Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

CHAPTER ONE: A VOLUME IN VERMILION

I

I blame that rat-weasel Stamford, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can’t afford to mix up your accents grave and your accents acute. Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the gravitational pull as he would have said, of Professor James Moriarty.

In 1880, your humble narrator was a vigorous, if scarred, forty. I should make a proper introduction of myself: Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, late of a school which wouldn’t let in an oik like you and a regiment which would as soon sack Newcastle as take Ali Masjid. I had an unrivalled bag of big cats and a fund of stories about blasting the roaring pests. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and faced a surge of sword-waving Pathans howling for British blood, potting them like grouse in season. Nothing gladdens a proper Englishman’s heart — this one, at least — like the sight of a foreigner’s head flying into a dozen bloody bits. I’d dangled by a single-handed grip from an icy ledge in the upper Himalayas, with something huge and indistinct and furry stamping on my freezing fingers. I’d bent like an oak in a hurricane as Sir Augustus, the hated pater, spouted paragraphs of bile in my face, which boiled down to the proverbial ‘cut off without a penny’ business. Stuck to it too, the mean old swine. The family loot went to a society for providing Christian undergarments to the Ashanti, a bequest which had the delightful side effect of reducing my unmarriageable sisters to boarding-house penury.

I’d taken a dagger in the lower back from a harlot in Hyderabad and a pistol-ball in the knee from the Okhrana in Nijni-Novgorod. More to the point, I had recently been raked across the chest by the mad, wily old shetiger the hill-heathens called ‘Kali’s Kitten’.

None of that was preparation for Moriarty!

I had crawled into a drain after the tiger, whose wounds turned out to be less severe than I’d thought. Tough old hellcat! KK got playful with jaws and paws, crunching down my pith helmet like one of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, delicately shredding my shirt with razor claws, digging into the skin and drawing casually across my chest. Three bloody stripes. Sure I would die in that stinking tunnel, I was determined not to die alone. I got my Webley side arm unholstered and shot the hell-bitch through the heart. To make sure, I emptied all six chambers. After that chit in Hyderabad dirked me, I broke her nose for her. KK looked almost as aghast and infuriated at being killed. I wondered if girl and tigress were related. I had the cat’s rank dying breath in my face and her weight on me in that stifling hole. One more for the trophy wall, I thought. Cat dead, Moran not: hurrah and victory!

But KK nearly murdered me after all. The stripes went septic. Good thing there’s no earthly use for the male nipple, because I found myself down to just the one. Lots of grey stuff came out of me. So I was packed off back to England for proper doctoring.

It occurred to me that a concerted effort had been made to boot me out of the subcontinent. I could think of a dozen reasons for that, and a dozen clods in stiff collars who’d be happier with me out of the picture. Maiden ladies who thought tigers ought to be patted on the head and given treats. And the husbands, fathers and sweethearts of non-maiden ladies. Not to mention the 1st Bangalore Pioneers, who didn’t care to be reminded of their habit of cowering in ditches while Bloody Basher did three-fourths of their fighting for them.

Still, mustn’t hold a grudge, what? Sods, the lot of them. And that’s just the whites. As for the natives… well, let’s not get started on them, shall we? We’d be here ’til next Tuesday.

For me, a long sea cruise is normally an opportunity. There are always bored fellow passengers and underworked officers knocking around with fat notecases in their luggage. It’s most satisfying to sit on deck playing solitaire until some booby suggests a few rounds of cards and, why just to make it spicier, perhaps some trifling, sixpence-a-trick element of wager. Give me two months on any ocean in the world, and I can fleece everyone aboard from the captain’s lady to the bosun’s second-best bumboy, and leave each mark convinced that the ship is a nest of utter cheats with only Basher as the other honest hand in the game.

Usually, I embark sans sou and stroll down the gangplank at the destination, pockets a-jingle with the accumulated fortune of my fellow voyagers. I get a warm feeling from ambling through the docks, listening to clots explaining to the eager sorts who’ve turned up to greet them that, sadly, the moolah which would have saved the guano-grubbing business or bought the Bibles for the mission or paid for the wedding has gone astray on the high seas. This time, tragic to report, I was off sick, practically in quarantine. My nimble fingers were away from the pasteboards, employed mostly in scratching around the bandages while trying hard not to scratch the bandages themselves.

So, the upshot: Basher in London, out of funds. And the word was abroad. I was politely informed by a chinless receptionist at Claridge’s that my usual suite of rooms was engaged and that, unfortunately, no alternative was available, this being a busy wet February and all. If I hadn’t pawned my horsewhip, it would have got some use. If there’s any breed I despise more than natives, it’s people who work in bloody hotels. Thieves, the lot of them, or, what’s worse, sneaks and snitches. They talk among themselves, so it was no use trotting down the street and trying somewhere else.

I was on the point of wondering if I shouldn’t risk the Bagatelle Club, where, frankly, you’re not playing with amateurs. There’s the peril of wasting a whole evening shuffling and betting with other sharps who a) can’t be rooked so easily and b) are liable to be as cash-poor as oneself. Otherwise, it was a matter of beetling up and down Piccadilly all afternoon in the hope of spotting a ten-bob note in the gutter, or — if it came to it — dragging Farmer Giles into a sidestreet, splitting his head and lifting his poke. A comedown after Kali’s Kitten, but needs must…

‘It’s “Basher” Moran, isn’t it?’ drawled someone, prompting me to raise my sights from the gutter. ‘Still shooting anything that draws breath?’

‘Archibald Stamford, Esquire. Still practising auntie’s signature?’

I remembered Archie from some police cells in Islington. All charges dropped and apologies made, in my case. Being ‘mentioned in despatches’ carries weight with beaks, certainly more than the word of a tradesman in a celluloid collar you clean with India rubber. Six months jug for the fumbling forger, though. He’d been pinched trying to make a withdrawal from a relative’s bank account.

If clothes were anything to go by, Stamford had risen in his profession. Tiepin and cane, dove-grey morning coat, curly brimmed topper, and good boots. His whole manner, with that patronising hale-fellow-snooks-to-you tone, suggested he was in funds — which made him my long-lost friend.

The Criterion was handy, so I suggested we repair to the bar for drinks. The question of who paid for them would be settled when Archie was fuddleheaded from several whiskies. I fed him that shut-out-of-my-usual-suite line and considered a hard-luck story trading on my status as hero of the Jowaki Campaign — though I doubted an inky-fingered felon would put much stock in far-flung tales of imperial daring.

Stamford’s eyes shone, in a manner which reminded me unpleasantly of my late feline dancing partner. He sucked on his teeth, torn between saying something and keeping mum. It was a manner I would soon come to recognise as common to those in the employ of my soon-to-be benefactor.

‘As it happens, Bash old chap, I know a billet that might suit you. Comfortable rooms in Conduit Street, above Mrs Halifax’s establishment. You know Mrs H.?’

‘Used to keep a knocking-shop in Stepney? Arm-wrestler’s biceps and an eight-inch tongue?’

‘That’s the one. She’s West End now. Part of a combine, you might say. A thriving firm.’

‘What she sells is always in demand.’

‘True, but it’s not just the whoring. There’s other business. A man of vision, you might say, has done some thinking. About my line of trade, and Mrs Halifax’s, and, as it were, yours.’

I was about at the end of my rope with Archie. He was talking in a familiar, insinuating, creeping-round-behind-you-with-a-cosh manner I didn’t like. Implying that I was a tradesman did little for my ruddy temper. I was strongly tempted to give him one of my speciality thumps, which involves a neat little screw of my big fat regimental ring into the old eyeball, and see how his dove-grey coat looked with dirty great blobs of snotty blood down the front. After that, a quick fist into his waistcoat would leave him gasping, and give me the chance to fetch away his watch and chain, plus any cash he had on him. Of course, I’d check the spelling of ‘Bank of England’ on the notes before spending them. I could make it look like a difference of opinion between gentlemen. And no worries about it coming back to me. Stamford wouldn’t squeal to the peelers. If he wanted to pursue the matter I could always give him a second helping.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, as if he could read my mind.

That was a dash of Himalayan melt water to the face.

Catching sight of myself in the long mirror behind the bar, I saw my cheeks had gone a nasty shade of red. More vermilion than crimson. My fists were knotted, white-knuckled, around the rail. This, I understand, is what I look like before I ‘go off’. You can’t live through all I have without ‘going off’ from time to time. Usually, I ‘come to’ in handcuffs between policemen with black eyes. The other fellow or fellows or lady is too busy being carried away to hospital to press charges.

