Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (4 page)

“I know you owe him a lot,” Cecily said, “but even you must admit that he has at times, let us say, performed acts that are contrary to the laws of Her Majesty’s Government. What makes you so sure he wasn’t involved in that Widdersign idiocy?”

The mummer left the chair and dropped to his feet before Barnett had a chance to reply. “No way!” the little man asserted. “It ain’t his sort of lay at all!”

Cecily turned to him. “Well then, what makes
you
so sure?”

“Well, for one thing, I’d know if the professor were involved, wouldn’t I? He and me, we ain’t got no secrets from each other. At least none of a pro-as-it-were-fessional nature. Besides, the busies have it that he planned this here Widdersign job, and he don’t plan no such sloppy plans. If he had planned the job, those who was supposed to be tied up would right enough have stayed tied up—you can bank on it.”

“I think you’re right, Mummer,” Barnett mused.

Cecily cocked her head to the side like a curious sparrow. “So it’s not his honesty or morality but his proficiency that makes you think him innocent?” she asked.

Barnett considered for a second. “That’s right,” he agreed, “and I’d say it’s a much more reliable indicator. What can one really know of another’s degree of honesty or morality? Tell me that.”

Cecily smiled again. “What indeed?” she agreed. “How did the professor seem when you saw him?”

Barnett thought for a moment. “Gray,” he said, “and, I don’t know, stolid. As if he wasn’t going to let any of this bother him, but it took considerable effort to manage it.”

“What did you discuss?” Cecily asked.

“We didn’t so much discuss,” Barnett said. “The professor spoke, I listened. He told me his side of the case.” He stood up and began pacing again. “Well, no, not his side so much as what he thought must have happened. Since he wasn’t actually involved, he said, there were a certain number of assumptions in what he told me, but it was the most logical way for it to have happened.”

“There, you see?” The mummer hopped to his feet. “What was it he said? And what do he want us to do about it?”

“If there was anything he wanted me to do, he couldn’t tell me because the guards were right there in the room and whatever he said would get right back to the prosecution.”

“So just what did he say?” Cecily asked.

“And how did he look?” the mummer added. “He looked like he was losing weight when I seen him in court.”

“He looked fine,” Barnett told the mummer. “He told me that he hadn’t done it, in case I had any doubts, and that he couldn’t determine why Esterman was lying.”

“Esterman?” Cecily asked.

“The surprise witness,” Barnett told her.

“Was he one of the robbers?”

“Not likely!” said the mummer. “He ain’t steady enough to make an honest robber. I seen him on the stand, twitchin’ and blinkin’, and then, when he was answering questions, turning to stare steadylike at the jury with every syllable what came out of his mouth.”

“I’ve always thought,” said Cecily, “that a steady gaze is the sign of an honest soul.”

“That’s what they sez,” the mummer agreed. “And they sez it often enough so every swindler and liar and two-peg sit-down man in the world has learned to stare you right in the mug when he’s busy lying to you. Nothing breeds confi-blinking-dence like when the bloke’s staring you right in the mug.”

“There were six men in the gang that assaulted Widdersign,” Barnett explained to Cecily.

Cecily sighed. “I guess you’d better tell me about it,” she said, “as it involves the professor, and I do care about the professor. Also, it looks as though it’s going to involve you, and I—you know.”

“Yes,” Barnett said. He rubbed the side of his nose with his index finger, a gesture he had discovered helped clarify his thoughts, and picked up his notebook. “Two of the robbers were killed in the, ah, fracas,” he began, flipping through the notebook to find the right page. “One was wounded and captured, and the other three escaped into the forest with little to show for the escapade except, it is believed, a particularly fine topaz necklace belonging to Lady Hoxbary. On the other hand, Lady Hoxbary may have merely mislaid the necklace; she has been known to do so before.”

“And the wounded man?” Cecily asked.

“A few number-eight shotgun pellets in the leg,” Barnett told her. “Fully recovered by the start of trial.”

“He’ll never fly again,” the mummer offered. “He walks with a bit of a limp, which he was glad to display and, if you was to ask me, exaggerate for the jury, when he come to give testimony.”

“He gave testimony against Professor Moriarty?”

