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

‘You disagree, Colonel Moran?’ Colonel Moriarty said. ‘Does the Kallinikos offend your sensibilities?’

Like the Professor, the Colonel could read my face. It’s not such a trick. When I’m angry, I frown like thunder. When I’m enjoying myself, I grin like an ape. Only when I’ve got a better hand than the other fellow does the curtain come down and I present an aspect of stone. I was frowning, now.

‘It does take the sport out of it,’ I suggested mildly.

Three Moriarty brothers craned their necks to glare electrically at me.

‘Sport!’ spat the Stationmaster. ‘Have you missed the last fifty years of history?’

‘No, chummy, I’ve been in the thick of it, where the medals are won and the bodies are buried. I’ve had the fun, while you’ve been clipping platform tickets.’

‘In a generation, you’ll be obsolete,’ Colonel Moriarty told me. ‘The first time the Kallinikos sees off a cavalry charge, your type of soldier will be one with the dinosaurs. It may be less sporting, less fun, but we shall win.’

‘You may be right, Colonel,’ I told him. ‘But you’ll have the deuce of a battle first. Not with the enemy, with your own lot. You’re still in the British army and they’ll never stand for…’

‘I’m not in the British army,’ he said, with a Moriartian gleam in his eyes. ‘I am the British army. Just now, in command of a single train, I outgun all the medal-laden idiots who rode into the Valley of Death but didn’t learn from it.

‘You think the Empire’s war machine is still run by public school bullies who went into their father’s regiment and had a commission warm and waiting? I admit there are all too many of that breed. You can find them guzzling brandy in deadly dull clubs or sweltering in Turkish baths, swapping yarns about the wily Pathan and Johnny Zulu. They’re for show, Moran. For parades and guarding Buckingham Palace and skirmishing with brown bandits.

‘When we go against, say, Kaiser Wilhelm — and, make no mistake, we will — the Kallinikos, designed by scientists and operated by engineers, will carry the day. We’ll keep you on, of course. Your kind of soldier. We might call you a land captain and put you on top of the train like a figurehead. We’ll give you medals when you get your head shot off. But soldiers in overalls, not scarlet uniforms, will carry the fight.’

Colonel Moriarty looked at me and saw the sort of men who sneered at his precious Department of Supplies and would never let him sit at the top table no matter how many battles his choo-choo juggernaut won. He couldn’t even make or operate the Kallinikos — just fill in the forms to get it on the rails.

I took my revolver from my coat pocket and pointed it at the Colonel’s head. That shut him up.

‘Moran,’ cautioned the Professor, mildly.

In that moment, I couldn’t tell whether Moriarty would be grateful or furious if I killed his brother out of hand.

‘I could have you burned where you stand, before you manage to fire,’ Colonel Moriarty said.

I had noticed the nozzles of the flame-cannons swivelling to point at me.

Turning, I fired… and took off one of Oberstein’s kneecaps. He was felled and the palm-sized compression pistol — disguised as a big pocket watch — rolled from his grip. He had been creeping into a position where he could have shoved the thing in the small of the Colonel’s back and blasted his spine.

‘Can I have another medal for that, chief clerk?’ I asked. ‘I seem to have saved your life.’

Sophy Kratides’ face was burning. She’d been behind Oberstein and had not seen him reaching under his cassock.

At my shot, Lucas and Sabin had thrown themselves on the ground. Ilse von Hoffmannsthal, however, stood straight.

Oberstein swore in German.

Lucas and Sabin began to roll along the platform and — in a flash! — I perceived something not one of the brothers Moriarty had yet realised.

I can’t sniff dropped cigar ashes and tell you the inside-leg measurement of the smoker. But I’ve come through numerous battles with skin relatively intact because I don’t suffer from a maths teacher’s need to dwell on my workings-out. I just know things, without really troubling with how or why I know them. It’s a whiff in the air, sometimes; or a broken twig on the trail which is just too neatly snapped to be natural. Now, it was two men who — we had been told — acted for different masters moving in unison.

Stationmaster Moriarty thought he had summoned rival bidders, but his bogus psychic investigators were a spy ring. The card game which had tipped me off that Oberstein and Ilse were in cahoots was a double-bluff to convince me Sabin and Lucas weren’t in it with them.

Sophy Kratides whipped out throwing-knives, and might have skewered both the rolling men but for von Hoffmannsthal, who stepped in front of her and launched a kick which would have done credit to a cancan dancer — it turned out her skirts were loose trousers tailored to seem like conventional feminine attire, until the wearer made a move like this — and planted a boot-heel into the Greek woman’s sternum. I heard the thump of impact and Sophy staggered back.

Ilse then pulled a comb from her hair, which turned out to be a long, thin dagger. Sophy recovered her balance and thrust both of her knives toward the other woman’s eyes, only for the blades to be struck aside — with sparks — by a sweep of Ilse’s dagger.

Then, it was on… an expert knife-fight between fit fillies who whirled like dervishes and slashed at each other with well-matched precision and clinical malice. Their loose hair tossed as they hissed insults at each other in several languages. Both took minor cuts and sustained rents in their clothes, but avoided the other’s would-be killing thrusts.

Entertaining, I admit, but a distraction. I rapped on the worm’s metal hide with my revolver.

One of the plates of the Kallinikos slid aside, making an aperture in the carapace. An engineer — our old friend Berkins, in tailored overall and a peakless cap like a convict’s — was puzzled by the sudden commotion.

‘You can’t do that yurr,’ he said.

Lucas and Sabin had rolled away from the train, and stood up. They got busy with the big wheel which worked the points. Lucas struggled with the control. Sabin — whose walking stick was a disguised shotgun — kept us from interfering.

It wasn’t them I was bothered with, anyway. Though I saw what they were up to.

The Professor spotted him first.

‘Moran,’ he shouted. ‘Up there.’

On top of the train crouched a thin, spidery figure. He wore a black body-stocking and a tight-fitting hood with slit-holes for eyes. He must have been lying on the roof of the waiting room.

It was the double-fake Carnacki. Chief of the spy ring, it appeared.

I took a shot, which went true. It spanged against my target’s chest, and he was pushed backward but not knocked down. He was armoured, just like the worm. The gaunt, lithe fellow made sure I hadn’t another shot at him, stepping off the other side of the train and dropping behind it.

‘All aboard,’ I shouted, and barged past Berkins.

‘You’re not cleared for the Kallinikos,’ complained Colonel Moriarty. ‘You could be shot for treason!’

It wouldn’t be the first time they’d tried.

The Professor held his brother back. Which showed a faith in me I’d come to expect. At least the Professor understood what I was doing. Neither of us could have said why, though. Oh, we wanted to slap down the false-face fellow who thought he could pull off a coup under our noses, but it’s not as if we felt an obligation to preserve Her Majesty’s secrets for the Department of Bloody Supplies. I’ve lived long enough with my impulse to hare off into dicey situations where death and danger lurk to know I could no more moderate this tendency than a tiger could decide to be polka-dotted for a change.