The Return of Moriarty Read online

  The case had been well documented in the press, for Warner had offered the gems for sale in several public houses in the area: an act of supreme folly. Moriarty, however, was not concerned with how the gems had come into Abrahams’ possession. After lengthy negotiation he secured the precious stones for a reasonable price, though the bargaining left him drained.

  Before the meeting with Abrahams he had discussed a complicated issue with the three men, Fisher, Clark and Gay, who were intent on a robbery in Harrow. There were three of them and the job was obviously a four-handed affair that required certain refinements that only Moriarty could arrange. In plain language, the trio were short of cash and needed financial backing to provide a fourth man with an intimate knowledge of locks, and a wagonette or similar transport.

  The three men painted a glowing picture of the riches, in silver plate, jewels, cash and other convertible goods that could be had from the house in question—the country home of a wealthy baronet who, with his wife, would be visiting relatives in the West Riding during the weekend of April 20–23, leaving only two elderly servants in charge.

  Moriarty told them that he would give an answer within the next two days and, once the trio had left, sent for Ember, giving him instructions to look into the facts concerning the house, movements of the baronet and his lady, the staff, and all the intelligence that could be collected regarding amounts and values of fencible goods which could be removed.

  After that the Professor dealt with six other cases. One man, Larson, a forger of exceptional ability, had come with his wife and Bostock, his partner, to pay their simple respects to Moriarty, to kiss his hand and reinforce their loyalty to the governor of their criminal family.

  A father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Dobey, came to plead for justice, not of the same kind which had brought Hetty Jacobs to the chambers behind the warehouse, for in this instance, their daughter, a girl who undoubtedly lived well within the fringe of criminal and amoral enterprise that festered in London’s East End, had, a month before, had her face seamed with vitriol. John Dobey, her father, was certain about the perpetrator of this act of violence, a man called Tappit who had sought favors from the unfortunate Ann Mary Dobey, who had, until the incident, been employed as a barmaid at the Star and Garter public house near Commercial Road, now under new management since the previous owner had gone bankrupt in 1888, blaming his ill fortune on the Ripper murders, claiming that, “People aren’t going out anymore. Since the killings, I hardly get a soul in here of a night.”

  Ann Mary had been horribly disfigured, and Moriarty promised the incensed parents that he would have the matter looked into and, if proven, would see that Tappit was brought to the same rough justice he had executed on the girl.

  There was the wife of a convicted murderer who was to hang in a week and a pair of cases concerning payment—or, rather, lack of payment—for services performed on the Professor’s behalf: one to a seaman who had assisted in getting a wanted man out of the country and into Holland; the other to a publican in Bishopsgate who had lodged a visiting French anarchist for a week while he made contact with some brethren of similar persuasion. The payments were made and both men left happy, swearing future loyalty to the Professor.

  It had been a wearying evening, which was not over yet, for at this moment Moriarty was engaged in one of the most difficult problems, that of Rosie McNiel’s daughter, Mary, and Sal Hodges.

  Sal Hodges was undoubtedly one of Moriarty’s many major assets. Sal ran three distinct, though linked, operations: a string of high-class prostitutes who worked out of a couple of good West End addresses—one off St. James, a night house known as Sally Hodges’ House; the other more private. She also had a third string of moderately reasonable girls working from a house in the City (Sal’s girls, even at the latter address, were like queens when compared with the human dregs who worked the dockland areas); she also controlled a set of well-trained young women who brought in far more in the way of money than her whores. These were the hard girls—again part of the Swell Mob—who posed as prostitutes in order to pick pockets and skin any possible client. Her methods were loosely based on those of the famous Mother Mandelbaum of Clinton Street, New York, who had, during the seventies and eighties, proved that organized women were a criminal force with which to be reckoned. These girls of Sal Hodges would work late at night around the West End, luring men into their clutches by every known ruse, from pretending to have lost their way to making blatant sexual offers; either way, if one of Sal’s special girls got a man, he could say good-bye to wallet, watch and chain or any other valuables that might happen to be on his person. They were also most expert at picking the pockets of drunks and were not averse, when it was called for, to using physical violence, the most notable method being the garrotte, half, or even wholly, strangling their victims with rope or a silk scarf, looting the unconscious man, or corpse if he had put up a fight, and disappearing into the night murk like the sirens they were. As the rhyme went:

  The old “Stand and deliver’s” all rot.

