The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Their own lifeboat had made its way to shore shortly after the money had exchanged hands. To many passengers, it appeared to be a miracle, but once Irving had found out that Moriarty had been in charge of the little boat’s navigation, it suddenly seemed a lot less miraculous.

  “I took the liberty of ordering you breakfast,” the professor informed them, folding up his newspaper as they sat down oppos ite him. “I do hate to ruin a good meal with business, so let us conclude our dealings before it arrives, shall we? Give me the money and jewellery.”

  Irving and Nora had discussed this trade at great length the previous night. They could have taken the money and run, however they would have then spent the rest of their lives living in fear of his retribution. They did not want Moriarty as an enemy; they doubted such people lived for long.

  Instead, they had discussed how much they should ask to be paid for their participation. Nora had eventually persuaded Irving to simply see what Moriarty offered. He had so far proven to be a generous employer, having covered the costs of their tickets, clothes and hotel rooms. These were costs he would need to recoup.

  Nora handed over a satchel, containing both the money and jewellery, which Moriarty checked with a glance and placed on to the seat beside him.

  “You have removed nothing for yourselves?” he asked.

  “No, sir.” Irving shook his head. “We leave the subject of pay to you.”

  Moriarty nodded. “I offer you a quarter of our takings, or the opportunity to continue in my employ. Would you prefer to continue working for me?”

  Both offers took them both by surprise.

  The money would enable them to live well for many years, but the chance to continue working for him could lead to infinitely more.

  They were granted a moment to consider the offer due to the arrival of a serving girl, who delivered three fried breakfasts to their table, causing them to suspend their discussion until she had moved on.

  “It has been a profitable partnership, so far,” Nora replied, although oddly her eyes were focused on her plate rather than Moriarty. It was unlike her to appear so humble. “Would our quarter also include the value of the ship and cargo?”

  Moriarty laughed. “I have one hundred and five witnesses, including her captain, who will all testify that the RMS Heroic is at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “One hundred and four,” Nora pressed. “All I saw was a lot of smoke. And I can’t help but notice that the RMS Moriarty, docked outside, looks remarkably similar to the vessel in question, save for a little paint and the name on the side.”

  “I underestimated you, Miss Crogan.”

  “’Appens a lot, sir.” She smiled, using her knife to cut the bacon on her plate. “I’m assumin’ we’re eatin’ the livestock?”

  Irving looked down, becoming properly aware of the sausages and bacon that he had piled on to the end of his fork.

  “I waste nothing,” Moriarty told him. “But branded pigs are difficult to sell whole.”

  Irving stared at the fork, raised it into his mouth, then chewed and swallowed the mouthful of flesh.

  “My offer does not include any of the value from the ship or cargo,” Moriarty clarified. “You did not assist in their acquisition.”

  “Well, I reckon we might accept the job offer then,” Irving replied, once his mouth was clear, glancing at Nora for her approval. They had both agreed that they would make the decision together.

  “Yes, we shall,” Nora agreed.

  “Of course, you will.” Moriarty nodded. “What other choice could you make? I shall organise rooms and money in London for you. I have plans there.”

  As he sat at the table, finishing his breakfast, Irving Beck glanced at Nora Crogan and James Moriarty and realised that he had been mistaken in his previous beliefs. The world was not full of victims. The world was full of conniving thieves and villains, who were sophisticated and organised, constantly pursuing a chance to progress in the world, unconcerned about how they affected anyone else.

  He could be one them, or he would be nothing at all.

  The Fulham Strangler

  Keith Moray

  London, 1888

  Life had been extinguished in an instant. A single sharp blow with a wooden cube, an executioner’s block, and whatever sentience a spider might have was either obliterated or immediately sent into a higher plane to join the creatures who had lived before it and trapped millions of assorted insects in their webs. It was the penalty it paid for having the temerity to walk over the desk where the experiment was being conducted.

