Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

CHAPTER FOUR: THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES

I

As I entered our reception room, a slicing noise alerted me. A stick slashed at my head. I arrested its arc with a quick grab. As part of an unending ‘testing process’, Moriarty often tried to catch associates off guard. Some, not having my jungle-honed instincts, got broken heads.

I let the cane go and the Prof handed it to me.

Some lackwit had called while we weren’t in. Mrs Halifax had turfed him out, but he’d left his stick behind. That foul October, London was full of fools tapping through vile, yellow fog. Angry blighters collided at every corner and laid about each other like Italian duellists. Pickpockets left watches, but snatched canes.

‘Moran, what can you deduce about the owner of this item?’

Moriarty had picked up a craze for deductions. Don’t know where he got it from. Don’t bloody care. When I met him, he was set against guessing games. Still, when he was in a mood for ratiocination, it was best to humour him.

‘Apart from that he’s a forgetful sod, you mean?’

The Prof leered at my pleasantry.

I paced, swinging the stick, deliberately just missing scientific implements, pots of inestimable value and souvenirs of crimes past. Moriarty hissed as prized fetishes were in peril. Served him right for the blasted ‘testing process’. I seldom miss a shot, but confess I’ve sometimes missed just missing. A stuffed dodo under glass wobbled. Moriarty’s eyes glowed like wreckers’ lights. I stopped larking.

The stick was a specimen of the ‘Calcutta Clobberer’ or ‘Chicago Good-Night’. A decent heft, solid lead handle and longer than usual. It had seen hard use. Stains dried to black; I knew my night-work — fresh, they’d been red.

I spouted my deductions.

‘I should say this belongs to a chap who makes a habit of dashing the brains out of puppies, breaking the shins of beggars and throwing his weight around. A right bastard, I’ll be bound. Oh, and taller than the average. Does that cover it?’

Moriarty’s head craned from side to side. ‘As it happens, our prospective client’s legitimacy is in dispute.’

Hah! A client.

That wasn’t much of a deduction. Visitors to our Conduit Street HQ either wanted a consultation or were dragged squealing into Mrs Halifax’s basement with a flour sack over their heads. In basement cases, I’d often use my favourite cane — a flexible, steel-cored ‘house prefect’s coach-whip’, relic of cherished boyhood days. Many conversations flow better if punctuated with thwacks.

‘Anyone we know?’ I asked.

Moriarty flicked a calling card at me, putting spin on it. As I bent down to pick it up, he showed teeth in a mirthless gurn.

JASPER STOKE, TRANTRIDGE, WESSEX.

In a long life spent at gaming tables, in brothels, up mountains and in the bush, I’ve gained valuable insights into human nature. Anyone called ‘Jasper’ is an arrogant, untrustworthy scoundrel. Anyone called ‘Cedric’ is liable to be worse. And anyone called ‘Piers’ should be shot on sight. Don’t say you’ve never learned anything from my memoirs, for these are True Facts.

In the criminous line, arrogant, untrustworthy scoundrels might be valued customers. The Prof’s reputation for ingenious mercilessness convinces Jaspers and Cedrics to modify their habits in one particular. Your slick wastrel thinks nought of running up sky-high tabs on the never-never with tradesmen. However, the most unreliable gadabout — even a Piers — understands that a bill from Professor Moriarty must be settled to the farthing the instant it falls due. Otherwise, the flour sack and the Eton whip are but the beginning of a hard education.

‘Wessex,’ I spat. ‘Been through it on a train a time or two. Sheep-shagger country. Nothing worth shooting except wild ponies and potty parsons. Can’t say I’ve heard of Jasper Stoke. Is Trantridge a village or a house?’

‘Both. An estate of six thousand acres, it incorporates an ancient forest called The Chase. Trantridge Hall has been in the Stoke family since 1855. Properly, the tribe are the Stoke-d’Urbervilles. When the usurer Simon Stoke bought the property, he conjoined his humble name with that of a distinguished family thought extinct.’

‘This Jasper is Old Simon’s son?’

‘Nephew. Simon’s son and heir was killed over twenty years ago.’

‘Oh ho! Did slippery Jasper ease his way to the fortune with grease on the back stairs or ground glass in the brandy butter?’

‘Alexander Stoke-d’Urberville was murdered by his mistress, Theresa Clare. A stupid girl who, to complicate matters, claimed descent from the d’Urbervilles. She was hanged at Wintoncester. I despise amateurs, Moran. Murder is a calling. Few have the gift.’ [26]

I wasn’t surprised Moriarty could spout the facts. He committed volumes of the Newgate Calendar to memory, and had the lives of Jonathan Wild or Charley Peace off by heart. Reverting to the monotone drone which hampered his original career as a university lecturer, he would bore the Conduit Street Comanche with lectures about ill-prepared, foolish fellows — or, as here, fillies — who ventured unwisely into the field of crime. These digressions were Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys: instead of ‘Say your prayers and wash your hands or else nanny will give you a smack and your best tin soldier will be given to the poor children,’ it was ‘Scout your lay beforehand and eliminate your witnesses or else Sergeant Bigboots will truncheon your bonce and Jack Ketch will give you the Drop.’

‘The slut muddied the waters of succession by birthing at least one bastard,’ he continued. ‘Her issue by Alexander might have inherited.’

‘Don’t hold with cousins breeding. The whelps always have withered arms or come out as giant frogs.’

‘By most accounts, the child did not survive infancy.’

I looked again at the card. ‘So Jasper don’t want his family tree pruned?’

‘All we know is that he has lived the greater part of his life in the Americas, North and South. He intends to take possession of his family seat and assume the life of a country gentleman.’

‘You deduced this from his bloody walking stick?’

‘No, I read this in the bloody Times.’

A three-month-old newspaper lay on the table. In quiet moments, Moriarty would clip unusual words and proper names out of headlines — they came in handy for anonymous letters of instruction, persuasion or revelation. The section on ‘lately arrived’ visitors debarking from ships included a notice: ‘having lived the greater part of his life in the Americas, North and South, Mr Jasper Stoke now intends to take possession of his family seat and assume the life of a country gentleman’. I assumed that meant bouncing milkmaids, sheltering from sheets of rain in his leaky mansion, and pickling himself in poisonous Wessex ‘scrumpy’.

Moriarty stood at the bay window.

‘What d’you suppose Stoke wants with us?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea, Moran. But we shall find out soon enough. A man wearing an American hat is on the point of grasping our bell-pull.’

In Mrs Halifax’s parlour, a bell jangled as someone yanked the chain in a frenzy. Usually, this signified the imminence of one of several regulars who paid to be secreted in a boudoir wardrobe with peepholes. For them, frenzied yanking was a way of life. I deduced this caller, coarsened by the Americas, was unfamiliar with civilised trappings like doorbells, roofs and trouser buttons.

The Professor whistled into a speaking tube, signalling Selden, the bruiser who kept the door, to admit our prospective client. The tintinnabulation ceased, succeeded by the clumping of heavy boots on our stairs. Our visitor can’t have done much Indian fighting or buffalo hunting in the Americas. Anyone this noisy would soon be scalped or starved.

The door pushed open and a giant burst in. He wore a ten-gallon hat which might actually hold the full ten gallons. The norm is scarcely a single gallon and the orthography down to misapprehension of the Spanish for ‘high gallant’, don’t you know? He snatched the stick from my hands, which stung for a day afterwards.

‘There y’are, Gertie,’ he exclaimed, hugging the cane like a long-missing gold coin. ‘I was a-feared I’d lost yuh!’

‘Mr Jasper Stoke?’ enquired the Professor.

The giant looked perplexed. He wore an odoriferous fleece overcoat. His enormous, blue-stubbled jaw sagged, showing jagged brown teeth.

‘No suh, I ain’t a…’

‘I am Jasper Stoke,’ purred a smaller gent who made his way into the room in the giant’s wake.

Neither Moriarty or I had thought to deduce that stick and card belonged to different people. I wasn’t ashamed of the oversight, but it would rankle the Professor.

Stoke carried a curly brimmed topper and no stick. He could walk without support and had the giant on hand for cudgelling folk who got in his way. He was sharply dressed, with a deal of fancy braid on his waistcoat. Darkly handsome, if you care to know that sort of thing. He sported a double-dash of moustache, thin and oiled — with eyebrows to match. One cheek was faintly marred by parallel scars. Something clawed — a kitten or at least kittenish — had once had a go at him. His neat, white hands said ‘card sharp’ rather than ‘cowboy’.

There I go, making deductions with the best of them. We may have theorised from the wrong stick, but I’d been spot on at ‘right bastard’. Takes one to know one, as they say — before they get punched in the head for smugly spouting platitudes.

‘This is my top boy, Dan’l,’ Stoke said, indicating the stick cuddler. ‘Known in three territories as Desperado Dan’l. There’s a price on his head for killing a man…’

‘T’ain’t right, Mr Jass,’ Dan’l said. ‘Only white men I killed were shot fair and square in the front. That price ain’t legal. Ain’t no law against killing a Chinese in the back. Not accordin’ to Judge Bean, and if’n it’s his ruling in Texas, it’s good enough for Arizona. Aye, and Engerland, too.’ [27]

Moriarty was impatient with this legal footnote. ‘What can we do for you, Mr Stoke-d’Urberville?’

One of Stoke’s brows flicked up.

‘Professor Moriarty, I want a dog killed.’

II

‘No crime too small’ was never exactly Moriarty’s slogan, but the criminal genius would apply himself to minor offences if an unusual challenge was presented. To whit, if a sweetshop had a reputation for being impossible to pilfer from, he’d devote as much brainpower to a scheme for lifting a packet of gobstoppers as he would a plan for abstracting the Crown jewels from the Tower of London.

Before you ask — yes, Moriarty did ponder that particular lay. Rather than pull off the coup bungled by Thomas Blood [28], he negotiated quietly with a terrifying Fat Man in Whitehall. The plan was sold to HM government for a tidy sum, enabling the Yeoman Warders to institute countermeasures. Well-known objects are nigh impossible to fence at anything like list value, anyway. In 1671, the baubles were valued at £100,000, but Blood said he’d be lucky to get £6,000 for the mess of jewel-encrusted tat. The Professor was tempted to return annually to the well with improved schemes, but the prospect of getting further on the wrong side of the Fat Man gave even him pause.

Any rate, assassinating dogs was not generally in our line. On occasion, we had adversely affected the health of certain horses. If there were more lucre in fixing dog fights, we’d have applied similar methods to the odd pit bull. But there isn’t and we hadn’t. In Russia, I’d hunted wolves with a Tartar war-bow — but that was sport, not business.

I doubted Jasper Stoke-d’Urberville was bothered by a neighbour’s yapping pooch in darkest Trantridge. If that were the case, Dan’l could settle its hash. I’d already noted Gertie’s suitability for puppy braining. With Dan’l’s weight behind her, I dare say the stick could fell a prehistoric mastodon.

But our prospective client had brought his doggie problem to us.

‘I am prepared to pay five thousand pounds,’ Stoke said, ‘for a pelt.’

Even at today’s shocking prices, not a sum to be sniffed at, sneezed on or otherwise nasally rejected.

‘Mr Stoke-d’Urberville,’ said the Professor, rolling the name around like a sheik savouring a sheep’s eyeball before popping it between his back teeth, ‘whose recommendation brought you to our door?’

‘I’ve had doings with Doctor Quartz of New York…’

The Professor flicked his fingers. Stoke knew enough to shut up.

Some said Jack Quartz, vivisectionist and educator, was to the Americas what Moriarty was to Britain. [29] You were well advised not to suggest the equivalence in either’s earshot. I knew Quartz was still smarting over Moriarty’s Surprise Valley Gold Mine coup, a foot set in his sphere of influence — though its fabulous output had run dry after a few months, leaving the Firm on the scout for prospects like Stoke-d’Urberville. Moriarty expressed concern that Yankee tentacles were feeling about the globe. Quartz had supposedly secret treaties with the Unione Corse and the Camorra in Southern Europe and Dr Nikola and the Si-Fan in Asia. Outwardly, Moriarty and Quartz maintained courteous, professional relations: each would refer petitioners departing for foreign shores to the other.

The Lord of Strange Deaths could sit at their table, should that mandarin deign to dine with beaky barbarians. The Grand Vampire, chief of Paris’ Les Vampires, might have been admitted to the sewing circle, but no holder of that title had lived long enough in the office to take a hand in this Great Game.

Bet you didn’t know the world was cut up like that.

‘I am aware of Quartz,’ conceded the Professor. ‘Outline your situation, omitting no relevant detail.’

Stoke sat in the client’s chair. He lit a cheroot and took his ease.

‘I’ll give you the straight of it, Professor,’ he began. ‘A year back, I reached an unwelcome conclusion. I was about to be run out of Tombstone, Arizona. That’s a silver town. Previously, I made money in silver. Not digging it out of dirt, digging it out of miners. I operated saloons, gambling hells, rooming houses, some French girls. The real earner is baths. For the privilege of staying in business, everyone in Tombstone tithes to a brood of badged-up robbers. The Earps. Every damn brother holds some office. Federal marshal, town sheriff, tax collector. All want paying. Town has a shrinking economy. Mines are flooded. Silver’s petering out. So the Earps saw no reason to let me retain the remainder of my income. They were set on discussing matters at a particular corral where financial disputes are oft-times settled with long rifles. I saw no profit in war, but the alternative was unprepossessing at best. Then, as providence has it, word came via telegraph. An estate is mine for the taking in a country where constables’ hands might be out for pay-off but don’t have Buntline Specials in them. I gathered my top boys and set out to stake my claim.’

‘I got powerful sick on the boat,’ put in Dan’l. ‘Puked like to fill the wide ocean deep.’

Stoke shrugged.

‘My spread is the Trantridge Estate, in Wessex. Uncle Si, who used to be called “Simon Screw-the-marks”, bought it after a lifetime of squeezing pennies from widows. He didn’t live long enough to enjoy his spread, but Auntie hung in there. On her deathbed for thirty years, by my reckoning. When she finally kicked the bucket, it turned out I’m the only living relative. I inherit the entirety of her holdings. The land, the village, a forest, a church, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, fields of whatever muck they grow. Even a saloon. A pub they call it. The Old Red Dog. As Master of Trantridge, I own people… peasants, serfs, yokels. Slaves.’

In school, they say Wilberforce abolished slavery in the Empire and Lincoln freed the blacks in the Civil War. Abolition sounds impressive, doesn’t it? It bears repeating that all the acts and decrees and petitions — plus the maintenance of an anti-slaving fleet off West Africa — didn’t make slavery go away. Busybodies just made slavery illegal and, therefore, much, much more profitable. Pass a law against any endeavour and the honest merchants drop it. So who do you think takes over? Yes, criminals. There are laws against murder, theft or blackmail, but no windy politician or curate gets up and takes a bow for abolishing ’em. I’ve knocked about and seen plenty of human flesh bought, sold and put to work. The child purchased outright for six shillings in Piccadilly is as much a slave as any native on a block for ten dirham in Marrakech.

‘Auntie kept a light rein on Trantridge,’ continued Stoke. ‘She never got over losing her sight, much less the cluster-hump with cousin Alec’s murdering whore. A manager, Braham Derby, oversees rents, tributes and whatnot. This goof-off let the tenants misremember their situation, settle into a life of unearned ease and comfort. They’re on d’Urberville property. All they keep from their labours is the gift of the master. Id est, me. With the old lady planted, the situation is in flux.

