Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (31 page)

I did not think to remind him that our purpose was simply to save one rotten Englishman’s hide. Moriarty had not forgotten Mad Carew. He was playing a much larger game, but the original commission remained.

Fat Kaspar looked at the falcon. He brushed its jet wings with his feather duster, and the thing’s dead eye seemed to glint.

Something was going on between boy and blackbird.

Moriarty had already assigned the day’s errands. Simon Carne was off in Kensington ‘investigating a gas leak’. Alf Bassick was in Rotherhithe picking up items Moriarty had ordered from a cabinetmaker whose specialty was making new furniture look old enough to pass for Chippendale. Now, it was my turn for marching orders.

‘Moran, I have taken the liberty of filling in your appointment book. You have a busy day. You are expected at Scotland Yard for luncheon, the Royal Opera for the matinee and Trelawny House for late supper. I trust you can secure the items needed to complete our collection. Take whoever you need from our reserves. I shall be in my study until midnight – calculations must be made.’

‘Fair enough, Prof. You know what you’re doing.’

‘Yes, Moran. I do.’

So, how does one steal a coin from a locked desk in Scotland Yard? A castle on the Victoria Embankment, full to bursting with policemen, detectives, gaolers and ruthless agents of the British State. An address – strictly, it’s New Scotland Yard – lawbreakers would be well advised to stay away from.

Simple answer.

You don’t. You can’t. And if you could, you wouldn’t.

For why?

If such a coup – a theft of evidence from the Headquarters of Her Majesty’s Police – could be achieved, word would quickly circulate. The name of the master cracksman would be toasted in every pub in the East End. Policemen drink in those pubs too. Even if you left no clue, thanks to the brilliance of your foreplanning and the cunning of the execution, your signature would be on the deed.

Rozzers don’t take kindly to having their noses tweaked. If they can’t have you up for a given crime, they take you in on a drunk and disorderly charge, then tell anyone foolish enough to ask that you ‘fell down the stairs’. Once inside the holding cells, any number of nasty fates can befall the unwary. When the Hoxton Creeper was in custody, the peelers got shot of seven or eight on their most-hated list by making felons share his lodgings.

No, you don’t just breeze into a den of police with larcenous intent and a set of lock picks. Unless you’ve a yen for martyrdom.

You walk up honestly and openly, without trace of an Irish accent. You ask for Inspector Harvey Lukens of the SIB and
buy
whatever you want. Not with money. That’s too easy. As with the Grand Vampire, you find something the other fellow wants more than the item they possess which you desire. Usually, you can cadge a favour by giving Lukens the current addresses of any one of a dozen Fenian troublemakers on the ‘wanted’ books. The Branch was constituted solely to deal with a rise in Fenian activity, specifically a bombing campaign in the eighties which got under their silly helmets – especially when the
pissoir
outside their office was dynamited on the same night some mad micks tried to topple Nelson’s column with gunpowder.

Here’s the thing about the Special
Irish
Branch: unlike their colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Department, they didn’t give a farthing’s fart about
English
crime. As far as Inspector Lukens was concerned, you could rob as many post offices as you like – abduct the postmistresses and sell ’em to oriental potentates if you could get threepence for the baggages – just so long as you didn’t use the stolen money in the cause of Home Rule.

When it came to Surrey stranglers, Glasgow gougers, Welsh wallet-lifters, Birmingham burglars or cockney coshers, the SIB were remarkably tolerant. However, any Irishman who struck a match on a public monument or sold a cough drop on Sunday was liable to be deemed ‘a person of interest’, and appear – if he survived that far – at his arraignment with blacked eyes and missing teeth.

Shortly after luncheon – a reasonable repast at Scotland Yard, with cold meats and beer and tinned peaches in syrup – I left the building, frowning, and made rendezvous with a band of fellows. Thieves, of course. Not of the finest water, but experienced.
All
persons of special interest:

Michaél Murphy Magooly O’Connor, jemmy-man.

Martin Aloysius McHugh, locksmith.

Seamus ‘Shiv’ Shaughnessy, knife thrower.

Pádraig ‘Pork’ Ó Méalóid, hooligan.

Patrick ‘Paddy Red’ Regan, second-storey bandit.

Leopold MacLiammóir, smooth-talker.

They did not think to wonder what special attributes qualified them for this particular caper. The Professor was in it, so there’d likely be a payout at the end of the day.

