The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (52 page)

             
Halfway down Regent's Gate, opposite Walbine House, the jarvey pulled his horse to a stop. From where Alberts stood he could make out the form of a top-hatted man in evening dress emerging from the four-wheeler and tossing a coin up to the jarvey. The Right Honorable the Lord Walbine had obviously just returned home for the night. Lemming, Alberts thought, had been right.

             
The four-wheeler pulled away and rattled on down the street as his lordship let himself into Walbine House. All was quiet again P.C. Alberts resumed his beat, the tread of his footsteps once more the only sound to be heard along the tree-lined street. He kept to a steady methodical pace as he headed toward Kensington Gore.

             
It took P.C. Alberts almost ten minutes to make the circuit along Kensington Gore, back up Queen's Gate, and then across Cromwell Road to the Regent's Gate corner. As he turned onto Regent's Gate again, from somewhere ahead of him there came a sudden cacophony of slamming doors and running feet. The faint gleam of a lantern wavered back and forth across the street. It caught Alberts in its dim beam. "Constable!" came an urgent whisper that carried clearly across the length of the street. "Constable Alberts! Come quickly!"

             
Alberts quickened his stride without quite breaking into a run. "Here I am," he called. "What's the trouble, now?"

             
The butler, Lemming, was standing in the middle of the street in his shirtsleeves, his eyes wide, breathing like a man who has just been chased by ghosts. An older woman with a coat misbuttoned over a hastily donned housedress peered from behind him.

             
"Please," Lemming said, "would you come inside with us?"

             
"If I am needed," Alberts said, taking a firmer grasp of his nightstick. "What seems to be the trouble?"

             
"It's 'is lordship," the old woman said. " 'E just come in, and now 'e won't answer 'is door."

             
"His lordship arrived home a short while ago," Lemming explained, "and immediately retired to his room. Mrs. Beddoes was to bring him his nightly glass of toddy, as usual."

             
" 'E rang for it," Mrs. Beddoes assured Alberts, "as 'e always does."

             
"But the bedroom door was locked when she arrived on the landing," Lemming said.

             
"And 'e don't answer 'is knock," Mrs. Beddoes finished, nodding her head back and forth like a pigeon.

             
"I'm afraid there's been an accident," Lemming said.

             
"Are you certain his lordship is in his bedroom?" Alberts asked, staring up at the one lighted window on the second story of the great house.

             
"The door is secured from the inside," Lemming said. "I'd appreciate having you take a look, Constable. Come this way, please."

             
P.C. Alberts followed Lemming up an ornate marble staircase and down a corridor on the second floor to his lordship's bedroom door. Which was locked. Alberts knocked on the polished dark wood of the door panel and called out. There was no response.

             
"Has his lordship ever done this before?" Alberts asked.

             
"His lordship has been known to secure the door on occasion," Lemming answered. "But he has previously always responded to a knock, even if it was only to yell, 'Go away!' "

             
P.C. Alberts thought for a second. "We'd best break it in," he decided. "Lord Walbine may require assistance."

             
Lemming sighed, the relief at having someone else make the decision evident in his face. "Very good, Constable. If you say so."

             
The two men applied their shoulders to the door in a series of blows. On the fourth, the wood around the lock splintered. On the sixth it gave, and the door swung inward.

             
Alberts entered the room first. It was a large bedroom, dominated by a canopy bed. The Right Honorable the Lord Walbine, twelfth baron of that name, was lying quietly in the center of that bed in a fresh pool of his own blood. Sometime within the past ten minutes his throat had been neatly sliced from clavicle to clavicle.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

—Sherlock Holmes

             
Benjamin Barnett opened his
Morning Herald,
folded it in half, and propped it against the toast rack. "There's been another one," he said, peering down at the closely printed column as he cracked his first soft-boiled egg.

             
"Eh?" Professor James Moriarty looked up from his breakfast. "Another what?"

             
"Murder," Barnett said. "Another 'mysterious killing among the gentry,' " he read with evident satisfaction.

             
"Don't look so pleased," Moriarty said. "It might lead one to suspect that you had done it yourself."

             
" 'The third outrage in as many weeks,' according to the
Herald"
Barnett said, tapping the headline with his egg spoon. "The police are baffled."

             
"If we are to believe the newspapers," Moriarty remarked, "the police are always baffled. Except when inspector Gregson expects an early arrest.' Sometimes the police are 'baffled' and 'expect an early arrest' in the same paragraph. I can only wish that you journalists had a wider selection of descriptive phrases to choose from. It would certainly add an element of suspense to newspaper reading that is now grievously lacking."

             
"There's enough suspense in this story to keep even you happy," Barnett said. "A police constable broke down the victim's bedroom door, which was locked from the inside, to find him lying on his bed in a pool of his own blood, with his throat so deeply cut that the head was almost severed and the blood still flowing from the gaping wound in his neck. How's that for suspense?"

