“That may be, Professor,” Barnett said, “but your average newspaper reader is not interested in what’s happening on Mars, but in what’s happening in Chelsea. He’d rather have a mysterious murder than a mysterious nebulosity any time.”
“You are probably right,” Moriarty said, laying the journal aside and replacing his pince-nez glasses on the bridge of his nose. “There is, nonetheless, some small comfort, some slight gleam of hope for the future of the human race that can be derived from current scientific theory. I read my journals and they comfort me.”
“What sort of comfort, Professor?” Barnett asked, feeling that he had lost the thread of the conversation.
“I find solace in the theories expounded by Professor Herschel, among others, concerning nebulae,” Moriarty said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the large silver samovar which squatted at one end of the table. “They would suggest that the universe is larger by several orders of magnitude than previously imagined.”
“This comforts you?”
“Yes. It indicates that mankind, confined as it is to this small planet in a random corner of the universe, is of no real importance or relevance whatsoever.”
Barnett put his spoon carefully down on the side of his plate. He knew that Moriarty indulged in these misanthropic diatribes at least partly to annoy him, but at the same time he had never seen any sign that the professor was not totally serious about what he said. “I don’t suppose you’d care to do a piece for my news service on that general theme, Professor?” Barnett asked.
“Bah!” Moriarty replied.
“I could probably get a couple of hundred American newspapers to carry the piece.”
“The prospect of having my words read eagerly over the jam pot in Chicago is, I must confess, one that holds no particular charm for me,” Moriarty said. “Having my phrases mouthed in San Francisco, or my ideas hotly debated in Des Moines, has equally little appeal. No, I’m afraid, my dear Mr. Barnett, that your offer will not entice me into a journalistic career.”
“I’m sorry about that, Professor,” Barnett said. “The world lost a great essayist when you chose to devote yourself to a life of, ah, science.”
Professor Moriarty looked at Barnett suspiciously. “When I plucked you from a Turkish prison almost two years ago,” he said, “you were as devoid of sarcasm as you were embedded with grime. I no longer detect any grime.”
“Touché, Professor.” Barnett smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.
* * *
Benjamin Barnett had first met Professor James Moriarty in Constantinople almost two years before, at a moment when the professor was being chased down the Street of the Two Towers by a band of assassins in dirty brown burnooses. Barnett and a friend came to the professor’s aid, for which he thanked them profusely, although he regarded the assault as a minor annoyance from which he could have extricated himself quite easily without assistance. Which, Barnett came to admit when he got to know the professor better, was most probably true.
Moriarty had reciprocated by rescuing Barnett from the dank confines of the prison of Mustafa II, where he was being held for the minor offense of murdering his friend and the major indiscretion of spying against the government of that most enlightened despot Sultan Abd-ul Hamid, Shah of Shahs, the second of that name. Both crimes of which he was equally innocent, and for either of which he was equally likely to be garroted at any moment at the whim of the Sublime Porte.
But Moriarty had exacted a price for his rescue. “What I want from you,” he had told Barnett, “is two years of your life.”
“Why?” Barnett had asked.
“You are good at your profession, and I have use for you.”
“And after the two years?”
“After that, your destiny is once again your own.”
“I accept!”
It had seemed like a good bargain at the time. And even when Moriarty had smuggled Barnett across the length of Europe and they stood face to face in the professor’s basement laboratory in the house on Russell Square, it continued to seem so. Moriarty claimed to be a consultant and problem-solver, but he was strangely vague about the details. After extracting an oath of silence in regard to his affairs, he had put Barnett to work. Barnett had been a foreign correspondent for the New York World, living in Paris, when he had gone to Turkey to report on the sea trials of a new submarine and ended up in an Osmanli prison. It was his skills as a reporter that Moriarty wished to use. With Moriarty’s assistance, Barnett opened the American News Service, a cable service to United States newspapers for British and European news. This gave Barnett a cover organization to investigate anything that Moriarty wanted investigated. To the surprise of both men, the service quickly began to make money, and soon took on a life of its own as a legitimate news organization.
Gradually it dawned on Barnett that Moriarty’s ideas of law and morality were at variance with those of the rest of Victorian society. Moriarty, to put it bluntly, was a criminal. Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant consulting detective, considered Moriarty one of the most reprehensible villains in London as yet unhanged. This was, perhaps, an exaggeration. Holmes had been trying to catch Moriarty at some nefarious scheme or other for nearly a decade, and had yet to succeed. He had foiled one or two of the professor’s plans, and apprehended a henchman or two; but he had never managed to link the crime in question to the quondam professor of mathematics now living in Russell Square. This had undoubtedly led to a certain pique, and a tendency to see Moriarty under every bush and a sinister plot behind every crime.
Professor Moriarty was not a simple criminal any more than he was a simple man. He had his own morality, as strict as or stricter than that of his contemporaries. But it differed in tone as well as in content from that smug complacency with which Victoria’s subjects regarded “those lesser breeds without the law” unfortunate enough to be born in Borneo, or Abyssinia, or Whitechapel.
