he was not imagining these silent watchers because his conscience hung heavy, and filthy, with guilt?

  But he was being watched and he knew it. One of his four lieutenants must have passed the news of his return to others. Quod erat demonstrandum. But which one?

  Could it be Lee Chow? Unlikely, he considered, though the Chinese was not easy to read; like all his race, the smiling sallow little man was inscrutable. He showed a streak of ruthlessness that was always geared to the Professor’s needs and requirements. Moriarty doubted that Lee Chow had the necessary motivational guile to betray him.

  Likewise the foxy, ferrety Ember. Ember did not appear to have any desire for betterment; he did not dream, like some, of a future starred with great success. Ember, the Professor reckoned, was mainly satisfied with his lot, and asked only to remain in Moriarty’s service with modest rewards. In plain words, Ember knew his place.

  Which left Terremant and Albert Spear. On reaching Dover, Terremant had also noticed the watchers lurking nearby, and he quickly detected those on the train. He had also spotted the shadows close by since they had settled in the house on the fringes of Westminster. Anyone inclined to be deceitful or scheming would have chosen not to perceive the men and women who seemed to be permanently charged with keeping their eyes on the Professor and his household. Any new signs of a watcher, or some strange face coming within their purlieu, and Terremant would report it—he was quick to tell Moriarty of any changes. To the Professor, these did not appear to be the actions of a guilty man.

  There are three of them and Spear, he had told Daniel Carbonardo.

  So what of Spear?

  Albert Spear was the first man ever to work under the Professor. Together with Pip Paget, Spear had been his most trusted man for years, and he knew, literally, where most of the bodies were buried or, in some cases, exactly where they had gone into the water.

  Moriarty considered Spear to be the most intelligent of his immediate lieutenants. Therefore, following this private reasoning, he was possibly the most likely of his close associates to betray him, though he found it increasingly difficult to face up to the fact. If it were eventually demonstrated to be true he would, naturally, be white with anger, yet he also knew it could be years before he would find the ability in himself to take care of the matter—look how it had been, indeed how it was, with Pip Paget.

  As was often the case when he thought of the probable duplicity of Albert Spear, James Moriarty turned away from the subject in the hope that it might go away.

  He ran his right thumbnail down his cheek, from below the eye to the jawline, pressing hard so that the nail made a distinct impression on the skin, taking his mind away from the question of Spear.

  He drained the remaining brandy—“looked at the maker’s name,” as the saying had it—then rose to his feet and walked to his desk, unlocking the longest drawer and removing a small, leather-bound book: the book that contained notes concerning the amounts of money he had harvested during the past three years. Sadly, he could see at a glance that the takings of his family in London had dropped by thirty, maybe even forty percent over the time he had been away. True, he had earned large sums in the Americas; there had been banks in New York and Boston that they had robbed blind using forged bonds and stocks drawn on nonexistent banks in London, like the Royal English Bank and the British Bank of Manchester. Spear had handled himself wonderfully during that time posing as a bank representative, and they had laughed much at how they had passed themselves off as wealthy businessmen in some of New York’s and Boston’s best hotels, living off the fat of the land.

  Those had been good years, keeping their distance from the detective force at New Scotland Yard yet turning many a trick to guarantee a fine income. Alas, what they made on those roundabouts did not quite make up for the losses on the swings of the daily criminal earnings of what he thought of as his family in London.

  JAMES MORIARTY’S LAWYER, the solicitor Perry Gwyther, looked after the money and kept the books and there was plenty of cash to keep, even taking into account the dramatically falling returns during the years Moriarty had been away from London.

  The Professor took a healthy percentage from every robbery, every blagging, every smash-and-grab or knock-off, every break-in, whizzing, and dip that took place in the London area; he also took a slice from the money raked in by the whores and fancy girls, plus a good sum from any man or woman in his area who was on any street dodge, from the three card to thimblerigging, find the lady, or hoopla for that matter. It was why men and women from the larger criminal fraternity swore personal allegiance to him, using a carefully proscribed form of words:

  Those who enjoy my protection have certain allegiance to me.

  I pay you. You have an allegiance to me.

  You promised, so you have an allegiance to me.

  You belong to my family, so you have allegiance to me and to the family.

  Some had broken the oath and absconded to work with Idle Jack Idell, and those who broke the oath would pay. They would certainly pay more than those who gave their normal tribute.

  Every day of the week, two smartly dressed hard young men, one carrying a Gladstone bag, would pass along various London streets, stopping at stalls and shops, pausing to speak to people on one dodge or another, in eating places and public houses, thieves’ kitchens and bordellos, and with the good manners insisted on by the Professor they would say, smiles on their faces, “We’ve come for the Professor’s contribution.” In this way hundreds, nay thousands, of pounds would come eventually to Perry Gwyther to be salted away in special accounts kept by him for James Moriarty. The Professor.

