The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  “I thought it was ill luck to quote from that play, sir.” Carbonardo was uncharacteristically arch.

  “Daniel, yes. Ah, the Scotch play. So, I have a literate assassin. One who knows his Shakespeare.” Then, raising his eyebrows in query, “The knocking?”

  “A telegram for you, sir.” He offered the buff envelope. “The boy awaits an answer.”

  The Professor ripped open the flimsy envelope and quickly read the contents:

  ARRIVING ON THE PACKET IN DOVER FROM CALAIS DUE AT NOON ON MONDAY 22ND JANUARY STOP THENCE TO LONDON BY THE BOAT TRAIN STOP WIRE MY INSTRUCTIONS STOP GOOD WISHES VON HERTZENDORF ENDS

  “No answer,” the Professor smiled, as though to himself, then asked Carbonardo if he would draw a bath and see if Terremant had prepared breakfast.

  Outside it was heavy cold, with a north wind that had brought thick snow and a hard frost in the hours before dawn, its rime a carapace on plants and trees, the windows thick with freezing hard geometric patterns both outside and in.

  Eventually, bathed and shaved, James Moriarty went through to his main room, dressed in his dark blue silk dressing gown with the military frogging on the sleeves and across the fastenings. Running a hand over his freshly shaved jowls, he thought of Mysson and the need to have his razor freshly ground and stropped.

  Christopher Mysson—Sharp Kit—was their knife-grinder; he prepared all knives and razors and was paid two pounds a week to do it. A little man with an untidy mop of hair and some malformation of his back from stooping since childhood for hours on end over his footpedalled grindstone, he was a diligent worker. Daniel Carbo-nardo, for instance, swore by him. “Never had knives so sharp,” he would say. “Sharp as a hornet in heat.”

  Wally Taplin waited to serve him the breakfast Terremant had cooked.

  Years previously, Terremant had been taught the basics of cooking, from how to boil an egg to the method of grilling a beefsteak and preparing vegetables. His teacher was Kate Wright, who had been the Professor’s head cook and housekeeper before she, with her husband, was discovered in duplicity, and so paid the price, at the hands of Philip Paget as it happened—the reason Pip Paget had left Moriarty’s employ in a somewhat deceitful manner.

  Now, Jim Terremant was a reasonable, if rough and ready, cook. This morning he had prepared a small rump steak and some grilled kidneys, with potatoes after the French manner: parboiled, then fried, in deep beef dripping, until they were a golden brown. He had learned a little about French cuisine from a sous-chef at the Crillon while Moriarty was staying in Paris.

  Young Taplin poured the tea, a strong Indian brew, the kind that Moriarty liked best. He could not do with what he termed “thin and insipid tasteless Chinese Limehouse mistwater.” He would say loudly that he preferred something strong, “brewed from a good Indian particular, with sugar and a teardrop of tiger’s milk.”

  So, Wally poured the Darjeeling and kept the toast coming while the Professor ate his way through the steak and grilled kidneys, and put a sprinkle of lemon juice over the potatoes.

  When he tasted the tang of lemon on the crisp potatoes, the old rhyme went through his mind:

  Two sticks and Apple,

  Ring ye Bells at Whitechappel,

  Old Father Bald Pate,

  Ring ye Bells of Aldgate,

  Maids in White Aprons,

  Ring ye Bells at St. Catherines,

  Oranges and Lemons

  Ring ye Bells of St. Clemens.

  “Breakfast,” he would often say, “should be the best meal of the day: the most enjoyable.”

  On completing the meal he wiped off his mouth with a crisp, freshly laundered napkin—Ada Belcher again—and went over to his desk to write a letter to Joey Coax, the society photographer:

  Dear Mr. Coax,

  I have been much taken with your excellent photographs which have appeared in Queen and The London Illustrated News. In particular I found your portrait of the young Lady Beamish to be one of the best portraits ever done in this medium. However, I would much like to talk to you about other photographs that have come to my notice. These are your artistic poses of young women of great beauty, providing physical comfort to well-endowed young men. Regarding these, I think I have a plan from which we can both benefit. If you would like to discuss this matter further we could meet, I would suggest at one p.m. tomorrow, 19th January, at my dining rooms called The Press, where I can give you luncheon. I look forward to our meeting.