Still, a ‘tell’ is a handicap for a card player. And my red face gave warning.

Stamford smiled like someone who knows there’s a confederate behind the curtain with a bead drawn on the back of your neck and a finger on the trigger.

Libertè, hah!

‘Have you popped your guns, Colonel?’

I would pawn, and indeed have pawned, the family silver. I’d raise money on my medals, ponce my sisters (not that anyone would pay for the hymn-singing old trouts) and sell Royal Navy torpedo plans to the Russians… but a man’s guns are sacred. Mine were at the Anglo-Indian Club, oiled and wrapped and packed away in cherrywood cases, along with a kitbag full of assorted cartridges. If any cats got out of Regent’s Park Zoo, I’d be well set up to use a hansom for a howdah and track them along Oxford Street.

Stamford knew from my look what an outrage he had suggested. This wasn’t the red-hot pillar-box-faced Basher bearing down on him, this was the deadly icy calm of — and other folks have said this, so it’s not just me boasting — ‘the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has produced’.

‘There’s a fellow,’ he continued, nervously, ‘this man of vision I mentioned. In a roundabout way, he is my employer. Probably the employer of half the folk in this room, whether they know it or not…’

He looked about. It was the usual shower: idlers and painted dames, jostling each other with stuck-on smiles, reaching sticky fingers into jacket pockets and up loose skirts, finely dressed fellows talking of ‘business’ which was no more than powdered thievery, a scattering of moon-faced cretins who didn’t know their size-thirteens gave them away as undercover detectives.

Stamford produced a card and handed it to me.

‘He’s looking for a shooter…’

The fellow could never say the right thing. I am a sportsman, not a keeper. A gun, not a gunslinger. A shot, not a shooter.

Still, game is game…

‘…and you might find him interesting.’

I looked down at the card. It bore the legend ‘Professor James Moriarty’, and an address in Conduit Street.

‘A professor, is it?’ I sneered. I pictured a dusty coot like the stick-men who’d bedevilled me through Eton (interminably) and Oxford (briefly). Or else a music-hall slickster, inflating himself with made-up titles. ‘What might he profess, Archie?’

Stamford was a touch offended, and took back the card. It was as if Archie were a new convert to papism and I’d farted during a sermon from Cardinal Newman.

‘You’ve been out of England a long time, Basher.’

He summoned the barman, who had been eyeing us with that fakir’s trick of knowing who was most likely, fine clothes or not, to do a runner.

‘Will you be paying now, sirs?’

Stamford held up the card and shoved it in the man’s face.

The barman went pale, dug into his own pocket to settle the tab, apologised, and backed off in terror.

Stamford just looked smug as he handed the card back to me.

II

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,’ said the Professor.

‘How the devil did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.

His eyes caught mine. Cobra eyes, they say. Large, clear, cold, grey and fascinating. I’ve met cobras, and they aren’t half as deadly — trust me. I imagine Moriarty left off tutoring because his pupils were too terrified to con their two times table. I seemed to suffer his gaze for a full minute, though only a few seconds passed. It had been like that in the hug of Kali’s Kitten. I’d have sworn on a stack of well-thumbed copies of The Pearl that the mauling went on for an hour of pain, but the procedure was over inside thirty seconds. If I’d had a Webley on my hip, I might have shot the Professor in the heart on instinct — though it’s my guess bullets wouldn’t dare enter him. He had a queer unhealthy light about him. Not unhealthy in himself, but for everybody else.

Suddenly, pacing distractedly about the room, head wavering from side to side as if he had two dozen extra flexible bones in his neck, he began to rattle off facts.

Facts about me.

‘…you are retired from your regiment, resigning at the request of a superior to avoid the mutual disgrace of dishonourable discharge; you have suffered a serious injury at the claws of a beast, are fully recovered physically, but worry your nerve might have gone; you are the son of a late Minister to Persia and have two sisters, your only living relatives beside a number of unacknowledged half-native illegitimates; you are addicted, most of all to gambling, but also to sexual encounters, spirits, the murder of animals and the fawning of a duped public; most of the time, you blunder through life like a bull, snatching and punching to get your own way, but in moments of extreme danger you are possessed by a strange serenity which has enabled you to survive situations that would have killed another man; in fact, your true addiction is to danger, to fear — only near death do you feel alive; you are unscrupulous, amoral, habitually violent and, at present, have no means of income, though your tastes and habits require a constant inflow of money…’

Throughout this performance, I took in Professor James Moriarty. Tall, stooped, hair thin at the temples, cheeks sunken, wearing a dusty (no, chalky) frock coat, sallow as only an indoorsman can be; yellow cigarette stain between his first and second fingers, teeth to match. And, obviously, very pleased with himself.

He reminded me of Gladstone gone wrong. With just a touch of a hill-chief who had tortured me with fire ants.

But I had no patience with his lecture. I’d eaten enough of that from the pater for a lifetime.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I interrupted…

The Professor was unpleasantly surprised. It was as if no one had ever dared break into one of his speeches before. He halted in his tracks, swivelled his skull and levelled those shotgun-barrel-hole eyes at me.

‘I’ve had this done at a bazaar,’ I continued. ‘It’s no great trick. The fortuneteller notices tiny little things and makes dead-eye guesses — you can tell I gamble from the marks on my cuffs, and was in Afghanistan by the colour of my tan. If you spout with enough confidence, you score so many hits the bits you get wrong — like that tommyrot about being addicted to danger — are swallowed and forgotten. I’d expected a better show from your advance notices, “Professor”.’

He slapped me across the face, swiftly, with a hand like wet leather.

Now, I was amazed.

I knew I was vermilion again, and my dukes went up.

Moriarty whirled, coat-tails flying, and his boot-toe struck me in the groin, belly and chest. I found myself sat in a deep chair, too shocked to hurt, pinned down by wiry, strong hands which pressed my wrists to the armrests. That dead face was close up to mine and those eyes horribly filled the view.

That calm he mentioned came on me. And I knew I should just sit still and listen.

‘Only an idiot guesses or reasons or deduces,’ the Professor said, patiently. He withdrew, which meant I could breathe again and become aware of how much pain I was in. ‘No one comes into these rooms unless I know everything about him that can be found out through the simple means of asking behind his back. The public record is easily filled in by looking in any one of a number of reference books, from the Army Guide to Who’s Who. But all the interesting material comes from a man’s enemies. I am not a conjurer, Colonel Moran. I am a scientist.’

There was a large telescope in the room, aimed out of the window. On the walls were astronomical charts and a collection of impaled insects. A long side table was piled with brass, copper and glass contraptions I took for parts of instruments used in the study of the stars or navigation at sea. That shows I wasn’t yet used to the Professor. Everything about him was lethal, and that included his assorted bric-a-brac.

It was hard to miss the small kitten pinned to the mantelpiece by a jackknife. The skewering had been skilfully done, through the velvety skinfolds of the haunches. The animal mewled from time to time, not in any especial pain.

‘An experiment with morphine derivatives,’ he explained, following my gaze. ‘Tibbles will let us know when the effect wears off.’

Moriarty posed by his telescope, bony fingers gripping his lapel.

I remembered Stamford’s manner, puffed up with a feeling he was protected but tinged with terror. At any moment, the great power to which he had sworn allegiance might capriciously or justifiably turn on him with destructive ferocity. I remembered the Criterion barman digging into his own pocket to settle our bill — which, I now realised, was as natural as the Duke of Clarence gumming his own stamps or Florence Nightingale giving sixpenny knee-tremblers in D’Arblay Street.

Beside the Professor, that ant-man was genteel.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, unaccustomed to the reverential tone I heard in my own voice. ‘What are you?’

Moriarty smiled his adder’s smile.

And I relaxed. I knew. My destiny and his wound together. It was a sensation I’d never got before upon meeting a man. When I’d had it from women, the upshot ranged from disappointment to attempted murder. Understand me, Professor James Moriarty was a hateful man, the most hateful, hateable, creature I have ever known, not excluding Sir Augustus and Kali’s Kitten and the Abominable Bloody Snow-Bastard and the Reverend Henry James Prince[8]. He was something man-shaped that had crawled out from under a rock and moved into the manor house. But, at that moment, I was his, and I remain his forever. If I am remembered, it will be because I knew him. From that day on, he was my father, my commanding officer, my heathen idol, my fortune and terror and rapture.

God, I could have done with a stiff drink.