Moriarty had kept Barnett isolated from most of his criminal activities, finding Barnett more useful as an unbiased gatherer of information. As a result, Barnett had only hints of the organization that Moriarty commanded, or the activities that he directed. Barnett did know that whatever money Moriarty made from his activities, beyond that necessary to keep up his household, went into supporting his scientific experiments. Moriarty thought of himself as a scientist, and his other activities, legal and illegal, were merely the means of financing his inquiries into the scientific unknown.
* * *
Barnett stared at the tall, hawklike man across the breakfast table from him. Moriarty was an enigma: an avowed criminal, he had the highest intellectual and moral standards Barnett had ever known; an evident misanthrope, he quietly supported several charities in the most miserably poor sections of London; a confirmed realist, he showed an irrepressible inclination toward the romantic. It might not be that he sought out adventure; but however he might hide from it, it unerringly sought him out.
“You’ve always been interested in puzzles,” Barnett said, breaking off his chain of thought as Moriarty noticed his fixed gaze. “Doesn’t the image of a man murdered inside a locked room appeal to you?”
Moriarty thought over the question for a moment. “Not especially,” he said. “I’d need more information than is given in the Morning Herald before I find it puzzling. The way they leave it, there are too many possible answers only because there are too many unasked questions.”
“For example?”
“What of the windows, for example?”
“Locked. It says so.”
“Of course. But what sort of locks? There are gentlemen, I believe, who can open a locked window from the outside.”
“And then leave through the window, locking it after them?”
“In some cases, yes, depending upon the type of lock. Or, for example, the murderer could have concealed himself in a cupboard, or under the bed, and not left until after the body was discovered.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,”
Barnett said.
“I can list five other ways in which the supposed ‘locked room’ could have been circumvented,” Moriarty said.
“I take it back,” Barnett said, laying the newspaper face down on the table next to the chafing dish. “There is no puzzle. I was mistaken.”
“There are, however, several items of interest in the account,” Moriarty said.
“What items do you find interesting?”
“Ah!” Moriarty said. “More examples are requested. There is, for example, the question of motive. There are five motives for murder: greed, lust, fear, honor, and insanity. Which was this?”
“Scotland Yard is of the opinion that Lord Walbine was killed by a burglar.”
“Greed then,” Moriarty said. “But surely we have a most unusual burglar here: one who goes straight to the master bedroom when there are cupboards full of silver in the pantry; one who lays his lordship full length out on his bed and slashes his throat instead of giving him a friendly little tap on the head with a blunt object. And then one who disappears in a locked room.”
“You just intimated that you knew several men who could have done it,” Barnett said.
“Ah, yes. But again we come to the question of motive. Why would a burglar have gone to the additional trouble of closing the room after him? Why not just go out of the window and down the drainpipe?”
“I don’t know,” Barnett replied.
“And if it was indeed an interrupted act of burglary, what of the murder of Isadore Stanhope, the barrister, last week? Or the Honorable George Venn before that? All with their throats slit; all in their own bedrooms. One with his wife asleep in the adjoining bedroom, the other with a faithful hound lying undisturbed at the foot of the stairs. And nothing of value missing in any of the crimes. A singular burglar indeed!”
Barnett put down his spoon and stared across the table at his companion. Moriarty had not so much as glanced at the morning newspapers. Further, Barnett was willing to swear he hadn’t seen a newspaper in the past three weeks. Moriarty scorned newspapers, and seldom opened them. One of Barnett’s jobs was to keep a clipping file of current crime stories and other items that might interest the professor, but the last three weeks’ clippings lay in a box, unsorted and unfiled, on Barnett’s desk. Yet somehow Moriarty knew the details of the three linked murders, as he seemed always to know all that was happening in London and most of what was happening throughout the world.
“You have another theory, then?” Barnett suggested.
“One should never theorize with insufficient facts,” Moriarty said. “It is a practice most destructive of the mental faculties. As I said, there are some obvious questions that should be asked. The answers should give one a clear picture of the murderer and his motive.”
“Such as?”
Moriarty shook his head. “I don’t understand your fascination with this,” he said. “A mundane series of murders with nothing to recommend them to the connoisseur. Reminiscent of Roehm in Düsseldorf a few years back, or the notorious Philadelphia Fox murders in ’78. The only mystery in such cases is how the police can be so inefficient.”
“As I remember,” Barnett said, “they never caught the Philadelphia Fox.”
“My point exactly,” said Moriarty.
“If the investigation were in your charge,” Barnett asked, “what would you do?”
“I resist the answer which springs to my lips,” Moriarty said, with a hint of a smile, “as the language involved is rather coarse. However—” The professor removed his pince-nez lenses once again and began polishing them with his napkin. As he did he stared absently across the table at the Vernet which hung above the sideboard, a three-by-five-foot oil entitled Landscape with Cavalry.
Barnett watched with interest as the professor polished his lenses and stared unseeingly across the room. He was watching Moriarty think, as impressive an event to Barnett as watching Norman-Néruda play the violin or watching W. S. Gilbert scribble. Something incredible was happening right there in front of you, and if you were very lucky there was always the chance that some of whatever it was would rub off on you.
