The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  George performed near one of Shakespeare’s dolphins, looking up at Matt as though this was the cleverest trick in the world. He then barked twice, and Matt Shotton gave the leash a sharp pull. He was aware of the crowd spilling out from the Alhambra and of the traffic and people. Then George barked loudly again and slipped his leash, pulling it from Matt’s hand and heading off, barking and jumping, through the railings and out onto the road, as though the great three-headed dog Cerberus had been let loose and was at his heels.

  The problem with George was that he thought he was human, a spunky, tough little lad with no fear. After all, hadn’t he tried to break down the parlour wall to smash through when next door’s bitch, Dippin, was on heat? When he sensed things were right, he would hurl himself at the wall: This little ball of black and ginger hair would take a running jump at the wall in his heartfelt attempt to smash his way through. George reckoned he could go anywhere and do anything. One of his favourite pastimes was worrying horses.

  All little George was aware of was the hansom and its horse trotting down the centre of the street. George did not particularly like horses, so he barked louder than ever and ran out, yapping, snapping, and leaping up toward the larger animal.

  Ben Harkness was taken by surprise. Apple, usually the most docile of creatures, reared to the left; then, finding himself heading toward a crowd on the pavement, he reared up again, pulling to the right just as Danny Carbonardo squeezed the trigger.

  Danny was thrown back in the cab but could not stop the pistol from firing: once, twice, three times; and Ben Harkness saw first a woman stagger back, wheeling around as a bullet thumped into her shoulder, and then, to his horror, young William Walker stagger, mouth open in a soundless scream as blood blossomed on the boy’s shirtfront and splashed over his newspapers as he dropped them. There were screams and an agitated movement in the crowd. Harkness gave Apple a flick of the whip and pulled hard on the reins, dragging the cab to the right and urging the horse on as their speed increased and they made their way toward the only possible exit.

  Left out of Leicester Square, bearing left. The Old City Hall coming up on their right, then hard left into Charing Cross Road, going straight on until they reached Cranbourne Street again, turning right, away from Leicester Square, and so into Long Acre, where they planned to ditch the cab and escape on foot.

  Danny Carbonardo cursed roundly throughout. “I’ve let him down!” he shouted. “I’ve let the Professor down.” And Harkness quietly said, “It happens to us all sooner or later. It was that fucking little canine.” The fucking little canine had followed, barking, until they almost got to Charing Cross Road.

  “I should have shot the little bleeder,” Carbonardo said with a lot of feeling.

  “Oh, Danny; you’re not a child or a pet killer. Wouldn’t have done to have shot him.”

  FINALLY, MORIARTY PUSHED THROUGH the doors out into the wicked cold of Leicester Square, with tiny particles being carried on the wind. There was an ambulance pulled up close to the theatre, two big horses between the shafts, blowing steam into the freezing air. There were police bustling around and some nurses. But no sign of Idle Jack. My God, Moriarty thought. What the hell’s happened? Don’t say that Carbonardo’s missed him. How could that be?

  Then, with horror, he saw they were lifting the body of young William Walker into the ambulance, blood dripping from the stretcher. The Professor swallowed hard, almost weeping. My poor good boy, he thought. Daniel Carbonardo, where’s your natural aptitude now?

  “What’s happened?” he asked a police constable nearby.

  “You move along, sir. There’s been a terrible shooting: lady over there wounded, and the paperboy killed outright. Didn’t know what hit him, poor boy. There one minute, gone the next.”

  “Good, brave lad. Dear God,” Moriarty breathed, turning to see a young woman weeping and a nurse bandaging her shoulder, which dribbled blood.

  The woman was only some seventeen or eighteen summers old, seated on a step, upset and beyond comfort by the man with her, who murmured, “Come, Jessie. It’ll be fine.”

  “How would you know?” The woman spoke sharply; and as Moriarty turned, he was sure that he glimpsed Albert Spear in the crowd, with the boy Sam who had worked at the Glenmoragh Private Hotel, but when he looked again they had gone, melted away.

  So the Professor, filled with anger and rage, stumped off toward Piccadilly, where he would get a cab. His cloak filled with air, billowing and floating like a great sail behind him, and he spotted young Taplin across the road, trying to keep pace with him.