Instead, the Professor tinkled a silly little bell and Mrs Halifax trotted in with a tray of tea. One look and I could tell she was his, too. Stamford had understated the case when he said half the folk in the Criterion Bar worked for Moriarty. My guess is that, at bottom, the whole world worked for him. They’ve called him the Napoleon of Crime, but that’s just putting what he is, what he does, in a cage. He’s not a criminal, he is crime itself, sin raised to an art form, a church with no religion but rapine, a God of Evil. Pardon my purple prose, but there it is. Moriarty brings things out in people, things from their depths.

He poured me tea.

‘I have had an eye on you for some time, Colonel Moran. Some little time. Your dossier is thick, in here…’

He tapped his concave temple.

This was literally true. He kept no notes, no files, no address book or appointment diary. It was all in his head. Someone who knows more than I do about sums told me that Moriarty’s greatest feat was to write The Dynamics of an Asteroid, his magnum opus, in perfect first draft. From his mind to paper, with no preliminary notations or pencilled workings, never thinking forward to plan or skipping back to correct. As if he were singing ‘one long, pure note of astro-mathematics, like a castrato nightingale delivering a hundred-thousand-word telegram from Prometheus.’

‘You have come to these rooms and have already seen too much to leave…’

An ice-blade slid through my ribs into my heart.

‘…except as, we might say, one of the family’.

The ice melted, and I felt tingly and warm. With the phrase, ‘one of the family’, he had arched his eyebrow invitingly.

He stroked Tibbles, who was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.

‘We are a large family, many cells with no knowledge of each other, devoted to varied pursuits. Most, though not all, are concerned with money. I own that other elements of our enterprise interest me far more. We are alike in that. You only think you gamble for money. In fact, you gamble to lose. You even hunt to lose, knowing you must eventually be eaten by a predator more fearsome than yourself. For you, it is an emotional, instinctual, sensual thrill. For me, there are intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual rewards. But, inconveniently, money must come into it. A great deal of money.’

As I said, he had me sold already. If a great deal of money was to be had, Moran was in.

‘The Firm is available for contract work. You understand? We have clients who bring problems to us. We solve them, using whatever skills we have to hand. If there is advantage to us beyond the agreed fee, we seize it…’

He made a fist in the air, as if squeezing a microbe to death.

‘…if our interests happen to run counter to those of the client, we settle the matter in such a way that is ultimately convenient to us, while our patron does not realise precisely what has happened. This, also, you understand?’

‘Too right, Professor,’ I said.

‘Good. I believe we shall have satisfaction of each other.’

I sipped my tea. Too milky, too pale. It always is after India. I think they put curry powder in the pot out there, or else piddle in the sahib’s crockery when he’s not looking.

‘Would you care for one of Mrs Halifax’s biscuits?’ he asked, as if he were the vicar entertaining the chairwoman of the beneficent fund. ‘Vile things, but you might like them.’

I dunked and nibbled. Mrs H. was a better madame than baker. Which led me to wonder what fancies might be buttered up in the rooms below the Professor’s lair.

‘Colonel Moran, I am appointing you as head of one of our most prestigious divisions. It is a post for which you are eminently qualified by achievement and aptitude. Technically, you are superior to all in the Firm. You are expected to take up residence here, in this building. A generous salary comes with the position. And profit participation in, ah, “special projects”. One such matter is at hand, and we shall come to it when we receive our next caller, Mister — no, not Mister, Elder — Elder Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio.’

‘I’m flattered,’ I responded. ‘A “generous salary” would solve my problems, not to mention the use of a London flat. But, Moriarty, what is this division you wish me to head? Why am I such a perfect fit for it? What, specifically, is its business?’

Moriarty smiled again.

‘Did I omit to mention that?’

‘You know damn well you did!’

‘Murder, my dear Moran. Its business is murder.’

III

Barely ten minutes after my appointment as Chief Executive Director of Homicide, Ltd., I was awaiting our first customer.

I mused humorously that I might offer an introductory special, say a garrotting thrown in gratis with every five poisonings. Perhaps there should be a half-rate for servants? A sliding scale of fees, depending on the number of years a prospective victim might reasonably expect to have lived had a client not retained our services?

I wasn’t yet thinking the Moriarty way. Hunting I knew to be a serious avocation. Murder was for bounders and cosh-men, hardly even killing at all. I’m not squeamish about taking human life: Quakers don’t get decorated after punitive actions against Afghan tribesmen. But not one of the heap of unwashed heathens I’d laid in the dust in the service of Queen and Empire had given me a quarter the sport of the feeblest tiger I ever bagged.

Shows you how little I knew then.

The Professor chose not to receive Elder Drebber in his own rooms, but made use of the brothel parlour. The room was well supplied with plushly upholstered divans, laden at this early evening hour with plushly upholstered tarts. It occurred to me that my newfound position with the Firm might entitle me to handle the goods. I even took the trouble mentally to pick out two or three bints who looked ripe for what ladies the world over have come to know as the Basher Moran Special. Imagine the Charge of the Light Brigade between silk sheets, or over a dresser table, or in an alcove of a Ranee’s Palace, or up the Old Kent Road, or… well, anywhere really.

As soon as I sat down, the whores paid attention, cooing and fluttering like doves, positioning themselves to their best advantage. As soon as the Professor walked in, the flock stood down, finding minute imperfections in fingernails or hair that needed rectifying.

Moriarty looked at the dollies and then at me, constructing something on his face that might have passed for a salacious, comradely leer but came out wrong. The bare-teeth grin of a chimpanzee, taken for a cheery smile by sentimental zoo visitors, is really a frustrated snarl of penned, homicidal fury. The Professor also had an alien range of expression, which others misinterpreted at their peril.

Mrs Halifax ushered in our American callers.

Enoch J. Drebber — why d’you think Yankees are so keen on those blasted middle initials? — was a barrel-shaped fellow, sans moustache but with a fringe of tight black curls all the way round his face. He wore simple, expensive black clothes and a look of stern disapproval.

The girls ignored him. I sensed he was on the point of fulminating.

I didn’t need one of the Professor’s ‘background checks’ to get Drebber’s measure. He was one of those odd godly bods who get voluptuous pleasure from condemning the fleshly failings of others. As a Mormon, he could bag as many wives as he wanted — on-tap whores and unpaid skivvies corralled together. His right eye roamed around the room, on the scout for the eighth or ninth Mrs Drebber, while his left was fixed straight ahead at the Professor.

With him came a shifty cove by the name of Brother Stangerson who kept quiet but paid attention.

‘Elder Drebber, I am Professor Moriarty. This is Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of the First Bangalore…’

Drebber coughed, interrupting the niceties.

‘You’re who to see in this city if a Higher Law is called for?’

Moriarty showed empty hands.

‘A man must die, and that’s the story,’ Drebber said. ‘He should have died in South Utah, years ago. He’s a murderer, plain and flat, and an abductor of women. Hauled out his six-gun and shot Bishop Dyer, in front of the whole town. A crime against God. Then fetched away Jane Withersteen, a good Mormon woman, and her adopted child, Little Fay. He threw down a mountain on his pursuers, crushing Elder Tull and many good Mormon men[9]. Took away gold that was rightful property of the Church, stole it right out of the ground. The Danite Band have been pursuing him ever since…’

‘The Danites are a cabal within the Church of Latter-day Saints,’ Moriarty explained.

‘God’s good right hand is what we are,’ insisted Drebber. ‘When the laws of men fail, the unworthy must be smitten, as if by lightning.’

I got the drift. The Danites were cossacks, assassins and vigilantes wrapped up in a Bible name. Churches, like nations, need secret police forces to keep the faithful in line.

‘Who is this, ah, murderer and abductor?’ I asked.

‘His name, if such a fiend deserves a name, is Lassiter. Jim Lassiter.’

This was clearly supposed to get a reaction. The Professor kept his own council. I admitted I’d never heard of the fellow.

‘Why, he’s the fastest gun in the South West. Around Cottonwoods, they said he struck like a serpent, drawing and discharging in one smooth, deadly motion. Men he killed were dead before they heard the sound of the shot. Lassiter could take a man’s eye out at three-hundred yards with a pistol.’

That’s a fairy story. Take it from someone who knows shooting. A side arm is handy for close work, as when, for example, a tiger has her talons in your tit. With anything further away than a dozen yards, you might as well throw the gun as fire it.

I kept my scepticism to myself. The customer is always right, even in the murder business.

‘This Lassiter,’ I ventured. ‘Where might he be found?’

