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

Almost as an afterthought, I did the sums. Born 1840. Mrs H. was wrong. I was past fifty-one. F-k me for a French tart, that was older than Old Sir Augustus got to be!

The cake was sawed into chunks. Moriarty didn’t trouble to conceal his impatience with this social occasion. It was my birthday, but Mrs Halifax followed the chain of command and offered the Prof a slice of cake first. Brusquely, he turned it down. The attentions of the girls who were there — Fifi was ‘busy,’ with some damned subaltern due to ship out for parts East in the morning who wanted to be up all night before departure — were welcome, but palled as quickly as the cake. Corks popped — I didn’t think to scrabble in the corners for them, and check for hypodermic needle punctures — and champagne was poured. The fizz was passed around. I couldn’t taste mine.

I looked at Sophy, my most promising recent acquaintance. She avoided my gaze. I fancied that passing this milestone made me of less interest to her in my cranky old age than I might have been in my roaring forties. I watched her drink champagne and talk with Lotus Lei. The girls warmed to their subject, trading the whereabouts of spots in a man’s body where a long needle or a stiletto can slide in unnoticed then produce the most excruciating pain.

As a birthday treat, I wondered if I could ask for that bloody subaltern to be hauled up here in his drawers, then turned over to the Greek and the Celestial as a sort of dressmaker’s dummy. They could stick needles into his balls for an hour or two. After that, I might relax by punching him in the face until it looked like meat. Then, on the morrow, it might be amusing if the young terrier’s cronies came to see him aboard the ship, which was supposed to bear him off to the Empire to make his name and fortune, and he didn’t make an appearance until the anchor was pulled up with him tied to it upside down.

‘Moran, get to it and open that, would you? Before we all die of old age.’

Moriarty reminded me of the parcel. His birthday present to me, I realised.

I had my penknife to the string before it occurred to me there might be a trick. It would be just like the Prof to test out some new explosive device — a bomb, sent through the mail! — on whoever happened to be handy, i.e. me. That would make way for Sophy the Knives to take my berth.

There was a bit of a hush, and folks — chewing their cake like cows chew the cud — gathered around to see what I found inside the wrapping paper.

It was a locked wooden case. Varnished cherrywood. Moriarty handed me a key. The custom-made lock had a left-hand turn — you’d be surprised how many people don’t even try to twist the key the ‘wrong’ way before giving up — and lifted the lid. Nestled in velvet recesses were the components of a device which distantly resembled a gun. Barrel and breech were conventional, but the stock was swollen to accommodate a rubber lung. Also included were a pump-handle and some lengths of rubber tube.

Sophy was interested, but it was too manly a contraption to enthral the other girls. They drifted away. A bell tinkled, and Mrs Halifax sent Polly and the Ranee to take care of gentlemen callers. Party or no, there was a business to run.

‘I had Von Herder make this,’ Moriarty explained. ‘It is an air rifle.’

‘I know, Moriarty,’ I said. ‘The shadow man on the Kallinikos had a toy pop-pistol like it.’

‘That was a Straubenzee, an inferior piece. For precision, the Von Herder will match your Gibbs, Moran. It is silent, has no recoil and fires revolver shells. Imagine… a man falls dead with a soft-nosed pistol ball in his head. He can’t have killed himself, for he has no gun in his hand. He is alone in a room or in an open space. No one is within pistol range. How can this be? The murderer is half a mile away, in a place of concealment. Who then shall take the blame? What a puzzle that will be, Moran. A challenge to the scientific detective, I should say.’

Of course, it would be me up a tree pumping like a loon to get the thing ready for a second shot. The Von Herder was for someone reasonably sure he’d shoot true the first time. Fair enough, I’m known for clean kills. I’ve almost always brought down the cat or the elephant or the barrister with a clean shot. But there are always circumstances. At long range, the wind plays tricks. Too many animals have a habit of resting still long enough for you to line up sights, then making sudden movements for no good reason except to avoid being shot in the head.

I assembled the air rifle, which fit together as neatly as a child’s model ship. On another birthday I recollected — my ninth or tenth — I was given a model ship, though I’d asked for a real gun. In a pet, I launched the ship in the ornamental ponds of the khanum’s palace at Mazandaran, and bombarded it with pebbles until it sank with all hands. I thought I was alone in the courtyard, but something made me turn round and I saw a raised trapdoor which had been concealed in a mosaic. A ghost poked his skull face up through it. Now, I realise it was just a white man with no nose and lips, but then I was convinced it was a genuine spook. Even at that age, I knew terrible deeds were done beneath the palace. It was then, with those fried-egg eyes staring and the exposed teeth snarling, I realised a curious thing about myself: I was brave. The ghost did not frighten me. I was excited, yet calm. Annoyed, but purposeful. Time slowed and I was its master. I still had some pebbles, and pitched one at the apparition, plonking him straight on the bony bonce. The trapdoor dropped shut and that was the last of my ghost [54] Though he may never have realised the fact, Moran encountered this ‘ghost’ again in later life. In chapter six, he mentions he was in the Paris Opera House on the night in 1881 that a chandelier fell on the audience. This was the most famous crime committed by Erik de Boscherville, popularly known as the Phantom of the Opera. At the time Sir Augustus Moran was British Minister to Persia, Erik was employed by the family of the shah as an architect. For the khanum, the mother of Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, Erik designed a torture labyrinth at Mazendaran which to some extent prefigured the famous maze he created under the cellars of the Paris Opera. Accounts differ, but contemporary historians believe Erik congenitally disfigured rather than a victim of abuse or accident. See: Gaston Leroux, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, Le Gaulois, 1909–10; Susan Kay, Phantom, Doubleday, 1990. . The women of the palace said no such spirit walked here, and Mama told me to shut up about it — though Augusta and Christabelle were agog for details, the more hair-raising the better — lest our quixotic hostess be offended and urge her suggestible son to trade agreements with the wicked Tsar instead of our good Queen.

All these birthdays on, it was the model ship again. I still didn’t have a real gun, no matter how deadly this puff-rifle might be. Moriarty missed the point. The bang ! Herons startled from the reeds! The echo, resounding in my ears! The animal keeling over, dropped and dead before the sound has died down. The pull of the bolt and the ting of the ejected cartridge case! All part of the moment of a perfect shot. Lost with the limp phut of this toy. A telescope sight was also included in the box. I looked through it, sighting on Moriarty’s globe. Before using the air rifle, I’d want to fire it in. I had confidence in Von Herder’s sensitive fingers when it came to mechanical parts, but knew better than to trust a blind engineer with optical jiggery-pokery, even if he did get his lenses ground in Venice.

I held the assembled airgun — it was light — and got the feel of it. It would do, I suppose. It would have its bag. Tradesmen and club bores and Australians and rats and detectives. Not tigers. Not wolves. Not sporting men. Not even natives. This was a tool for a job. No pleasure in it at all, really.