Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (36 page)

Tyrone Mountmain expired from drinking poisoned ginger beer. His Auntie Soph was hanged for it. There are more Mountmains, though – so the Struggle goes on. Eternally.

Early the next morning, the Professor had me roused from Fifi’s bed – all that killing naturally had my blood up, and there was but one handy treatment for that – and insisted we take a promenade across the battlefield.

Conduit Street was strewn with debris. Bullet pocks scarred walls and pavements. All the windows were broken. Don Rafaele’s stand smouldered. Other residents were appalled, and complaining. Not all the corpses had been carted off. A Templar was crucified across the doors of the Pillars of Hercules. A pile of rags lay on our front step, brown hands outstretched and empty. A policeman – one of ‘ours’ – shooed away busybodies.

The street was full of trash.

Margaret Trelawny’s white hand, all but two fingers broken off, lay in a pool of congealed, melted ice cream.

A few of the Jewels of the Madonna were about too, amid the crushed ruin of one of Moriarty’s trick boxes. Their settings were bent and broken.

Moriarty spotted the Green Eye of the Little Yellow God and the Black Pearl of the Borgias, rolling together in a gutter like peas in a pod. Someone’s real eye, red tangle of string still attached, lay with them.

‘Pick those up, would you, Moran? We’ve still a client to service.’

‘Just the Green Eye?’

‘We’ll have the Black Pearl, too.’

‘We’d better hope the Creeper drowned.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t. Excessive lung capacity. An entirely natural, if freakish attribute, before you ask. But for the moment, there’s little risk.’

Moriarty was pleased with his handiwork.

‘This wasn’t about Humphrey Carew, was it?’

‘Not entirely, Moran. Very perspicacious of you to notice. I never get your limits. You have them, of course. No, the Green Eye was the least of our items of interest.’

‘A lot of trouble for an item of little interest.’

‘There is always a lot of trouble in situations like these. I can’t abide a fanatic, Moran. They are variables. They do not fit into calculations. The mumbo-jumbo is infinitely annoying. Consider the Camorra – a perfectly sound criminal enterprise, poisoned by infantile Marianism. Really, why should a bandit care about a statue’s finery? Likewise, the Fenians and their hopeless ‘Cause’. They may free themselves from British rule, but for what? The Irish will still have priests to rob and rape them and bleat that it’s for their own good, and they never think to shrug off the yoke of Rome. The Templars – who knows what they are for? They’ve forgotten themselves. At bottom, none are any better than the Creeper. Baby brains fixated on shiny things.

‘It is best for us, for the interests of the Firm, that these cretins be taken off the board. The Italians and Irish and pseudo-Egyptians shall trouble us no longer. The Soho Merchants’ Protective Society is smashed. Our tithes will be paid without complaint. Mrs Halifax will lose no further assets to Margaret Trelawny. Navvies and poets who might have been tempted to sink monies in the Irish Invincible Republicans will gamble and drink and whore in establishments we have an interest in. The wealthy and powerful who need to be blackmailed will not have to dress up as pharaohs to do it.’

For the only time I can remember, Moriarty smiled without showing teeth.

This morning, as on few others, he was content. His sums added up.

‘What about the little brown priests?’ I ventured. ‘They’ll still come for us. We have the emerald.’

‘If I do not pay the remainder of the purchase price today, ownership reverts to Major Carew. Moran, do you have a penny about you?’

‘Why, yes, I...’ I began, fishing in my watch pocket. I caught Moriarty’s eye and my fingers froze. ‘No, Moriarty,’ I said. ‘I’m short of funds.’

‘Pity. We shall have to return Carew’s property, with apologies.’

The man himself was in the street, blinking in the daylight. He took in the carnage and destruction.

‘Is it over? Am I safe?’

‘That’s for you to decide. I can guarantee that you will not be murdered by the priests of the little yellow god.’

Carew laughed, still mad – but happy, too.

He walked down to the dead priest and kicked him. The Nepalese rolled over. He had been shot neatly through the dot in his forehead.

‘That’s what I think of your blasted yellow god,’ he said.