‘On the trip over, while Dan’l was a-heaving, I read up German books on “economic models”. Having just lost one business, I’m not about to be beggared again. Trantridge isn’t like a silver town: big money for a few years, tailing out to nothing when the seam is exhausted, with the added drawback of thieving Earps. It’s more akin to the big Texas cattle outfits or the old Southern cotton plantations: potentially big money forever, if the peons are ridden hard. The “economic model” can work, so long as malcontents are dealt with smartly.

‘English landlords have sweated the paddies for generations. If the fighting Irish can be ground under by milksops, Wessexers ought to be a pushover, right? Hang a few, burn out a couple of hovels, cut some fences and they’ll get an understanding. Then, I sit back and enjoy the life of a country gent. Buy a seat in parliament and a box at Toneborough Race Track.’

Stoke sat back and took a puff. I wondered when the dog would come into it. ‘Economic models’ are all very well, but if you put a dog at the beginning, there had damn well better be barking before act two.

‘First priority is to explain to my tenants — as much my property as the sheep, chickens and crops — that I intend to exercise full rights. I had Derby, kept on in strictly advisory capacity, call a meeting at the Village Hall and make sure every man-jack turns up. So, this hubbub of smock-frock, fringe-beard straw-suckers sat on hard benches, wishing they were in the Red Dog. I kept ’em waiting a few hours.

‘At last, I strode in. Place went hush. You could hear the tinkling of my silver spurs. My boys were stationed at strategic points, coat-tails folded back to show iron on their hips. In German economics, you learn to impose your will on a workforce through theatrical devices. Trantridgers have never seen the like of these hombres. Lazy-Eye Jack has been in a range war or two, Nakszynski the Albino once ate a Canadian mounted policeman’s liver and Dan’l here fills a room without hardly trying.

‘I delivered a speech, nothing too hard to follow. Two or three points, with pauses so the outraged babble could die down. What they considered theirs is mine. When the complaining went on too long, Lazy-Eye fired a slug into a beam. Shut everyone up. A roomful of clods stuck fingers in their ears. I awaited the inevitable. The point of giving the whole herd the bad news all at once is to stir the toughest, most resolute c--sucker into making a move. Then, you knock him down and the rest fall in line.’

Professor Moriarty, a follower of economic theory, nodded approval.

‘So, who got up but Diggory Venn, a f--ing startling individual. Apache red in the face and hands. Owing to his former profession of peddling sheep-dye, if you can believe it. Nowadays, he wanders the lanes preaching dignity of labour and the rights of man. A veritable c-t. Venn isn’t even a tenant. Just passing through. I counted on there being someone like him at the meeting. Venn aspired to go head-to-head about what I categorise as a “workable economic model” and he calls “bounden servitude”. Of course, this wasn’t a debate. This was an announcement.

‘I gave the sign and Lazy-Eye and the Albino served the reddleman the way they treat sod-busters in Texas. Dragged onto the village green, tied to the village pump and given a village barbed-wire whipping. His back wound up matching his face and hands. The complaints stopped. Trantridge began to turn a profit… for me. Tenants might go a trifle hungry or have to patch up old coats rather than buy new, but that’s how things are ordered in accordance with the property laws in Jolly Old England. Now, it’s my turn to get comfortable… which I managed for about a fortnight.’

The Professor paid close attention.

‘Venn is whipped. If he makes more trouble, I’ll have him up at the assizes for sedition. Braham Derby has to listen to whining yokels and isn’t exactly joyful, but keeps book smartly. Besides, I also shelter his sister Mod, the only poke-worthy baggage in the county.’

‘Miss Mod’s so purty,’ Dan’l said, in tones which suggested Gertie had a rival. Stoke’s expressive eyebrow twitched at his top hand’s gush. Mod Derby was a tender point with him, which suggested she’d be worth meeting. Even a double-dyed Jasper can have a blind spot.

‘Mod’s a step up from her brothers, that’s sure.’

‘Brothers?’ jabbed Moriarty.

‘Besides Braham, who’s useful enough when it comes to following milk yields and pig prices, there’s Saul, a dreamy mooncalf.’

‘I like Saul,’ Dan’l said. ‘He talks to me.’

‘That’s all you can say for Saul Derby,’ conceded Stoke. ‘He rubs along with Dan’l. He even cosies up reasonably with the Albino, who frightens most as much as… well, as much as you do, Professor.’

Moriarty smiled, not unpleased.

‘The Derbys are like Injun scouts, you know. Injuns don’t ever really go tame, but once they’re beaten they see reason. Wessex, it transpires, is as fraught as the West. Adders in the fields. Mires on the moors. Dyed-red rabble-rousers. Escaped convicts from Prince Town Gaol. It’s a marvel they don’t have f--ing Earps, while they’re at it. Though I’d rather be up against a Buntline Special than Parson Tringham’s campfire bogey. You can backshoot even the fastest pistolero. With Tringham’s dog, bullets don’t take.’

‘Who is Parson Tringham?’ asked the Professor.

‘Another unwelcome visitor. Breezed up one afternoon, eighty years old and babbling foolishness. I’d not underestimate the damage this mule head has done in a lifetime of sticking his prick into other people’s compost. Makes a hobby of the d’Urberville family. Can you credit it? Preacher digs about in someone else’s history for jollies. Even my daffy aunt knew better than let him cross her threshold. With her gone, Tringham wanted another stab at getting into “the archives”. I should’ve had the Albino cut his throat and dump him in The Chase. Instead, Braham turned him away. He slunk to the saloon and told his tale of a dog.’

Now, we were getting to it.

‘I had this later from Lazy-Eye. He’s courting Car Darch, a local strumpet. They do their carousing in the Red Dog. Tringham came in, settled by the fire, ordered a pint of ole goat piss, and yarned to the starving serfs — they’ve tin enough in their pockets for drink, notice. He told ’em how their pub got its name…’

As he talked, Stoke leaned forward, voice low, cheroot-end burning bright, eyebrows like horns.

‘My uncle bought the d’Urberville name outright. I couldn’t tell you who his father… my grandfather… was, but I’ve a parchment listing d’Urbervilles all the way back to Sir Pagan, who came over in 1066. Simon Stoke was from no one out of nothing and laid out gelt for centuries of tradition. He bought ancestors. Also, the family seat, a pew in the church and a mess of ghost stories. A phantom coach heard when a d’Urberville is about to die. Just to confirm that Uncle Si got the family curse with the name, it was reported running to schedule when Cousin Alec was pig-stuck. Tess the Knife is supposed to haunt us too. Her spook can be recognised because her head lolls the wrong way, on account of vertebrae separating when she was hanged.’

‘I seen the Brokeneck Lady,’ Dan’l said. ‘By The Chase, at night, net over her face, wailing…’

The giant shook in his fleece. Stoke was irritated by the interruption.

‘You can set aside the phantom coach and the moaning murderess. It’s the dog that’s a bother. A great red hound. A big bastard beast. This is what I want killed. I want its hide above the fireplace in Trantridge Hall. I want its paws made into tobacco pouches. I want its teeth on a necklace for my fancy woman. I want its tail wound round the brim of my tall hat.’

Moriarty tapped his teeth with a yellow knuckle.

‘This dog of yours…’

‘He goes by “Red Shuck”.’

‘This “Red Shuck”? Am I to understand this is not a living animal but a ghost?’

Stoke stubbed out his cheroot and nodded grudgingly.

‘Yes, it’s supposed to be a ghost, but, answer me this… Can a ghost rip out a strong man’s throat?’

III

I’m going to interrupt. I know, just as we’d got to the dog. So far, like Tristram Shandy, Red Shuck has barely figured in a story which purports to be all about him. Now, I’ll tell you about the dog.

Stoke gave us the gist he had from Lazy-Eye Jack of what Tringham told the Trantridge soaks — which the parson, in turn, had gleaned from old Wessex wives. At the end of this chain of Chinese whispers, we got great red hound… big bastard beast… said to be a ghost… ripped-out throat. Very ominous and in line with Stoke’s stated policy of theatrical effect, but scarcely useful intelligence. Moriarty had me pop round to the British Museum and look up our prospective quarry. The prime source on Sir Pagan d’Urberville is the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis [30] and there’s a chapter on Red Shuck in the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-Wolves [31].

So, herewith, the terrible tale of the ‘Curse of the d’Urbervilles’. Read it by candlelight at midnight and be prepared to whiten your hair and soil your drawers.

As Stoke mentioned, Sir Pagan ‘came over in 1066’. This signifies that, like many of the best families, the d’Urbervilles were founded by a bandit whose crown-snatching patron could bestow estates as he saw fit. During the Norman Conquest, Pagan was a sly, ginger-headed youth. How anybody could advance in a priest-ridden era with his name is beyond me! I imagine he spent his life trying to convince folk it was pronounced ‘Pah-ganne’.

He was one of seventy-six Frenchmen who claimed to have put that fatal arrow into Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Several began the day fighting on the English side and three didn’t even have right arms. An ancestor of the spotty prig who flogged me for misappropriation of buns at Eton shot the King from Calais. He claimed God’s winds fetched his shaft straight into Harry’s eye. This leads me to deem the typical eleventh-century frog no more trustworthy than today’s nation of moustache musketeers, bedroom bandits and painted midgets. Sir Pagan, at least, was at the battle.

Having just taken over a whole country, the new king had a lot on his plate. For a start, he was on a tear to get everyone who’d scorned him as William the Bastard to hail him as William the Conqueror. Bill the Conk couldn’t be bothered to sort through the claims, so seventy-six lying bowmen got knighted in a job-lot. After that, they felt literally entitled to claim their own fiefdoms. Sir Pagan d’Urberville’s land-grab netted him a third of Wessex. He built himself a castle at Trantridge.

Titled and landed, Sir Pagan toadied less to the Conqueror, but knocked along with the Bastard’s son, William Rufus. William I was an empire builder, a man with a mission; William II was an empire enjoyer, a pursuer of virile pastimes. Junior succeeded to the English throne in 1087 and grumbled that he would have preferred Normandy, which went to his older brother. With his pal crowned, Sir Pagan became eminent. After William Rufus remarked offhand that d’Urberville’s forest offered the finest ‘chase’ in his kingdom, it became known as The Chase.

The new king was a fiend for hunting. His primary interest was any game animal which might provide horns, hide or tusks to decorate his castles. William II was killed by a close friend while they were out after deer. Something similar happened to a tiger-stalking crony of mine in India. It was said Walter Tyrell, William Rufus’ slayer, was too good a bowman to make such a mistake. A like criticism was laid against me. I refer the interested reader to my earlier remark about how difficult it can be to just miss a shot.

With English game ripe to be brought down by Norman sports, Sir Pagan threw himself into the pursuit. Every huntsman has to have his dogs. The Trantridge kennels became famous. Though he cleans it up somewhat, Baring-Gould recounts a rumour that Sir Pagan d’Urberville himself sired the litter which became his hunting pack, getting puppies on a she-wolf imported from the Harz Mountains. The dogs came out big, hungry and red.

Even taking the she-wolf story with a pinch of the proverbial, Sir Pagan remained essentially French in his habit of tumbling anything which strayed past. You’re aware of the custom of droit de seigneur, that the feudal lord is entitled — nay, obliged — to take first jump at any local bride on her wedding night? Pagan imported the custom to England. When grooms complained, he ruled that, to be impartial about it, he’d take his pleasure with them too. Extensive romping and riding to hounds made Sir Pagan a fine, rollicking fellow to lordly Norman chums and a bitterly hated tyrant to smelly Saxon underlings.

After a few years’ happy hunting, Sir Pagan’s dickybird got him into trouble. Comes to us all, I’m afraid. Sir Pagan, like several of his lineal and nominal descendents, came a cropper because he stuck it in the wrong hole — or at least the wrong hole-bearer.

Word got out that d’Urberville was regularly rogering peasant bridegrooms. Venic of Melchester, a Saxon monk, left his monastery to raise a fuss about such shocking behaviour. He turned up at Trantridge in the middle of a feast and had the poor judgement to deliver a fiery sermon against sodomy, fornication and the wicked habit of calling English meats by French names. Sir Pagan was a firm adherent of the philosophy that you could hunt or prod anything and often do both. He had Venic whipped and set off after the monk with his dogs. Baring-Gould doesn’t go into what happened after Pagan ran down his prey in The Chase — but it’s a fair bet Venic got served in the Bulgarian fashion and staggered away bow-legged. Don’t see the attraction myself, but Mrs Halifax says it takes all sorts to butter a biscuit.

Aggrieved, Venic took a petition of complaint to the court, calling for the King’s Justice upon Sir Pagan. When William Rufus laughed off his pal’s high-spirited prankery, the monk went to the church and called for Heaven’s Justice. The Bishops knew the king and his axeman lived closer to their palaces than the Pope in Rome, let alone God Almighty, and dismissed Venic as a crank. At this, he despaired. He swore aloud at a crossroads that he would deal with the Devil, if Hell’s Justice were levelled against Sir Pagan d’Urberville…

Now pledged a monk for Satan, Venic returned to The Chase, where he lived wild, more beast than man. He harried Sir Pagan’s men-at-arms, killed the livestock and raided foodstores. Sir Pagan made his own vow to kill Venic and — for months — set out regularly with his dogs. Even before Venic moved in, The Chase was reputedly haunted. Paths were ill mapped and changed from day to day. If you walked around the wood, it was no larger than a small-holding; if you walked through, it seemed the breadth of a kingdom. Still, Sir Pagan knew his woods and should have been able to catch Venic again.

Failing to bring back his monk’s head, he grew moody. He let serfs go inviolate to their marriage beds. He failed to attend court and slid from Royal favour — making room for the rise of Walter Tyrell… and we all know how well that turned out.

He laid off hunting anything but the mad monk.

Cheated of regular prey, the pack became unruly, vicious, and fought among themselves. Soon, they were killing and eating each other. That’s when Sir Pagan first noticed Red Shuck. Originally the runt of the she-wolf’s litter, he grew stronger, surviving many battles. He grew wilder, redder even, as if taking on substance from dogs he killed, ’til he stood tall as a pony, long as a boat — with bloody froth about his mouth and fangs like daggers. Sir Pagan’s remaining cronies cautioned him against the dog, but the Master was pleased with Red Shuck. He thought that only when it had consumed the hearts of the rest of the pack would it be able to root out Venic. At last, Red Shuck had the kennel to himself, as Sir Pagan was left alone with his servants by the desertion of his household. His wife and children removed themselves across Wessex and established the d’Urberville seat of Kingsbere.

Still, Venic was not found, no matter how knight and dog sought him. He would appear in the village, speaking against Normans in general and Sir Pagan in particular — but when d’Urberville and Red Shuck came, he was back in The Chase. This went on until Sir Pagan took it into his head to flush out his quarry by burning the forest to ash. In India, this is known as hunquah. It’s a tricky practice, as likely to raze the village as flush out the tiger.

