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

“Come on.” Nora grinned. “Let’s find our victims.”

The hold was unlike anything Irving had seen in his life. It was two storeys high and ran almost two-thirds the length of the ship. There were piles of packing crates, suitcases, numerous wagons, industrial-sized freight pallets and even livestock. Irving let out a low whistle, surprised at just how much had been crammed into the cargo compartment.

“Where’s yours?” Nora’s accent had shifted back to that of the back alleys of the city.

Irving nodded to the rear of the hold, to where he could see a man in an old-fashioned, bright scarlet military tunic shouting at the men loading his belongings.

“Let’s go and introduce ourselves, shall we?” Nora picked up the hem of her skirt and stalked forward. As they approached, she gently fell back into character, letting go of her skirt, straightening her back and raising her chin. Her voice gushed with feigned excitement. “Good afternoon, sir! Are you heading for a new life in the United States too? It certainly looks that way. It is the most exciting enterprise, is it not?”

Major-General Fitzwilliam was not a pleasant man. He met their enquiries with short, blunt answers, evidently more interested in his cargo than making new acquaintances.

“What an absolute arse,” Nora summarised succinctly once they had moved away. “And imagine how much worse he’d have been if we’d been the real us?”

Irving shrugged; he was not particularly bothered by how people treated him, especially when he was planning to take every single pound they owned.

“Is your target here too?” he asked, glancing around the shadowy hold.

Nora nodded. “Over there. The heiress Estelle Lloyd-Trefusis. Her husband was one of the largest landowners in the south-west, before he died in mysterious circumstances.”

“I can’t see her.”

“Over by the pigs, looking terrified.”

Irving moved his gaze over to the livestock pens and smirked at the sight of a well-dressed woman, her nose pinched between her thumb and forefinger, frantically shouting orders at her farmhands. She was so agitated that she lost her footing, overbalanced and ended up trapped amongst the squirming pigs. She screamed.

Irving laughed. “She’s in her element.”

“I’ll handle this one. You laughing won’t help us.” Nora patted him on the arm and then gestured with her thumb, pointing behind him. “Besides, it looks like the boss wants you.”

Moriarty had appeared on the walkway above them. He stood there silently, looking out across the hold. Irving, not wanting to draw any attention to them, slowly climbed the steps up to him, until they stood side by side.

“Do you know why they own all these possessions, while you own so little, Irving?” the professor asked, while making sure his pocket watch was fully wound.

“They earned it in some clever way, I guess.” Irving shrugged. He had never been one to question his status in life. There did not seem much point, given there was so little that he could do to change it.

“They earned it?” Moriarty raised his eyebrows and scoffed. “Not the farmhands who tend to those pigs, or the young soldiers that the Major-General sent to their deaths?”

Irving shrugged again.

“The likes of you must have Karl Marx spinning in his grave.” Moriarty shook his head sadly. “Economics is just another branch of mathematics. I see the equations to which you are blind. Where you see only chaos, I can see intellects manipulating the values. It truly is the perfect crime. None of you can even see the riches that have been taken from you.”

“What can we do about it?” Irving shrugged.

“We can take it back.”

“You see yourself like a Robin Hood then? You steal from the rich, give to the poor?”

Moriarty laughed. “What a fantastical notion. An honourable crime.” The smile faded from his face. “No, I don’t steal from the poor, because the poor have nothing worth stealing. Why pick a pocket, when you can empty a safe? Why rob a craftsman of his tools, when you take his valuable skills and enslave him for a pittance of pay? The only way to have any power in this world is to take it from those who have it. To not be enslaved by dictates of others. That is what I do.”

Irving nodded. He had no qualms about stealing from the people here. He had no qualms stealing from anyone. He needed to make sure he had clothes on his back, food in his stomach and a dry place to sleep; those were his priorities. As long as Moriarty offered him those, who was he to question his motivations or instructions?

“Go and have dinner, Irving. Then catch a little rest in your cabin if you can.” Moriarty clicked his pocket watch closed. “You have exactly nine hours. The explosive charge is in place, the captain will be detonating it at ten minutes after midnight. Nobody will ever guess what started the fire in the engine room. Let Emma know. Be ready.”

Moriarty turned on his heel and left via the door to the deck.

Irving stared at the sprawling contents of the hull. It really was a shame that such riches were going to go straight to the bottom of the ocean. He felt especially sorry for the pigs. They would drown. Nobody would care.

Irving was sitting on the edge of his berth, waiting for the inevitable explosion. He envied Moriarty his pocket watch, the man was undoubtedly calmly counting down the seconds, but Irving had no way to measure the time. Pocket watches were expensive. He had not slept. All he could do was anxiously wait for the explosion, never knowing exactly how close they were to the moment of detonation.

Would he even know it when he heard it?

He had his answer a moment later. There was a short, sharp bang, followed by the scream of tortured, twisting, juddering metal. A vibration ran through the walls and flooring, shaking the room. A moment later, there was the sound of doors opening, followed by voices in the hallway outside, as worried passengers left their staterooms. Irving rose to his feet and opened his door, to find Major-General Fitzwilliam and a host of other passengers standing outside, discussing the noise. As a noticeable burning odour slowly filled the air, their faces paled. The major-general muttered the one word that no sane person on a ship ever wanted to hear.

“Fire.”

An alarm bell began ringing.

Taking charge, Major-General Fitzwilliam marched off down the hallway in search of the captain, so Irving followed. He did not want to let his target out of his sight. The agitated man rudely pushed past Nora and the heiress, to be confronted by the captain coming the other way.

“We have a fire in the engine room,” the captain announced, pointing along the hallway. “I need you to make your way to the lifeboats! Now!”

Panic-stricken gasps rippled along the hallway.

The illusion of polite society dissolved in a moment, as people began fleeing, not paying any attention as to whether they were stepping on their companions. Major-General Fitzwilliam stormed back down the hallway, but, just as Moriarty had predicted, he hesitated by the door of his stateroom and then made his way back inside. The heiress, shrieking in fear, flew back into her room and slammed the door.

Irving glanced at Nora, who at some point in the last few hours had acquired a large oilskin coat and a sailor’s canvas knapsack, which she was carrying over one shoulder.

“Given the situation, is there anything in the world you would go back for?” he enquired.

“My daughter,” she replied, without hesitation. “Everything I do, I do for her. My respectable family disowned me when I had her out of wedlock, left me to fend for myself on the streets the only way I could; so my daughter is the only thing in the world that I would risk dying for. You?”