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

He stationed himself near the foot of the staircase that the waiter had indicated and waited. His instructions to Mrs Norton had been quite clear; once she secured the signet, she was to make a wax impression of it, then slip it back into the King’s possession. Failing that, she must steal it. How she was to do either was not his concern. He cared only that she reappeared with it soon and gave it to the man who signaled her. After that, she could wait upon his pleasure for news of her husband.

A brief stir at the top of the stairs caught his attention and he looked up in time to see Mrs Norton and the King on the landing. He looked angry, while she appeared to be most distraught. He saw her wrench her hand from the King’s grasp and propel herself down the steps as rapidly as was feasible in her emerald gown. Her cheeks were flushed and she dashed an angry tear away as she descended. When she reached the bottom of the steps, she reached into her reticule, clearly searching for something.

A gentleman bowed and handed her his handkerchief. She thanked him and, after a moment of holding it in her hand, pressed it back upon him without seeming to use it. Any words exchanged between them were too swift and low for the Professor to hear, but that didn’t matter. That had been the prearranged signal and Mrs Norton had provided either the signet or its copy. Biting back a smile, Professor Moriarty exited the room without waiting to see her departure or her host’s reaction to it, happily assured of the success of his plans.

It was time to retrieve Godfrey Norton and prepare for his next steps. He thought it best to show Mrs Norton that her husband was still intact. Otherwise, she might be tempted to warn the King before he had the opportunity to use the ring, and that would be most unfortunate.

As he anticipated, Colonel Moran was waiting for him outside and he entered the coach with a brief nod to his lieutenant. They went by a roundabout path down several thoroughfares to a building on the outskirts of Whitechapel. There, the Colonel stopped and handed the reins to the guard before disembarking from the coach. The same man who accompanied the Professor earlier met the Colonel at the door and ushered him inside.

A few moments later, they emerged with another man held between them. He had a hood over his head and he hung limply from their grasp as if he were asleep or drugged. They hauled him toward the coach, only to be intercepted by a gentleman riding down the street on a smart hack. He slid his horse smoothly between them and the carriage. “I say,” he said, “your friend a bit worse for the drink? He might do better without that bag on his head, though.”

The Colonel reached a hand toward his pocket, his expression menacing. But another coach had appeared on the street and stopped next to the Professor’s. Professor Moriarty, had he chosen to appear at the coach window at that moment, might have recognized the gentleman on the hack as his tea-spilling acquaintance from the King’s reception.

Certainly, the two men who emerged from the stopped coach would not have been in attendance at that same gathering. “My friends from Scotland Yard would like a look at this chap’s face,” the gentleman on the hack continued serenely, as if he had not seen the Colonel’s hand move toward his pocket, then fall away. The big man clenched his fist and dropped their burden before lunging at the men from Scotland Yard.

The Colonel released the man to fall limply to the cobbles and embarked on a lunge of his own, this one calculated to take him away from the detectives and down the nearest alley. He nearly collided with the hack. The gentleman now held a pistol in his hand, with the barrel most unequivocally pointed at his heart. Colonel Moran froze and held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. His companion was being subdued with truncheons and it was some moments before anyone had the opportunity to check the inside of the Professor’s coach.

In the end, it was a new arrival who flung open the door and swore softly at the sight of the empty cushions. The lady with him turned away and swept over the cobbles to free the fallen man’s head. She applied some salts from her bag and, a moment or two later, Mr Godfrey Norton, barrister, coughed his way back to life, if not immediately back to health.

Mrs Norton looked up at the large gentleman standing next to the coach and murmured in a choked voice, “Thank you, Mr Holmes. I am eternally in your debt.”

The gentleman’s hooded eyes appraised her and her husband for a long moment before Mr Mycroft Holmes favored her with a bow. “I believe that England may be in yours, madam. You have foiled a plot against one of Her Majesty’s allies and kept our government from losing face. Allow me to have you escorted to your lodgings and a doctor fetched for your husband.”

The Professor moved out of earshot after that. He didn’t need to hear more; the details of how the clever Irene Adler and her allies had wrecked his plans could wait. The accompanying painful loss of faith in the mathematical precision of his plans, the precision that should have guaranteed his success, was overwhelming. But it would pass quickly enough. Holmes’s brother was a variable that he had not accounted for in his calculations and he had underestimated Mrs Norton. These were not mistakes that he would make again and, when he returned from this Elba, his empire would once again be his. The Napoleon of crime disappeared into the fog.

They’d strung up the boy, Twist, from a gas lamp outside and left him there for us to find. Moran carried him in: a limp, pale bundle of broken bones encased in pinched, scarred skin.

Moran laid him down on the kitchen table, as gentle as a serving maid. He stood there looking down mutely on the boy. His face was a mask of anger and hate.

Remarkably, the dead body still tried to move. Moran jumped back with a cry. Twist’s limbs flopped on the kitchen table. His mouth opened and closed without words. His eyes sprung open and glared at us, and I saw the evil, alien flame of intelligence behind the eyes.

The phenomenon only lasted for a moment. Then the flame went out and the body collapsed back and was still, the last vestiges of animated life gone from it. It had not been one of them, only a sliver, just enough for them to deliver this message, let us know they knew where we were, that they could reach us if they wanted to.

‘They want us alive,’ I said, and Moran turned on me and said, ‘No, they want you alive, Professor. They couldn’t give a f—k about the rest of us.’

The ratter, Fagin, looked up balefully from the corner. His face was as white as a skull.

‘Where do we go now?’ he said. ‘We’re trapped. There’s no way out, not any more. Maybe there never was—’ He was babbling, half crazed by now. He’d lost half his boys to the other side and the rest had run. Twist had been the last boy standing.

I stared at him coldly.‘Remember, Fagin. This is still my city,’ I told him. ‘I ruled it from the shadows and I will rule it yet again.’

‘Jack rules it,’ the ratter said. ‘This is Jack’s town now.’

I was on him in a fraction of a second. My fingers tightened on his throat. The ratter’s face turned even whiter. His eyes bulged.

‘F—k Jackie Boy,’ I said. ‘This is my turf.’ I stared into his eyes. ‘Do you understand me, Fagin? Do you understand ?’

‘Yes!’ he choked. ‘Yes, yes!’

I released him and he slumped to the ground, massaging his throat. I looked around me, at our bolt-hole. The wallpaper was ghastly. The windows were covered in makeshift blackout blinds. Twist lay on the table. I turned my eyes from him.