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

Instead, the Professor tinkled a silly little bell and Mrs Halifax trotted in with a tray of tea. One look and I could tell she was his, too. Stamford had understated the case when he said half the folk in the Criterion Bar worked for Moriarty. My guess is that, at bottom, the whole world worked for him. They’ve called him the Napoleon of Crime, but that’s just putting what he is, what he does, in a cage. He’s not a criminal, he is crime itself, sin raised to an art form, a church with no religion but rapine, a God of Evil. Pardon my purple prose, but there it is. Moriarty brings things out in people, things from their depths.

He poured me tea.

‘I have had an eye on you for some time, Colonel Moran. Some little time. Your dossier is thick, in here…’

He tapped his concave temple.

This was literally true. He kept no notes, no files, no address book or appointment diary. It was all in his head. Someone who knows more than I do about sums told me that Moriarty’s greatest feat was to write The Dynamics of an Asteroid, his magnum opus, in perfect first draft. From his mind to paper, with no preliminary notations or pencilled workings, never thinking forward to plan or skipping back to correct. As if he were singing ‘one long, pure note of astro-mathematics, like a castrato nightingale delivering a hundred-thousand-word telegram from Prometheus.’

‘You have come to these rooms and have already seen too much to leave…’

An ice-blade slid through my ribs into my heart.

‘…except as, we might say, one of the family’.

The ice melted, and I felt tingly and warm. With the phrase, ‘one of the family’, he had arched his eyebrow invitingly.

He stroked Tibbles, who was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.

‘We are a large family, many cells with no knowledge of each other, devoted to varied pursuits. Most, though not all, are concerned with money. I own that other elements of our enterprise interest me far more. We are alike in that. You only think you gamble for money. In fact, you gamble to lose. You even hunt to lose, knowing you must eventually be eaten by a predator more fearsome than yourself. For you, it is an emotional, instinctual, sensual thrill. For me, there are intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual rewards. But, inconveniently, money must come into it. A great deal of money.’

As I said, he had me sold already. If a great deal of money was to be had, Moran was in.

‘The Firm is available for contract work. You understand? We have clients who bring problems to us. We solve them, using whatever skills we have to hand. If there is advantage to us beyond the agreed fee, we seize it…’

He made a fist in the air, as if squeezing a microbe to death.

‘…if our interests happen to run counter to those of the client, we settle the matter in such a way that is ultimately convenient to us, while our patron does not realise precisely what has happened. This, also, you understand?’

‘Too right, Professor,’ I said.

‘Good. I believe we shall have satisfaction of each other.’

I sipped my tea. Too milky, too pale. It always is after India. I think they put curry powder in the pot out there, or else piddle in the sahib’s crockery when he’s not looking.

‘Would you care for one of Mrs Halifax’s biscuits?’ he asked, as if he were the vicar entertaining the chairwoman of the beneficent fund. ‘Vile things, but you might like them.’

I dunked and nibbled. Mrs H. was a better madame than baker. Which led me to wonder what fancies might be buttered up in the rooms below the Professor’s lair.

‘Colonel Moran, I am appointing you as head of one of our most prestigious divisions. It is a post for which you are eminently qualified by achievement and aptitude. Technically, you are superior to all in the Firm. You are expected to take up residence here, in this building. A generous salary comes with the position. And profit participation in, ah, “special projects”. One such matter is at hand, and we shall come to it when we receive our next caller, Mister — no, not Mister, Elder — Elder Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio.’

‘I’m flattered,’ I responded. ‘A “generous salary” would solve my problems, not to mention the use of a London flat. But, Moriarty, what is this division you wish me to head? Why am I such a perfect fit for it? What, specifically, is its business?’

Moriarty smiled again.

‘Did I omit to mention that?’

‘You know damn well you did!’

‘Murder, my dear Moran. Its business is murder.’

III

Barely ten minutes after my appointment as Chief Executive Director of Homicide, Ltd., I was awaiting our first customer.

I mused humorously that I might offer an introductory special, say a garrotting thrown in gratis with every five poisonings. Perhaps there should be a half-rate for servants? A sliding scale of fees, depending on the number of years a prospective victim might reasonably expect to have lived had a client not retained our services?

I wasn’t yet thinking the Moriarty way. Hunting I knew to be a serious avocation. Murder was for bounders and cosh-men, hardly even killing at all. I’m not squeamish about taking human life: Quakers don’t get decorated after punitive actions against Afghan tribesmen. But not one of the heap of unwashed heathens I’d laid in the dust in the service of Queen and Empire had given me a quarter the sport of the feeblest tiger I ever bagged.

Shows you how little I knew then.

The Professor chose not to receive Elder Drebber in his own rooms, but made use of the brothel parlour. The room was well supplied with plushly upholstered divans, laden at this early evening hour with plushly upholstered tarts. It occurred to me that my newfound position with the Firm might entitle me to handle the goods. I even took the trouble mentally to pick out two or three bints who looked ripe for what ladies the world over have come to know as the Basher Moran Special. Imagine the Charge of the Light Brigade between silk sheets, or over a dresser table, or in an alcove of a Ranee’s Palace, or up the Old Kent Road, or… well, anywhere really.

As soon as I sat down, the whores paid attention, cooing and fluttering like doves, positioning themselves to their best advantage. As soon as the Professor walked in, the flock stood down, finding minute imperfections in fingernails or hair that needed rectifying.

Moriarty looked at the dollies and then at me, constructing something on his face that might have passed for a salacious, comradely leer but came out wrong. The bare-teeth grin of a chimpanzee, taken for a cheery smile by sentimental zoo visitors, is really a frustrated snarl of penned, homicidal fury. The Professor also had an alien range of expression, which others misinterpreted at their peril.

Mrs Halifax ushered in our American callers.

Enoch J. Drebber — why d’you think Yankees are so keen on those blasted middle initials? — was a barrel-shaped fellow, sans moustache but with a fringe of tight black curls all the way round his face. He wore simple, expensive black clothes and a look of stern disapproval.

The girls ignored him. I sensed he was on the point of fulminating.

I didn’t need one of the Professor’s ‘background checks’ to get Drebber’s measure. He was one of those odd godly bods who get voluptuous pleasure from condemning the fleshly failings of others. As a Mormon, he could bag as many wives as he wanted — on-tap whores and unpaid skivvies corralled together. His right eye roamed around the room, on the scout for the eighth or ninth Mrs Drebber, while his left was fixed straight ahead at the Professor.

With him came a shifty cove by the name of Brother Stangerson who kept quiet but paid attention.