Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (3 page)

“Bosh,” said Mortimer. “Then and now—bosh! Don’t believe it for an instant. Something horrible has happened here, but you can’t think that … the baron … had aught to do with it.”

“Well, where is he, then?” asked Pellew, peering around the room.

Suddenly Mollie screamed once more and jumped back from the bed. “Something grabbed my leg!” she shrieked.

The gaggle of girls gathered in the hallway outside shrieked in sympathy, then shrieked again as an arm emerged from beneath the bed, its hand reaching … reaching …

Mortimer and Pellew jumped for the arm and pulled. It was attached to a wizened little man in a white shirt and black breeches who slid out from under the bed and lay prone and motionless on the floor. The girls shrieked once more.

“Why, it’s Mr. Fetch,” Mollie said, peering down at the man.

Fetch opened his eyes and blinked at the light. “Where am I?” he croaked, rolling over. “What happened?”

“Never mind that,” Mr. Mortimer said severely. “Where’s the baron?”

Fetch tried to sit up but lay back down with a weak groan. “I was bumped,” he said. “Banged. Bopped aside the head. Something grabbed me from behind, and—oww!” He had tried to touch the spot above his left ear where the damage had been done, but the pain was too great.

“What sort of something hit you?” Mollie asked.

One of the girls outside the door put her hand to her mouth. “Ghosts and ghoulies,” she whispered in a loud and earnest whisper. “There’s strange things walks these corridors at night.”

“Mighty strange,” one of the other girls agreed. “I have felt their presence as a cold, clammy hand on my back in the dark!”

“None stranger than yourself, Gladys Plum,” Mollie said severely. “Go back to your rooms now, all of you, and stop frightening each other, or you’ll be feeling my cold hand where it’ll do some good.”

The cluster of young women looked at her wide-eyed and made no attempt to move.

“Where is your master?” Mortimer repeated, bending over the prostrate Fetch. “Where is the baron?”

“Don’t know,” Fetch mumbled. “Where am I?”

Mollie squatted on the balls of her feet next to Fetch. “You’re in Rose’s room,” she told him. “Until moments ago you were under Rose’s bed.”

Moving his head gingerly, Fetch looked around the room. “I was?” he asked, wonderingly. “What was I doing there? Where’s the baron got to, then?”

“Wait!” Mortimer said. “What’s that sound?”

“Sound?” Pellew straightened up and looked searchingly around the room.

“Be quiet and listen,” Mortimer instructed, holding his forefinger to his lips.

They listened silently for a few moments. A couple of the girls in the hall giggled nervously, but Mollie looked sternly at them and all giggles subsided.

“What sort of sound?” Mollie whispered.

“It’s a sort of soft scratching, thumping, sobbing sort of sound,” Mortimer said. “Coming from…” He looked around him, trying to locate the sound. “There it is again, but I cannot tell where it’s coming from.”

Mollie lifted her eyes to the ceiling and held her breath. “I do hear it,” she said. She waved a finger around the room like a compass needle gone wild and then steadied it to point to the wardrobe. “There,” she said. “It comes from there.”

Pellew tiptoed over to the wardrobe with exaggerated caution and paused in front of the door to look back at Mortimer. Mortimer nodded and, standing behind him, the porter raised high his cudgel.

Pellew stood to the side of the wardrobe and yanked at the door handle—with no effect. He yanked again and again it did not budge, but this time a loud squeal emerged from inside the wardrobe.

Pellew frowned and, moving in front of the door, took the ornate round knob firmly in both hands. Spreading his legs to brace his feet against the sides of the wardrobe, he yanked again with all his might. There was a creaking and a snapping and the door flew open, throwing Pellew onto his back in an undignified sprawl.

In the wardrobe were hanging a few frocks and jackets, a teal blue velvet cloth coat, and a red silk dressing gown with Japanese pretensions. Crouched under the dressing gown in as tight a ball as she could manage was a small girl in a frilly white chemise, her pert round face wet with tears and red with the long effort at suppressing a scream—a series of screams—that now began to tumble forth.

Mollie squinted at the girl and took a step forward. “Here now, here now, Pamela,” she said sharply. “Let’s have none of that. You must control yourself. Whatever were you doing in the wardrobe? You must take a deep breath and control yourself.”

