The Return of Moriarty Read online

  There was also a pair of robberies planned, so both the former Moriarty men moved through the dingy streets with their hearts light. They did not see the beggar in the shadows near to The Nun’s Head nor did they hear his soft whistle. They padded on their way, slightly fuddled with the heavy drinking, unaware that the whistle had set a small boy running hard through the streets, as though his very life were in jeopardy.

  They had no cause for concern when they came upon the small and foxy Ember loitering at a streetcorner.

  “Well, Jonas and Walter. It’s been a long time. Where’ve you been hiding yourselves? Somewhere safe and far away from the law?”

  Ember’s eyes, as always, never ceased to flick back and forth as though trying to penetrate every shadow of the night.

  Neither man feared Ember.

  “Now, doesn’t that take the Huntley.” Fray grinned. “Our little old mate Ember.”

  “How goes it with you, Ember?” Roach towered over him in a menacing attitude.

  “We heard your guv’nor got hisself removed this afternoon, Ember. Got hisself taken out of the parish.”

  Ember nodded and looked mournful.

  “You lot’re not in luck,” Roach crowed. “What with the Professor leavin’ you all in the lurch, and now the dear departed colonel—but then he wasn’t much of a gaffer, the colonel.”

  “Not up to the Professor,” said Ember quietly. “That’s why the Professor had him done.”

  For a few seconds the significance of the remark did not penetrate. Fray sniggered.

  “The Professor? What you bloody mean…?”

  They had not heard the quartet of punishers come up silently behind them.

  “The Professor wishes to see you both,” continued Ember, still calm.

  Roach, always the quicker of the pair, sensed danger, his face registering bewilderment, like a man who has been hit hard and suddenly. He wheeled around too late, and a fist caught the side of his jaw, sending him down like a felled log.

  Fray hesitated for the fast bat of an eye before trying to take to his heels. Ember simply stuck out his leg and the big man tripped, sprawling headlong, the breath knocked out of him, giving enough time for two of the punishers to lift and render him insensible with a quick blow on the back of the neck.

  Ember faded into the shadows and the four punishers lurched into a broken step, half carrying and half dragging the treacherous Fray and Roach between them, singing drunkenly as they went so that any passing folk would imagine the rough-looking sextet to be out on a revel, during which a hapless pair had reached the point of no return.

  For Fray and Roach there was indeed no return. In one of the many side alleys, badly lit and paved with slanting and broken cobbles, a covered cart waited, the horse docile but the driver alert. The two unconscious men were thrown unceremoniously into the rear, quickly followed by the four punishers, two of whom sat themselves heavily on top of the prone bodies. Once inside there was a soft call to the driver, and the cart moved off in the direction of Limehouse.

  A little thin evening mist came in from the river, diffusing the light of the few gaslamps in the streets around the warehouse when, some twenty minutes later, the cart drew up outside the big doors.

  Ember and the four punishers who had taken Roach and Fray were not the only Moriarty men abroad on the Professor’s business. Lee Chow and the big punisher, Terremant, sat in the taproom of a small public house near Aldgate. The Chinese had discovered, with admirable speed, that John Tappit made a habit of calling into the place during the early evening after finishing his work as a storeman for F. & C. Osler, who had their showrooms—chandeliers, lamps, table glass, ornaments, porcelain and china—in Oxford Street.

  Tappit was a thin young man with no special skills but a certain intelligence, flawed though it was by fiery emotions. The job was steady and paid little, but in these times of poverty his position was to be envied by many. On this particular evening he reached his drinking haunt a little after eight.