             
Moriarty sighed and shook his head. Taking off his pince-nez glasses to polish them with his linen napkin, he focused his water-gray eyes myopically on Barnett across the table. "Actually it's quite distressing," he said.

             
"How's that, Professor?"

             
Moriarty held up the thick paperbound volume that rested beside his plate. "This came in the first post this morning," he said. "It is the quarterly journal of the British Astro-Physical Society. There is more of mystery and suspense in these twelve-score pages than in ten years' worth of the
Morning Herald."

             
"That may be, Professor," Barnett said, "but your average newspaper reader is not interested in what's happening on Mars, but in what's happening in Chelsea. He'd rather have a mysterious murder than a mysterious nebulosity any time."

             
"You are probably right," Moriarty said, laying the journal aside and replacing his pince-nez glasses on the bridge of his nose. "There is, nonetheless, some small comfort, some slight gleam of hope for the future of the human race that can be derived from current scientific theory. I read my journals and they comfort me."

             
"What sort of comfort, Professor?" Barnett asked, feeling that he had lost the thread of the conversation.

             
"I find solace in the theories expounded by Professor Herschel, among others, concerning nebulae," Moriarty said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the large silver samovar which squatted at one end of the table. "They would suggest that the universe is larger by several orders of magnitude than previously imagined."

             
"This comforts you?"

             
"Yes. It indicates that mankind, confined as it is to this small planet in a random corner of the universe, is of no real importance or relevance whatsoever."

             
Barnett put his spoon carefully down on the side of his plate. He knew that Moriarty indulged in these misanthropic diatribes at least partly to annoy him, but at the same time he had never seen any sign that the professor was not totally serious about what he said. "I don't suppose you'd care to do a piece for my news service on that general theme, Professor?" Barnett asked.

             
"Bah!" Moriarty replied.

             
"I could probably get a couple of hundred American newspapers to carry the piece."

             
"The prospect of having my words read eagerly over the jam pot in Chicago is, I must confess, one that holds no particular charm for me," Moriarty said. "Having my phrases mouthed in San Francisco, or my ideas hotly debated in Des Moines, has equally little appeal. No, I'm afraid, my dear Mr. Barnett, that your offer will not entice me into a journalistic career."

             
"I'm sorry about that, Professor," Barnett said. "The world lost a great essayist when you chose to devote yourself to a life of, ah, science."

             
Professor Moriarty looked at Barnett suspiciously. "When I plucked you from a Turkish prison almost two years ago," he said, "you were as devoid of sarcasm as you were embedded with grime. I no longer detect any grime."

             
"Touch
é
,
Professor." Barnett smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.

-

             
Benjamin Barnett had first met Professor James Moriarty in Constantinople almost two years before, at a moment when the professor was being chased down the Street of the Two
Towers by a band of assassins in dirty brown burnooses. Barnett and a friend came to the professor's aid, for which he thanked them profusely, although he regarded the assault as a minor annoyance from which he could have extricated himself quite easily without assistance. Which, Barnett came to admit when he got to know the professor better, was most probably true.

             
Moriarty had reciprocated by rescuing Barnett from the dank confines of the prison of Mustafa II, where he was being held for the minor offense of murdering his friend and the major indiscretion of spying against the government of that most enlightened despot Sultan Abd-ul Hamid, Shah of Shahs, the second of that name. Both crimes of which he was equally innocent, and for either of which he was equally likely to be garroted at any moment at the whim of the Sublime Porte.

             
But Moriarty had exacted a price for his rescue. "What I want from you," he had told Barnett, "is two years of your life.
"

             
"
Why?" Barnett had asked.

             
"You are good at your profession, and I have use for you.
"

             
"
And after the two years?"

             
"After that, your destiny is once again your own.
"

             
"
I accept!"

             
It had seemed like a good bargain at the time. And even when
Moriarty had smuggled Barnett across the length of Europe and they stood face to face in the professor's basement laboratory in the house on Russell Square, it continued to seem so. Moriarty claimed to be a consultant and problem-solver, but he was strangely vague about the details. After extracting an oath of silence in regard to his affairs, he had put Barnett to work. Barnett had been a foreign correspondent for the
New York World,
living in Paris, when he had gone to Turkey to report on the sea trials of a new submarine and ended up in an Osmanli prison. It was his skills as a reporter that Moriarty wished to use. With Moriarty's assistance, Barnett opened the American News Service, a cable service to United States newspapers for British and European news. This gave Barnett a cover organization to investigate anything that Moriarty wanted investigated. To the surprise of both men, the service quickly began to make money, and soon took on a life of its own as a legitimate news organization.