Moriarty Meets His Match: A Professor & Mrs. Moriarty Mystery (The Professor & Mrs. Moriarty Mystery Series Book 1) (11 page)

Bruffin blanched. That dire result had evidently not occurred to him.

“You’re still the best suspect,” Holmes said, “in terms of access and skill.”

“Really, Holmes!” Watson scolded. “I thought we’d ruled him out.”

“Not until this afternoon, Watson. Not until I learned that Mr. Bruffin had invested his own nest egg.” Holmes glanced toward the back of the workshop. “He had more motivation than anyone to supply a successful demonstration.”

Holmes clapped his hands together. “Now, Professor, I think you’d better tell us what prompted you to perform your ‘dashed silly prank.’” Holmes smiled genially, but his dark eyes glittered. “I shouldn’t think such actions fall within the purview of the Patent Office.”

“Indeed not.” Moriarty scratched a spot behind his ear, feeling like a schoolboy caught stealing answers to exams. “The truth is there’s been a sort of sophomoric rivalry between myself and Lord Nettlefield, going back a few years. It started with a paper I gave at the Royal Society concerning the dynamics of an asteroid, an interesting mathematical problem I’d been tinkering with. During the discussion afterward, I made some sharpish remarks about amateur scientists, with reference to a pamphlet put out by his lordship. He took offense and did me a similar disservice in return later on. When I realized the spherical engine advertised in the Exhibition catalog lacked the proper complement of indicators, I saw an opportunity to supply a small corrective. I meant no harm to any person or thing other than his lordship’s self-regard.”

Holmes asked, “At what time did you perform your act of sabotage?”

Moriarty frowned at the harsh term. “I entered the Exhibition Galleries at about eight thirty. I had the indicator and tools in my coat pockets. It took me about twenty minutes to attach the device, after which, I left.”

“How did you gain entrance at that hour?” Holmes asked.

“I told the guard I was from the Patent Office.” Moriarty chuckled. “It’s extraordinary how effective that is. I signed a false name in the book.”

“Yes,” Holmes said, not sharing his amusement. “I recognized the handwriting, when I revisited the logbook. I had pages of your notes to acquaint me with your style.”

“You have a remarkable eye for detail,” Moriarty said. “I’m impressed.”

Holmes accepted the accolade with a slow blink, like a cat. “How did you obtain the indicator?”

“It’s a standard model,” Bruffin answered. “Elliott Brothers make them.”

“That’s where I bought it,” Moriarty said. “The source was noted in the patent documents.”

Watson said, “You went to a deal of trouble and expense for a mere professional rivalry.”

“Suggestive of a greater animosity,” Holmes said. “Mutual, by your account.”

“I wouldn’t say
animosity,
” Moriarty said. Not in the present company, at any rate.

Holmes showed his teeth. “Some strong emotion would surely have been required to impel you to go to such an expenditure of time, effort, and money.”

“Not at all,” Moriarty said. “I see no value in half measures. Mr. Teaberry and his front-sheeters planned that demonstration to attract investors. The public had a need — indeed, a right — to all the information required to perform a fair evaluation. Mr. Bruffin has just told us that Teaberry insisted on removing the indicators. All I did was restore a crucial component.”

“Then you attended the event,” Holmes said, “eager to watch the expression on Lord Nettlefield’s face when he pulled the lever and engaged the engine.”

Moriarty spotted this trap before he could step into it. “Not quite, Holmes. I did not expect his lordship to pull the lever. Oscar Teaberry’s name was in the catalog, as you know. Actually, I rather think I expected the engineer to demonstrate his own device.”

“Had you a prior acquaintance with Mr. Teaberry? Any smoldering animosities?”

“None whatsoever.” Moriarty kept his tone level, with a touch of patient amusement at Holmes’s histrionic phrasings. “I read his name in the catalog, but otherwise know nothing of the man.”

“Everyone has heard of Oscar Teaberry, Holmes,” Watson said. “He’s the fastest rising star in the city. Quite the force to be reckoned with, by all accounts. Careful to observe the letter of the law, but not necessarily the spirit.”

“That is my impression also,” Moriarty said. “My main objective was to deflate the company’s puffery. These novel designs should be explored, and exploration requires investment. That’s not the problem. But investors must have all the facts before parting with their savings.”

“I agree,” Bruffin said. “I’d no’ pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”

“No one blames you for that,” Watson said. “These company men are notorious for their tricks.”

