The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  “Just before I helped with getting poor Mr. Arthur’s box down, sir. Oh, sir. Poor Mr. Arthur!” and Willy Taplin started to weep like a seven-year-old having a fit.

  “Good boy,” said Moriarty. “Don’t talk about this to anyone.”

  When he left the room a few minutes later, with Harkness, Terremant was back, standing in his usual place on the landing, smiling his daft smile and looking pleased with himself.

  Moriarty smiled back, went up to him, pressed close to the big man, and hissed, “Cock Robin.”

  At the same time he slipped his right hand under Terremant’s jacket and took hold of the short, sturdy neddy cudgel the fellow kept in a leather loop on his belt. Stepping back, Moriarty swept the cudgel around in a great arc so that it caught Terremant an almighty swipe on the left side of his head. They were not to know it, but that one tremendous blow did the job: Terremant’s neck was broken, which accounted for the strange angles of his head after the following blows. Moriarty swung the club the other way, smashing down on the right side.

  Terremant grunted and dropped to his knees, looking up at Moriarty, shocked, as the Professor began to rain blows onto the man’s head and face, beating him to a crushed pulp so that his face looked, at the end, like a mashed beetroot. Again and again he hit him, and the blood was spattered over the skirting, down the stairs, and across the heavy paper on the wall.

  When he was done, the Professor let Terremant’s body, with its battered stump of a head lurching to one side, go tumbling down the stairs just as Daniel Carbonardo reappeared.

  He tossed the cudgel down onto the hall tiles and told Carbonardo to get rid of the body. “Sink him like you sank that Austrian scum. Take him out and sink him deep,” he called, still shaking with anger. Then, like an afterthought, he told him to get Huckett’s men up to redecorate the stairs.

  19

  The End Game

  ENGLAND: APRIL 30–MAY 29, 1900

  GRIEF SWAMPED MORIARTY. There were moments when he believed he would die of it: of a broken heart, inconsolable.

  Sal Hodges did not see him for over three days, for he stayed in his work room, but, like other members of the household, she heard him weeping, and occasionally wailing, like a priest from some bizarre old religion going through his private ritual, cleansing himself.

  The letters were delivered by Pip Paget, straight from the postman at the front door. They spoke every day—Paget and the Professor—while Daniel Carbonardo borrowed a horse and cart from Huckett, threw Terremant’s body in the back, and covered it with old sacking and off-cuts of wood before setting off for Devon, where he disposed of the mortal remains of James Thomas Terremant, suitably weighted, in a deep-water cove near Bolt Head.

  Out in the world, the police were investigating the shooting of a cabbie and his passenger, a small man who had a twin-barrelled shotgun—probably a Purdy, the barrels sawn short and the maker’s name and number filed off. The gun had been recently fired, but they had no idea about the target.

  Cadvenor, the undertaker, had used his common sense and summoned up one of his tame doctors to sign Arthur’s death certificate, listing the cause of death as a cardiac arrest, which, in a way, was the truth. He also altered Arthur’s name to Albert Stebbings, a sixty-five-year-old labourer; and it was Albert Stebbings’s funeral that Moriarty attended at Golders Green Cemetery on May fourth at two-thirty in the afternoon.

  Sal did not stir from her room, but James Moriarty visited her on his return to say that their boy had been “put away,” in a good and proper manner.

  “They had ‘Love Divine All Loves Excelling,’ and ‘Soldiers of Christ Arise, and Put Your Armour On.’ It was all very rousing,” he told her. Privately, he thought it was all the bellicose sweetness so beloved of middle-class women.

  Sal was much distracted, anxious and concerned, hardly raising her eyes to look at him. This he attributed to their son’s sudden and violent end. He then went back downstairs because he had much to do, particularly work regarding Idle Jack and the end game. The man could not go on living; that had been obvious for some time, and the Professor bitterly regretted Carbonardo’s failure on the first occasion, outside the Alhambra Theatre. Now, following the callous murder of Arthur, things had to be speeded up, and the whole of the Professor’s concentration became completely focused on the question of how Idle Jack could be lured to his death, and what form that death should take.