  At other times, Professor James Moriarty might have given the creature’s life and that of its ancestry some academic thought. A mathematical genius, whom some said rivalled the great Fibonacci himself, Moriarty had written a treatise on the binomial theorem at the age of twenty-one, a book on The Dynamics of an Asteroid and numerous academic papers on subjects as diverse as the invention of zero and the limits of growth of the human brain. His mind revelled in both pure and applied mathematics and sought distractions in abstruse problems such as the population explosion of spiders. Yet on this bleak, smoggy day in London, when other more mundane problems demanded his attention, he was less inclined towards frivolous pursuits.

  He wiped the mangled arachnid body from the bottom of the die, one of the three pairs of dice that he had been experimenting with, and immediately cast the dice on the desk.

  ‘Two and five and three. Ten again!’

  He added the total to the row of figures he had been recording, each entry precisely made in his scholarly hand. Had anyone been looking in on his study, that is precisely what they would have seen. A scholarly gentleman with pince-nez spectacles resting on an aquiline nose. An aesthetic man with a Shakespearean brow, receding black hair swept back and piercing, unemotional eyes. His posture was slightly stooped, presumably from years of bookish study. Indeed, the impression of a man of learning would have been entirely correct, for Professor James Moriarty had previously held the chair of mathematics at Durham University for several years, before his contretemps with the university senate that saw his departure for London, a spell of private tutoring of prospective Army candidates while he established and built his somewhat unique business empire.

  There was a tap on the door that evoked a curt call to enter from the professor. The oak door opened and an elderly manservant with neutral, almost transparent hair entered. He was carrying a silver tray upon which were a glass of claret and an envelope.

  ‘Are your dice calculations going well, Professor?’

  Moriarty eyed the servant dispassionately. As he did so his head oscillated slightly from side to side in a manner evocative of a reptile sizing up its prey. It was a look that the man knew well, but which never failed to produce a disagreeable shiver of discomfort at the base of his spine.

  ‘They are, Joshua. Entirely as Galileo predicted, with three dice the total of ten will show up more often than the total of nine. Totally predictable, of course, since there are two hundred and sixteen possible combinations with three dice. Of these, there are twenty-seven combinations that form a total of ten and twenty-five that form a total of nine.’ He sat back and sneered. ‘Unbelievable that the Duke of Tuscany paid the greatest scientist of his day to solve such a minor problem.’

  Joshua, a family servant since the professor’s childhood, who had seen to his master’s personal needs since then, placed the glass of claret on the desk and laid the envelope in front of him. ‘And does this mathematical curio alter the instructions that are given to your gaming house managers, Professor?’

  ‘Not a whit, Joshua! Not one whit. They will still use the Fulhams and the tappers as usual to give the houses an edge. And they will be backed up by the enforcers if anyone is inadvertently caught in the act. The usual disposal methods are to be used.’

  He sat back and sipped his wine, his eye falling momentarily upon the blank area on the wall where, until so recently, his prized painting La Jeune Fille à l�
�Agneau, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, had resided. Losing it only a few days before had been partly responsible for his present state of irritability, manifested in the ruthlessness with which he was prepared to dispense death to spider or any creature who dared to cross his path, and the reason why he had sought to distract his mind with dice problems. He found that when he wanted to develop a plan his mind worked best when it had several things to think about.

  ‘So, tell me, has O’Donohue received the consignment?’

  ‘He has, Professor. He said that it will be ready for you whenever you are ready.’

  Idly, Professor Moriarty reached for the envelope, neatly labelled with his name, but without postage or other markings. ‘How did this message come?’

  ‘The usual courier.’

  The professor opened it and drew out the note from within. It was written in code, which, as the inventor, he could read as if he were merely reading in one of the dozen languages in which he was fluent.

  Joshua noticed the pinpoints of colour develop on his cheeks, a sure sign of anger, which could have any of a dozen consequences for someone.

  ‘They dare send me this!’ he said after a moment, his voice calm, but with a steely edge that was apparent to Joshua.

  ‘Is it ill tidings, Professor?’

  ‘For someone, Joshua. For anyone who thinks that I am someone that can be given instructions like a hireling.’