“Well, he had to, didn’t he?” asked the mummer.

“He pled guilty,” Barnett explained, “and received a lighter sentence for informing on his companions.”

“Ten years in quod, it were,” expanded Tolliver. “Seeing as how he could have swung, like as what they’re trying to do to the professor, I’d say he come off it pretty light. Particularly as how he couldn’t do all that much informing on account of which he didn’t know who any of them were. Or so he said. My sources,” the mummer went on, tapping the side of his nose suggestively, “had it that the prosecutor offered to go even lighter on him if he could somehow produce some of the swag from the earlier robberies, no questions asked, as it were.”

“I didn’t know you had sources,” said Barnett.

“I has my nose to the wheel,” Tolliver explained.

“Any ‘swag’ in particular?” asked Cecily.

“A good question,” said the mummer, “and it would seem that the answer is ‘indeed so.’ The Marchioness of Cleves, whose husband is some biggywig in Her Majesty’s Government, is anxious to get her bauble back.”

“The, ah, Bain of Thorncroft,” Barnett remembered. “A big topaz.”

“Twenty carats,” said Cecily, who had a fondness for jewelry and an impressive knowledge thereof. “Possibly the world’s largest imperial topaz.”

“What makes it imperial?” Barnett asked.

“Its color mostly. This one is a sort of pinkish orange.”

“So,” the mummer went on, “this’ere robber, Manxman Benny by name, he cops a plea, but he don’t give the rozzers anything for it they can chew on—except the professor.”

“The authorities believed him?”

“It must’ve gone summat like this,” the mummer offered. He raised a hand in supplication and assumed a high, shrill voice, “‘Honest, Inspector, I can’t peach on any of me mates, ’cause I never seen them before the job, and I don’t know nothing about any other jobs, and I don’t know who they are when they’re at home. But I happen to know who the big boss is, and I’ll swallow my fear of his retri-as-it-were-bution and give you his name. Which is Professor James Moriarty. S’welp me, governor, that’s all I knows.’”

“And on that evidence they put the professor on trial?” Cecily asked incredulously.

“There was a bit of detail to add corroboration,” Barnett told her, “but basically, that was it.”

“Until the Honorable Eppsworth, what appeared for the prosecution, opened his sleeve and Esterman fell out,” the mummer expanded.

“Esterman’s the local publican,” Barnett explained. “Owns the Fox and Hare in Wedsbridge. He claims that Moriarty stayed there for two nights the week before the robbery. Signed the register with the name Bumbury. Moriarty, on the other hand, says he was never anywhere near Wedsbridge. On the nights in question he was at his observatory on the Moor, but the only one there with him was his caretaker, an old ticket-of-leave man named Wilcox, who testified to that effect. When asked by the prosecutor whether he would lie for Moriarty, he replied, ‘A’course I would,’ which sort of ruined the effect.”

“That’s what you get for telling the truth in this man’s world,” the mummer said darkly.

“Maybe not,” Cecily suggested. “After all,
something
hung that jury.”

“True,” Barnett agreed.

“Someone should have hung Esterman for a lying dog, which is what he were,” the mummer added with a vicious upward swipe with his left foot.

“What in the world—what’s this?” Barnett suddenly demanded. He had closed his notebook and thoughtlessly turned it over as he was laying it down. There were some words crudely written in pencil on the stiff back cover:

look in binding

“Where’d that come from?” Barnett demanded. “What binding? The binding of what?”

Mummer Tolliver picked up the notebook and turned it over and over in his little hands. “It’s spirit writing,” he announced

The Barnetts, husband and wife, looked at him.

“A ghost sneaked in and wrote that bit on my notebook?” Barnett asked, with the hint of a smile.

“It weren’t no ghost. The professor wrote that bit,” Mummer explained.

“Ah! So Professor Moriarty snuck in and scribbled on my notebook?”

The mummer looked annoyed. “It’s spirit writing,” he explained patiently, “what is done onstage or in a séance by the medium to produce a manisfetation … manifestation from the spirit world. The medium holds up a slate or pad so the assembled multitude can see that there ain’t nothing wrote on it, and then he turns it over and holds it upside down with a member of said multitude holding the other end. Then he whinges for a bit for the spirits to answer their call. Then he turns the slate or likewise the pad over, and writing has miraculously appeared from the spirit world.”

