by Kim Newman
‘Ah, a good one, Moriarty. A fine funny gag. You nearly had me there...’
Moriarty’s head began to oscillate.
‘Surely, no, you can’t be serious?’ said Stoke. ‘That’s... why, that’s gross extortion. No, I’m grateful as all get-out, Moriarty. You’ve served me well, but what you ask is... ridiculous, out of the question, unholy. Contrary to all principles of sound business. No, five thousand is the limit. The price we agreed, and the price I’ll pay.’
Stoke took a Gladstone bag from the cabinet, and transferred the silver to it under the vulture eye of Professor Moriarty.
‘A fair sum for services rendered,’ he said. ‘I’ll even throw in the bag.’
He tried to grin, though his face wasn’t working yet.
A movement caught my eye. A pair of feet disappearing through the kitchen door. A bloody trail across the floor showed where Saul had dragged himself.
‘Now,’ said Stoke. ‘There’s the matter of another thrashing. Colonel, if you’d shift your boot...’
I did so. Mod gathered her skirts and stood. She spat in Stoke’s face. He smiled.
‘My family owes yours a murder,’ he said. ‘Yours won’t be in the papers, though. You’re for an unmarked grave in The Chase with your brother – nephew? – and his f---ing mutts.’
Moriarty picked up the Gladstone bag as if it were a specimen.
‘Moran, our business here is done,’ he said. ‘We should leave Mr Stoke and Miss Durbeyfield to their discussions. I doubt they’ll care for witnesses.’
‘Hah,’ Stoke said. ‘You’re a card after all, Moriarty. I’m glad to have known you, and no hard feelings. You’ve not done badly out of Trantridge.’
My wounds might argue, but I didn’t.
Moriarty and I made for the door. Jasper reached for a carving knife.
Then Dan’l noticed there was one body missing from the pile of human and animal remains in the corner.
‘Where’s Saul?’ he asked.
‘What, eh, what?’ Stoke said.
We left the dining room.
In the foyer, we saw Saul – reddled and torn from head to toe – on the stairs, supporting himself on a banister, trying to work his wrecked mouth.
There were six wolves. Only four bagged.
When he saw us, Saul’s remaining eye shone with rage. He uttered strange, angry sounds.
Moriarty nodded polite acknowledgement to the bloodied heir of Sir Pagan and Red Shuck. We no longer had business with him.
Behind us, the dining-room doors opened again. Stoke charged out, waving Gertie.
‘There you are, you c---sucker!’ Stoke shouted at Saul. ‘Prepare for a complete skull-f---ing!’
Saul managed a shrill screech. Two red wolves, larger than their slain comrades, charged down the stairs towards the Master of Trantridge. Their eyes shone, as if with nightshade drops.
Mod was at the dining-room doors. Dan’l held her back with tender restraint which suggested she’d suffer less at his hands than his employer’s.
Saul sank to his knees, bleeding. His whistle became a rattling sigh. He kept trying to raise his hands. Stoke struck one of the red, snapping beasts with the stick, but the other was on him, forepaws to shoulders, jaws around his face. Gouts of gore sprayed the wallpaper.
Moriarty helped me out of the house and closed the door behind us.
Across the lawn, stepping out from The Chase, was a woman in a long black veil, head hung to one side. I lifted my splinted hand to wave at her, and she darted back into the trees.
From inside the house came a howling.
We walked away from Trantridge Hall, leaving claimants to settle disputes among themselves.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX MALEDICTIONS
I
Professor Moriarty did not readily admit his mistakes. Oh, he made ’em. Some real startlers. You were well advised not to bring up the Tay Bridge Insurance Fiasco in his gloomy presence. Or the Manchester and Provincial Bank Robbery (six months’ brain work to set up, a thousand pounds seed money to pull off: seven shillings and sixpence profit). The Professor was touchy about failures. Indeed, he retained me to keep ’em quiet.
However, one howler he would own to.
