The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

The weather had been strange: changeable. This morning it was cold and damp. Now, freezing fog hung dense across the square; you couldn’t, as they said, see a hand’s turn in front of you.

  He had stolen the spare key when visiting on the previous afternoon under the pretext of seeing if Mrs. James had arrived, knowing full well that she had not. Slipping the key into the lock he turned it noiselessly, praying that the boot boy had done his bidding—that he had slid the bolts back and taken off the chains. He pressed against the heavy wood and the door swung open so that he could step inside and close it behind him, leaning his shoulders and long back against it, waiting for his eyes to adjust as he stood in the blackness, aware of the pleasant warmth even here in the hall, the carpet soft, yielding under the rubber soles of his heavy boots.

  Sam, the boot boy, had told him number eight. Mrs. James would be in number eight, on the first floor, along the passage, then first door on the right. “She’ll only be there the one night,” he had said. “Then she’ll be off to see her boy at Rugby School, poor little bleeder.”

  Fancy that, he had thought, the Professor’s son at Rugby with the nobs. There were others who’d take care of the boy if need be; after all, he was son and heir to a huge organization and vast wealth. Daniel’s job now was to frighten the woman into revealing the truth. Mrs. James, whose real name had been Sal Hodges. He remembered her well from the old days: the Professor’s woman, his bit of regular hot tail.

  After five minutes he could see through the darkness as good as in daylight, so he walked to the foot of the staircase, slipping his right hand inside his dark ulster and pulling out the knife, holding it well away from his body, point down, right hand firm around the carved horn handle, thumb against the crossguard, the nine-inch blade tapering to a needle point and a blood drain down the flat of both sides. “Have care,” Mysson had told him. “I’ve ground that blade sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. Just how you like it.”

  Women were easy: Threaten to cut them on the face, then give them a small cut and they’d fold like a newfangled card table. Men were another matter: Go for their most precious organ, that was the rule. Go for it with a razor, give it a tiny cut, or with the hot tweezers, and they would inevitably squeak and squeal. Nay, scream and yell.

  He was about to move up the stairs when he heard the hansom, the horse’s hooves clopping in a steady rhythm, then faltering as it pulled up outside. Gawd in heaven, what could he do now? But the hansom moved on, the cabbie searching for a number: not this one, not fifty-six, the Glenmoragh Private Hotel, the hotel that did not advertise. “We are recommended by our regulars,” Mr. Moat, Ernie Moat, the manager, bragged.

  Hansoms may soon thin out, he thought, mounting the stairs slowly. The horseless carriage was said to be the coming thing, though he couldn’t quite believe that: They were noisy, smelly things, difficult to control and not at all reliable.

  When he reached the door he found that it had not been locked, not that it would have hampered him had it been secured: Daniel was as good with locks and lock picks as he was with weapons.

  As he stepped into the room, the sweet scent of the woman enveloped him, the air infused by whatever she wore to hide her natural odours. For a moment he stood by the bed, his head dizzy as he looked down on her face, hearing her steady breathing and knowing it could suddenly end if he willed it. That was the usual job and that’s what he really was: a doomsman, a reaper’s henchman, a coffin nailer, and, more to the point, a priser, one who made people talk: a ventriloquist as some said, or a confessor to the more religious.

  His left arm shot out, a big hand across the woman’s nose and mouth so that she woke with terrible suddenness, looking into the dark. The other hand came down, the knife ripping her nightdress, exposing her breasts, then moving up. The point resting against her cheek, then balanced straight above her right eye.

  “I’m going to ask you one question,” Carbonardo hissed. “And when I take my hand from your mouth you’ll not scream, or make noise. You’ll answer my question; otherwise you’ll say good-bye to your right eye. I’ll have it out in a trice, and I don’t joke about things like that. You understand me?”

  He could see her staring eyes, wide open and fearful as she tried to nod assent. Carbonardo muttered that he was about to remove his hand when, without warning, vicelike fingers locked around his wrists; the knife was jerked from his right hand while the other was torn from the woman’s face as someone turned up a gaslight and he saw that the woman was not Sal Hodges, and that men were swiftly around him, pinioning his arms to his sides and quietly telling him not to struggle—men Daniel recognized as trained hands, people who could move as one and would obey orders with military precision.