Pamela gulped and stopped sobbing long enough to take a deep breath, then broke out into a fresh paroxysm of sobs.

Mortimer moved up and took the girl in his arms, patting her sympathetically if awkwardly on the back. “There, there,” he said. “I have a gel at home just about your age, maybe a peck younger. You mustn’t upset yourself so. What were you doing in the wardrobe?”

Pamela sobbed.

“Were you there while … it … happened?” Pellew asked. “Whatever it was? Take a deep breath, now.”

Pamela looked at him, took a deep breath, and sobbed.

“I don’t think,” Mollie said, “that deep breathing is going to help.”

Mortimer took an oversized white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped off Pamela’s moist face. “So it would seem,” he agreed.

“I’ll take her into her room,” Mollie said, gathering the girl into her own arms. “We’ll talk to her later, after she’s had a chance to … whatever it is she needs to do.”

Mr. Mortimer looked at Mr. Pellew, and Mr. Pellew looked at Mr. Mortimer. “Go for the specials,” Mortimer told Pellew. “I’ll stay here and do what can be done.”

“Put someone at each door,” Pellew said.

“Of course,” Mortimer agreed, “but I fear the horse is long gone.”

“What horse?” Mollie demanded. “What specials?”

“The Special Household Branch of the CID, at Scotland Yard, ma’am,” Mortimer told her. “There’s nothing for it, I’m afraid. There’s been murder done, and His—ah, Baron Renfrew is missing.”

“What household?” Mollie squealed, her hands flying up to her face. “I don’t want the rozzers in here,” she protested, looking around wildly as though she expected them to jump through the window any second.

“Oh, these aren’t the regular police,” Mortimer assured her. “This is a very discreet group of gentlemen specially trained to handle situations like this. Mr. Pellew will take our coach and fetch them. Will you please see that all outer doors are secured?”

“Situations like what?” Mollie asked. “Just what is this’ere Special Household Branch?”

“Go, Mr. Pellew,” Mr. Mortimer said, taking charge with a firm hand. “See to the door, if you please, Miss Mollie. All will be revealed to you in the fullness of time. Which in the present case will probably be within the next half hour, I should say.”

Mr. Pellew trotted off down the corridor, the cluster of girls parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. If, Pellew thought, a religious simile wasn’t too inappropriate at a time like this.

“I say!” a voice bellowed from down the hall. “Will you girls please keep it down? We’re trying to play cards in here!”

[CHAPTER THREE]

INDECISION

Pleasure is nothing else

but the intermission of pain.

—JOHN SELDEN

MUMMER TOLLIVER,
Professor Moriarty’s diminutive assistant, perched precariously on the seat of the green damask armchair in the Barnetts’ sitting room. His small patent-leather-shod feet swung to and fro viciously, a visual counterpoint to the sharp anger in his voice as he spoke.

“You got in to see the professor, is what,” he said.

“Just barely,” Benjamin Barnett admitted from the depths of his overstuffed easy chair.

“But they won’t let me see him, is what,” Mummer continued, “and they wouldn’t pass along the bundle of necessaries what I had brought for him. ‘Concerned for his safety,’ they says. Me, what’s been the professor’s confidant and midget-of-all-work for the better part of two decades. And it ain’t just me what they’re so-called protecting him from. Mr. Maws is upset ’cause they won’t let him bring no cleaned and starched and pressed clothes to the professor. It ain’t right is what he says for the professor to be without his shirts and collars and suchwhats. And if it comes to that, it ain’t right is what I says.”

“Mr. Maws?” Barnett’s wife, Cecily, looked up from her seat at the writing desk between the tall front windows. “Oh yes, the professor’s butler.”

“Butler and facto-te-tum and bodyguard when such is called for—not that the professor can’t take care of ’imself in a scrap.”

“The authorities are making it quite difficult to get in to visit the professor,” Barnett agreed. “Special forms from the Home Office, special permission from the governor of the prison, neither of which they seem inclined to pass along easily. It took them four days to process my request, and I’m a journalist.”

“Yes, well, I’m a midget,” said the mummer. “Ain’t midgets got no rights in this’ere queendom?”

Cecily raised an eyebrow. “Queendom?”

“Stands to reason, don’t it?” said the mummer. “T’ain’t nary a kingdom at the present moment, is it?”

