Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

“Where did you get the money?” he whispered, and Martin smiled slightly and shook his head. “Did you—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Martin said.

Moriarty deduced that this meant the money was not his, and Martin was the operative for some unseen person or persons, away from the scene of the crime and therefore apparently uninvolved if it failed or attracted police attention. This idea intrigued him, that a person might engineer events and yet be invisible.

They neared the end of the Strand, and passed a theatre called Punch’s Playhouse and Marionette Theatre; Moriarty recalled that the unseen men who manipulated the puppets whilst remaining hidden during a Punch and Judy Show were known as “professors”.

“And what do I have to do?” Moriarty asked. “I doubt I shall be playing Twenty-One with your money.”

“You’re right,” Martin said, nodding. “No, the game is held in an empty house near the building works at Farringdon, and we need someone to keep watch for the local bobbies.”

“I see,” Moriarty said. He nodded, but his tone betrayed him.

“You seem disappointed,” Martin said. “Or is it that you don’t understand me? When I say ‘bobbies’, I mean police. What is it you call them in Ireland? Peelers, is it?”

“I understand you perfectly well,” Moriarty said coldly, “but I expected you would need more from me – is this why you followed me halfway across London, and now would have me walk the other half? To be a watchman for a card game?”

“Let me finish,” Martin said, and his smile took on a sneering look. “You’re to be the watchman, yes, to make sure that no one interrupts the game, but standing at the window of the room, watching the street outside, you will also be able to see the cards of the other players, and to signal me about their hands. So, I can—”

“Will I be able to see all the other players’ cards?” Moriarty asked.

Martin looked surprised. “There will be four players,” Martin said slowly, “and I shall sit facing the window. From your position, you should be able to see at least two of the other hands, and you can signal to me—”

“And the other player? If he has a good hand, which I cannot see?”

Martin said nothing to this, and they walked in silence through Temple Bar, the gate-like structure at the point where the Strand joined Fleet Street. They were close to other pedestrians, but Moriarty knew this was not why Martin had suddenly grown so silent.

Beneath their feet, the River Fleet flowed, and only one person above it on the street that bore its name gave it any thought.

“You have a better suggestion then?” Martin said eventually.

“Yes,” Moriarty replied, “in fact, I do. Have you heard of card counting?”

“What?” Martin said, frowning. “Are you telling me you can—”

“Yes, I can,” Moriarty said. “Mathematics is my strongest subject. After a handful of rounds of Twenty-One, I will know which cards are yet to be played, and can give you an indication whether you should ‘hit’ for another card, or … is it ‘stick’? Is that the word?”

“Yes,” Martin said, sounding doubtful. “Are you certain you could keep count in that way?”

“I have done it before,” Moriarty said, and this was true: whilst watching others playing cards, he had little difficulty in calculating what the next card dealt or revealed would prove to be. “I would merely need to cough, or make some other agreed signal, to indicate whether you should take a card. And I would have no need of seeing the other players’ hands, just your cards.”

“So I would sit with my back to the window, and you would look at my hand?”

“Precisely.”

They walked down Fleet Street, closing in on Farringdon, and Martin was quiet, thinking about this proposal. He knew of card counting, but had never been able to do it. And the younger boy’s notion did remove the element of doubt about visibility of the other hands …

“We could try your suggestion,” Martin said, and in that moment Moriarty felt the balance between them shifting, as if a moon had suddenly become the focus for the rotation of a planet, or there had been a reversal in an asteroid’s dynamics. “It might work.”

Moriarty nodded, as if he was ambivalent to the approval of his proposal, despite the sensation he had of how easily one could go from being followed to leading, from puppet to professor; all one needed, it seemed, was knowledge of a particular sort, applied at the appropriate point.

“We’re nearly there,” Martin said, and they turned north off Fleet Street. Ahead of them Moriarty could see the signs of the digging and building works that were underway. “What signals should we use then?”

“A cough for hit,” Moriarty said, “and a sniff for stick? How does that sound to you?”

“Cough for a card, sniff for stick,” Martin said, nodding. “Yes, that sounds reasonable.”

They walked on, and soon started stepping round holes in the paving and road surface. In several places, there were holes big enough for a grown man to enter, carelessly covered with pieces of wood or other items. As they walked past these larger holes, Moriarty could hear the sound of water running, the river, and this reinforced that there were forces at play beneath the everyday world.

“Before we go in,” Moriarty said to Martin, “tell me, why me?”

Martin frowned at him, not understanding.

“Why did you pick me? Out of all those in Hyde Park today, why did you think I was most suitable for this – and likely to agree to it?”

Martin laughed, but it was a sound lacking in warmth or mirth.

“I saw you in Hyde Park,” Martin explained, “standing there, without family or friends. And I saw the way you looked at the people passing by – you were frowning, almost sneering, as if watching them from a distance, even when they were close by. You looked at them as if they were—” Martin shrugged “—animals in a zoo. I knew then that you were more like me than the others in the park. I guessed at your age, too, and thought that the money might appeal.”

Martin looked at Moriarty, and the sly smile on his face suggested he thought Moriarty might be disappointed by this explanation, that he might have preferred to have been told that he looked more intelligent, or even more devious, than the others in the park. But Moriarty merely nodded, his expression unreadable.

“This is the house,” Martin said, pointing to a large and dilapidated house. In truth, it was more absence than building: the top floor was lost beneath a collapsed roof and the structure had caved in, though in the mess and disruption of the surrounding street the missing three-quarters of this house was unremarkable.

The front door, its wood burned in places and scratched in others, looked as if it would prove impossible to open, but Martin stepped to the door and pushed it inwards with ease.

Martin gestured inside, and Moriarty hesitated.

“Oh, very well,” Martin said with a smile. He tugged his cap from his head and tucked it into one of the pockets of his coat – pockets that, Moriarty noted, seemed to go down a long way – and stepped over the threshold into the hallway.

Inside the house, there was a strong smell of damp plaster, and from the walls came the sound of mice, or possibly rats. Martin took a few steps down the darkened hallway, then pushed a door, and the two of them stepped into the room beyond, their footfalls noisy on the wooden floor.

The flickering of a number of candles revealed that the room had long since ceased to be a parlour, and was now devoid of furniture save for the small table and four chairs that sat at its centre. Three men stood in the room, and it seemed to Moriarty as if they represented a series of stages in an advertisement for a combined facial hair tonic and weight-loss patent medicine; the first man was clean-shaven and fat, the second man had a moustache and was stocky of build, and the third man was bearded and thin. They were all talking in low voices when Martin and Moriarty entered.