The Return of Moriarty (12 page)

“I understan'. If Tappit no man who throw acid, then Tappit not get Tommy Lollocks crushed.”

Moriarty smiled.

“Tommy Rollocks, Lee Chow,” he corrected.

“I say Lollocks, Plofessor. All same Bollocks.”

Moriarty chuckled.

“All right, Lee Chow. Go to it.”

The grinning Chinese departed. If it does turn out to be Tappit, Moriarty thought, it won't be a simple matter of a kick in the testicles. Doing a girl's face with vitriol demanded something of a very different nature. W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan had summed it up—
Let the punishment fit the crime.
Whoever had marked Ann Mary Dobey would be paid in a subtle manner. Moriarty smiled mentally, the action not passing over his face, retribution would be necessarily harsh.

By eleven o'clock the Professor had carefully gone over the last three years' accounts for five of his restaurants and a couple of the music halls. He was shrewd enough to know that the legitimate ventures were of the highest importance to him at this point in his career.

He leaned back in his chair, happy with the results of the examination. The books showed that these projects were bringing in a sizable profit. Business was exceptional, and if he added this side of things to the activities of his vast criminal network, Moriarty's position could do nothing but improve and prosper, especially since his plans to invest in the growing movement of anarchy in Europe would, in his mind, only place him in a stronger situation—the fulfillment of the first part of his ambition, absolute control of European crime.

The meeting with his Continental colleagues, arranged for April 13, was possibly the most important matter the Professor had in hand, for his whole future rested on its outcome: certainly very big things could emerge, and his plans could only solidify and move forward if the conference were successful.

Paget tapped at the door and entered.

“I've got them all downstairs.”

He looked even more determined than usual.

“Our old regulars?” Moriarty smiled as Paget nodded. “I'd better come down to them. I doubt if there is room for all of us in here.”

Paget gave a brief flickering grin, which reflected the hardness of the man.

“They're all there but for Fossick.”

Moriarty raised his eyebrows in query.

“Fossick is past it, I'm afraid. The drink and the syphilis, I think. A shadow of his former self.”

Moriarty nodded and walked toward the door.

Downstairs in the “waiting room” nine men were gathered; men who would have frightened all but the most hardened specimens of humanity. They were each over six feet in height, built broadly and muscular, with faces betraying a brutality, a cruelty even, that would have been difficult to match.

They were all former pugilists, prizefighters bearing the scars and marks of their previous profession—cauliflower ears and battered noses; one of them had his left eye askew, another's jaw was bent to the left, the result of a bad break that had been left to set on its own.

Moriarty stood at the bottom of the stairs, his eyes roving across the faces. He knew each and every one well. When he had first set eyes on them, they all had the mark of despair on their faces, now replaced by a kind of character bred of determination.

Moriarty knew that this change was, in the main, due to him.

“It's good to see you again, lads,” he smiled.

There was a muttered response, almost a verbal doffing of caps and pulling of forelocks, smiles and grins lighting the hard, callous faces of the men.

“Well, Paget has probably told you already that there is work to be done,” continued the Professor. “We have some troublemakers around. Eat and relax for the moment. I am waiting for our good friend Ember to return with a few names. Once he is back, I'll unleash the lot of you like a pack of avenging angels.” A slow smile crossed his face. “Though it is hardly angels that I can call you.”

A few of the men laughed, deep pleasurable grunts.

“Angels of destruction, if you like, Professor,” one of them, a huge bullyboy called Terremant, said in a gruff voice.

“Aye, angels of destruction. Let Mrs. Wright see to your needs now.” He turned to Paget. “Good work. Now get on with the Harrow business. Take your time. I will not need you back here much before tomorrow.”

“I'd like to return tonight if I'm finished.”

Was it anxiety in Paget's eyes?

“Ah, yes, I had forgotten that you have good reasons for being here at night. Your perfect lady.…”

“She's no whore,” Paget bridled. To call someone a “perfect lady” was no compliment.