‘It’s no go, the bribery,’ I told them. ‘Lukens won’t play that game. So, it’s the contingency plan, lads. The coin’s in the desk, the desk’s in the basement office. I’ve left a window on the latch. When the smoke bomb goes off and the bluebottles run out of the building, slip in and riffle the place. Take anything else you want, but bring the Professor his item and you’ll remember this day well.’

Half a dozen nods.

‘Ye’ll not be regrettin’ this at all at all, Colonel, me darlin”,’ Leopold said. His brogue was so thick the others couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was an Austrian who liked to pretend he was an Irishman. After all, whoever heard of a Dubliner called Leopold? It’s possible he’d never even been to the ould sod at all.

Ó Méalóid pulled out a foot-long knotty club from a place of concealment and Regan slipped out his favourite stabbing knife. McHugh’s long fingers twitched. Shaughnessy handed around a flask of something distilled from stinging nettles. The little band of merry raiders wrapped checked scarves around the lower halves of their faces and pulled down their cap brims.

I left them and strolled back across the road. Pausing by the front door, I took out a silver case and extracted a cylinder approximately the size and shape of a cigar. I asked a uniformed police constable if he might have a lucifer about him, and a flame was kindly proffered. I lit the fuse of the cylinder and dropped it in the gutter. It fizzed alarmingly. Smoke was produced. Whistles shrilled.

My thieves charged across the road and poured through the open window.

And were immediately pounced on by the SIB Head-Knocking Society.

The smoke dispelled within a minute. I offered the helpful constable a real cigar he was happy to accept.

From offstage came the sounds of a severe kicking and battering, punctuated by cries and oaths. Eventually, this died down a little.

Inspector Lukens came out of the building and, without further word, dropped a tied handkerchief into my hand. He went back indoors, to fill in forms.

Six easy arrests. That was a currency the SIB dealt in. Six Irish crooks caught in the process of committing a stupid crime. As red-handed as they were redheaded.

This might shake your belief in honour among thieves, but I should mention that the micks were hand-picked for more than their criminal specialties and stated place of birth. All were of that breed of crook who don’t know when to lay off the mendacity... the sort who agree to steal on commission but think for themselves and withhold prizes they’ve been paid to secure. Dirty little birds who feather their own nests. Said nests would be on Dartmoor for the next few years. And serve ’em right.

It didn’t hurt that they were of the Irish persuasion. I doubt any one of them took an interest in politics, but the SIB would be happy to have six more heads to bounce off the walls or dunk in the ordure buckets.

You might say that I had done my patriotic duty in enabling such a swoop against enemies of the Queen. Only that wouldn’t wash. I’ve a trunkful medals awarded on the same basis. Mostly, I was murdering heathens for my own enjoyment.

I unwrapped the handkerchief and considered the Eye of Balor. It didn’t look much like an eye, or even a coin – just a lump of greenish metal I couldn’t tell was gold. In legend, Balor had a baleful, petrifying glance. On the battlefield, his comrades would peel back his mighty eyelids to turn his Medusan stare against the foe. Stories were confused as to whether this treasure was that eye or just named after it. Desmond Mountmain claimed it had been given to him during a faerie revel by King Brian of the Leprechauns. I suspected that the brand of pee-drinking lunacy practised by his sister ran in the family. It was said – mostly by the late Dynamite Des – that any who dared withhold the coin from a true Irish rebel would hear the howl of the banshee and suffer the wrath of the little people.

At that moment, an unearthly wail sounded out across the river. I bit through my cigar.

A passing excursion boat was overloaded with small, raucous creatures in sailor suits, flapping ribbons in the wind. The wail was a ship’s whistle. Not a banshee. The creatures were schoolgirls on an outing, pulling each other’s braids. Not followers of King Brian.

Ever since the tomato stall, I’d had my whiskers up. I was unused to that. This business was a test for even my nerves.

After a few moments, I carefully wrapped the coin again and passed it on to a small messenger – Filthy Fanny, not a bloody leprechaun – with orders to fetch it back to Conduit Street. Any temptation to run off with the precious item would be balanced by the vivid example of the six Irishmen. The professional urchin took off as if she had salt on her tail.

I summoned the not-for-hire cab I had arrived in.

‘The Royal Opera House,’ I told Chop, the Firm’s best driver. ‘And a shilling on top of the fare if we miss the first act.’

