Moriarty (3 page)

It was down those steps, seventy-two hours previously, that the little old, bent hansom cab driver had come asking for Mr. Carbonardo, refusing speech with anyone but Mr. Daniel Carbonardo, enunciating the name with care, rolling the
R
s in almost an Italian or Spanish manner.

On being taken upstairs to the study and being introduced to the master by Tabitha, his one servant, the caller assumed a subservient
manner, hands clasped low, head bent, waiting for the master of the house to speak. Daniel was brusque with the man; indeed, he had immediate reservations about him: Old, bent, and with an unhealthy, greyish pallor, the fellow should never, he considered, be allowed to drive a cab.

“What is it, then?” he asked. “I am a busy man and cannot spare you more than a couple of minutes.”

“You'll spare me more when you hear the purport of my business.” The man had the gravel throat of one who liked spirits and tobacco more than was good for him. He spoke low, quietly, in a way that set Daniel thinking of another whose speech was always low, the voice dropped to make certain you listened carefully.

Now, Carbonardo looked hard at the man's face, peering into his eyes, lifting his chin slightly as though searching for some clue. “I know you,” he said at last. “Harkness, isn't it?”

“The same, sir. Indeed. I've had the pleasure of driving you many times.”

Daniel Carbonardo took a pace back. “You used to work for the Professor. I remember you well: Moriarty's private cabbie, right?”

“Oh, indeed right, sir. Yes. Moriarty's personal cab driver. But what d'you mean,
used
to work for the Professor?”

“Surely you cannot work for him anymore, for he's left the country. He's not been heard of for some years.”

“Back, sir. He's back.” The little man paused as though for dramatic effect. “Returned to London, sir.” He continued. “Back here in the Smoke. Back and waiting to have words with you. Waiting even as we speak.”

“Where?” Now Daniel's voice was hoarse, his throat dry, the news of Moriarty's homecoming making him wary, vigilant. Maybe even a mite frightened.

“Never mind the where or the why, Mr. Carbonardo. I am to take you to him instantly. Indeed, every minute we tarry will edge the Professor closer to irritation, something neither of us require, sir.”

Daniel shook his head in a small flurry of discontent. “No! No!” he muttered, stepping briskly to the door. “If you have orders, then take me now.” In the hall he shrugged into his dark green ulster, nodded to Harkness, then followed the cabbie down the front steps and into the waiting hansom.

It took near five and forty minutes for the cab to travel west, to one of those anonymous squares that had, over the past half century, started to appear close by the borough of Westminster. But at last they came to a halt, and Harkness called down to tell Daniel they had arrived.

“You're to go straight in and up to the second floor,” he called through the partition that separated cabbie from passenger below.

Alighting, Carbonardo found they had stopped in front of a fine, large, terraced house with broad steps leading to a solid oak front door. From behind the windows came the bright glare of electric light, and the area in which he found himself smelled of money: It was the kind of London square where men of substance lived and kept their families, tended by wealth, surrounded by luxury. These were the manner of houses fast taking the place of the crushed, cramped buildings that had previously made up a vast part of Westminster: the sprawling dense huddle of structures, leaning in on one another, tipping over and locking together to make up the rookery known as the Devil's Acre, a region that had teemed with men and women with whom Daniel Carbonardo himself would have had second thoughts about associating.

“You're to go straight up, sir. He has rooms on the second floor. Go straight up, there's no cause for concern. He's expecting you.”

The front door was unlatched, and inside, in the spacious hall, Daniel was puzzled to find no fitments or furniture—just bare boards, and stark stripped walls with outlines where pictures had once hung or furniture stood.

The heels and soles of his boots thumped against the wooden flooring, sending echoes loud through the house, and, as he made his way up the stairs, he was conscious of the gas mantles unlit behind their glass bowls. What electric lighting had been introduced was obviously recent, and did not exist throughout the entire house.

As he reached the second-floor landing, Carbonardo heard a sound from below. The front door through which he had just entered creaked again, while a second footfall sounded, crossing and starting to mount the stairs behind him, a shadow passing over the scrubbed bare boards. Swiftly, Daniel took two steps into the passage that led, forking from the landing, off to the right. He turned and, flattening his back against the wall, barely breathing as he listened, watchful, to the footsteps coming closer.