  Daniel Carbonardo’s world was suddenly turned sideways, and he cursed, angrily spitting out the oath.

  A match flared and a lantern was raised.

  “Hello, Daniel,” said Idle Jack, grinning like a wolf in the thin light. “We have need to talk.”

  Carbonardo was seized from behind and quietly led, protesting, from the room.

  2

  Return of the Guard

  LONDON: JANUARY 15, 1900

  AFTER DANIEL CARBONARDO left Moriarty alone in his rooms on the second floor of the elegant house on the fringes of Westminster, the Professor went out onto the bare landing and softly called for Terremant to come back up to him. “Tom,” he called. Then again, “Tom.”

  He stood for a moment looking down at the empty hall and the stripped wood of the staircase with the brass fitments still in place for the stair rods, the borders smooth with varnish. For a moment he thought about Daniel Carbonardo out there now, getting things ready to put Sal to the question and solve his biggest problem. Then Terremant returned through the front door below, glancing up and nodding to his master as he climbed the stairs, nimble for one of such height, weight, and muscle.

  Moriarty was pleased with his arrangements, for he had purchased the entire house through a third party—a solicitor whom he had used many times in the past. He was also pleased with his instructions to Carbonardo, for he knew he could rely on Daniel’s judgement; he would get the information required. After that it would be a matter of dealing with the guilty party, silencing forever the man who was betraying him and those who trusted him.

  There were three of them and Spear.

  Through the same man, the solicitor, who was named Perry Gwyther, senior partner in the firm of Gwyther, Walmsley and Mercer, solicitors of unimpeachable good name, he arranged to have some of his own furnishings brought out of storage and taken to the house, where he personally oversaw the work of the good and honest man charged with making the rooms comfortable and to the Professor’s liking: by name George Huckett of Hackney, Builder & Decorator, as he styled his business. In due course Moriarty would have the whole house restored, decorated, and furnished to his satisfaction, but for now the rooms in which he lived were enough and in good order. He had this living and working room, a bedroom, and a small room where simple food could be prepared. Next to the bedroom, George Huckett arranged for his plumber, by name “Leaky” Lewis, to fit up a bathing room with a hand washbasin and a deep, raised bath on stylish claw feet—the water heated by a coke-burning stove under a great tank in the house’s old basement kitchen and pulled upstairs by one of the newfangled electric pumps.

  The house was only partially wired for the electric light, and in due course, when the entire house had been done, he thought he would perhaps have the revolutionary new telephonic apparatus connected. Moriarty was a man who rarely dismissed new inventions as passing fads. He was farsighted and could see how things like electricity and the more recent form of telephone communication, even wireless, could well assist him in his endeavours. The solicitor, Gwyther, maintained that within a couple of decades everyone would possess wireless receiving sets through which they would listen to the world’s great symphony orchestras and outstanding actors. This would, Gwyther contended, hail the advent of a new understanding
of great music, drama, and literature, for the most common of men would have access to the arts, in their own homes. Moriarty did not know how he felt about this, for he imagined that a universal entrée to the arts might well lead to them being devalued, and he liked things to retain their value.

  Turning back into the room, Moriarty lit a wax taper from the fire, adjusted the wicks, and lighted his two oil lamps, simple brass pieces, each with a tall classic column on which stood the oil reservoir and lamp, each capped by a tall glass funnel rising from inside a decorated opaque glass globe. The light from the two lamps, one on his desk—a davenport with a piano front—the other on a drum table at the rear, spilled out as though filling the room with warm sunlight, giving the illusion of an added depth to the cream, gold-flecked heavy wallpaper and a fresh gleam to the polished furniture. Somehow, James Moriarty preferred the soft lamplight to the harsher glare from the electric light.

  Now, the Professor advanced to the fireplace, above which hung the most striking item in the entire suite of chambers: the painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, possibly Thomas Gainsborough’s greatest portrait, painted in the 1780s and missing since May 25, 1876, when, on a warm, misty midnight, the Professor, with the help of Albert Spear and Philip Paget, gained access to the upper art gallery of Thomas Agnew & Sons, at 39a Old Bond Street in the heart of the West End of London, where he had cut and removed the priceless painting from its frame.