  They had failed to kill Idle Jack, God rot him. He put his head down against the wind, which carried particles of snow and ice painfully into his face.

  Moriarty reached back into his long black Irish past and pulled out from many generations ago an old curse, from his travelling ancestors, the diddicoi, and he murmured it onto Idle Jack’s head:

  “Ekkeri, akai-ri, you kair-ari,

  Fillisin, follasy, Idle Jack, ja’ri:

  Kivi, kavi, Irishman,

  Stini, stani, buck.”*

  As he made his way up toward the “Dilly,” the wind blew stronger and the snow hit his face like needles, as though nature itself was reacting to his muttered spell.

  13

  The Monkery

  LONDON & OXFORDSHIRE: JANUARY 20, 1900

  FROM THE MOMENT he stepped through the back door into the passage running past the kitchen, Albert Spear was aware of the sense of disaster pervading the house.

  The down he could feel seemed to have reached saturation point, as if it even affected the dust motes floating in the thin sunlight shafting through the windows from the cold early-morning air. It was not actually freezing today, a mild thaw having set in during the night.

  Spear already knew what was up, or was near certain that he knew. The morning papers had given him the tip with headlines like SHOTS FIRED WOMAN WOUNDED BOY KILLED. And MURDER OUTSIDE ALHAMBRA. Or MAN IN HANSOM SHOOTS NEWSBOY.

  That was enough to pique interest, made you want to read on, and while he did not recognize the woman’s name—Jessie Rippon—the boy’s was almost too familiar.

  William Walker (14), newsboy of no fixed abode.

  Wally Taplin’s eyes were ringed raw red from weeping, and Danny Carbonardo could not even crack a smile sitting there in the kitchen with an enamel mug of tea, hands trembling when he raised the mug to his lips; Ben Harkness was pacing around, looking miserable.

  Carbonardo acknowledged him with a curt nod and a “Bert.” Ben Harkness just looked right through him.

  “They been on the carpet,” Jim Terremant told him, muttering low as they stood together at the door to the little room Terremant had appropriated for himself. “Well and truly on the carpet after the balls they made of things last night. Even the gaffer’s upset about Billy Walker. Tears. Blowing his nose.” He shook his head hard. Then, with a catch in his voice, “Everything,” and shook his head again.

  Spear asked if this was the Professor’s plan. “Settling with Idle Jack? Topping him?”

  “Reckon so,” Terremant said, and warned him not to mention dogs for a bit. “‘Specially yappy little terriers.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll cheer up the old man.” Spear gave his fearsome shark’s smile, showing the inside of his mouth, gums and all, and his sharp broken teeth. Bert Spear had big teeth, some of them pointed as if they had been ground by Kit Mysson’s machine, the one he used on the knives. “I got good news for him.” Spear gave another of his smiles.

  “What’s that, then?” Terremant sounded dead interested.

  “You’ll hear soon enough.” Bert Spear had long learned to keep quiet, not to blab about the Professor’s business before it was all clear with the gaffer.

  Terremant shrugged and said he should watch himself because George Huckett’s men were all over the place, “Saturday morning an’ all. Measuring and sanding, even using blowlamps. Said they’d be in here, in the kitchen, on Monday. Pro
fessor’s having the whole house done up.”

  They were there all right, men in overalls working away in the hall and on the staircase, stripping off the old wallpaper with blowlamps and scrapers, sanding down the paintwork, a singeing smell in the air. Some of them threw furtive peeps at Albert Spear, sideways looks, turning away quickly, put off by the lightning-flash scar and broken nose, the way he held himself: a dangerous man. Spear wondered if the Professor’s plans had changed, now he was setting this fine house to order.

  Things went off well, though, after what you might call a hesitant start, for the Professor looked grim as a shroud, showing no pleasure at Spear’s unheralded arrival.

  “Yes?” he said flatly, looking up from the desk where he was writing. “What is it, Bert?”

  Even when he told Moriarty he had found a warehouse, the Professor’s initial reaction was tepid: just a questioning, “Well?”

