The Return of Moriarty Read online

  “Seriously incommoded?” Spear’s voice went up an octave. Terremant wasn’t good with words, and these two were unlikely intruders into his vocabulary.

  “It’s what he said. ‘I have been seriously incommoded, Terremant. Somebody’s skimmed the cream off of my milk.’ Meaning a lot of the lads were leaving. He holds us responsible.”

  “We weren’t here. He told us to stay out. To back off.”

  “Well, those we left in charge have been found wanting, and he’s not a happy man. I’ve rarely seen him so unhappy. Mild as a hornet, he is.”

  “Beware his sting then.”

  “Aye, indeed. The gaffer can be a cantankerous bugger when he’s a mind.”

  “So he’s got a load of boys to do men’s work?”

  “A lot of young lads want jobs. He’s done it before. Ember’s had young ’uns working for him in the past.” He made a grunting sound from the back of his throat, trying to clear it. “If you want to know, Bert, I pointed him in that direction. There’re not enough of our lads working, so he put the boys on the lurk. He’s got young lads watching everywhere. Even watching the place where he’s living. I think one followed me down to Poplar tonight, and if he did, he’s a good boy ’cos he ain’t showed hisself.”

  “But they’re untrained. Inexperienced.”

  “What’s that matter? These boys’re eager.”

  Now, outside Carbonardo’s house, Spear said, “Just let him see us, eh, Jim? Not threatening. Stand on the steps here.”

  “Yes, that’s the way I’d do it, Bert,” Terremant said, and they saw Daniel Carbonardo come to a ground-floor bow window, probably his front room.

  The assassin twitched the net curtain and peeped out.

  Daniel Carbonardo saw them from behind the curtain covering the bay window of his front parlour. He recognized Spear and Terremant standing still and silent in the pool of light from the electric lamp standard in the street, outside his house.*

  He felt no true fear, and was happy that to a large extent his feelings were ones of safety. Of course the Professor would want to see him; of course he’d send his top men, even if he suspected them of treason. Then he wondered, for an instant, had they really come from Moriarty, or were they part of a darker game? For one fleeting moment he considered going out through the garden; he even moved to the door, then turned back. Spear and Terremant would have people at the back. They’d come to take him, and these blokes weren’t for taking chances when they were intent on stopping someone. He went to his desk, took out the keys attached to a chain running from under his waistcoat, unlocked the top middle drawer, and activated the deep secret compartment in the desk’s right-hand pillar. He took his long knife and his Italian pistol, with which he had armed himself on his return to Hoxton, and placed them carefully side by side in the secret compartment. He then slid the drawers closed and locked everything again, noting that his hand was shaking like a cornered weasel and reckoning that was a direct result of the water torture, which, in retrospect, still terrified him.

  Going from the parlour into his small hall, he looked for a second at the valise he’d already packed to assist in his escape. Another ten minutes and he would have been gone. But perhaps it was better this way. He opened the front door, pulled it back wide, and stepped forward, holding his hands away from his body.

  “I’m not going to resist you,” he called softly, and Terremant said, “I’ll look after him, Bert. You go out the back and bring in Ember and the Chink.” So Bert Spear stepped past him with a nod and a “Good man,” while Terremant flexed his arms as a kind of warning.

  He needn’t have bothered: Terremant was six foot three in his stocking feet with a burly body to match, while Carbonardo was only five foot four and slightly built; of swarthy complexion, he had dark tousled hair and dark eyes showing some blue in them. “Real little heartbreaker,” Sal Hodges had said the first time she set eyes on him, and Sal knew about broken hearts.

  Spear found the back door on the latch, and upon opening it he bumped straight into Ember and Lee Chow.

  Spear told them, “He’s buckled, ready to whistle for the Prof.”

  “Good thing an’ all,” Ember said.

  “Watch him care-for-ee,” Lee Chow cautioned. “Daniel is cunning fellow. Danger-ess man.”

  They followed Spear through to the hall, where Terremant had come inside and closed the door. Daniel stood at the foot of the stairs with both hands on the wooden ball that topped the newel post.