  Lee Chow and Terremant appeared to take no particular notice of Tappit as he ordered his glass of spirits, drinking quietly and alone at the far corner of the room. Lee Chow’s investigations had been thorough. He knew the young man who had so viciously burned and disfigured young Ann Mary Dobey had, for the past few weeks at least, stuck to a seemingly regular routine. Lee Chow had seen Ann Mary and even his hard upbringing failed to stave off an upsurge of revulsion over the raw burns that had clawed out the flesh in a long and irregular pattern, from hairline to jaw, down the left side of her face. He had spoken of it to Terremant on their way toward Tappit’s moment of destiny, and the big punisher was as keen as the small Chinaman that Tappit should get his reward for one night’s sudden and violently impetuous work. Lee Chow knew that if he did not have a change of ritual, Tappit would stay in the hostelry for only half an hour before moving back to his lodgings and a frugal meal.

  They waited for some twenty minutes, the taproom becoming thick with smoke and noisy with the inconsequential and, for the most part, ignorant chatter of men and women thrown together more from desperation than friendship. Terremant eventually saw that Tappit was getting to the last drops in his glass. He nudged Lee Chow, and the unlikely pair made for the entrance, crossing the road outside and loitering with a good view of the door.

  Tappit came out some eight or nine minutes later, turned left, walking at a steady, natural pace, then left again into the Minories. The Moriarty men stayed some twenty yards behind Tappit, only coming close to him as he turned once more, this time into one of the many lanes that led off that unpleasant thoroughfare.

  The lane between Swan and Good Streets was deserted, as dark and menacing as that in which Ember and the four punishers had taken Roach and Fray not long before.

  Lee Chow did not speak until they were hard behind their quarry.

  “John Tappit. We come flom Plofessor.”

  Tappit stopped dead, a statue in the mist, one who had looked back upon Sodom and, like Lot’s wife, had been turned to salt.

  Lee Chow advanced on the still figure, moving in front of him while Terremant stepped up behind, his hands ready to pinion Tappit. In the dim light there was the glint of a knife in Lee Chow’s hand. Tappit’s eyes widened with a terror that rooted him to the ground. A gurgle of fear bubbled from the back of his throat, eventually emerging as a strangled, “Wha … Wha …? W-Why?”

  Terremant’s arms passed around Tappit’s body, holding him as though by a pair of metal clamps.

  “You burn Maly Dobey’s face. Now you pay.”

  Lee Chow was nothing if not sparse with his words, but the small yellow man’s heart and mind were filled with fury. He would have liked to cut Tappit’s head clean from his body and leave him dead, but his sense of vengeance was such that he knew instinctively that a quick, if painful, death was too good for any man low enough to wreak havoc on a pretty girl’s face because she would not have him.

  Lee Chow raised the knife, his ears deaf to the choking sobs of the petrified Tappit, who was now pressing backward against the solid muscular frame of Terremant, his head turning from side to side in a last vain effort to escape the knife blade. Lee Chow’s hand swept upward, grabbing at Tappit’s hair to hold the head fast.

  The sobs turned into a long, shivering shriek of anguish as the point of the knife penetrated the soft flesh of his right cheek. Lee Chow’s wrist performed a quick circular movement, reminiscent of an expert fishwife gutting a large and live fish. There was a slippery pat on the cobbles as Tappit’s right cheek fell to the ground, but by this time the head was still for he had lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Lee Chow, eyes still gleaming anger, pulled the head in the other direction and performed a similar operation on the left cheek. Terremant stepped back and the insensible body crumpled and pitched forward.

  The Chinaman bent down, wiping the razor-sharp blade on the luckless man’s coat, then, turning him over with the toe of his boot, picked up the two pieces of loose
flesh and hurled them into the darkness.

  Tappit would live, and some skillful surgeon might even patch him up, but he would become a walking lesson in the kind of retribution Moriarty meted out to anyone who took spite against those who lived under his protection—for the word would soon be out about tonight’s work.

  Being one of Moriarty’s men did not afford any special protection from the rigors of London traffic. The cabbie, negotiating Piccadilly Circus in the hansom that contained the Professor, wished that his employer had some sway over the other cabs, private vehicles and omnibuses that pressed together in the night streets. The underground railway was still in its infancy, and, while trams had first made their appearance a few years previously, nothing seemed to ease or stem the crush of horse-drawn traffic in the streets.

