Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

That was a mistake. Lassiter stopped listening. Anyone who could hear a cocking pistol through a window and across the road would have noticed if he were being marked.

‘…if I’m not at my post when my replacement arrives, the agency will know something is amiss.’

Jane-Helen looked hard at me. She hadn’t bought it either.

Still, in the short term, my story would be hard to dis prove. I had introduced a notion that would snag and grow. That I was to be relieved, that confederates would be arriving soon.

Lassiter’s sensitive ears would be twitching.

Every cat padding over a garden wall or tile falling off an ill-made roof would sound like evidence of a surrounding force to our rider of the purple sage.

‘Algy wants to see Rache ’utterflee dance now,’ announced the girl.

She fluttered dramatically about the room, trailing ribbons, inflating sleeves and lifting skirts. One of her stockings was bagged around her ankle.

‘’Utterflee ’utterfly, meee oh myyy,’ she sang.

Lassiter’s face was dark and heavy. I was quite pleased with myself.

I snuck a peek at the clock on the mantel and made sure I was noticed doing it.

‘’Utterfly ’utterflee, look at meee…’

Lassiter chewed his moustache. Jane-Helen seemed greyer. And I was almost starting to enjoy myself again.

Then the front window smashed in and something black and fizzing burst through the curtains.

I saw a burning fuse.

VII

Lassiter got his boot on the fuse, killing the flame.

‘That’s not dynamite,’ I said, helpfully. ‘It’s a smoke charge. They want you to run out the front door. Into the line of fire.’

I didn’t mention that I’d thought of something similar.

‘Jim, they’re out there,’ Jane said.

‘Asty mans,’ Rache said, peeved by the interruption.

There was a crack. More glass broke behind the curtains. A ragged hole appeared in the velvet. I’d not heard the shot. Another shattering and the curtain whipped with the impact. And again.

‘Untie me and I can help,’ I said.

Lassiter wasn’t sure but Jane fell for it. She did my hands while Rache unpicked the knots at my ankles. I took my Webley from the floor, shaking off the flakes of plaster. Of course, it was empty.

The curtain rail, rope still attached, fell off the wall as another silent fusillade came. Cold wind blew through the ruined window. More panes were shot out.

The neighbours would be around again soon. This was not the thing for a respectable street.

Bullets ploughed into the floor, rucking the carpet, and the opposite wall. Our sniper had an elevated position.

I waved my gun, to attract Lassiter’s attention.

He dug into his pocket and brought out a handful of bullets, which he poured into my palm. I loaded and closed the revolver. I noticed Lassiter noticing how practiced I was. Algy Arbuthnot, VC, was an old soldier and daring detective so that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

‘Where is the gunman? Top floor of the house on the corner?’

Lassiter shook his head.

‘Tree on the other side of the road?’

Lassiter nodded.

I’d been behind that tree earlier. It had been twilight when Lassiter conked me and was full dark now. No one was about when I took my watching spot; now, there were armed hostiles.

‘How many?’

Lassiter held up four fingers, steadily. Then another three, with a wriggle at the wrist. He knew there were four men — Danites? — out there, and felt there might be another three besides.

I’ve come through scrapes with worse odds. From Moriarty’s background check, I knew Jim Lassiter had too.

‘This might be a moment for one of your famous rockslides,’ I ventured.

Lassiter cracked a near-smile.

‘Yup,’ he said.

As Drebber had mentioned, Lassiter was once chased up a mountain by a mob and precipitated a rocky avalanche to sweep them away. His history was studded with such dime-novel exploits.

Was Drebber out there? And Stangerson? With other guns?

My suspicion was that, weighing up their contract with Moriarty & Co., the Danites decided £205,000 was a mite steep for an evening’s work. They had come to us in the first place not because they were leery of doing their own murdering but because this wasn’t their city and they didn’t have any idea how to track Lassiter and his women to their hole. The Professor had come straight out and announced where they were to be found, to show off how bloody clever he was. No thought as to whether Basher might get caught ’twixt the guns. My only consolation was that Moriarty undoubtedly meant what he said about Higher Law. For breaking the deal, he’d probably exterminate the Danite Band to the last man (their horses and dogs too), then arrange a cholera outbreak in Salt Lake City to scythe through the Latter-day Saints.

I, of course, would still be dead.

Lassiter and I were either side of the window, just peeking out at a sliver of night.

Another shot.

I heard a rattling about from one of the nearby houses. A spill of light lay on the street as a front door opened. In that illumination, I glimpsed a figure in rough work clothes. A pointed red hood covered his entire head, big circles cut out for the eyes, gathered at the neck by a drawstring. Our shy soul froze a moment in the light and stepped back, but Lassiter plugged him anyway, reddening one of his eyeholes. He collapsed like an unstrung puppet.

An irritated, bald man in a quilted dressing gown came out of his house, to make further complaint about the infernal racket. He was surprised to find a masked gunman lying dead over his front gate, obscuring the ‘no hawkers or circulars’ sign. The neighbour looked around, astonished.

‘What the devil…’

Someone shot him. Oops, it might have been me. I was always one to blaze away without too much forethought.

Lassiter looked disapproval at me.

A great many curtains fell from fingers in nearby houses.

The neighbour was only winged, but made a noise about it. The fellows who had accompanied him on his earlier deputation put cotton in their ears and went back to bed.

So my shot had accomplished something.

Lassiter looked out of the window, searching for another target.

From where I was, I could easily shoot him in the stomach and try to hold Drebber to coughing up the agreed fee.

Evidently he could hear the wheels turning in my head.

‘Algy,’ he drawled, gun casually aimed my way, ‘how’d you like to go through the winder and draw their fire?’

‘Not very much.’

‘What I reckoned.’

Another bomb sailed through the window, without meeting any obstruction, and rolled on the carpet, pouring thick, nasty smoke. They’d let the fuse burn down before lobbing this one.

‘Is there a back door?’ I asked.

Lassiter looked at me, pitying.

Upwards of four men could surround a villa, easily.

Jane looked at Lassiter like a pioneer wife who trusts her man to save the last three bullets to keep the women out of the clutches of Injuns. I always wondered why those covered wagon bints didn’t backshoot their pious pas and learn to sew blankets and pop out papooses, but I’m well known for my shaky grasp of morality.

Bullets struck the piano, raising strangulated chords.

‘This is London, England,’ Jane said. ‘We left all this behind. Things like this don’t happen here.’

Lassiter looked at me.

We both knew everywhere was like this, herbaceous border in the back garden and ‘Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird’ sheet music propped on the piano or no. He’d have done better going to ground in the Old Jago or Seven Dials, where life was more obviously like this — those rookeries had well-travelled rat runs and escape routes.