Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX MALEDICTIONS

I

Professor Moriarty did not readily admit his mistakes. Oh, he made ’em. Some real startlers. You were well advised not to bring up the Tay Bridge Insurance Fiasco in his gloomy presence. Or the Manchester and Provincial Bank Robbery (six months’ brain work to set up, a thousand pounds seed money to pull off: seven shillings and sixpence profit). The Professor was touchy about failures. Indeed, he retained me to keep ’em quiet.

However, one howler he would own to.

He was ruminating upon it that morning, just as the sensational events I’ve decided to call ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ got going. Jolly good title, eh, what? Makes you want to skip ahead to the horrors. But don’t… you won’t fully appreciate the gut-slitting, dynamiting, neck-breaking, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones business without understanding how we got neck-deep in it.

In our Conduit Street rooms, we were doing the books, perhaps the least glamorous aspect of running a criminal empire. Once a mathematics tutor, Moriarty enjoyed balancing ledgers — as much as he could enjoy anything, the sad old sausage — more than robbing an orphanage trust fund or bankrupting a philanthropic society. He opened a leatherbound book and did that side-to-side snakehead thing which I’ve had cause to mention before. Everyone else who met him remarked on it too.

‘I should not have taken Mr Baldwin as a client,’ he declared, tapping a column of red figures. ‘His problem was of minimal interest, yet has caused no little inconvenience.’

The uninteresting, inconvenient Ted Baldwin was a union ‘organiser’ in Pennsylvania coal country. As ever in America, you can’t tell who were the worst crooks: the mine-owning robber barons or the fee-gouging workers’ brotherhood. In our Empire, natives dig dirt, plant tea and fetch and carry for the white man. However, Red Indians don’t take to the lash and the Yanks fought one of the century’s sillier wars over whether imported Africans should act like proper natives.

Nowadays, America employs — which is to say, enslaves — the Irish for such low purposes. A sammy takes only so much field-slog before up and cutting your throat and heading into the bush. Your bog-trotter, on the other hand, grumbles for 700 years, holds rowdy meetings, then decides to get very, very drunk instead of doing anything about it.

On the whole, I prefer natives. They might roast you on a spit, but won’t bore the teats off you by blaming it on Cromwell and William the Third. Yes, I know Moran is an Irish name. So is Moriarty. That comes into it later, too.

Our client Baldwin’s union — the Vermissa Valley Scowrers (don’t ask me what that means or if it’s spelled properly) — were undone by a Pinkerton operative who, when not calling himself John McMurdo, went by the unbelievable name of Birdy Edwards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a disgrace to the profession of Murder for Hire. If you operate in a country where captains of industry and hogs of politics make murder legal so long as it’s a union organiser being murdered, what’s the point, eh? Moriarty never lobbied for laws to make it all right for him to thieve and murder and extort.

Posing as a radical, Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers. As a result, most of the reds wound up shot in their beds or hanged from mine-works, but our man Baldwin was left in the wind at the end of the bloodletting with a carpet bag full of union funds. In his situation, I’d blow the loot on women and cards, but Baldwin was of the genus bastardii vindice.

Just to rub it in, this Birdy flew off to England with Baldwin’s sweetheart. Hot on the trail and under the collar, Baldwin came to London and called on the Firm. A wedge of greenback dollars hired us to locate the Pink, which we did sharpish. Sporting the more plausible incognito of John Douglas, Edwards was sunning himself at Birlstone, a moated manor.

An easy lay! Shin up a tree in the grounds and professionally pot the blighter through the leaded library window as he sits at his desk, perusing La Vie Parisienne. Aim, pull, bang… brains on the wall, ‘Scotland Yard Baffled’, notice in The Times, full fee remitted, thank you very much, pleasure to do business with you!

But, no, the idiot client got all het up and charged off to Birlstone to do the deed himself. Upshot: one fool face blown through the back of one fool head. Yes, sometimes they have guns too. A careful murderer is mindful of the risk inherent in turning up at a prospective victim’s front door with a red face and a recital of grievances.

