Moriarty (16 page)

Apart from these excellent places, he had a series of chophouses and pie shops that provided simple but plain English fare, and altogether, the profit from these establishments brought Moriarty some five or six hundred pounds a week—a sizeable sum, much of which he ploughed back into the business of his criminal family.

So Professor Moriarty did not go short of anything, and he was known to be generous and charitable to those who worked for him. Albert Spear in fact was often heard to observe that the Professor was too generous for his own good, as the saying went.

And now, sitting here in his temporary accommodation on the edge of Westminster, he owned that he probably was just that: far too generous. Look how he had let Pip Paget get away free with his betrayal.

Soon after the wedding of Pip Paget and Fanny Jones, the Professor had ordered him to kill. What was worse, the victim was a woman known to him: Kate Wright, who had been their housekeeper in the great warehouse headquarters in Limehouse. He knew that had been the straw, the one that caused the breaking of Paget's back, the final breaching of Paget's trust, for he had done what was asked of him, yet after it was done he left with Fanny Jones, never to return. In his strange, paradoxical way, the Professor had known the cause of his desertion and had left the matter alone, willing to find within himself an excuse for the big, good-looking lad with the fair hair bleached by the sun. He, Moriarty, was to blame for Paget's reaction, and while he knew nothing of love, he had in some strange manner loved Pip Paget as a substitute son. Yet now his mind altered. With luck and guile he would soon have a secret headquarters again and the one
person he wanted as his housekeeper was Paget's wife, the country girl Fanny Jones; and whatever the morals, Moriarty usually got his way. Even now he felt his mouth water, and in this salivation, he imagined he could taste Fanny Jones's boiled leg of pork with pease pudding.

He rose again, stretched, and walked to the door, opening it and going out onto the landing, hearing, as he did so, the secret knock far below, down the stairs and along the passages to the back door. The secret knock that was not so much a secret, it being the music-hall comedian's get-off dance—dum-diddy-dum-dum dum-dum, shave-and-a-haircut, me-next.

Then he heard the voices: Spear, with watchful Harry Judge in attendance.

“I
FEAR IT'S HARD
and brutal tidings, Professor.” Spear parroted the words Ember had used when reporting to him. The Professor stood in front of the fire, Spear looking directly into his eyes, with Harry Judge on guard outside the door.

“Go ahead, then. I dare say I can take it.”

“It's Sal. Sal Hodges.”

“What of Sal?” Moriarty did not even sound alarmed.

“It seems she's been murdered. Dead. Strangled in Idle Jack's house. The house that was his father's in Bedford Square.”

“And when did this take place?” Still unruffled.

“Yesterday evening. The body's at old Cadvenor's parlour.”

“The undertaker?”

“The undertaker,” Spear spoke low in affirmation.

“And you've seen the body?” the Professor hissed.

Spear shook his head, still wondering at Moriarty's unaffected manner.

“So you haven't seen the corpse?”

“Not yet, sir. No.”

“But you've talked to those who have?”

“I've talked with George Gittins. He says she don't look herself.”

“I don't suppose she does; not if she's been strangled.” Moriarty nodded. “Right, then perhaps we'll go together and take a look at her when you've given me the hard and brutal news.”

“We know where Idle Jack will be, more or less on his own. Out in the open. On Friday evening.”

“More or less alone?”

“He'll have a bodyguard with him. Maybe two.”

“Sidney Streeter?”

“I don't think you'll be worried by him anymore.”

“I wasn't worried by him in the first place.”

“Well, I think he is gone to Rotisbone. Been removed from the parish.”

“I wish him bon voyage. But who will take his place?”

“I have no idea, though I wager that young Rouster, Rouster Bates, will be one of them.”

“What, that hoddy-doddy little man?” It summed up the tubby little tough.

“He used to work for us. Yes. Probably him, and possibly another. But Jack'll be outside and walking to and from his cab. Outside the Alhambra, Leicester Square. Going in for the benefit performance, which begins at nine o'clock. Heaven knows what time it'll end. Midnight, maybe long after. But I'm reliably told he will order his cab for fifteen minutes after midnight.”