Hayricks were carted to a clearing and a fire started. It wouldn’t spread, as if the breath of Hell kept it back. At sunset, Sir Pagan sensed his enemy nearby and sicced his dog. Red Shuck bounded from the clearing, intent on rending Venic apart. Fearful cries, human and animal, were heard. Sir Pagan’s last servants abandoned him — except one page, necessary to recount the end of the story. Sir Pagan ranted at the trees, his failing fire and the skies. Then, who should step into the clearing but Venic of Melchester, wearing the bloody skin of Red Shuck.

Most versions of the tale throw in ‘hold, varlet’/‘Norman dog’/’Saxon swine’/‘have at thee, sirrah’ chatter out of Ivanhoe. I imagine the actual talk between mortal enemies ran to free exchange of Old English and French words not in Sir Walter Scott’s vocabulary.

Sir Pagan reached for his sword. Venic wrapped the dog-hide around his shoulders, until it was tighter than his own skin. Then his eyes got big. He had more and longer teeth. He was covered in red fur. He was, in fact, Red Shuck, walking on his hind legs like a man. Baring-Gould’s version is that the dog was the monk all along, but Orderic Vitalis has it that Venic commingled with Red Shuck just as the top dog had taken on the strength of the pack — by consuming his flesh and spirit. At any rate, this thing which was both Red Shuck and Venic fell upon wicked Sir Pagan and tore out the knight’s gullet. To finish off his meal, the big dog ate d’Urberville’s still-beating heart.

Since that day, the legend goes, Red Shuck has lived in The Chase, snacking off lost children, feasting on d’Urberville meat whenever the family produces a tyrant or villain. Which, as you might expect, has happened often.

Over the centuries, dozens of dastardly d’Urbervilles have been killed in circumstances ambiguous enough to allow the legend of the avenging demon dog to enjoy periodic revivals. Few of the family died in bed — unless you count those stabbed by their popsies like Alec Stoke-d’Urberville or poisoned by impatient heirs like Puritan General Godwot d’Urberville. No wonder the true line was extinct when Shylock Si was rooting for a new name. It’s a mystery the d’Urbervilles lasted as long as they did, considering an apparently hereditary predisposition to suspicious accident, outright homicide, unusual suicide (Sir Tancred d’Urberville arranged to be eaten by rooks), inexplicable mutilation and unsolved disappearance.

The phantom coach is a sixteenth-century addition to the family’s spectral register, summoned by Lizzie d’Urberville to fetch her naughty children off to Hades. When you say ‘naughty children’, you mean broken crockery and pulled pigtails… when my sanctimonious pater said ‘naughty children’, he meant gambling debts and housemaids in the pudding club… when a sixteenth-century d’Urberville said ‘naughty children’, she meant violated churchyards, drowned schoolfellows and a castle burned to the ground.

Before and after the story of the coach was put about, the primary d’Urberville ghost was Red Shuck. However, upon examination of first-hand accounts, the spook tales mostly amount to a d’Urberville dying and within three months someone seeing a dog in the dark which might have been red but might equally not, or could also have been a large goat or a stile with a blanket thrown over it.

It’s on record that, at various times, rashes of savage attacks on animals and people have taken place in or near The Chase. In the 1820s, the naturalist Dunstan d’Urberville advanced a theory that the legend of ‘Red Shuck’ related to some as-yet uncatalogued animal found only in the thick of the ancient woodland.

In clubrooms, I’ve run across the odd sportsman — Long John Roxton comes to mind — obsessed with hunting specimens which aren’t in the books. Undeterred by the obituaries of predecessors who actually have pre-deceased them on the trail of monsters, they set out to bag Scotch lake serpents or the Beast of Gévaudan. Few of these Nimrods bring back trophies which don’t look like they’ve been sewn together for a funfair. However, every year, in unexplored corners of the globe, new creatures are catalogued by intrepid men of science — shortly followed by intrepid men of sport, like yours truly. Sticking a Latin name on a lemur or warthog or dragonfly is all very well, but it can’t compete with the honour of being the first to pot the marvel and mount it over the mantelpiece. As a veteran of a couple of go-rounds with the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, I know whereof I speak.

Duffer Dunstan posited the existence in The Chase of a large, unusually hardy wolf species which had survived the extinction of wolfkind in the rest of the British Isles. While tracking his ‘Wessex Wolf’, Dunstan tripped over a tree stump and broke his fool leg. He expired, without heir, of odoriferous gangrene and that was the last of the d’Urbervilles.

…Until Simon Stoke saved up his pennies.

IV

Having outlined the Red Shuck legend, as told by Parson Tringham in the Red Dog, Jasper Stoke continued his own story.

‘Two nights later, there was a howling in The Chase. I’ve heard coyotes and I’ve heard Injuns pretending to be coyotes. This was different. You know that animal screech you hear after someone’s been tortured a spell?… After the tough leather has gone out of a hard customer, but before the body’s completely done for?… The deep-lungs scream that comes when the mind cracks like a walnut?’

Professor Moriarty nodded, with a tiny smile.

‘Well, the howling was worse than that. The whole house stirred from their beds, or whoever’s beds they were in, and clattered about in nightshirts and boots. We found guns and gathered in the great hall.’

‘I fetched Gertie,’ Dan’l said.

‘Howling seemed to come from all around, as if it had got into the house like a draught. Nakszynski, the coolest of hands, let shot fly and pimpled a suit of armour. The maids quacked like geese. Saul, who isn’t all there, sat by a window, gazing out at the bright moon. He looked like a ghost himself. He uttered “Red Shuck”, which was the first I heard the name. I asked what he meant, but he was dreaming out loud. Mod stopped me from shaking an answer out of her brother, saying Saul always comes over queer on full-moon nights. Just one more piece of f--ing information calculated not to set the mind at ease.

‘The howls were going on full-throat and the Albino firing a shotgun indoors hadn’t soothed the ears any. Lazy-Eye Jack heard “Red Shuck” and dug up what he recollects of Tringham’s yarn. The phrase “ghost dog” gave me a sudden insight. I was being fooled with by someone who wished ruin to my prospectus for Trantridge. I don’t credit tales of infernal animals or a d’Urberville curse. I’m more inclined to lay my troubles on the corporeal, contemporary Diggory Venn. I suspected red-stained fingers in the puddle. I told the boys to track down the howling c-t and put it out of its misery.’

Dan’l looked sheepish at this.

‘I expect a deal of smart snapping-to when I give out an order,’ continued Stoke. ‘On this occasion, there was general hesitation. Though Lazy-Eye hadn’t seen fit to pass the parson’s ghost story to me, he’d spread it round the bunkhouse, with embellishments to frighten superstitious, ignorant morons…’

He looked at Dan’l.

‘Mod and her brothers knew the tale from childhood. So did the servants. I was the only prick to whom Red Shuck was fresh news. As master, it fell to me to venture out with my Winchester and see off the howling nuisance. Braham advised against it, and he’s supposed to be the sensible, educated one in his family. Nakszynski was fired up to shoot something which would bleed. We stepped out the big front door. As soon as we were outside, the howling shuts off… and the rest of the yellow-livered curs joined us in the drive…’

‘Was anyone absent?’ asked the Professor.

‘No,’ responded Stoke. ‘I counted heads and checked off names. I thought, like you, that it was an inside job. But we were all present. At sun-up, two maids and a stablehand gave notice and hared off as if there was an Earp price on their heads. One dolly didn’t even stay to pick up her wages. The other said she’ll be safer on the game in Casterbridge. Which gives you an idea of what I’m facing.’

‘All this from a noise in the night?’ I snorted.

‘Something got into the chicken coops and tore apart the poultry…’

‘Feathers and guts and beaks and eyes everywhere,’ elaborated Dan’l. ‘Like to put me off mah feed!’

‘In daylight, Braham grew back his balls and concluded a fox or a weasel was the guilty party. Maybe a fox and a weasel, working together. Nasty critters, foxes and weasels. I ordered new wire fences around the coops, stouter timbers… and restocked the place. No fox-weasel is going to fright me off my land. I got more of the Red Shuck story from Lazy-Eye Jack and Mod. It isn’t happenstance Trantridge Hall got raided and howled at. This was direct challenge to me and my position.

‘Next night, there was howling again… further off from the house. I’d set night-guards, but they didn’t see anything. I was all for charging into The Chase and killing whatever and whoever was behind the racket. Again, I was cautioned against this. After a moment, I saw Braham’s right and I’m wrong. Not because a demon dog is waiting in the clearing where wicked Sir Pagan was devoured… but because I knew this was a trick to draw me into the wild woods where I could be done away with in such manner a ghost can take the blame. No law’s ever hanged a ghost. So, I insisted we all go back to bed and ignore the rumuckus. I personally had a fine night’s sleep.

‘Next morning, one of the tenants, Git Priddle, was missing some sheep who’d bled a deal before being fetched off, but that’s his problem. Payment was still due and, after the Albino knocked Priddle about a bit, was forthcoming. I know there is subterfuge round Trantridge and still suspect a red hand in it, though Venn hasn’t been sighted since he took his back-stripes. I took advantage of the rent-collection round to have the estate entirely searched, prying into every barn and pen to conduct a census of livestock necessary for the accounts, and to see if anyone, or any creature, is concealed. We turned up beasts scurvy tenants were keeping off the rolls and clipped ears with wirecutters to discourage the practice. I’m in two minds about Git Priddle’s famous black ram, which strikes me as more likely in hiding than done for, but it didn’t show up. No trace of the reddleman either. And no Red Shuck.

‘By day, I had The Chase searched, though that’s the definition of futile endeavour. Next night, last of the full moon, I thought to get ahead of Red Shuck and frame my own trap. Leaving the Hall and grounds unguarded would be too obvious, so I had the boys sit up after dark, complaining loudly at the inconvenience, then slope off in the small hours as if shirking duty. Trick of it was that, well before sundown, without letting anyone else in on it, Lazy-Eye secreted himself by the coops under a blanket of twigs and leaves which makes him look, even smell, like a garbage heap. The old Injun fighter can lay still for days if need be. Among the aliases on his ”Wanted — Dead or Alive“ poster is “Ambush Jack”. He had orders to shoot any c--sucker who showed face on the grounds. That night, there was no howling. I figured Ambush Jack trumps Red Shuck…

‘Lazy-Eye wasn’t at his post the next morning. His blanket was flung aside and tracks led into The Chase. Dan’l and I set out after him. Trail was plain even in the early morning mist. When we found Jack, in a clearing, he wasn’t yet dead. Blood bubbled out of his throat. Air whistled through a hole. He died without saying anything. His holster was empty. We found the gun yards away, still in his hand — Jack’s hand wasn’t on the end of his arm any more. I’m no tracker, but I could tell something’s been about from the broken bushes and trampled grass. In soft earth, we found this…’

From his coat pocket, Stoke produced an object wrapped in a red scarf. He passed it to Moriarty, who unwound the scarf.

‘Your department, I think, Moran,’ he said, and tossed it over.

I’d seen similar things. It was a plaster of Paris impression of a pawprint, or at least a dent in the ground made by something shaped like a big animal’s foot. From the shape, the print was dog or a wolf, but the span suggested something the size of tiger or rhino.

‘The detail which springs out of the foolishness of the legend,’ continued Stoke, ‘is that Red Shuck persecutes d’Urbervilles whenever one of the family is “a tyrant or villain”. I’m not given to the vice of self-deception. My tenants view me as tyrant and villain. If that’s their comfort, fine. So long as they work and pay and bow and scrape. My plan for Trantridge depends on me being tyrant and villain. My conviction, from study of German economics, is that what was once categorised as tyrannical and villainous is, in modern times, respectable and even necessary. That aside, it’s my personal whim to play tyrant and villain. As Master of Trantridge, it is my lawful right. This is why I have brought my business to you…’

Moriarty nodded.

‘Red Shuck may be a phantom and a fraud, but it’s killed my top boy. I can’t let that go. Word about Lazy-Eye Jack spread over the county afore noon. And suddenly everyone’s talking up that damned Red Shuck. Already, Trantridgers grumble about paying rents and following orders. A few beatings, and even a barn-burning, and they’re still not trodden down enough. They whisper that Venic of Melchester has come back in demon dog form to serve me as he served wicked Sir Pagan. This interferes with my affairs, do you understand? My position depends on the exercise of terror. By me, not against me. When I walk about, peasants must crap their britches. They must be in mind of Diggory Venn’s bloody back, or Git Priddle’s black eye, or the Kail lad’s clipped ear, or the poorhouse hells they’ll fetch up in if I turn them off the land. I cannot be seen to be afraid. I cannot be struck at without returning the blow tenfold. I had it from an old-time Georgia overseer: if one slave runs, hang ten. Most don’t have the salt for it, not least because the ones you hang are your own property and their worth comes off your book. But once you do it, they tend their own pens, keep their own troublemakers in shackle.

‘In Wessex, I might be able to hang a shepherd or two, but ten would be more trouble than they’re worth. So, I pick a family at random, the Balls, and evict ’em, set to wander and beg on the roads and wind up destitute, derelict and, I fervently hope, dead. That’s for Lazy-Eye Jack. But it’s not enough. While the parson’s ghost tale is going round, I can’t press on with my economic plan. So there must be no more bedtime stories, no whispers that New Master will get his comeuppance, not even a hope of deliverance. You understand? The dog must be killed, even if it doesn’t exist. I’ve come to you, Professor, because I need the story killed. Now, can you do that?’

The Professor pondered. Stoke glared intently, playing with his still-glowing cheroot stub.

‘Your problem — though inherently absurd — has features of interest,’ Moriarty said.

I was interested enough by the mention of £5,000 for a pelt.

Stoke let out breath. People aren’t usually relieved when Moriarty involves himself in their affairs, but I suppose it has to happen from time to time.

‘Legends of spectral avengers abound,’ said the Prof, ‘and encourage a persistent fiction that “evil-doers” who, by ingenuity and endeavour, evade human justice must answer to supernatural authority. Such fables are a hindrance to the Calling of Crime. By eliminating your Red Shuck, we chip away at the monument of this myth. I shall accept your commission…’

And the five thousand plums!

‘… and replace the fairy tale of Virtue Triumphant with the brute fact of Wickedness Rewarded. A philosophical — nay, a mathematical — point must be proved. Your problem provides an opportunity to serve the cause of Higher Thought.’

Moriarty read his German economics too. It’s all very well to theorise that wickedness, cruelty, self-interest and the whims of the few overriding the bleats of the many are essential to the furtherance of an efficient, modern society. But, to me, deep-thinkers like Moriarty, Nietzsche and Machiavelli miss an essential truth — it’s a lot of jolly good fun being an ‘evil-doer’. None of these coves seem to relish being a total rotter — though Moriarty, at least, did not confine his evil to theory like some of the windier philosophers. I believe that — in his tiny, shrivelled, eight-months-gone apple of a heart — the Professor got spasms of enjoyment from his crimes, for it’s a sad rogue who strives his life long to increase the miseries of his fellow man without getting at least a warm feeling when he sees others beggared or dumped in unmarked graves on his account. Everyone knows I’m a sentimental soul.

Moriarty’s head oscillated. Dan’l, alarmed, gripped Gertie as if he were worried the Prof was about to turn into a snake as old Venic turned into Red Shuck. I knew the Prof’s habits — he was calculating…

‘I am currently much involved,’ he announced. ‘Several crimes require my presence in London…’

This was news to me.