Holmes turned the false sensor plate in his long fingers, an abstracted expression on his face, plainly bored by the discussion of promotion strategies. When the conversation paused, he spoke again to Moriarty. “Did you know Lord Carling would be at the first demonstration?”

“I did not. Nor had I any prior acquaintance with his lordship.” Moriarty smiled. “I don’t believe I had ever heard his name. I’m afraid I pay little attention to the society columns.”

“You were intent upon Lord Nettlefield and the effect your prank would have on him.”

“As I have said — quite clearly, I believe — my objectives were twofold.”

“Was anyone in the vicinity when you reached the exhibit?” Holmes seemed to use abrupt changes of topic as a tactic for intimidating his interlocutor. They didn’t trouble Moriarty, who’d handled worse at scholarly meetings. His sangfroid plainly irritated the detective, a little icing for the cake.

“No one close by,” Moriarty said, “although the hall was busier than I’d anticipated, with uniformed guards and workmen moving about. There was a great stir around the Austria and Hungary exhibit, as I recall.”

“Then there were no witnesses to your actions. Did the guard register the time of your departure?”

“No,” Moriarty said. “He was busy talking to two foreigners. I waved, but couldn’t swear he saw me.”

“Then you could have been inside longer than you claim. In fact, you might have spent the whole night in the hall, unnoticed, with your pockets full of tools and a long-standing grudge against a man anyone could assume would take center stage at the opening demonstration.”

Moriarty held his peace. He wouldn’t dignify that flight of fancy by raising an objection.

Holmes met his silence with his shark’s smile, then turned toward his friend as if continuing an ongoing conversation. “We’ve ruled out an accident, Watson. We know the engine was deliberately rigged to explode. The question remains whether Lord Carling’s death should be classed as manslaughter or deliberate homicide. We must pursue the origin of this hammered plate, but I find myself curious about that ‘similar disservice’ with which Lord Nettlefield repaid our professor’s critical remarks. What do you suppose we’ll find, Watson, when we dig into that so-called sophomoric rivalry?”

Chapter Eleven

Moriarty awoke the next morning feeling stiff and frowsty. He wanted air and exercise to clear his mind and needed clarity now more than ever before. Holmes had thrown the gauntlet of his suspicions at Moriarty’s feet. His very life might depend on how he took it up.

He took the underground to Sloane Square and walked the short distance to the London Athletic Club. He changed into his rowing jersey and breeches, giving his suit to the attendant in the dressing room to hang up. He kept his scarf to ward off the initial chill.

He took out a single scull and rowed upriver. He bent to his oars with a creased brow, still caught in the anxious eddies of his troubled sleep. His landlady’s knock had woken him with a start from a nightmare of pursuit. He’d lain gasping on his pillow, heart pounding, convinced he would be charged with murdering a peer of the realm.

He’d dreamed he was standing in the dock while Sherlock Holmes testified against him, delivering a bewildering chain of incriminating details in a rapid spate. Lord Nettlefield stood in the gallery, grinning behind his monocle. Mrs. Gould leaned against him in a shockingly low-cut gown, pointing at Moriarty with a jeweled fan, saying, “It’s elementary, my dear man. We’ve done for Lord Carling and now we’ll make you swing for it.”

As the rowing warmed his muscles and the cool breeze blew away the muddled mix of memory and dream, Moriarty’s capacity for rational thought regained its strength. He was a man in his prime, strong and fit, educated to the highest standard in a realm whose standards were the highest in the world. Unencumbered by wife or child, he enjoyed an unparalleled freedom of action. He had a native gift for ratiocination honed by years of mathematical studies. He was a match for Sherlock Holmes, even if a novice at the detecting game. But he was a quick study; he’d catch up.

And he held one overwhelming advantage: he knew for a fact that he was innocent. He wouldn’t waste time on that fruitless hypothesis.

Mrs. Gould was another question altogether. One large, imponderable question: Why had she kissed him? Surely no woman would do that without some feeling for a man. He didn’t believe for a minute that she’d been overcome by his sheer physical magnetism. The thought alone made him chuckle out loud. But they had formed some sort of tenuous bond after the explosion, some sense of fellow feeling. He rarely encountered women in evening dress and found it difficult to think around the vision of her ivory skin, so dewy and smooth. And the scent of gardenias that played around her . . .

He shook his head. He’d have to find a way to see her again. At the least, the kiss implied an interest or at least a willingness to receive his attentions. It was up to him to find or devise another opportunity.