Moriarty allowed a pause.

“No, I'm sorry, Paget. You told me about her. Fanny Smith, was it?”

“Jones, Professor, Fanny Jones.”

“Yes, Jones, again my apologies, Paget, but I am still a little upset to have learned of her at this late stage—learned that she was living under my roof. Both of you are here, so both of you are under my protection. When shall I meet the girl?”

“Whenever you like, sir.”

Moriarty paused again, with brief and perfect timing.

“I have business to which I must attend today, and tonight. Maybe I will see her sometime tomorrow. Is the girl in the house?”

“Yes. She looks after my quarters and helps Mrs. Wright in the kitchen—does shopping and the like.”

“All right. Go about the Harrow matter, we'll talk of her again tomorrow, Paget. It is not your fault. You are a good and trusted man.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

Paget nodded to the men, who were by this time engaging themselves with tankards of ale and hot pies provided by the Wrights, and left quietly.

Moriarty went back to his chambers.

Some thirty minutes later Spear returned, flushed and nervous.

“You have found him?” Moriarty asked calmly from behind his desk. He was talking of Moran.

Spear nodded. “He's in Horsemonger Lane awaiting trail. It appears he was committed by a magistrate at Bow Street this morning, early, on a charge of murder. He will have only been at Horsemonger Lane a matter of hours.”

Moriarty's brow creased, eyes narrowing.

“Awaiting trial?” He did not expect an answer. “There are certain privileges to that, are there not?”

“They can still have things taken in to them. Food and drink; clothing. Until the trial and conviction. They'll as like hang him there. They have the means in the gatehouse.”

“Moran will blow long before that happens, then we will all be done for. Our friend the colonel needs to leave this planet long before the trial.”

His brow creased again, and for a few moments he appeared to be lost in thought.

“Fanny Jones.” He smiled. “Would the colonel recognize Fanny Jones?”

“I doubt it. I suppose he has only seen the girl a dozen times, if that, and he was not much of a man for the ladies—not for their faces any road; only their mouths and thighs.”

“Find out about her, Spear. Work quickly. If she is as clean as we are to believe, then there are things she can do for us. Get out and see if she did serve this Lady Bray; what she did to get so summary a dismissal. Look into her background.…”

“It'll take time, Professor.”

“Just the outline. Feel it out. Use your instinct; I know you, Spear, you'll be certain within two hours. In any case, we will be sure once she is on her way to Horsemonger Lane.”

The smile on Moriarty's face reflected true evil, that strange and rare look when a human being has touched the furthest limits of corruption. Today the psychiatrists would have a dozen names for it, but then, in 1894, Sigmund Freud was still groping in the dark toward an understanding of mental disarray, while criminal psychology, or forensic psychology, were simply words.

But the quest for power, the deliberate ambition to own—property, lives, towns, cities, souls—had flooded into James Moriarty's brain early in life. He could not have been more than ten or eleven years of age when he first knew that he was different.

He had no memory of Ireland, even though his mother, and both his elder brothers talked of the green fields, the farm and the animals. His first memories were those of the city, of Liverpool, and the quiet little house among the genteel middle classes, and the raging inferno inside telling him to break loose from his surroundings: from the faded velvet and the dead eyes of people he did not, and could not, recognize peering from the picture frames in the little parlor. They were arranged in rows along the dresser together with some plates decorated with a blue pattern.

He smiled to himself, for those days seemed far off, in a time when they had called him Jim. Three brothers named James, a foolish fancy of his father, or mother. Mam who played the pianoforte in the parlor and took in pupils while James studied and Jamie dreamed of wars and death or glory. And Jim? Jim did not dream of power, there was no time to sit and dream—James' example at least showed him that. You had to take the moment by the throat, and use it, wring every ounce of breath from it; so Jim, even at this tender age, began to look about him to see where the sources of power lay, and he found, very quickly, that they lay in various clearly aligned areas. You had to get a hold on people first, have them in thrall, exercise control over them, and that, he found, was easier than it first appeared.