“The question of motive,” Moriarty said, readjusting his pince-nez on his nose, “would seem to be the most promising. Of the five I cited, we can eliminate but one: insanity. I would concentrate on the backgrounds of the three men to establish what they had in common, to try to find a common denominator for our killer.”
“I don’t know, Professor,” Barnett said. “The way those three were killed seems pretty crazy to me. Slitting their throats in their own beds, then sneaking out past locked doors and sleeping dogs.”
“Slitting their throats may be an action of insanity,” Moriarty said, “but it seems to me that the subsequent innocuous departure was eminently sane.”
Mr. Maws, Moriarty’s butler, appeared at the dining-room door. “Beg pardon, Professor,” he said in his gravelly voice, “but there is a gentleman to see you. An Indian gentleman. I took the liberty of placing him in the drawing room.”
Moriarty pulled out his pocket watch and snapped it open. “And nine minutes early, I fancy,” Moriarty said. “No card?”
“None, sir. He did mention the lack, sir. Apologized for not having one. Gave his name as Singh.”
“I see,” Moriarty said. “Tell the gentleman I shall be with him in a few moments.”
“Nine minutes early?” Barnett asked, as Mr. Maws withdrew to reassure their visitor.
“It is nine minutes before ten,” Moriarty said. “This also came in the first post.” He extracted an envelope from his jacket pocket and flipped it across the table to Barnett. “What do you make of it?”
The envelope was a stiff, thick, slightly gray paper that Barnett was unfamiliar with, as was the paper inside. The address on the envelope, James Moriarty, Ph.D., 64 Russell Square, City, was done with a broad-nibbed pen in a round, flowing hand. The handwriting on the letter itself was more crabbed and angular, written with an extremely fine-pointed nib.
“Two different hands,” Barnett noted. “Let’s see what the note says”:
James Moriarty, Sc.D.—
Will be calling upon you at ten of the a.m. tomorrow morning. Am hopeful to find you at home at that instant. Am hopeful to interest you in impossible but potentially lucrative endeavor. Have been informed by several that you are man most likely to talk to in this regard. With greatest hopes and much potential thanks, I am name of Singh.
“Very interesting stylistically, if not very informative.” Barnett held the note up to the light. “I don’t recognize this paper. No watermark. No crest. But it is a thick, expensive paper of the sort used for printing invitations, possibly. It’s an odd size; almost square.”
“What does all of this tell you?”
“Well,” Barnett considered. “Nothing really beyond what it says. A gentleman named Singh will call at ten and he has some sort of proposition to put to you.”
“A reasonable conclusion,” Moriarty said, “confirmed by the fact that the gentleman has indeed shown up a trifle before the hour. Nothing more?”
“No, not really.”
“Any suggestion regarding the distinctly different hands on the message and the envelope?”
“No. It is curious, I admit. But no ready explanation for it springs to my mind. What does it tell you?”
“That, and the unusual shape of the paper, do offer a field for speculation,” Moriarty said, pushing himself to his feet, “but there is no point in indulging in that pernicious habit when the object of our speculation awaits us in the drawing room.”
“You wish me to be present at the interview?”
“If you like.”
“Thank you, but I think not. I really should get to the office.”
“I thought the admirable Miss Perrine was handling the affairs of the American News Service.”
“She is, and very well,” Barnett said. “She controls a staff of nine reporters, four secretary-typists, three telegraphists,
and assorted porters, page boys, errand boys, and the like with a hand of iron. A very exceptional young lady.”
“She enjoys this position of authority?” Moriarty asked.
“Her only regret, or so she has informed me, is that her administrative duties leave her little time for writing.”
“Well, you’d better leave, then,” Moriarty said, “before the young lady discovers that you are dispensable. I will take care of the potentially lucrative Mr. Singh.”
“I am going to put a couple of my reporters to work on those murders,” Barnett said. “I am convinced that there’s a story there.”
“There well may be, Barnett,” Moriarty said, smiling down at him, “but are you quite sure it should be told?”
THREE
221B BAKER STREET
Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid.
DR. JOHN H. WATSON
Sherlock Holmes waved his visitor to a seat. “Come, this is most gratifying,” he said. “Welcome, my lord. I have sent the page boy down for some tea. In the meantime, what can I do for you?”
The Earl of Arundale looked with distaste around the cluttered sitting room of the world’s foremost consulting detective. The basket of unfiled clippings on the desk, the jumble of chemical apparatus atop the deal-topped table to the right of the fireplace, the stack of envelopes affixed to the mantelpiece by a thin-bladed oriental knife; could genius indeed exist amid such disorder? He pulled the tails of his morning coat around him and gingerly sat on the edge of the aged leather sofa. “Gratifying?” he asked. “Surely a man of your repute has had noble clients before.”
“I was referring to the problem that brought you, my lord,” Holmes said. “It is gratifying to have a case that exercises the intellect. Those which have come my way for the last few months have indicated a sad decline of imagination among the criminal classes. As for my clientele, we entertain all sorts here. The last person to sit where you are sitting was a duke, and the person before that, if I remember correctly, was a woman who had murdered her first three husbands and was plotting the death of her fourth.”
Death by Gaslight Page 2