With the client dead, you might think we’d close the account and proceed to the next profitable item of deviltry. Not how the racket works. We’d accepted a commission to kill Edwards-McMurdo-Douglas. Darkly humorous remarks about persons not being dead when Professor Moriarty has been paid to polish them off were heard. Talk gets started, you lose face. Blackguards with inconvenient relatives take their business elsewhere. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. or that Limehouse Chinese with the marmoset would be delighted to accommodate them.

So, at our own expense, we pursue Edwards, who has booked passage to Africa. This is where you might remember the bounder. He — ahem — fell overboard and washed up on the desolate shore of St Helena. We could have shoved Birdy off the dock at Southampton and been home for tea and — ahem, encore — crumpet in Mrs Halifax’s establishment for licentious ladies. Not obtrusive enough, though. Nothing would do for the Prof but that the corpse be aimed at the isle of Napoleon’s exile. He spent hours with charts and tide-tables and a sextant to make sure of it. Moriarty was thinking, as usual, two or three steps ahead. There was only one place on Edwards’ escape route anyone — specifically, anyone who scribbles for the London rags — has ever heard of. A mysterious corpse on St Helena gets a paragraph above the racing results. A careless passenger drowned before embarkation doesn’t rate a sentence under the corset endorsements. Advertising, you see: Moriarty strikes! All your killing needs satisfied!

Still, it was Manchester and Provincial all over again. Baldwin’s dollars ran out. On St Helena, the Professor insisted we take the sixpenny tour and poke around the eagle’s cage. He acquired a unique, if ghastly, souvenir which figures later in the tale — this is another ominous intimation of excitements to come! The jaunt entailed five different passports apiece and seventeen changes of mode of transport across two continents. Expenses mounted. The account was carried in debit. [32]

‘Politics will be the ruination of the fine art of crime,’ Moriarty continued. ‘Politics and religion…’

This is the moral, Oh My Best Beloved: never kill anyone for a ‘Cause’.

For why not, Uncle Basher?

Because causes don’t pay, Little Friend of all the World. Adherents expect you to kill just for the righteousness of it. They don’t want to pay you! They don’t understand why you want paying!

Not ten minutes after our return, malcontents were hammering at our door, soliciting aid for the downtrodden working man. Kill one Pinkerton and everyone thinks you’re a bloody socialist! Happy to risk your precious neck on the promise of a medal in some twentieth-century anarchist utopia. I wearied of kicking sponging gits downstairs and chucking their penny-stall editions of Das Kapital into the street.

Reds fracture into a confusion of squabbling factions. The straggle-bearded oiks didn’t even want us to strike at the adders of capital. That would at least offer an angle: rich people are usually worth killing for what they have about their persons or in their safes. No, these firebrands invariably wanted one or other of their comrades assassinated over hair’s-breadth differences of principal. Some thought a Board of Railway Directors should be strung up by their gouty ankles on the Glorious Day of Revolution; others felt plutocrats should be strung up by their fat necks. Only mass slaughter would settle the question. If the GD of R has not yet dawned, it’s because socialists are too busy exterminating each other to lead the rising masses to victory.

I think this circumstance gave the Prof a notion about Mad Carew’s quandary. Which is where the blessed maledictions I mentioned earlier — you were paying attention, weren’t you? — come in, and not before time.

II

Just after the Prof let loose his deep think about ‘politics and religion’, the shadow of a man slithered into the room. Civvy coat and army boots. Colonially tanned, except for chinstrap lines showing malarial pallor. Bad case of the shakes.

I knew him straight off. Last I’d seen him was in Nepal. He’d been plumper, smugger and without shot nerves, attached to the British Resident; attached to the fundament of the British Resident, as it happens. Never was a one for sucking up like Mad Carew. Everyone said he’d go far if he didn’t fall off a Himalaya first.

Fellah calls himself ‘Mad’ and you know what you’re getting. Apart from someone fed up of being stuck with ‘Humphrey’ and dissatisfied with ‘Humph’.

