Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (25 page)

“Do you think you can find out?”

“’Course I can find out, who says I can’t?”

“Fairly rapidly?”

“By this time tomorrow.”

“Then here’s what I want,” said Moriarty.

THE LAST PLANTAGENET

SPECIAL TO THE EVENING CALL

IT IS NOT EVERYDAY that an ancient and honorable patent of nobility which has fallen into disuse is reclaimed by its rightful heir. Mr Albreth Decanare, who has recently moved to Britain from his domicile in France, has assumed the title of Earl of Mersy. Mr. Decanare claims to be the direct male descendant of Reginald Phipps Calworthy Bonneworth, the last Earl of Mersy, and has presented documents to support his peerage claim to the Crown Office of the House of Lords, which is looking into the matter.

The last Lord Mersy fled England in 1588 when evidence was presented involving him in the so-called Babington Plot, which as every schoolchild knows was an attempt to displace Queen Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots. He is believed to have died in Grenoble in 1604. The peerage itself was never revoked and has remained vacant these last three centuries.

The prospective Lord Mersy has also brought with him documents that prove his ancestor innocent of the charges which were brought against him by Lord Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s personal secretary and, it is popularly believed, her spymaster.

If his claim is upheld, then Mr. Decanare may also regard himself as the rightful heir of the Plantagenet kings, as the Earls of Mersy had always claimed direct descent in the male line from Richard III’s nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick, who was executed in 1499.

Of course it is all moot now. The presumptive Lord Mersy could scarcely find any support in a bid to reclaim the British throne for the House of Plantagenet in this staid and settled century of ours, but it is interesting to speculate on what could have been.

[CHAPTER TWENTY]

THE BELLEVILLE SLICER

Nobody ever does anything deliberately

in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil.

Everybody acts in the interests of good,

as he understands it.

But everybody understands it in a different way.

Consequently people drown, slay, and kill one another

in the interests of good.

—P. D. OUSPENSKY

MLLE. LOUISA DESCHAMPS WAS A
tall, slender young woman of perhaps thirty. Her thick bun of brown hair was meticulously done up atop her thin face, and her wide brown eyes looked unflinchingly upon the world and expected nothing from it. She sat stiffly on the front edge of the straight-back oak armchair that Holmes had pulled out for her, her feet together, her arms tight against her sides, as though not to encourage her body to take up more than the least necessary amount of space. Her high-waisted brown dress was without ornamentation but for a wide white lace collar that circled her neck. She carried, clutched firmly in her right hand, a long white parasol with an ivory handle in the shape of a parrot’s head.

“This is not something of which I enjoy speaking,” she said in French, looking from Barnett to Holmes and then turning her gaze to the abbess, “but you must know that. Why am I here?” Her voice was deep with a barely perceptible burr that softened the consonants.

“Because I asked you to come?” the abbess suggested.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because you have a story to tell, and these men want to hear it.”

“Why?”

“This,” the abbess said, gesturing with her hand, “is my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and this is Mr. Benjamin Barnett. They are British.”

“So I gathered,” Mlle. Deschamps said, “by their shoes.”

“They have come over here for our help, Louisa,” the abbess said. “There is a madman loose in England. He is murdering women and cutting them most horribly. According to Mr. Holmes, the man was described by one who saw him as tall, slender, regal-looking, dressed as a gentleman. He laughs while he mutilates. Not a robust laugh but a childish giggle. They believe he is French. In order to better ascertain where he might be now, they need to discover his history.”

Louisa Deschamps had been slowly rising as the abbess spoke. She was trembling all over. A moment after the abbess ceased speaking, Louisa’s parasol clattered to the ground in front of her, her eyes closed, and she fell back into her chair.

“Mon Dieu,”
said the abbess, rising quickly. “I should have thought … I am so sorry.”

Before the others had a chance to do anything, Louisa’s eyes opened and she looked around the room. “Silly of me,” she said, sitting up in the chair with an attempt at a tiny smile.

Holmes was on his feet. “Mademoiselle, are you all right?”

