The government trouble-shooter had been appointed as my shadow. I led him a merry dance by going round in circles. Sherlock’s posse did what was expected of them, each having been detailed to stick to one of us like a limpet. The upshot was that none of us managed to shake off our pursuers. Which was what I had intended.
Meanwhile, Bartola’s young nephew Teddy, a boy of rare intelligence, had quietly slipped out of the house dressed like the schoolboy he was, with two thousand pounds in the satchel slung negligently across his shoulder. I had complete confidence in his maturity and wit.
He had always been equal to any task that I had entrusted him with in the past.
Next day the lovers were able to catch the boat train and gained their freedom. I was left to face his lordship’s ire.
I went to Cadogan Close and asked to see the scourge of the Teutons. The moment he saw me, he fired a volley of abuse in my direction. I explained that I did exactly as he told me and delivered the money to the kidnapper. I refused to accept responsibility for the kidnapper’s treachery. Naturally I promised to tell everything I knew to Inspector Bradstreet who the politician had summoned to help find the kidnapper. I told the man a number of facts which I felt had confused him to the point that his head was beginning to swim.
PS. I left an invoice for £17 10s 6d with Bull for his lordship, with instruction to pay this sum to my solicitor.
Sebastian Moran
Although I do not exult in self-aggrandisement, I feel that I should mention Armande’s summing up of this episode of my life. It might be an exaggeration, but I will write my account as it happened and let you, my readers, decide for yourselves beginning by quoting her: “If zat horrible man ad not been trying to keel you, Europe ould ave been anniheelated by the forces of zat wicked Kaiser Wilhelm.”
She meant Colonel Sebastian Moran, who had picked up the baton from the evil Moriarty. He was now in charge of the latter’s unfinished operations. The men who had served the professor with unstinting devotion had now, it seemed, sworn allegiance to the renegade soldier. He had inherited all the files the dead man had left behind. He seemed to have accepted a handsome advance from my erstwhile lover, the deranged king of Bohemia, to deliver my person to him, dead or alive. He had got in touch with that fatuous royal buffoon, and was now redoubling his efforts to capture yours truly.
I was well aware of the perils facing me, but felt a degree of security in Water Lane, living there under an assumed name. I never came out of the house in my own guise, in case Moran’s men were watching. I usually made myself up as an elderly invalid. The neighbours had no inkling of who I was or what our activities might have been. Besides, I was also operating as a man, under the name of Mr Dai Lernière, from my office in Warren Street, providing the same sort of services as my mentor. Only Holmes and my associates at the Club des As knew of my true identity.
If putative stalkers were on the lookout for me, they were not going to find it easy, resourceful and ruthless though they be.
I was on the Waterloo & City Railway one day, in my Dai Lernière persona. Opposite me, three rows away, was a bearded cleric in a black cassock. I noticed that he had been staring at me a little too discreetly, but dismissed this thought, safe in the belief that my Lernière disguise was infallible. Draw the line between caution and paranoia, Irene, I told myself. However, as I am myself inured in the art of disguise, an oblique glance at the man of god suggested that his black beard was too thick, too shiny and too black. When I got down at Mansion House, he followed me out. He hesitated before deciding to go a different way. I am an old hat at evasion. I reacted as if I had noticed nothing untoward. A week later, I was again travelling on the Underground, when I caught sight of a doddery dowager opposite me. I would not have noticed anything unusual even if she appeared very tall for a woman. As I came out of the station, I noticed that she was walking behind me with great difficulty, leaning on a cane. Fifty yards on, however, she was just behind me, still limping pitifully. A rather careless slip on his part. If he were Moran, that is.
I took my worries to Baker Street. I was ushered in by Mrs Obassanju. Holmes was seated behind his desk in a pose that I had seen many a time when I was passing myself for Mrs Hudson. It was overflowing with files, just as it had always been in my time. After the usual exchange of civilities, I told him about my suspicions. I had feared that he might have pooh-poohed my alarm as paranoia, but he nodded in a knowing manner.
