gone wrong. There is a difference between a man who doubts you and a man who doubts himself, and it matters considerably.
My deal came third.
I’ve been shuffling cards for the better part of thirty years and it looks exactly as it should; two riffles, a strip cut, a final riffle, thorough and unremarkable. What it doesn’t look like is what it actually is, which is a shuffle that preserves the relative order of the bottom six cards while appearing to disturb them entirely. The adjustment is in the pressure of the thumbs and is quite invisible to anyone who doesn’t already know to look for it, which no one at that table did.
I offered the deck to Caldwell to cut.
He cut too shallow, as he’d been doing all evening. It’s a habit, like any other. Men who cut shallowly almost invariably do so every time, and Caldwell was no exception. The six cards I’d arranged stayed within a range I could account for.
I dealt cleanly, nothing to attract attention, and turned the last card face up as the rules require. The nine of clubs. Trumps established.
Not ideal. Workable.
Caldwell went into trumps aggressively from the off. I let the first two tricks go without a fight; resisting would have told him more than I wanted him to know. On the third I came back in and immediately shifted to hearts, leading at middle strength rather than high, which is an invitation of sorts. Hargreaves squared his cards once, which told me what I needed to know, and led into it with everything he had. Caldwell hesitated, then followed.
My Queen of Hearts, which I’d kept back through three rounds while Caldwell convinced himself the suit was finished, took the critical trick at precisely the right moment.
He set his cards down and looked at the table for a moment. Not at me, not at Hargreaves. At the table. A man revisiting his own arithmetic, not questioning mine. He couldn’t find where he’d miscounted because he hadn’t miscounted. The count was perfectly correct. The cards had simply not behaved as they should have done.
“One should never assume a suit is spent,” I said, to nobody in particular.
The hand finished as I’d intended.
Hargreaves sat back in his chair. “You’ve hit your stride, Moran.”
“It comes and goes,” I said.
Caldwell glanced across. “The hearts were odd. Didn’t fall the way I’d have expected.”
“Weak trumps will do that,” I told him. “Encourages people to hold on longer than they ought.”
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation and close enough to his own thinking that it satisfied him. He nodded slowly and reached for the cards.
The fourth hand I dropped. Not dramatically ; a finesse missed, a lead that was too conservative when a bit of aggression might have served. The sort of small error any competent player makes when his concentration slips after a strong hand, and every man at the table had made at least one such error that evening. Caldwell’s shoulders came down. Hargreaves recovered his earlier good humour.
Balance restored, which was precisely what was wanted.
We finished the rubber with a narrow advantage on our side. Enough to matter, not enough to raise eyebrows. I totted up the score, collected my winnings and stood.
Hargreaves smiled. “You must come again tomorrow, Moran.”
“If I’m able,” I said.
As the table broke up, Caldwell said something to Hargreaves about the cards whether the club shouldn’t replace the decks a bit more regularly. Perfectly casual. The sort of remark that could mean nothing at all.
I didn’t look back as I left.
But I noted it.
A man who blames the cards rather than the player is a man who won’t cause trouble. I had given him exactly the right place to direct his suspicions.
That, in the end, was the whole of it.
On the third day of my observations I had entered the unoccupied house. The approach was made from the rear, through a narrow passage that few would have reason to notice. The door yielded with measured pressure. Inside, the air was stale, undisturbed. I paused, listening. Nothing. The house was as it appeared. I moved through it slowly, mapping its interior. The boards creaked in places, but not all. I learned where to step, where to avoid. The upper floor offered the vantage I required. From the front window, Pembroke’s door lay in clear view. The distance was suitable. The angle unobstructed. I refined the space. A chair was placed and adjusted until it did not move. A small table was positioned nearby. A cloth was laid to prevent sound. Each detail attended to. The place became not merely suitable, but precise.
And slowly, without haste, the process approached. There are men who rely on secrecy, and there are men who make secrecy unnecessary by the thoroughness of their methods. The Professor belongs to the latter kind. Each day, I returned to my clubs. Each night, I considered the work yet to be done. The night before, on returning to my rooms I retrieved the box from its hidden compartment under the wardrobe.