Chapter Twenty-Five #3
“I like to think people are responsible for their own choices,” Professor Moriarty said, steepling his hands.
He had never sounded more like a crossroads devil.
“It’s what makes people so interesting. Each person a puzzle of wants and fears and expectations—a set of stories, if you prefer—that they believe about themselves and others.
Once solved, this makes them . . . predictable.
After that, it becomes more a game of billiards.
Understanding the shape of the board and the pieces on it.
Calculate the angle and the right place to apply pressure, determine the amount of necessary force .
. . You’d be amazed how the world races to meet your expectations. Wouldn’t you agree, Sam?”
“Me?” Sam said.
“You hear the hidden script of the world, too, don’t you?
” Professor Moriarty said. “What they want you to say—their secret desires, their fears. You see it all written on their faces. It’s what you use to get your way, where my daughter resorts to violence.
But then, they say daughters always fall for someone just like their father. ”
It was true—the shadow side of what Hel had said about how not all fighting need look the same. Had she found it comforting? The thought turned Sam’s stomach. She pressed her fingers into her corset.
“She is nothing like you,” Hel and her father said at the same time.
Her father chuckled. “See? In her need to act contrary to my every instruction, she has become predictable.”
Hel was done with this conversation, with this man, with whom she’d always been on her back foot.
Sam could see it in every line of her body, in the white-knuckled grip she had on her revolver.
Hel wanted to shoot him in the head and be done with it.
But that was another thing Professor Moriarty had gotten right about Hel: He was unarmed, aside from his tongue, which in Sam’s opinion was sharp enough it ought to be considered, and Hel wouldn’t kill an unarmed man.
“Why am I here?” Hel said, a slight tremble beneath the steel in her voice.
Professor Moriarty smiled; he heard it, too, and he wanted them to know it.
Sam had never hated a man more, for making Hel doubt herself, for making her believe that everything she ever did in her life was by his plan—that even her rebellion served his needs.
“Why, so you can arrest me,” Professor Moriarty said. “Wasn’t that what you’ve wanted all these years? Consider it an early birthday present.”
“You could have turned yourself in,” Hel said, her voice hard.
“Would you believe I simply wished to give you the credit?” Professor Moriarty said. “To get the man even the Scotland Yard failed to catch?”
“No.”
“No?” Professor Moriarty hummed quietly to himself.
“Perhaps, then, you might believe that I’m overcome with guilt about my many sins and wish to pay my dues to society.
Or, I could be exhausted, tired of this paranoid nonexistence, running from the law.
Take your pick, only take me in. Or someone else will.
But then, I imagine, there will be questions. ”
Sam could see the frustration running through Hel like a live wire.
If he offers you anything, deny it. But how could she deny this?
Not only because she wanted him in jail, but because Professor Moriarty was right: If she didn’t capture him, with Jakob and the Special Branch waiting, there would be questions.
It was a double-bind, a problem to which there was no good solution.
Either way, Hel lost—if she accepted that she was playing his game.
“Well?” Professor Moriarty said, as if they were simply discussing which variety of tea to order and not the arrest of the most wanted man in the world.
Hel and Sam waited on the train platform at Amiens Street Station.
The platform was bristling with Special Branch.
The real Special Branch this time; Jakob had, at last, gone to Dublin Castle.
Snipers aimed at every possible egress from the solitary train car circled with portable steel walls with slits in them, like some sort of medieval fortification.
“Set shields,” Hel murmured. “They’re expecting explosions.”
“What do you think?” Sam said.
Hel shook her head. “Too expected.”
A lone raven cackled from where it perched in the branching steel above them. Hel eyed it but didn’t shoot, which Sam took for a victory. It wouldn’t go over well—not here amidst the Special Branch, with her their scapegoat, absent Professor Moriarty in that car.
He’d be there, Sam told herself. He had to be. There’d been no opportunity for him to escape. The Special Branch had come, and they’d sealed up the compartment, armored cars escorting it back to the train station. Guards at every entrance.
There was a shout, and a young man in uniform hustled forward.
Sam could see the sweat beaded on his brow, the way his lips pulled downward in a grimace.
He pressed his back to the train car and beat the side of his fist on the door.
“Professor Moriarty, we have you surrounded!” It appeared even a criminal still retained the accolades of higher education. “Come out slowly, with your hands up.”
No one so much as breathed in the silence that followed.
The only sound was the raven plucking roughly at its feathers and chuckling to itself, as if at a secret.
The sweaty young man looked at the forces arrayed before him.