‘In this city,’ Drebber decreed. ‘We are here, ah, on the business of the Church. The Danites have many enemies, and each of us knows them all. I was half expecting to come across another such pestilence, a cur named Jefferson Hope who need not concern you, but it was Lassiter I happened upon, walking in your Ly-cester Square on Sunday afternoon. I saw the Withersteen woman first, then the girl, chattering for hot chestnuts. I knew the apostate for who she was. She has been thrice condemned and outcast…’

‘You said she was abducted,’ put in the Professor. ‘Now you imply she is with Lassiter of her own will?’

‘He’s a Devil of persuasion, to make a woman refuse an Elder of the Church and run off with a damned Gentile. She has no mind of her own, like all women, and cannot fully be blamed for her sins…’

If Drebber had a horde of wives around the house and still believed that, he was either very privileged or very unobservant.

‘Still, she must be brought to heel. Though the girl will do as well. A warm body must be taken back to Utah, to come into an inheritance.’

‘Cottonwoods,’ said Moriarty. ‘The ranch, the outlying farms, the cattle, the racehorses and, thanks to those inconveniently upheld claims, the fabulous gold mines of Surprise Valley.’

‘The Withersteen property, indeed. When it was willed to her by her father, a great man, it was on the understanding she would become the wife of Elder Tull, and Cottonwoods would come into the Church. Were it not for this Lassiter, that would have been the situation.’

Profits, not parsons, were behind this.

‘The Withersteen property will come to the girl, Fay, upon the death of the adoptive mother?’

‘That is the case.’

‘One or other of the females must be alive?’

‘Indeed so.’

‘Which would you prefer? The woman or the girl?’

‘Jane Withersteen is the more steeped in sin, so there would be a certain justice…’

‘…if she were topped too,’ I finished his thought.

Elder Drebber wasn’t comfortable with that, but nodded.

‘Are these three going by their own names?’

‘They are not,’ said Drebber, happier to condemn enemies than contemplate his own schemes against them. ‘This Lassiter has steeped his women in falsehood, making them bear repeated false witness, over and over. That such crimes should go unpunished is an offence to God Himself…’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said. ‘But what names are they using, and where do they live?’

Drebber was tugged out of his tirade, and thought hard.

‘I caught only the false name of Little Fay. The Withersteen woman called her “Rache”, doubtless a diminutive for the godly name “Rachel”…’

‘Didn’t you think to tail these, ah, varmints, to their lair?’

Drebber was offended. ‘Lassiter is the best tracker the South West has ever birthed. Including Apaches. If I dogged him, he’d be on me faster’n a rattler on a coon.’

The Elder’s vocabulary was mixed. Most of the time, he remembered to sound like a preacher working up a lather against sin and sodomy. When excited, he sprinkled in terms which showed him up for — in picturesque ‘Wild West’ terms — a back-shooting, claim-jumping, cow-rustling, waterhole-poisoning, horse-thieving, side-winding owlhoot son of a bitch.

‘Surely he thinks he’s safe here and will be off his guard?’

‘You don’t know Lassiter.’

‘No, and, sadly for us all, neither do you. At least, you don’t know where he hangs his hat.’

Drebber was deflated.

Moriarty said, ‘Mr and Mrs James Lassiter and their daughter Fay currently reside at The Laurels, Streatham Hill Road, under the names Jonathan, Helen and Rachel Laurence.’

Drebber and I looked at the Professor. He had enjoyed showing off.

Even Stangerson clapped a hand to his sweaty forehead.

‘Considering there’s a fabulous gold mine at issue, I consider fifty thousand a fair price for contriving the death of Mr Laurence,’ said Moriarty, as if putting a price on a fish supper. ‘With an equal sum for his lady wife.’

Drebber nodded again, once. ‘The girl comes with the package?’

‘I think a further hundred thousand for her safekeeping, to be redeemed when we give her over into the charge of your church.’

‘Another hundred thousand pounds?’

‘Guineas, Elder Drebber.’

He thought about it, swallowed, and stuck out his paw.

‘Deal, Professor…’

Moriarty regarded the American’s hand. He turned and Mrs Halifax was beside him with a salver bearing a document.

‘Such matters aren’t settled with a handshake, Elder Drebber. Here is a contract, suitably circumlocutionary as to the nature of the services Colonel Moran will be performing, but meticulously exact in detailing payments entailed and the strict schedule upon which monies are to be transferred. It’s legally binding, for what that’s worth, but a contract with us is enforceable under what you have referred to as a Higher Law…’

The Professor stood by a lectern, which bore an open, explicitly illustrated volume of the sort found in establishments like Mrs Halifax’s for occasions when inspiration flags. He unrolled the document over a coloured plate, then plucked a pen from an inkwell and presented it to Drebber.

The Elder made a pretence of reading the rubric and signed.

Professor Moriarty pressed a signet ring to the paper, impressing a stylised M below Drebber’s dripping scrawl.

The document was whisked away.

‘Good day, Elder Drebber.’

Moriarty dismissed the client, who backed out of the room.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to Stangerson, who stuck on the hat he had been fiddling with and scarpered.

One of the girls giggled at his departure, then remembered herself and pretended it was a hiccough. She paled under her rouge at the Professor’s sidelong glance.

‘Colonel Moran, have you given any thought to hunting a Lassiter?’

IV

A jungle is a jungle, even if it’s in Streatham and is made up of villas named after shrubs.

In my coat pocket I had my Webley.

If I were one of those cowboys, I’d have notched the barrel after killing Kali’s Kitten. Then again, even if I only counted white men and tigers, I didn’t own any guns with a barrels long enough to keep score. A gentleman doesn’t need to list his accomplishments or his debts, since there are always clerks to keep tally. I might not have turned out to be a pukka gent, but I was flogged and fagged at Eton beside future cabinet ministers and archbishops, and some skins you never shed.

It was bloody cold, as usual in London. Not raining, no fog — which is to say, no handy cover of darkness — but the ground chill rose through my boots and a nasty wind whipped my face like wet pampas grass.

The only people outside this afternoon were hurrying about their business with scarves around their ears, obviously part of the landscape. I had decided to toddle down and poke around, as a preliminary to the business in hand. Call it a recce.

Before setting out, I’d had the benefit of a lecture from the Professor. He had devoted a great deal of thought to murder. He could have written the Baedeker’s or Bradshaw’s of the subject. It would probably have to be published anonymously — A Complete Guide to Murder, by ‘A Distinguished Theorist’ — and then be liable to seizure or suppression by the philistines of Scotland Yard.

‘Of course, Moran, murder is the easiest of all crimes, if murder is all one has in mind. One simply presents one’s card at the door of the intended victim, is ushered into his sitting room and blows his or, in these enlightened times her, brains out with a revolver. If one has omitted to bring along a firearm, a poker or candlestick will serve. Physiologically, it is not difficult to kill another person, to perform outrages upon a human corpus which will render it a human corpse. Strictly speaking, this is a successful murder. Of course, then comes the second, far more challenging part of the equation: getting away with it.’

I’d been stationed across the road from The Laurels for a quarter of an hour, concealed behind bushes, before I noticed I was in Streatham Hill Rise not Streatham Hill Road. This was another Laurels, with another set of residents. This was a boarding house for genteel folk of a certain age. I was annoyed enough, with myself and the locality, to consider potting the landlady just for the practice.

If I held the deeds to this district and the Black Hole of Calcutta, I’d live in the Black Hole and rent out Streatham. Not only was it beastly cold, but stultifyingly dull. Row upon monotonous row of The Lupins, The Laburnums, The Leilandii and The Laurels. No wonder I was in the wrong spot.

‘It is a little-known fact that most murderers don’t get away with it. They are possessed by an emotion — at first, perhaps, a mild irritation about the trivial habit of a wife, mother, master or mistress. This develops over time, sprouting like a seed, to the point when only the death of another will bring peace. These murderers go happy to the gallows, free at last of their victim’s clacking false teeth or unconscious chuckle or penny-pinching. We shun such as amateurs. They undertake the most profound action one human being can perform upon another, and fail to profit from the enterprise.’

No, I had not thought to purchase one of those penny-maps. Besides, anyone on the street with a map is obviously a stranger. Thus the sort who, after the fact, lodges in the mind of witnesses. ‘Did you see anyone suspicious in the vicinity, Madam Busybody?’ ‘Why yes, Sergeant Flat-Foot, a lost-looking fellow, very red in the face, peering at street signs. Come to think of it, he looked like a murderer. And he was the very spit and image of that handsome devil whose picture was in the Illustrated Press after single-handedly seeing off the Afghan hordes that time.’