He was ruminating upon it that morning, just as the sensational events I’ve decided to call ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ got going. Jolly good title, eh, what? Makes you want to skip ahead to the horrors. But don’t... you won’t fully appreciate the gut-slitting, dynamiting, neck-breaking, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones business without understanding how we got neck-deep in it.
In our Conduit Street rooms, we were doing the books, perhaps the least glamorous aspect of running a criminal empire. Once a mathematics tutor, Moriarty enjoyed balancing ledgers – as much as he could enjoy anything, the sad old sausage – more than robbing an orphanage trust fund or bankrupting a philanthropic society. He opened a leatherbound book and did that side-to-side snakehead thing which I’ve had cause to mention before. Everyone else who met him remarked on it too.
‘I should not have taken Mr Baldwin as a client,’ he declared, tapping a column of red figures. ‘His problem was of minimal interest, yet has caused no little inconvenience.’
The uninteresting, inconvenient Ted Baldwin was a union ‘organiser’ in Pennsylvania coal country. As ever in America, you can’t tell who were the worst crooks: the mine-owning robber barons or the fee-gouging workers’ brotherhood. In our Empire, natives dig dirt, plant tea and fetch and carry for the white man. However, Red Indians don’t take to the lash and the Yanks fought one of the century’s sillier wars over whether imported Africans should act like proper natives.
Nowadays, America employs – which is to say, enslaves – the Irish for such low purposes. A sammy takes only so much field-slog before up and cutting your throat and heading into the bush. Your bog-trotter, on the other hand, grumbles for 700 years, holds rowdy meetings, then decides to get very, very drunk instead of doing anything about it.
On the whole, I prefer natives. They might roast you on a spit, but won’t bore the teats off you by blaming it on Cromwell and William the Third. Yes, I know Moran is an Irish name. So is Moriarty. That comes into it later, too.
Our client Baldwin’s union – the Vermissa Valley Scowrers (don’t ask me what that means or if it’s spelled properly) – were undone by a Pinkerton operative who, when not calling himself John McMurdo, went by the unbelievable name of Birdy Edwards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a disgrace to the profession of Murder for Hire. If you operate in a country where captains of industry and hogs of politics make murder legal so long as it’s a union organiser being murdered, what’s the point, eh? Moriarty never lobbied for laws to make it all right for him to thieve and murder and extort.
Posing as a radical, Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers. As a result, most of the reds wound up shot in their beds or hanged from mine-works, but our man Baldwin was left in the wind at the end of the bloodletting with a carpet bag full of union funds. In his situation, I’d blow the loot on women and cards, but Baldwin was of the genus bastardii vindice.
Just to rub it in, this Birdy flew off to England with Baldwin’s sweetheart. Hot on the trail and under the collar, Baldwin came to London and called on the Firm. A wedge of greenback dollars hired us to locate the Pink, which we did sharpish. Sporting the more plausible incognito of John Douglas, Edwards was sunning himself at Birlstone, a moated manor.
An easy lay! Shin up a tree in the grounds and professionally pot the blighter through the leaded library window as he sits at his desk, perusing La Vie Parisienne. Aim, pull, bang... brains on the wall, ‘Scotland Yard Baffled’, notice in The Times, full fee remitted, thank you very much, pleasure to do business with you!
But, no, the idiot client got all het up and charged off to Birlstone to do the deed himself. Upshot: one fool face blown through the back of one fool head. Yes, sometimes they have guns too. A careful murderer is mindful of the risk inherent in turn
ing up at a prospective victim’s front door with a red face and a recital of grievances.
With the client dead, you might think we’d close the account and proceed to the next profitable item of deviltry. Not how the racket works. We’d accepted a commission to kill Edwards-McMurdo-Douglas. Darkly humorous remarks about persons not being dead when Professor Moriarty has been paid to polish them off were heard. Talk gets started, you lose face. Blackguards with inconvenient relatives take their business elsewhere. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. or that Limehouse Chinese with the marmoset would be delighted to accommodate them.