“Good. Let me concern myself with the time.” Moriarty squeezed out a thin smile, showing his teeth. Then, from the back of his throat came an unholy cackle. “Albert, that is the best news. Don't you think
it's time for Idle Jack to become Jack-in-the-Box?” The cackle was totally without mirth and was delivered in a snakelike hiss.

Albert Spear, steeped in sin as he was, felt a long furrow of fear pass through him, meddling with his brain and seeping dread into his bones and internal organs. His old grandmother would have said someone had just walked over his grave, but from Spear's viewpoint it was as though someone had got down into his grave and was trying to pull him in after him.

“Is Daniel in?” Moriarty asked.

“He is, yes. With the boy.”

“Send them both up on your way out. And Terremant, is he back yet?”

“He's still out with Ember and Lee Chow. They're sifting every piece of dust to find our people and drag them back.”

“And you'll join them, no doubt.”

“No doubt, sir.”

“And you'll get on with finding a suitable warehouse.”

“Sir, there's much to be done.”

Moriarty nodded. “Get on with you and do it then, Bert. Send the others up.”

Spear had reached the door before Moriarty stopped him again.

“And Spear…?”

“Sir?”

Moriarty let him stand there for ten … fifteen seconds, unable to make up his own mind. “Spear old friend …?” Still without his mind made up. Another ten seconds. Then he thought, there's a French saying,
pour encourager les autres
. To encourage the others. “Do you happen to know where that blackguard Paget has got to?”

“No idea, sir.” Spear's voice cracking a little.

“Find him. Let me know where he is. Right?”

Spear wondered,
If I find him should I first warn him? First, before I tell the Professor
. “I'll find him, guv'nor,” he said, knowing he would if he put his mind to it. “Sir, I think you should know that it's said William Jacobs was present when Sal Hodges met her end.”

Moriarty nodded, an almost dismissive gesture. “Spear,” he began. Then, “Idle Jack is a man who delights in forbidden pleasures—not just the perversion of man lusting for man. Idle Jack is worse; much worse. And when a man has the desires of Idle Jack, and the murderous sly cunning that goes with them, then he is somehow warped, and not worthy to be called a man at all.” He raised a hand, almost a farewell wave. “And in the morning be here. Half past nine. Be here so we can go and look at Sal's body, eh?” He gave a throaty little laugh that puzzled Albert Spear as he left the room and hurried down to the basement, Judge at his side, wanting to know everything as usual.

Back in his quarters, the Professor smiled to himself. He was thinking of Sal, whom he had seen last night, and again first thing in the morning, before she went off to catch the train to Rugby, where she was to visit their son.

Lying on his desk was her telegram sent from Rugby General Post Office at four this afternoon:

LONDON: JANUARY 18, 1900

T
ERREMANT TAUGHT YOUNG
Wally Taplin to make firelighters by rolling whole pages of
The Times
newspaper into long tight sticks, then twisting them into a kind of granny knot. “They'll help start the fire a treat,” Terremant told him. “Three or four of 'em topped by some dry kindling and you'll have it going in no time. Just add coal.”

One of Wally's jobs was to get the Professor's fire going of a morning. “Only works with the old Thunderer,” Terremant counselled the boy. “I've tried other newspapers, but the Thunderer's the one. It don't work with the
Telegraph
or the
Express
, and the
Graphic
…? Well, the
Graphic
's no bloody good at all … just smoulders, then goes out.”

The Thunderer was
The Times
.

Down in the basement, they had slept in. This was partly due to Terremant not getting home until three in the morning and young Wally sitting up talking to Daniel Carbonardo—listening to grisly tales—as if waiting for Terremant, who had been out around the stews and sinks talking former Moriarty men and women back into the family.

“Some of 'em required a little encouragement,” he said in the morning when they were crawling around sleepily, just waking up. “I encouraged them, never worry.” He slapped his gloved palm with the heavy stick he carried. The stick had a great knobbled head, like the tip of a mutinously erect pego.
*
Hard as a brick and heavy as lead. Until he came across the stick in a Berlin shop, close to the Hotel Bristol on the Kurfurstendamm, where Moriarty was staying in the spring of 1898, Terremant always carried a neddy—a short, truncheon-like weapon also shaped similarly to the male member.