She could see the whites of his eyes even from all the way in the back lines.
“Professor Moriarty.” The man who spoke had a presence that Sam had seen in soldiers before—like he was looking out at her from somewhere deep inside himself.
He had a heavy brow and a generous moustache, his dark brown hair slicked down and parted in the middle.
She knew without asking that this was the man in charge, Detective Thompson.
He stood stiff-backed, his arms folded behind him, as if he weren’t at all afraid of bombs—as if he suspected no one was there at all. “If you mean to turn yourself in, open the door slowly and remove yourself from the train car, keeping your hands where we can see them.”
Detective Thompson slid Hel a sidelong glance, his meaning clear. If no one was in that compartment—if Professor Moriarty had escaped? Well. There were two uses for those soldiers.
“Did we get it?” Hel murmured, an edge to her voice.
If her father wasn’t there, it would be the difference between Hel being lauded as a hero .
. . or condemned as a criminal. And then she would have a choice to make: to escape and go into hiding, or to allow those she’d fought to protect to put her in irons. Both choices let her father win.
And Sam—she would have to choose, too. Except it wasn’t a choice at all, was it?
“I think so,” Sam whispered back.
“You’d better get it ready,” Hel said.
“Here?” Sam said. “In public?” She hadn’t thought this part through when she’d made the modifications. Only where she might best conceal it.
Hel’s lips quirked, without taking her eyes from the train car. “I know the experience must be novel, but I strongly suspect no one is looking at you.”
It was true. The men were all focused on the door, from which Professor Moriarty would purportedly emerge. Even those who were supposed to be watching Hel. Still—
“If I’d known fieldwork called for so much undressing . . .” Sam grumbled.
Hel raised an eyebrow. “You’d have worn something with fewer buttons?”
Sam blushed, remembering the feel of Hel’s hands undoing her, her dress sliding to the floor. With an irritated noise, she spun and got to work on her jacket.
Detective Thompson was shouting orders. “We’re going in!
On a count of one . . . two . . .” On three, the terrified man with his back to the train pulled the door open, and two men shoved their way inside.
The air was still, everyone’s ears cocked for sounds of a scuffle—but aside from the footsteps that thudded up and down the train car, it was silent.
“It’s empty!” a man cried out from the doorway. “There’s no one here.”
“Sam?” Hel murmured as the men closed in around them, their rifles aimed at Hel’s heart. “You have it?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam said, turning around, all buttoned up again.
“He’s not there,” Detective Thompson said.
“Because you let him escape,” Hel said sharply. They had wanted to stay in the car with him—it had been Detective Thompson’s men who required they exit and seal it up.
“It’s only your word he was ever there to begin with,” Detective Thompson said dismissively.
“What about the men who sealed the train car?” Hel demanded.
“They claim they didn’t see anything,” Detective Thompson said. The men who’d come, they’d been his. Professor Moriarty’s. He’d planned this the whole time. “You were warned, Moriarty.”
“We have proof,” Sam blurted before Hel could say something she regretted. “I captured photographs of Professor Moriarty on this camera.” And she offered the camera she’d removed from the bowler hat and sewn into her corset.
There was a pause as Detective Thompson considered this. “How are we to know they’re recent? That this isn’t part of some plan?”
“We stole this camera from one of my father’s spies,” Hel said.
“There ought to be all sorts of interesting photos in there, aside from the ones he took of us. At least some of them you ought to be able to date. Besides which, the photographs are of him in that train car. You can take your own photographs of the train car and decide for yourself.”
“You might have faked the photographs,” Detective Thompson said.
“Photography fakes are done during development,” Hel said. “These are yet undeveloped.”
Detective Thompson snatched the camera out of Sam’s hands. “Very well. We will take this into consideration,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in confinement until we can develop them.”
“But—” Sam began.
“It’s all right,” Hel said, and passed Heathcliff to Sam.
But it wasn’t. Sam bit her lip as she realized exactly how much they were risking here, letting that camera go. Detective Thompson might do anything with that film—burn it, lose it, manipulate it. Claim it never existed, like the men with the train car before them. It was the only proof they had.
“I’ll go with you,” Jakob said to Detective Thompson, his arms crossed, as he glared at Hel. “After what I’ve been through, I think I deserve the truth.”
Detective Thompson’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. What else could he do?
Thank you, Sam mouthed.
Jakob nodded tightly, and then he and the men were escorting Hel to her room at the Shelbourne, where she’d be held under watch until the photos exonerated her—or didn’t.