  Cordially

  James Moriarty

  When he had first seen the “artistic” photographs, Moriarty had scoffed. “Nothing but lazy lasses having their way with skinny little men blessed with enormous haricots,” he said. But later he came to realize that Coax had the knack of positioning the subjects and lighting them so that the pictures were indeed erotic in substance.

  Now, he addressed the envelope to Mr. Coax’s studio in New Oxford Street, sealed it, and instructed Wally Taplin to deliver the letter by hand. “You must place it directly in Mr. Coax’s hand,” he told the boy. “He is a tallish man, dark hair going bald at the back. A tonsure like a monk.” He placed his own right hand over the crown of his head, a gesture for the benefit of young Taplin. “He dresses in a dandified way,” he continued. “And, Wally, don’t let yourself be caught alone with him inside his studio. Conduct all business with him outside his door, even in the street. You follow me?”

  “I’m ahead of you, Professor. Mr. Terremant’s told me about dandified gents…”

  “I’m sure he has, Walter.”

  “Has a name for them.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me …”

  “Begins with a P …”

  “Yes, my lad.”

  “And I’m to kick ’em in the baubles if they try anything on.”

  “Good boy.” Moriarty smiled benevolently and ruffled the lad’s hair. “On with you, then,” he said, as Terremant came in to say that Spear had arrived and Harkness had the cab out front.

  Changing into his dark jacket over his waistcoat, then getting into his topcoat—the one with the heavy fur collar—Moriarty pulled on his gloves, flexing his fingers to stretch the leather and lacing the gloved fingers of each hand, improving their tight fit. Finally he put on his hat, giving it a tiny pat on the right side to set it at a jaunty angle, and took the ebony silver-topped cane from Terremant. Thus dressed, he joined Spear outside, noticing with pleasure that the steps had been swept and cleared of snow.

  “Good boys,” he muttered to himself, nodding and looking pleased.

  “Cadvenor’s funeral parlour,” he told Harkness as he climbed into the cab with Spear close behind him.

  Michael Cadvenor ran his business from a gloomy house in St. Luke’s Road that was in the area where the Kensington gravel pits were once grouped around the Uxbridge Road. In the fourteenth century it was known as Knottyngull. In reality it was Campden Hill or North Kensington, lately Notting Hill, and once the turnpike was opened it became Notting Hill Gate.

  Quickly alerted to Moriarty’s arrival at his premises, Cadvenor came out of his front door, dry-washing his hands in his usual unctuous manner, bowing from the waist as if to royalty. “You do me an honour, Professor, coming to my home.”

  “I have come to your business, not your home, Michael. I wish to see the corpse you brought back last night from Brick Lane.”

  More bows and the stretching out of an arm, gesturing with flattened palm toward his mortuary, a brick structure built onto the west end of the house—not the most wonderful place to visit. Inside there was the faintest scent of decay, which, Moriarty considered, would be unbearable had it not been freezing cold. Inside, unshaded electric bulbs sent a glare of harsh light down on the six-wheeled stretchers that sat neatly arranged in the clinically bare room. The shape of a human form showed under a somewhat grimy white sheet thrown over the stretcher nearest the door.

  “I only have the one visitor at the moment, so.” Cadvenor’s Irish brogue was just detectable. “Just
the one, Professor, and I was wondering if you—”

  Moriarty cut him off sharply. “Let me see.”

  He had already handed his hat and cane to Spear as he strode to the terribly still figure under the sheet and told Cadvenor to uncover the head. “Let me see her.”

  The Professor had to use his legendary iron control as the head and shoulders were uncovered, for at first sight this was Sal Hodges. It was only as he bent closer to the face that Moriarty realized there were things about the face of the corpse that did not apply. Yes, at first sight she was the twin of Sal Hodges, and he was surprised to feel a long shaft of pain travel through his body, close to his heart. Then, looking closer, he saw that this woman had grey hair and that the hair was in fact covered with what initially looked like some kind of chemical residue. Brick dust, he thought to himself; then he corrected it. Henna. This person had used henna to colour her hair, and James Moriarty knew, sure as there were four aces, that Sal Hodges had never used any kind of colouring for her hair. Many a time he had run his fingers through the long fall and lifted the hair in his hand, heavy and sleek as it was, coppery gold and full of body. Sal had no need of colouring.

