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

“Well, it’s now or never,” Jacques breathes, with a confidence he doesn’t feel, as he dons his goggles and prepares to strap himself on to the exposed-to-the-elements pilot’s seat.

“Nay, don’t do it, lad,” Herriman suddenly says, laying a fatherly hand on the boy’s arm. “Don’t go up into the air and out over the black, black sea in that old thing. It’s too dangerous. Just stay here and we’ll pretend that we’ve looked all over London for the girls. Tell their parents that they’re gone, let them accept it and move on with their lives.”

“We’ve talked about this, Boss,” Jacques yells over the roar of the engine, as the worn propeller blades gain momentum and the little ship tugs at its mooring like an eager terrier desperate to be let off the leash. “If we take people’s money then we have to do what they’ve asked. And, anyway, you know as well as I do that this is the big one. There’s a giant behind these abductions, you mark my words, and we’re just the men to bring him toppling down. Now cast me off, or I’ll lose him in this fog!”

“Ah, Jacques the giant slayer,” Herriman mutters, shaking his head ruefully, but the straining guy lines are already taut as wire and the whine of the labouring engine has become a scream, so, defeated, he unhooks the rope and sends Jacques speeding off into the black maw of the thickest fog of the decade.

Mora is still chattering away excitedly about Parisian ice-cream shops and new hats with wax cherries on the brims, like a little pet chipmunk unaware that it’s about to be python food , Rosie thinks as she tries to shut her out and scan the skies through the row of brass-riveted portholes, desperately trying to find a landmark to orientate herself.

“We went straight down the Thames,” she whispers to no one in particular, consulting the tiny compass embedded in the heel of her boot. “But we’ve not crossed the Channel at the right angle for Paris. I think we’re heading for Switzerland.”

He can barely feel his own face or his hands on the tiller, and his eyelids are frozen open even under the protection of the thick greenish bottle-glass goggles, but he holds grimly on, the image of that row of daguerreotypes spread across Herriman’s desk like a winning hand of cards burned into his memory as he brings each lost girl’s face to mind. They were all ordinary lasses, daughters of factory workers and manual labourers, not the sort of people who would have sway with the police or have the means to hire their own team, but pooling their meagre credits had led them to Herriman’s door, the cheapest – and probably worst – private detective in all of Shoreditch, oftentimes more crooked than the people he supposedly investigated but basically decent at the core of his fat and lazy heart. Jacques saw to that.

And tonight they were going to crack open the case of the century, the trafficking of girls across Europe by Zeppelin for heaven knew what purpose other than the obvious. Though it was funny that none of them ever came back, alive or dead …

But the fog banks were diminishing now and the air was thin, almost too thin. Jacques was finding it difficult to breathe as red blood-spots began to appear before his eyes, and, no trained rocketeer, he would probably have fallen from his seat and tumbled head first into the abyss had he not been well strapped in and his hands frozen to the controls as the huge ship ahead of him nosed its way cautiously into a giant loading bay in the side of a mountain, the dull gunmetal of the doors bereft of any identification save for two words that spoke greater volumes to the young sleuth than any sizable treatise or tome:

Moriarty Corporation

They were all clustered like indigo-blue limpets around the portholes by now, a chattering, giggling gaggle of humanity, like schoolgirls on a trip to the seaside. And they’re all so young, Rosie mused, watching her companions carefully as the big airship manoeuvred itself into the dock below a turreted gothic hotel, which sat like a lone sentinel atop a snow-capped peak, sheer rock faces leading to glacial ravines on all the sides, the only way up or down a rickety funicular that clung perilously to the side of the mountain like a seaside automation.

The woman in black had appeared again, as if by magic or some stage wizardry whereupon the Queen of the Night would be hoisted through trapdoors to a fanfare of magnesium flares and emerge triumphant to confront an amazed Tamino. Her hair was dishevelled and she wore aviator’s goggles carelessly around her neck. Her face seemed flushed with little red spots on her otherwise pallid cheeks, her ice eyes sparkling with their own private aurora, as she segregated the chattering girls into two groups, little Mora being led off at the head of a large and noisy bunch all twittering about baked ice-cream desserts and boxes of bonbons dusted with gold.

“Mora, no,” Rosie tried to cry out as her new friend was led away by quiet men in agonisingly familiar grey uniforms, but the black rocketeer silenced her with a frozen stare which would have planted ice splinters into the hearts of lesser mortals and even momentarily subdued our heroine. She watched powerlessly as the girls were led chattering into a subterranean chamber cut deep in the rock below the soft and welcoming lights of the Swiss hotel above.

He was still frozen, but the heat from the Zeppelin’s enormous turbine engines blasted him like a hot-air drying machine, and he began to gradually feel his numb limbs become sensate, as he dragged the little telecopter into a shady inglenook and watched aghast as a group of about twenty girls were led out by men in the familiar slate-grey uniforms of the Moriarty Corporation militia, the most savage mercenaries in all of Europe. And, though he tried to follow, a heavy copper-reinforced contagion barrier slid up noiselessly from within a high archway hewn from the rock and then slammed shut again as the last of the girls, like some Hamelin brood, vanished from sight and into the depths of the unassailable mountain.

Unsure of how to proceed, he paused, only to hear voices and see a second group emerge from the big grey airship, a blonde rocketeer he recognised as Hilda Braun of the Prussian Luftwaffe leading a party of four quieter young women up some steep stone stairs and into the bowels of the luxurious hotel above.

And at the front of the group walked Rosie!

Rosie. With her indomitable spirit and quick mind, her soft grey eyes flashing with rage at Herriman when she had burst into their office demanding their assistance with the disappearance of her father. Her long grey dress neat but with discreet darns at the cuffs and a patch at the hem, a thick band of mourner’s crêpe knotted at her coat sleeve like a man would wear. And Herriman had given her short shrift. Spotted an illegitimate daughter with scant income, living on handouts from some toff now bored with paying for the results of an eighteen-year-old indiscretion and conveniently vanishing. He’d seen the same story a hundred times before, he’d later told Jacques. The man disappeared and left the mistress and her brat bereft. Plus, he added with a knowing man-to-man wink to his assistant, no money to pay for the almost-sure-to-be-fruitless investigation that they wanted him to carry out.

“My heart bleeds for you, my dear,” he had said to Rosie with an obsequious smile that grey February morning when the soft mist floated down the river like a funeral cortège. “But, in my experience, when a man such as your father disappears then the likelihood of him ever being found is practically nil, and who’s then to pay my fee, little Rosie, or ensure that my poor children see a meagre chop of mutton for their evening meal.”