The Return of Moriarty Read Online Free PDF

they’ve never been in trouble.”
    More by luck than judgment, thought Moriarty, for both Bill and Bert Jacobs were artful pickpockets who worked the West End crowds, and had done since they were quite small. The young men were well set up and on their excursions to the theaters, music halls, and parks in the West they looked and behaved like a pair of young gentlemen on a night out. Moriarty himself had seen to their training, and they would have passed as upper-class bucks anywhere. Moriarty well knew that if the boys had been operating some forty or fifty years previously, they would have been part of the Swell Mob, though now they were in a class of their own with techniques well adapted to the modern conditions.
    â€œWhat happened?” he asked gently.
    â€œThey was there with old Bland, taking a glass, listening to the old man talk. He was a great talker, remembered times long gone. They always enjoyed his company.”
    Moriarty understood. Bland was a man with an extraordinary memory who recalled events and people, thieves, villains, murderers from his youth. Lads like the Jacobs brothers could have done worse than listen to him, for they could learn a great deal.
    â€œThey were there when the pigs came. * It seems that Bland had been careless. He’d got all the swag from the Maidenhead Manor break right there, in his drum. Nibbed proper.”
    â€œAnd they took your boys along for good measure.”
    â€œThe bastards took ’em all right, not that they didn’t put up a fight.”
    Moriarty sighed. After all, those two boys had been trained at his personal expense and he had been getting a fair share of what they earned. They should have known better than to resist arrest. That neither of the Jacobs boys could possibly have been involved in the Maidenhead Manor robbery went without saying. They knew their place, expert dippers as they were; nothing could have persuaded them to take on anything like a robbery of those proportions.
    â€œSo they were taken for being accomplices of Bland’s …?”
    â€œThey’re all in lumber now.”
    â€œYes, Bland for the swag, and the boys for accomplices and resisting arrest?”
    â€œBut they weren’t accomplices, sir. Never on my life would they have been involved in that.”
    â€œI know, Hetty, I know that, but English justice is a strange thing.”
    â€œThere ain’t no justice.”
    â€œThere will be. How did the boys fare?”
    â€œThree years each. They’re both in the ’Steel. Vile place, that is.” †
    â€œThey tell me it’s better now, better than it used to be, they’re not strictly separated anymore.”
    â€œDon’t you believe it, sir. They’ve still got those cells there, and the turnkeys are brutal.”
    â€œI know about the turnkeys, Hetty.” His voice became sharp. “Who was the judge?”
    â€œHawkins.”
    Moriarty smiled. So Hawkins was still sitting on the bench. One would have thought he would have retired by now. Sir Henry Hawkins was a renowned judge, the man who, sixteen years previously, had sentenced Charlie Peace to life imprisonment only to find that Peace was shortly afterward arraigned on another charge, that of the willful murder of Arthur Dyson at Banner Cross, Sheffield.
    â€œAnd they are now in the ’Steel, Hetty?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou will get justice. I’ll see to it.”
    â€œBut how…?”
    â€œHetty, have I ever failed any of my people? Did I ever fail your husband? Or any of your friends, my friends, your family, my family?”
    She cast her eyes downward, shamed by his soft statements.
    â€œNo, Professor. No, you have never failed any family people.”
    â€œThen trust me, Hetty. When I tell you that you will get justice, then believe that you will get justice. Wait and be thankful that I have returned.”
    â€œThank you, Professor.”
    She fell to