‘…you will soon read of the Barrie-McTrostle disinheritance… the Clapham Gas House atrocities… and the Winklesworth & Company stock malfeasance…’

He was making this rot up, but Stoke’s eyes goggled — imagining vast feats of inconceivable criminality. Moriarty was not above puffing up his feats by reference to imaginary crimes. Usually, he was deceiving someone about something and had a long game in mind, so I played along.

‘There’s the abduction of the Ranee of Ranchipur, too,’ I put in.

The ‘Ranee of Ranchipur’ was the professional name of Molly Duff, one of Mrs Halifax’s girls. She stained herself brown to pass as a Hindu princess.

Moriarty nodded sagely. ‘Yes, an exacting proposition. The Ranee is to be taken from under the Rajah’s nose and sold to a Scottish peer during her birthday party. That will require my personal attention.’

Stoke’s wonderment was tinctured with dismay as he saw his own knotty problem sliding down the agenda and out of the door.

‘However,’ said the Professor, ‘in this instance, I can with full confidence entrust your dog to my associate, Colonel Moran. He is known far and wide as the greatest hunter of the age. If an animal draws breath, he’s killed it.’

The old chest fairly swelled with pride, though I knew the Prof was stroking the client while palming the job off on me.

‘I know all about keeping natives under the lash,’ I said. ‘I doubt those of Wessex differ much from the heathens I ran into out East.’

‘Moran will run down to Trantridge with you…’

‘…bringing along my guns, what?’

‘…suitably armed to bring down any Wessex Wolf. He will take stock of your situation, then act expeditiously to effect a satisfactory outcome.’

Stoke had the temerity to baulk at this.

‘I’ve set a pile of money on the table, Professor… I was hoping for the boss of this outfit, not the top hand.’

‘Mr Stoke-d’Urberville, when it comes to tramping through mud and muck after ferocious beasts, the Colonel has far more experience than I. Moran will set down observations and send me regular communiqués about his progress…’

This again was news to me, and not entirely welcome.

‘A portion of my brain will be fully occupied with Red Shuck. Even if I am removed from the scene of your travails. If you are beset by a mysterious “do-gooder”, he or she will be thwarted. On that, you have the word of Professor James Moriarty.’

Which, as far as it went, was impressive. If Moriarty promised to cut your throat or assault your sister and get away with it, you could be assured he’d follow through. Otherwise, his word was worth about as much as my promissory notes to tailors or cabbage-men… but Jasper Stoke, tyrant and villain though he might be, set much by hollow wordage from so distinguished a gent.

V

I packed guns for a trip west.

Impertinent reviewers of my Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas made waggish remarks about the Moran propensity for ‘droning at length’ about guns. I still hold those seventy-eight pages, with practical footnotes, on the rifle ‘Prometheus’ a worthwhile addition to the literature and essential to the understanding of later, more immediately exciting chapters. Discerning readers have given testimonials as to the fascinating, educational and profoundly important nature of these outpourings from my pen — which not a few rank higher than anything from Dickens or Shelley.

‘Prometheus’, custom-made by George Gibbs of Bristol, is sadly lost. Having served me better than any woman I’ve ever paid for, the rifle suffered tragically when pressed into service as a crutch as I hobbled out of an East African jungle on a broken leg. I laid the gun to rest in a grave with the three bearers who deserted me. I don’t officially record those sammies, because close-up executions spat from an abused and spoiled weapon can’t be set beside the true shots of the gun’s great days. But they constituted the final bag. Had ‘Prometheus’ survived beyond publication of Heavy Game, I might have added a literary lion or two to its tally. Luckily, the Eton coachwhip was to hand when opportunity came to answer my critics.

If you’ve a fancy to hang the antlers of a Grand Duke in your lodge, you might need a recoilless pistol which looks like a pair of opera glasses and doesn’t make a noise louder than a round of applause. Then, Blind Herder’s your man. Still, if Red Shuck was actual game, I needed a game rifle. Gibbs & Co. remained my preferred supplier. I’d not named a gun since ‘Prometheus’, but I’d a rack to choose from. Elephant, lion, tiger, bear, native and witness widows across the Empire could attest to their reliability. I took three rifles, including one calibrated for shots of up to three-quarters of a mile with an optical contraption for sighting purposes. My Webley had finally succumbed when I was forced to use its barrel as a jemmy and its handle as a hammer to extricate myself from the oubliette of Arnsworth Castle. So, I needed a side arm. Officially, Gibbs does not make a revolver — but, as a service to a valued customer, they furnished me a superbly crafted, teak-handled specimen superior to the job lots of shooting iron turned out by Yankee bodgers like Samuel Colt.

It was arranged that, three days after our first consultation, I would meet Jasper Stoke at Paddington Station and we would chuff-chuff west. Before leaving, I conferred with Moriarty in the windowless study where he experimented. He was not busy with other crimes, imaginary or genuine. He was dissecting a violin. An Amati of Cremona, if that means anything. He had secured it at auction for a fabulous sum — solely, I believe, to keep it from a rival bidder for whom he had a particular dislike. With dressmakers’ scissors and a surgeon’s scalpel, he anatomised his fiddle, snipping strings, sundering joins. Perhaps the Prof hoped to find out where the tunes came from.

Looking up from his labours, Moriarty saw me dressed for the country and raised a bony finger to signal I shouldn’t leave just yet.

He pushed away from his workbench, rolling his chair on castors across uncarpeted floor towards a cabinet of many drawers. The Professor boasted that this contained a thousand unique methods of murder — though, when someone was to be got rid of, he usually left the mamba venom envelope gum and asphyxiating orchids to his oriental peer, relying instead on tried-and-true British bludgeoning or my own marksmanship. He pulled a drawer marked ‘58’ and took out a small cardboard box.

‘It’s not a spider, is it, Moriarty? You know my opinion on arachnids!’

The Professor opened the box, which was full of apparently ordinary bullets. Moriarty plucked a rimmed.455 pistol cartridge. They make them by the thousand. But instead of dull lead, its nose gleamed sterling silver.

I whistled and commented, ‘Pricey.’

‘Indeed,’ Moriarty said. ‘Material is costly and manufacture complicated. But you lecture often on the importance of using the proper loads. The literature would have it that supernatural game such as Red Shuck requires a silver bullet. I shall want a precise account of every shot fired. Any rounds not discharged are to be returned when this matter is settled.’

I slipped the box into my pocket.

‘Moriarty, do you give any weight to the notion that there’s a ghost or goblin behind this business? Our client plainly doesn’t…’

‘Our client, though not unperceptive in some matters, is a limited man.’

‘I’ve seen mysteries beyond explanation in the East, but run into many more which turn out to be some clever fakir trying to put one over on the white man.’

‘Dullards would have you believe that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth… but to a mathematical mind, the impossible is simply a theorem yet to be solved. We must not eliminate the impossible, we must conquer it, suborn it to our purpose. Whatever remains, however dully probable, will satisfy earthbound thinkers, while we have the profit of the hitherto inconceivable. Besides, I daresay anyone with a silver bullet in his brains couldn’t tell it from lead.’

From this, I knew Moriarty was playing his own game. When he rattled on, he was mesmeric. He could convince you Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — also the product of ‘a mathematical mind’, remember — made sound sense. Most criminals were so rapt by his phrases and his eyes and his snake-neck wobble they blithely did whatever he wanted without knowing why. I was not immune, but had been with the Firm long enough to know the Prof’s tricks.

I left Moriarty to his musical experiments, and Chop drove me to the station.

VI

In our first-class compartment on the Great Western Railways train to Stourcastle, I quizzed Jasper Stoke about the layout at Trantridge. It’s advantageous to know the territory before setting a foot there. I had conned maps, almanacs and gazetteers; now I drew Stoke out on things nobody thought to set down. You can deduce — to use the word of the week — a great deal from smells. Not a pleasant topic, especially when the odours of Wessex are under discussion, but revealing.

‘The Chase stinks like Pennsylvania,’ Stoke said. ‘Open-cast mine country.’

‘Is there any mining?’ I asked.

‘In the New Forest, towards Bramshurst, there are pits, but nothing in The Chase. I can’t even say what the luciferous stench is. Chemicals in the ground? And something rotten. Like eggs gone off.’

Stoke filled up the compartment with fug, puffing on his cheroots. He gave a lot away when smoking. He tried to exhale confident clouds, Indian signals announcing himself as Big Chief, but chewed the stub, got leaf-bits stuck to his teeth and punctured the will-o’-the-wisp. A man for putting up a front, he couldn’t keep it together. No wonder he’d been chased out of Tombstone by the improbably named Earps. He was buckling in Wessex, and — if he didn’t get his dog-pelt soon — would probably be chased out of Trantridge too.

I can’t say I took to Stoke. British-born, he might be — but American in his ways. Big-talking, craven, insensitive and miserly. In his terms, a compleat c--sucker. If he ever ran across Jim Lassiter, he’d be dead in the dust before he could clear his holsters. Still, at least he wasn’t a bloody Mormon.

He didn’t want to look yellow-livered, though — despite his tale of terror — and compensated with high-handed, down-the-nose lecturing. In advance of the promised five thou, a small sum had passed from his coffers to ours. He felt this entitled him to treat Moriarty & Moran as jobbing carpenters hired to put up shelves. He gave out German cant about ‘payment by results’ and it still rankled that the Professor wasn’t personally in Wessex dancing to his tune.

Dan’l, the savage giant, was more forthcoming. From him, I picked up the fact that The Chase put folk in a funk even before the story of Red Shuck was revived. This stretch of ancient woodland had been the site of many crimes, it seems — now even the most daring poacher hesitated to trespass there. Dan’l wasn’t that troubled by the beast which had done for Ambush Jack, which he said did less damage than a mountain lion. He’d killed mountain lions with Gertie, and showed me deep old scars to illustrate the yarn. I have a few of those too and we played a jolly game of pulling up sleeves and opening shirts to display manly badges. However, Dan’l was scared of the Brokeneck Lady. Something was done to Theresa Clare in The Chase which she didn’t complain about at the time. It excited her spirit post-mortem, though. Dan’l said that, while taking his turn on guard, he’d seen her, veiled, head lolled to one side, creeping out of the woods.

‘Put the fear in me, she did,’ he said. ‘Mountain lion’s nothin’, but there’s no tellin’ with a haint. All sorts of ways a haint can hex you.’

Stoke snorted, but I took note. There might be a bagful of spooks to deal with, though our client only laid bounty on the dog. Still, I had a box of silver bullets.

At Stourcastle, a covered trap waited.

It was, of course, raining.

VII

Moriarty asked me to set down my observations. Very well…

I have visited all the shitholes of the world and Wessex ranks with the worst of ’em. Whores smell better in Afghanistan. Weather is nicer in Tibet. Cuisine is more appetising in the Australian outback, where snakes count as a Sunday delicacy you look forward to all week. And the natives are more welcoming in the Andaman Island Penal Colony.

The dull, driving rain made me miss London’s pea-souper.

Two bedraggled souls stood outside the station, sheltering under a lean-to which was near collapse.

‘Where’s the coachman?’ barked Stoke.

This was addressed to a burly man with the puff gone out of him. A well-chewed moustache and creeping baldness betokened a tendency to fret and fuss.

‘Come on, Derby,’ continued Stoke. ‘Out with it.’

Derby didn’t elucidate, but his smaller companion — a reedy, floppy-haired, permanently smiling cove in a peculiar tweed singlet and dun-coloured hooded cape — piped up cheerily.

‘Coachman fled the scene,’ he said, with a strange whistling voice. ‘Took fright. Not the only one. More maids quit. And the cook. And Chitty, the butler. Thring’s taken his place. We’ll have to make do as best we can, Mr Stoke. As best we can.’

Stoke, angry at the news, made no introductions. I gathered these were Braham Derby, Stoke’s overseer, and his purportedly mad brother, Saul.

‘You should have hired someone,’ Stoke said. ‘How does it look to have my manager doing scut-work like carriage-driving?’

Braham shrugged. ‘No one’s to be had, Mr Stoke. Not at any price.’

I understood. Besides the prospect of being ripped by Red Shuck, none of the locals wanted anything to do with fetching home the hated New Master. They’d be best pleased if Stoke caught a chill on the platform and died.

‘Been more howling,’ Saul said, almost cheerfully.

He turned to me, wide eyes darting up as if he glimpsed something high over my shoulder, swooping towards my back. When I cast an eye behind me, there was nothing. He caught me once and I resolved not to be fooled again. In turn, Stoke, Dan’l and even Braham — who ought to be used to his brother’s ways — owl-twisted their necks and got rain in their faces. Saul whistled to himself, seemingly unaware. I had him down as either the village idiot or a genius wearing the cloak of lunacy.

Saul was snug in the carriage while Braham sat up on the seat in the wet and grimly drove us to Trantridge. Stoke said nothing to encourage it, but Dan’l — who evidently felt the mooncalf a kindred spirit — asked for news.

‘Much disturbance among mammals,’ said Saul. ‘Hares and rabbits and rats and shrews and stoats. The Hall is plagued with their mischief. The creatures of The Chase are quitting their homes. The pink-eyed man shoots at them. But they get into the house and fight the cats. All nature is in an uproar. I have written to the press about the phenomenon.’

Stoke snorted. He didn’t know what it means when small game flees. A bigger predator is about.

I was in tiger country.

VIII

Seen through a veil of drizzle, Trantridge Hall was what you’d expect — big front to impress the peasants, but boarded upper windows and fallen tiles suggested lack of care with the upkeep.

The drill for greeting the Master in the lesser great houses of the shire counties is standard. Even if the landowner has only popped into town to have a tooth pulled or purchase the latest number of La Vie Parisienne, he expects to come home and find the servants have left off whatever they were doing — or pretending to do — and lined up smartly on the front lawn, showing teeth in beaming smiles.

If it’s wet, that’s just hard cheese. Valets, maids and the like are too afraid of dismissal without references to come down with sniffles like high-born folk.

The showing outside the Hall was like inspection the morning after a skirmish. Gaps in the ranks betokened casualties or — most likely — desertions. Such smiles as were on display didn’t pass muster. Here, dismissal in disgrace was early parole.

The carriage halted. An undersized menial advanced to open the door and lower the step, then offer Stoke the temporary shelter of an umbrella. Thring had a red splotch birthmark as if a ball of mud flung at his eye had spattered half his face. He was a jumped-up footman, filling the too-big tail-coat of the butler who’d taken flight.

‘Welcome home, sir,’ Thring said — as if he hated his Master enough to think he deserved a place like this.

Stoke grunted and stepped down, boots sinking into the miry, rutted drive. He paid no heed to the line of soggy servants, as if about to make an undignified dash for the front door. In the lea of the gothic door arch was a woman wrapped in oilskins. She took the prize for most convincing sham smile in the vicinity, and even fluttered flirty fingers.

From Dan’l’s sigh, I gathered this was his favourite — Braham and Saul’s sister Mod. I’d marked her down as ‘of interest’ because she was reputedly the finest piece on the estate. One would be hard-put to determine the yay or nay of that from her weatherproof bonnet and fishing gear, though she showed a pleasant, pink face.

Thring made no move for the house and Stoke deigned to look at the line. Some maids curtseyed, but most made no effort to pretend they weren’t cold and miserable. A snap produced more snarling smiles.

