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

‘Both. An estate of six thousand acres, it incorporates an ancient forest called The Chase. Trantridge Hall has been in the Stoke family since 1855. Properly, the tribe are the Stoke -d’Urbervilles. When the usurer Simon Stoke bought the property, he conjoined his humble name with that of a distinguished family thought extinct.’

‘This Jasper is Old Simon’s son?’

‘Nephew. Simon’s son and heir was killed over twenty years ago.’

‘Oh ho! Did slippery Jasper ease his way to the fortune with grease on the back stairs or ground glass in the brandy butter?’

‘Alexander Stoke-d’Urberville was murdered by his mistress, Theresa Clare. A stupid girl who, to complicate matters, claimed descent from the d’Urbervilles. She was hanged at Wintoncester. I despise amateurs, Moran. Murder is a calling. Few have the gift.’ [26] See Thomas Hardy, ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’, The Graphic, 1891.

I wasn’t surprised Moriarty could spout the facts. He committed volumes of the Newgate Calendar to memory, and had the lives of Jonathan Wild or Charley Peace off by heart. Reverting to the monotone drone which hampered his original career as a university lecturer, he would bore the Conduit Street Comanche with lectures about ill-prepared, foolish fellows — or, as here, fillies — who ventured unwisely into the field of crime. These digressions were Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys: instead of ‘Say your prayers and wash your hands or else nanny will give you a smack and your best tin soldier will be given to the poor children,’ it was ‘Scout your lay beforehand and eliminate your witnesses or else Sergeant Bigboots will truncheon your bonce and Jack Ketch will give you the Drop.’

‘The slut muddied the waters of succession by birthing at least one bastard,’ he continued. ‘Her issue by Alexander might have inherited.’

‘Don’t hold with cousins breeding. The whelps always have withered arms or come out as giant frogs.’

‘By most accounts, the child did not survive infancy.’

I looked again at the card. ‘So Jasper don’t want his family tree pruned?’

‘All we know is that he has lived the greater part of his life in the Americas, North and South. He intends to take possession of his family seat and assume the life of a country gentleman.’

‘You deduced this from his bloody walking stick?’

‘No, I read this in the bloody Times.’

A three-month-old newspaper lay on the table. In quiet moments, Moriarty would clip unusual words and proper names out of headlines — they came in handy for anonymous letters of instruction, persuasion or revelation. The section on ‘lately arrived’ visitors debarking from ships included a notice: ‘having lived the greater part of his life in the Americas, North and South, Mr Jasper Stoke now intends to take possession of his family seat and assume the life of a country gentleman’. I assumed that meant bouncing milkmaids, sheltering from sheets of rain in his leaky mansion, and pickling himself in poisonous Wessex ‘scrumpy’.

Moriarty stood at the bay window.

‘What d’you suppose Stoke wants with us?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea, Moran. But we shall find out soon enough. A man wearing an American hat is on the point of grasping our bell-pull.’

In Mrs Halifax’s parlour, a bell jangled as someone yanked the chain in a frenzy. Usually, this signified the imminence of one of several regulars who paid to be secreted in a boudoir wardrobe with peepholes. For them, frenzied yanking was a way of life. I deduced this caller, coarsened by the Americas, was unfamiliar with civilised trappings like doorbells, roofs and trouser buttons.

The Professor whistled into a speaking tube, signalling Selden, the bruiser who kept the door, to admit our prospective client. The tintinnabulation ceased, succeeded by the clumping of heavy boots on our stairs. Our visitor can’t have done much Indian fighting or buffalo hunting in the Americas. Anyone this noisy would soon be scalped or starved.

The door pushed open and a giant burst in. He wore a ten-gallon hat which might actually hold the full ten gallons. The norm is scarcely a single gallon and the orthography down to misapprehension of the Spanish for ‘high gallant’, don’t you know? He snatched the stick from my hands, which stung for a day afterwards.

‘There y’are, Gertie,’ he exclaimed, hugging the cane like a long-missing gold coin. ‘I was a-feared I’d lost yuh!’

‘Mr Jasper Stoke?’ enquired the Professor.