  To some extent Idle Jack’s future drove out the sorrow, so that Moriarty’s days were taken up with the question of revenge—a totally personal matter.

  Within a week, possibilities began to emerge.

  That morning there had been yet another report from Georgie Porgie, Samuel Brock, his spy close within Sir Jack Idell’s household:

  Jack is doing som kind of bizniz with the foreners I tol you about. He wants to have a meeting with them but they will not give him a time or place. And I am getting worried because some of the people here are givin me odd looks, like they suspect me, or somethin. Last nite I cort Darryl Wood starin at me. He looked puzeled, like he knew wat I was up to. You think I orta come out? I am much afeared.

  I would be much afeared, Moriarty thought. This was an immediate warning, and yes, he considered, yes, it was time he pulled out young Sam, brought him back here. But he also knew that George Gittins was not where he had put him to accomplish that job. Gittins, who was supposed to be on guard, watching Idle Jack’s house; Gittins, shot in the head and laid up. The Professor, straight off, had second thoughts about George Gittins; after all, he had been close to Terremant, who had used him in the attempt to recapture their house off the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street. Possibly, Terremant, in his treachery, had sought to draw George Gittins away from the Bedford Square lurk. Now, Moriarty would have to get someone else to snatch young Brock from the possible jaws of death. Pip Paget could do it, but he wanted Pip for another part of this plan, so it would have to be either Ember or Spear.

  It took Moriarty a night to make the decision and send for Albert Spear. Take care, he told himself, do nothing hasty. It was imperative that he make no mistakes. In situations like this you usually got only one chance. They had already had their one chance, outside the Alhambra. The second would be complicated. It also had to be foolproof.

  Spear finally shuffled into Moriarty’s room at eight in the morning on May sixth. He seemed uncomfortable and dejected, looking down at his boots and not meeting the Professor’s eye.

  “You alright, Bert?” Moriarty asked.

  “You mean apart from feeling like a fresh-boiled owl, Professor?”

  “You look uncommonly out of sorts, Bert.”

  “I’m sad, sir, on account of Mr. Arthur.” Spear shook his head. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am. He was a fine young man, We’ve lost a right don, sir, and that’s a fact.”

  “Thank you, Albert. I was proud of the young ‘un. But we must go forward. There are things we have to do.”

  “One thing in particular, Professor.”

  Moriarty looked up at him, a quick squint, fast, his eyes lighting on the big bruiser for a fraction of a second, then down again.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Yes, the one thing we both know. Requiescat to Idle Jack.”

  “That’s the one, Professor. Any ideas how we can get near?”

  “I have the germ of an idea, Bert. A glimmer. A twinkle in the eye, as they say. I’ll tell you when it has …” He gave a gruff, short laugh. “Well, when the germ has germinated, so to speak.”

  “In the meantime, Professor, what can I do?”

  “You remember the boy, Sam? The one you chastised? Used to work at the Glenmoragh Hotel? Lippish.”

  “How could I forget him? You gave him some work, I think, sir.”

  “Yes.” The Professor then told him what to do. “You must never take your eyes off the house, Spear. The boy is, I think, doomed unless you can pick him up from the street and bring him to me.” It was Moriarty’s understanding that the boy was trus
ted enough to take any letters from Idle Jack out to the nearby post box each evening. That would be the optimum time to lift him off the street and bring him back to the comparative safety of Moriarty’s family.

  Daniel Carbonardo returned from Devon, reporting that the disposal of Terremant’s body had gone well, and on Thursday, May tenth, Spear went across to Bedford Square and joined the team Gittins had assembled there: a pair of tough, hard men, much steeped in the ways of the criminal world—Nick Palfrey and Joe Zwingli, men who had worked at one time or another under all four of the old Praetorian Guard.

  “The lad does the post run every day?” Spear asked.

  “Near as damnit.” Palfrey was a bright but intimidating fellow with a lumpy face, scarred and bruised by time lived within the Professor’s family. “Round about five o’clock, most days,” Joe Zwingli said in the husky, grating voice that made people think his throat was red raw with some infection.

  Spear waited, and at a little after five the boy came out, walked around the corner into Bayley Steet, and popped a small pile of letters into the pillar-box there. Then he retraced his steps back into Idle Jack’s house.