  Like most cabbies, Harkness—for that was the name of Moriarty’s driver—was a cheery, if foul-mouthed man who had failed miserably at all other jobs and had sunk to what was considered then the low profession of a cabbie. Chance had brought him better things, and, although he still had a little deep resentment for being openly classed as the driver of a hansom, he at least had the inner knowledge that he was probably one of the best paid in London.

  In the back of the cab Moriarty gazed out on the city. He felt safe and secluded here, watching the traffic and the pavements crowded with the world and his wife, bent on pleasure of one kind or another. Moriarty was content to bask in the knowledge that a good third of that passing parade would in some way be either his clients or victims.

  He preferred cities—particularly the big cities of Europe—to small towns and the countryside. The lush green of country fields, the sparkle of brooks and the elegant beauty of trees and woodlands were not to the Professor’s liking. They were too close to God, and he was a man who, if he feared anything, feared the power of God among men. Mammon was his safe hiding place, and cities were the natural habitat of Mammon. It pleased him to reflect on the number of thieves, pickpockets, whores, sharps and duffers who would at this moment be abroad on his business—and the number of men and women who relied on his patronage in order to practice their chosen craft.

  He had been away from London for too long and now, savoring the mixture of smells, which were ever sooty, foggy, horse-scented yet peculiar to the capital, the Professor realized how much he owed to the particular viciousness of that city’s criminal fraternity. His mind also drifted back to the irredeemable action that had finally put him at the top of the underworld, making him the outstanding master of nineteenth-century crime. It was only his vanity that allowed him to take the supreme risk of keeping a private journal, which (even though he had skillfully coded the document) would, he hoped, one day present a unique record of his life and times. Moriarty, as so many had done before him, clung to the insatiable wish for immortality.

  Part of that original need had come, naturally, from envy of his elder brother, the real Professor James Moriarty, whose immortality had been assured so early with the treatise on the binomial theorem, and the chair of mathematics at the small university.

  It was when he had 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-finished work, The Dynamics of an Asteroid, lying on the smugly neat desk facing the leaded window looking out onto the quiet courtyard. It was, he supposed, at that moment, as he saw James’ potential, that he knew the full flush of jealousy. His brother would undoubtedly become a great and respected man—and this at a time when he was trying desperately to build himself into a man to be feared and respected within the criminal hierarchy of first, London, and then the whole of Europe.

  There had been setbacks, failures; he needed, at that point more than anything, some way of showing the underworld that he was truly a man of strength, a force to be reckoned with, a man of unique skills.

  It was only after Professor James Moriarty had been acclaimed for The Dynamics of an Asteroid that Jim, the professor’s youngest brother, saw clearly the way in which he could both further himself and remove the torment of envy from his obsessed brain. He, more than anyone else, knew his elder brother’s weakness.

  By the late 1870’s the tall, gaunt and bent professor was fast becoming a public figure. His mind, it was claimed, bordered on genius; his star seeming to be set for a rapid rise into the academic stratosphere. The newspapers wrote of him, and there were predictions of a new appointment—for the chair of mathematics would soon be vacant at Cambridge, and it was common knowledge that Moriarty had already turned down two similar appointments on the Continent.

  The time was right for Moriarty the younger to act. And, as always, he planned as meticulously as his brother did in the world of mathematics.

  Among his acquaintances, the younger Moriarty had fostered an old actor of the blood-and-thunder school, a man whose one-man performances—in which he presented a range of the great Shakespearean characters, from the hunchback Richard III to the old and embittered Lear—were still much in demand.

  Hector Hasledean was by this time in his late sixties and drew freely upon a lifetime of stage experience—a flamboyant figure in private as well as public life, much given to the bottle, but still retaining the ability to move large audiences and even amaze them with his actor’s craft, which included a stunning aptitude for changing his appearance in a manner at which his audiences marveled.

  Moriarty, always certain of his victims’ weaknesses, made himself invaluable to the old man with small gifts of spirits and cigars. He quickly won the man’s confidence, and one night before Hasledean had lapsed into complete fuddlement Moriarty made his first approach. He wished to play a joke, he confided, on his famous brother by appearing before him as a replica, an imitation, of the great man.

