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

I discerned no obvious link between Irene Adler and the troubles besetting us, but she was up to something. Even if she was just in London to see the fireworks, she was a nagging pain. In a move which, even if I say so myself, was exceptionally clever, I assigned Sophy to discover that bitch’s secrets. Naturally impervious to the diva’s charms, our knife-woman also had experience enough with handsome scoundrels to see through Rupert’s hand-kissing insouciance.

Sophy came back and reported, with a cold smirk, that Irene’s main reason for staying in London was a secret course of beauty treatments at Madame Sara’s — touching up her hair colour, ironing out tiny wrinkles around her eyes. Sophy took great delight in this. Picking up Moriarty’s pet name for Irene, she amended it to that old bitch. I should have been reassured… but was struck with melancholia. Irene Adler, too, was not as young as she’d once been. Only Jo-Jo Balsamo was eternal, and she looked more marble statue than woman.

A week after Sophy’s intelligence, we received a formal letter from Madame Sara, severing all ties — financial and otherwise — with the Firm. Damn me, but I should have seen it coming. All the while she was having cream worked into her temples, Irene had worked her spell on the Sorceress of the Strand. The Derry & Tom’s androgyne was furiously pedalling off heartbreak on a bicycle tour of Wales while Sara worshipped at the altar of Adler. My instinct was to order an explosive reprisal against the Madame’s premises, prefaced by telephoning Lukens with a begorrah or two, but the papers announced Sara had temporarily shut up shop and would be travelling on the continent with friends. She had been invited to Ruritania to ‘do’ the Princess Flavia’s hair for an upcoming coronation. There might be time to nobble her before she boarded the boat-train, but what with all the other grief the Firm had only a skeleton staff on hand. Sophy volunteered to do the deed, but I didn’t want to chance such valuable asset on a mere pettish killing. A mad vitriol-chucker would do, but they were in short supply that season.

The Professor, uncharacteristically, said we should let Sara go and be glad to be rid of her if she took that bitch off the table. I hoped the pair of she-cats tore Rupert of Hentzau to pieces. When word got out that Moriarty had accepted letters of resignation and declarations of independence — hitherto unthinkable — there was a queue of messengers from ship-deserting rats of all colours. It was Decline and Fall to the letter, and the Goths and Vandals overrunning our empire sported size-nineteen boots and knob-end helmets.

X

The Firm ran a printing press in Wapping, running off snide [55] Snide: forged currency. good enough to pass in Threadneedle Street. Not an Archie Stamford botch, but prime quality forgery. In April, the plant was subtly sabotaged. Paper with a face value of £7,000 had to go in the furnace. The rag was excellent, the engraving exceptional and the ink mixed to the proper recipe. Our plates matched the genuine article, down to the rubric ‘For the Gov.r and Comp.a of the Bank of England, Frank May’, but our five-pound notes came out signed ‘James Moriarty’.

This prompted me to a deduction: our ‘Great Unknown’, the intelligence behind the strikes against us, couldn’t be Dr Mabuse, or — at least — not Mabuse solo. The nose-tweak with the chief cashier’s signature betrayed that most un-German characteristic: a sense of humour. I barged into the Prof’s study with this profound insight, but he’d already worked it out through wear on a vanished night-watchman’s left-behind trousers or the depth rat turds had sunk into the dripping pan on a hot day or somesuch.

‘Mabuse needed only to prick us,’ I was told. ‘He has put blood in the water. To alert the sharks. He himself has left the country. He is not at any of his Berlin addresses, which are watched constantly. He wears a new face. He is gone to earth. But he pays attention, follows the feeding frenzy.’

Moriarty had nervous energy now. For months he had accepted each blow and merely oscillated, thinking thinking thinking… I hoped we were at the point of doing doing doing.

The Professor wiped wasps off his long canvas gloves, brushing them into the funnel of the glass and wood nest-maze he had constructed. He took down his best hat and pulled on his coat.

‘I have a call to pay, Moran,’ he said. ‘In Baker Street. A minor nuisance on the point of becoming a middle-sized obstacle must be bent to our purpose…’

Ah-hah, I thought, the Thin Man! He’d been a bother a time or two. The Birdy Edwards foul-up, for once. The Maupertuis fiasco, for twice. He’d also nabbed a couple of the Firm’s sometime clients: Grimesby Roylott was dead and John Clay gaoled thanks to his unwanted intervention. And… well, he was just a shit… a puffed-up, hectoring, tiresome beaky shit. With a halfway decent line in publicising himself, as witness: all those back numbers of The Strand piled up in the jakes.

This brothel-creeping keyhole bandit had popped up at the edges of the picture all spring. In Leeds, just before the smashing of the blackmail ring. At Scotland Yard, in conference with Inspector Patterson. Disguised as a trainer at the Epping Forest tourney. Delivering a box of papers to the Crown prosecutor in Dover. Treating himself to a celebratory beefsteak at Simpson’s in the Strand. He was one of the toothiest of the sharks tearing into our flanks.

‘This is his handiwork, then?’ I said, waving the funny money.

Moriarty allowed it was. ‘Most droll, Moran. Our consulting detective has the fingers of a forger. He has my signature to the curlicue. He could cash a cheque at Box Brothers.’

My fire rose. Larks like this got under my skin. I was heating up, and — after all these months of frustration — ready to ‘go off’ like Krakatoa.

‘Hang a dartboard on the fiddler’s back, Moriarty. The Von Herder’s fired in. This pestilential sleuth c-t would make a decent first kill for its bag!’

‘Not yet, Moran. I’ve a use in mind for the Thin Man.’

This surprised me.

‘I know the blighter’s in trade, but surely he wouldn’t take you as a client.’

‘I have, through proxies, hired him three times. We couldn’t get shot of that homicidal lunatic Bert Stevens until I persuaded him to carry his carcass to Baker Street. Mabuse can do us more injury than Stevens ever did. And he is in hiding, where he thinks he cannot be found. We need a bloodhound, and the Thin Man has a reputation. It will be a simple matter to draw the attention of the Great Detective to the Great Unknown. He believes he serves abstract reason, but has been manipulated into this persecution of our Firm. With all his cleverness, the Thin Man cannot realise the full extent of our organisation. He has us in his sights now, but would not know our names — would not be scribbling details on his index cards, would not be in cahoots with Patterson of Scotland Yard — were it not for information gifted him by Mabuse. You remember “Fred Porlock”?’

I did. All too well. It was the alias of someone inside the Firm who leaked titbits to all sorts of wrong people: policemen and detectives and journalists. We found him out, and Moriarty… well, let’s just say a culprit was duly tried, convicted and punished.

‘We were given the wrong man. “Frog Junkin” was “Fred Porlock”. Mabuse himself, sowing the seeds of our ruin.’

We were beset on all sides. The spectres the Professor had invoked in the Thoroughgood tomb were manifesting. I wondered if we’d ever be rid of these parasites. Napoleon hadn’t survived concerted attacks by lesser men. We had our Blucher in Mabuse, and now it seemed we had our Wellington in the Thin Man.