The giant looked perplexed. He wore an odoriferous fleece overcoat. His enormous, blue-stubbled jaw sagged, showing jagged brown teeth.

‘No suh, I ain’t a…’

‘I am Jasper Stoke,’ purred a smaller gent who made his way into the room in the giant’s wake.

Neither Moriarty or I had thought to deduce that stick and card belonged to different people. I wasn’t ashamed of the oversight, but it would rankle the Professor.

Stoke carried a curly brimmed topper and no stick. He could walk without support and had the giant on hand for cudgelling folk who got in his way. He was sharply dressed, with a deal of fancy braid on his waistcoat. Darkly handsome, if you care to know that sort of thing. He sported a double-dash of moustache, thin and oiled — with eyebrows to match. One cheek was faintly marred by parallel scars. Something clawed — a kitten or at least kittenish — had once had a go at him. His neat, white hands said ‘card sharp’ rather than ‘cowboy’.

There I go, making deductions with the best of them. We may have theorised from the wrong stick, but I’d been spot on at ‘right bastard’. Takes one to know one, as they say — before they get punched in the head for smugly spouting platitudes.

‘This is my top boy, Dan’l,’ Stoke said, indicating the stick cuddler. ‘Known in three territories as Desperado Dan’l. There’s a price on his head for killing a man…’

‘T’ain’t right, Mr Jass,’ Dan’l said. ‘Only white men I killed were shot fair and square in the front. That price ain’t legal. Ain’t no law against killing a Chinese in the back. Not accordin’ to Judge Bean, and if’n it’s his ruling in Texas, it’s good enough for Arizona. Aye, and Engerland, too.’ [27] The American jurist Roy Bean (c. 1825–1903) dismissed a case against Paddy O’Rourke because — after close examination of the Revised Statutes of Texas — he declared ‘homicide is the killing of a human being, however I can find no law against killing a Chinaman’. At the time, Bean’s saloon-cum-court in Vinegaroon, Texas, was surrounded by 200 Irish labourers who declared they would lynch the judge if O’Rourke were convicted. This might have influenced the decision. By the standards of his times, Bean was a lenient judge. Most of those he found guilty were fined the amount of money they had about them at the time of arrest and set free; he only sentenced two men to hang, and one of those escaped.

Moriarty was impatient with this legal footnote. ‘What can we do for you, Mr Stoke-d’Urberville?’

One of Stoke’s brows flicked up.

‘Professor Moriarty, I want a dog killed.’

II

‘No crime too small’ was never exactly Moriarty’s slogan, but the criminal genius would apply himself to minor offences if an unusual challenge was presented. To whit, if a sweetshop had a reputation for being impossible to pilfer from, he’d devote as much brainpower to a scheme for lifting a packet of gobstoppers as he would a plan for abstracting the Crown jewels from the Tower of London.

Before you ask — yes, Moriarty did ponder that particular lay. Rather than pull off the coup bungled by Thomas Blood [28] Colonel Thomas Blood (1618–80) talked his way into the jewel house of the Tower of London, posing as a clergyman, and made off with the Crown jewels. He and his confederates were caught on Tower Wharf. Charles II, supposedly taken by Blood’s roguish daring, pardoned him. In preparation for the raid, Blood befriended Talbot Edwards, master of the jewel house, and cajoled a private viewing, whereupon — presumably with roguish daring — the elderly man was struck with a hammer, knocked down, bound and gagged and stabbed. Blood’s gang forgot to bring suitable swag-bags and had to improvise: Blood hammered flat St Edward’s crown, his brother-in-law sawed the sceptre into two parts and a man named Parrot stuffed the orb down his trousers. , he negotiated quietly with a terrifying Fat Man in Whitehall. The plan was sold to HM government for a tidy sum, enabling the Yeoman Warders to institute countermeasures. Well-known objects are nigh impossible to fence at anything like list value, anyway. In 1671, the baubles were valued at £100,000, but Blood said he’d be lucky to get £6,000 for the mess of jewel-encrusted tat. The Professor was tempted to return annually to the well with improved schemes, but the prospect of getting further on the wrong side of the Fat Man gave even him pause.