The Revenge of Moriarty (23 page)

Sal Hodges was out of sorts, though not because of the dark Carlotta. There were other matters on her mind which she was not yet ready to reveal to Moriarty.

‘Merciful heavens, James,' she exclaimed on discovering him hunched behind the tripod camera stand, his head enveloped in a black cloth. ‘You are positively a man of hobbies these days. If it is not the card tricks, it's the piano. Now this.'

‘Ah, my dear, but this is a means to an end. As far as photography is concerned, the click of the shutter is the springing of the trap. But I wish to discuss women, Sal, or rather a woman.'

‘The Tigress has scratched you?' Sal's eyebrow shot up, her elegant mouth twisted in a sarcastic smirk.

‘It has nothing to do with the Tigress, and I pray you to remember that she, like this camera, is but a means. Bait.'

‘Well, mind you are not snared too heavily by her honey trap. Did you keep her happy last night?'

‘And if I did?'

‘My womanly intuition tells me you keep her content each time I am absent.'

Moriarty laughed. ‘Well, let your womanly intuition work on another problem. The girl we have at Crow's home.'

‘Lottie?'

‘If that is her name.'

‘It is. I saw to that one on Bertram Jacobs' instructions before you returned to England.'

‘I want her removed and something of a different mettle put in to replace her.'

‘Carlotta would be good. Can I use her?'

‘Carlotta is a shade obvious.' Moriarty had the grace to smile. ‘No, I want someone a little more subtle. A girl that will stir Crow's blood.'

‘I see your way, James, but it might misfire. Big Sylvia is not a fool even though she is foolish.'

‘Big Sylvia, as you choose to call her, is, I am given to understand, much taken up with improving her station in life. Present her with a
fait accompli
– a well-mannered, subservient girl who will show Crow a pretty ankle. He is tired of his wife's posturing. Just see to it, Sal. Choose the right one and have Lottie out and her in before Christmas. It is a risk, I know, but it has been managed before. I'd like as many pounds as pretty servants have brought their masters to bed and provided many a happy year's comfort under the mistress's nose.'

Sal laughed. ‘Indeed, James, it's an old trick and can be happy intrigue. I fear poor Lottie's mother will be taken suddenly ill, and her cousin sent for as a replacement. I believe I can find just the girl for the job. A butterfly who has mastered the art of innocence so that it would bring a saint on like an old ram.'

As a policeman, Angus McCready Crow prided himself on his sensitivity to atmosphere. This sixth sense worked most strongly four days before Christmas when he returned to King Street. He was in low spirits that evening, for Ember could not be found, and Lee Chow – whose description was at every police station in the metropolitan area – seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Neither was there scent nor sniff of Schleifstein and his companions, though Crow now had descriptive proof that it was indeed the German who had been living at the Edmonton house. More, known villains had now returned to that old stubborn silence whenever the name of James Moriarty was mentioned.

‘They have gone blind, deaf and dumb,' said Tanner, after a foray amongst criminals who were normally wont to sell their own fathers for a bottle of spirits.

‘Like the three wise monkeys,' Crow commented sadly, knowing all too well that it could mean but one thing. The Professor had reclaimed his hold on the lawless of London.

The moment he opened the door of 63 King Street the subtle atmosphere hit him like a pugilist's fist in the belly. There was a new tranquillity, coupled with more tangible and delicate aromas filtering up from the kitchen.

Sylvia, however, still appeared spiky. Hardly had he entered the parlour when she began, ‘A fine how-de-do we've had here today.'

Crow said nothing, a tactic which, in the past weeks, he had found best to adopt when faced by Sylvia's unqualified statements.

‘With all the preparations for Christmas,' she sighed. ‘With the comings and goings, the arrangements and plans. Too bad. Too bad …' She left the sentence unfinished, as though her husband could define its meaning by some mode of mind reading.

Crow brightened. Perhaps, he thought, Sylvia's two uncles and their attendant wives would not be coming to spend the holiday after all – a possibility which would lighten Crow's life not inconsiderably. The uncles and their wives being unutterable social mountaineers of great diligence.