  Three to one; hit behind; with a wipe

  round the jowl, boys,

  That’s the ticket, and Vive la garrotte!

  While the great garroting epidemic of the early 1860’s was long dead, Sal’s girls had devised new methods, which, combined with the old, made them into a class that rekindled the terrors of Chokee Bill and the mid-century scourge. Indeed, in certain fashionable areas where they worked, the wealthy and prosperous walked at night in real dread.

  Sal was in her early thirties, a woman who had known great deprivation in the early years of her life, but who had, through ambition and an overriding desire to better herself, traveled the rough and steep road by way of whoring in her early teens to being a kept woman—a situation she exploited to the full, the gentleman concerned being a titled member of the aristocracy and extremely rich to boot.

  She endured, as she said, the situation for two years, during which time she procured much material—letters and documents—with which to compromise her lover. When the moment was ripe, she simply presented the hapless man with the facts, demanded the deeds to the house in which he had kept her, plus a not inconsiderable sum of money in return for her silence and the incriminating papers. From that moment Sal’s business thrived, the house in which she was kept becoming the first of her more plush bordellos. Shortly after this she came under the influence of James Moriarty and the extent of her business grew and flourished.

  She was a striking woman who dressed well and always in the latest fashion, her hair a golden color, her frame well proportioned and voice well modulated except in times of stress, when she had an unfortunate tendency to lapse into the more loose speech that was the inheritance of her youth. It was such a lapse as this under which she was laboring in Moriarty’s chambers as she faced Mary McNiel’s mother.

  “You sit there as if you’d never had a pego between your thighs and have the bloody nerve to call me a whore, you proud-arsed cow,” she shouted at Mrs. McNiel.

  “Well, whore you are, Sal Hodges, and whore you’ll always be, and I’m not seeing a girl o’ mine walking the streets with you and the rest of your sisters of the abyss.”

  “Think your bloody daughter’s too good for whoring, do you? You’ll think she doesn’t shit, I suppose. Well, let me tell you a couple of truths, Rose McNiel. Your Mary’s been on the game in her own sweet way for a good few months—long before my girls got at her—”

  “You’re a lyin’ harlot!”

  “Ask ’er, bloody arsk ’er yerself, lady bloody horse droppins.”

  “My Mary’s a good girl—”

  “Like ’er mother, I suppose? Don’t think I don’t remember you, Rose McNiel, because I remember you only too well. The sailors used to call you randy Rosie—”

  She was cut short by Rose McNiel flinging her small body across the room, hands clawing at her face. Paget and Lee Chow moved with speed and separated the two women, dragging them—spitting and struggling—a
part. Mary McNiel, a pretty, dark girl of some seventeen summers, remained seated on one of the easy chairs, her face chalk white, the blood drained from her lips.

  “I will have silence.”

  It was the first time that day that Moriarty had raised his voice above its normal soft level.

  “This is not a bar parlor, nor a meeting place for your rubsters, Sal. I ask you both to remember that.”

  Mary McNiel was the bone of contention. Until a few months before, she had been reasonably occupied, according to her mother, assisting the landlord of The Seven Stars in Leman Street. Then one night Mrs. McNiel had received a message that Mary would not be returning home that evening and would be staying with friends. It did not take Rose McNiel long to find out that the “friends” were Sal’s girls and Mary was living in one of the West End houses. If the truth be told, Rose McNiel was more concerned about the fact that her daughter was no longer bringing in the few extra shillings a week.

  “All right.”

  Moriarty came around to the front of his desk. Rosie McNiel had subsided into a chair, Lee Chow hovering behind her. Paget stood by Sal Hodges who was breathing heavily. (For a moment, Moriarty became fascinated with the rise and fall of her chest). Little Mary McNiel, still looking white and worried, was leaning forward in her chair. Moriarty’s eyes narrowed, his face oscillating gently from side to side, the eyes moving from woman to woman.