  “I’ve run me hands over him,” Terremant said. “Clean as a button-stick.”

  “He’s a good boy, Daniel.” Spear put a hand on the assassin’s shoulder. “Not going to cause us any bother, are you, son?”

  “Just want to talk to the Professor. Want to find out who peached on me. Then I can go and take care of whoever it was. I’m sometimes stupid. I was told to make myself scarce and I was going to, but I wasn’t thinking right. Should’ve gone to the Prof straight off.”

  “Who told you to go for a walk, then?”

  “Would you believe it? Idle bloody Jack.”

  “You’d better secure your house then, Daniel,” Spear suggested.

  “Jack Idell come a shade heavy with you then, Danny?” Terremant probed.

  “Yes, but I’ll talk about it to the Professor.”

  “Good.” Terremant nodded, no feeling in his voice.

  “None of our business.” Spear shook his head.

  “Oh, I think you’ll find it is,” Daniel Carbonardo said with the ghost of a smile.

  PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY sat back in his favourite chair, facing the fire and looking up at the Duchess of Devonshire, who always calmed his mind when things became difficult and his thoughts were frayed. He often wondered how a painting had the power to calm him, but there was no denying it. The Duchess did have that effect.

  The whole business with Carbonardo naturally worried him. One of his young shadows had followed the assassin to the Glenmoragh Private Hotel with instructions to report back once Carbonardo had taken his leave.

  The lad had, of course, returned with the startling news that his mark had been hustled out and into a hansom—an unexpected turn of events.

  Moriarty had chosen these boys, some fifteen lads aged between thirteen and sixteen years, mainly for their fitness. They had to have stamina, he told them, and Terremant had brought him unusually good specimens—unusual because most street boys of that age were poor cases, what with the hard life and unappetizing and sometimes meagre victuals. Terremant’s lads were in the main fit, strong, and intelligent.

  The particular boy on the Carbonardo watch, a fourteen-year-old called William Walker, was a runner, able to keep up with the cab in which Carbonardo was spirited away, or at least keep it in sight so eventually he was there, watching the doors of the notorious house to which the assassin was taken. He also had the presence of mind to stay hidden nearby, even during the cloudburst that came an hour or so later. So he was quite near to the door when the bedraggled and shaken Carbonardo was brought out of the house, and he clearly heard one of the brutish rampsmen tell a cabbie to take him back to Hoxton. “To his own gaff. He’ll show you the way,” the tough had added.

  Billy Walker quite clearly heard the cabbie reply, “All Sir Garnet, Sidney,”* and he noted that the rampsman was a burly oaf with a shaved head and a nasty scar running from the corner of his mouth, “as if someone had tried to enlarge his norf and sarf.”

  Billy Walker then showed intelligence by coming straight back to the Professor, who had quickly summoned another of the boys—Walter Taplin—and sent him, posthaste, to Poplar to seek out the Praetorians.

  Many men in Moriarty’s position would have worried, counting the minutes—all dragging like hours—before his old lieutenants reappeared with or without the hapless Carbonardo. But James Moriarty had trained himself to sterner stuff. He was not a man to chew his fingernails or worry himself into all manner of stews. There was nothing he could do about the situatio
n, so he sat back, enjoyed looking at the Duchess, and thought how comparatively lucky he was. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as the Good Book says.

  As he sat, warmed by the fire and the balloon glass of good brandy at his elbow, he thought long about times gone by, musing on his childhood back in Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin, some thirty-five or -six years previously; and before that, dimly, as if through a mist, he remembered the farm, out in County Wicklow, where he had been born. Then he thought of his mother, God rest her, Lucy Moriarty, the kind and saintly woman who was one of the best cooks ever to come out of the Emerald Isle. How did she find the time to do everything? For she also taught the piano and, oddly, he was the only son who had any talent in that direction. As he thought of his dearly loved mother, Moriarty absently ran his right thumbnail down his cheek, from just below the eye to his jawline.