Leaning against a wall was a pink-eyed, skull-faced apparition wrapped in a Yankee cowman’s duster coat. He had cracked a whip to signal the respect due the Master. Dead-white hair straggled from under his broad-brimmed hat. Even a rank amateur deducer would peg him as Nakszynski the Albino, Stoke’s surviving gunhand.

‘Back to work, the lot of you,’ shouted Stoke — in the circumstances, almost a kindly gesture. He didn’t have to say it twice; the servants hurried out of the rain.

Under Thring’s umbrella, Stoke trudged towards the door and the charms of Miss Derby.

I unbent myself out of the trap and looked about.

‘Best get inside, Colonel,’ Braham said. ‘Get a hot toddy in you.’

Mod Derby opened her arms and spread oilskin bat wings as if to envelop Jasper Stoke.

Then another woman appeared, from behind a bush, and levelled a rifle at Stoke. He threw himself into the mud, squealing. The grim-faced harpy, dress front torn open and hair caked with dirt and twigs, stood over the Master of Trantridge and took surprisingly steady aim.

The Firm was on the point of losing a client before the job was half started.

The woman’s weapon was a Brown Bess. The musket might have been a relic of Waterloo, kept for seventy years in a corner with the brooms. I doubted the would-be assassin had kept her powder dry.

Stoke fairly blubbed for his life. He crab-walked backwards three or four yards, making a muddy arse-and-boot-heel trail in the grass. No wonder he’d quit Tombstone. If an apparition with an antediluvian firearm reduced him to wailing terror, I could imagine the effect of a sharp-eyed Earp with a working Winchester.

‘Mattie Ball, come away,’ said Braham. ‘Kill him and you’ll swing for sure.’

The woman didn’t take heed. With her thumb, she pulled back the cock.

I strode into the scene and interposed my chest, shoving up against the musket’s cold barrelmouth.

‘If you want to shoot someone,’ I said. ‘How about me? Got the sand for that, eh? I’m Colonel Sebastian Moran, of the First Bangalore Pioneers. I’ve cheated death in all corners of the world and don’t fancy a Wessex grave. Not at all, my good woman. If you were in shooting mood, you’d already have discharged this antique.’

I recollected Stoke had turned a family named Ball off the estate. Mattie must be a survivor of the clan, demented by sufferings too sordid to dwell on.

She could fire her musket but once — if, indeed, it would fire. She’d not get a chance to reload, pack and take aim again. The avenging farmgirl wouldn’t want to waste her shot on anyone but the author of her misfortunes.

Mattie Ball was demented, but I faced her down. I’ve done as much to men and beasts — and similarly bloodthirsty females — before. A moment of clarity, of understanding, decides the way the cards will fall. Such encounters are over with between the ticks of a clock… but the seconds stretch to hours while you’re in it.

Thus far, the turn has always been in my favour.

Hesitation sparked in the woman. I made a grab for her gun, got a grip and forced the barrel upright. I slipped my gloved thumb into the lock, which bit as Mattie Ball jerked the trigger. The lock scarcely penetrated leather.

I wrenched the musket from her hands. The Albino, who should have kept better lookout, was suddenly there, holding Mattie from behind, spade-bladed Bowie to her neck. Not the proper tool for opening a throat, but it’d do.

Braham wanted to protest, but Nakszynski showed yellow teeth in pink gums which matched his eyes. He began a shallow, preliminary cut.

‘Enough of that, Chalky,’ I said. ‘Miss Ball is just leaving.’

I wasn’t having some bunny-eyed Johnny-come-lately Yankee Polack mule-skinner spoiling the moment. I’d shared something with Mattie Ball, more intimate than the usual mess between man and woman. I wasn’t minded to let it go yet. The knife-touch pricked the woman’s soul. Her eyes and teeth were set in defiance.

Nakszynski gave me a ‘Who are you?’ look, but didn’t press on with his murdering.

Stoke, muddied all over, was helped up by Thring and Dan’l. Mod indicated she’d like to fuss over him, but held back because of the dirt.

‘Hello Mattie,’ Saul said. ‘I was sorry to hear about your poor mama… and your brothers… and Granver Ball… and…’

I assumed Stoke would have need of Nakszynski’s whip. Instead, he broke free of his aides and sloshed at Mattie. Squirting angry tears, he stuck a craven fist into her belly. She doubled, twisting out of the Albino’s grip, and fell, retching. Stoke kicked her in the side, and rolled her over. He spat on her and kept kicking. Animal whining and growling came out of him. His kicks echoed inside her chest as if it were a tight drum.

I started to feel the pinch of the gun-cock.

I gently eased it back and removed my throbbing thumb. I was right about the musket’s age, but it had either been cared for well over the years or recently restored.

Mattie curled, hugging her face, knees over her stomach. Stoke kept booting her spine. Thring stood by, umbrella raised over his Master’s head. A little more rain could hardly put the self-declared tyrant and villain in a sorrier state.

In the spirit of experiment, I cocked the musket and pulled the trigger.

The blast caught everyone’s attention. I’d like to say a far-off bird tumbled from the sky, but the ball went wild and fell spent. Brown Bess had a fine record in seeing off England’s enemies, but only in the days when Jean François marched close enough for you to smell the garlic breath before you let fire. For accuracy at a distance, you were better off with a longbow.

The crack of the shot echoed.

Stoke froze in mid-kick and Mattie Ball scurried away, quick for someone who’d taken such punishment. She hared across Trantridge Hall’s well-kept lawns towards tangled forest. The Chase. Mattie paused, tiny against the thick, tall trees, and raised a fist. Then she was gone.

No one was inclined to follow.

‘Moran,’ shouted Stoke, ‘what the Devil do you think you’re about?’

‘Put a bounty on the pelt and I’ll bring her down from here,’ I said, raising Brown Bess as if to take aim. The gun, of course, was empty, though I judged Stoke in no state to distinguish a single-shot musket from a repeating rifle. ‘But my understanding is that I’m here to hunt a dog. Anything else is out of season. Now, someone mentioned “hot toddy”. It would behoove us to show the sense to get out of the f--ing rain…’

No one argued the point.

I strode to the door, where I encountered Mod Derby. She gave me a welcoming wink and hand squeeze.

‘Colonel Sebastian Moran, ma’am,’ I said, raising her hand to my lips.

‘Welcome to Trantridge, gallant Colonel,’ she said. Her smile put a dimple in her cheek, and I always appreciate a dimple. ‘You have saved us all from murder.’

It was possible that, after putting her single ball in Stoke, Mattie Ball could have found a bayonet in her shawl, fitted it to the musket and skewered the entire household. I’d have laid odds against, though.

‘I suppose I have,’ I said, as if the thought of receiving thanks never entered my head. ‘All in a day’s work, ma’am.’

‘Modesty,’ she said. ‘But you may call me Mod.’

As with Mattie, I shared a long moment with Mod in which things were settled. Again, my hand took a trick. Without words, something to our mutual benefit was decided.

Stoke, plastered with filth, barged past into his house. He took no notice of what had passed between me and his supposed fancy woman.

We all went into Trantridge Hall.

IX

In conduct under fire, Jasper Stoke had settled the question of the hue of his innards — a sickly custard-yellow. His hands, the servants and the Derby siblings knew it. Even simple Dan’l and fairy-feathered Saul. Having ‘lost face’, as the Celestials say, mine host kept the company waiting for supper. Another theatrical device, no doubt. Probably made sense in German economics.

We convened in a big gloomy room. Blazing logs raised steam from damp furnishings within a few feet of the fireplace. Cow-gum stink suggested wallpaper paste liquefying. Paintings above the mantel, warped by years of radiant heat, did not hang true. However, the warmth did not reach as far as the table. We might have sat in Siberia or Staines for all the good the fire did us.

Gussied up in regimental dinner jacket, displaying a shelf-load of gongs earned by bravery and homicide in the service of the Queen, I did my best to ignore the cold. Mod Derby had abandoned oilskins for more flattering dress, with the neck cut lower than is the London fashion — displaying one or two reasons for favouring counties over capital. She had a head of long, fine, flaxen hair. I was persuaded to recount anecdotes relating to my medals. Seated at my right, Mod jogged my memory by replenishing my goblet with wine from Simon Stoke’s recently discovered cellar. Twittering Saul was to my left, grazing on plates of nuts and berries set out to keep stomachs from rumbling as the evening meal was delayed by the non-appearance of the Master of Trantridge.

Also present were Braham and Nakszynski. Dan’l evidently took his eats with the children or the cowboys. I was surprised to discover another guest at table: that same Parson Tringham who was the unwitting inspiration for Stoke’s dog problem or else an active participant in the plot against him. If the old idiot were puzzled that Stoke — who’d turned him out on his ear the last time he attempted to call — should ask him to dine, it hadn’t stopped him coming. Tringham nattered about long-dead d’Urbervilles as if anyone were interested. He was of our company because Stoke thought he should be grilled for further intelligence. After listening to his witterings, it seemed to me a happier outcome would be if the parson were simply grilled. The Albino had no compunctions about eating a mountie’s liver. Surely, a clergyman’s tongue would at least serve as an appetiser?

I ignored Tringham and maintained attentions to Mod. I had every reason to anticipate private entertainment from that direction.

It nagged, however, that Moriarty had charged me with making detailed observations. Encomia to Modesty Derby’s teats would not interest the cold, sad maniac. No, the Professor would rather have the ramblings of a crackpot genealogist.

Tringham had long sought entry to the archives of the family — meaning the centuried d’Urbervilles, of course, not the jumped-up Stokes. The dinner invitation had persuaded him such was now within his grasp. Well past the age when any self-respecting Eskimo would have packed himself off on an ice floe, his enthusiasms — and his mouth — were unstilled. To be so close to a cherished objective pricked his bump of excitability, and he expostulated about every item in the room.

Of all things, Tringham started on about the paintings.

Over the fireplace was a full-length portrait of Simon Stoke-d’Urberville. In a case of ‘never mind the picture, look at the frame’, an oblong of gilt curly flourishes and oak leaves surrounded the moneylender. The Shylock’s hand rested on a stack of ledgers. The fizzog was bland — the sort you forget while you’re looking at it — but the artist had worked on that long-fingered hand, giving the impression its usual placement was in someone else’s pocket. To Simon’s right, in an equally pretentious, equally twisted frame was a veiled young crone, posed in a bower. Birds perched on her head and arms as if she were a Christmas tree, chickens mixed in with robins and sparrows. This was the widow who’d lingered long abed upstairs before leaving the accumulated boodle to her remittance-man nephew. Being blind, she couldn’t have known how hideous her picture was; being rich, I doubt she was troubled by anyone telling her.

Tringham called our attention to the third in the trinity above the mantel. The matching frame should have been inhabited by murdered Alexander, beloved sprog of Mr and Mrs Stoke-Parvenu. Instead, a red-bearded brute in armour skulked in the woods, a big red mastiff curled about his metal boots. The painting was old, dark and curling at the edges.

‘Pagan Plantagenet d’Urberville,’ the parson said. ‘Circa 1660. Costumed as the original Sir Pagan. Born Percy d’Urberville, he took the names of his ancestors, provable and fancied. He believed secret marriages intermingled the blood of the d’Urbervilles with the line of the rightful kings of England. When the Interregnum ended, Pagan Plantagenet nominated himself as a truer heir to the throne than Charles. Few supported him. Lord Rochester ridiculed him as “Percy the Pretender”. He spent a fortune on forged documents, muddying the waters of d’Urberville scholarship for centuries to come. It’s a frightful bother when a scrap of Norman parchment might be a Restoration fake.’

‘Looks a grim old swine,’ I said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘He perished in a duel with a neighbour, Squire Frankland. He insulted the squire by shooting his terrier. In a manner of speaking, he was another victim of the legend of Red Shuck. While posing for this picture, he was bitten by the dyed mastiff used as a model for the original Red Shuck. This gave him an entrenched terror of dogs. He took to carrying a brace of pistols for protection from them. That’s how he came to kill the squire’s pet. As aggrieved party, Frankland had choice of weapons and picked rapiers. For all his Norman affectations, Pagan Plantagenet was a poor swordsman. But he shouldn’t be here.’

‘What d’you mean, Parson?’ I asked. Tringham was agitated about some wrongness.

‘His picture shouldn’t hang in this spot. Certainly not in that horrible frame. The d’Urbervilles were long gone from Trantridge Hall in Pagan Plantagenet’s time. His seat was Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill, as are the family tombs. Incidentally, it might amuse you to know I once had cause to alert John Durbeyfield — an offshoot, degenerate modern twig of the family — to the existence of those tombs. Later, to my astonishment, the wife and children of this peasant “Sir John” took up temporary residence among their ancestors, like Indian ghouls. What do you think of that?’

‘Not much,’ responded Mod — who, in a brief flash of teeth, indicated this footnote amused her not at all. I had come in on the last act of a play which was a long evening in the running, and couldn’t hope to pick up all the plot threads.

‘If Percy were fascinated by his ancestor,’ I suggested, getting back to the portrait, ‘wouldn’t he have poked around here?’

‘Much as you have,’ added Mod, with a cutting tone which didn’t cut the thick-skinned parson.

‘Pagan Plantagenet was afraid of The Chase,’ he answered. ‘Red Shuck, you know, supposedly abides hereabouts. The painting is Ecole de Lely. Face and dog were executed by the commissioned artist at a sitting, the rest assigned to pupils. One would have done the armour, for instance, from an empty suit. A junior could have visited The Chase to put in the trees without the sitter having to come near the place. The mystery is how the picture comes to be at Trantridge not Kingsbere.’

‘Him,’ Mod said, pointing at Simon Stoke, ‘he’s your answer. He bought his ancestors in a job lot. He probably put the picture up. Hung so he himself seems superior. A sign of conquest, of his swallowing of the old d’Urbervilles.’

‘My sister has a point,’ Saul said. ‘Stoke probably didn’t know which Pagan he had, and took Percy the Pretender for the original.’

‘It’s not so much the picture that excites,’ Tringham said, ‘but the possibility Mr Stoke acquired other items along with it — documents, perhaps, or books. Pagan Plantagenet collected authentic items along with his fakes. Among his sins was the sacrilege of destroying them to provide raw materials — scraping manuscripts clean, so he had properly aged paper upon which to set out mendacious scrawls. If the cause of scholarship is just, Pagan Plantagenet d’Urberville might be judged the worst man in his family…’

‘Might he now?’ announced Jasper Stoke-d’Urberville, sweeping into the hall, scrubbed and scented, in evening clothes. A dramatic entrance, of course. The doors were held open by footmen. ‘Might he indeed? I hope to contest that title, Parson.’

He sauntered to his place at head of table.

‘I intend to go Mr Percy Pagan Plantagenet one better,’ said the Master of Trantridge. ‘When I have a dog shot, it’ll be the right one.’

From this, I deduced Jasper had loitered outside, eavesdropping, awaiting the theatrical moment.

Suddenly, in another stage device, maids were hurrying about under Thring’s direction, setting food on the table. They began with Jasper rather than, as tradition would dictate, the company’s sole lady. I always advocate feeding a filly first, since such trifles make the dears more warmly inclined to one’s advances. Scorning points of amatory order leads to nights in cold, lonely beds — even, nay especially, on the part of blokes who foolishly suppose they have proprietary interest in some delicate personage. Stoke had staked claim by referring to Mod Derby as his ‘fancy woman’. Finely attuned as I am to feminine character, I could tell that if he expected a midnight visit after this day’s work, he was out of luck.

