Moriarty (36 page)

Until then they had been using the rudimentary forms of contraception available to them: working things out from the phases of the moon, and Pip getting off at Hillgate, as the jargon had it. Now, all that was changing, and in bed Fanny had become a different person, clinging to him, making him complete the act and behaving like a doxy, as if she wanted to be at it all hours of the day and night. This Pip enjoyed, but found unsettling—well, who wouldn't?

Now Pip was away on the Professor's business. For at least a day, maybe two. And the Professor was in his room, keeping everyone away. Even Sal Hodges, who was most anxious to talk with him, was kept out.

Moriarty was composing a letter—four letters in reality, all to be taken abroad.

He then gave them the precise time, date, and place of the proposed meeting. Pip Paget had returned from doing Moriarty's bidding. “One date is certain and best,” he reported. “Tuesday, twenty-ninth May.”

“Then that must be the day on which Idle Jack will meet his nemesis.” Moriarty closed his mouth and gave a thin, almost ghastly smile. “At six o'clock in the morning, Pip?”

“Six o'clock precisely, Professor. Yes.”

“And the other matters are taken care of?”

“Near enough, sir, yes. Lazarus Grosewalk says he has four rogues who will not fight one with another, but who will turn the entire pack into a set of death within seconds. They are, it appears, born leaders. Males who will see to it that they are obeyed.”

Moriarty nodded and returned to his letter:

The letters were then signed, the envelopes addressed and sealed; then they were passed over to the boys who would take them, by hand, onto the Continent and give them directly to the men who
were the hinges of this plan: Schleifstein of Berlin; Grisombre of Paris; Sanzionare of Rome; and Segorbe of Madrid.

Moriarty spent much time instructing the four lads from what he called his shadows—Dick Clifford, Marvin Henry, “Welsh” Bruce, and Benny Brian. He was most anxious that these lads did their job properly and with confidence. He was not concerned with the fact that they each had to travel a considerable distance—to Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Madrid; the fact that was most in his mind was the manner in which they made contact with the four men who between them controlled vast armies of criminals. These were men who did not enjoy being sought out or hunted for in their particular capital cities. All of them took great pains to remain hidden. If a friend from outside wanted to meet and speak with any one of these men, he would have to go through what amounted to a ritual. For instance, Grisombre, in Paris, had to be asked for in a small, unassuming café on the Boule Miche on the Left Bank, the Rive Gauche, of Paris. And you could not ask for Jean Grisombre by that name; you asked for a Monsieur Corbeaux, and you also had to be possessed of a recognizable name. With Grisombre it had to be a Paul Godeux from Lille, who had a wife called Annette and two children, Pierre and Claudine. There were further questions, of course—name of a grandmother, or sister, or even a dog.

All four of the crime bosses of Europe had similar labyrinthine secret passwords and traps to pass through before you even got to within an ace of seeing the man for whom you searched.

Moriarty went through this whole rigmarole with his chosen shadows, testing them, going backward and forward through each stage of the maze, until he was assured that all four boys could do the job to which each was assigned. At last the boys left at various times of day on Friday, May eighteenth.

Almost a week later, Moriarty received a telegram from Wilhelm Schleifstein under his assumed name, Gunther. The telegram read:

M
ORIARTY KNEW
as he stood in the darkness at the back of Paget's cottage at half past five in the morning of Tuesday, May twenty-ninth, that luck did not enter into it. If you leave nothing to chance, you do not require luck. He had left nothing to chance.

Moriarty and the men of his Praetorian Guard, plus Daniel Carbonardo acting as his personal bodyguard, had arrived late on Monday night. They carried food and drink with them, which they ate following a careful reconnaissance of every possible hiding place within an eight-mile radius of the cottages on Sir John Grant's estate, the reconnaissance carried out by almost the entire army of lurkers and punishers, brought down from London for that express purpose.

“If there is any kind of emergency in London while we are here,” Moriarty said to the estimable Daniel Carbonardo, “then we are most likely scuppered.”

“Half of the lads will be back in London by now, Professor,” Carbonardo told him. “And we should be done here before seven, so everyone will be back before nine this morning. I don't think we need worry.”

In the darkness, Moriarty nodded.

The old huntsman to the Grant-Willow Hunt, Lazarus Grosewalk, had been awaiting their arrival—a small man, leathery of face and hands, with a deft and commanding manner that suited his position in life.

He immediately took Moriarty off to see the hounds, kept in their long wire run and big enclosed kennel area. They were noisy, giving tongue immediately Grosewalk appeared. “They're a bit nervous,” the huntsman said. “They know something is afoot; they're restless, and they can smell the other dogs.”

The four rogues, as he had referred to them, were a quartet of ugly-looking hounds, alpha males that had gone bad, each in a separate cage almost a mile away, but they, too, were nervous and showing signs of aggression, jumping up against the cage walls and snarling the moment the old huntsman approached with the Professor, who pulled a thick leather wallet from inside his clothing.

“No, sir. No. Not yet.” Grosewalk pushed at the empty air as if pushing the money away. “I want nothing 'til it's all done. Taking it now would be bad luck. There's many a slip.”

“Well, it's all here, Lazarus. The money for restocking the pack, and the fee we agreed upon.”

“I've no doubt on it, sir. But I'll take it afterwards when you're gone and satisfied.”