  “You have been wasting my time.”

  The voice was soft again, but clipped, dangerous.

  “I’ve known Sal a long time, Rosie. A very long time. In all the time I’ve known her, she’s only had her girls take another girl on one occasion. Eighteen eighty-eight—not a vintage year for whores, though the Ripper only touched the dregs, so none of Sal’s girls need have worried. Maggie Rutter was her name, right, Sal?”

  “She’s still with me, Professor.”

  “Tall, red-haired with a skin like ivory.”

  Everyone had their attention fixed on the Professor.

  “Maggie was working free-lance—in Sal’s manor. Before that, if Sal found a dollymop on her patch, she got rid of her. One day she’d be there, the next, gone—pouff—like the Demon King at the pantomine. Oh, she’d turn up again, but never where Sal’s girls were working. I never pry into that kind of thing. I’ve never asked Sal how she did it, but I knew it was done, and it is in my mind that it was not a pleasant matter for the doll concerned.”

  He paused, eyes flicking once more.

  “Then came Maggie Rutter, and I did ask Sal about that. ‘Professor,’ she told me, ‘Maggie looked good. I felt she deserved a chance, so I offered her a place among my own family.’ You have wasted my time because I believe that is what has happened again. Is that so, Sal?”

  “That’s it, Professor. That’s exactly it.”

  “So, Rosie, your precious Mary, in whose mouth butter would not melt, was taking time off from The Seven Stars public house to take a bit of trade, and I don’t have to tell you that Leman Street is on Sal’s ground. You suit yourselves, but I would suggest that you, Rosie, should have fair words with Sal. Come to some arrangement regarding a small portion of Mary’s earnings.” His head flicked toward Mary. “You, girl, I shall see you here, in these chambers at eleven o’clock tomorrow night.…”

  “And he will not be charged, Mary, you understand?” spat Sally Hodges. “The Professor is never charged.”

  Moriarty’s face buckled into a thin smile. “Now, get out, the lot of you.”

  When they had gone, Paget returned to ask if there were anything further needing to be done.

  “You’ve enough, I think.” Moriarty gave him a cold, hard look. “What with Michael the Peg and Lord Peter to be seen about, and Alton, the turnkey.”

  “I’ll get to it, sir.”

  Moriarty had a lot of thinking to do. He leaned back in the smoking chair and allowed his mind to play over the many issues facing him, both here and abroad. There was an underlying thought. I fancy, Moriarty mused, a glass of port and a buttered bun. Twenty minutes later, Ember burst in with the news of Colonel Moran.

  Upon leaving Conduit Street, as we have already noted, Sebastian Moran took a hansom to the Anglo-Indian Club, passing down Regent Street and through the Haymarket. Even though the night was now blustery, with a chill wind gusting the streets, the world and his wife were out, hansoms, omnibuses and carriages crowding the thoroughfares of the West End, the pavements thronged with men and women intent on a night out, some heading for the innocent pleasures of Charley’s Aunt, still delighting audiences at the Royalty, or Gaiety Girl at the Prince of Wales’.

  Yet Moran was pleased to observe that the more hedonist pastimes were also well catered for in the Haymarket and its adjacent alleys and streets. Those of Sally Hodges’ girls who were allowed to hunt in the West End were doubtless there among the others. The individual beats of this area were not so strictly controlled as those down in the City, toward the East, so dollymops mingled easily with their harder sisters in the family of love, all of them watched by the hawk-eyes of the cash carriers and the occasional rampsman.*

  Moran indulged himself in the thought that when his work was done, he might well repair to one of the better night houses, perhaps Sal Hodges’ best house off St. James, where he knew there was a pair of French girls, newly brought from Paris, who were particularly expert in the gamaruche. The thought was pleasing to the old soldier and hunter, whose quarry that night was very big game, the smell of which brought a thrill to his stomach and the inevitable tingle to the loins.