So, at our own expense, we pursue Edwards, who has booked passage to Africa. This is where you might remember the bounder. He – ahem – fell overboard and washed up on the desolate shore of St Helena. We could have shoved Birdy off the dock at Southampton and been home for tea and – ahem, encore – crumpet in Mrs Halifax’s establishment for licentious ladies. Not obtrusive enough, though. Nothing would do for the Prof but that the corpse be aimed at the isle of Napoleon’s exile. He spent hours with charts and tide-tables and a sextant to make sure of it. Moriarty was thinking, as usual, two or three steps ahead. There was only one place on Edwards’ escape route anyone – specifically, anyone who scribbles for the London rags – has ever heard of. A mysterious corpse on St Helena gets a paragraph above the racing results. A careless passenger drowned before embarkation doesn’t rate a sentence under the corset endorsements. Advertising, you see: Moriarty strikes! All your killing needs satisfied!
Still, it was Manchester and Provincial all over again. Baldwin’s dollars ran out. On St Helena, the Professor insisted we take the sixpenny tour and poke around the eagle’s cage. He acquired a unique, if ghastly, souvenir which figures later in the tale – this is another ominous intimation of excitements to come! The jaunt entailed five different passports apiece and seventeen changes of mode of transport across two continents. Expenses mounted. The account was carried in debit. [1]
‘Politics will be the ruination of the fine art of crime,’ Moriarty continued. ‘Politics and religion...’
This is the moral, Oh My Best Beloved: never kill anyone for a ‘Cause’.
For why not, Uncle Basher?
Because causes don’t pay, Little Friend of all the World. Adherents expect you to kill just for the righteousness of it. They don’t want to pay you! They don’t understand why you want paying!
Not ten minutes after our return, malcontents were hammering at our door, soliciting aid for the downtrodden working man. Kill one Pinkerton and everyone thinks you’re a bloody socialist! Happy to risk your precious neck on the promise of a medal in some twentieth-century anarchist utopia. I wearied of kicking sponging gits downstairs and chucking their penny-stall editions of Das Kapital into the street.
Reds fracture into a confusion of squabbling factions. The straggle-bearded oiks didn’t even want us to strike at the adders of capital. That would at least offer an angle: rich people are usually worth killing for what they have about their persons or in their safes. No, these firebrands invariably wanted one or other of their comrades assassinated over hair’s-breadth differences of principal. Some thought a Board of Railway Directors should be strung up by their gouty ankles on the Glorious Day of Revolution; others felt plutocrats should be strung up by their fat necks. Only mass slaughter would settle the question. If the GD of R has not yet dawned, it’s because socialists are too busy exterminating each other to lead the rising masses to victory.
I think this circumstance gave the Prof a notion about Mad Carew’s quandary. Which is where the blessed maledictions I mentioned earlier – you were paying attention, weren’t you? – come in, and not before time.
II
Just after the Prof let loose his deep think about ‘politics and religion’, the shadow of a man slithered into the room. Civvy coat and army boots. Colonially tanned, except for chinstrap lines showing malarial pallor. Bad case of the shakes.
I knew him straight off. Last I’d seen him was in Nepal. He’d been plumper, smugger and without shot nerves, attached to the British Resident; attached to the fundament of the British Resident, as it happens. Never was a one for sucking up like Mad Carew. Everyone said he’d go far if he didn’t fall off a Himalaya first.
Fellah calls himself ‘Mad’ and you know what you’re getting. Apart from someone fed up of being stuck with ‘Humphrey’ and dissatisfied with ‘Humph’.
There’s a bloody awful poem about him... [2]
He was known as ‘Mad Carew’ by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.
Reading between the lines – a lot more edifying that reading the actual lines – you can tell Carew knew how to strut for the juniors, coddle the men, sniff about the ladies of the regiment (bless ’em) and toady to the higher-ups. Officers like that are generally popular until the native uprising, when they’re found blubbing in cupboards dressed as washerwomen.
