Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (26 page)

‘What is it?’ asked Stoke.

‘We agreed five thousand pounds for a pelt... you have
four.
You do not need a Professor of Mathematics to tally that up as
twenty thousand pounds.
Silver is acceptable.’

The mobile half of Stoke’s face fell to match the dead side... then he caught himself and managed a cracked chuckle. He brought up a finger in mock-accusing, would-be jovial fashion.

‘Ah, a good one, Moriarty. A fine funny gag. You nearly had me there...’

Moriarty’s head began to oscillate.

‘Surely,
no,
you can’t be serious?’ said Stoke. ‘That’s... why, that’s gross
extortion.
No, I’m grateful as all get-out, Moriarty. You’ve served me well, but what you ask is... ridiculous, out of the question,
unholy.
Contrary to all principles of sound business. No, five thousand is the limit. The price we agreed, and the price I’ll pay.’

Stoke took a Gladstone bag from the cabinet, and transferred the silver to it under the vulture eye of Professor Moriarty.

‘A fair sum for services rendered,’ he said. ‘I’ll even throw in the bag.’

He tried to grin, though his face wasn’t working yet.

A movement caught my eye. A pair of feet disappearing through the kitchen door. A bloody trail across the floor showed where Saul had dragged himself.

‘Now,’ said Stoke. ‘There’s the matter of another thrashing. Colonel, if you’d shift your boot...’

I did so. Mod gathered her skirts and stood. She spat in Stoke’s face. He smiled.

‘My family owes yours a murder,’ he said. ‘Yours won’t be in the papers, though. You’re for an unmarked grave in The Chase with your brother – nephew? – and his f---ing mutts.’

Moriarty picked up the Gladstone bag as if it were a specimen.

‘Moran, our business here is done,’ he said. ‘We should leave Mr Stoke and Miss Durbeyfield to their discussions. I doubt they’ll care for witnesses.’

‘Hah,’ Stoke said. ‘You’re a card after all, Moriarty. I’m glad to have known you, and no hard feelings. You’ve not done badly out of Trantridge.’

My wounds might argue, but I didn’t.

Moriarty and I made for the door. Jasper reached for a carving knife.

Then Dan’l noticed there was one body missing from the pile of human and animal remains in the corner.

‘Where’s Saul?’ he asked.

‘What, eh, what?’ Stoke said.

We left the dining room.

In the foyer, we saw Saul – reddled and torn from head to toe – on the stairs, supporting himself on a banister, trying to work his wrecked mouth.

There were
six
wolves. Only four bagged.

When he saw us, Saul’s remaining eye shone with rage. He uttered strange, angry sounds.

Moriarty nodded polite acknowledgement to the bloodied heir of Sir Pagan and Red Shuck. We no longer had business with him.

Behind us, the dining-room doors opened again. Stoke charged out, waving Gertie.

‘There you are, you c---sucker!’ Stoke shouted at Saul. ‘Prepare for a complete skull-f---ing!’

Saul managed a shrill screech. Two red wolves, larger than their slain comrades, charged down the stairs towards the Master of Trantridge. Their eyes shone, as if with nightshade drops.

Mod was at the dining-room doors. Dan’l held her back with tender restraint which suggested she’d suffer less at his hands than his employer’s.

Saul sank to his knees, bleeding. His whistle became a rattling sigh. He kept trying to raise his hands. Stoke struck one of the red, snapping beasts with the stick, but the other was on him, forepaws to shoulders, jaws around his face. Gouts of gore sprayed the wallpaper.

Moriarty helped me out of the house and closed the door behind us.

Across the lawn, stepping out from The Chase, was a woman in a long black veil, head hung to one side. I lifted my splinted hand to wave at her, and she darted back into the trees.

From inside the house came a howling.

We walked away from Trantridge Hall, leaving claimants to settle disputes among themselves.