  Spear was glad to see that the boy appeared to have his wits about him and did not seem to be havey-cavey, or have a touch of the slows, but looked around, alert and bright.

  “We’ll do it tomorrow, same sort of time,” Spear said and left, disappearing as quietly as he had arrived.

  Then, in the late afternoon of Friday the eleventh, he came back with Osterley and his growler. Palfrey and Zwingli were there again, having been relieved by another pair of Gittins’s original team, Moggy Camm and a squat, silent rough by the name of “Dutch” Nightingale. This last name was a bit of a joke, for a Dutch nightingale—and a Norfolk nightingale, come to that—was cheap talk for a frog, and Nightingale’s physical likeness to a frog, or toad, was striking. Spear had often remarked in the past that he was never about when Nightingale got undressed, but he was prepared to wager that the little fellow had webbed feet.

  Sam came out of Idle Jack’s house at just before five minutes past five. Spear gave the signal and, accompanied by Joe Zwingli, the growler went across the square at a lick. Spear opened the door and leaned out to scoop up the boy, pulling him inside, whispering at him, “Scream, Sam! Shout and scream like you are being taken against your will,” and Sam yelled and hollered his lungs out.

  “They heard him,” Spear told the Professor when they got the lad back to the house. “That evil feller, that Broad Darryl Wood, poked his head out of the door and made as if he would follow us, but then thought better of it. Good for him; I’d have had his deadlights out if he had given any bother.”

  Sam was in a state, wailing and trembling like a leaf in a gale; he could not keep still. Then, when he was finally taken up to Moriarty, he couldn’t stop thanking him, chattering on and kissing the signet ring on the Professor’s right hand.

  Moriarty sat the lad down, gave him a few sips of brandy to calm him, and then began to question him about what was actually going on in Idle Jack’s camp, asking devious questions, slowly drawing out facts.

  They talked round the clock for twenty-four hours with breaks roughly every three hours, when Fanny would bring them hot drinks and bread with cheese for young Sam, who had done well under Idle Jack’s roof, keeping his eyes and ears open and his memory sharp as a Whitechapel needle.

  “Nobody actually said as much,” he admitted, “but you didn’t need Mr. Charles Dickens’s imagination to work out what was going on. They was planning to have this sit-down and talk with these foreign geezers.”

  When he had, to use his own words, “bled the lad dry,” Moriarty went down to the servants’ part of the house, around the kitchen area. Fanny Paget worked away but seemed glum and miserable, and all of the old Praetorian Guard were now gathered together, talking, looking serious. Moriarty motioned Ember to come upstairs with him.

  “I want four of my best shadows. I have an adventure for them, and they must be the most intelligent of my boys,” Moriarty told him, referring to the young lads he had working for him. “My good boys,” he would say. “My shadows.”

  “Very good, Professor. Can I give them any hint of the work?”

  Moriarty shook his head. Even though he had dealt with the traitor from the Guard, he was still not ready to take chances. “Just assemble them here. There will be about a week’s work, and they will have to travel,” he instructed. Ember went away and began the relatively long process of deciding who were the most reliable boys to be chosen for this work, finally deciding on lads he knew well, all of them sixteen years of age or older: Dick Clifford, a boy who was always happy, singing away to himself; then Marvin Henry, “Welsh” Bruce, and Benny Brian. These were lads who had always worked well together and he sought them out, told them where to report, and said they should look smart and be prepared for anything. The Professor’s shadows.

  Quietly, Moriarty made notes and checked dates, carefully working out his plans. Then he sent for Pip Paget and told him what he must do. “You go and talk to Lazarus Grosewalk. After all, you lived next door to him for some time. Tell him that I will be his friend forever more, that if he does this one thing for me, he can call on me anytime and I shall give him whatever he asks. Even if it is something impossible.”

  “He’ll be anxious about his place in the future.” Pip himself was concerned for his own future, for things had been difficult with Fanny since young Arthur’s murder.