Moriarty gave Carew back his emerald, and he waved it in the dead priest’s face. A laughing daredevil again, he cast around for ladies to impress with his flash.

‘I’ll have this green carbuncle cut up in Amsterdam, and sold to the corners of the Earth. Then I’ll have the last laugh! Hah!’

‘My bill will be sent to your club,’ Moriarty said. ‘I suggest you settle it promptly.’

‘Yes, yes, whatever... but, hang it, I’m alive and this blighter’s dead. All the blighters are dead. You’re a miracle worker.’

I knew – with an instinct that the Professor wouldn’t call supernatural – Mad Carew would gyp us. He was that sort. Couldn’t help himself. One implacable foe was off his back – for the moment, at least – yet he was thoughtlessly on the point of making another.

Carew pumped my hand and pumped Moriarty’s hand. The Professor gave our client’s shoulder a friendly squeeze and pushed him away. Carew walked off with a bounce in his stride, whistling a Barrack-Room ballad.

We watched him leave.

‘One thing, Moriarty,’ I said. ‘You promised Carew he wouldn’t be murdered by priests of the little yellow god. Even if the London nest is wiped out and their hairy pet is on the run, there are others back home in the mountains. An army of them, just like this fanatic, sworn to get back the emerald. They’ll know of this mess soon enough, and they’ll send other priests across the globe for Carew and the Eye.’

‘True.’

‘So you lied to him?’

‘No. I seldom lie. It spoils the equations. When I clapped his shoulder, I gave him a present...’

He opened his hand. The Black Pearl of the Borgias wasn’t in it.

‘It will take the next assassins months to get here from Nepal. It will take but hours for the Creeper to get out of the river.’

So, now you know how it came out. According to Carew’s will, he was to be buried at his last posting. They fit him in a coffin, face up but toes down, and some obliging Nepalese who happened to be visiting London transported him all the way there. The emerald went with him and was stolen from his body before burial. So, the poet had the truth of it, after all – with the exception that Amaryllis Framington married a tea trader and retired to Margate.

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,

And the yellow god forever gazes down.

‘James,’ the Professor said.

‘James,’ his brother acknowledged.

‘You’ve not met my associate,’ Moriarty said. ‘Colonel Moran, Colonel Moriarty.’

‘Colonel,’ nodded the thin-faced cove.

‘Colonel,’ I responded.

I’ve seldom had cause to mention Moriarty’s family. Read on, and you’ll find out why.

Until that winter, I knew little of the clan. The parents had been lost at sea some years previously. The single odd thing my partner in crime – not just a turn of phrase – had let slip about his people was that Mr and Mrs Moriarty had such a liking for the name ‘James’ they gave it to each and every child of their union.

‘It’s James, James,’ the Colonel said.

Yes, there was a third Moriarty brother. It was fortunate there were no sisters.

The triplicate nonsense would have been even more confusing if any of the three brothers could lay claim to a single intimate acquaintance who might wish to address them by their first name. You’re feeling sorry for them now, aren’t you? No love for the Jameses Moriarty, boo hoo hoo. Just goes to show you never met any of ’em. If you had, you’d suppress a shudder and nod sagely. Only one Moriarty is a villain in the public eye (though not, as it happens, a court of law), but if you ask me the Professor wasn’t the worst of them.

Most of us are saddled with relations. I’ve touched on my own from time to time. Seldom happily. With regret, I discern traits passed down – though not anything useful, like the family loot – from old Sir Augustus to me. He was a terror, a bully and a cool shot in the service of Queen and Country. I’ve worked for myself – or the Prof – but otherwise carry on in pater’s tradition. I’ve also attained that sorry point in life when I look into the shaving mirror after a heavy night in the tap-room and see the old man staring back at me with bloodshot orbs. The propensity for slipperiness with cards, believe it or not, I have from dear Mama, who showed me how to deal from the bottom while I was in velvet knickers and had ringlets.