  Moran was dressed in white tie because it was de rigueur in the dining rooms of the Anglo-Indian Club, and the evening found his appetite demanding the spices of Indian cooking.

  He lingered in the club for some two hours, dining on a rich Murghi Doh-Peeazah—the aromatic chicken carbonnade; with Phali Dum—beans, onions and ginger served very hot; Alu Turracarri—the simple potato curry, much beloved of Englishmen who had served in India; a turnip dish known as Korma Shalgam; fried cucumbers—Kheera Talawa; and the hot Mattar Paneer—a curry of peas with Indian cheese. There were also urd lentils, lime, tomato and onion pickles, mango chutney, an onion raita, and crisp poppadoms together with thick, whole-wheat-flour roti.

  The meal in itself gave the colonel fresh confidence, for it could not fail to remind him of those days he had spent, a younger man then, with the Indian Army, and the pleasures he experienced—delights, it must be said, that were laced with violent, even sadistic, overtones—in what was, to him, an enchanted country.

  When he left the club, Moran was beginning to feel a tense sensation, a tightening of the muscles at the back of his neck, a prelude to the action he was about to take. Once more he hailed a hansom, this time ordering the cabbie to put him down at the crossing between George Street and Baker Street.

  As he paid off the cab, Moran’s heart was pounding. He knew that if luck was with him, he would, for the second time in a matter of weeks, be able to commit a perfect crime. At this moment a large force of detectives from Scotland Yard was attempting to unravel the seemingly impossible murder of the young Honorable Ronald Adair. Now Holmes was back in London, the one man whom Moran knew had the mental agility not only to understand how Adair could be shot dead by a revolver bullet in a locked room, but also penetrate the identity of his killer.

  Moran walked slowly along Baker Street, his head down against the wind, moving toward the point where Blandford Street sliced through at a right angle. He could feel the bulky objects in his pockets and, as he came closer to the area that was his goal, his gnarled hand took a tighter grip on the heavy cane he carried. He was aware of one of Parker’s barkers loitering at the Blandford Street end and, as he came almost directly opposite number 221B, where Holmes had his chambers, Moran’s heart almost skipped a beat.

  As he looked up at the windows that undoubtedly belonged to 221B Baker Street, he could see, outlined against the luminous window blind, the sharp, black shape of a man’s head an
d shoulders. As Moran glanced upward, the head moved, as though in a gesture of negation in mid-conversation. Moran knew the shape of the head and squareness of the shoulders as well as he knew his own palms. The figure behind the blind was, without question, Sherlock Holmes himself.

  Moran continued to move, more slowly now, casting a glance back up the street. There were two more of Parker’s men, huddled, as though sheltering in a doorway; apart from them, few people were now abroad. Moran smiled grimly to himself and plunged forward, turning right at the corner, into Blandford Street, then right again down a narrow passage, through a wooden gate and into a bare yard, the back door of a house, its windows dark and silent, facing him.

  Moran, slipped a key from his pocket and swiftly had the door open. He closed it softly behind him and, using all the cunning of the great hunter he had once been, stood silently in the dark passageway, allowing his eyes to adjust to the blackness. In a matter of minutes he could see almost as well as in the street and, once more with stealth, he made his way toward the stairs, creeping steadily on the balls of his feet, making little noise during his progress.

  Moran knew which room he wanted on the first landing. He moved almost noiselessly into it, a front room overlooking Baker Street. Once inside his mind was filled with one thought, his eyes penetrating the darkness, moving to the window and peering out toward the casement across the street, where the silhouette of Holmes’ head was still outlined. Slowly Moran inched up the window and knelt behind it. Through the opening he had a perfect view, and, as he concentrated, the colonel began to remove the items from the pockets of his overcoat.

  As he worked, screwing the skeletal rifle butt onto the heavy metal cane, which was in reality the barrel and mechanism of a special high-powered air gun, made specifically for Moriarty in Germany, the pictures moved clearly, in Moran’s mind—pictures of the last time he had used the weapon. He saw young Adair confronting him in the private room at the Bagatelle Card Club.