He rowed under the Battersea Bridge, focusing for many minutes on nothing but the river and the rhythm of his stroke. He watched the wake of his boat spreading downstream, enjoying, as always, the sensation of rowing backward into the future, watching the past slip behind him.

He could not imagine what sort of man would choose so bizarre a method of murder as an exploding steam engine, but the evidence of sabotage now seemed incontrovertible. If Bruffin were right about the expertly placed puncture, then Holmes must be right about the crime. The explosion had been deliberately aimed at whoever pulled the lever.

Which begged the question: Who knew which man would do the honors that morning?

Moriarty cast his thoughts back to the Galleries as they had been on the night before the explosion. The various halls had not been terribly well-guarded, nor could they have been. Exhibitors worked through the night, coming and going through both the front gate and the goods entrance. The saboteur could have hidden in one of the elaborate displays until dawn, sabotaged the engine by the early morning light, then returned to his hiding place until the Exhibition opened and the crowds came streaming in.

How long would it take to replace that sensor plate? Moriarty considered it while he rowed through a flock of ducks. The arrows of their individual wakes intersected his in a bifurcating pattern that shimmered in the sunlight. The ducks squawked at him as he disrupted their formation and resumed their positions as he passed.

The sensor plate sat on the surface of the engine, necessarily so. It would be a matter of minutes to remove the housing for the warning bell, unscrew the original plate, screw down the new piece, and replace the housing. He worked it through in his mind, using strokes of the oars as a counting rhythm. Ten minutes at the outside.

Holmes’s timeline was useless. Any number of persons could have switched those plates.

A curious item, that hammered steel plate. Where had it come from? It must have been made or altered. It would have had to fit precisely, or Bruffin would have noticed it.

Holmes would undoubtedly track the thing down. He seemed to have the resources of Scotland Yard at his command. Moriarty couldn’t hope to compete on that front.

He glanced over his shoulder and realized with a start that he was about to pass under the Hammersmith Bridge. Great Scott, he’d come nearly six and a half miles! He normally turned at Putney. Now he had to row the extra distance back with the tide rising against his stroke. He would be late for work.

As he turned the scull around, he returned to his first question: Who knew which man would open the demonstration? The question had a corollary: Who was the intended victim? Holmes had spoken with disdain of motive. Moriarty couldn’t match the detective in the arena of evidence collection, but he suspected motive would be the key to solving this crime.

There’d been a scuffle at the last minute among three contenders: Oscar Teaberry, whose name was in the catalog as the president of the Compact Spherical Engine Company; Lord Nettlefield, who, with his gargantuan self-regard, considered himself the leading figure in that company; and Lord Carling, the ranking peer among the front-sheeters. Carling had won on grounds of precedence. His victory might have been predicted, but only if the murderer had known he would be there. Otherwise, odds would have been given to Lord Nettlefield.

Who had a motive to murder the viscount?

Holmes put Moriarty at the head of that list. What other names could be supplied? His son, Reginald, didn’t seem to like him much, but if all sons with controlling fathers resolved their resentment through murder, the male population would be halved overnight. Still, the son should be considered a suspect.

Nettlefield must have business rivals, even enemies. He might have repaid an insult from a competitor with the same heavy hand he’d shown Moriarty at Durham, only this time he’d offended a man with fewer scruples. How could he investigate Nettlefield’s business history? He might start with the company prospectuses they kept at the Patent Office.

Oscar Teaberry was an unknown quantity apart from his reputation as a man whose companies sailed close to the edge of outright fraud. He must have enemies — business rivals and investors who had lost money on his schemes.

Moriarty remembered Mrs. Gould crossing her lilac-gloved fingers when shaking hands with the man. Her late husband had been a mining engineer. She might well have the knowledge and skill to replace a sensor plate. He found it difficult to connect so heinous a crime with so lovely a lady, yet ladies had committed fouler crimes. Hell hath no fury, as the saying went.

How could he find out about her past? One of his colleagues was addicted to the society pages, which Dr. Watson had quoted regarding her. He could start there. He might also learn something about her immediate future — someplace where he could engineer another encounter.

The simplest hypothesis, however, was that the saboteur had achieved his intended goal: to murder Lord Carling. The best place to look for a hatred strong enough to provoke murder was inside the walls of the family home. The household must have known his lordship planned to attend the opening demonstration. Did Carling have a son who loathed him as much as Nettlefield’s? He must have a secretary; perhaps the man could be induced to answer a few questions. He could give the Patent Office gambit one more try.

Moriarty smiled as he guided his scull onto the beach at the club. Mrs. Gould had given her address as Cheshire House, where she was a guest of Lord Carling’s daughter. With a little luck, he might catch two birds with one net.