‘Sebastian Moran,’ he said curtly. ‘He is after both of us, as I have told you. The man is driven. You might not know this, he is now actively working towards the destruction of the Empire.’ I must have frowned.
‘Only last week I had the visit of Mycroft. He spoke of the consternation of the Viscount, and gave me a dossier that William Melville, or M, had been collecting for the Cabinet Secretary.’
Melville was the chief of the G-division of Scotland Yard, known as the Secret Service.
Holmes obviously trusted me. He rightly did not think any the less of me for my Austrian ancestry. He told me of the concern of the cabinet about an imminent war with the Kaiser, after the events in Servia. Moran had been known to visit the German Embassy in disguise, and was suspected of working for the Triple Alliance. I found that shocking. We knew that he had fought valiantly for the country, risking life and limb. I wondered what brought about the volte-face.
Holmes, the great mind reader nodded. He opened a drawer and took a file from it. You can read it, he said, but it must not leave these premises. He offered to tell me its contents, culled by M.
Moran was born in Liverpool in the late forties in a wealthy family which had made its fortune in tea. He went to Uppingham and as a teenager had been prominent in the OTC – Officer Training Corps. Everybody foretold a brilliant military career for him. He was a perfect fit for the Royal Shropshire Regiment in which his father bought him a commission. He earned for himself the admiration of General Gordon, then a Lieutenant Colonel, by his bravery and military nous. The latter recommended him for a DSO for the part he played in the relief of Chansu. Unfortunately for him, the confusion of the times was responsible for communications going astray, resulting in the Honour not being awarded. That caused considerable resentment in the young lieutenant. It might even have been at the root of his perfidy. Nothing much is known about him from that time, until he re-emerged as a Captain in the Sudan, where he was welcomed by his old chief, now a full-fledged general. He fought valiantly and was wounded in an action in which he saved the lives of his men when they came under attack by the soldiers of the Mahdi, in a daring rescue mission. Coming out of hospital he wanted to rejoin Gordon, to whom he was fiercely loyal, and from whom he had been cut off. He ended up with Field-Marshal Garnet Wolseley’s Camelborne Division as he prepared for the relief of Khartoum. Aware that his old chief was under the threat of annihilation by the superior numbers of the Mahdi, he could not understand what he saw as the Field Marshal’s lackadaisical attitude. He rushed into the latter’s tent one night and told the supreme commander in no uncertain terms that he was either an incompetent fool, a craven coward, or a criminal. Why Wolseley did not clap him in chains on the spot and court-martial him, is not known. But court-martialled, he was, a week later. Refusing to obey an order to shoot some prisoners, he was charged with insubordination. In a war situation, he received the maximum penalty: death by firing squad. However, because of the numerical superiority of the enemy, and in view of the fact that he was a unique marksman, he was given a temporary reprieve. As he had predicted they arrived in Khartoum two days after Gordon had been speared to death. His headless body was still there for all to see, hanging from a post in the public square, spat at and desecrated. Moran was heart-broken when he saw the fate of the man he had most admired in the world. He had a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He blacked his face and escaped as a Sudanese foot soldier and was forgotten.
Back in London, he was rumour
ed to have joined forces with Professor Moriarty who named him his second in command. He was as fanatically loyal to the Napoleon of Crime as he had been to the Martyr of Khartoum. Together they had carried out a series of daring outrages, and now that the evil mathematician was no more, Moran was thought to have assumed the leadership of his gang. Demented as he obviously was, he had declared himself the sworn enemy of the English establishment. He had been heard expressing the wish to see the British Empire completely overrun by the forces of Kaiser Bill.
That, in a nutshell, is what the man is about, Mycroft had told his brother. He is completely fearless. Reckless and ruthless. As such he poses a serious danger to the Empire. He was consorting with the German Embassy and it is feared that he was providing them with vital secrets.
Or perhaps planning sabotage somewhere.
‘Can one ask why they don’t lock him up?’