Stoke dug into his grub without waiting for his guests to have plates in front of them. Tringham, served last, muttered needless grace over his mess of cabbage and boiled beef. No one else troubled the Divinity before scoffing.

With his mouth full, Jasper announced he had sent word to the constabulary, indicting Mattie Ball for attempted murder.

‘I’ll have the countryside against her,’ he crowed. ‘I’ll post bounty on her, as you suggested, Moran. She’ll not be taken alive. An example must be made. One deranged female won’t stand in the way of progress.’

Mod and Braham Derby exchanged glances.

‘It is not enough that the Ball woman failed in her murderous mission,’ Stoke continued, warming to his subject, flecks of gravy marring his starched dickey. ‘The story of her attempt, her exploit, must end in defeat and degradation. Matilda Ball must be despised and laughed at, not to suit my vanity, mind you, but in the spirit of propaganda. Her downfall will elevate my status as Master of Trantridge.’

I remembered sobbing, muddy Jasper Stoke kicking a defenceless damsel. I usually advocate kicking a man when he’s down. What better time, indeed, to kick a man than when he’s suitably arranged within boot distance? But for a passionate surge of victory, the tiger you bring down must have claws. I’d shared a moment with the musketeer maid. It rubbed the wrong way when Stoke, in his telling of the tale, got between me and her. I care not two hoots and a shit for prayer before meals. Food is brought to table by violence and drudgery or wanting because some other sod has skipped grace and eaten it first. God don’t come into it. But Stoke’s manner in talking of Mattie Ball was my idea of sacrilege.

Saul Derby took the conversation off on another tangent — a proposed study of badger runs in The Chase. He ventured they might be of more use than overgrown, broken and disused human paths.

Then, as the poet has it, there came a knocking. Not a gentle raven-tap at the window, but a hammering on the front door. This resounded through the foyer and thence to the dining room. I had noticed a great iron handle, suitable for raising such a racket, stuck to the front of Trantridge Hall.

Stoke ordered Thring to see who it was and tell them to piss off. Proving himself not a complete fool, he gave Nakszynski the nod to go with the butler. Even discounting ghosts, he had a superfluity of here-and-now enemies who would love a clear shot at him.

‘Come now,’ said Braham, as the Albino stood up. ‘It’s not like anyone who wants to kill Mr Stoke would just walk up the drive and knock on the door…’

That marked Braham Derby as an amateur. In point of fact, a murderer often knocks on the door — summoning a victim conveniently to the point of a knife or the end of a gun. I’ve paid such calls myself, tipped my hat to a cooling corpse, and walked off before hue and cry can be raised.

Stoke wavered and Nakszynski sat again.

The doors were flung wide again. The caller trumped the Master’s strut with a genuine theatrical effect. A big man, dressed entirely in crimson from his shoes to his tall hat, he was bright scarlet in the face and hands. Across broad shoulders he carried a heavy, limp bundle. Completing the infernal effect, he whiffed of something like brimstone. Frankly, I’ve met subtler volcanic eruptions.

The Albino had a Colt.45 drawn. I kept my Gibbs out of sight, but equally out of my pocket. If needs be, I could fire under or through the table. Mod gave a little intrigued parp as my cold revolver brushed her thigh.

Diggory Venn, the red-dyed radical — for it could be no one else! — shrugged off Thring as the butler tried to lay hand on him. Venn heaved his bundle onto the table. It displaced the remains of the meal, and splayed before the Master of Trantridge.

As the bundle slid, wrapping came loose.

A white face showed, with a red hole beneath it. Mattie Bell was open-eyed in death, throat ripped out.

Before Stoke could blurt ‘what is the meaning of this?’ or somesuch, Tringham stood up, gulped, and fainted.

‘Satisfied?’ said the reddleman, directly addressing Stoke.

The Master was astonished and queasy. Blood dripped into his lap. Corpse-eyes looked up at him.

If you swear by Mrs Beeton, this was probably the wrong time for the maid to fetch in the port. But Jasper Stoke wasn’t the only one among us glad of access to fortified spirits.

Pistol back in my pocket, I examined the body. I shut Mattie’s eyes. My smell was still on her, but some other animal had taken what was rightly mine. That ticked me off and made this a personal matter. Hunter’s honour, you know. I don’t expect anyone to understand, but these things run deep.

I would skin that bloody Red Shuck.

X

I doubt anyone else at Trantridge Hall slept that night as soundly as I did. I know no one else breakfasted as heartily the next morning.

Even the Stoke-d’Urberville kitchens couldn’t go far wrong with breakfast. We were served buffet fashion in the foyer. Mattie Ball was still laid out on the dining table, a drop cloth for a shroud. I had second helpings of poached eggs and devilled kidneys.

When setting off on a hunt — or a punitive military expedition — it’s essential to be rested, refreshed and well fed, else you’re halfway to failure before you’ve taken your first shot. I’ve the happy knack of being able to pinch out thoughts like a candle as soon as I bed down. No nightmares trouble the rest of Basher Moran. I run into enough while I’m awake.

Stoke, however, was red-eyed from a case of the horrors. He cuffed a maid who offered him toast. Braham Derby, if anything, looked worse. From Mod, I knew her brother and Mattie had once had an ‘understanding’ which didn’t survive the New Master’s German economics.

We’d forgotten Parson Tringham, and left him where he fell. Some time in the night, he’d roused to find himself alone with Mattie and quit the Hall.

Stoke was worried he’d be browbeaten into traipsing into The Chase. On that score, he had no concern. No use for a yellow liver in a hunting party. I also recalled cases where the Firm lost a fee because a client happened to get killed before his bill was settled. So: five thousand reasons to keep Jasper Stoke among the living.

It fell to me, as ranking shikari, to pick beaters and bearers. From the Hall, I chose Nakszynski and Saul. I reckoned the Albino a stealthier accomplice than blundering Dan’l, and gathered he had experience in tracking and killing dangerous beasts and deadly men. The strange youth knew the wilds and paths of The Chase better than anyone alive. Practically raised in them. On first-name terms with the squirrels. Knew every tree to talk to. They have holy fools like that in India. Some make damn decent guides — they take you to where the tigers are, and no one is too put out if they get eaten.

Outside the Hall, Diggory Venn waited. He hadn’t slept under Stoke’s roof. The client still favoured shooting the reddleman, being three-quarters convinced he was in league with the demon dog. I saw his reasoning, but he was wrong. Stoke could have sacrificed an ally to deceive an enemy — a trick I’d essayed a time or two myself — but Venn, foolish fellow, rang true. He could no more slaughter an innocent than turn blue.

The beast had killed Mattie Ball and Lazy-Eye Jack, on opposite sides at Trantridge. Red Shuck was indiscriminate, as much a threat to the villagers as the Master. Venn, self-declared protector of downtrodden tenants, wanted it dead as much as Stoke, self-appointed oppressor of the unwashed.

Since his whipping, the reddleman had been living off the land. He had a lair in The Chase. He was careful not to say if anyone in the village or at the Hall helped him with the odd hot meal or mug of tea — though I’d swear he hadn’t been abiding on nuts, berries and edible bark alone.

I quizzed him. He’d come across signs of a large animal or animals in the woods and heard nocturnal howling, but hadn’t so much as glimpsed red hide through the trees.

‘No ghosts then?’

‘Didn’t say that,’ replied Venn. ‘I seen the Brokeneck Lady. Or someone like. After I found Mattie, she were there — at edge of Temple Clearing, close by a tree. An ululation alerted I to her presence, such as no human nor animal tongue could make. First, I were ’suaded ’twas Mattie’s spirit, gone from her mortal clay, lingering to see justice done. Then, I perceived this woman were garbed different. Long black dress, with shiny black buttons up the front. A thick veil, like twenty year of cobweb. Head kinked over to one side. From the hanging, they do say.’

‘You think it was Theresa Clare?’

‘Tess Durbeyfield as was?’ he said, shrugging. ‘Couldn’t see this one’s face through the veil. I never set eyes on Tess when she were living. Can’t say who this were. She been seen hereabouts afore. I had little concern for her. Were Mattie Ball to think on.’

From concealment in The Chase, Venn had seen what happened at the Hall yesterday. When Mattie fled into the forest, he resolved to offer her shelter and succour. When he caught up with her, she was dead on the ground, eyes glassy. In his rage, Venn assumed Stoke responsible, just as Jasper blamed the reddleman for the death of Lazy-Eye Jack. Now, there was uneasy truce. A third party, set against both factions, was in play: Red Shuck, perhaps in league with this spectral lady.

I’d risen early, with a hunting thrill in my water and a stiff prick. It takes little to make me happy — something new to kill today, and someone new to bed tonight. Prospects fair in both categories, I judged.

Holstered under my arm, my revolver was loaded with silver bullets — which I hoped to conserve, though one or two might make souvenirs. I put my trust in plain lead and carried a rifle I reckoned almost equal to the late ‘Prometheus’. The gun’s bag ran to six tigers, nine lions, a few Welshmen and one Honourable Lord brought down in testing circumstances from the visitors’ gallery to save the House from an excessively dull speech on the subject of Irish Home Rule. Never let it be said that Moriarty & Moran made no contribution to politics.

A drab, damp, cold October day. Sunrise about ten-thirty ante meridien; near full dark just after lunch. It had stopped raining. Thick strands of mist stirred at knee-height like ghost eels.

Venn and Saul, in a huddle, argued over the best path to take to the clearing where Mattie had been found. Venn looked even stranger under thin sunlight which brought out the peculiar, unrelieved redness of his entire person. He carried a stout straight stick which was a match for Dan’l’s Gertie and held it as if he had some skill at the old English sport of quarterstaff. I’ve seen men with long sticks beat men with short swords, so I didn’t care to underguesstimate the reddleman’s martial prowess.

Saul was in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, armed only with a bag for scientific specimens. He’d been responsible for the plaster cast Stoke had brought to Conduit Street and was silly enough to whimper that we should take Red Shuck alive since it might be an unknown species. I promised we’d name it Canis Rufus Saulus, but it’d be easier to stick on a label post-mortem.

Nakszynski wore a shaggy coat made from grizzly hide, tailored with pockets for concealed hold-out pistols and lengths of cheesewire. The lining sheathed sufficient knives to serve boneless duck and fish at a Lord Mayor’s dinner and have enough left over to perform emergency amputations on a cartload of railway-crash wounded. He performed a familiar ritual — loading and checking guns, spitting on blades. His murder tools were in order, ready for use. Stoke stood by his man like a prize-fight trainer, happy to dispense advice on the theory of fisticuffs yet happier still not to be the fellow stepping into the ring to put the advice into practice while another bludgeon-fisted ape pounded on his head.

Most of the household were here to see off our expedition. Mod planted a crafty kiss on my cheek, and slipped a hand into my trousers to administer a secret squeeze. Stoke scowled at the intimacy he could see, but losing a poke-partner came a long way down his list of frets. I reckoned he’d retreat inside and have the Hall barricaded until we came home with Red Shuck hanging upside down from Venn’s stave.

We set off across the lawn, and paused in the shadow of The Chase.

‘This is a truly venerable tract of forest,’ Saul announced, as if lecturing sightseers, ‘one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe is still found on aged oaks. Enormous yew trees, not planted by the hand of man, grow as they did grow when they were pollarded for bows.’

He made a few more remarks about ‘sylvan antiquity’. I disregarded them like the steam of his breath. The tall stark trees were more black than green. Within the woods, groundmist was waist high. The Chase showed its true self.

It was not a forest. It was an English jungle.

XI

Saul — smallest, least encumbered of the party — bent low and scurried through his famous badger runs. Venn, the Albino and I had to take less thorny paths through the dripping woods.

We could scarcely have got wetter if it were raining.

The morning mist didn’t burn off, which made looking out for beast’s spoor an iffy prospect. Exposed roots and the mouths of rabbit-warrens became mantraps. A sane hunter was exceedingly careful where he put his boots.

Sunlight was intermittent. Every step took us back in time. All Saul’s rot about Druidical mistletoe and pollarding for bows brought to mind high old merrie England. Flagons of foaming mead and clots in armour gallantly clouting each other. This was more savage, cold and bloody uncomfortable. As Stoke had warned, it stank like a tannery.

‘What is that smell?’ I asked Venn.

‘What smell?’ he responded. His nostrils must have been burned senseless by living with the stench. In fact, now I came to think of it, the reddleman had the pong on him like the stain on his face.

I like jungle, but The Chase was a Pit of Hell on a wet Wednesday.

After an hour of slow going, we felt we had travelled ten hard leagues but might well have only penetrated a few hundred yards into the wood. Venn tapped his stave against an oak, signalling a halt. We had found an open space about fifty paces across. The trees were so tangled above, the clearing was like a leaky cathedral. Shafts of light poured down through a ceiling of woven wood.

‘Here be the place,’ the reddleman said.

‘Temple Clearing,’ Saul said, popping out of his badger-run. ‘Where Venic turned and Red Shuck killed Sir Pagan. They found that Lazy-Eyed Jack fellow here with his gizzard gone.’

Venn walked slowly, stirring the mist with his stick.

‘Mattie were here,’ he said, ‘lying on this.’

He knelt and waved mist away from a long, flat stone — the size of a table or a tomb. Hewn from rock, smoothed by time. Someone had taken the trouble to haul it here from a quarry.

‘Scary Face Stone,’ Saul said.

I looked at it several ways, but couldn’t see it. Cracks in rock or knots in wood can pull a face, but this was featureless.

‘The name is a corruption,’ Saul went on. ‘Originally, it was Sacrifice Stone. Old even in Sir Pagan’s time. Our Palaeolithic ancestors used it. It’s been washed over and over in blood.’

There were traces of blood on it now.

‘You say the woman was lying here?’ I addressed Venn. ‘How? Arms and legs out, as if thrown away? Or tucked straight, as if on display?’

Venn thought about it, red brows knitting. ‘The second way.’

‘Her hands? Show me how her hands were. By her sides, or…?’

I made defensive claws, as if shielding my throat. Venn crossed his wrists, palms flat against his breast.

‘Never known an animal arrange kill for a funeral,’ I said.

Venn nodded. ‘Only one do have such a habit. That be a human man. But a human man don’t bite out a woman’s throat.’

That showed how limited the reddleman’s experience of the world was. As Moriarty and I learned during the Affair of the Hassocks Hobgoblin, some specimens of ‘human man’ have exactly that predilection. In this case, I’d seen Mattie’s wound and concurred that no man had done that damage.

‘Only a beast could have killed Mattie, but only a man would have laid her out,’ said Saul. ‘In the story of Red Shuck, Venic was sometimes man and sometimes beast.’

Nakszynski spat tobacco at Scary Face Stone, unimpressed.

I was conscious of my silver-loaded revolver. As if on cue, the howling started.

The others had heard this before, but all bristled. Even Nakszynski’s white hair rose under his patched hat.