Now, he slapped his open palm again. “Oh, I encouraged them alright. They understood what I was saying. They comprehended my meaning.”

Young Taplin shuddered, then sat bolt upright, hearing a thunderous knocking at the front door.

“I'll learn
him
an' all.” Terremant was off, quick as a butler on Palm Sunday, as the saying had it.

It was a telegram boy, all neat in his blue uniform, heavy coat collar turned up against the cold, with the leather pouch unbuckled on his belt and a telegram for James Moriarty.

“I have to wait. See if there's a reply,” the boy said, trying out a bit of cheek on Terremant, who nodded at him, then summoned a
drowsy Daniel Carbonardo from below stairs to take the telegram to the Professor.

Carbonardo had barely turned the handle on the Professor's bedroom door when Moriarty sat up, eyes open, awake and alert, a hand reaching for the Borchardt automatic pistol that was never far distant from his grasp, awake or asleep.
*

“What is it?” he asked, flat and seemingly disinterested. “What was all that knocking? ‘Knock, knock, knock. Who's there? A farmer that hanged himself on th'expectation of plenty,' was it?”

“I thought it was ill luck to quote from that play, sir.” Carbonardo was uncharacteristically arch.

“Daniel, yes. Ah, the Scotch play. So, I have a literate assassin. One who knows his Shakespeare.” Then, raising his eyebrows in query, “The knocking?”

“A telegram for you, sir.” He offered the buff envelope. “The boy awaits an answer.”

The Professor ripped open the flimsy envelope and quickly read the contents:

“No answer,” the Professor smiled, as though to himself, then asked Carbonardo if he would draw a bath and see if Terremant had prepared breakfast.

Outside it was heavy cold, with a north wind that had brought thick snow and a hard frost in the hours before dawn, its rime a carapace on plants and trees, the windows thick with freezing hard geometric patterns both outside and in.

Eventually, bathed and shaved, James Moriarty went through to his main room, dressed in his dark blue silk dressing gown with the military frogging on the sleeves and across the fastenings. Running a hand over his freshly shaved jowls, he thought of Mysson and the need to have his razor freshly ground and stropped.

Christopher Mysson—Sharp Kit—was their knife-grinder; he prepared all knives and razors and was paid two pounds a week to do it. A little man with an untidy mop of hair and some malformation of his back from stooping since childhood for hours on end over his footpedalled grindstone, he was a diligent worker. Daniel Carbo-nardo, for instance, swore by him. “Never had knives so sharp,” he would say. “Sharp as a hornet in heat.”

Wally Taplin waited to serve him the breakfast Terremant had cooked.

Years previously, Terremant had been taught the basics of cooking, from how to boil an egg to the method of grilling a beefsteak and preparing vegetables. His teacher was Kate Wright, who had been the Professor's head cook and housekeeper before she, with her husband, was discovered in duplicity, and so paid the price, at the hands of Philip Paget as it happened—the reason Pip Paget had left Moriarty's employ in a somewhat deceitful manner.

Now, Jim Terremant was a reasonable, if rough and ready, cook. This morning he had prepared a small rump steak and some grilled
kidneys, with potatoes after the French manner: parboiled, then fried, in deep beef dripping, until they were a golden brown. He had learned a little about French cuisine from a sous-chef at the Crillon while Moriarty was staying in Paris.

Young Taplin poured the tea, a strong Indian brew, the kind that Moriarty liked best. He could not do with what he termed “thin and insipid tasteless Chinese Limehouse mistwater.” He would say loudly that he preferred something strong, “brewed from a good Indian particular, with sugar and a teardrop of tiger's milk.”

So, Wally poured the Darjeeling and kept the toast coming while the Professor ate his way through the steak and grilled kidneys, and put a sprinkle of lemon juice over the potatoes.