‘A telegram,' said Sylvia, cryptically.

‘Ah.'

‘For Lottie, would you believe?'

‘The postal services are open to all, my dear.'

‘No notice. Nothing. She must pack her bags and go this very afternoon. Her mother, it seems. People are so inconsiderate, being ill at this time of the year.'

Crow's face broke into a grin of Cheshire cat dimensions. ‘You mean that Lottie has left us? Gone?'

‘I said to her, what am I to do? I said.'

‘And?'

‘And the madam had it all in hand. There was no option. A cousin recently arrived in London, it seems. From a very good little family, but fallen upon bad days and willing to take any form of employment. She arrived within the hour, so there we are. Lottie out. Harriet in.'

Crow groaned. Lottie had been bad enough. A cousin fallen upon hard times might prove even worse.

‘It is all the extra work,' moaned Sylvia, as though the small King Street house was some kind of a mansion. ‘Teaching her the ropes, so to speak.'

At that moment, a tap on the door heralded the arrival of the newly installed Harriet – pert, dark, pretty, with rounded hips and a smile, even in the teeth of Sylvia Crow's glower – announcing that dinner was served.

At first, Angus Crow was inclined to think that his wife had cooked the meal, it was so good. But upon enquiry, between the grouse pie (a favourite not often provided at King Street) and the excellent lemon pudding, it turned out that the entire dinner was of Harriet's making. Things, he considered, were looking up.

She was certainly brighter than the dour Lottie, and much more pleasant on the eye: particularly when later in the evening the girl came in to bank up the parlour fire – showing a great deal of ankle, and not a little calf in the process.

Harriet, the detective thought, would be a pleasure to have in King Street. He pondered upon the double meaning of that notion, much surprised to find the old Adam rising within him, rejuvenated, as it were, by a dazzling smile, a manner of walking, and the arch way in which the girl asked if there was anything else she could do for him.

Christmas came and went at the house in Albert Square with a genuine sense of celebration. For Martha and Polly Pearson it was a time to be well remembered, for their master appeared to take the good cheer of the season most seriously: allowing everybody to join in as though they were one big family.

On Christmas Eve they all gathered in the drawing room, around a tree which had been delivered two days previously, and hung about with garlands and baubles by Mrs Hodges and Miss Carlotta. There was sherry wine to drink, and the Professor himself handed out small gifts to all. A locket for Polly and a gold brooch for Martha.

On Christmas Day they were kept busy by Bridget Spear, preparing the banquet which was partaken by all but themselves and Harry Allen, who volunteered to keep them company and share their portion below stairs.

Late in the afternoon, however, they were instructed to serve tea, with the big iced cake, in the drawing room, and hardly had they taken the trays and stands up, than they were told to stay and take part in the celebrations – which included some roistering songs around the piano, games, which gave Polly and Harry Allen even more opportunity to intertwine in dark corners of the house, and a display of incredible card tricks performed by the Professor. A strange topsy-turvy Christmas indeed, and puzzling to the girls, who were most conscious of the barriers which society decreed should be maintained between servants and master.

The day ended with Martha, head reeling from too much wine, lying alone in the attic bedroom – Polly having found the necessary courage to finally cross the borderline of womanhood, snug tight in Harry Allen's bed.

Two days later, the Professor left for a short excursion to Paris.

Neither of the girls saw him go, for he left in the early hours, being driven to Dover by Harkness, seen off only by the faithful Albert Spear.

Yet if either Polly or Martha had caught sight of the figure leaving the house on that morning, it is doubtful whether they would have recognized him. Instead of the familiar, and sometimes forbidding person, they would have observed a gangling man of middle age, with straggling fine grey hair, thinning, and so unruly that the least breath of wind whipped it into a wild sparse thatch. His nose was slightly hooked, and the eyes stammered of vagueness. Nor were this man's clothes as immaculate as those in which the Professor was usually to be seen. They fitted, yet did not fit: the trousers being a shade long, and the arms of his jacket and greatcoat a trifle short. He carried a portmanteau, and had a large oblong photographic box slung, with a strap, about his shoulders. Indeed it was James Moriarty, but now he carried in his wallet papers which presented him as Joseph Moberly – artist and photographer extraordinary.