  Lucy Moriarty did not tie herself to one particular family, but hired herself out to households and organizations, having a set tariff for banquets, meals of celebration, or special occasions—any number of guests, from three to three hundred upwards, as her advertisement proclaimed. She had, it was known, been called to cook for royalty and for great men of the land, and many of her dishes could never be beaten by other equally talented cooks. It was said that her steak-and-kidney pie was the food of angels (the pastry being the lightest and most meltingly succulent that even truly knowledgeable palates would ever taste); that her lobster cocktail was ambrosia; and that a man would have to walk the length and breadth of Europe to enjoy the equal of her beef Wellington and horseradish.

  Lucy Moriarty’s one failing in life was her marriage. Her husband, Sean Michael Moriarty, the schoolmaster, was a man of irrational temper and a drunkard to boot. Sean Moriarty gave his wife three fine sons and precious little else. He treated his sons as though they were whipping boys to his conscience, and when he had finished leathering them he would, often as not, take his belt to his wife.

  Until she could stand it no longer.

  Moriarty could still clearly remember the night when his mother gathered up all three children and stole out of the house, leaving the cruel and unruly Moriarty asleep in his chair, deep in an alcoholic stupor. Which was how he spent most Saturday nights.

  Lucy Moriarty had managed to squirrel away a substantial nest egg from her cooking jobs, and on that fateful night she had money enough to pay the fares for herself and the three boys on the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, where her sister Nelly lived in comparative peace with her kind and hardworking docker husband.

  Sean Moriarty never came in search of his family, and Lucy paid her parish priest for Masses of thanksgiving (never, of course, telling the priest the details or reason for her giving thanks lest Father O’Flynn counsel her to return to Sean and make good their marriage). She also said countless novenas to the Blessed Virgin, praying that Sean Moriarty would continue to be absent from hearth and home.

  The strange thing about the Moriarty family, growing up in Liverpool, was that the three boys were all blessed, or more likely cursed, with the same Christian name—an eccentricity that could be laid at the door of their bibulous father.

  The eldest was James Edward, the middle boy was James Ewan, and the youngest had been baptized James Edmund Moriarty. Among themselves they differentiated by using mainly diminutives—James, Jamie, and Jim. All three, however, seemed to have inherited some talents from their clever, but flawed, father. The eldest, James, was a natural scholar, specializing early in mathematics. The middle son, Jamie, had organizational skills, plus a natural aptitude for the mathematics of war; he excelled in such things as the game of chess, and had a deep knowledge of history of famous battles, his favourite books being the works of great military thinkers such as von Clausewitz’s On War; the great Chinese classic, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the similarly named Art of War by Machiavelli; while the ninth-century work The Tau of War by Wang Chen was his favourite bedside book (not unexpectedly, these books were also favourites of the youngest Moriarty). Inevitably, James was marked early in life for an academic career, while Jamie seemed destined for a military life.

  So what of James Edmund, Jim to his brothers? Jim was the most secretive of the trio, guarded, with a cold touch of his father’s legendary brutality. The one difference was that he kept that coldness and innate cruelty in check. He was also blessed with organizational skills that showed at an early age, when he drew around him boys whom he could lead into skulduggery—real skulduggery, not simply high-spirited youthful japes. By the age of fifteen, Jim Moriarty had led his cronies in a robbery that made the headlines in Liverpool, the theft of over three hundred bottles of fine wine and brandy from a secure warehouse in the docks area. A few months later, the same gang broke into a city jeweller’s strong room and lifted thousands of pounds’ worth of necklaces, rings, and other items. These are among the first things mentioned in the Moriarty Journals, which he began writing at the age of fifteen.

  Back in Dublin, Sean Moriarty died suddenly of an unexpected ailment—a street robbery—when Jim was only sixteen years of age. Interestingly, he does not confess to this wanton crime (in the Journals), but he does admit to being away from home for five days coinciding with his father’s death. Sean Moriarty was found beaten with iron bars and robbed of what little money he had on him. The crime brought a comment from a Dublin coroner, who remarked, “A man can hardly walk the length of his own shadow these days without being set upon by hooligans or rampers: getting as bad here as it is reported in England. Which is saying something.”