  Only after Spear had enthused and told him the details did the Professor show a little pleasure. It was the largest of three warehouses standing parallel to the river—the closest, protected by a wall, with its own gate, the warehouse being sold off by an import firm that usually brought in tea but had recently lost one of their biggest suppliers, so was currently going through a difficult time.

  “Absolutely ideal, Professor, sir. A mite larger than the one we had in Limehouse.” This one was in Poplar, about two and a half miles from where they had been on the night Daniel Carbonardo had been snatched: The Sheet Anchor public house.

  “You want to see it, sir?” Spear asked, but the Professor shook his head. “If you say it’s ideal, then it’s ideal. First thing Monday get Perry Gwyther to do the business. Buy it. I want to move on. Buy it, and talk to Gwyther about an architect.”

  Spear nodded. “Thought I’d go and find Pip Paget today.” Casual, as if he had just thought of it—like the idea had popped into his mind that very minute.

  Moriarty looked up, startled. “You know where he is?”

  “Got a hint.”

  “Don’t let him see you,” he ordered quickly.

  “As if I would, guv’nor.”

  And this time the Professor gave him a straight smile. “Find him,” he said. “Find him, then come and tell me. I’ll want to see you all bright and early tomorrow morning anyway. Something important is coming off. I’ll send young Wally round to those I don’t see before then, but I’ll need you all here first thing. Eight o’clock Sunday morning.”

  Spear simply nodded and left to find Harry Judge, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands outside the back door, drawing on a cigarette.

  “We’re going for a trip out; going on the monkery, Harry,” Spear told him.

  “Where, boss?” The monkery was tramps’ talk for the countryside, or becoming a tramp in the countryside.

  “Out Oxford way. Going to look up an old chum.”

  “How we getting out there, then?”

  “Go on the rattler. Take less than two hours. Hour and a half, maybe.”

  Judge stamped again. “Bloody fast, them rattlers. I don’t like ’em all that much.”

  Spear laughed and said something about the queen not liking her first ride in a steam train, but that was half a century ago.

  “If we was meant to ride rattlers, God ’ud ’ave given us wheels instead of feet.”

  Albert laughed again and said they would have to ride a gig at the other end.

  “I just hope the roads are clear of snow. You can never tell out on the monkery. They don’t do things like we do here in the city. They’re not as quick as in the city. Not as efficient.”

  Spear said it would be fine. “If the roads aren’t clear we’ll just have a nice dinner in some tavern; quaff some ale and come home again.”

  “That sounds more like it,” Judge said, grinning the grin of a man who likes a little adventure but wasn’t happy about travelling to find it.

  IDLE JACK WAS incandescent with rage. “I’m going to tear his heart out,” he declared loudly, striding across the withdrawing room in his Bedford Square house, the room Billy Jacobs had likened to a tart’s parlour. “I’ll show him he’s not wanted here, damn his eyes. I’ll reach into his chest and tear his black heart out, throw it down. Feed it to the dogs.” He stamped his foot in time to his threat. “In the street! I can’t believe it! Tried to shoot me! Me? In a London street, with innocent people standing near. Tried to shoot me from a hansom cab!” The room did not look like a tart’s parlour. It was just that the Idells had always preferred bright colours.

  “Jack, calm down. You’ll have a turn, do yourself a mischief.” Broad Darryl Wood was sprawled in a nursing chair over by the fire, coal and crackling logs throwing flames up the chimney. “We don’t yet know it was him. Not for certain.”

  “’Course it was him. I’ve showed him what’s what and he’s angry. I wouldn’t mind wagering it was Carbonardo himself doing the shooting. The police’ll be outraged. And that’s no good to any of us. All we need is the rozzers out in force. Moriarty’s too arrogant by half; he’s attracting the coppers like a magnet, and we can all do without that.”

  In private, Jack dropped the pretence of looking like his father, flat-footed and slack-jawed. In effect he was slim, tall, and rather fine-looking: a bit of a dandy, who walked and moved elegantly, with light, neat, peppery hair, and cold grey eyes that could freeze you cold as a corpse.