  The lawyer would often rib the Professor and tell him that really he could manage very well without all the money that came in from the various nefarious activities of his family. Indeed, the Professor had a good income already from his honest work. He owned a trading company called The Academic Vending and Service Company Limited, which dealt with the income he received as managing director of six purpose-built music halls and several relatively novel dining rooms and eating places throughout London. The three main well-run good dining rooms, which ran to serving four- and five-course meals for luncheon and dinner, were named The Press off Fleet Street, The Royal Borough in Chelsea, and The Stocks in the City. These places were rivals to the restaurants of the great hotels and to rooms like The Café Royal.

  Apart from these excellent places, he had a series of chophouses and pie shops that provided simple but plain English fare, and altogether, the profit from these establishments brought Moriarty some five or six hundred pounds a week—a sizeable sum, much of which he ploughed back into the business of his criminal family.

  So Professor Moriarty did not go short of anything, and he was known to be generous and charitable to those who worked for him. Albert Spear in fact was often heard to observe that the Professor was too generous for his own good, as the saying went.

  And now, sitting here in his temporary accommodation on the edge of Westminster, he owned that he probably was just that: far too generous. Look how he had let Pip Paget
get away free with his betrayal.

  Soon after the wedding of Pip Paget and Fanny Jones, the Professor had ordered him to kill. What was worse, the victim was a woman known to him: Kate Wright, who had been their housekeeper in the great warehouse headquarters in Limehouse. He knew that had been the straw, the one that caused the breaking of Paget’s back, the final breaching of Paget’s trust, for he had done what was asked of him, yet after it was done he left with Fanny Jones, never to return. In his strange, paradoxical way, the Professor had known the cause of his desertion and had left the matter alone, willing to find within himself an excuse for the big, good-looking lad with the fair hair bleached by the sun. He, Moriarty, was to blame for Paget’s reaction, and while he knew nothing of love, he had in some strange manner loved Pip Paget as a substitute son. Yet now his mind altered. With luck and guile he would soon have a secret headquarters again and the one person he wanted as his housekeeper was Paget’s wife, the country girl Fanny Jones; and whatever the morals, Moriarty usually got his way. Even now he felt his mouth water, and in this salivation, he imagined he could taste Fanny Jones’s boiled leg of pork with pease pudding.

  He rose again, stretched, and walked to the door, opening it and going out onto the landing, hearing, as he did so, the secret knock far below, down the stairs and along the passages to the back door. The secret knock that was not so much a secret, it being the music-hall comedian’s get-off dance—dum-diddy-dum-dum dum-dum, shave-and-a-haircut, me-next.

  Then he heard the voices: Spear, with watchful Harry Judge in attendance.

  “I FEAR IT’S HARD and brutal tidings, Professor.” Spear parroted the words Ember had used when reporting to him. The Professor stood in front of the fire, Spear looking directly into his eyes, with Harry Judge on guard outside the door.

  “Go ahead, then. I dare say I can take it.”

  “It’s Sal. Sal Hodges.”

  “What of Sal?” Moriarty did not even sound alarmed.

  “It seems she’s been murdered. Dead. Strangled in Idle Jack’s house. The house that was his father’s in Bedford Square.”

  “And when did this take place?” Still unruffled.

  “Yesterday evening. The body’s at old Cadvenor’s parlour.”

  “The undertaker?”

  “The undertaker,” Spear spoke low in affirmation.

  “And you’ve seen the body?” the Professor hissed.

  Spear shook his head, still wondering at Moriarty’s unaffected manner.

  “So you haven’t seen the corpse?”

  “Not yet, sir. No.”

  “But you’ve talked to those who have?”

  “I’ve talked with George Gittins. He says she don’t look herself.”

  “I don’t suppose she does; not if she’s been strangled.” Moriarty nodded. “Right, then perhaps we’ll go together and take a look at her when you’ve given me the hard and brutal news.”

  “We know where Idle Jack will be, more or less on his own. Out in the open. On Friday evening.”

  “More or less alone?”

  “He’ll have a bodyguard with him. Maybe two.”

  “Sidney Streeter?”

  “I don’t think you’ll be worried by him anymore.”

  “I wasn’t worried by him in the first place.”

  “Well, I think he is gone to Rotisbone. Been removed from the parish.”

  “I wish him bon voyage. But who will take his place?”

  “I have no idea, though I wager that young Rouster, Rouster Bates, will be one of them.”

  “What, that hoddy-doddy little man?” It summed up the tubby little tough.

  “He used to work for us. Yes. Probably him, and possibly another. But Jack’ll be outside and walking to and from his cab. Outside the Alhambra, Leicester Square. Going in for the benefit performance, which begins at nine o’clock. Heaven knows what time it’ll end. Midnight, maybe long after. But I’m reliably told he will order his cab for fifteen minutes after midnight.”

  “Good. Let me concern myself with the time.” Moriarty squeezed out a thin smile, showing his teeth. Then, from the back of his throat came an unholy cackle. “Albert, that is the best news. Don’t you think it’s time for Idle Jack to become Jack-in-the-Box?” The cackle was totally without mirth and was delivered in a snakelike hiss.

  Albert Spear, steeped in sin as he was, felt a long furrow of fear pass through him, meddling with his brain and seeping dread into his bones and internal organs. His old grandmother would have said someone had just walked over his grave, but from Spear’s viewpoint it was as though someone had got down into his grave and was trying to pull him in after him.

