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

Then, a form of pox caught fire in Conduit Street. Every female person in the house came down with it — the symptoms were angry red blotches over the face, persistent voiding of bodily wastes from every orifice, and sleeping spells which lasted from twenty to thirty hours. With Mrs Halifax and every one of her girls out of commission, customers had to be turned away. Those few persistent enough to barge in and insist on regular appointments encountered swollen, puking, shitting, spotted filles de joie and beat a hasty retreat.

Dr Velvet, the quack on hand for the girls’ little female complaints, didn’t know this pox, but said it was not venereal in character. He thought it might be an allergic reaction, but really couldn’t say — though he charged his usual fee for not saying. Velvet was especially puzzled that only the women in the house were affected — the sole exception being Slender Simon, the catamite Mrs H. kept on hand for those bucks whose tastes ran to tossing a pretty boy into the mix when taking ’em on two or three at a time.

Chop and Purbright brought up some girls from South of the River — savages with tattoos and bone earrings, to hear the men talk about them — and put them in the empty house across the way, taking care not to let them get anywhere near our sickening tarts. The new soiled doves came down with the pox too, and were disappointed in any hopes they had of meeting a gent from up West.

At the risk of incurring a debt no one wanted to think about, we secured a consultation from the Lord of Strange Deaths — who would, in other years, have been our number one suspect. As the world’s greatest expert in exotic poisons and subtle plagues, he saw straight off how it had been done. A mixture of Peruvian boomslang venom and Tanzanian desert rose sap had been smeared on soap used in the laundry where the bed sheets were washed. The Lord was, in his inscrutable way, irked that the attack against us had been made from a Chinese establishment in which he, naturally, had a controlling interest. By way of apology, he had the laundry manager crushed in his own steam press. An outsider, of course, was responsible.

A sudden rash of efficiency erupted in police forces across the nation. A crime Moriarty had carefully planned for an Edinburgh mob — the theft and ransom of a collection of horrible Highland landscape paintings which happened to be favourites of the Queen — was a fizzle. The lay was cracked exactly as the Professor dictated, but a posse of jock constables lay in wait with truncheons. In several towns, bought-and-paid-for coppers were mysteriously reassigned to menial duties and replaced by newly appointed hotheads with private incomes and a burning zeal to fight crime. A long-standing blackmail operation in Leeds was smashed when a dozen worthies simultaneously grew spines and took their lumps by owning up to indiscretions, misappropriations and other sins to wives, employers or the petty sessions court. Thus rendering an extensive archive of letters, photographs and statements gathered over a decade entirely valueless. Five myopic customs officers in Dover were given a choice between resignation or arrest, shutting down a handy black-market trade route to and from Europe. An all-comers bare-knuckles contest in Epping Forest was raided. Some of the greatest sports in the land, who liked a flutter on the pugilists, had to be politely reminded such pursuits were technically against the law. A courier was arrested in Amsterdam. When punched in the gut, he sicked up a lavender bag of uncut diamonds. Three ringleaders of the Conduit Street Comanche were seized from their dens, scrubbed with lye and packed off to schools in remote rural areas run by muscular Christian brothers with gruel, the lash and compulsory prayers at four in the morning.

All this was inconvenient. The next phase was more bothersome, and struck closer to home. We were hampered.

I’ve not dwelled much on the day-to-day business of the Firm. My duties were elevated, and as a consequence I had little to do with the collection of tithes from outfits operating under our aegis. Various London businesses — public houses, restaurants, sweet shops, opium dens, theatres, music halls, casinos, dog tracks, pie stalls — paid handsomely for the privilege of not having their premises raided by the Comanche. They also allowed the Firm the use of services from time to time, and provided household necessities and luxuries gratis. A great part of the economy of the city, even the legitimate economy, depends upon criminal custom, and Moriarty had painstakingly spun his web so we profited from our associations. Then, there was a hiccough.

Nathaniel Rawlins, a solicitor with only one client, came reluctantly to Conduit Street to announce that his collectors were coming up short. It was his duty to oversee collections, pay out salaries and bank profits with Box Brothers. He was terrified of earning the boss’ opprobrium, so let the shortfall go unreported for several vital days before bringing the matter to us. The Professor was busy with his wasps and his plans, so I had to deal with the matter. Rawlins assembled his tallymen, and I listened — with growing fury — to their complaints. Some formerly cowed proprietors were withholding payments, claiming that if they were paying for protection they should get it. Windows had been smashed, pot-boys roughed up, some obscene public displays shut down by the police, and a café in Tite Street closed after an outbreak of food poisoning caused by something less exotic than boomslang venom in the soup. Folk who’d been happy to pay and tell themselves that they were subdivisions of the Firm rather than victims of extortion were bleating loudly.

As assassin-in-chief, I was expected to eliminate a plague of minor officials, vandals, constables and annoying customers to pay back all those sovereigns we’d squeezed out of Soho. I was not about to put my new airgun — tested and sighted in, but not yet fired in the field — to such low use, and told the collectors to collect harder. Rawlins wouldn’t have recruited them if they weren’t capable. Over the fat years, they had got too used to an easy life, and let their saps go soft and knuckle-dusters get rusty. For a while, more insistent demands restored the flow of money… but then the Tite Street waiters, unemployed and crotchety, set about Bruiser Downes with table legs and saw him off. New faces sprung up in the street, eager to offer the protection it was whispered that the Firm could no longer deliver. Several of Rawlins’ collectors took beatings, set up in business for themselves (very unwise) or scarpered on long-planned seaside holidays. The Professor shrugged this drip-drip-drip problem off as not sufficiently interesting, and told me to take drastic measures. Unable to think of anyone else who could do the job, I negotiated with Margaret Trelawny — not a lady I was overly keen to dine with á deux — to borrow the Hoxton Creeper. His looming presence made the average publican or shop manager find cash they didn’t know they had to make arrears payments, but the Creeper was not subtle. Witnesses tended to remember his face, and couldn’t help giving good descriptions of him. Mad Margaret demanded a greater degree of autonomy for her Temple of Tera, which I was forced to grant her. At that, I fancied her mask smiled nastily.

The Firm was trembling.

Most of the Thoroughgood funeral party had hied back from whence they came — Dr Nikola was rumoured to be in the Congo, perfecting surgical procedures on gorillas — but that bitch was still in town. I considered setting the Creeper on her for my peace of mind, but the giant was a mug for a pretty face and I didn’t fancy having a spine-snapping juggernaut lobbed straight back at me. Irene and her beau were everywhere… at the opera, at society balls, giving charity concerts, visiting missions in the East End, dining with cabinet ministers. I wondered what had become of Colonel Sapt, the Ruritanian Secret Police Chief. When that bitch first plagued us, he was her companion and secret confederate. Sapt was a Rudolfite and Hentzau a Michaelist, so she’d hopped the fence in the Ruritanian succession debate. I assumed that, as ever, she was on nobody’s side but her own.