“Ah!” Barnett said.

“What has happened unbeknownst to said multitude is that the medium writes the message—
I am watching over you,
or
Have faith!
or
Give the swami fifty quid,
or whatsomever seems appropriate to the occasion—upside down with a bit of chalk or pencil lead held in by his fingernail and a lot of practice to get it right.”

“The professor has practiced this art?” Cecily asked.

“He can call the spirits from the vasty deep,” the mummer affirmed. “Sometimes they come when he calls them.”

“So, upside down, eh?” Barnett took the notebook in his hands and considered. “The professor did hold the notebook once,” he recalled. “It fell to the floor, and he picked it up and handed it to me. That was shortly before the end of the interview.”

“It just fell to the floor?” Cecily asked.

“Yes, it … wait a minute! No. Moriarty knocked it to the floor with a sweep of his arm. Then he picked it up and apologized. He—” Barnett closed his eyes and pictured the event. “He held it toward me for perhaps thirty or forty seconds while he was apologizing and then handed it over. I did think it strange at the time. The professor isn’t one to spend time apologizing, but, you see, the stress of confinement, I thought … Anyway, that must have been when he did it.”

“What does it mean?” Cecily asked. “Look in binding?”

The mummer gave an excited hop. “It must be the binding of the thingummy, doncher see? The notebook.”

Barnett examined his trusty reporter’s notebook as though he had never seen it before. It was about six inches wide and eight high, slightly under an inch thick, with two stiff covers of some sort of paperboard, surfaced in a glued-on beige fabric that wrapped around to serve as the spine. It had a stitched binding, like a book, as the pages were not designed to be easily torn out. He turned it over and over in his hands. “I don’t see—”

“Here!” the mummer said suddenly. He took the notebook and opened it flat and then turned it upside down. “See the way the cloth pops away at the spine when it’s opened like this? Take a dekko and see if anything’s inside that there space.”

Barnett tried to peer inside the space thus revealed. “It’s too dark,” he said. “Wait a moment.” He lifted the notebook, still spread open, up to the light from the window and looked through. “Something,” he said. “Some sort of tube.” He tried poking at it with his forefinger, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Here,” the mummer offered, producing a very large pair of tweezers from his jacket pocket. “Try with these.”

“What on earth?” Barnett asked. “Why are you carrying these monstrous things around?”

“Very useful for opening doors,” the mummer told him, “if the key should happen to be on the other side of the lock.”

Cecily looked closely at the oversized device. “Does the need for this come up often?” she asked.

“You’d be surprised how many untrusting people are abroad in this world,” the mummer told her.

Barnett inserted the tweezers into the space and gently pried at the cylinder, pulling it from its resting place. “It’s a tightly rolled-up piece of—it feels like silk,” he told them.

“Fancy that,” said the mummer.

“Perhaps you should unroll it,” Cecily suggested.

Barnett complied, flattening it out on the table as he did so. The eight-by-eight square of fine silk fabric thus revealed was covered with tiny writing in Professor Moriarty’s meticulous hand.

Barnett studied it for a minute.

“Well,” he said, “I believe we have our instructions.”

[CHAPTER FOUR]

DURANCE VILE

I know not whether Laws be right,

Or whether Laws be wrong;

All that we know who lie in gaol

Is that the wall is strong;

And that each day is like a year,

A year whose days are long.

—OSCAR WILDE

IT WAS FAST APPROACHING MIDNIGHT AND,
the governor of Newgate Prison being a thrifty man, the gaslights in the stone corridors of the Old Block had been turned down to a faint orange glow, the barest hint of which penetrated the slots in the more favorably positioned cell doors. In the silence one could hear the dripping of distant water and the scurrying of small, quick animals.

Professor James Clovis Moriarty, MS, ScD, PhD, FRAS, quondam holder of the Thales Chair of Mathematics at Midlothian University, author of
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
,
Some Thoughts on an Absolute Value for
π
,
and
A Few Hesitant Steps into the Fourth Dimension,
as well as a score of other well-regarded papers on mathematics and astronomy, paced slowly back and forth the six steps his cell would allow.