Some scorn opera as unrealistic. Large licentious ladies, posturing villains, concealed weapons, loud noises, suicides, thefts, betrayals, elongated ululations, explosions, goblets of poison and the curtain falling on a pile of corpses. Well, throw in a bag of tigers, and that’s my life. If I want treachery, bloodshed and screaming women, I can get enough at home, thank you very much.

I dislike opera because it’s
Italian.
The eye-tyes are the lowest breed of white man, a bargain-priced imitation of the French. All hair oil and smiling and back-stabbing and cowardice, left out in the sun too long.

This brouhaha of the Jewels of the Madonna of Naples was deeply Italian, and thoroughly operatic. The recitative was too convoluted to follow without music.

The gist: a succession of mugs across Europe got hold of the loot first lifted by Gennaro the Blacksmith, also known as Gennaro the Damned and Gennaro the Dead. The Camorra – a merciless, implacable brotherhood – was sworn to kill anyone who dared acquire the treasure, but no fool thought to return the loot and apologise. They all tried for a quick sale and a getaway, or thought to hide the valuables until ‘the heat died down’. Under the jewels’ spell, they forgot about the only institution ever to combine the adjectives ‘efficient’ and ‘Italian’. The Camorra carries feuds to the fifth generation; there’s little to no likelihood of anyone or their great-grandchildren profiting from Gennaro’s impetuous theft.

As mentioned, the latest idiot to acquire the Jewels was Giovanni Lombardo, a propmaker for the Royal Opera. He’d received the package from an equally addled cousin, who expired from strychnine poisoning at a Drury Lane pie stall a few hours later. Lombardo had been victim of a singular, fatal assault in his Islington carpenter’s shop. His head chanced to be trapped in a vice. Several holes were drilled in his brain-pan. A bloodied brace and bit was found in the nearby sawdust.

An editorial in the Harmsworth Press cited this crime as sorry proof of the deleterious effects of gory sensationalism paraded nightly in Italian on the stage, instead of daily in English in the newspapers as was right and proper. That
Faust
was sung in French didn’t trouble the commentator. Generally, the French are to be condemned for license and libertinism and the Italians for violence and cowardice. When foreigners copy each other’s vices, it confuses the English, so it’s best to ignore the facts and print the prejudice.

The Harmsworth theory, which Scotland Yard was supposedly ‘taking seriously’, painted the culprit as a demented habitué of the opera, sensibilities eroded by addiction to tales of multiple murder and outrageous horror. No longer satisfied with the bladders of pig’s blood burst when a tenor was stabbed or the papier maché heads which rolled when an ingénue was guillotined, this notional fiend had become entirely deranged. He doubtless intended to recreate gruesome moments from favourite operas with passing innocents cast in the roles of corpses-to-be. No one was safe!

This afternoon, a gaggle of ladies loitered outside the Royal Opera House with banners. One pinned a ‘suppress this nasty foreign muck’ badge on my lapel. I assured the harridan I’d sooner send my children up chimneys than expose their tender ears to the corrupting wailing of the so-called entertainment perpetrated inside this very building. If there were still profit in selling brats as sweeps, I’d be up for it. Only the mothers of my numberless darling babes, mostly dark-skinned and resident in far corners of the Empire, would insist on their cut of the purse and render such child-vendage scarcely worth the effort.

While chatting with the anti-opera protester, I cast a casual eye about Covent Garden. No more suspicious, olive-skinned loiterers than usual. Which is to say anyone in sight could – and perhaps would – turn out to be a Camorra assassin. One or two of the protesting ladies wore suspicious veils.

Lombardo’s wounds consisted of two medium-sized holes, one small (almost tentative) hole and one large (ultimately fatal) hole. He had kept the secret of the jewels until that third hole was started. Then, the final hole was made to shut him up. All very Italian.

Lombardo had asked around London fences for prices on individual stones, so the spider in the centre of his web heard of it. Moriarty also knew the carpenter had been commissioned to provide props for the current production, and saw at once where the loot was hidden. In act three of
Faust,
Marguerite, the stupid bint who passes for a leading lady, piles on a collection of tat gifted her by the demon Méphistophélès and regards herself in a mirror. She gives vent to the ‘Jewel Song’
(‘Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir!’),
an aria which sets my teeth on edge even when sung in tune (which is seldom). It’s about how much lovelier she looks when plastered with priceless gems.