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

Major Humphrey Carew was both kinds of Mad. He had been one; now, he was close to the other.

‘Beelzebub’s Sunday toast fork, it’s Carew!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you get in here?’

The blighter had the temerity to shake his lumpy fist at me.

After a dozen time-wasting socialist johnnies required heaving out, Moriarty had issued strict instructions to Mrs Halifax. No one was admitted to the consulting room unless she judged them solvent. Women in her profession can glim a swell you’d swear had five thou per annum and enough family silver to plate the HMS Inflexible and know straight off he’s putting up a front and hasn’t a bent sou in his pockets. So, Carew must have shown her capital.

Moriarty craned to examine our visitor.

Carew kept his fist stuck out. He was begging for one on the chin.

Mrs Halifax crowded the doorway with a couple of her more impressionable girls and the lad who emptied the pisspots. None were immune to the general sensation which followed Carew about in his high adventures. Indeed, they seemed more excited than the occasion merited.

Slowly, Carew opened his fist.

In his palm lay an emerald the size of a tangerine. When it caught the light, everyone on the landing went green in the face. Avaricious eyes glinted verdant.

Ah, a gem! So much more direct than notes or coins. It’s just a rock, but so pretty. So precious. So negotiable.

Soiled doves cooed. The pisspot boy let out a heartfelt ‘cor lumme’. Mrs Halifax simpered, which would terrify a colour sergeant.

Moriarty’s face betrayed little, as per usual.

‘Beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate,’ he lectured, as if diagnosing an illness, ‘coloured by chromium or perhaps vanadium. A hardness of 7.5 on the Mohs Scale. That is: a gem of the highest water, having consistent colour and a high degree of transparency. The cut is indifferent, but could be improved. I should put its worth at…’

He was about to name a high figure.

‘Here,’ Mad Carew said, ‘have it, and be done…’

He flung the emerald at the Professor. I reached across and caught it with a cry of ‘owzat’ which would not have shamed W.G. Grace, the old cheat. The weight settled in my palm.

For a moment, I heard the wailing of heathen worshippers from a rugged mountain clime across the roof of the world. The emerald sang like a green siren. The urge to keep hold of the thing was nigh irresistible.

Our visitor’s glamour was transferred to me. Mrs Halifax’s filles de joie regarded my manly qualities with even more admiration than usual. If my pisspot had needed emptying, I wouldn’t have had to ask twice.

The stone’s spell was potent, but I am — as plenty would be happy to tell you if they weren’t dead — not half the fool I sometimes seem.

I crossed the room, dropped the jewel in Carew’s top pocket, and patted it.

‘Keep it safe for the moment, old fellow.’

He looked as if I’d just shot him. Which is to say: he looked like some of the people I’ve shot looked after I’d shot them. Shocked, not surprised; resentful, but too tired to make a fuss. Others take it differently, but this is no place for digressions.

Without being asked, Carew sank into the chair set aside for clients — spikes in the backrest could extrude at the touch of a button on Moriarty’s desk, and doesn’t that make the eyes water! — and shoved his face into his hands.

‘Privacy, please,’ Moriarty decreed. Mrs Halifax pulled superfluous spectators away, not forgetting to tug the pisspot boy’s collar, and closed the door. Listeners at the keyhole used to be a problem, but a bullet hole two inches to the left indicated Moriarty’s un-gentle solution to unwanted eavesdroppers.

Carew was a man at the end of his tether and possessed of a fortune. An ideal client for the Firm. So why did I have that prickle up my spine? The sensation usually meant a leopard prowling between the tents or a lady of brief acquaintance loosening her garter to take hold of a poignard.

Before he said any more, I knew how the story would start.

‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,’ began Mad Carew…

Lord, I thought, here we go again.

III

Some stories you’ve heard so often you know how they’ll come out. ‘I was a good girl once, a clergyman’s daughter, but fell in with bad men…’ ‘I fully intended to pay back the rhino I owed you, but I had this hot tip straight from the jockey’s brother…’ ‘I thought there was no harm in popping in to the Rat and Raven for a quick gin…’ ‘I must have put on the wrong coat at the club and walked off wearing a garment identical to — but not — my own, which happens to have these counterfeit bonds sewn into the lining…’

And, yes, ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu…’

I’ve a rule about one-eyed yellow idols — and, indeed, idols of other precious hues with any number of eyes, arms, heads or arses. Simply put: hands off!

I don’t have the patience to be a professional cracksman, which involves fiddling with locks and safes and precision explosives. As a trade, it’s on a level with being a plumber or glazier, with a better chance of being blown to bits or rotting on Dartmoor — not that most plumbers and glaziers wouldn’t deserve it, the rooking bastards! Oh, I have done more than my fair share of thieving. I’ve robbed, burgled, rifled, raided, waylaid, heisted, abducted, abstracted, plundered, pilfered and pinched across five continents and seven seas. I’ve lifted anything that wasn’t nailed down — and, indeed, have prised up the nails of a few items which were.

So, I admit it — I’m a thief. I take things which are not mine. Mostly, money. Or stuff easily turned into money. I may be the sort of thief who, an alienist will tell you, can’t help himself. I steal (or cheat, which is the same thing) just for a lark when I don’t especially need the readies. If a fellow owns something and doesn’t take steps to keep hold of it, that’s his lookout. But even I know better than to pluck an emerald from the eye socket of a heathen idol… whether it be north, south, east or west of Kathmandu.

Ever heard of the Moonstone? The Eye of Klesh? The All-Seeing Eye of the Goddess of Light? The Crimson Gem of Cyttorak? The Pink Diamond of Lugash? All sparklers jemmied off other men’s idols by fools who, as they say, ‘Suffered the Consequences’. Any cult which can afford to use priceless ornaments in church decoration can extend limitless travel allowance to assassins. They have on permanent call the sort of determined, ruthless little sods who’ll cross the whole world to retrieve their bauble and behead the infidel who snaffled it. That also goes for the worshippers of ugly chunks of African wood you wouldn’t get sixpence for in Portobello Market. Pop Chuku or Lukundoo or a Zuni Fetish into your game bag as a souvenir of the safari, and wake up six months later with a naked Porroh man squatting at your bed-end in Wandsworth and coverlets drenched with your own blood.

Come to that, common-or-garden, non-sacred jewels like the Barlow Rubies, the Rosenthall Diamonds and the Mirror of Portugal are usually pretty poison to crooks who waste their lives trying to get hold of ’em. Remember the fabled Agra Treasure which ended up at the bottom of the Thames? [34] See: John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Sign of the Four’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 1890. Best place for it.

Imagine stealing something you can’t spend? Oversize gems are famous, thus instantly recognisable. They have histories (‘provenance’ in the trade, don’t you know? — a list of people they’ve been stolen from) and permanent addresses under lock and key in the coffers of dusky potentates or the Tower of London where Queen Vicky (long may she reign!) can play with them when she has a mind to.