The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  Moriarty’s rule was that under no circumstances should you call attention to yourself. That had been part of his long success and the aim of disguise: the way in which he moved, invisible among ordinary human beings out and about in the world. His greatest coups had all contained within them this one magnificent moment, the final act in which he revealed himself as the Professor: James Moriarty. Complete invisibility was demanded of those who went with him in public. In a sentence, Joey Coax offended and embarrassed him. He also drew attention to him—a cardinal sin.

  Now Coax was fast approaching the table, with his little squeaks; the grimace at other people already lunching; the occasional pretence of knowing individuals, mainly women; and the nodding bowing of the head, “Hallo, dear, and how are you? … Ah, Sir Duncan… How are you, Cecil?”

  Moriarty made some instant decisions, thinking on his feet as it were, preparing small changes to his plans. Moving this, replacing that, to get ready to face this walking gee-gaw.

  “You are James Moriarty?” The tubby, almost bloated face of Joey Coax, with its inflated nostrils, rubbery lips, and eyes enhanced (Moriarty could hardly believe it) with a few touches of bluish makeup, looked down at the—thank God—disguised face of Tovey Smollet. “You are James Moriarty?” as though this just could not be possible. Heads turning, ears twitching.

  “Alas, no,” Moriarty answered crisply. Then, with eyes showing intense distaste, “Mr. Coax, I presume?”

  “Yeeeaaas,” drawn out, an embroidered acknowledgement that sounded uncertain as to his own name.

  “Then sit down, sir. Be quiet and let me explain.” Charming and at the same time cold. Pleasant, yet with a hard block of steel not under the surface but clear and visible. If Joey Coax knew what was good for him, he would take his seat quietly and listen with every fibre of his being.

  For a second or two he seemed to behave himself, as Armand held the chair for him and as Moriarty indicated to the waiter that he would have to return with the menu later. Then Coax opened his mouth, but Moriarty lifted a finger and hissed, “No! Listen! James Moriarty has been delayed. He bids you start your lunch without him. I am his representative and we can deal with the business side of this meeting now, before Moriarty arrives. Understand?”

  Again he had to hush Coax, who had taken a further gulp of air prior to holding forth.

  “My Principal has asked me to make you an offer. It is that you spend one day working for and with James Moriarty. The purpose will be to take a series of photographs similar to the artistic pictures already referred to in his letter. Understand?”

  Once more he had to hush the man, who was ready to burst out chattering again. “In a matter of days you will be told when and where these photographs are to be taken. Moriarty will supply the models, and the studio. You will supply your photographic equipment, and you will be paid handsomely.” He slid a small piece of card across the table. “That will be your fee, plus, of course, any monies you may lose through a clash of my Principal’s set date with any work you have to put aside.” Damnit, he thought to himself, if he only had more time to get another photographer as good as Coax! But von Hertzendorf would arrive on Monday, and he could not have the man hanging around in London waiting to do the pictures. The session of photography would have to take place on Wednesday or Thursday—most probably Thursday, to enable von Hertzendorf to get some rest before the event.

  Coax was looking at the sum of money written on the card. It was more than his entire earnings for the past calendar year—and Moriarty knew it. “Agreed?” Moriarty asked, and Coax gave a soundless but firm nod, eyes wide with amazement.

  Moriarty often said, “There is one thing people of all classes, creeds, and stations find hard to resist. Money.”

  “Good,” he told Coax, with a thin, humourless smile. “It will be on one day next week. Hold yourself in readiness and do not breathe a word of this to anyone. You must understand that.”

  Coax looked alarmed. “Are you threatening me?” he asked.

  “In a word, yes.” The affirmative came as if from a long way off, borne on a bitter blizzard. “If this gets out, my Principal will kill you. No doubt of that. Now enjoy your luncheon. The rare roast beef is excellent here, but don’t forget to tip the carver.” Then, as he turned: “Oh, yes. It is not certain that my Principal will put in an appearance. Go with God!”

