Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

He smiled, a creepy thing for a man with lips as thin as his. His near-fleshless head moved from side to side. I was reminded of a cobra I chopped into three wriggling sections in the Hindu Kush. I couldn’t follow Moriarty’s drift, but that was usual. I nodded and hoped he would come eventually to a point. A schoolmaster before taking to villainy, his rambles tended to wind towards some inverted moral.

‘Summer will be upon us soon,’ he mused, ‘the season for picnicking in the park, for tiny fat arms to go bare, for governesses to sit and gossip unveiled, for shopgirls and their beaux to spoon in public. This will be a bumper year for our yellow-and-black-striped friends. My first generation of polistes pestilentialis is hatching. The world is divided, Moran, between those who sting and those who are the stingees.’

‘And you would be the sting-ers,’ shrilled that voice.

The American Nightingale had been admitted by Mrs Halifax, the superannuated harlot who kept a brothel on the lower floors. Moriarty had persuaded Mrs H to let us have the flat rent-free. Following the interview at which this matter was arranged, she wore a bandage on her right hand. He acquired a neatly amputated little finger which, in a vial of brine, he used as a paperweight. In these rooms, the Consultantship of Moriarty and Moran received ‘clients’.

‘Miss Irene Adler,’ acknowledged Moriarty. ‘Your Lucia di Lammermoor was acceptable, your Maria Stuarda indifferent and you were perhaps the worst Emilia di Liverpool the stage has ever seen.’

‘What a horrible man you are, James Moriarty!’

His lips split and sharp teeth showed.

‘My business is being horrible, Miss Adler. I make no effort at sham or hypocrisy.’

‘That, I must say, is a tonic.’

She smiled full-bore and arranged herself on a divan, prettily hiking her hemline up over well-turned ankles, shifting her décolletage in a manner calculated to set her swanny mams a-wobble. Even Moriarty was impressed, and he could keep up a lecture on the grades of paper used in the forgery of high-denomination Venezuelan banknotes while walking down the secret corridor with the row of one-way mirror windows into the private rooms where Mrs H’s girls conducted spectacularly indecent business day and night.

I still maintain all would have been well if only I’d shown the Adler minx what was what straight off, tossed her skirts over her head, plonked her fizzog-down on the reception room rug (a tiger whose head snarled as if he still bore a grudge from that tricky shot I made bringing him down) and administered one of my famous ‘Basher’ Moran Specials. Had I but properly poked that Yankee popsy, she might have broken the habit which eventually set all manner of odd bods scurrying around trying to clear up her confounded messes.

Irene Adler had the face of an angel child, the body of a full-grown trollop and a voice like a steel needle slowly sliding into your brain. Even warbling to an audience of tone-deaf polacks, she hadn’t lasted as prima donna. After her Emilia flopped so badly the artistic director of the Warsaw Opera had to blow his brains out, the company cut her adrift, leaving her on the loose in Europe to the disadvantage of several ruling houses.

And here she was on our settee.

‘You are aware that the services I offer are somewhat unusual?’

She fixed Moriarty with a steely glint that cut through all the sugar.

‘I am a soprano from New Jersey,’ she began, pronouncing it ‘Noo Joisey’. ‘I know what a knob crook looks like. You can figure all the sums you like, Professor, but you’re as much a capo di cosa nostra as the Moustache Petes in the back-room of the Burly-Cue. Which is dandy, because I have a job of burglary that needs doing urgently. Capisce?’

The professor nodded.

‘Who’s the military gent who hasn’t taken his glims off my teats for the last minute and a half?’

‘Colonel Sebastian Moran, the best heavy-game shot our Eastern Empire has ever produced.’

‘Good with a gun, eh? Looks more like a shiv-man to me.’

She pointed her index fingers at her cleavage, which she thrust out, then angled her fingertips up to indicate her face.

‘That’s better. Look me in the lamps, Colonel.’

I harrumphed and paid attention. If she hadn’t wanted fellows to ogle, she shouldn’t have worn that dress. There’s no reasoning with women.

‘Here’s the thing of it,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of the Duke of Strelsau?’

‘Michael Elphberg, so-called “Black Michael”, second in line to the throne of Ruritania.’

‘That’s the fellow, Prof. Things being slow this season, I’ve been knocking around a bit with Black Mike. They call him that because of his hair, which is dark where the rest of his family’s is flame-red. He’s a gloomy, glowering type as well so it suits him on temperamental grounds too. As it happens, photographs were taken of the two of us in the actual pursuit of knocking-around. Artistic Studies, you might say. Six plates. Full figures. Complete exposures. It would ruin my reputation should they come to light. You see, I’m being blackmailed!’

Her voice cracked. She raised a kerchief to her eye to quell a tear, then froze, a picture of slighted maidenhood. Moriarty shook his head. She stuffed the hankie back into her sleeve and snorted.

‘Worth a try just to keep my hand in. I’m a better actress than critics say, don’t you know? Obviously, I’m not being blackmailed. Like you said, there are stingers and stingees. We are stingers.’

‘And the stingee?’

‘Another bloody colonel. Colonel Sapt. Chief of the Ruritanian Secret Police. Which has been a dozy doddle for the last thirty years, since it’s one of the most peaceable, least-insurrection-blighted spots on the map. Not so much as a whiff of dissent since ‘48. When, admittedly, the mob burned down the old White Palace. There are very scenic gardens on the site. Anyway, intrigue stirs. King Rudolf is getting on, and two sons have claims to the throne. Rudolf the Red, the older, is set on shoring up his case by marrying his cousin, Princess Flavia. Where do they get these names? If you put them in an opera, you’d be laughed off stage. Sapt is loyal to Rudolf. Lord knows why, but there you are. Some people are like that. He’s also a keen appreciator of the aesthetic worth of a fine photo.’

‘I see,’ I said, ‘this Sapt thinks to blacken Michael’s name – further blacken, I suppose – so the duke will never be king.’

Irene Adler looked at me with something like contemptuous pity.

‘Gilbert the Filbert, Colonel of the Nuts, if those pics were seen, Black Mike’d be the envy of Europe. He’d be crowned in a wave of popularity. Everyone loves a randy royal. Look at Vicky’s brood. No, Sapt wants the photographs off the market, so Mikey can be nagged into marriage by Antoinette de Mauban, his persistently pestering mistress. Which would scupper any chance he might have with Flavourless Flavia.’

‘You said Rudolf was engaged to the princess?’

She made a gesture, suggesting the matter was in the balance. ‘Whichever Elphberg marries Flavia is a cert to be king. Black Michael is scheming to cut his half-brother out. Are you following this?’ ‘

Moriarty acknowledged that he was.

‘Why do you want those photographs?’

‘Sentimental value. I come off especially well in Study No. 3, where the light catches the fall of my hair as I lower my… No? Not convinced? Rats, I must work on this acting lark. Obviously, I want to blackmail everyone - Colonel Sapt, Black Mike, Red Rudi, Mademoiselle Toni, Princess Lavatoria… With half Ruritania paying me to keep quiet and the other half to speak up, I should be able to milk the racket for a good few years – at least, until succession is settled – and secure my comfortable old age.’