* * *

Moriarty pulled out his pocket watch as he trotted up the steps to the Patent Office. Almost eleven o’clock: an hour late. He strode across the central corridor to the set of rooms where he spent the better part of his week checking new patent applications against the records to make sure they did not duplicate existing inventions. He shared an office with two men: Moses Jackson and Alfred Housman. Jackson, though younger, was an examiner, while Moriarty and Housman were merely assistants.

The two friends had come down from Oxford together, gotten jobs together, and now lodged together with Jackson’s brother in Bayswater, not far from Moriarty’s house. They’d invited him out for drinks once or twice, but he’d always declined, and eventually they stopped asking. When he’d first come up to London, he’d been in no mood for the prying questions such social activities inevitably entailed. He might not mind it so much now. And he somehow felt he would like Mrs. Gould to think he had friends.

Housman sat at the long central table they shared for studying the oversized volumes of patents. Jackson perched in his favorite spot on the corner. They had evidently been engaged in a lively conversation, stopping abruptly as Moriarty entered.

“And here is the man himself,” Jackson said. They watched as he shed his hat and coat, hanging them on the rack by the door.

“I apologize for my lateness,” Moriarty said. “I went for an early row and forgot to check the tide table.”

“That’s twice in as many weeks,” Housman said. “And never once in all the year before.”

“Our professor is a man of regular habits,” Jackson said. “Or he was.”

Moriarty feigned an air of tolerant amusement. “Have I missed something interesting?”

They grinned at him, their eyes alight with curiosity. “We have been wondering,” Jackson said, “if it could be a coincidence that the ever-punctual James Moriarty should be late on the very day a stranger appears at our door asking questions about him.”

Moriarty’s heart clenched. Scotland Yard? He took a slow breath to calm himself, averting his face as he pulled out the chair at his desk. Trying to sound only mildly interested, he asked, “Really? What sort of stranger?” He turned the chair around and sat, slouching a little, crossing his right leg over his left and swinging his foot, like a man ready for a spot of jolly office chaffing. He remembered a joke from his Cambridge days. “Please tell me she was beautiful, rich, and not wearing anything.”

No, that didn’t sound right.

It hadn’t been. “Not wearing a
ring,
old bean,” Jackson said, chuckling. “A wedding ring, is what’s meant. Although I rather like your version better.”

“No joy either way,” Housman said. “This individual was definitely male. Said he was a journalist from the
Daily News.
Absolutely Fleet Street — checked trousers, four-inch moustache, tickets in his hat band. And he possessed the most appalling beak. Like an axe blade.” Housman crooked his finger over his nose to demonstrate and a chill ran up Moriarty’s spine.

Holmes.

“He said he was following up on persons who witnessed that explosion at the Inventions Exhibition last Friday morning.”

“Looking for the human interest story,” Jackson said. “He asked all sorts of questions about you.”

“We did our best,” Housman said, “considering how little we know. You live near us on Westbourne Crescent and you held a chair in maths at Durham. End of story. I’m afraid you won’t get much of a feature. Funny, when you think it’s been nearly a year. Six hours a day, six days a week, and we don’t even know where you’re from.”

“Miswell,” Moriarty said. “Gloucestershire. No one’s ever heard of it.”

“He asked the oddest question,” Housman said. “Wanted to know where we get our pencils. We were pleased to inform him that the Patent Office is supplied by Smythson in Bond Street. Only the best for Her Majesty’s servants.”

The pencil! What had he told Holmes about his pencil? Moriarty feared he might have been caught in a direct lie, and a pointless one.

“We didn’t even know you were at the Exhibition on Friday morning,” Jackson said, now sounding more like a supervisor than a curious coworker. “Didn’t you tell us you had some personal business to attend to?”

“Did I say that?” Moriarty tried for a sheepish grin but doubted it worked. Subterfuge was not among his talents. “I have a bit of a fascination for those spherical engines. I wanted to see the first demonstration when everyone was fresh.”

“We would have gone with you,” Housman said. “I’d say it counts as part of our proper work, wouldn’t you, Moses?”

“Why not?” Jackson’s eyes gleamed. “But now you must tell us everything, Professor. Every last detail. Were you really there for the explosion? It must have been horrendous. We could call back that reporter chap if you like. Get your name in the paper.”

“He left a card.” Housman reached for a pasteboard rectangle lying on the table. He passed it to Jackson, who leaned forward to hand it to Moriarty.