‘Ah, there’s the rub, Miss Adler. He is a sharp operator, no one knows his whereabouts. Like you – and me to a lesser extent- he uses a variety of disguises, as you have seen for yourself. The Pilenas, brothers with whom Melville is working are watching the German Embassy, but they cannot do it round the clock. Remember Moran is mad but vigilant. He knows how to spot the enemy and take evasive action.’
William Melville, was the Irishman originally recruited to spy on Fenian rebels, who ended up structuring the Secret Service and was now leading it. Kazimierz and Pyotr Pilenas were Latvians, drafted in by Melville to keep an eye on Russian emigrés helping the Bolshevik revolution from London. Having proved themselves efficient operatives, they had been entrusted with strategic surveillance jobs.
Holmes had no real advice to give me, except to urge me to be on my guard. A week later, however, he sent word to me to meet him at the Parasol, where we sometimes share a mocha and a gâteau. He had a proposition for me.
‘Since Moran is known to be tailing you, it has been thought in some quarters, that you might be the ideal person to lure him and...eh...neutralise him.’
‘Neutralise him? You mean as in shooting him dead?’ Holmes bit his lips and avoiding my eyes, moved his head right and left, in the manner of some Indian gentlemen that I have seen. I had of course killed Lord Stonehead in Ashridge forest, but I wasn’t sure if I was up to doing it again. In that case, I had been personally aware of the trespasses of his degenerate lordship against children. I had never properly met Moran, and had only hearsay and rumours to go by.
‘It’s got to be done within a week. And I’ll tell you why.’
Melville was at a loss. The Security at the War Office had discovered that papers had gone astray for short periods but had surreptitiously reappeared afterwards. It seemed that Moran had an insider working in Whitehall, who was passing on military secrets to him. The contents were so precious that Wilhelmstrasse (the German Intelligence Agency) was sending one of their most trusted operatives to London to collect them, in person.
‘Shouldn’t be too difficult to pick up the traitor by a close scrutiny of the personnel,’ I ventured. Holmes shook his head. No, he explained. There were twelve key people who had access to those sensitive documents. A full-scale investigation would grind the strategic work done there to a standstill. Under the circumstances, that would cause serious prejudice to the intelligence work that needed urgent attention. To say nothing of the despondency it would cause among vital operatives, who would all feel that fingers were being pointed at them. M had of course introduced an agent there, but it seems that, if anything, this had alerted the fellow. There had been no leakage since. Possibly because the traitor had already done his worst. Moran has to be eliminated before the man from Wilhelmstrasse arrives.
‘Mycroft has consulted with Melville. Nobody has any idea how to find Moran. The man is an eel. Since he is known to be after you, it was thought that our best chance of catching him would be through you. Yes, my dear Miss Adler, we’re giving you the honour of being our bait.’ I did not detect any evidence that he was saying this in jest, but did not waste time mulling over the fact that baits usually ended up being swallowed.
He looked at me with those piercing eyes of his, no doubt to discover how this intelligence had struck me. I tried to be noncommittal. He took something from a small valise and handed it over to me.
‘All we have for you is an old Daguerreotype of the man when he was a lieutenant in the Shropshire Regiment. Besides you’ve seen him twice, albeit disguised. Extrapolate, Miss Adler, and you get our man.’ That was a tall order. Would Moran even try to find me again in the coming week? Would I be able to handle him? Would I have the nerve to shoot him? What would happen to me afterwards? The police would be bound to arrest me if I carry out the shooting in broad daylight.
Would they then sacrifice me for the greater good?
‘The Police would have to arrest you of course,’ said my mind-reading associate, ‘but naturally you would be quietly released.’ How was I supposed to kill the man?
‘Oh, I have something else for you,’ he said, and found it in the valise. ‘Open your handbag,’ he said. I knew what he meant to do, so I did as he bade and pushed it towards him. I saw him slip something in it. I knew what it was.