Not Carew, though. He had what they call ‘a streak’. Raring off and getting into ‘scrapes’ and collecting medals and shooting beasts and bandits in the name of jolly good fun. I wore the colours – not the sort of colonel with a daughter, but the sort not to be trusted with other colonels’ daughters – long enough to know the type. Know the type, I was the type! I’m older now, and see what a dunce I was in my prime. For a start, I used to do all this for army pay!
‘Mad’ sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in ’em that you put there. ‘Mad’ is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner for lunacy as you’re turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest ‘scrape’ was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.
Major Humphrey Carew was both kinds of Mad. He had been one; now, he was close to the other.
‘Beelzebub’s Sunday toast fork, it’s Carew!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you get in here?’
The blighter had the temerity to shake his lumpy fist at me.
After a dozen time-wasting socialist johnnies required heaving out, Moriarty had issued strict instructions to Mrs Halifax. No one was admitted to the consulting room unless she judged them solvent. Women in her profession can glim a swell you’d swear had five thou per annum and enough family silver to plate the HMS Inflexible and know straight off he’s putting up a front and hasn’t a bent sou in his pockets. So, Carew must have shown her capital.
Moriarty craned to examine our visitor.
Carew kept his fist stuck out. He was begging for one on the chin.
Mrs Halifax crowded the doorway with a couple of her more impressionable girls and the lad who emptied the pisspots. None were immune to the general sensation which followed Carew about in his high adventures. Indeed, they seemed more excited than the occasion merited.
Slowly, Carew opened his fist.
In his palm lay an emerald the size of a tangerine. When it caught the light, everyone on the landing went green in the face. Avaricious eyes glinted verdant.
Ah, a gem! So much more direct than notes or coins. It’s just a rock, but so pretty. So precious. So negotiable.
Soiled doves cooed. The pisspot boy let out a heartfelt ‘cor lumme’. Mrs Halifax simpered, which would terrify a colour sergeant.
Moriarty’s face betrayed little, as per usual.
‘Beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate,’ he lectured, as if diagnosing an illness, ‘coloured by chromium or perhaps vanadium. A hardness of 7.5 on the Mohs Scale. That is: a gem of the highest water, having consistent colour and a high degree of transparency. The cut is indifferent, but could be improved. I should put its worth at...’
He was about to name a high figure.
‘Here,’ Mad Carew said, ‘have it, and be done..
.’
He flung the emerald at the Professor. I reached across and caught it with a cry of ‘owzat’ which would not have shamed W.G. Grace, the old cheat. The weight settled in my palm.
For a moment, I heard the wailing of heathen worshippers from a rugged mountain clime across the roof of the world. The emerald sang like a green siren. The urge to keep hold of the thing was nigh irresistible.
Our visitor’s glamour was transferred to me. Mrs Halifax’s filles de joie regarded my manly qualities with even more admiration than usual. If my pisspot had needed emptying, I wouldn’t have had to ask twice.
The stone’s spell was potent, but I am – as plenty would be happy to tell you if they weren’t dead – not half the fool I sometimes seem.
I crossed the room, dropped the jewel in Carew’s top pocket, and patted it.
‘Keep it safe for the moment, old fellow.’
He looked as if I’d just shot him. Which is to say: he looked like some of the people I’ve shot looked after I’d shot them. Shocked, not surprised; resentful, but too tired to make a fuss. Others take it differently, but this is no place for digressions.
Without being asked, Carew sank into the chair set aside for clients – spikes in the backrest could extrude at the touch of a button on Moriarty’s desk, and doesn’t that make the eyes water! – and shoved his face into his hands.
‘Privacy, please,’ Moriarty decreed. Mrs Halifax pulled superfluous spectators away, not forgetting to tug the pisspot boy’s collar, and closed the door. Listeners at the keyhole used to be a problem, but a bullet hole two inches to the left indicated Moriarty’s un-gentle solution to unwanted eavesdroppers.
Carew was a man at the end of his tether and possessed of a fortune. An ideal client for the Firm. So why did I have that prickle up my spine? The sensation usually meant a leopard prowling between the tents or a lady of brief acquaintance loosening her garter to take hold of a poignard.
Before he said any more, I knew how the story would start.