Louisa’s eyes went to Holmes and then to Barnett. “Is it he?” she cried. “Could it be? I thought he was dead. They told me…”

“Here!” The abbess passed Holmes a small glass. “Cognac. Give it to her.”

Holmes took the glass and cupped Louisa’s hands around it. For a moment she stared at the glass as though unsure what it was and then, in a quick motion, brought it to her lips and emptied it.

“Ah!” Holmes said, rubbing his hands together. “Come, this is promising!”

“Holmes!” exclaimed Barnett. “Really! The lady is seriously distressed.”

“Indeed,” said Holmes. He leaned toward Mlle. Deschamps, his eyes fastened hawklike on her face. “I take it this description has some meaning for you?” he asked. “Is that why you carry the parasol?”

“Yes,” she told him, reaching down to retrieve the object from the floor by her feet. “I am never without it.”

“Holmes,” Barnett said, “what—”

“Come now,” Holmes said. “You heard that dainty little sunshade clatter as it hit the floor. Surely to give such a satisfying thunk its shaft contains either a flask or a blade. Circumstances favor the blade.” He turned back to the young woman. “Of whom are you afraid?”

“Of the man who did this,” she said, pointing a finger toward the high collar surrounding her neck. “I had thought him dead, but I couldn’t be sure. Now—what you say … There couldn’t be two such monsters.”

“Monsters?” Barnett asked. “You mean…”

She raised her hands to her neck and undid the small buttons that held up her collar. “Two such men as the one who did this,” she said, pulling the collar open and lifting her head.

Stretched in an arc on her neck above the collarbone was a wide, angry scar—a red slit that looked somehow barely closed, as though it might open and allow blood to gush forth at any second.

“Good God!” Barnett exclaimed.

“Dear me,” said Holmes. “What an unusual mark. I have made something of a study of scarring, and I have never seen another like it.” He stood up and took a magnifying glass from his pocket. “May I?”

“If you like,” she said. “Why not?”

Holmes gently pushed apart the collar even more and peered closely at the wound. “A sharp blade,” he commented, “but that, by itself, would not cause this. The wound is fairly old, quite well healed I would say, and yet the scar itself looks almost fresh. What accounts for this?”

“The chief of surgery at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital is, I’m afraid, responsible for the appearance of the scar,” Louisa said. “He put some salve on it while it was healing, and it had a bad reaction. The scar formed a sort of scab and, after a while, turned this color. It had been healing well before that. Still, as he almost certainly saved my life, I cannot speak ill of him. As for the scar itself, the man you seek is, I believe, responsible.”

“Ah!” Holmes said. “Then—”

“Perhaps you should let her tell her story, Sherlock,” the abbess suggested, “then ask such questions as you have.”

“Of course,” Holmes said, leaning back in his chair and sliding the magnifying glass back into his jacket pocket. “You must forgive me, mademoiselle. My eagerness sometimes causes me to get ahead of myself.”

“And way ahead of those around you,” the abbess commented wryly.

Mlle. Deschamps held the glass out to the abbess, who, after a moment, nodded and reached for the flask of cognac.

“It has been two years,” she said. “I was a dancer at the Montagnes Russes. Not in the chorus, you understand, but a principal. I had admirers, but none above the others, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes, of course,” Holmes said. “Go on.”

“There was this man—the one you describe—who would come almost every night. He sat all alone at a table in the front, drank a bottle of champagne, and stared at the girls. But of course there were many men who did that.” She stopped talking and turned to look at the abbess, who, after a second, took up the story.

“At that time,” said the abbess, “there was a man—a madman—loose in Paris. He was given the horrible sobriquet of ‘the Belleville Slicer’ by the press, since his first known victim, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, was found in an alley off the rue Ramponeau in Belleville. But he soon graduated to attacking women in their own homes at night.”

“Strange,” said Barnett, “I don’t remember—”

“It received curiously little attention in the press,” the abbess said. “Curious, that is, until you reflect that the Paris Exposition was about to start, and the authorities didn’t want anything to discourage the thousands of tourists that were destined to come and gape at Mr. Eiffel’s new tower and wander among the many pavilions and admire everything Parisian—everything French. One could not allow the occasional butchery of a young woman to distract from all that. After all, the monster was only attacking the
filles clandestines,
not respectable women or tourists.”