I don’t know what men mean by fear. My nerves aren’t plumbed in that way. But that howling — softer, more expressive than I’d imagined from reports — pricked an instinct I’d thought dead. It was as if a sail-maker’s needle slid into the nape of my neck then drew down, scraping every bone-knob in turn. My wet skin crawled in disgust at myself, the others, the noise…

We looked around, but it was impossible to tell where the howling came from. I fancied it might be high up, in the trees — but dogs, no matter how big, don’t climb. Red Shuck wasn’t a cat — they scratch as well as bite and Mattie had no claw marks on her. Besides, I know cats. You can live with cats if you’re wary, but you can’t use them the way you can dogs. Red Shuck was being used.

Nakszynski, guns in his hands, wheeled about, scanning for movement. Venn stood slowly, in a fighter’s stance — a double-grip on his stave. The howl died down. There was a noise of birds taking flight. The Albino aimed upwards, but didn’t waste a shot.

Saul, not at all concerned, whistled shrilly.

It was a wonder Nakszynski didn’t shoot him there and then. I knew at once what he was doing.

In answer to his trilling came another howl. Longer, and closer.

With the mist and the trees and the wet, even the best tracker wouldn’t be able to run down Red Shuck in his own woods. But bringing the beast to us was easy. All we had to do was sound a dinner gong.

Saul whistled again.

XII

In the Carpathians, they say this about werewolves: there’s always a tree between you and it, but never a tree between it and you.

I tugged off my right glove with my teeth and stuffed it in a pocket. I like a naked finger on the trigger, no matter the cold. I unslung my rifle and took a firing position, stock to shoulder. Beyond the gunsight, I saw only trees. Thick black pillars in white mist.

There was movement in the mist.

We could still hear howling, but Temple Clearing was confusion to the senses. The noise didn’t seem to come from the moving shape.

I kept my gun up. Eddies and waves in the mist told me something big was coming, careening between trees, picking up speed. We heard crashes, saw lower branches shake. The thing was running blind.

Beats, like a galloping horse. It was coming fast and low, without regard for itself or us.

Another howl sounded, shrill and close and mocking, off to one side. Not from the onrushing creature.

I looked to the howling, bringing my aim round.

We were in The Chase with more than one beast.

I swung back to the more imminent threat, just as some big, black — not red! — and shaggy quadruped burst into the clearing, barrelling like a bull, snorting like a hog, foaming like a mad dog. I fired true and placed a shot in its skull. Momentum kept the thing coming. What was it? Venn whacked with his stave, which was snatched from his hands. I cleared my breech and reloaded. The Albino’s guns went off, blasting fist-sized red gobbets out of a woolly hide.

The howling kept up. I didn’t fire again. This might be a tactic to get us to waste our shots.

‘It’s Old Pharaoh,’ shouted Saul.

It must be dead or dying, but still it tore around, head down, butting at us. Venn, off his feet, slammed into me. I fell backwards into damp mist and put out my hand — which jammed painfully against cold rock. I fell onto Scary Face Stone. My rifle hit me in the face.

‘Git Priddle’s prize black ram,’ Saul explained.

I recalled the beast, which Priddle claimed was taken by Red Shuck. Stoke suspected Old Pharaoh was hidden from his tally-man, so the farmer could duck out of paying tax due.

Through agitated mist, I saw the ram was as big as some lions I’ve shot, humped like a buffalo, with curls of battered, hardened horn. Blood leaked from the hole I’d put in its bulbous forehead. Life was gone from saucer-sized eyes, but it took long moments for the message to reach the body.

Then, Old Pharaoh fell, dead.

Outside Temple Clearing, the howling abated.

I groped in the mist for my gun. Saul waded towards me — to help? His boot came down on my bare hand, crushing it against Scary Face Rock. Two or three fingers broke. Pain rushed up my arm.

I swore.

Saul tried to apologise. I kept swearing, at the pulsating hurt as much as the blundering idiot. Saul took me by the shoulders and helped me get my balance. I found the rifle on the ground, but agony hit again as I made a fist to pick it up.

I raised the gun in a rough aim, but could no more fit my snapped trigger-finger into the guard than you could thread a needle with a sausage. I threw the rifle down. My revolver was slung for a cross-draw. I had to reach into my coat and fish the gun out of my armpit with the wrong hand.

I laid against a bleeding wall of mutton, as if the dead ram were a pile of sandbags. Venn was beside me.

‘Sheep be driven,’ he said. ‘By a dog.’

I’d worked that out by now.

Even though we’d all suspected human agency behind Red Shuck, no one at Trantridge — including yours truly — had thought it through. With my hand swollen and useless and the smell of just-dead sheep in my nose, I had a moment to wonder whether Moriarty had seen the truth and not troubled to mention it. It was the manner of smug trick he was given to, a refined version of his testing via sudden missile or sharp question.

From Stoke’s story, I’d pictured a canny malcontent importing or discovering or raising some unknown species of canine and letting it prey on whom it might. This feint with Old Pharaoh bespoke more active agency. Our as-yet unknown enemy had Red Shuck trained as a sheepdog. Doubtless, the doggie was tutored in amusing tricks — fetch out the fellow’s throat, jump up and bite, roll over and kill. In Wessex, it wouldn’t even take a mastermind. A half-skilled shepherd could manage the trick, and the region was thick with the bastards. If I survived the afternoon I’d call on the Priddle hovel with harsh questions for a well-known ram-withholder.

I was still trying to make a fist, to control the knot of pain at the end of my arm.

Venn coughed blood. It smeared his chin, matching his skin. Even his teeth were red.

Saul, in the centre of the clearing, shrugged off his sample-bag, ears pricked. The Albino was by him, reloading. Besides Old Pharaoh, he had shot several trees — which bore fresh, white scars.

The howling stopped, but I didn’t think the beast had gone away. It had been called to heel.

Saul whistled again, drawing out his trill.

I brought up my revolver. I’m a fair left-hand shot, and the pistol was best for close work anyway.

In answer to Saul’s whistle came a low growl.

‘Shuck be hungry,’ Venn said.

‘Chalky,’ I called. ‘It’ll be under the mist. Can you shoot fish?’

The Albino nodded.

‘If it comes into the clearing, blast it!’

I flapped my crushed hand, as if telling Nakszynski — and whoever else might be spying — I was out of the fight. My thought was to leave the sheepdog to the Albino and save my silver for the shepherd.

Saul whistled again, higher — as if trying out signals.

‘Shut up, you damn fool,’ I shouted. ‘Dog knows we’re here. Dog don’t need a foghorn to find us.’

Saul swallowed and was silent. Who’d have thought such a fairy-footed fellow could do so much damage? My hand felt as if it’d been stamped on by an elephant in clogs.

I didn’t like the way this expedition was going.

Either you bring back trophies or scars — often, both. I could claim Old Pharaoh’s horns, but ram wasn’t the game I’d set out for.

Unlike Old Pharaoh, our new caller came stealthily. The mist was all about like a smoking pool, thickening by the moment. I couldn’t see my own boots. The ram’s hump was barely an island. Saul was in it up to his chest. Nakszynski, furthest off, was almost a ghost.

I heard the dog. It might be a Wessex Wolf or a Trantridge Terrier, but it was a dog. Only dogs pant that way. Only dogs rattle spit as they contemplate din-dins.

We were supper on the hoof.

Though it was only early afternoon and less than a mile from Trantridge Hall, we were lost in nighted jungle, with monsters on all sides.

‘Why be you smiling?’ Venn asked.

‘If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ I said.

I might die in The Chase. The notion made me hot and angry. It rankled I was so ill-prepared as to find myself in this fix. But a curl of my brain — which everyone from the fulminating Sir Augustus to the calculating Professor Moriarty found fault with — was alive now as at no other time. Some chase women, some chase opium dragons, some chase pots of gold. Dammit, some chase postage stamps or currant buns. I chase these edge-of-life-and-death moments — when an animal or man tries to kill me, and I kill them instead. It’s the surge inside — in the water, behind the eyes, in the loins. That’s what Basher Moran’s about. All the rest is fancy trimming. Nice enough to have, but not real. I’d protested when the Prof diagnosed my ‘addiction to fear’ on our first meeting, but had come to see he’d known me better than I knew myself in those innocent days.

There was that smell again. The Chase smell, vile to the nose and eyes. Old and faint on the reddleman, sharp and new on the dog.

Nakszynski was taken by a red devil which leaped up on his chest and bore him under the mist. I glimpsed eyes of flame and teeth like yellow knives. No point in firing wild. I guess the Albino dropped his guns and tried to get a grip on the neck of the thing with its fangs in his throat.

A long string of terrible Polish words came out of Nakszynski — the only speech I ever heard from him. I’d thought him mute. Then, with a liquid gurgle, his verbal torrent petered out.

‘Saul, run,’ I shouted.

He needed no further orders and bolted for one of his tunnel-paths. I looked for a red streak in the white — and took aim. If Saul Derby played hare to this hound, it might afford me a shot.

No movement.

I turned to Venn, to suggest he watch our backs. Red Shuck could come at us from any direction.

The reddleman’s face was an open-mouthed mask of surprise. He saw something behind me. A whining, straining, inhuman sound assaulted my ears. I turned and brought up my gun. A heavy length of wood smacked into my skull.

A human figure rose out of the mist, head hung to one side. It was veiled, wore a long black dress and held Venn’s stave.

I wondered if silver bullets were good for ghosts.

Before I could fire, the apparition swung. I took a whack to my head. Hot wet blood gouted from my ear and I went down. This time, I went out too.

XIII

I woke up in an earth-floored, flame-lit space. My cold, wet clothes were now hot, wet clothes. Blood crusted in my ear, under a field dressing. My fingers were splinted and bound.

I tried to sit up, which hurt.

Venn, bent over the fire, stirred a cauldron of broth. With his flame-lit, scarlet face, he could pass for a pantomime demon. The sulphurous smell was thick. Runic scratchings marked rock walls. Stick-figure men chasing big-mouthed, pointy-eared dogs twice their size.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

Venn noticed I was awake. ‘Red’s Hole. Old, old place. Be my home, for now. Plenty live here afore me, back to Bible times.’

That was a comfort.

‘It might sound ungrateful to ask, but why aren’t we dead?’

‘Brokeneck Lady. Drove off Shuck. Patched you up.’

I’d expected to be torn to pieces by the beast which brought down Nakszynski. Unconscious, I couldn’t have put up a fight.

‘Where is this spectral Flo Nightingale now?’

‘Outways,’ Venn said, jerking his thumb towards a woven curtain of vines.

‘She have much to say?’

‘Not so you’d note. Ghosts, generally, don’t.’

My head hurt from more than the thwacking now. I’d failed to make the proper deductions…

By my watch, it was getting on in the evening. I still had my half-hunter, though my guns had been taken.

I was hungry enough to try the reddleman’s soup.

The curtain rustled. A white, long-fingered hand gathered a fold and switched it aside. Into Red’s Hole came the Brokeneck Lady…

A wet dress dragged on the ground. The veil hung to the waist on one side but almost up to the ear on the other. I’ve seen hanged men. Their heads loll just the same.

Venn glanced up, but kept stirring.

The ghost’s head rolled, as if it were trying to set skull on spine like a cup and ball game. For a moment, the head was in its proper position. Then it inclined in the other direction. And back again. Then, evenly, it nodded from side to side. The veil swung.

I knew that cobra-neck wobble!

The veil was lifted.

‘Moriarty,’ I shouted. ‘You f--ing c-t!’

Professor Moriarty showed teeth and hissed. His eyes were flint.

‘What I mean to say is… damn it, what’s the meaning of this?’ I blustered. Few call the Prof a ‘f--ing c-t’ and live to write their memoirs. ‘How? Why? What the…’

‘Fair questions, Moran,’ he said. ‘They shall be answered.’

Moriarty unfastened his dress, pinching a row of little black buttons out of their eyelets. Underneath, he wore his town clothes.

I saw his dress and veil were shiny, waterproof material. More practical than unearthly. In his cocoon, the bastard kept snug and dry. Whereas I felt like shit. Wet shit that’s been trodden in.

‘You hit me,’ I said. ‘Twice!’

‘You were about to waste silver, Moran.’

It was like him to be more concerned over expenses than the threat to his life. Even with my left hand, I’d have shot him square.

‘One can learn more observing from concealment than out in the open,’ he expounded. ‘With you in the field, Moran, no one looked for me.’

So, I’d been the hare to flush out this hound. I wasn’t surprised. Being used this way came with the position of Number Two. Everyone in his employ was expendable. I wasn’t even angry he had acted according to his nature, just as I would to mine. That didn’t mean I liked being so used, or would forget.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I came down on the same train as you,’ he said. ‘In the next compartment. I overheard every word which passed between you and our client. Stoke, in fact, mentioned the significant point of the smell in The Chase…’

‘Hold on a mo, Moriarty! You couldn’t have got off at Stourcastle. We’d have seen you.’

‘I travelled on to Sherton Abbas and made my way back to Trantridge via hired trap. I have been in The Chase ever since.’

I couldn’t imagine the habitué of lecture halls and laboratories in the wild woods, even with his waterproof frock.

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘I did not sleep. I took an injection. Too much had to be found out and tested. I exploited rumours of the ghost of Theresa Clare to conceal my presence.’

He would never admit it, but I knew Moriarty derived some thin, watery thrill from ‘dressing up’. Like his deduction craze, it came on him as if he were in a competition whose terms were set by another he wished to better. Usually, he was rotten at dissembling. He couldn’t do voices and the snake-neck thing gave him away. This performance was well above his average. The Polish Jew in Irving’s The Bells wasn’t half as eerie.

‘How did you make the noise? The ghost sound?’

The Professor’s lips set in a tight line — his approximation of a smile. From his pocket, he produced a wooden box with a crank-handle. He worked it and a whine filled the cave. It set my teeth on edge.

‘You don’t imagine I would dismantle an Amanti on a whim? The violin was sacrificed to this invention.’

Mercifully, he shut the toy off.

‘Wouldn’t rattling a chain and going “woo-woo” have been a damn sight cheaper?’

‘This is not for your ears, Moran. Nor any human ears.’

‘Communicating with spirits now, Moriarty? I’d not take you for a table-rapper.’

‘This instrument has nothing to do with ghosts. It is for dogs.’

XIV

It was full dark in The Chase.

Venn remained in his hole. He was not Red Shuck’s master. Our commission was to kill the dog only. Therefore, we’d no quarrel with the radical reddleman.

Moriarty returned my guns. I could balance the rifle on my bandaged paw and pull the trigger with my left hand — but accuracy would be an issue.

‘Saul has queered my game,’ I complained. ‘What happened to the idiot? Did Red Shuck get him?’

If Saul made it home, he’d be taken for the party’s sole survivor. That would really put the wind up our client, who was panicky enough to start with.

Moriarty lead the way with a dark lantern, as if he knew The Chase as well as Saul. In his few hours as Weird Witch of the Woods, he’d explored thoroughly.

He stopped in his tracks and shone the beam at a thicket between two old tree trunks. Red scuffs showed on bark.

‘Blood?’ I asked.

‘Reddle.’

‘Venn?’

The Professor shook his head. ‘Smell it,’ he said.

I bent to sniff. That damn pong!

‘I can’t understand why Venn doesn’t whiff this,’ I said.

‘He’s lived in it for years,’ Moriarty said. ‘He no longer notices.’

I touched fingers to sludgy stains. Wet powder, not blood. That goes sticky and stops being red.

‘Sheep dye,’ Moriarty said. ‘Not presently being used on sheep.’