Professor Moriarty did not readily admit his mistakes. Oh, he made ’em. Some real startlers. You were well advised not to bring up the Tay Bridge Insurance Fiasco in his gloomy presence. Or the Manchester and Provincial Bank Robbery (six months’ brain work to set up, a thousand pounds seed money to pull off: seven shillings and sixpence profit). The Professor was touchy about failures. Indeed, he retained me to keep ’em quiet.

However, one howler he would own to.

He was ruminating upon it that morning, just as the sensational events I’ve decided to call ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ got going. Jolly good title, eh, what? Makes you want to skip ahead to the horrors. But don’t... you won’t fully appreciate the gut-slitting, dynamiting, neck-breaking, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones business without understanding how we got neck-deep in it.

In our Conduit Street rooms, we were doing the books, perhaps the least glamorous aspect of running a criminal empire. Once a mathematics tutor, Moriarty enjoyed balancing ledgers – as much as he could enjoy anything, the sad old sausage – more than robbing an orphanage trust fund or bankrupting a philanthropic society. He opened a leatherbound book and did that side-to-side snakehead thing which I’ve had cause to mention before. Everyone else who met him remarked on it too.

‘I should not have taken Mr Baldwin as a client,’ he declared, tapping a column of red figures. ‘His problem was of minimal interest, yet has caused no little inconvenience.’

The uninteresting, inconvenient Ted Baldwin was a union ‘organiser’ in Pennsylvania coal country. As ever in America, you can’t tell who were the worst crooks: the mine-owning robber barons or the fee-gouging workers’ brotherhood. In our Empire, natives dig dirt, plant tea and fetch and carry for the white man. However, Red Indians don’t take to the lash and the Yanks fought one of the century’s sillier wars over whether imported Africans should act like proper natives.

Nowadays, America employs – which is to say, enslaves – the Irish for such low purposes. A sammy takes only so much field-slog before up and cutting your throat and heading into the bush. Your bog-trotter, on the other hand, grumbles for 700 years, holds rowdy meetings, then decides to get very, very drunk instead of doing anything about it.

On the whole, I prefer natives. They might roast you on a spit, but won’t bore the teats off you by blaming it on Cromwell and William the Third. Yes, I know Moran is an Irish name. So is Moriarty. That comes into it later, too.

Our client Baldwin’s union – the Vermissa Valley Scowrers (don’t ask me what that means or if it’s spelled properly) – were undone by a Pinkerton operative who, when not calling himself John McMurdo, went by the unbelievable name of Birdy Edwards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a disgrace to the profession of Murder for Hire. If you operate in a country where captains of industry and hogs of politics make murder legal so long as it’s a union organiser being murdered, what’s the point, eh? Moriarty never lobbied for laws to make it all right for him to thieve and murder and extort.

Posing as a radical, Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers. As a result, most of the reds wound up shot in their beds or hanged from mine-works, but our man Baldwin was left in the wind at the end of the bloodletting with a carpet bag full of union funds. In his situation, I’d blow the loot on women and cards, but Baldwin was of the genus
bastardii vindice.

Just to rub it in, this Birdy flew off to England with Baldwin’s sweetheart. Hot on the trail and under the collar, Baldwin came to London and called on the Firm. A wedge of greenback dollars hired us to locate the Pink, which we did sharpish. Sporting the more plausible incognito of John Douglas, Edwards was sunning himself at Birlstone, a moated manor.

An easy lay! Shin up a tree in the grounds and professionally pot the blighter through the leaded library window as he sits at his desk, perusing
La Vie Parisienne.
Aim, pull, bang... brains on the wall, ‘Scotland Yard Baffled’, notice in
The Times,
full fee remitted, thank you very much, pleasure to do business with you!

But, no, the idiot client got all het up and charged off to Birlstone to do the deed himself. Upshot: one fool face blown through the back of one fool head. Yes, sometimes they have guns too. A careful murderer is mindful of the risk inherent in turning up at a prospective victim’s front door with a red face and a recital of grievances.