  Moriarty stood, bowed, and left the dining room as unobtrusively as possible. “Give that popinjay whatever he wants to eat,” he told Armand. “And then never, ever serve him in this room again.”

  Armand bowed deeply as the Professor went to the cloakroom to retrieve his coat, hat, gloves, and cane. Within ten minutes he was safely in the cab again with Ben Harkness guiding them away from the area, Archimedes between the shafts, trotting well.

  “Ben, I’m hungry,” the Professor said, leaning back, and Harkness turned the hansom up Chancery Lane toward Holborn, where there was an Eel Pie Shop that did the delicacy his master enjoyed most.

  On the way there, Moriarty thought of Joey Coax and his preening ways. He would have to take care when he oversaw the photography next week. He would have to handle Coax with a chair and a whip, like a lion tamer.

  The Eel Pie Shop tucked away in High Holborn had a window with eels laid out on deep beds of parsley, with pies, or replicas of such, in tins tastefully displayed around the eels: The slimy, secretive, and sinuous creatures were at last on view, enticing and tempting those with taste for a gastronomic delight, for when skinned and prepared this is the sweetest of fish, and in addition to making pies, this shop did it in the way Moriarty liked it best, not in a pie, or jellied, doused in pepper and vinegar, but, as it stated, chalked on the big menu board, Eels Prepared in the Norfolk Manner.

  The shop was busy this lunchtime, though not as busy as it would be at night. The owner, in his long white apron, was behind the counter, helped by his two winsome daughters, the pies appearing as though from nowhere—as though an unseen assistant, concealed under the counter, was popping pies up from an endless supply. The owner was running his knife along the inside of the tin and tipping the pie onto greaseproof paper, handing it to the customer while his wife, at the receipt of custom, took the money, the pies coming thick and fast. It was always like watching conjurors doing that favourite trick, the multiplying bottles, where bottle after bottle appears from a metal tube, and from the last one the prestidigitator pours any drink called for.

  Ben Harkness asked for two portions of Norfolk eel, the skinned creature cut into segments of two or three inches, smothered in batter, and deep-fried.

  The Professor would never eat the dish in public, for you ate it like playing a mouth organ, which he could do with great delight in the back of the hansom.

  And he did just that as they trotted quietly back to the house on the fringes of Westminster.

  THE MOMENT HE STEPPED out of the cab in front of the house, Moriarty knew that some disaster had taken place. Like his gift for mesmerism, he could not explain this heightened instinct, but he felt his heart race suddenly and his stomach clench, as though he were rapidly descending in some contraption as yet never experienced.

  It was still bitter cold and, as though to loosen the sense of doom he was feeling, the Professor began muttering some familiar Shakespeare under his breath as he toiled up to his front door.

  “When milk comes frozen in a pail,

  When blood is nipped and ways be foul,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl,

  Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note.”

  And he remembered the old superstition that if you hear an owl hoot in the city, then it is the harbinger of death.

  In the hall, just inside the door, Billy Jacobs’s brother, Bertram, stood close to the stairs with Spear next to him, one arm on his shoulder, and young Wally Taplin leaned against the wall beside the green baize door that led to the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Each of them was ashen-faced, breathing heavily, while Bertram Jacobs appeared to
be beside himself and in shock, his eyes watering, mouth twisted in grief, lips trembling and hands shaking, weaving around, uncontrolled.

  “What has happened?” Moriarty demanded, shrugging himself out of his coat and handing it, together with his hat and the other items, to Wally.

  “Professor! Oh, thank God! Thank God you’ve returned!” Bertram, breathless, threw himself onto his knees, took Moriarty’s hand, and kissed the signet ring on his right middle finger—as you would venerate a bishop. In itself this was not unusual; members of the Professor’s family often performed this act of homage quite naturally. It was a sign of affection as well as a kind of serfdom within criminal families.

  “What has happened?” he repeated, and Spear replied, stone-faced, “It’s young Billy. He’s dead. Hanged in the attic.”

  “Hanged himself?”

  “I have no way of knowing, Professor. We’ve only just found him.”