Finally, as the interloper reached the top of the stairs, Daniel hardly dared breathe, lest the shallow rise of his chest call attention to him, silent in the shadows. He waited, conscious even of his heartbeat, thinking the sound might be so loud that it would give away his position. To his left he glimpsed a tall cloaked figure pausing on the landing, then crossing and opening the one door facing the staircase. He heard the footfalls, then the turning of the brass knob, the unlatching of the lock, and the sound of the door moving over what was probably a thick carpet as it swung inward. Before the door closed again he heard a single laugh, a throaty chime of what could have been either amusement or triumph.

Counting silently to himself to quell the alarm and jangling of his nerves, Daniel Carbonardo followed the figure who had moved so
stealthily across the landing and into the facing room. Taking a deep breath, he turned the doorknob, pushed with his shoulder, and stepped into the room.

Moriarty smiled at him, one hand raised as he seemed to peel off part of his face. It took Daniel a moment to realize that what he removed was in fact a piece of stiffened molded linen that altered the shape of his cheek, as if he were removing half of Harkness's face to reveal his own beneath it. “I told you that you'd give me more time, young Daniel, once you'd heard the purport of my business,” he said in the familiar voice, half whisper, half threat, and wholly commanding, one of the many facets of the Professor's physical makeup—the eyes, the authoritative manner, and that distinctive voice, once heard never forgotten.

“Come, Daniel, let us sit, perhaps take a glass of good brandy wine. Come, make yourself comfortable.”

“You all the time, Professor! I could have sworn it was your man Harkness.” He looked around, for the first time taking in the room, feeling the deep pile Wilton under his feet, the coal fire roaring in the well-blackened grate, the old polished furnishings, the scent of beeswax in the air, the desk with inlaid red, gold-trimmed skivers, a pair of padded chairs, an ornate corner cupboard with a selection of leather-bound books on its shelves, good pictures on the walls, the heavy velvet curtains in a crushed gold shade complementing the creamy carpet.

“There.” Moriarty peeled the treated linen from his other cheek, then from around his nose until he was revealed as the man Daniel Carbonardo knew as Professor James Moriarty. “I always enjoy taking on the role of another.” He straightened, a smile twinkling on his lips and in his eyes. “But you know that, Daniel. You know how addicted I am to disguise, and how I delight in stepping into the shoes of other
men… and their bodies, of course.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “This weather, it can't make up its mind. Topsy-turvy.” The smile again. “You know my man Terremant of course.” A gesture to the shadows at the farthest end of the room, out of which the big bully of a man stepped, appearing as if by magic.

“Terremant was at one time in charge of my people known as the punishers,” he said with a sly chuckle, as though the name amused him. “When I had to say good-bye to Pip Paget I required a replacement, and good Terremant seemed to fit the bill, as they say.” There followed the conversation already recounted.

Then—

“I have work for you, Daniel. Important work. You must entice intelligence from an unwilling tongue for me.” Turning to the big man still half in the shadows, he said, “Stop your ears to this, Tom Terremant. Stop your ears and freeze your brain.”

“Aye, Professor,” the giant of a man grunted.

“No,” Moriarty snapped. “Go. Wait on the landing. I can trust no one.”

The big Terremant shrugged in good humour, then lurched from the room.

“And stand away from the door, Tom. Go down and see to my horse, Archie.”

Terremant grunted and closed the door behind him.

“My horse, Archie,” Moriarty laughed. “Short for Archimedes. He's a good horse, but he belongs to my man Harkness. I bequeathed the horse to him when I last went away, what? Some six, seven years ago?” The Professor laid a finger against his nose, then tiptoed to the door, pulling it open suddenly to reveal the landing was empty.

From below came the sound of Terremant's tread as he crossed the hall to open the front door.

Moriarty came back into the room. “Good. Now listen to me carefully, Daniel. Tomorrow you must go to a certain private hotel and make arrangements. Then, on the following night I require you to find out who has been upending me, making a fool of me. You've doubtless heard of Sal Hodges, Daniel.”

