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

‘Elder Drebber, I am Professor Moriarty. This is Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of the First Bangalore…’

Drebber coughed, interrupting the niceties.

‘You’re who to see in this city if a Higher Law is called for?’

Moriarty showed empty hands.

‘A man must die, and that’s the story,’ Drebber said. ‘He should have died in South Utah, years ago. He’s a murderer, plain and flat, and an abductor of women. Hauled out his six-gun and shot Bishop Dyer, in front of the whole town. A crime against God. Then fetched away Jane Withersteen, a good Mormon woman, and her adopted child, Little Fay. He threw down a mountain on his pursuers, crushing Elder Tull and many good Mormon men [9] A more balanced account of these incidents can be found in Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey, Harper & Brothers, 1912). . Took away gold that was rightful property of the Church, stole it right out of the ground. The Danite Band have been pursuing him ever since…’

‘The Danites are a cabal within the Church of Latter-day Saints,’ Moriarty explained.

‘God’s good right hand is what we are,’ insisted Drebber. ‘When the laws of men fail, the unworthy must be smitten, as if by lightning.’

I got the drift. The Danites were cossacks, assassins and vigilantes wrapped up in a Bible name. Churches, like nations, need secret police forces to keep the faithful in line.

‘Who is this, ah, murderer and abductor?’ I asked.

‘His name, if such a fiend deserves a name, is Lassiter. Jim Lassiter.’

This was clearly supposed to get a reaction. The Professor kept his own council. I admitted I’d never heard of the fellow.

‘Why, he’s the fastest gun in the South West. Around Cottonwoods, they said he struck like a serpent, drawing and discharging in one smooth, deadly motion. Men he killed were dead before they heard the sound of the shot. Lassiter could take a man’s eye out at three-hundred yards with a pistol.’

That’s a fairy story. Take it from someone who knows shooting. A side arm is handy for close work, as when, for example, a tiger has her talons in your tit. With anything further away than a dozen yards, you might as well throw the gun as fire it.

I kept my scepticism to myself. The customer is always right, even in the murder business.

‘This Lassiter,’ I ventured. ‘Where might he be found?’

‘In this city,’ Drebber decreed. ‘We are here, ah, on the business of the Church. The Danites have many enemies, and each of us knows them all. I was half expecting to come across another such pestilence, a cur named Jefferson Hope who need not concern you, but it was Lassiter I happened upon, walking in your Ly-cester Square on Sunday afternoon. I saw the Withersteen woman first, then the girl, chattering for hot chestnuts. I knew the apostate for who she was. She has been thrice condemned and outcast…’

‘You said she was abducted,’ put in the Professor. ‘Now you imply she is with Lassiter of her own will?’

‘He’s a Devil of persuasion, to make a woman refuse an Elder of the Church and run off with a damned Gentile. She has no mind of her own, like all women, and cannot fully be blamed for her sins…’

If Drebber had a horde of wives around the house and still believed that, he was either very privileged or very unobservant.

‘Still, she must be brought to heel. Though the girl will do as well. A warm body must be taken back to Utah, to come into an inheritance.’

‘Cottonwoods,’ said Moriarty. ‘The ranch, the outlying farms, the cattle, the racehorses and, thanks to those inconveniently upheld claims, the fabulous gold mines of Surprise Valley.’

‘The Withersteen property, indeed. When it was willed to her by her father, a great man, it was on the understanding she would become the wife of Elder Tull, and Cottonwoods would come into the Church. Were it not for this Lassiter, that would have been the situation.’

Profits, not parsons, were behind this.

‘The Withersteen property will come to the girl, Fay, upon the death of the adoptive mother?’

‘That is the case.’

‘One or other of the females must be alive?’

‘Indeed so.’

‘Which would you prefer? The woman or the girl?’

‘Jane Withersteen is the more steeped in sin, so there would be a certain justice…’

‘…if she were topped too,’ I finished his thought.

Elder Drebber wasn’t comfortable with that, but nodded.

‘Are these three going by their own names?’

‘They are not,’ said Drebber, happier to condemn enemies than contemplate his own schemes against them. ‘This Lassiter has steeped his women in falsehood, making them bear repeated false witness, over and over. That such crimes should go unpunished is an offence to God Himself…’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said. ‘But what names are they using, and where do they live?’

Drebber was tugged out of his tirade, and thought hard.

‘I caught only the false name of Little Fay. The Withersteen woman called her “Rache”, doubtless a diminutive for the godly name “Rachel”…’

‘Didn’t you think to tail these, ah, varmints, to their lair?’

Drebber was offended. ‘Lassiter is the best tracker the South West has ever birthed. Including Apaches. If I dogged him, he’d be on me faster’n a rattler on a coon.’

The Elder’s vocabulary was mixed. Most of the time, he remembered to sound like a preacher working up a lather against sin and sodomy. When excited, he sprinkled in terms which showed him up for — in picturesque ‘Wild West’ terms — a back-shooting, claim-jumping, cow-rustling, waterhole-poisoning, horse-thieving, side-winding owlhoot son of a bitch.

‘Surely he thinks he’s safe here and will be off his guard?’

‘You don’t know Lassiter.’

‘No, and, sadly for us all, neither do you. At least, you don’t know where he hangs his hat.’

Drebber was deflated.

Moriarty said, ‘Mr and Mrs James Lassiter and their daughter Fay currently reside at The Laurels, Streatham Hill Road, under the names Jonathan, Helen and Rachel Laurence.’

Drebber and I looked at the Professor. He had enjoyed showing off.

Even Stangerson clapped a hand to his sweaty forehead.

‘Considering there’s a fabulous gold mine at issue, I consider fifty thousand a fair price for contriving the death of Mr Laurence,’ said Moriarty, as if putting a price on a fish supper. ‘With an equal sum for his lady wife.’

Drebber nodded again, once. ‘The girl comes with the package?’

‘I think a further hundred thousand for her safekeeping, to be redeemed when we give her over into the charge of your church.’

‘Another hundred thousand pounds?’

‘Guineas, Elder Drebber.’

He thought about it, swallowed, and stuck out his paw.

‘Deal, Professor…’

Moriarty regarded the American’s hand. He turned and Mrs Halifax was beside him with a salver bearing a document.

‘Such matters aren’t settled with a handshake, Elder Drebber. Here is a contract, suitably circumlocutionary as to the nature of the services Colonel Moran will be performing, but meticulously exact in detailing payments entailed and the strict schedule upon which monies are to be transferred. It’s legally binding, for what that’s worth, but a contract with us is enforceable under what you have referred to as a Higher Law…’

The Professor stood by a lectern, which bore an open, explicitly illustrated volume of the sort found in establishments like Mrs Halifax’s for occasions when inspiration flags. He unrolled the document over a coloured plate, then plucked a pen from an inkwell and presented it to Drebber.

The Elder made a pretence of reading the rubric and signed.