  Moriarty thought to himself that the lad had wanted to speak with him before he went off to The Press for luncheon, and he could not find the time to do so. This was his second mistake of the day: First was not taking enough care over Joey Coax, and now this. He should have made time for Billy, and now it was too late.

  “Where was everyone when this took place?” he asked, and gradually the story came out.

  All four members of the Praetorian Guard had been in and out of the house over the past few hours. The boys had been washing up dishes and pans downstairs in the old kitchen. Ember and Lee Chow were in and out seeking old family members to, as Spear put it, “talk them back into the family.” Terremant had done the same, and Billy had been running around helping to tidy the place up with his brother. “We was doing women’s work, Professor. We really must have women to deal with the cleaning soon.” Spear sounded put out.

  “I sent Billy up to clear out the waste in your basket upstairs. Fold the newspapers. Stuff like that, Professor,” Spear told him, still surly. “He seemed to be taking an awful long time so I went up with Bert Jacobs here. We couldn’t find him at first. Then I went to the top of the house, to the attics, and there he was, just hanging there. Dead.”

  The attics ran the length of the house, left and right, east and west, off a wide landing right at the top of the stairs. Each had two dormer windows, but no ceiling; instead, the inside of the roofs was visible, and there were great-beam A-frames high up, where normally the ceilings would begin.

  A ladder, leaned against the cross-beam of the A-frame farthest to the east, and a rope had been knotted around the cross beam. From the rope hung the muted, fractured body of Billy Jacobs, his head crushed to one side at a sharp angle, the neck obviously broken, ripped aside. No man could have told how it had happened. All that was certain was that he was dead. And Moriarty recalled the Tarot that Sal had read for him, and the Hanged Man.

  God’s teeth, Moriarty thought, this is the worst yet, and it looks black for Bert Spear. “You didn’t leave the house like the others?” he had asked Spear on their way up, and the big man shook his head, puzzled and sullen. The lad had wanted to talk privately, and he had little doubt as to what Billy wished to talk about—after all, Moriarty thought, he had ordered Spear to question him. This would concern Idle Jack and the spy he had inserted among the Praetorians.

  Says he has plenty to tell you … Says it is urgent.

  There are three of them and Spear.

  Bert Jacobs was weeping openly now, not even attempting to hide his sorrow, moaning, “My brother. My little brother. Oh my suffering brother!”

  Moriarty turned on the lad, sharply. “Strong men of our mettle don’t weep, Bert. Control yourself.” Then, to Spear, “Where’s Sal?”

  “She went out a good hour ago. Down the house in the Haymarket. Down to see her gay ladies.* Said she’d be back by four.” Spear, Moriarty noted, did not look him in the eye.

  With Spear’s help, the Professor cut Billy Jacobs down from his gallows and Moriarty reflected that the man could easily have measured out a length of rope, constructed a noose, then jumped from the beam to break his neck. On the other hand, just as easily, one man could have rendered Jacobs unconscious, lugged him up the ladder, and let him go with an already prepared noose, tight around his neck, the knot hard just behind the left jawbone. That was Jack Ketch’s trick, the one that threw the head back, breaking the spinal column at about the third vertebra, killing instantly. Until only just over thirty years ago you could see it yourself on execution days, outside Newgate Prison* or Horsemonger Gaol. Now, though, there was no knot to go behind the left jawbone. Instead they had a purpose-made rope with a pear-shaped eye woven into one end, the work of William Marwood, the “humane” executioner who made many changes in the apparatus of death and was followed by the first of the Pierrepoint family, Henry. The brutal, often bungling Ketch, of course, became the generic name for executioners, Jack Ketch having served during much of the seventeenth century.

  They laid out Billy on the hard planked floor of the attic, Moriarty thinking what a sad little fellow he looked, now he had departed this stiffening body. He thought of the man’s mother, Hetty, who had originally pleaded with him to save her sons, who had been arrested while visiting an old family friend who just happened to be a fence. Bertram, who was helping, seemed to be trying to catch the Professor’s eye, as if wanting to speak with him.

