Moriarty Returns a Letter (7 page)

“He’s upstairs,” said the woman. “At the snooker table.”

The captain took his pint of pale beer and ascended one flight of wooden stairs to the billiard room above.

It was a loft structure, with two walls, and a wooden railing that overlooked the bar below.

At the front of the room, nearest the stairs, was a snooker table, with a rack of wooden cues on the wall and a small black chalkboard for writing scores. There was no game in progress, and two small children, a girl of about five and a boy of about nine, played with the piece of hanging white chalk, drawing designs on each other’s hands.

Farther back in the room, in the shadows beyond the well-lit snooker table, two men stood in one corner, one of them taking aim at a dartboard.

The captain stepped carefully around the two children and moved toward the back of the room.

He stopped at a respectful distance from the dart throwers. The man not currently throwing a dart acknowledged the captain’s presence with a nod that indicated the captain would be invited to the next game, if he chose to participate.

The captain stood by and waited his turn.

One of the two men, the one who had just nodded, was in British uniform; he was in his late thirties, perhaps forty. The other, the man currently throwing the darts, was some thirty years older.

A father and son was the captain’s guess. Probably it was the grandchildren who were playing with the chalkboard.

The captain had two children of his own, just now grown to adulthood, and a young grandchild as well.

He hadn’t seen any of them in almost two years. Perhaps that was why, as he was looking at these young children now, they reminded him of his own.

And at this moment, the American captain hoped that the man throwing darts was not in fact the person he had come looking for. Perhaps the woman at the hotel had been mistaken about the hotel owner’s destination. Or perhaps that man had come here and then gone and this was someone else entirely.

It wasn’t as though the captain could not do what might need to be done. After Normandy, he knew that he was capable of doing anything that was necessary.

But he had had enough of death and dying.

What he was thinking of doing now was to just walk back down the stairs, catch a bus to Victoria Embankment, and talk to someone again at Scotland Yard. That would suffice. He could leave it with them. And then he would just go back home to New York and resume his life. It might be just that simple.

But first he had to be sure. He couldn’t just stride into Scotland Yard, tell them a tale his mother had told him, and expect to be believed. He had tried that once already, immediately after getting out of the hospital, and the officials he talked with had not been of much help. There was a war on, after all. They were not much interested in a crime that he claimed his mother said had been committed against an American in London some fifty years ago.

The officer at Scotland Yard had said that they had more pressing concerns.

And at this moment, the American captain was inclined to agree. He drank the remainder of his beer in one long draught and set the empty glass down on the table, and was about to leave.

“Your turn, mate.”

The older man was pulling the darts out of the board, his back to the American.

“Thanks,” said the American. “But I need to be on my way.”

“We’d love it if you’d stay for a game, Yank,” said the younger of the two dart players.

This was a friendly invitation between peers, one Allied officer to another, and the only reason the Englishman addressed him as “Yank” instead of “Captain” was because they were in a pub and the formal titles were dropped in favor of being sociable. There was an etiquette to be observed, a basic courtesy, and the American had no excuse that was good enough for him to decline.

“Sure,” he said.

The English officer gave his handful of darts to the American.

“But watch out my dad doesn’t cheat you,” he said. He winked when he said that, and then he went to check on his two children at the chalkboard.

The American stepped up to the throwing line, holding the three darts in his hand. He had played the game once or twice before, on his first arrival in London. He was pretty sure he had a grasp on the rules.

He waited for the older man to finish collecting his darts from the board.

The older man turned—and now, for the first time, the American saw the right side of his face. In the light from the lamps above the dartboard, he could see it clearly—a birthmark, a slashing reddish line, just above the man’s jaw.

The American froze. And stared.

The older man caught that stare, and returned it with an inquiring glance. The American looked away, and the older man came back to the throwing line.

“And what is your name, Captain?” said the older man. And then, with the American not responding immediately, he pointed toward the board and said, “Your turn now, you see.”

This was a challenge.

“Moriarty,” said the American. “My name is James Moriarty. After my father.”

With that, the American threw his three darts in rapid succession, each perfectly on target.

He went to collect his darts from the board. When he had done so, he turned, and saw that the older man was staring at him—staring at his face in the light of the dart lamp, just as the American had stared at the older man’s birthmark a few moments before.

The American came back behind the throwing line, and the older man, finally averting his gaze, stepped up. He got ready to throw, though to the American the older man seemed to still be trying to look at him out of the corner of his eye.

As the older man prepared to toss his first dart, the American said, “And what is your name, then?”

The older man tossed his dart, just as the American answered his own question.

“Redgil, isn’t it?”

The dart went wide. The older man, with the two remaining darts clenched in his fist as if they were ice picks, turned to face the American.

And then, suddenly—so suddenly that only the survivors would ever be aware of it—there was a disturbance in the air.

*   *   *

The V-2 flying bomb struck in the street, directly in front of the pub.

At the Marylebone Grand Hotel—the nearest occupied structure, other than the pub itself—the walls shook, mirrors broke, and plaster fell, but within moments all half-dozen occupants and staff had found one another in the lobby and determined that no one in their building required immediate medical attention.

Once they knew that, every one of them, staff and guests, went out into the street and down to the site of impact to see how they could help.

Bonnie, the young desk clerk, ran toward the location of the blast.

Remnants were everywhere in the street. Bonnie nearly tripped over the pub’s wooden logo sign. If it had been any more of a direct hit, there would have been nothing left at all of the pub or anyone in it. And as it was, there wasn’t much.

The entire front façade and wall were gone, as well as the side of the building facing south.