‘Our business is murder for profit, killing for cash,’ Moriarty had put it. ‘We do not care about our clients’ motives, providing they meet the price. They may wish murder to gain an inheritance, inflict revenge, make a political point or from sheer spite. In this case, all four conditions are in play. The Danite Band, represented by Elder Drebber, seek to secure the gold mine, avenge the deaths of their fellow conspirators, indicate to others who might defy them that they are dangerous to cross, and see dead a foeman they are not skilled enough to best by themselves.’

What was the use of a fanatical secret society if it couldn’t send a horde of expendable minions to overwhelm the family? These Danite Desperadoes weren’t up there with the Thuggee or the Dacoits when it came to playing that game. If the cabal really sought to usurp the governance of their church, which the Professor confided they had in mind, a greater quantity of sand would be required.

‘For centuries, the art of murder has stagnated. Edged weapons, blunt instruments and bare hands that would have served our ancient ancestors are still in use. Even poisons were perfected in classical times. Only in the last hundred and fifty years have fire arms come to dominate the murder market place. For the cruder assassin, the explosive device — whether planted or flung — has made a deal of noise, though at the expense of accuracy. Presently, guns and bombs are more suited to the indiscriminate slaughter of warfare or massacre than the precision of wilful murder. That, Moran, we must change. If guns can be silenced, if skills you have developed against big game can be employed in the science of man-slaying, then the field will be revolutionised.’

I beetled glumly up and down Streatham Hill.

‘Imagine, if you will, a Minister of State or a Colossus of Finance or a Royal Courtesan, protected at all hours by professionals, beyond the reach of any would-be murderer, vulnerable only to the indiscriminate anarchist with his oh-so-inaccurate bomb and willingness to be a martyr to his cause. Then think of a man with a rifle, stationed at a window or on a balcony some distance from the target, with a telescopic device attached to his weapon, calmly drawing a bead and taking accurate, deadly shots. A sniper, Moran, as used in war, brought to bear in a civilian circumstance, a private enterprise. While guards panic around their fallen employer, in a tizzy because they don’t even know where the shot has come from, our assassin packs up and strolls away untroubled, unseen and untraced. That will be the murder of the future, Moran. The scientific murder.’

Then the Professor rattled on about airguns, which lost me. Only little boys and poofs would deign to touch a contraption which needs to be pumped before use and goes off with a sad phut rather than a healthy bang. Kali’s Kitten would have swallowed an airgun whole and taken an arm along with it. The whiff of cordite, that’s the stuff — better than cocaine any day of the month. And the big bass drum thunder of a gun going off.

Finally, I located the right Laurels.

Evening was coming on. Gaslight flared behind net curtains. More shadows to slip in. I felt comfy, as if I had thick foliage around me. My ears pricked for the pad of a big cat. I found a nice big tree and leaned against it.

I took out an instrument Moriarty had issued from his personal collection, a spyglass tricked up to look like a hip flask. Off came the stopper and there was an eye piece. Up to the old ocular as if too squiffy to crook the elbow with precision, and the bottom of the bottle was another lens. Brought a scene up close, in perfect, sharp focus.

Lovely bit of kit.

I saw into the front parlour of The Laurels. A fire was going and the whole household was at home. A ripening girl, who wore puffs and ribbons more suited to the nursery, flounced around tiresomely. I saw her mouth flap, but — of course — couldn’t hear what she was saying. A woman sat by the fire, nodding and doing needlework, occasionally flashing a tight smile. I focused on the chit, Fay-called-Rachel, then on the mother, Helen Laurence-alias-Jane Withersteen. I recalled the daughter was adopted, and wondered what that was all about. The woman was no startler, with grey in her dark hair as if someone had cracked an egg over her head and let it run. The girl might do in a pinch. Looking again at her animated face, it hit me that she was feeble-witted.

The man, Jonathan Laurence-né-Jim Lassiter, had his back to the window. He seemed to be nodding stiffly, then I realised he was in a rocking chair. I twisted a screw and the magnification increased. I saw the back of his neck, tanned, and the sharp cut of his hair, slick with pomade. I even made out the ends of his moustache, wide enough to prick out either side of the silhouette of his head.

So this was the swiftest pistolero west of the Pecos?

I admit I snorted.

This American idiocy about drawing and firing, taking aim in a split-second, is stuff and nonsense. Anyone who wastes their time learning how to do conjuring tricks getting their gun out is likely to find great red holes in their shirt-front (or, in most cases, back) before they’ve executed their fanciest twirl. That’s if they don’t shoot their own nose off by mistake. Bill Hickok, Jesse James and Billy the Kid were all shot dead while unarmed or asleep by folk far less famous and skilled.

Dash it all, I was going to chance it. All I had to do was take out the Webley, cross the road, creep into the front garden, stand outside the window, and blast Mr and Mrs Laurence where they sat.

The fun part would be snatching the girl.

Carpe diem, they said at Eton. Take your shot, I learned in the jungle. Nothing ruddy ventured, nothing bloody gained.

I stoppered the spyglass and slipped it into my breast pocket. Using it had an odd side effect. My mouth was dry and I really could have done with a swallow of something. But I had surrendered my proper hip flask in exchange for the trick telescope. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Perhaps Moriarty could whip me up a flask disguised as a pocket watch. And, if timekeeping was important, a pocket watch disguised as something I’d never need, like a prayer book or a tin of fruit pastilles.

The girl was demonstrating some dance now. Really, I would do the couple a favour by getting them out of this performance.

I reached into my coat pocket and gripped my Webley. I took it out slowly and carefully — no nose-ectomy shot for Basher Moran — and cocked it with my thumb. The sound was tinier than a click you’d make with your tongue against your teeth.

Suddenly, Lassiter wasn’t in view. He was out of his chair and beyond sight of the window.

I was dumbfounded.

Then the lights went out. Not only the gas, but the fire — doused by a bucket, I’d guess. The womenfolk weren’t in evidence, either.

One tiny click!

A finger stuck out from a curtain and tapped the windowpane.

No, not a finger. A tube. If I’d had the glass out, I could confirm what I intuited. The bump at the end of the tube was a sight. Lassiter, the fast gun, had drawn his iron.

I had fire in my belly. I smelled the dying breath of Kali’s Kitten.

I changed my estimate of the American. What had seemed a disappointing, drab day outing was now a worthwhile safari, a game worth the chase.

He wouldn’t come out of the front door, of course.

He needn’t come out at all. First, he’d secure the mate and cub — a stronghold in the cellar, perhaps. Then he’d get a wall behind his back and wait. To be bearded in his lair. If only I had a bottle of paraffin, or even a box of matches. Then I could fire The Laurels: they’d have to come out and Lassiter would be distracted by females in panic. No, even then, there was a back garden. I’d have needed beaters, perhaps a second and third gun.

Moriarty had said he could put reliable men at my disposal for the job, but I’d pooh-poohed the suggestion. Natives panic and run, lesser guns get in the way. I was best off on my tod.

I had to rethink. Lassiter was on his guard now. He could cut and run, spirit his baggages off with him. Go to ground so we’d never find him again.

My face burned. Suddenly I was afraid, not of the gunslinger but of the Prof. I would have to tell him of my blunder.

One bloody click, that was all it was! Damn and drat.

I knew, even on brief acquaintance, Moriarty did not merely dismiss people from the Firm. He was no mere theoretician of murder.

Moran’s head, stuffed, on Moriarty’s wall. That would be the end of it.

I eased the cock of the Webley shut and pocketed the gun.

A cold circle pressed to the back of my neck.

‘Reach, pardner,’ said a deep, foreign, marrow-freezing voice. ‘And mighty slow like.’

V

My father always said I’d wind up with a noose around my neck. Even Sir Augustus did not predict said noose would be strung from a pretentious chandelier and attached firmly to a curtain rail.

I was stood on a none-too-sturdy occasional table, hands tied behind my back with taut, biting twine. Only the thickness of my boot heels kept me from throttling at once.

Here was a ‘how-d’you-do?’.

The parlour of The Laurels was still unlit, the curtains drawn. Unable to look down, I was aware of the people in the room but no more.

The man, Lassiter, had raised a bump on my noggin with his pistol butt.

I had an idea this was still better than an interview with a disappointed Professor Moriarty.

On the table, by my boot toes, were my Webley, broken and unloaded, the flask-glass, my folding knife, my (emptyish) notecase, three French postcards and a watch which had a sentiment from ‘Violet, to Algy’ engraved inside.