  The idea appealed to the actor, who laughed much and entered into the conspiracy with professional zest, working with Moriarty on the disguise—choosing the right kind of bald-pate wig from the greatest expert of the day; supervising the making of the boots, with lifts to give extra height; assisting in the design of the harness, which would allow the characteristic stoop to be maintained; and introducing Moriarty to the standard books of the day: Lacy’s Art of Acting, How to Make-Up, A Practical Guide to the Art of Making-Up, by “Haresfoot and Rouge,” and the more recent Toilet and Cosmetic Arts by A. J. Cooley.

  In a matter of some four weeks, Moriarty could transform himself within an hour into an almost unbelievable likeness of his revered brother. And one week, almost to the day, after he had attained this particular skill, old Hector Hasledean was found dead in his dressing room, apparently of a seizure, which may well have been a happy accident.*

  Moriarty always took care when donning his disguise—changing from James Moriarty, the youngest of the three Moriarty brothers, to James Moriarty, the eldest and erstwhile professor of mathematics, author of the treatise on the Binomial Theorem and The Dynamics of an Asteroid.

  Apart from a similar bone structure, there were so many ways in which James the youngest differed from James the eldest: height, stance, physiognomy. It was his habit to look long at himself in the buff before effecting the transformation. It was a carefully studied process, for James Moriarty was already many years ahead of his time, having evolved a system akin to that which Konstantin Sergeivich Stanislavsky was, many years later, to offer to the theater in An Actor Prepares.

  Moriarty would stand looking at his nakedness, and it looking back at him, as he emptied his mind, filtering in the character and presence of his elder brother until, even without the aids he had yet to apply, there was a subtle alteration, as though he became another person in front of his very eyes. Or were they his eyes?

  As Moriarty looked back at himself from the mirror at this moment in the ritual, there was always a deep touch of fear: F
or that few seconds while the complete transformation was taking place in his head he would wonder which of them he was—the killer or the victim? It had been just like that at his brother’s end and his own beginning.

  Once he was mentally ready, Moriarty began what had become an almost automatic rite. First the long, tight corset to pull in his flesh so that he could take on the thin, near wraithlike proportions of the other Moriarty. This was followed by what appeared to be a more restricting device, a kind of harness—a slim leather belt that passed around his waist and was buckled tight. A series of crossover straps came over his shoulders and threaded through flat loops sewn into the front of the corset; from thence they passed down to buckles on the front of the belt. When these buckles were drawn tight, the effect was to pull his shoulders forward so that he could only move with a stoop. Moriarty next donned his stockings and shirt before climbing into the long striped trousers, which had to be hitched up to mid-calf until he had put on and laced the boots, specially designed with built-up soles to add the necessary height.

  All that was left now to complete the required picture was skillful alteration of the face and head, ingeniously effected by the paints and brushes used by actors and those who were expert in disguise.

  First, he tucked his mane of hair under a tight-fitting skullcap and began to work on his face, using firm, deft and confident strokes so that he assumed the gaunt, hollow-cheeked look so easily identified with Dr. Watson’s famous description of the arch-criminal. Even with only the skullcap covering his hair the effect was remarkable, the pallor striking and the eyes sunken unnaturally into their sockets.

  Then came the final and crowning part of his disguise—a domed head covering of some pliable and thin material mounted on a solid cast. Externally the color and texture were those of a normal scalp, and, when fitted in place over the skullcap, the effect was extraordinarily realistic, giving the natural impression of the high bald forehead sweeping back and leaving only a sprinkling of hair behind the ears and at the nape of the neck. Moriarty would then make a few slight adjustments, using a small pot of flesh-colored cream, which he worked around the join between the wig and flesh. Once satisfied, he would finish dressing and, standing in front of the mirror, peer at himself from all possible angles. Moriarty looked back from the glass at Moriarty.