With the client dead, you might think we’d close the account and proceed to the next profitable item of deviltry. Not how the racket works. We’d accepted a commission to kill Edwards-McMurdo-Douglas. Darkly humorous remarks about persons not being dead when Professor Moriarty has been paid to polish them off were heard. Talk gets started, you lose face. Blackguards with inconvenient relatives take their business elsewhere. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. or that Limehouse Chinese with the marmoset would be delighted to accommodate them.

So, at our own expense, we pursue Edwards, who has booked passage to Africa. This is where you might remember the bounder. He – ahem –
fell
overboard and washed up on the desolate shore of St Helena. We could have shoved Birdy off the dock at Southampton and been home for tea and – ahem, encore –
crumpet
in Mrs Halifax’s establishment for licentious ladies. Not obtrusive enough, though. Nothing would do for the Prof but that the corpse be aimed at the isle of Napoleon’s exile. He spent hours with charts and tide-tables and a sextant to make sure of it. Moriarty was thinking, as usual, two or three steps ahead. There was only one place on Edwards’ escape route anyone – specifically, anyone who scribbles for the London rags – has ever heard of. A mysterious corpse on St Helena gets a paragraph above the racing results. A careless passenger drowned before embarkation doesn’t rate a sentence under the corset endorsements. Advertising, you see: Moriarty strikes! All your killing needs satisfied!

Still, it was Manchester and Provincial all over again. Baldwin’s dollars ran out. On St Helena, the Professor insisted we take the sixpenny tour and poke around the eagle’s cage. He acquired a unique, if ghastly, souvenir which figures later in the tale – this is another ominous intimation of excitements to come! The jaunt entailed five different passports apiece and seventeen changes of mode of transport across two continents. Expenses mounted. The account was carried in debit.
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‘Politics will be the ruination of the fine art of crime,’ Moriarty continued. ‘Politics and religion...’

This is the moral, Oh My Best Beloved: never kill anyone for a ‘Cause’.

For why not, Uncle Basher?

Because causes don’t pay, Little Friend of all the World. Adherents expect you to kill just for the righteousness of it. They don’t want to pay you! They don’t understand why you want paying!

Not ten minutes after our return, malcontents were hammering at our door, soliciting aid for the downtrodden working man. Kill one Pinkerton and everyone thinks you’re a bloody socialist! Happy to risk your precious neck on the promise of a medal in some twentieth-century anarchist utopia. I wearied of kicking sponging gits downstairs and chucking their penny-stall editions of
Das Kapital
into the street.

Reds fracture into a confusion of squabbling factions. The straggle-bearded oiks didn’t even want us to strike at the adders of capital. That would at least offer an angle: rich people are usually worth killing for what they have about their persons or in their safes. No, these firebrands invariably wanted one or other of their comrades assassinated over hair’s-breadth differences of principal. Some thought a Board of Railway Directors should be strung up by their gouty ankles on the Glorious Day of Revolution; others felt plutocrats should be strung up by their fat necks. Only mass slaughter would settle the question. If the GD of R has not yet dawned, it’s because socialists are too busy exterminating each other to lead the rising masses to victory.

I think this circumstance gave the Prof a notion about Mad Carew’s quandary. Which is where the blessed maledictions I mentioned earlier – you were paying attention, weren’t you? – come in, and not before time.

Just after the Prof let loose his deep think about ‘politics and religion’, the shadow of a man slithered into the room. Civvy coat and army boots. Colonially tanned, except for chinstrap lines showing malarial pallor. Bad case of the shakes.

I knew him straight off. Last I’d seen him was in Nepal. He’d been plumper, smugger and without shot nerves, attached to the British Resident; attached to the fundament of the British Resident, as it happens. Never was a one for sucking up like Mad Carew. Everyone said he’d go far if he didn’t fall off a Himalaya first.

Fellah calls himself ‘Mad’ and you know what you’re getting. Apart from someone fed up of being stuck with ‘Humphrey’ and dissatisfied with ‘Humph’.