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

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. [32] For a more detailed account of the Vermissa Valley Scowrers and the attempted murder at Birlstone Manor, see John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Valley of Fear’, The Strand Magazine, 1914–15.

‘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.

II

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’.

There’s a bloody awful poem about him… [33] ‘The Green Eye of the Yellow God’, J. Milton Hayes, 1911. Moran’s quotation of the once-popular monologue establishes this section of his memoirs was written at least twenty years after the event. Internal evidence suggests chapters one, two and six were written much earlier.

He was known as ‘Mad Carew’ by the subs at Khatmandu,

He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;

But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,

And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.

Reading between the lines — a lot more edifying that reading the actual lines — you can tell Carew knew how to strut for the juniors, coddle the men, sniff about the ladies of the regiment (bless ’em) and toady to the higher-ups. Officers like that are generally popular until the native uprising, when they’re found blubbing in cupboards dressed as washerwomen.

Not Carew, though. He had what they call ‘a streak’. Raring off and getting into ‘scrapes’ and collecting medals and shooting beasts and bandits in the name of jolly good fun. I wore the colours — not the sort of colonel with a daughter, but the sort not to be trusted with other colonels’ daughters — long enough to know the type. Know the type, I was the type! I’m older now, and see what a dunce I was in my prime. For a start, I used to do all this for army pay!

‘Mad’ sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in ’em that you put there. ‘Mad’ is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner for lunacy as you’re turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest ‘scrape’ was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.