  The problem was that when Pip had taken on the gamekeeper’s job with Sir John and Lady Pam, he had made a pact with Fanny. They had pledged not to have any children until things were more settled. Arthur’s death had upset everyone, and in Fanny’s case it had concentrated her mind on the fact that life was fragile, hung by a thread. “You don’t know what is round the corner,” she said to Pip. “I do not think we should wait over-long before we start a family. Not now.”

  Until then they had been using the rudimentary forms of contraception available to them: working things out from the phases of the moon, and Pip getting off at Hillgate, as the jargon had it. Now, all that was changing, and in bed Fanny had become a different person, clinging to him, making him complete the act and behaving like a doxy, as if she wanted to be at it all hours of the day and night. This Pip enjoyed, but found unsettling—well, who wouldn’t?

  Now Pip was away on the Professor’s business. For at least a day, maybe two. And the Professor was in his room, keeping everyone away. Even Sal Hodges, who was most anxious to talk with him, was kept out.

  Moriarty was composing a letter—four letters in reality, all to be taken abroad.

  You are playing with fire. If you do not stop immediately it will consume you, and it will be as though you never existed. I refer, naturally, to your conversations with Sir Jack Idell, who can charm birds from the air and snakes from their lairs. This is not a threat made by me, but simple plain fact. This man, Idle Jack, is a usurper, a cheat, a thief, a liar, a murderer who would have you all hoodman blind. Playing the crooked cross is, to him, like a second nature. For some time now, he has attempted to gain control of my entire family here in London. You know me well enough, my friend. You know what is within my power and what I am not able to accomplish. Mark me well: this Idle Jack has all but been completely stripped of his power. Making a convenience with him will only put matters off for a few weeks at the most. I urge you to follow my instructions well in order to avoid perishing with this common fellow. There is no escape. If you are not with me, then you are against me, and with Jack Idell. If you are with Idell you will be swept away. Now, if you are with me and wish to survive into a fruitful and ripe future in the broad and sunlit uplands of our common cause, then this is what you must do. Send a message to Jack Idell giving him the information he requires for a meeting. You do not have to come and be part of that meeting. I shall see to it all.

  He then gave them the precise time, date, and place of the proposed meeting. Pip Paget had
returned from doing Moriarty’s bidding. “One date is certain and best,” he reported. “Tuesday, twenty-ninth May.”

  “Then that must be the day on which Idle Jack will meet his nemesis.” Moriarty closed his mouth and gave a thin, almost ghastly smile. “At six o’clock in the morning, Pip?”

  “Six o’clock precisely, Professor. Yes.”

  “And the other matters are taken care of?”

  “Near enough, sir, yes. Lazarus Grosewalk says he has four rogues who will not fight one with another, but who will turn the entire pack into a set of death within seconds. They are, it appears, born leaders. Males who will see to it that they are obeyed.”

  Moriarty nodded and returned to his letter:

  If you are agreed, then send me a telegram stating in the simplest of terms that you are about to forward the instructions to Jack Idell.

  The letters were then signed, the envelopes addressed and sealed; then they were passed over to the boys who would take them, by hand, onto the Continent and give them directly to the men who were the hinges of this plan: Schleifstein of Berlin; Grisombre of Paris; Sanzionare of Rome; and Segorbe of Madrid.

  Moriarty spent much time instructing the four lads from what he called his shadows—Dick Clifford, Marvin Henry, “Welsh” Bruce, and Benny Brian. He was most anxious that these lads did their job properly and with confidence. He was not concerned with the fact that they each had to travel a considerable distance—to Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Madrid; the fact that was most in his mind was the manner in which they made contact with the four men who between them controlled vast armies of criminals. These were men who did not enjoy being sought out or hunted for in their particular capital cities. All of them took great pains to remain hidden. If a friend from outside wanted to meet and speak with any one of these men, he would have to go through what amounted to a ritual. For instance, Grisombre, in Paris, had to be asked for in a small, unassuming café on the Boule Miche on the Left Bank, the Rive Gauche, of Paris. And you could not ask for Jean Grisombre by that name; you asked for a Monsieur Corbeaux, and you also had to be possessed of a recognizable name. With Grisombre it had to be a Paul Godeux from Lille, who had a wife called Annette and two children, Pierre and Claudine. There were further questions, of course—name of a grandmother, or sister, or even a dog.