“No, t’ain’t,” Cecily agreed.

“Even when I got to see the professor,” Barnett expanded, “they didn’t make it easy. They brought me into a tiny stone-walled room with a guard at the door—inside the door, mind you, and sat me across from him at a wooden table that was screwed to the floor. And the chairs—they also were fastened in place. Which place was too far from the table to comfortably write or whatever. A truly large guard stood between us and glowered down at us as we talked. The professor was wearing manacles, which the guards refused to remove. And they searched me twice—at the inner gate and then again at the door to the room. I had to empty my pockets. I was allowed to bring in nothing but my notebook and a pencil. Only one pencil, mind you. I was worried the whole time that the point would break while I took notes.”

“I could’ve been a journalist,” the mummer said. “I wrote something once. It concerned a large fish.” He stared at the wall glumly, as though the experience were one he didn’t want to think about any further.

“I thought persons awaiting trial were permitted visitors,” Cecily said.

“Some are and some are not,” Barnett told her. “The professor, for some reason, is one of the are-nots.”

“A jellyfish,” the mummer expanded.

Cecily paused in her note writing, her pen poised to continue. “Why, do you suppose, they’re making it so difficult to see him?”

“What I think,” the mummer offered, “is they’re afraid he’ll blow the quad and depart for a spot what offers more room to move about. P’raps they think I’ll smuggle him out in my knapsack.”

Cecily smiled at the image. “You have a knapsack?” she asked.

“O’course,” the mummer said. “I has to have a place to carry about my whatnots and doodads, don’t I?”

“Of course,” Cecily agreed.

“There are those who would like to get a glimpse of my whatnots,” the mummer said darkly, “but I can tell a hawk from a handsaw.”

Cecily smiled. “Good for you,” she said.

Barnett got up and began pacing the floor. He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, remembering the bizarre conditions under which he had first met Moriarty. Some six years earlier Sultan Abd-ul Hamid, the second of that name, had been considering purchasing the Garrett-Harris submersible boat for use in his navy. The
New York World
had sent Benjamin Barnett, its ace foreign correspondent, to Constantinople to report on the craft’s sea trials. Barnett had first encountered Moriarty running down a street in Stamboul with a gang of street toughs in close pursuit. Barnett and Lieutenant Sefton, a British naval officer, had rescued the professor, who thanked them for their assistance although, he assured them, he could have handled the situation quite well on his own. Shortly thereafter Sefton had been murdered, and the Ottoman authorities had decided in their wisdom that Barnett was guilty. Professor Moriarty had rescued Barnett from an Osmanli dungeon, where he was awaiting trial. Despite his innocence it was probable that when the authorities finally got around to trying him, the wheels of the sultan’s justice would have ground him fine.

A year later, while Barnett was working for Moriarty in London, he first met his beloved Cecily. He owed much to Professor Moriarty, a debt he felt he could never adequately repay. “If the professor needs help—” he began.

“Did he say so?” Cecily asked.

“No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t, but then it would have been difficult with the Cardiff Giant sitting between us.”

“He’ll find some way to let us know, to tell us what he wants us to do,” Cecily said firmly. “If you try to interfere blindly, you’ll probably only make a mess of things.”

Barnett paused before the sofa and sighed. Why is it, he wondered, that when a woman marries a man she immediately loses all respect for his intelligence and ability? The thought that perhaps she never had any such respect in the first place crossed his mind, but he thrust it out again. “Mummer’s probably right,” he said, resuming his pacing. “The prison authorities are taking precautions against the professor’s reputed omniscience. They’re afraid he’s going to escape.”

“As well they should be,” the mummer observed.

“Sometimes,” Cecily reflected, “having a reputation for being clever works against one’s best interests.” She turned back to her note writing.

“The professor usually don’t tootle his own flute,” the mummer said, “but there’s others what tootle it for him. So he’s got a reputation among the villainous classes for knowing everything what there is to know, which is pretty much on the square, and for doing everything what gets done, many of which he wouldn’t nohow touch.”

“The whole thing is ridiculous, of course,” Barnett said. “To think Moriarty could have done such a thing—been so stupid—it’s ridiculous.”

Cecily put her pen down carefully on the blotter and took a deep breath. “Stop pacing,” she said. “You make me nervous.”

“Sorry.” Barnett flopped down onto the sofa.