“They'll do the job, though?” Moriarty asked. “They'll kill him?”

“When we have the scent on him, yes. That's what I feel worst about. That's a country rule, sir, and I broke it. You don't shoot a fox like I did a few hours ago.”

Moriarty nodded again, and eventually they returned to the cottage, where Grosewalk showed them the blanket and everything else that was made ready. Then the remaining time ticked quickly past, in that silent brooding time as the world woke up.

They all stood in the darkened cottage as the first trembling rays of the new day's light filtered through the curtains. Then, on the dot of six o'clock, they heard the sound of Idle Jack's horse, its hooves rattling out like a pair of great shells hitting each other in a steady rhythm.

“Right lads,” Moriarty said softly as the huntsman went out to greet Idle Jack, chatting respectfully and telling the boy he had with him to take the gentleman's horse away, look after it. “Give him a drink,” he said, which was the signal for the four Praetorians to close in on Idle Jack and bind his arms, pulling him into the cottage, where Moriarty let himself be seen.

“Damn you!” was all Idle Jack said, and later even Moriarty commented that the man had shown considerable courage.

“Ah, but he didn't know what was coming at that point,” Spear said. And that was true enough, for they dragged Jack Idell around to the back of the cottage where Grosewalk had left the thick blanket—the blanket that he had wrapped the dead fox in, rubbing the animal's scent and blood into the rough wool until it was entirely impregnated with the creature's smell.

“This is disgusting,” Jack Idell said. “What's to be gained …” He started to speak again, to say something further, then realized what was happening, for the pack of hounds were loudly giving tongue and the huntsman had released them, sounding his horn for them to give chase and releasing the four rogue dogs into the pack. They all got the scent immediately, the hounds holding off and yapping, uncertain until the four rogues came hurtling through the dawn light toward the back of the cottage.

Moriarty led his men back inside the cottage, and as they went, they pushed Idle Jack onto the ground.

Jack let out one great high, terrified scream as the pack came onto him, the rogues breaking through, chasing him as he rolled, then staggered
to his feet, running, trying to cross the lane. But they had him down, and Pip Paget for one knew that he would never get the sound out of his head, would never be able to come back and live in this place for Idle Jack's screams seemed to cut and cleave the air, screams of terror mixed with screams for help, for someone to aid him, as the hounds found his throat and shook and bit down with no conscience, so that all was still and silent but for the baying of the hounds after less than two minutes.

“Too quick,” said Moriarty as old Grosewalk whipped the hounds off and tried to deal with the rogue dogs. “I wanted him to suffer,” even though he could clearly hear the jaws of the chomping hounds.

“A clean kill,” Grosewalk said after the hounds were back in kennels and he had, with difficulty, subdued the rogue dogs, who now had the taste and were slavering for more, their fangs still bloody and wet with blood and slime.

“It's going to be a lovely day,” Spear said as he stood in front of Paget's cottage. Daniel Carbonardo was just whipping up the horses, pulling the cart away toward the road. In the cart lay the bitten, crushed, and gouged remains of Idle Jack Idell, covered with old sacking.

The sky was blood red as the postdawn light sifted across the fields and hedgerows, and the hounds kept up their terrible, ceaseless clamour.

“A clean kill, and that's for sure,” Grosewalk repeated, then sounded “gone away” on his brass hunting horn.

LONDON: JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1900

S
OMETIMES IN THE NIGHT
Sal Hodges would ask herself why she had done it; but it was useless even asking, because she knew damn well why. She had done it because he was set on it, and he just did not give up as she inched her way toward the birth those years ago.

Now, she realized she was faced with choices: Either she came clean to him, risking a terrible wrath, or she tucked her secret away and lived with it for the rest of her life.

Sal Hodges returned to the Professor's bed five days after he came back from Steventon to London, following what must, she reasoned, have been an important and fruitful night. She knew a body had been found, but no more.

The fact was that Daniel Carbonardo, on Moriarty's instructions,
took the cart, under the cloak of night, and tipped the body at the foot of Nelson's column, where it lay like a pile of old rags until the morning. Idle Jack was, by this time, unrecognizable: a terrible sight, for the hounds and the rogue dogs had destroyed most of his face, and torn at other parts of his body.

The first senior police officer at the scene made the bare weighty statement, “We're going to need help with this,” and sent for Angus McCready Crow, now a Superintendent in the Detective Division, who in turn paid a visit to Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street—but that is another story, which will be told.

The clearing up of the fringes of Idle Jack's organization took place over the next handful of days. The barque
Sea Dancer
unexpectedly exploded in Portsmouth, tied up to a quay with only her captain, William Evans, aboard.

And there was the case of Broad Darryl Wood, the man who had been Idle Jack's second-in-command and was set to be heir to his family. It was sad, for he took to drink, and one night, during late July of this same year, 1900, he came staggering out of a pub in Oxford Street and bumped straight into Lee Chow, who said, “Ah. So Mis'er 'ood. Nice to see …” and promptly did the cheek trick with his little razor-sharp filleting knife: flick-flick, and Wood's cheeks were no more. Lying at his feet. They sewed him up as best they could, and it has to be said that he was not a man you could keep down. There was more of him in the future, though his nickname altered from “Broad” to “Cheeky.” “Cheeky” Darryl Wood, later a force to be reckoned with in Moriarty's family. There's a turn-up for the book, as they say.