‘Okay, Algy,’ drawled Lassiter, ‘listen up…’

I didn’t feel inclined to correct his assumption.

‘We’re gonna have a little talk-like. I’m gonna ask questions, and you can give answers. Understand?’

I tried to stand very still.

Lassiter kicked the table, which wobbled. Rough hemp cut into my throat.

I nodded my understanding, bringing tears to my eyes.

‘Fine and dandy.’

He was behind me. The woman was in the room too, keeping quiet, probably holding the girl to keep her from fidgeting.

‘You ain’t no Mormon,’ Lassiter said.

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.

The table rocked again. Evidently, it had been a question.

‘I’m not a Mormon,’ I said, with difficulty. ‘No.’

‘But you’re with the Danite Band?’

I had to think about that.

A loud noise sounded and the table splintered. A slice of it sheared away. I had to hop to keep balance on what was left.

My ears rang. It was seconds before I could make out what was being said.

‘Noise-some, ain’t it? You’ll be hearin’ that fer days.’

It wasn’t the bang — I’ve heard enough bangs in my time — it was the smell, the discharged gun smell. It cleared my head.

The noose at my throat cut deep.

I had heard — in the prefects’ common room at Eton, not any of the bordellos or dives I’ve frequented since those horrible days — that being hanged, if only for a few seconds, elicits a peculiar physiological reaction in the human male. Connoisseurs reckon this a powerful erotic, on a par with the ministrations of the most expert houri. I was now, embarrassingly, in a position to confirm sixth-form legend.

A gasp from the woman suggested the near-excruciating bulge in my fly was externally evident.

‘Why, you low, disgustin’ snake,’ said Lassiter. ‘In the presence of a lady, to make such a…’

Words failed him. I was in no position to explain this unsought, involuntary response.

Arbuthnot, captain of the second eleven, now active in a movement for the suppression of licentious music hall performance, maintained this throttling business was more pleasurable if the self-strangulator dressed as a ballerina and sucked a boiled sweet dipped in absinthe.

I could not help but wish Arbuthnot were here now to test his theory, instead of me.

‘Jim, Jim, what are we to do?’ the woman said. ‘They know where we are. I told you they’d never give up. Not after Surprise Valley.’

Her voice, shrill and desperate, was sweet to me. I knew from the quality of Lassiter’s silence that his wife’s whining was no help to him.

I began to see the advantages of my situation.

I had been through the red rage and fear of peril and come to the cold calm clearing.

‘At present, Mr and Mrs Lassiter,’ I began in somewhat strangulated voice, giving them their true names, ‘you are pursued only by foreign cranks whose authority will never be recognised by British law. If your story were known, popular sympathy would be with you and the Danites further frustrated. Those I represent would make sure of that.’

‘Who do you represent, Algy?’

That was the question I’d never answer, not if he shot all the legs off the table and let me kick. Even if I died, Moriarty would use spiritualist mediums to lay hands on my ectoplasm and double my sufferings.

‘If I step off this table, your circumstances will change,’ I said. ‘You will be murderers, low and cowardly killers of a hero of the British Empire…’

Never hurts to mention the old war record.

‘Under whatever names you take, you will be hunted by Scotland Yard, the most formidable police force in the world…’

Well, formidable in the size of the seats of their blue serge trousers…

‘All hands will be against you.’

I shut up and let them stew.

‘He’s right, Jim. We can’t just kill him.’

‘He drew first,’ Lassiter said.

‘This isn’t Amber Springs.’

I imagined the climate was somewhat more congenial in Amber Springs, wherever that might be. The community’s relative lack of policemen, judges, lawyers, gaolers, court reporters and engravers for the Police Gazette — which in other circumstances would have given it the edge over Streatham in my book — was suddenly not a point in its favour.

Even with my ringing ears, I heard the click. Lassiter cocked his gun.

He walked around the table, so he could at least shoot me to my face. It was still dark, so I couldn’t get much of a look at him.

‘Jim,’ protested Jane-Helen.

There was a flash of fire. For an instant, Lassiter’s fiercely moustached face lit orange.

The table was out from under me, and the noose dragged at my Adam’s apple.

I expected the wave of pain to come in my chest.

Instead, I fell to the floor, with the chandelier, the rope-coil and quite a bit of plaster on top of me. I was choking, but not fatally. Which, under the circumstances, was all I could ask for.

A tutu and a sweetie would not have made me feel more alive.

Lassiter kicked me in the side, the low dog. Then the woman held him back.

That futile boot was encouraging. The fast gun was losing his rag.

Gaslight came up. Hands disentangled me from the brass fixtures and the noose, then brushed plaster out of my hair and off my face.

I looked up, blinking, at a very pink angel.

‘Wuvvwy mans,’ said the glassy-eyed girl, ‘Rache want to keep um.’

VI

Though still tied — indeed, with my ankles bound as well — I was far more comfortable than I had been.

I was propped up on a divan in the parlour of The Laurels. Rache — the former Little Fay — was playing with my hair, chattering about her new pet. She must have been fifteen or sixteen, but acted like a six- or seven-year-old. I remembered to smile as she cooed in my ears. Children can turn suddenly, and I had an idea this child-minded girl could be as deadly as her foster father if prodded into a tantrum.

She introduced me to her doll, Missy Surprise. This was a long-legged, homemade, one-armed ragdoll with most of her yellow wool hair chewed off. She got her name because there was a hiding place in her tummy, where Rache kept her ‘pweciousnesses’ — cigar-tubes full of sweets.

The ‘Laurences’ were still undecided about what to do with me.

It’s all very well being a gunslinger, but skills that serve in the Wild West — or the jungle, come to that — need to be modified in Streatham. At least, that was the case if you were a fair-play fathead like Jim Lassiter.

These were truly good, put-upon people. That made them weak.

Rache kissed my ear, wetly.

‘Stop that, darling,’ said her mother.

Rache stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her brows.

‘Don’t be a silly, Rache.’

‘Rache not a silly,’ she said, knotting little fists. ‘Rache smart, ’oo knows it.’

Jane-Helen melted, and pulled the girl away from me, hugging her.

‘Not so tighty-tight,’ protested Rache.

Lassiter sat across the room, gun in hand, glowering.

Earlier, he had been forced to tell a deputation of concerned neighbours that Rache had dropped a lot of crockery. No one could possibly mistake gunshots for smashing plates, but they’d retreated. Blaming the girl had put her in a sulk for a moment, and inclined her even more to take my part.

This blossoming idiot was heiress to a fabulous gold mine.

‘We could offer him money,’ Jane-Helen said, as if I weren’t in the room.

‘He won’t take money,’ Lassiter said, glumly and — I might add — without consulting me for an opinion.

‘You, sir, Algy…’ began the woman.

‘Arbuthnot,’ I said, ‘Colonel Algernon Arbuthnot, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers…’

A right rabble, that lot. All their war wounds were in the bum, from running away.

‘Hero of Maiwand and Kandahar…’

I’d have claimed Crécy and Waterloo if I thought they’d swallow it.

‘Victoria Cross.’

‘’Toria Ross,’ echoed Rache, delighted.

‘Colonel Arbuthnot, what is your connection with the Danite Band?’

‘Madam, I am a detective. Our agency has been on the tracks of these villains for some months, with regards to their many crimes…’

She looked, hopeful, at Lassiter. She wanted to believe the rot, but he knew better.

‘…when we were alerted to the presence in London of dangerous Danites, well off their usual patch as you’ll agree, we made a connection. Of course, we knew you were here under an alias. We had no reason to bother you, but the movements of incognito Americans — possessed of fabulous riches, but content to live in genteel anonymity — are noticed, you know. If we could find you, so could they. We’ve had men on you round the clock for two weeks…’

That was a mistake. Lassiter stopped listening. Anyone who could hear a cocking pistol through a window and across the road would have noticed if he were being marked.

‘…if I’m not at my post when my replacement arrives, the agency will know something is amiss.’

Jane-Helen looked hard at me. She hadn’t bought it either.

Still, in the short term, my story would be hard to disprove. I had introduced a notion that would snag and grow. That I was to be relieved, that confederates would be arriving soon.

Lassiter’s sensitive ears would be twitching.

Every cat padding over a garden wall or tile falling off an ill-made roof would sound like evidence of a surrounding force to our rider of the purple sage.

‘Algy wants to see Rache ’utterflee dance now,’ announced the girl.