‘It’s a single shot Derringer. You will only get one chance. Make sure you don’t miss. Mind you, we know how good you are, but go on Clapham Common after midnight and practise if you must.’ He instructed, as he gave me a box of bullets.
‘Mr Holmes,’ I said, ‘you haven’t even asked me if I accept the task.’ He gave me the benefit of one of his rare smiles.
‘I am asking you now.’ However, before I said anything, he went on. ‘You don’t have to tell me your answer now. Go and think about it, but don’t take too long. Kazimierz has found out that the contact will be here in 8 days.’
‘If they know so much, why do they need to bring me in?’ I asked.
‘The strange thing is that they have odd pieces of information, but they lack the most crucial piece of the jigsaw. Nobody in the Service knows what Moran looks like now, or his whereabouts.
When M checks on an address his agents have just unearthed, he is told that “the gentleman moved out this morning.” They know this German spy is meeting him in 8 days. Where? Nobody knows.
His name? What does he look like? Idem. So you see the problem?’
This seemed such an impossible task that I was absolutely bowled over. No challenge is too big for this conceited failed actress. I made my way home and consulted with Armande. If deep in my heart I had been wishing that she would talk me out of this folly, she was of no help at all. I was delighted.
‘But of course we aren’t going to sit on our derrières and let those sales Boches destroy our world,’ she said piously. I didn’t remember including her in the as yet unborn scheme, but I chose to say nought. What alternatives did I have?
‘We must get Artémise Traverson over on the double.’
‘Why?’
‘But Ee-reine, that photograph Monsieur Hol-mès gave you is useless.’
‘I know that. What can Artémise do?’
‘Well ma chère don’t make me change my good opinion of you. We nid to get im to mek copies of this Co-lo-nel Moranne...ee must be in his sixties now...Artémise will imagine...he is so cleveur...what the man looks like as we spik. As he is cleveur...and you say he was in disguise, ee will draw im not only older, but in many guises. With a beard, with moustaches, grey air, black air.
With sagging lolos like an old lady. A beggar woman. A bishop. You see more or less?’
‘Chapeau, Armande,’ I said doffing an imaginary hat in her direction. I am also going to enlist the help of Bartola. The two women have both proved themselves worthy allies. They both have sensible heads on their shoulders.
‘Yes, Armande, we’ll get Traverson over.’ I sent word to him by my trusted Teddy.
As Artémise wanted to work undisturbed, we arranged f
or him to have exclusive use of the study on the first floor whose window allowed in good light. Armande plied him with Mocha and tartes, and we left him there with everything he might need. He would not allow us in the room until he had finished. He did 8 sketches altogether. Some had beards and or moustaches, others gave him grey hairs. In two he was drawn as a woman. In one he was completely bald. They were all entirely plausible likenesses. Bartola took them to a photographer in the Elephant and Castle and had facsimiles made.
Sometimes when you are looking for a needle in a haystack, all you need is a magnet. As Moran had caught up with me on the Tube, it seemed to be the obvious place to start our quest. Our aim was for the three of us, my companions and I, to travel from Finsbury Circus to Hammersmith and back again a few times, stopping at Piccadilly Circus for occasional changes. We would sit separately so we could observe our quarry from different angles if he turned up.
On the following Monday we embarked on our venture, I in my Irene allotropy. I had to urge Bartola and Armande to contain their excitement so as not to attract undue attention to ourselves. We must have made about ten trips before we called it a day. We saw no sign of the infamous colonel. We knew beforehand that we would not necessarily hit the jackpot first time. We were ready to keep doing this for as long as it took, but already on the second day, who would board the haystack but our needle? We got our magnet ready. The train going to Hammersmith had stopped at King’s Cross. Just as the doors were closing, an immaculately dressed, clean-shaven man in a bowler hat and Savile Row’s finest, walked in, carrying a rolled umbrella and a leather attaché case. I caught the expression on the faces of my two companions and they gave me a clear nod.
The Adventures of Irene Adler : The Irene Adler Trilogy Page 17