  On that night, almost a quarter of a century ago, the famous painting hung alone in Agnew’s first-floor gallery in Old Bond Street, a crimson silk rope keeping the more inquisitive viewers at a distance. This was where Moriarty first saw the painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, visiting 39a Old Bond Street on the very morning of its theft, joining the line of people moving steadily through the main gallery and up the stairs to where Gainsborough’s masterpiece was the sole item on display in the long upper room.

  He was drawn to look at the painting not through any desire to observe a work of art, but to view something that had already sold for ten thousand pounds sterling, the highest price so far ever paid for a painting. And at that time it was reliably rumoured that Agnew was about to sell the work to Junius Spencer Morgan as a gift for his son J. Pierpont Morgan—now, almost a quarter of a century later, the prime controller of American Finance, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the United States of America.

  Indeed on that very afternoon in the present—January 15, 1900—James Moriarty had heard another whisper: that the original painting was about to be returned to the Agnew family, having been discovered in New York. Indeed he knew this to be “true” because he had arranged for an exceptional forgery to be smuggled into New York in the first place, and found in the second, plus identified in a roundabout way the original thief as being a confidence trickster called Adam Worth.* Once Worth was publicly accused and the forgery had changed hands, becoming the accepted true and original painting, the Professor could relax.†

  The forger, one Charlie “The Draughtsman” Dainton of Camber-well, had a head start on other copyists, for Moriarty allowed him to paint his brilliant replica while looking at the original; then, when everything was done and tidy, he took Charlie out on a celebratory picnic near the old university city of Oxford—ham, pickles, tomatoes, a large veal-and-ham pie with hard-boiled eggs, a flask of fruit salad, and an excellent bottle of Puligny-Montrachet that they cooled in the river, hanging the bottle in the water by a strong cord.

  They sat on a secluded, willow-screened patch of grass, close to a riverside public house called The Rose Revived, and when The Draughtsman was sated with food and mellow with the wine, Moriarty leaned over and thanked him for his expertise and friendship, clasping, for a second, both of the forger’s hands in his. Then, as the forger smiled happily, the Professor slit his throat, holding down his hands until he bled out and his lungs collapsed. After that he weighed down the body with chains and old pig iron—which he had conveniently brought with him in a large trunk strapped to the rear step of his gig—then tipped the body into the river, washing the blood from his hands as he did so.

  The body of Charlie Dainton was never recovered; it was as though he had never been.

  This was on a Sunday evening during July of the previous year, so, having disposed of the only other person who could have given the game away, James Moriarty repaired to choral evensong in the chapel of Christ Church College, where the choir sang an anthem suitably based on the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “And a Man Shall Be as Rivers of Water in a Dry Place,” a piece composed by Moriarty himself and sent, under an assumed name, to the choirmaster with a hint that he might be in the congregation on that day. After evensong, Moriarty walked around the corner to the Mitre Hotel, where he dined on roast beef followed by summer pudding, washed down with a pleasant burgundy.

  Moriarty rarely thought of The Draughtsman again, except for those occasions when he regretted the fact that the man was not there when he could have been of assistance in pulling off some criminal endeavour.

  And here, now, in the present, above his mantel in this suite of rooms close to Westminster, hung the true original, in all its glory: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, formerly Georgiana Spencer, half turned to her left with her right shoulder square to the spectator, a blue silk sash setting off her white dress, curls roiling from under a black feathered hat, her pert face closed as if holding a secret known only to herself, lips edging toward a smile and her eyes half mocking, half inviting, in what errand boys called a come-hither look.

  Moriarty could not comprehend love. Lust he understood, but love—well, that was another matter. What he should really have considered was obsession, but he found it difficult to recognize that particular weakness in himself.

  The magic of this piece of Tom Gainsborough’s art never failed to have a profound effect on Professor Moriarty. He often thought that had his brain been equipped with taste buds, it would have been as though his mind had bitten into the most refreshing, deliciously ripe fruit, flooding his brain with juices that brought together all the great, exotic tastes—more than could ever be experienced in a lifetime.