  Sherlock Holmes had not bothered to remove his old grey dressing gown all day. Indeed, it had been his companion over most of the preceding three days, ever since he had solved the case of the missing cavalryman, to much acclaim from the journalists of the Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, to say nothing of the gratitude passed on from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria’s inner circle, via a runner from Downing Street. Yet all this meant little to the great detective, who made no secret of the fact that he selected his cases for the sheer intellectual challenge they presented rather than for any promised honour or fiscal reward.

  In the absence of a suitable case or conundrum to occupy his mind, he was wont to lapse into a fit of melancholy, which he assuaged either by playing his Stradivarius, or by using a seven per cent solution of cocaine or by smoking copious quantities of tobacco.

  It was the latter that he had opted for on this occasion, thanks mainly to a promise he had made to his friend and chronicler, Dr John Watson, before he had departed to visit his ailing uncle in Norfolk. The violin lay unused in its case.

  Food interested him not one whit, despite his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson’s attempts to coax his appetite with all manner of little snacks. Her entreaties to open a window to let in fresh air fell on deaf ears as he studied the spiders that he had allowed free rein to weave their silvery gossamer webs in the darkest corner of his rooms. Their behaviour intrigued him for they were among the most efficient of nature’s killing machines, as he had witnessed at first hand in the case of the Patagonian Ambassador.

  His mood had not been helped when he surfaced that afternoon after taking a nap in his bedroom to find that Mrs Hudson had taken the opportunity to air his room and to remove all of the cobwebs and their architects with duster, dustpan and brush.

  The arrival of a telegram came at the right moment, when the bookcase with the dummy book in which he kept his syringe and secret supply of cocaine started to tempt him.

  He tore it open with his thumb and read:

  Mr Holmes. Would value your opinion about Fulham murder.

  Strangulation. Will call at 7 p.m.

  Inspector Alistair Munro

  With an exultant cry, he skewered the telegram to his mantelpiece with a stab of his jackknife, his usual method of filing documents of interest. A thin smile crossed his lips and almost immediately he felt his mood had lightened.

  At a couple of minutes before seven o’clock, Holmes heard the sound of a Hansom cab pull up on the wet cobbles outside his 221b Baker Street residence. True to his word, Inspector Alistair Munro rang the bell at exactly seven o’clock and, moments later, upon being admitted by Mrs Hudson, his footsteps could be heard bounding up the stairs. Holmes opened the door to his robust rap.

  Alistair Munro was a good-humoured man of the same height as Holmes, albeit of slightly broader build. He had sandycoloured hair and moustache in keeping with his Highland ancestry and an accent to match. He removed his customary bowler and Ulster as he came into the room. He tossed them on to a free chair, while Holmes busied himself with the whisky decanter and the gasogene.

  ‘Warm yourself by the fire, Munro. You have had a busy evening, I see. You mentioned a murder in Fulham, yet I perceive that in the hours since you sent the telegram you have been across the river in Putney in order to search for clues as to the reason that the pawnbroker was murdered.’

  ‘How the devil did you know that, Mr Holmes?’ the inspector asked incredulously, sitting forward to gratefully receive his whisky and soda.

  ‘A simple matter. In the band of your bowler hat you have a seven-penny omnibus ticket, which is the second-class fare from Scotland Yard to the stop on the south side of Putney Bridge. Your telegram talked about the Fulham murder, which you will note already has a whole paragraph in this evening’s edition of the Daily Chronicle. Yet the Chronicle article talks about the murder of a Putney pawnbroker. Ergo, you had already been at the murder scene in Fulham then returned to Scotland Yard to report to your senior before heading across the river by omnibus. I presume that you chose that method of travel rather than using an official vehicle in order to be incognito as you investigated the pawnbroker’s shop and home in Putney. Having done so, you travelled here by Hansom.’

  ‘Exactly so, Mr Holmes,’ Munro replied, waving his hand in refusal of the cigar box which Holmes held out to him. ‘You forget I don’t smoke,’ he added with a half-grin.