All the tables and booths from the first floor were a shambles, but the bar was still standing.

Sharp fragments—from a wall mirror, from lamps, from a slate chalkboard—were everywhere.

Bonnie stood in place for a moment in front of the devastation, her ears still recovering from the sound of the blast, and tried to determine in which direction to move to help.

The barmaid, dazed but apparently uninjured, was being helped out from behind the bar by the two older gentlemen who had been drinking their pints there a moment earlier.

Johnnie, the bellhop from the hotel, just a few months short of being seventeen and not yet old enough to be in the service, was already moving toward the flattened bar booths to assist the injured middle-aged couple who were stirring there.

Bonnie knew the street and its occupants very well, and she tried to think of who else was likely to have been in the pub. She knew of at least four people—no, five, if you included the American who said he was going there—who should have been inside.

Mr. Redfern, the hotel owner. His son. And, dear God, the two young children.

If they weren’t below in a booth and they weren’t at the bar, then she knew they all would have been in the loft, where the hotel owner played darts.

Above and to her right, all but one of the supporting structures for the billiard loft had been blown away. The wooden frame of the floor leaned precariously downward, touching the ground floor in front of the bar.

The snooker table, a traditional full-size model, twelve feet long, six wide, and weighing a ton, was at a forty-five-degree angle—one corner perched on the portion of the loft floor that had survived, and the diagonal corner resting on the ground below, where it had fallen with enough violence to break off the two supporting legs in front.

Bonnie began to move through the debris in that direction.

She saw blood on the shards at her feet.

Then she heard a child crying.

And she saw movement.

They had been concealed by the fallen loft floorboards at first, and by the still-teetering snooker table, but now she saw them—three human figures.

The hotel owner—and his two grandchildren.

Bonnie stepped forward to help.

Mr. Redfern appeared to have already shaken off most of the dust and debris. He ushered the smaller of the two children—the one who had been crying, the five-year-old girl, who was crying still—toward Bonnie.

Bonnie took the girl in her arms, and then briefly paused. At her feet, just a couple of yards away, were two bodies. One had very clearly been struck by the falling table, the other perhaps by something else, but there was no question that those two adult males were dead.

Bonnie covered the little girl’s eyes as she carried her away from the scene.

Bonnie knew the man killed by the fallen snooker table was the girl’s father; the other man was bloodied with severe head trauma, but Bonnie knew from his uniform that he was the American captain.

Now Mr. Redfern walked out with the nine-year-old boy. The boy was still covered in chalk dust and splinters of wood and plaster, but apparently without major injury. Unlike his younger sister, he wasn’t crying. He just stared, in shock, as his grandfather led him out of the rubble.

“He saved me,” said the girl, through sobs, and struggling in Bonnie’s arms. “He pulled me away from it.”

“I know, darling,” said Bonnie, assuming the girl was referring to her father. “I know.” Bonnie cradled the girl’s face and tried to keep her from looking back.

5

CANVEY ISLAND, THAMES ESTUARY—PRESENT DAY, 1998

Lawrence Cheeverton had been running his little boat in the broad estuary of the Thames for more than twenty-five years, and he had fished out many things, but never anything like the catch he’d pulled in one night last autumn from the river proper.

He’d been on his way back home from the farmers’ market at Blackheath, where he sold the eels and sole and sea bass that he had hauled in that morning.

It was night on his way back, because after selling his catch he’d spent several hours, and all of the day’s profit, in the pub at Blackheath before heading home.

This was an indulgence he’d been allowing himself more frequently, and especially on that one night in autumn, because it was just one week before his sixtieth birthday.

It had begun to occur to him that time might be running short.

He no longer felt young. Physically, he felt that he might still be able to run the boat, and throw the nets and haul them in, for another twenty years or so. That is, barring injury, of course.

But in other respects, it had begun to occur to him that time might be running out. And it was the very experience of drinking at the pub that was telling him that.

For the first three or four pints on these evenings when he tarried, there would be good company—other fishermen like himself, and a couple of locals from the market, all tossing darts, or standing at the bar and telling the most entertaining lies they could.

But then the crowd would thin out. One after the other, his drinking companions would announce their last round, because they had to get on home, even though it wasn’t even last call yet. “Why leave so early?” Cheeverton would complain, and he had wondered why he was always the last one standing.

Then he had realized what the difference was—the others all had someone at home to go to.

Not anyone scenic necessarily, mind you—he had seen some of their wives in the pub. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, there was someone.

He had been married once himself, some thirty years ago. He had been young then, at an age when working twelve hours a day on the water made him appear strong and vigorous, rather than old and worn, and at an age when his talk of someday owning a small fleet of boats of his own almost sounded plausible.

So plausible, in fact, that he had once been able to impress a lovely young woman in her early twenties, who had also grown up on the island and could be impressed by such things, and who had not yet thought of what better prospects she might have if she took her youth and beauty to the city.

When he actually managed to marry that girl, everyone in the town had recognized what a catch she was for someone like him. There were many hearty congratulations on his good fortune, and more than a few remarks on the side regarding how long it was likely to last.

For three years, things had in fact gone all right—until one particularly unproductive season, and a series of foolish financial decisions on his part, made her realize that his talk of his own little fleet would never be achieved, that at best he might someday be able to buy an old secondhand boat and eke out his living on it (which indeed was what had come to pass), and that she would never be more than a poor fisherman’s wife if she stayed.

He had almost been able to see those thoughts go through her mind at the time; they registered in her eyes in the morning; they slipped out at times when both he and his wife had a few pints in the pub.