  While Idle Jack Idell was proud of coming from a military family, the darker side of his lineage was seldom far away. Jack’s grandfather, Roger Idell, and his great-grandfather Kimble had been slavers; that was where the money came from, where the house in Hertfordshire, and the estate, and the entire village of Idellworth some five miles from Hitchin came from. It had been serious wealth in the day of his father, Roister Idell, huge riches when his grandfather ran what was left of the slaving—half-a-dozen ships and a private army, with outposts in Africa, now gone to rack and ruin along the Slave Coast, between Cotonou and Lagos.

  Idle Jack had slavery in his veins, and the stories he heard from his grandfather were enough to keep the dream alive in his head. Jack had that ruthlessness in his character, that merciless streak that allowed him to take people, drag them down, and inflict pain without a second thought. He treated all men and women as if they were inferiors. Darryl Wood, a man of wit as well as brawn, once said that Jack Idell would expect the queen herself to do his laundry if he was invited to stay in Buckingham Palace. It was the old family bloodline into slavery that gave him a start in his cunning life of crime. He was prepared to see other people work for him until they dropped, and for little wages if necessary.

  Some of the seafaring men who were young lads in his grandfather’s day now owned their own vessels and were more than willing to work, illegally, at the slavery for Jack Idell. There were four men in particular who were little less than pirates even in this modern age, the start of the twentieth century. In the late 1890s, and even now in 1900, Ebeneezer Jephcote, William Evans, Corny Trebethik, and Michael Trewinard sailed regularly on what were well-organized slave-acquisitioning voyages. They sailed from Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, and Liverpool, heading to his family’s old stamping ground, around Lagos. But they would also call in at Naples on the Italian coast, and Dubrovnik on the Serbian shoreline.

  The slave trade, like so many other things, was now illegal, society having become infected with what Idle Jack called “the prude germ.” Yet Jack Idell’s captains still managed to return with human cargo to smuggle into the country. More females than males now. Always girls and boys of eight or nine years, even younger. The blacks from the old gathering grounds of Africa, but whites also from the poor regions of Serbia and rural Italy: Told they were heading for a good new kind of life, they quickly became pliable, for most had suffered the trauma of being orphaned—mainly by Jack’s press-gangs. “Make them motherless and fatherless,” Jack would instruct his captains. “Let them see what happens when they cross us: easy lesson for them to learn. Then don’t
kill them by kindness, but show them how they can win treats by doing what they’re told.”

  Idle Jack had no scruples regarding how he used these children. There had been a lively and lucrative trade in children some fifty or so years before, so, he reasoned the demand would be the same now. He recalled his grandfather’s stories of the Haymarket in the ‘40s and ‘50s: How girls of twelve—the age of consent—or less would take men by the hand and bid them to follow, in the most beguiling manner. So, he reasoned, it would still be the same now. There would be men today with those self-same appetites who would gladly pay in order to spend time with very young girls of twelve, eleven, or even only ten summers, just as there would be men who would pay good money to buy, or spend time with, a catamite. All the children Jack put to work in London could, in many ways, be classed as exotic. The dark-skinned children certainly were, and his men had a good eye when choosing the white Italians and others.

  Only the previous week, Ebeneezer Jephcote had suggested sailing his barque, Midnight Kiss, into Cadiz, because “I have a contact there with a source of pliant gypsy girls, young and ready to fuck a horse for money. Beautiful, loose-limbed, and with obvious passion in every movement. Oh, Sir Jack, you should see them dance; then you would know what the word sinuous means.”

  And Jack had told him, “Do it and bring me two samples.”

  Certainly, Idle Jack had branched out into the selling of protection to commercial businesses on high streets; running casinos and night drinking dens and bucket shops, and demanding a percentage of money made illegally in his satrapies and all the other dodges and money-makers on the edge of illegality that Moriarty ran, or took his cut from, in London and other large cities. But his main source of cash was from the sale and prostitution of children, something that made James Moriarty’s blood boil. It was an area of prostitution that the Professor would have no part of, and it was the overriding reason why he was determined to win back the rights to his criminal empire. Above all things, this was the one crime Moriarty wished to expunge, the one he would not go near even with the proverbial bargepole.