  ‘On the contrary, Munro, I keep hoping that you will one day turn to tobacco. It is a great aid to the detective mind.’ He shut the box and tossed it on the floor by the fire. ‘Now, pray tell, why exactly should the murder of a pawnbroker in Putney be of interest to me.’

  ‘Because, Mr Holmes, the pawnbroker is none other than Liam O’Donohue, Professor Moriarty’s quartermaster.’

  Holmes had picked up his cherry-wood pipe, but at mention of Moriarty’s name his jaw muscles tightened. ‘Then give me the facts, Munro.’

  Munro took a sip of his whisky then laid the glass on the side table. ‘Very well, Mr Holmes. This morning one of the local constables was on his beat on Dawes Road in Fulham when a woman rushed into the street screaming murder. He recognised her as one of the cleaners at the Fusilier’s Club, a so-called gentlemen’s club. I say ‘so-called’, because it is nothing more than a gaming house and bordello. Men go there to gamble with cards, dice, playing all manner of games with rules of their own devising. That is, it is a place full of professional cheats and rogues. There is a bar where they can drink or they can enjoy the company of ladies of the night in an upstairs lounge, or, after negotiation, in one of the many boudoirs.’

  ‘Is the Fusilier’s Club one of Professor Moriarty’s establishments?’

  ‘No sir, it is independent. It belongs to an American consortium as far as I have been able to ascertain. It is run by Jack Lonsdale, a manager who oversees the gaming and by Mrs Dixie Heaton, the madame.’

  ‘And O’Donohue, was he a member?’

  ‘He was. That was why it was such a shock to the cleaning woman. She knew him. She opened one of the downstairs rooms and found him lying splayed out on the floor, dead as a doornail. He’d been strangled.’

  ‘What with? A garrotte of some kind?’

  Munro shook his head and took another sip of whisky. ‘Bare hands, Mr Holmes. Or rather, it looks like one hand. There were bruises on his throat, you see. The constable was a competent fellow, he didn’t disturb the scene of the crime, but locked the door and reported to the Fulham Road station. The inspector there knew of O’Donohue’s connection with Professor Moriarty, so he sent word for me at Scotland
Yard, knowing that I deal with anything to do with him. I went straight there and examined the scene and questioned everyone in the club before going back to the Yard to report to my superintendent.’

  ‘You are presumably confident that the murderer was no longer there, but I perceive that you have no real clue as to who the murderer is.’

  ‘Exactly, Mr Holmes. My worry, and the superintendent’s worry too, is that this could spark off a gang war. Apart from Moriarty’s criminal empire, there are lots of other gangs that would love to take over some of his activities. There are Chinese tongs in Limehouse, Italians in Clerkenwell and …’

  ‘I am possibly even more aware of many of the lesser gangs of London than you, Munro,’ Holmes said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Yet I must agree, if someone has been foolish enough to execute one of Moriarty’s gang, especially a high-up member such as O’Donohue seems to have been, then they can surely expect repercussions.’

  He picked up coal tongs and lifted a glowing cinder from the fire to light his cherry-wood pipe. ‘And then you went to Putney to check his shop and his living quarters.’

  ‘I did, but I found nothing that could help me. Yet although I know he is Moriarty’s quartermaster, I don’t know exactly where he keeps his warehouses. I have men scouring the wharfs in both directions from Putney Bridge.’

  Holmes smoked in silence for a few moments then abruptly stood up. ‘Then let us go. It is time to view the body.’

  Munro drained his glass and stood with alacrity. ‘That is just what I was hoping you’d say, sir. I instructed the Hansom driver to wait. We will go straight to the mortuary at Fulham, where I had the body taken.’

  The body of Liam O’Donohue lay covered by a blanket atop a slab in the green-tiled mortuary.

  ‘I delayed the post-mortem examination until you had inspected the body,’ Munro explained, as the mortuary attendant, a bucolic-looking constable by the name of Grimes, removed the blanket.