  Down below, in the servants’ quarters, they heard the rear door close and voices, Terremant’s rising above the others.

  “Albert. Go down to them and wait for me. I wish to speak with Billy’s brother here.”

  “Would it not be better for me to stay, sir?” Spear asked.

  No indeed, Moriarty thought. No. This time I wish to speak with a Jacobs boy on my own. Aloud he told Spear, No. He would take Bertram to his rooms, give him a drink. “You wait downstairs with your colleagues, Albert. I’ll be down directly.”

  Bert Spear left reluctantly, his footsteps echoing on the bare boards down the stairs, the sound sinister in the near-empty house. So much so that Moriarty decided there and then to summon George Huckett as quickly as possible so that the house could be decorated and made habitable throughout. Tomorrow, he thought, would be good, for by then, if all the plans went well, it would be the right time to begin a new phase in his family’s fortunes.

  Once in his set of rooms, Moriarty told Bertram Jacobs to sit down, then poured him a liberal dose of brandy. “There, have a warm-up, Bertram. You want to talk with me, I think.”

  Young Bertram was shivering like a man on the edge of a fit, but it was the horror of what had happened to his brother, combined with the bitter cold outside.

  “Come along with you, Bert. We’ve known each other long enough to speak our minds,” Moriarty said, not unkindly, reaching out to the man.

  Jacobs’s cheeks were still wet with tears, and he gulped once or twice before he was able to control himself. “I wanted to say how sorry I was. How sorry both of us were, Professor, for believing all that rubbish Idle Jack told us about you not coming back. Billy was outcast by it; couldn’t hardly forgive hisself. Told me that when he come over to fetch me. I’d be obliged if you would take us—me—back under your protection, where I should’ve stayed.”

  “I’ll be glad to have you back, Bertram, as long as you stay true to the family.” He leaned forward and patted the man on his shoulder. “Now, having said that, what else do you want to tell me?”

  “Well…”

  “Come on.” Moriarty’s voice took on a sharp edge. “What was your brother so keen to tell me?”

  “You are going to be angry, Professor.”

  “Just tell me, man,” he said quietly.

  “There is a spy in your family. Close to you, Professor.”

  “Oh, I know that. Have known for some time. What I need to know now is who the spy is. What’s his name? One of my closest people, I think. Who?”

  Bertram Jacobs shook his head fiercely. “I don’t know, Professor. Billy didn’t know either …” />
  “Then, damnit, what do you know?” The anger was bubbling like lava in his throat.

  “We know…well, Billy knew, and told me, how Sir Jack made contact with him. How he meets with him, or his representative.”

  “Well, tell me; it’s dead important. I mean dead important. Tell me.”

  “Idle Jack has a house. Bought it specially. Keeps it empty most of the time, except he has a woman stays there, Hannah Goodenough. Looks after the place. When his spy wants to meet, or is sending someone with special word, he puts an advertisement in The Standard, uses a cipher, ‘Who Killed Cock Robin.’ He puts the advert in saying he would like to see Cock Robin in the usual place; that means the house…”

  “Where is this house?”

  “Near Paddington. Near the Railway Station. It’s a small house in Delamare Terrace, hard by the canal.”

  “And all he does is put this advertisement in The Standard? Either Idle Jack or his man puts it in?”

  “That’s it, sir. Says, ‘Would like to meet Cock Robin usual place at six P.M. on Monday,’ or whenever it is.”

  Moriarty smiled a grim smile. Then we have him, he thought. Telling Bertram Jacobs to stay where he was, he left the room and went down to the servants’ quarters where his Praetorian Guard were gathered in the kitchen—except for Albert Spear, who seemed to be lurking in the passage that led from the stairs behind the green baize door toward the back door.

  “I want you to send young Walker to Cadvenor. I’ll prepare a letter.” He planned for Michael Cadvenor to look after Bertram for the time being. “Tell him to come over after dark, and with his plain van, not the one that shouts his work at the public. I want Billy prepared decently. Have we got a priest who won’t ask questions?”