She fluttered dramatically about the room, trailing ribbons, inflating sleeves and lifting skirts. One of her stockings was bagged around her ankle.

‘’Utterflee ’utterfly, meee oh myyy,’ she sang.

Lassiter’s face was dark and heavy. I was quite pleased with myself.

I snuck a peek at the clock on the mantel and made sure I was noticed doing it.

‘’Utterfly ’utterflee, look at meee…’

Lassiter chewed his moustache. Jane-Helen seemed greyer. And I was almost starting to enjoy myself again.

Then the front window smashed in and something black and fizzing burst through the curtains.

I saw a burning fuse.

VII

Lassiter got his boot on the fuse, killing the flame.

‘That’s not dynamite,’ I said, helpfully. ‘It’s a smoke charge. They want you to run out the front door. Into the line of fire.’

I didn’t mention that I’d thought of something similar.

‘Jim, they’re out there,’ Jane said.

‘Asty mans,’ Rache said, peeved by the interruption.

There was a crack. More glass broke behind the curtains. A ragged hole appeared in the velvet. I’d not heard the shot. Another shattering and the curtain whipped with the impact. And again.

‘Untie me and I can help,’ I said.

Lassiter wasn’t sure but Jane fell for it. She did my hands while Rache unpicked the knots at my ankles. I took my Webley from the floor, shaking off the flakes of plaster. Of course, it was empty.

The curtain rail, rope still attached, fell off the wall as another silent fusillade came. Cold wind blew through the ruined window. More panes were shot out.

The neighbours would be around again soon. This was not the thing for a respectable street.

Bullets ploughed into the floor, rucking the carpet, and the opposite wall. Our sniper had an elevated position.

I waved my gun, to attract Lassiter’s attention.

He dug into his pocket and brought out a handful of bullets, which he poured into my palm. I loaded and closed the revolver. I noticed Lassiter noticing how practiced I was. Algy Arbuthnot, VC, was an old soldier and daring detective so that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

‘Where is the gunman? Top floor of the house on the corner?’

Lassiter shook his head.

‘Tree on the other side of the road?’

Lassiter nodded.

I’d been behind that tree earlier. It had been twilight when Lassiter conked me and was full dark now. No one was about when I took my watching spot; now, there were armed hostiles.

‘How many?’

Lassiter held up four fingers, steadily. Then another three, with a wriggle at the wrist. He knew there were four men — Danites? — out there, and felt there might be another three besides.

I’ve come through scrapes with worse odds. From Moriarty’s background check, I knew Jim Lassiter had too.

‘This might be a moment for one of your famous rockslides,’ I ventured.

Lassiter cracked a near-smile.

‘Yup,’ he said.

As Drebber had mentioned, Lassiter was once chased up a mountain by a mob and precipitated a rocky avalanche to sweep them away. His history was studded with such dime-novel exploits.

Was Drebber out there? And Stangerson? With other guns?

My suspicion was that, weighing up their contract with Moriarty & Co., the Danites decided £205,000 was a mite steep for an evening’s work. They had come to us in the first place not because they were leery of doing their own murdering but because this wasn’t their city and they didn’t have any idea how to track Lassiter and his women to their hole. The Professor had come straight out and announced where they were to be found, to show off how bloody clever he was. No thought as to whether Basher might get caught ’twixt the guns. My only consolation was that Moriarty undoubtedly meant what he said about Higher Law. For breaking the deal, he’d probably exterminate the Danite Band to the last man (their horses and dogs too), then arrange a cholera outbreak in Salt Lake City to scythe through the Latter-day Saints.

I, of course, would still be dead.

Lassiter and I were either side of the window, just peeking out at a sliver of night.

Another shot.

I heard a rattling about from one of the nearby houses. A spill of light lay on the street as a front door opened. In that illumination, I glimpsed a figure in rough work clothes. A pointed red hood covered his entire head, big circles cut out for the eyes, gathered at the neck by a drawstring. Our shy soul froze a moment in the light and stepped back, but Lassiter plugged him anyway, reddening one of his eyeholes. He collapsed like an unstrung puppet.

An irritated, bald man in a quilted dressing gown came out of his house, to make further complaint about the infernal racket. He was surprised to find a masked gunman lying dead over his front gate, obscuring the ‘no hawkers or circulars’ sign. The neighbour looked around, astonished.

‘What the devil…’

Someone shot him. Oops, it might have been me. I was always one to blaze away without too much forethought.

Lassiter looked disapproval at me.

A great many curtains fell from fingers in nearby houses.

The neighbour was only winged, but made a noise about it. The fellows who had accompanied him on his earlier deputation put cotton in their ears and went back to bed.

So my shot had accomplished something.

Lassiter looked out of the window, searching for another target.

From where I was, I could easily shoot him in the stomach and try to hold Drebber to coughing up the agreed fee.

Evidently he could hear the wheels turning in my head.

‘Algy,’ he drawled, gun casually aimed my way, ‘how’d you like to go through the winder and draw their fire?’

‘Not very much.’

‘What I reckoned.’

Another bomb sailed through the window, without meeting any obstruction, and rolled on the carpet, pouring thick, nasty smoke. They’d let the fuse burn down before lobbing this one.

‘Is there a back door?’ I asked.

Lassiter looked at me, pitying.

Upwards of four men could surround a villa, easily.

Jane looked at Lassiter like a pioneer wife who trusts her man to save the last three bullets to keep the women out of the clutches of Injuns. I always wondered why those covered wagon bints didn’t backshoot their pious pas and learn to sew blankets and pop out papooses, but I’m well known for my shaky grasp of morality.

Bullets struck the piano, raising strangulated chords.

‘This is London, England,’ Jane said. ‘We left all this behind. Things like this don’t happen here.’

Lassiter looked at me.

We both knew everywhere was like this, herbaceous border in the back garden and ‘Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird’ sheet music propped on the piano or no. He’d have done better going to ground in the Old Jago or Seven Dials, where life was more obviously like this — those rookeries had well-travelled rat runs and escape routes.

The smoke was getting thick and the carpet was on fire.

I saw an empty bucket lying by the grate. The water had been used earlier to douse the fire. That was my fault.

Lassiter chewed his moustache. That was his ‘tell’, the sign he was about to ‘go off’.

‘I’m goin’ out the front door,’ he said.

‘You’ll be killed for sure,’ Jane pleaded.

‘Yup. Maybe I can take enough of ’em with me so’s you and Little Fay can get away clean. You’re a rich woman, Jane. Buy this man, and men like him, and keep buyin’ them. Ring yourself with guns and detectives. The Danites will run dry afore the gold.’

I peeked into the road again. The groaning neighbour was doubled over on the pavement, but the dead Danite had been dragged off.

Fire was coming from at least two points. Just harrying, not trying to hit anyone.

There was someone on the roof. We could tell by the creaking ceiling.

Lassiter filled his guns. He had two Colts with fancy-dan handles. He ought to have had holsters to draw from, but would have to carry them both. Twelve shots. Maybe seven men. He’d get hit several times, no matter how good he was. I might even be able to put a couple in his spine as he strode manfully down the path of The Laurels and claim it was a fumble-fingered accident.

He was an idiot. If it’d been me, I’d have picked up Jane and tossed her, in a froth of skirts, through the window. She was the one they wanted, heiress to the Withersteen property. At the very least, she’d be a tethered goat to draw the big game into range.

I was cold and clear and clever again. The Professor would have been proud.

‘They can’t afford to kill the women,’ I said. ‘That’s why they didn’t throw dynamite. They want someone alive to inherit, someone they can rob through Mormon marriage.’

Lassiter nodded. He didn’t see how that helped.

‘Stop thinking of Jane and Rache as your family,’ I said. ‘Start thinking of them as hostages.’

If he didn’t take umbrage and shoot me, we might have a chance.

VIII

‘We’re coming out,’ I announced. ‘Hold your fire.’

Rache giggled. I held the baggage round the waist, gun in her ear, and stood in the doorway.

To the girl, it was a game. She had Missy Surprise hugged to her chest.

Lassiter and Jane were more serious, but desperate enough to try.

They had objected that the Danites would never believe their man would harm his beloved wife and daughter. I told them to stop thinking like their upright, moral, tiresome selves and put themselves in the mind-skins of devious, murderous, greedy blighters. Of course they’d believe it — they’d do the same thing with their own wives or daughters. Unspoken but obvious was that I would too.

Indeed, here I was — ready to spread a pretty little idiot’s brains on the road.

It’d be a shame, but I’ve done worse things.