Moriarty enjoyed travelling: particularly when in some disguise, for nothing pleased him so much as to know that he was hoodwinking those around him. It was his general rule that a good disguise helped one to blend, unnoticed, into one's surroundings. As Joseph Moberly, however, he took on a different line of attack. Moberly was the epitome of the vague, highly-strung, artist with an interest in every human being who came his way. A loud, high-pitched voice and braying laugh signalled his arrival wherever he moved, and a strange, almost birdlike series of mannerisms – including an odd clicking of the tongue and lips – betrayed, perhaps, a lack of confidence.

He spoke to everyone who even looked at him, telling them – whether they cared or not – that he was making his first visit to Paris where he planned to photograph some of the great paintings in the Louvre Museum. He might also, he claimed, take some photographs of the streets of that great city and he proposed to exhibit the lot next summer in a gallery off Bond Street.

Passengers on the afternoon packet from Dover, and later, on the train to Paris, were heartily sick of him long before they steamed into the Gare du Nord. Smiling inwardly, for the day had been a game – a diversion to pass the journey – Moriarty took a cab to a quiet, unassuming
pension
near the Place de L'Opéra where he dined well and spent a restful night. The next day could well be crucial.

He breakfasted leisurely on the following morning, constantly engaging the harassed waiter in execrable French, before taking himself, at about half-past ten, to the Louvre – lugging the large photographic case with him.

Up to this point, all the intrigue and plotting against those whom he had sworn to bring under domination, or be revenged against, had been directed by Moriarty but carried out by his trusted minions. At last, he, the greatest criminal intelligence of his time, was to carry out a lawless act on his own. As the cab drew him nearer to the Rue de Rivoli, Moriarty felt the old stirring in the blood, that sense of half-fear and half-expectation which sends a quiver through both mind and body on the verge of a great criminal adventure. The crime of the century they would have called this. It was a pity, he thought, that he could not allow it to be publicly recognized. That was, perhaps, part of the brilliance, the incisive genius of the project. That he ruled the great criminal family of London was common knowledge; that he was able to evade capture by the police of a dozen countries might be envied by other members of the underworld's hierarchy, or cause great embarrassment to the forces of law and order; but this, the theft of one of the world's great masterpieces, had to go unsung. After this had been accomplished, what he had in store for Grisombre would be one of his crowning glories. Sadly, that also had to remain in the shadows, from whence it might only become hearsay in the folk lore of crime.

It was a bright, if chill, day as Moriarty made his way across the Place du Carroussel to the great building with its long arms of annexes stretching out as though to embrace the visitor. He went first to the administrative offices where it took half an hour to make the application for permission to take photographs in the Grand Gallery and the Salon Carré. Then there was another half hour's wait before the permit was issued.

Certainly if Moriarty was desirous of drawing attention to himself as Joseph Moberly, his actions did not fail him. There was little doubt in the minds of the concierge and the many museum attendants, that the strange English photographer was a great eccentric. As the dishevelled figure entered the main vestibule and showed his pass to the attendant on duty, people turned to stare, while others covered their mouths to hide smiles at his appalling accent and even worse grammar.

But the French have always appreciated those who live a life of mad nonconformity. The attendants took to him, and, in the days that followed, referred to him, with affectionate smiles, as Monsieur Plique-Plaque – from his habit of clicking his tongue and lips as he worked at his photography in the Grand Gallery on the first floor of the museum.

He would start work relatively early each day, finishing before three in the afternoon, because of the light. For the first two days, Moriarty confined himself to making photographs of paintings in the Grand Gallery – that six hundred yards of walls packed tightly with paintings, running between the Salon Carré and the Salle Van Dyck overlooking the Quai du Louvre. He would have preferred to work straight away in the Salon Carré, where the
Mona Lisa
was hung in pride of place, but, to his frustration, two official photographers were already installed there, doing commissions for the Director.