  Yet he still admitted that the face had Sal’s features, sunken now, in death, the lips blue and horrible bruising about the throat where the strangulation had taken place. Despite the decay, he could not deny that the features were those of Sal.

  Taking a handful of the sheet, just below the neck, Moriarty tugged mightily and stripped the body so that it now lay unclothed and awful in death before their eyes.

  “Spread her legs!” he ordered, nodding at Michael Cadvenor, who, mistaking his meaning hesitated.

  “But, sir…” he stammered.

  “Spread her legs, damn you, Michael. Do as you’re told and remember who pays your stipend.”

  Hesitantly, Cadvenor reached over and gently pulled the woman’s legs apart, a hand on each knee. Then, Moriarty leaned forward, took the right thigh in his gloved hand, and turned it so that he had a full view of the skin on the inside of the thigh—pasty, bluish, marbled dead flesh.

  “Now turn her over, Michael. Over with her.”

  Michael Cadvenor gave the body a well-learned flip over, one movement, so that now it lay face down, the flabby, dimpled buttocks quivering like fleshy jelly on a plate.

  The body had a scar, a long whitish laceration running from just behind the left shoulder almost to the shoulder blade. Livid white it was, a scar of some deep wound from long ago.

  The Professor nodded, then straightened, and took his hat and cane from Spear. “Keep this body another two days. No longer.” He looked hard at the undertaker. “Just in case I need others to see it. After that, unless I give you back word, get rid of it. Drop it in a pauper’s grave.”

  So saying, he turned on his heel and marched from the mortuary, the clicking of his heels on the bare concrete falling on totally deaf ears.

  Giving Harkness an order to stop at the first available post office, he sprang into the cab, Spear behind him not daring to speak for there was an atmosphere that, he told Terremant later, “you couldn’t cut with a knife, let alone your fingers, it was so thick. The Professor seemed to glower from all parts of his body. You could touch the glowering of him. Made me truly frightened.”

  At the first post office, Moriarty swept in, people parting to allow him to enter—such was his commanding presence—like the sea parting from the bows of a ship. He took a telegram form and addressed it to Mrs. James at the hotel in which Sal was staying close to Rugby School. The text of his message read:

  YOUR PRESENCE URGENTLY REQUIRED IN LONDON STOP TAKE THE FIRST CONVENIENT EXPRESS AND COME STRAIGHT TO MY HOME WITH HASTE STOP GOOD WISHES JAMES

  “Home,” he ordered peremptorily on returning to the cab, and on reaching the house he paused before the door, turning to Spear.

  “Albert, you’re to bring me that slimy toad Jacobs. William Jacobs. He was supposed to be there when that woman died.” Then, quickly: “I don’t know who she is. Almost the spit and image of Sal, but it’s not her. We looked, didn’t we?”

  “We did, Professor, but I must own, I first thought it to be Sal Hodges. I just couldn’t tell.”

  Moriarty gave a one-note, barking laugh. “No, but I could. Sal’s got my mark on her. That woman had not. It’s not Sal. Damned if she isn’t like her though. William Jacobs. Bring him. Even if you have to lift him off the street. Bring him to me. I want the truth.”

  “I’ll find him, Professor. I’ll take Lee Chow with me. He’d frighten the devil in Hell, Lee Chow would. I’ve told him that, mind. To his face.”

  “I don’t want a hair of Bill Jacobs touched, Albert. But I want you to lift him and bring him here.”

  SAL HODGES RETURNED to the house at half past eight. She said she would have been sooner but for the snow on the railway line out in the country. “They had men out digging the rails clear,” she told Moriarty.

  “Lucky they didn’t have to dig you clear, Sal,” he said with what amounted to a dark smile, but she detected something shadowy and sinister behind his words.

  “Dear God, James. What d’you mean?” It was his look as well as the words that disturbed her, deeper than anything had ever distressed her in all her life. She knew James Moriarty and his moods, but this was something she had never seen before, a lingering, worrying concern behind every movement and the way he spoke, every word and the manner in which he pronounced them.

  “Later.” He looked at her, his eyes seeming soft as she had never seen them before. She wondered, What’s happening to him? Smitten, distracted, or what? But, then, Sal admitted that she was cursed with unsolved queries. Sal’s conscience was riddled with doubts. She had her own secrets, her own deceptions, her own lies, and they all lay heavy on her grimy soul.