  “Is Daniel in?” Moriarty asked.

  “He is, yes. With the boy.”

  “Send them both up on your way out. And Terremant, is he back yet?”

  “He’s still out with Ember and Lee Chow. They’re sifting every piece of dust to find our people and drag them back.”

  “And you’ll join them, no doubt.”

  “No doubt, sir.”

  “And you’ll get on with finding a suitable warehouse.”

  “Sir, there’s much to be done.”

  Moriarty nodded. “Get on with you and do it then, Bert. Send the others up.”

  Spear had reached the door before Moriarty stopped him again.

  “And Spear…?”

  “Sir?”

  Moriarty let him stand there for ten … fifteen seconds, unable to make up his own mind. “Spear old friend …?” Still without his mind made up. Another ten seconds. Then he thought, there’s a French saying, pour encourager les autres. To encourage the others. “Do you happen to know where that blackguard Paget has got to?”

  “No idea, sir.” Spear’s voice cracking a little.

  “Find him. Let me know where he is. Right?”

  Spear wondered, If I find him should I first warn him? First, before I tell the Professor. “I’ll find him, guv’nor,” he said, knowing he would if he put his mind to it. “Sir, I think you should know that it’s said William Jacobs was present when Sal Hodges met her end.”

  Moriarty nodded, an almost dismissive gesture. “Spear,” he began. Then, “Idle Jack is a man who delights in forbidden pleasures—not just the perversion of man lusting for man. Idle Jack is worse; much worse. And when a man has the desires of Idle Jack, and the murderous sly cunning that goes with them, then he is somehow warped, and not worthy to be called a man at all.” He raised a hand, almost a farewell wave. “And in the morning be here. Half past nine. Be here so we can go and look at Sal’s body, eh?” He gave a throaty little laugh that puzzled Albert Spear as he left the room and hurried down to the basement, Judge at his side, wanting to know everything as usual.

  Back in his quarters, the Professor smiled to himself. He was thinking of Sal, whom he had seen last night, and again first thing in the morning, before she went off to catch the train to Rugby, where she was to visit their son.

  Lying on his desk was her telegram sent from Rugby General Post Office at four this afternoon:

  ARRIVED SAFELY ARTHUR LOOKS WELL AND SENDS LOVE WITH MINE STOP I SHALL RETURN AS ARRANGED STOP MY LOVE SAL

  9

  Resurrection

  LONDON: JANUARY 18, 1900

  TERREMANT TAUGHT YOUNG Wally Taplin to make firelighters by rolling whole pages of The Times newspaper into long tight sticks, then twisting them into a kind of granny knot. “They’ll help start the fire a treat,” Terremant told him. “Three or four of ’em topped by some dry kindling and you’ll have it going in no time. Just add coal.”

  One of Wally’s jobs was to get the Professor’s fire going of a morning. “Only works with the old Thunderer,” Terremant counselled the boy. “I’ve tried other newspapers, but the Thunderer’s the one. It don’t work with the Telegraph or the Express, and the Graphic…? Well, the Graphic’s no bloody good at all … just smoulders, then goes out.”

  The Thunderer was The Times.

  Down in the basement, th
ey had slept in. This was partly due to Terremant not getting home until three in the morning and young Wally sitting up talking to Daniel Carbonardo—listening to grisly tales—as if waiting for Terremant, who had been out around the stews and sinks talking former Moriarty men and women back into the family.

  “Some of ’em required a little encouragement,” he said in the morning when they were crawling around sleepily, just waking up. “I encouraged them, never worry.” He slapped his gloved palm with the heavy stick he carried. The stick had a great knobbled head, like the tip of a mutinously erect pego.* Hard as a brick and heavy as lead. Until he came across the stick in a Berlin shop, close to the Hotel Bristol on the Kurfurstendamm, where Moriarty was staying in the spring of 1898, Terremant always carried a neddy—a short, truncheon-like weapon also shaped similarly to the male member.

  Now, he slapped his open palm again. “Oh, I encouraged them alright. They understood what I was saying. They comprehended my meaning.”

  Young Taplin shuddered, then sat bolt upright, hearing a thunderous knocking at the front door.

  “I’ll learn him an’ all.” Terremant was off, quick as a butler on Palm Sunday, as the saying had it.

  It was a telegram boy, all neat in his blue uniform, heavy coat collar turned up against the cold, with the leather pouch unbuckled on his belt and a telegram for James Moriarty.

  “I have to wait. See if there’s a reply,” the boy said, trying out a bit of cheek on Terremant, who nodded at him, then summoned a drowsy Daniel Carbonardo from below stairs to take the telegram to the Professor.

  Carbonardo had barely turned the handle on the Professor’s bedroom door when Moriarty sat up, eyes open, awake and alert, a hand reaching for the Borchardt automatic pistol that was never far distant from his grasp, awake or asleep.*

  “What is it?” he asked, flat and seemingly disinterested. “What was all that knocking? ‘Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there? A farmer that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty,’ was it?”