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

Stoke took a key from his waistcoat and opened a cabinet. Inside was a big, solid safe. Several gents of my acquaintance could have opened it quicker without knowing the combination beforehand than Stoke did working the wheel with excited, still-bloody fingers.

‘Silver to your satisfaction?’

Stoke laid five weighty bars of Tombstone silver on the table.

Moriarty waited, making no move.

‘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.

I

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.