  James, the eldest, flourished academically, eventually studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, and quickly making his way in the world of academe, while Jamie joined the army and was eventually commissioned. For a time, Jim disappeared and was rumoured to be working for the railways as a stationmaster in the West of England.*

  The one thing that is, to quote Albert Spear, “plain as Salisbury” is the growing pathological jealousy that grew in the youngest Moriarty’s heart against his eldest brother. That, combined with the increasing suspicions of the authorities, led him to take the terrible steps that began to form the great plan for his future as a superlative criminal mastermind.

  The immortality of the eldest brother, James, was assured early with his treatise on the binomial theorem, coupled with the Chair of Mathematics at one of Britain’s smaller universities, and it was only when the youngest brother first visited James in that quiet intellectual backwater that he realized what fame his brother had already achieved. Moriarty would never forget that day: the tall and stooping boy he remembered now transformed into a man to whom deference was shown on all sides. The letters from famous men, congratulations and flattery; the already half-completed work on The Dynamics of an Asteroid lying on the smugly neat desk facing the leaded window looking out onto the quiet courtyard.

  He thought now, as he waited in his makeshift rooms on the edge of Westminster, that it was during that visit so many years ago that he knew the full flush of envy as he saw James’s real potential. His brother would undoubtedly become a great and respected man—and this at a time when he, Jim Moriarty, was harried on all sides, desperately trying to build himself into a man to be feared and respected within the criminal hierarchy of, first, London, and then the whole of Europe.

  At the time of that first visit to the up-and-coming professor, young Moriarty had suffered a number of setbacks and more than anything, he needed some way of showing the underworld that he was truly a man of strength, a force with which to be reckoned, a leader with unique skills.

  It was only after Professor James Moriarty was acclaimed for his work The Dynamics of an Asteroid that the professor’s youngest brother saw clearly the way in which he could both further himself and scour the torment of envy from his brain. After all, he, more than any other person, knew his elder brother’s weaknesses.

  By the later 1870s, the tall, gaunt, and stooped professor, old before his time, was becoming a public figure. His
mind, it was claimed, bordered on genius, his star seeming to be set ready for a rapid rise into the academic stratosphere. The newspapers wrote of him and there were predictions of a new appointment: the Chair of Mathematics would shortly be vacant at Cambridge, and it was common knowledge that the professor had already turned down two similar posts on the Continent.

  The time was ripe for the youngest Moriarty to act, and, as with all things, he laid his plans as meticulously as the professor in his world used science.

  Among his acquaintances, the young Moriarty had fostered the friendship of an elderly actor of the blood-and-thunder school, Hector Hasledean, a thespian whose one-man performances, in which he presented a striking range of Shakespearean characters from the hunchback Richard III to the old and embittered King Lear, were still much in demand.

  Hasledean was by this time in his late sixties, and drew freely upon a lifetime of theatrical experience. A flamboyant figure in both private and public life, the actor, though much given to the bottle, had a huge well of talent, still retaining the ability to move audiences with his range of emotions but also dazzling through his ability to change his appearance. Audiences marvelled at this talent, and young Moriarty set out to learn from him the tricks of that particular trade.

  Always certain of his victims’ weaknesses, young Moriarty became an invaluable friend to the ageing actor, plying him with gifts of good wines and expensive spirits. He quickly won the actor’s confidence, and one night before Hasledean lapsed into total fuddlement, Moriarty made his first approach.

  He explained that he would like to play a trick on his famous brother and now sought the actor’s help in teaching him the art of disguise—in particular, how he could appear before his famous brother as a replica of the great man. The idea appealed to the actor, who totally entered into the spirit of things, working with the younger man and teaching him the rudiments of disguise: choosing the right kind of bald-pate wig with the assistance of the greatest expert of the day, supervising the making of special boots with “lifts” to give the added height, and designing a harness to help the young man maintain the required stoop. He also bade his pupil study the best books on makeup and disguise: Lacy’s Art of Acting, A Practical Guide to the Art of Making-Up by Haresfoot and Rouge, and the more recent The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts by A. J. Cooley.