I took a step out into the garden. No one killed me, so I took another step down the path.

Lassiter and Jane came after me, backwards. The Danite perched on the roof wouldn’t have a shot that didn’t go through the woman.

Hooded men came out of the shadows. Five of them, carrying guns. All their weaponry was kitted out oddly. The barrels were as long again as they ought to be, and swelled into thick, ceramic Swiss-roll shapes. Silencers. I’d heard of the things, but never seen them. Cut down the accuracy, I gathered. The cat couldn’t hear you firing, but you’d probably miss. I’d rather use one of Moriarty’s airguns than a ridiculous contraption like that.

‘Parley,’ I said.

The leader of the band nodded, silly hood-point flopping.

The funny thing was that the hood was useless as disguise. Most masks are. You remember faces first of all, but people are a lot more than their eyes and noses — hands and legs and stomachs and the way they stand or hold a gun or light a cigar.

I was facing Elder Enoch J. Drebber.

I assumed our agreement was voided.

‘You don’t want these lovely ladies harmed,’ I said.

‘I only need one,’ Drebber responded, raising his gun.

At this range, he could plug Rache in the breast and the shot would plough through her and me, killing us both.

‘Rache not like mans,’ she said. ‘Rache poo on you!’

Drebber’s eyes widened in his hood-holes. Rache held up Missy Surprise, and angled the rag-doll, her fingers working the hard metal inside the soft toy.

Lassiter’s second gun went off and Missy Surprise’s head flew apart.

The Danite on Drebber’s right fell dead.

‘You’re next,’ I told Drebber.

I was sure she’d been aiming at him in the first place, but he wasn’t to know that.

The man on the roof decided it was time to take his shot. His finger had probably been itching all evening. I’ve had trouble with fools like that on safari, so keen on not coming home without having cleaned the barrel, they need to fire an elephant gun at the regimental water bearer just so they could say they’ve killed something.

Lassiter was quicker than a Bhishti, and not struggling with a ridiculously overweighted yard-and-a-half of rifle.

The keen rifleman tumbled dead into the flowery bower around the front door.

Seven, minus three. Four.

‘Drop the ironmongery, Elder,’ I ordered.

Rache blew a loud raspberry.

Drebber was shaking. He nodded, and guns fell onto the road.

‘All of them,’ I said.

Hands went to belts and inside pockets and boots and special compartments and a variety of hold-out single-shots and throwing knives rattled down as well.

‘Now, take your dead folks and scarper.’

The four surviving Danites did as they were told. The fellow in the bower was a sixteen-stone lump of his many wives’ cooking and it took two to lift him.

They had a carriage down the road, and it trundled off.

Not a bad night’s work, I thought. Providing it was over.

Rache was dancing around, and I thought it a good idea to relieve Missy Surprise of her.45 calibre insides. I gave the doll back and the girl loved it none the less for not having a head.

Jane was looking at me with something like rapt gratitude. Usually a good moment to make a proposition. I doubted my currency with Jim Lassiter stood as high as that.

‘Colonel Arbuthnot, what can we ever do to repay you?’

‘You can die,’ said a voice I recognised. ‘Yes, die.’

IX

I was fuming.

Moriarty didn’t deign to explain, but I had caught up on it.

Of course, he knew the Danites would try to save the fee and go for the kills on their own.

Of course, he had mentioned the Laurence address deliberately, to prompt fast action.

Of course, he had followed me and watched my travails all evening long, not intervening until the danger was over.

Of course, he had found a way to profit.

He strolled up the street, head bobbing. He was dressed all in black, for the night-time. He also had a carriage parked nearby, with Chop, his Chinese coachman, perched up on the box. He enquired solicitously after the neighbour, who was still making a performance of being slightly shot. Somehow, the man got the notion he had been saved by my intervention from a conspiracy of high-ranking Masons who wanted him dead over some imagined slight. It would be a risky proposition to complain officially about such well-connected villains since they owned the police. He bustled inside and drew his curtains, hoping to hide from inescapable doom under his coverlets.

Then Moriarty applied himself to the murders.

I was not privy to the arrangements the Professor made with Lassiter and Jane. I had to be in the still-smoky parlour, while Rache — excited to be up long past her bedtime — banged at the gutshot piano while singing more verses of her butterfly song.

At the conclusion of negotiations, Moriarty was proud owner, through hard-to-trace holding companies, of the Surprise Valley Gold Mine. Amusingly, he was now a major employer in Amber Springs, Utah.

Jim Lassiter/Jonathan Laurence, Jane Withersteen/Helen Laurence and Little Fay Larkin/Rachel Laurence were dead, burned to crackling in the smoking ruins of The Laurels, Streatham Hill Road. It was the gas mains, apparently. And the neighbours had some stories to tell.

What amazed me most was that the Professor had the corpses ready. Chop and I had to wrestle them into beds before the fatal match was struck. I suspected three strangers of the right ages had been ‘burked’, but Moriarty assured Jane the substitutes were ‘natural causes’ paupers rescued from anatomists’ tables. She believed him, and that’s what counts with women like her.

He had a satchel full of documents: passports, birth certificates, twenty-year-old letters, used steamer tickets, bank books, even photographs. If the Lassiter/Laurences wanted to assume other identities, they should have come to him in the first place — when it would have cost less than a gold mine. He let Mr and Mrs Ronald Lembo of Ottowa keep a private fortune of, amusingly enough, £205,000, deposited at Coutts. Not unlimited wealth, but most people should be able to live comfortably on the interest. I’d run through it inside a week.

Jane said the Professor was a wonderful man, but Lassiter knew better. He went along, but knew he’d been bushwhacked. I now think Moriarty even contrived for Drebber to come across the Laurences in the first place. For him, a fugitive in possession of a fabulous gold mine is someone who needs their exile life turned upside down.

Rache was afraid of the man. She wasn’t stupid, just different. She would have to learn a new name, Pixie, and address her parents as Uncle and Aunt, but they’d adopted her in the first place.

Along with the evidence of full lives lived from birth up to this minute, the Lembos found that they had been staying — in a suite at Claridge’s! — in London for several days. Travelling trunks, including entire wardrobes, were ensconced there. I had no doubt the staff would recognise them and they’d be offered their ‘usual’ at breakfast the next day. The family were on a long, leisurely world tour and had tickets and reservations for Paris, Strelsau, Constantinople, and points east. Eventually they would fetch up in Perth, Australia.

In the coach on the way back to Conduit Street, I asked about Drebber and Stangerson.

‘If anyone deserves to be murdered,’ I said, ‘it’s those splitters.’

The Professor smiled. ‘And who will pay us for these murders?’

‘Those two I’d slaughter for free.’

‘Bad business, giving away what we charge for. You won’t find Mrs Halifax bestowing favours “on the house”. No, if we were to take steps against the Danites, we would only expose ourselves to risk. Besides, as you know, giving out an address is often a far more deadly instrument than a gun or a knife.’

I didn’t understand and said so.

‘Elder Drebber mentioned another enemy of the Danites, one Mr Jefferson Hope. Not a fugitive, in this case, but a pursuer. A man with a deadly grudge against our clients which dates back to a business in America which is too utterly tiresome to go into at this late hour.’

‘Drebber was half expecting to run across Hope,’ I said.

‘More like he was expecting Hope to run across him. This is even more likely now. I’ve sent an unsigned telegram to Mr Hope, who is toiling as a cab driver in this city. It mentions a boarding house in Torquay Terrace, Camberwell, where he might find Drebber and Stangerson. I gather they will try to get a train for Liverpool soon, and a passage home, so I impressed on Hope that he should be swiftly about his business.’

Moriarty chuckled.

If you read in the papers about the Lauriston Gardens murder, the Halliday’s Private Hotel poisoning and death ‘in police custody’ of the suspect cabman, you’ll understand.[10] When the Professor sets abut tidying up, slates are wiped clean, broken up and buried under a foundation stone.

So, at the end of it all, I was in residence at Conduit Street, part of the family. I was the Number Two in the Firm, the Man in Charge of Murder, but had a sense of how far beneath the Number One that position ranked. I had been near-hanged and shot at, but — most of all — kept out of the grown-ups’ business. Like Rache, good enough to spring the big surprise but otherwise fondly indulged or tolerated, I wasn’t party to serious haggling, just the bloke with the gun and the steady nerve.

Still, I knew how I would even things. I began to keep a journal. All the facts are set down, and eventually the public shall know them.

Then we’ll see whose face is red. No, vermilion.