He lifted aside the bushes, which were uprooted but tethered together. They disguised a gate fixed between the two trees. He unlatched it. We entered a concealed enclosure.

Moriarty shone his light around.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘Originally, Venic of Melchester’s hideaway. Recently, put back in use. Look…’

Iron animal cages were at present empty, gnawed animal bones strewn in the straw. Drinking bowls bore the marks of chewing. Posts set in the ground had iron rings and shackles.

‘Red Shuck’s lair,’ Moriarty said. ‘Here, our demon has been trained to viciousness. Here, he has been reddened…’

Under a tarpaulin, we found brushes and pots of dye.

‘He?’

I counted six cages.

‘Strictly speaking, they.’

I saw spoor on the dirt. Not the fantastic, elongated, claw-toed prints of the plaster cast, but tracks I was more familiar with. I’d seen enough in the snows of the Steppe.

‘Wolf,’ I said.

‘White wolf,’ concurred Moriarty. ‘Large, not inexpensive. Imported from the Russias. I made enquiries with the usual importers of exotic animals about recent purchases of unusual canines. As a professional courtesy, Singapore Charlie was forthcoming. You know the Lord of Strange Deaths’ fondness for spiders and such…’

I did — though that’s not a story I want to go into now, or indeed ever.

‘Some months ago, a customer paid cash for six white wolves, giving the name “Pagan Sorrow”. Wolf fur is prized, but I fear dye makes these pelts unsaleable.’

‘Except to Stoke. He’ll be happy with fox-red tails, just so long as Red Shuck is brought down.’

Moriarty nodded in agreement.

‘It’s not just Red Shuck, though. Someone — this “Pagan Sorrow” — whistled up the doggies and sicced ’em on Stoke…’ I continued.

‘Indeed.’

‘And tricked up the plaster cast? To sell the Red Shuck story?’

‘Quite so.’

‘Cunning bastard!’

Moriarty shrugged, allowing a neatness to the scheme.

‘Moriarty, if these cages are empty… where are the wolves?’

The Professor looked at me. ‘I’m sure we shall find them before they find us.’

With that comforting thought, we were on our way again.

XV

Outside Trantridge Hall we found Dan’l, standing guard, Gertie at the ready.

‘Saul said you wuz done for. Et by a dog demon.’

‘Saul’s not the first and won’t be the last to report my death. He’s alive then?’

‘Came back in a state. Said hounds of Hell were after him.’

‘So they were.’ I noted the plural.

Inside, we found the company in the dining room. A Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfire roared and spit on the huge grate. A carved, bloody side of beef was hacked to the bone on a platter. Stoke, drunk and affrighted, sunk in an armchair. Mod, in a scarlet satin dress, poured for the Master. Braham paced in front of the fire. Thring stood by, with a trolley of bottles fetched up from the cellar.

Saul, it seems, had gone early to bed after an exhausting day.

Mod swarmed up at me in a froth of concern.

‘Sebastian,’ she cooed, ‘it’s such a relief you are living! We thought you’d perished in The Chase. Another victim of the Curse of the d’Urbervilles.’

‘No, that was Nakszynski.’

She touched my bandaged head and kissed my cheek.

‘You’ve been heroically wounded. Who did those splints for you? I’ll change them properly. You’ll take brandy, of course. And supper.’

I warmed under the spell of feminine attentions. Mod cocked her head, as if only just noticing I was not unaccompanied.

‘This is Professor Moriarty,’ I said. ‘My associate.’

She curtseyed and extended a hand which the Prof did not take. He sized Mod up with a single watery-eyed glare.

Moriarty distrusted and disliked women. I only distrust them.

‘Moriarty and Moran — f-kload of use you’ve been,’ blustered Stoke from the depths of his chair. ‘Nakszynski’s dead, and the dog’s not.’

Moriarty looked at our client.

‘You will have your pelt,’ he assured the craven sot. ‘But, first, Mr — Derby is it? — would you fetch down the portrait which hangs above the mantelpiece? The one on the left. Yes, the fellow in the armour. I wish to examine it…’

Braham was surprised to be so addressed.

‘Are you sure?’ he responded. ‘It’s a dirty, ugly thing.’

‘If I were not sure, I would not make the request. Now, in the name of your Master, please comply.’

In his sozzled fug, Stoke gave a shoulder hitch which indicated his manager should follow Moriarty’s orders.

‘It’s Sir Pagan Plantagenet d’Urberville,’ said Mod to the Professor. ‘Last night, Parson Tringham told us…’

Moriarty waved her silent. She pouted, but recovered.

Braham carried a tall-backed chair close to the fire and stood on it. He had to stretch to heft the picture off its hooks. Flames licked at his trousers. He wobbled on the chair, finding his burden unwieldy. Sticky canvas parted from the frame in a curl.

‘Careful, you shitbird,’ shouted Stoke. ‘That’s my f--ing property!’

Braham stopped the music hall comedy turn and deliberately chucked the picture onto the fire. He reached into his jacket and pulled a pistol.

Making the most expensive left-hand shot of my life, I plugged Braham under the chin. Silver ploughed up through his skull. The top of his head spattered over Uncle Si’s portrait. Braham dropped like a liquid turd from a loose-bowelled elephant.

I assumed my chances with his sister were up the chimney.

Moving fast, Moriarty fetched the picture off of the fire and laid it on the table. He blotted out flames with a napkin.

Mod had her hand in her mouth, stopping a scream.

Braham lay where he fell. No point even checking to see if he was dead. Still, I kicked his gun out of his hand, into a far corner of the room.

Stoke tried to focus. Dan’l hurried in, summoned by the shot.

Thring squeaked and ran. I drew a bead on his back as he made for the kitchen door.

‘Let him go,’ Moriarty said, still concerned with the painting. ‘The butler has nothing to do with it.’

The Professor took the peeled-up corner of the portrait, then ripped the canvas from the frame. Pagan Plantagenet’s picture had been glued over the portrait of a handsome, weak-faced young man.

‘Remind you of anyone?’ asked the Professor.

The hair was dark — otherwise, it was Saul Derby to the life.

This had to be Simon’s son and intended heir, the rake who was too stupid not to turn his back on a woman when a knife happened to be within easy reach.

I felt a sharp pain in my back. Craning around, I saw a meat fork stuck out of my left shoulder. It had been pulled from the beef and put into me. Mod, less solicitous of my health than before, twisted the fork. Pain ran down my arm. My revolver fell from nerveless fingers.

I was no longer in a position to sneer at the late Alexander Stoked’Urberville.

From the foyer, a whistle sounded.

The doors opened. In walked Saul Derby, accompanied by four wolves. The pack trotted in step with him — big mouths open, spit-ropes hanging from fangs, eyes bright, fur thick with reddle and gore.

One animal broke ranks and loped over to Braham to lick salty mess from his head. Saul whistled, sharply. The wolf sat up, alert.

Sauntering as if he owned the Hall, pets matching his pace, Saul came to the table. He admired the portrait as if looking in a flattering mirror. Then, he took notice of the picture’s discoverer.

‘Professor Moriarty, I presume,’ he said, mildly.

Moriarty nodded and responded ‘…and you are “Pagan Sorrow”. Sorrow Durbeyfield.’

Saul regarded the Prof with admiration.

‘You could call yourself Sorrow Clare, if you took your mother’s married name,’ continued Moriarty. ‘Or claim the name and estates of your father, variously called Alexander Stoke, Stoke-d’Urberville or plain d’Urberville.’

Saul touched his father’s painted face. I suppose he was mad, but who in this room wasn’t?

Moriarty lectured on what was doubtless the wolf-whistler’s favourite subject: himself.

‘You’re supposed to have died in infancy, are you not? There’s some tuppenny tears anecdote about an unbaptised babe refused the solace of a tiny grave in Marlott churchyard. Was that a trick or did you have a shortlived twin? No matter. You were raised discreetly with your mother’s siblings. No one in Wessex keeps a name whole. Over centuries, D’Urberville became Durbeyfield. Clipping it to Derby was a recent expedient. This is your Aunt Modesty. That fellow cooling by the fire is your Uncle Abraham. Your aunt Elizabeth-Louise is around somewhere, hanging her head in shame for her impersonation of her sister’s ghost. Did you huddle together in the d’Urberville tombs all those years ago, swearing to have your birthright and bring ruin to the perfidious Stokes?’

Saul-Sorrow shrugged. So did his wolves.

‘It’s a curious thing, when one parent murders the other. Clouds issues. And the inheritance.’

‘Trantridge is mine, whichever way you look at it,’ said Saul-Sorrow, who didn’t seem so foolish now. ‘Whether through the Stokes or the d’Urbervilles, I am true Master.’

‘C--sucker!’ rumbled Stoke from his chair. He’d drawn up his legs at the sight of so many Red Shucks. He must think he was seeing through the multiplying glass of drink. ‘Whey-faced c-t!’

It was easy to forget Stoke was in the room. While Moriarty laid out the plot, I was more concerned with the pressing — not to say stabbing — matter of the fork in my back.

‘There is another claimant,’ Moriarty told Saul. ‘My client.’

‘That’s for damn certain,’ put in Stoke.

‘I want no battle with you, Professor,’ Saul said. ‘I am an admirer. I daresay few appreciate your achievements as I do. What I’ve done has taken applied thought. It’s not been rushed into like ordinary crime. It has been a scientific campaign.’

Moriarty’s head oscillated. Someone was in trouble.

I wished the bloody fork out of my back. My hands were at present useless to me. Saul stepping on my gun-hand was no mistake but a strike in his campaign.

‘I had to prime Tringham to revive the Red Shuck legend. I had to craft that plaster cast to sell the monster. I had to find, treat and train my pack. I had to harry away, not too quickly, removing all Stoke’s comforts and aides. It’s taken much to reach this pass. There have been sacrifices.’

We all stood or sat still, mindful of the beasts in the room. Mod, in theory of the wolves’ party, was uncomfortable around them. Among Saul’s ‘sacrifices’ had been his brother’s former fiancée, I remembered. Aside from physical discomfort, I was rather cheered it was all now out in the open. You know where you are when you can see the animal’s eyes. Or, in this instance, the animals’ eyes.

‘Whatever Stoke is paying you, I’ll double,’ Saul said to the Prof. ‘Look at him. Your client. A useless, drunken, cowardly braggart. Practically an American! No fit Master of Trantridge. I have plans for the estate, Professor. Scientific plans. I intend to reintroduce the Wessex Wolf to England. I’ll clear out the village, of course. People get in the way. But The Chase will be preserved. Do we have an understanding? Double the fee!’

Stoke whimpered, clutching an empty goblet. I believe he wet himself.

Moriarty’s head continued its swaying.

‘No, Mr Sorrow,’ he said, at last. ‘It will not do. I have taken a commission. Thus far, Mr Stoke-d’Urberville has kept his part of the bargain. I have a reputation to uphold.’

That was a laugh. He’d sold out clients for profit so often it was almost a habit — though he was careful to keep it quiet so as not to inhibit trade.

Stoke looked desperately hopeful.

‘Have you ever seen anyone torn apart?’ Saul asked. ‘By wolves?’

‘Not by wolves,’ the Professor replied.

‘It’s most… instructive…’

Saul gave a short, shrill whistle. His wolves leaped…

XVI

Stoke screamed as Red Shuck — four Red Shucks! — swarmed all over him. Their teeth caught in his clothes. Cloth ripped.

Then, another noise assaulted my eardrums.

And the wolves laid off our client.

Moriarty had produced his crank-handle music box. Its thin, unearthly whine filled the dining room. Unpleasant to human ears, it was agony to canine senses. The wolves rolled over, choking on their froth, biting their own tails, pawing their skulls.

Saul was almost as sorely affected. The confidence went out of him. Dan’l got meaty arms around him and held him from behind.

I scraped the fork out of my back against a long-case clock. I felt a wet seepage inside my jacket. Better out than in, though.

Mod made a rush towards the Professor, but I tripped her — then put a boot on her head to keep her on the carpet.

The wolves’ eyes rolled and bulged, as if their brains were boiling in their pans. Bloody tears started from their eyes. Red foam oozed from their nostrils.

My gold back teeth pained me.

At once, the Professor’s gadget shut off, with the twang of a snapped string in its works. Its job was done, though. The demon dogs lay, heads leaking — dead as fur rugs.

Stoke uncurled from his ball of terror and stood. In a poor state, quivering like a recruit who’s survived his first charge, he bled from a dozen scratches. Half his face was slack, skewing his villain’s moustache to one side.

Swiftly, our client got his starch back. As he crossed the room, he stood taller, taking pleasure in having the upper hand and his enemies out in the open.

Mod writhed and kicked, but I kept her down with boot pressure. For skewering me, the minx deserved worse.

Stoke would serve his enemies as he saw fit.

He picked up Gertie, which Dan’l had dropped, and felt the stick’s weight. I recalled my deduction that it had been used in night-work. Saul struggled in Dan’l grip, but had nothing to say for himself. He bled from the ears, showing kinship with his wolves.

Stoke fetched an enormous clout to Saul’s face. Cheekbones gave way.

Let go, Saul fell to his knees. Stoke rained blows on his head and shoulders, then launched into kicks to the chest — with odd reverse heel-stabs which would have made sense if he were wearing spurs — and vicious jabs at the groin.

Our client kicked Saul from one side of the hall to the other. Saul’s clothes soaked through until they were a match for Diggory Venn’s.

Mod keened in frustration. I noted a sympathetic spasm on Dan’l’s face. The big cowboy wasn’t entirely with his boss in all this. He liked Saul and Mod and — despite what had happened in front of his face — his slow mind wouldn’t change for a while yet…

Eventually, Stoke left off kicking and went to the table. He stuffed a thick slice of beef into his mouth and washed it down with a quaff of wine. Exercise had given him an appetite.

Saul rolled into a heap, among his dead wolves.

Stoke was drunk on the thrill of hurting someone helpless, aglow with the sudden change in his fortunes. He wasn’t afraid any more. Despite the sorry state of his appearance, he was Master of Trantridge again.

‘You’ll join me in a drink, Moriarty? Moran?’

I needed to get a hellcat out from under my foot, but appreciated the offer.

‘Just a tipple,’ I said.

Mod thumped the floor.

‘Our business is concluded,’ Moriarty said, curtly — freezing Stoke as he reached for the bottle. ‘There is the question of the agreed fee. Five thousand pounds for a pelt.’

Stoke grinned. ‘Indeed. You’ve earned it right smartly, Professor. You and your little gimmick-box. That was your angle, of course. You could have just sold me the box and I’d not have needed your personal services. I’ll not grudge you that. It’s sound economics, one businessman to another.’

Stoke took a key from his waistcoat and opened a cabinet. Inside was a big, solid safe. Several gents of my acquaintance could have opened it quicker without knowing the combination beforehand than Stoke did working the wheel with excited, still-bloody fingers.

‘Silver to your satisfaction?’

Stoke laid five weighty bars of Tombstone silver on the table.

Moriarty waited, making no move.

‘What is it?’ asked Stoke.

‘We agreed five thousand pounds for a pelt… you have four. You do not need a Professor of Mathematics to tally that up as twenty thousand pounds. Silver is acceptable.’

The mobile half of Stoke’s face fell to match the dead side… then he caught himself and managed a cracked chuckle. He brought up a finger in mock-accusing, would-be jovial fashion.

‘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.