Somehow, the notion that Professor Moriarty had parents – might have
been a child –
never sat right. A viper is a snake straight from the egg. I couldn’t help but picture little Jamie as a balding midget in a sailor suit, spying Cook and the baker’s boy rolling in flour on the kitchen table through his toy telescope, and blackmailing them for extra buns.

It had been a profitable season for the Firm. We’d done nicely out of the Mystery of the Essex Werewolf, come out of the lamentable business of the Four Lemon Drops with surprising credit, and salvaged more than could be expected from the disaster of Loki Tunnel. Lately, England was too confining a laboratory for Moriarty’s experiments in crime.

We were expanding on the continent, tactfully skirting – for the moment – territories claimed by others and offering consultant services to blackguards in Spain, Holland and Poland. Moriarty had put his stamp on a series of coups – kidnappings, major thefts, an assassination – which raised his stock as the premier criminal mastermind in Europe.

Queen Victoria could unroll a map of the world and take pride in the extensive red patches which mark the Empire; the Prof had similar ambitions for the globe in his study. Stuck with red-headed needles wherever a Moriarty crime had been accomplished, the globe increasingly resembled a pincushion.

I had recently greatly enjoyed murdering a Member of Parliament with a garrotte of red ribbon, then providing succor to his saucy widow, his blushing twin daughters... and, thanks to a fortuitous midnight encounter, his tweeny maid. I’d have done the prig for the bonuses alone, but that business put twenty thou in the coffers. You’d never believe who paid for that forced bye-election. My only regret was that I couldn’t mount an honourable head on the wall. I contented myself with draping the ribbon on some antlers and keeping intimate trophies from the ladies of the deceased’s household in a private drawer alongside like items.

It was a new year, a new decade: 1891. Life was fine. Crime was paying.

Then, early in January, Professor Moriarty asked me to accompany him to the Xeniades Club to meet with his brother, Colonel Moriarty.

Are you familiar with that breed of novel heroine who prefaces a chapter of awful experiences with ‘had I but known...’? Well, had I but bloody known, I’d have stayed in bed with or without a tweeny foot warmer. But I didn’t and got up. Cheerful as a goose-throttler the week before Christmas, I put on my hat, picked up my cane, and toodled along to Jermyn Street and Colonel Moriarty’s club.

A few words on the Xeniades Club – what a horrible place! I’m a member of the Anglo-Indian and the Tankerville myself, though I tend to let niceties like paying annual fees slide for the odd decade. As a cardplayer, yarn-spinner, hero of the Empire, big-game hunting bore (I admit it) and devotee of manly pursuits, I’ve been in and out of every gent’s club in London, from the Athaneum and the Beefsteak through the Troy Club and Boodle’s to the Club of the Damned and the Mausoleum Club (pronounced Mouse-o-layum, if you ever get the invite). I’m also known at exclusive gathering places catering to fellows who are most decidedly not gentlemen but can afford to pay for their pleasures and the privilege of having those who provide them keep quiet afterwards.

The Xeniades Club was founded by whining bounders who’d been blackballed at any number of established London clubs and decided that at least one should have no barriers at all to membership. You can imagine the shower that let in: grubby-fingered tradesmen, monomaniacs and cranks of every persuasion; plain-speaking provincial aldermen; foreigners, even. Furthermore, the Xeniades encouraged ‘lively debate’, and was thus one of the noisiest big rooms I have ever been in... not excluding the mess hall at Sing Sing Prison during a riot in which twelve inmates and three guards were killed, or the auditorium of the Paris Opéra after a chandelier fell on the audience during (what else?) that bloody jewel song from
Faust.

If I were in the habit of thinking things through, I’d have made these
deductions:
the Xeniades was for blighters so objectionable no other club would have them. Colonel James Moriarty was a member.
Colonel
James Moriarty. What kind of colonel can’t even get into the Army and Navy, which is open to
any
serving officer on full or half pay? Any soldier who can rise to the rank of colonel – which is, admittedly, where they leave you when they tumble to what sort of a rotter or loon you are behind the medal ribbons and, yes, I am speaking for experience – ought to have distinguished himself in some manner which would at least get him into Stoats and Weasels.