  From the moment he first saw the painting, Moriarty knew he must possess it, for having the picture would be like owning the duchess herself: She would be the rationale for his life, his inspiration, the shaft of light that made his criminal labyrinth crystal clear in his mind, a kind of profound love lighting the darkness of his being. What was more, he considered, he would not have to idly converse with the duchess, nor remember her likes and dislikes, purchase feminine fripperies to keep her happy, or make love to her. Moriarty enjoyed the delights of a woman as much as the next man, in some ways even more than the next man, but he found the whole thing became complicated once love marched through the door. Moriarty’s memory was prodigious, but he knew that a man had to be possessed of second sight to keep up with the changeable tides of a woman. Albeit he would sometimes admit that the unpredictable beliefs and decisions of certain ladies could be part of a particular woman’s charm, but often at a cost to a man’s temper, or even his sanity.

  That warm night all those years ago saw him going late into the streets with Spear and Paget, pausing outside Agnew’s premises in Old Bond Street, signalling Paget into a doorway to act as their crow—their lookout—handing him his top hat and silver-knobbed cane, then lifting his right foot for Albert Spear to stirrup him up to the window, where he removed a small crowbar from a secret pocket in his coat and worked it into the interior lock, the sneck, of the casement, sliding up the lower part of the window, now released, and stepping inside.

  He had never forgotten his own sense of amusement: What, he asked himself, would his colleagues think of him vaulting up the wall and springing through the window? Absurd, their imagining the Professor as they knew him, performing these burglar’s acrobatics.* Just as he had never forgotten the orgasmic thrill of taking out his little, pearl-handled folding fruit knife and using it to cut the canvas from its fr
ame, then rolling it into a tubular shape to fasten it inside his coat before returning to the casement, briefly aware of a night watchman’s heavy snore from outside the door, and climbing from the open window and dropping into the street below, retrieving his silver-tipped cane and top hat from Paget, and leading the men back along the pavement and away from Old Bond Street with a feeling of near drunkenness.

  From that night on, he kept the painting with him, wherever he went.

  A talisman.*

  There was a cough behind him. Terremant stood in the doorway. “Professor, you called me Tom, sir. My name’s Jim. James.”

  Moriarty dragged his eyes from the painting, reluctance in his face. “Your given names are James Thomas. Is that not so?”

  “Yes, but I’m known as James. Jim to be exact. When the lads want amusement they call me Little Jim—like Little John in the Robin Hood story.”

  “Well, I have too many Jameses in my family, Tom. So to me, you’ll always be Tom when I bother with your first name. Now, come and sit down. You’ll take a drink?” He gestured toward a chair, his neck protruding and his head moving from side to side, the nervous tic inherited—like his older brother’s—from father or mother, or even farther back in his lineage; it was an odd reptilian movement of the head, side to side, slowly to and fro. What we do presume from medical opinion is that the tic exhibited itself in moments of pressure or stress, and in view of the instructions Moriarty was about to give to his henchman, some stress would certainly be present. “Your colleagues in what I like to call my Praetorian Guard return to London this very night, Tom.”

  Terremant gave a small gasp. “So soon?”

  “Yes, they’ve come by rail and sea, ending tonight in Southampton, aboard the SS Canada of the Dominion Line. At this moment they will be bound for London and, I am assured by the Dominion Line’s representative in Haymarket, they will be arriving in London at approximately half past the hour of eight tonight. You are to meet them in the saloon bar of The Sheet Anchor public house off the West India Dock Road, in Poplar, about half past nine.” He took up the bottle and poured a generous glass of brandy for Terremant, the amber liquid seeming to glow as if giving off a pulse of light. “There, that will keep the cold at bay. Now, I have particular instructions which I’ve written for Albert Spear.” He strode with purpose to his desk and picked up four or five pages of a heavy white rag paper filled with the Professor’s neat copperplate handwriting, which he scanned closely before folding it neatly, running his fingers and thumb over the creases to make the folds sharp, then sealing the pages in an envelope of matching paper.