Women and girls seemed to exercise great control over men, so the first step was to have some dominance over them. Jim Moriarty spent many hours wandering around at night, noting where the people who lived in their street were mostly to be found. It became relatively easy once that was discovered.

The first was the nursemaid at number fifteen. Jim had caught her, or rather seen her, with a soldier. He suspected that things were not as they should be, because the girl, aged about sixteen years, spent most of her free time—one evening a week and the occasional Sunday—not with just one soldier, but several. Jim had finally discovered her behind some bushes in the old Zoological Gardens with her skirt up to her neck and a large corporal on top of her, moving as though he was trying to win a gold cup.

When it was finished, the corporal gave the nursemaid some money and left: the click of those coins remained a memorable sound. Five minutes later there was another soldier with her and the same sequence of events.

Jim Moriarty was aware of the dangers. Young boys were found dead every day in Liverpool. But that did not stop him, because he also knew that the nursemaid had a good position with a very respectable family and she had come from a favorable home; his mother had said that she was the daughter of a country schoolmaster. When Moriarty put it to her, the girl had been scornful at first.

“You dirty young beast. You don't know anything.”

“Wait and see then.”

“You couldn't do anything. I'd set my young man onto you.”

“You'd still get caught. I wrote it all down, just as I saw it and it's in a safe place. If anything happens to me, my best friend knows what to do.”

“What do you want, you little bastard?”

“Mam said you were a lady. Ladies don't talk like that.”

“What?”

He told her. Half of what she made out of the soldiers. She argued and cried a little, but paid up. So did the son of his Mam's best friend, two other nursemaids, the cook at number forty-two and the prim, proper Miss Stella, who taught in Sunday school—he found out about her by accident, but she paid him like the others, just the same.

All those folk were his high-class clientele.… Young Moriarty had smaller fish to fry as well: the other kids at school, and it was with them that he learned the lessons of real power. But that was the beginning, and another story.

In spite of his broken nose and the disfiguring scar, Spear could well have passed as a police officer. He sat in the private bar of The Victory, close enough to Park Lane to be the haunt of those more superior servants—the butlers and valets—attached to the households of the rich, famous and influential who had their town houses in that area.

Spear did not actually tell the barman that he was from the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He merely hinted at the possibility. The hint worked wonders: for one thing, quite a number of plainclothesmen had been using the pub during the last weeks while looking into the murder of Ronald Adair, so it was not particularly odd for another one to turn up, especially the day after the murderer had been apprehended. The barman tipped off the landlord, who came through and actually asked Spear if he would care for a drink on the house. Spear accepted with good nature and within ten minutes was rewarded with the information that Sir Richard Bray's butler, a Mr. Halling, was in the habit of calling in at The Victory at around nine o'clock most evenings and at midday two or three times a week.

Spear was in even greater luck when, at five past the hour of noon, the door to the private bar opened to disclose a funereal-looking, tall, thin man who was indubitably in the higher echelons of service. The landlord introduced them, and Spear, speaking in low, almost hallowed tones, asked Mr. Halling if he could have a confidential word with him. He also bought the glasses of spirits.

Halling was obviously uncertain; there had been reporters from the newspapers around of late, and he did not wish to get involved.

“There's no question of you being involved, Mr. Halling.” Spear's tone bordered on reverence. “We don't wish to involve anybody, but there are some side issues arising from that nasty business at four twenty-seven Park Lane.”

Halling scowled, looking down his nose as though some unsavory smell had assailed his nostrils.

“Regrettable,” he said rather in the manner of one commenting on the loss of a florin than on the loss of a life. “A most regrettable and unwholesome business. I would rather make no comment.”

Spear sighed. He was good at impersonating the frustrated noises of authority.