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

I wasn’t aware of any surplus stiffs on the premises — though I’d not have been surprised if one or two decedents showed up under the sideboard or in the window-seat. That had happened before. I was given pause by the two smaller coffins sharing the second funeral carriage. To my knowledge, the Professor had only ever murdered one circus midget… and that was in the way of an experiment. He wished to determine whether a child-sized corpse ‘burned beyond recognition’ in a bread-oven could be proved in autopsy not to be a particular missing heir. Guess what? It can. It was back to the drawing board in the Finsbury Disinheritance Caper.

Moriarty and I, hats ringed with black crepe, sat either side of the faux widow in an open calêche, holding up black umbrellas against the drizzle. Sophy sniffled like Eleanora Duse upon learning her fiancé has been assassinated in Fédora. Chop, suitably top-hatted and dour, sat up on the box, holding the reins as two fine black horses, with plumed headdresses, drew us up Kingstead Hill. At least one of the nags from Bulstrode & Sons was dappled, but soot-blacked every morning to fit the mood. In the rain — and have you noticed how it always rains at funerals? — the blacking began to run.

Other mourners awaited in Egyptian Avenue. Select souls, mostly in crow black. Sombre faces, betokening the friends of bluff Ben Thoroughgood and poor little lost Willy and Harry. Even I was shocked to see who’d turned out. I didn’t know ’em all straight off, but recognised enough faces to take a guess as to who else might be signing the condolence book. There were veiled ladies in the party, none making as much effort as Sophy.

I had, of course, brought my Gibbs side arm and pearl-handled pocket razor. In addition, a coil of piano wire nestled inside my hat — a trick I learned from the late Nakszynski, the Albino. In case of special circumstances, the ferrule of my umbrella came off to unsheath a needle which was envenomed by squeezing a bulb in the handle. Judging from the cut of everyone’s mourning clothes at this send-off, I wondered if I’d not come underarmed.

Grimes, a well-paid sexton, had the tomb opened and berths cleared for the three newcomers. Coffins were stacked up like child’s building bricks, suggesting that the Thoroughgood family would soon have to purchase another wing for their needs. I gallantly assisted the widow down, while Moriarty held the umbrellas. One or more of the mourners whistled.

A pair of Bulstrode sons shifted the coffins into the tomb. Mr Beebe, an entirely legitimate — if myopic in everything — clergyman, droned a sermon. We used to ask Mrs Halifax’s girls to come along for a pleasant outing, but their giggles and rude remarks put the parson off his stroke. Now, only those who could remain ‘in character’ — like the estimable Sophy — were entrusted with invitations.

Several of the Thoroughgood men were interred anonymously by the terms of contracts they had signed with Mrs H. It was a service she provided to any clients who died of a coronary, asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion in the pursuit of their pleasures, and would rather disappear than have loved ones know the exact circumstances of their deaths.

Solemn duties done, the morticians tactfully withdrew. Beebe hung about soliciting donations to a restoration fund or home for indigent seamstresses or somesuch. A pay-off mollified him and he left too.

Inside the tomb, mourners stood around glass-topped coffins. Some doffed hats, some raised hankies, some lit cigars and muttered, impatient with the performance. The beloved dead looked like Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, for the very good reason that the same artisans made both. Benjamin Thoroughgood was a spare head of General Gordon.

Moriarty told Grimes to seal the tomb doors behind us, and return in an hour. The sexton — who had never been able to account for the Dutch guilders he tried to pay for drink with on the night Van Helsing was arrested — had complied with stranger requests. I wish I could say this was the only time I’d heard the rasp and scrape of heavy stone tomb doors closing with me still on the inside and corpses for company.

‘Gentlemen, ladies, I bid you welcome,’ Moriarty addressed the mourners. ‘You know why I’ve invited you here. Several of you have travelled great distances, at no little inconvenience to your continuing interests. Your presence betokens the seriousness with which you take this matter. Most of you are familiar with each other, but some are new to this rarely convened circle. We all know who we are. Do I need to make introductions? Some of us prefer titles to names… so, the Lord of Strange Deaths and the Daughter of the Dragon… the Grand Vampire of Paris and Mademoiselle Irma Vep… Doctor Nikola of Australia and Madame Sara of the Strand… Miss Margaret Trelawny and the Hoxton Creeper… Doctor Mabuse of Berlin and Fraulein Alraune ten Brincken… Arthur Raffles of the Albany and his, ah, friend, Mr Manders… Théophraste Lupin and Josephine, Countess Cagliostro… Doctor Jack Quartz of New York and Princess Zanoni… Rupert, Count of Hentzau, and… Miss Irene Adler.’

One of the veiled ladies lifted her black gauze.

‘Hello, boys,’ said that bitch.

IV

So there you have it. The worst people in the world. All in the same tomb. If Grimes fell down a manhole and left us there to rot, or — more likely — eat each other, well… every detective, do-gooder and right-thinking prig in Christendom could get sloshed and break out their party hats.

I wouldn’t know how to send a telegram to someone like Dr Nikola, who favoured Asian mountain fastnesses and Pacific island hideaways, and I’m not deranged enough to invite the Lord of Strange Deaths to tea. As the loyal reader knows, I’m afraid of very little, but if anyone gives me pause it’s that dome-headed, bloody clever Chinaman. Being not afraid of death isn’t the same thing as not caring about hours — in some cases, weeks — of preliminary discomfort. The cellars of the Si-Fan were known as places to avoid. The mad mandarin had a marmoset on his shoulder, if you can believe it. His Eurasian companion — supposedly his daughter, as if that spared her anything — occasionally fed the chittering beast nuts from a packet. The Celestial pair wore white robes, because they do everything sideways out East and that’s the custom for attending the funerals of folks who aren’t in your immediate family.

As for the others… by now, you’ve heard of most of them. Those you don’t know you’re better off for it, but I’ll fill in the dance card anyway.

The second biggest surprise was the presence of my old friend Mad Margaret — Queen Tera as was — and her pet goon. The bandages were off. She now wore a smooth white alabaster mask which matched her replacement hand — eyebrows and lips picked out in gold. God knew what she looked like underneath, though her luxuriant raven hair had either re-grown or was a wig left over from the Princess Theatre’s last Antony and Cleopatra. She’d retrieved the Jewel of Seven Stars and wore it on her meat hand. The Black Pearl of the Borgias — which I happen to know Countess Cagliostro once coveted — winked from a brooch on her lapel. I doubted she’d forgiven or forgotten our previous encounter and she can’t have felt kindly towards the Professor after the mêlée in Conduit Street and the dismantling of her Kensington Temple. If she was here, keeping her resentments to herself, then she must have a very good, or very insane, reason to join the circle.

I’d never seen Jack Quartz before. Can’t say I was impressed. He sported an ostentatious cigar and the flashiest girlfriend. Princess Zanoni had more paint, powder and wax on her face than the fake heads in the coffins. The American mad doctor was tubby round the middle and running to jowls that made him look as if he were hiding cotton balls in his cheeks. Yanks never know when to stop, whether their passion is vivisecting beautiful women — which was how Dr Jack passed his leisure hours when running New York’s criminal underworld became too burdensome — or eating yard-across slabs of beef with fried potatoes washed down with brown carbonated health tonic. Nikola sliced people and animals up alive too, with obscure scientific end — the Prof tried to explain it to me once — but Quartz played with scalpels just for larks.