“The
filles
…?” Barnett began.

“The term used by the authorities to describe unregistered prostitutes, as opposed to the
filles soumises,
who have their identity cards from the gendarmes. Everything in France is regulated. The poor girls are not given any assistance, you understand, but they are regulated.”

“You sound…” Holmes began.

“Yes, I do, don’t I,” agreed the abbess, smiling a tight little smile. “As you may have noticed in the past, I have little respect for those who feel they have the right to tell others how to behave.”

“And you an abbess?” queried Holmes. “How do you reconcile—”

“It is, how shall I put it? A marriage of convenience between myself and the Church, but not necessarily of conviction—on either part. My superiors turn a blind eye to much of what I do, and I to much of what they do.”

The abbess picked up three stem glasses with her right hand, holding them upright between her fingers, and filled each with about three-quarters of an inch of cognac. “Here,” she said, handing one to Holmes and one to Barnett. “Let us fortify ourselves for the narrative.” She held the decanter up with a questioning glance at Mlle. Deschamps, who shook her head.

“No more for now,” she said.

“Well, then,” the abbess said, resuming her story. “Louisa was the monster’s last victim. He was, as you have certainly surmised, the gentleman who sat at the front table. It was her misfortune that he had turned away from the
filles éparses
—the streetwalkers, and she somehow caught his eye.”

“He must have followed me home at some time,” Louisa said, “for he knew where I lived. Indeed I have reason to believe that he had been in my flat several times in my absence. I had, on occasion, noticed things disturbed ever so slightly. I assumed it was the cleaning lady or the concierge, who took a healthy interest in the lives of her tenants. But…”

“Go on,” said Holmes.

“On this occasion he was waiting for me in my bedroom, sitting on my bed. When I entered he leaped up and grabbed me by the”—she swallowed and went on—“by the throat and dragged me back over to the bed. I was too startled even to be afraid, it was so sudden. But also I was too startled to do anything to help myself. I dropped my candle when he grabbed me, and the room was dark, but I knew who it was almost instantly—he was giggling the whole time, and that same … noise … would escape from him from time to time while he was watching the girls dance at the club. A feeling of dreadful fear came over me. It was clear that he was a madman and I would be lucky to escape from this alive.” She stopped speaking and closed her eyes.

“If you don’t want to continue—” the abbess began.

Louisa shook her head, and she said, “However, I will, perhaps, take a little more of the cognac, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” said the abbess, reaching for the decanter.

“I have not spoken of this but three times since it happened,” Louisa said. “Once to the gendarmes, again to the
juge d’instruction,
and to madame the abbess, who consoled me and gave me the will to go on.” She held her glass out to the abbess and then took a sip of the cognac. “He cut me,” she continued. “First cutting through my blouse and my corset and, quite incidentally I’m sure, cutting through my skin. I still have that scar also.”

“You are very brave even to talk about it now, years later,” said Barnett.

“Thank you,” she said. “I do not feel brave. I feel frightened that there is the possibility that he is once more on the streets. Very frightened.”

“He is in London, not Paris, if it is indeed he,” said Holmes.

“How did you escape this madman?” Barnett asked.

“I was unable to scream,” she said, “but in thrashing about I, quite accidentally, overturned the night table by the bed. A large ewer fell to the floor and shattered. A few seconds later my brother, Jacques, came rushing into the bedroom. He grappled with the man, who wrenched himself free and fled down the stairs, leaving behind his hat and a large, very sharp knife.”

“So the man got away?” Barnett asked.

“For the moment. Jacques thought it more important to tend to my wounds, and so I lived. Had he chased the man he might or might not have caught him, but I surely would have bled to death.”

“Your brother lived with you?” asked Holmes.

“No. Jacques is a sailor. He was home on leave from the battleship
Marceau
and had been asleep on a couch in an alcove off the parlor. I didn’t even know he was there. Obviously the Belleville Slicer didn’t either.”