  It was even more disturbing because of what had passed here, in this room, barely thirty-six hours previously. On their last meeting, on the night before she had left to see their son, Arthur, at Rugby School, James Moriarty had been particularly combative.

  “Did you know I sent young Danny Carbonardo after you, Sal?” he asked.

  “Why would you do that? To kill me? Why …?”

  “To get at the truth. You have always been close to my main men, to my Praetorians.”

  “I’d never deny that.”

  “Then I reasoned that if one of them had gone bad on me you would have known which one.”

  “You’re probably right there. But, surely that’s not the case, is it?”

  “It could be. Someone’s been gabbling where they shouldn’t. I suspected as much in New York, and in Berlin, and again in Vienna. So I set a small snare. Only the four of them—Spear, Ember, Terremant, and Lee Chow—only that quartet knew the day of my return to London. Even you weren’t told, Sal.”

  “True enough. I had no idea. It was a wonderful surprise to get your note saying you were here.”

  “Yet when I landed at Dover there was a reception committee: They were there when the boat came in, they were there on the train, and they awaited me at Victoria Station. Even took post outside this very house.”

  “So it has to be one of them,” she agreed, looking troubled. “Those four. I would not have ever guessed it, James. Trust me. I’ve been loyal to you, I swear it. Always. I’ve heard nothing, seen nothing.”

  “I believe you. But you’ve been warned, so watch them, Sal. Hang by your eyebrows; keep your eyes skinned and ears akimbo. If you detect something out of collar—”

  “You’ll be the first to know of it, James. You must believe me. I remain true.”

  Then the boys came in with the food Mrs. Belcher had cooked specially: pork chops, bacon, potatoes in their jackets with a butter cream and onion dressing that she had made, hoping Mr. P. would like it—very tasty, with a smidgeon of horseradish to tickle the taste buds. She knew him only as Mr. P., didn’t know his real name or anything; and if she suspected, Ada Belcher had the sense to keep quiet.

  The b
oys piled their plates high, and Wally poured the wine. Champagne, Mr. Terremant uncorked for them, and had already taught Wally to pour without the bubbles overflowing the glass.

  When the lads had gone, James Moriarty looked across the table, into her eyes, and with soft firmness, asked, “Who would look very like you, Sal, but without the tattoo on your thigh, and with a nasty scar behind her left shoulder? Used henna on her hair. Who would that be, Sal? Because she’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “As a herring.”

  “How?”

  “Strangled.” A count of maybe two, during which Moriarty drew his right thumbnail down his cheek, from just below the eye to the jawline. “Who, Sal?” Demanding.

  She gave a shivering sigh, then nodded. “That would be my half sister. Sarah Maddingley. By my father out of a different mother. Amazing, though. Two peas in a pod. Ringers, they said.”

  “The spit and image, but for her being older and gone more to seed and dyeing her hair badly.”

  “She was actually younger, James, and she had taken to passing herself off as me, yes.”

  “She was successful. Whoever killed her thought he was killing you.”

  “And who was that? Who strangled her?”

  “Like as not it was Idle Jack. We’ll know later, but ninety-nine percent Idle Jack in his house at Bedford Square. Bert Spear’s looking for the witness now, and we’re taking care of Jack on Friday. Tomorrow. I didn’t even know you had a half sister.”

  “It was nothing to be proud of. If I’d had anything at all of value, she’d have bled me white for it. It’s irony that someone’s killed her thinking it was me. Mind you, I always worried that she would talk herself into dangerous conditions. She had a fearsome quick temper on her; she would go off like a bomb. Look at her sideways and she would crack off in your face.”

  Sal had grown up in a Berkshire village, Hendred—there were two Hendreds—not a long way distant to the country house Moriarty owned close by Steventon. “My father used to ride over, see this woman in West Hendred: used to go diving in the dark with her, name of Beatrice Maddingley. I suppose he took one dive too many. I remember her—big woman, a shade blowsy, had hair the colour of dishwater, my mother used to say. Dishwater Beatty, my mum called her. I can hear her now.” Her voice rose, imitating a loud Berkshire burr: “‘You been wi’ Dishwater Beatty ag’in, Charlie? Well don’t come near me. I don’t want to catch anything she’s got, where your maggot’s been burrowing.’” Sal smiled, fondly recalling her mother.