“Why of course, Professor, yes.”

“Mmmm. Of course, and you still doubtless think of her as my bed warmer.”

“Well, sir. It's said that …”

“That Sal Hodges and Professor James Moriarty dance the horizontal jig, and that she's mother to my child.”

“Well, sir…”

“‘Well, sir. Yes, sir.' Don't be shy, sir. Of course that's what's said, and to some extent it is true. Maybe is still true.”

Daniel Carbonardo nodded and said a silent affirmative.

“The night after next, Daniel. The night after next you must find out who the traitor is. She'll know, Daniel. Sal Hodges'll know, mark me.”

So now, two nights later, shrouded in fog, Daniel Carbonardo crossed the street and went lightly up the steps of the Glenmoragh Private Hotel. Standing in front of the door he took shallow breaths that formed little clouds from his lips, willing himself not to cough. From somewhere over the roofs came the striking of a clock: three in the morning. Silent, cold, menacing; the world muffled by the thick, bitter mist.

The weather had been strange: changeable. This morning it was cold and damp. Now, freezing fog hung dense across the square; you couldn't, as they said, see a hand's turn in front of you.

He had stolen the spare key when visiting on the previous afternoon under the pretext of seeing if Mrs. James had arrived, knowing
full well that she had not. Slipping the key into the lock he turned it noiselessly, praying that the boot boy had done his bidding—that he had slid the bolts back and taken off the chains. He pressed against the heavy wood and the door swung open so that he could step inside and close it behind him, leaning his shoulders and long back against it, waiting for his eyes to adjust as he stood in the blackness, aware of the pleasant warmth even here in the hall, the carpet soft, yielding under the rubber soles of his heavy boots.

Sam, the boot boy, had told him number eight. Mrs. James would be in number eight, on the first floor, along the passage, then first door on the right. “She'll only be there the one night,” he had said. “Then she'll be off to see her boy at Rugby School, poor little bleeder.”

Fancy that, he had thought, the Professor's son at Rugby with the nobs. There were others who'd take care of the boy if need be; after all, he was son and heir to a huge organization and vast wealth. Daniel's job now was to frighten the woman into revealing the truth. Mrs. James, whose real name had been Sal Hodges. He remembered her well from the old days: the Professor's woman, his bit of regular hot tail.

After five minutes he could see through the darkness as good as in daylight, so he walked to the foot of the staircase, slipping his right hand inside his dark ulster and pulling out the knife, holding it well away from his body, point down, right hand firm around the carved horn handle, thumb against the crossguard, the nine-inch blade tapering to a needle point and a blood drain down the flat of both sides. “Have care,” Mysson had told him. “I've ground that blade sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. Just how you like it.”

Women were easy: Threaten to cut them on the face, then give them a small cut and they'd fold like a newfangled card table. Men were another matter: Go for their most precious organ, that was the rule. Go
for it with a razor, give it a tiny cut, or with the hot tweezers, and they would inevitably squeak and squeal. Nay, scream and yell.

He was about to move up the stairs when he heard the hansom, the horse's hooves clopping in a steady rhythm, then faltering as it pulled up outside. Gawd in heaven, what could he do now? But the hansom moved on, the cabbie searching for a number: not this one, not fifty-six, the Glenmoragh Private Hotel, the hotel that did not advertise. “We are recommended by our regulars,” Mr. Moat, Ernie Moat, the manager, bragged.

Hansoms may soon thin out, he thought, mounting the stairs slowly. The horseless carriage was said to be the coming thing, though he couldn't quite believe that: They were noisy, smelly things, difficult to control and not at all reliable.

When he reached the door he found that it had not been locked, not that it would have hampered him had it been secured: Daniel was as good with locks and lock picks as he was with weapons.

As he stepped into the room, the sweet scent of the woman enveloped him, the air infused by whatever she wore to hide her natural odours. For a moment he stood by the bed, his head dizzy as he looked down on her face, hearing her steady breathing and knowing it could suddenly end if he willed it. That was the usual job and that's what he really was: a doomsman, a reaper's henchman, a coffin nailer, and, more to the point, a priser, one who made people talk: a ventriloquist as some said, or a confessor to the more religious.