There’s a bloody awful poem about him… [33]

He was known as ‘Mad Carew’ by the subs at Khatmandu,

He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;

But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,

And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.

Reading between the lines — a lot more edifying that reading the actual lines — you can tell Carew knew how to strut for the juniors, coddle the men, sniff about the ladies of the regiment (bless ’em) and toady to the higher-ups. Officers like that are generally popular until the native uprising, when they’re found blubbing in cupboards dressed as washerwomen.

Not Carew, though. He had what they call ‘a streak’. Raring off and getting into ‘scrapes’ and collecting medals and shooting beasts and bandits in the name of jolly good fun. I wore the colours — not the sort of colonel with a daughter, but the sort not to be trusted with other colonels’ daughters — long enough to know the type. Know the type, I was the type! I’m older now, and see what a dunce I was in my prime. For a start, I used to do all this for army pay!

‘Mad’ sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in ’em that you put there. ‘Mad’ is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner for lunacy as you’re turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest ‘scrape’ was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.

Major Humphrey Carew was both kinds of Mad. He had been one; now, he was close to the other.

‘Beelzebub’s Sunday toast fork, it’s Carew!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you get in here?’

The blighter had the temerity to shake his lumpy fist at me.

After a dozen time-wasting socialist johnnies required heaving out, Moriarty had issued strict instructions to Mrs Halifax. No one was admitted to the consulting room unless she judged them solvent. Women in her profession can glim a swell you’d swear had five thou per annum and enough family silver to plate the HMS Inflexible and know straight off he’s putting up a front and hasn’t a bent sou in his pockets. So, Carew must have shown her capital.

Moriarty craned to examine our visitor.

Carew kept his fist stuck out. He was begging for one on the chin.

Mrs Halifax crowded the doorway with a couple of her more impressionable girls and the lad who emptied the pisspots. None were immune to the general sensation which followed Carew about in his high adventures. Indeed, they seemed more excited than the occasion merited.

Slowly, Carew opened his fist.

In his palm lay an emerald the size of a tangerine. When it caught the light, everyone on the landing went green in the face. Avaricious eyes glinted verdant.

Ah, a gem! So much more direct than notes or coins. It’s just a rock, but so pretty. So precious. So negotiable.

Soiled doves cooed. The pisspot boy let out a heartfelt ‘cor lumme’. Mrs Halifax simpered, which would terrify a colour sergeant.

Moriarty’s face betrayed little, as per usual.

‘Beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate,’ he lectured, as if diagnosing an illness, ‘coloured by chromium or perhaps vanadium. A hardness of 7.5 on the Mohs Scale. That is: a gem of the highest water, having consistent colour and a high degree of transparency. The cut is indifferent, but could be improved. I should put its worth at…’

He was about to name a high figure.

‘Here,’ Mad Carew said, ‘have it, and be done…’

He flung the emerald at the Professor. I reached across and caught it with a cry of ‘owzat’ which would not have shamed W.G. Grace, the old cheat. The weight settled in my palm.

For a moment, I heard the wailing of heathen worshippers from a rugged mountain clime across the roof of the world. The emerald sang like a green siren. The urge to keep hold of the thing was nigh irresistible.

Our visitor’s glamour was transferred to me. Mrs Halifax’s filles de joie regarded my manly qualities with even more admiration than usual. If my pisspot had needed emptying, I wouldn’t have had to ask twice.

The stone’s spell was potent, but I am — as plenty would be happy to tell you if they weren’t dead — not half the fool I sometimes seem.

I crossed the room, dropped the jewel in Carew’s top pocket, and patted it.

‘Keep it safe for the moment, old fellow.’

He looked as if I’d just shot him. Which is to say: he looked like some of the people I’ve shot looked after I’d shot them. Shocked, not surprised; resentful, but too tired to make a fuss. Others take it differently, but this is no place for digressions.

Without being asked, Carew sank into the chair set aside for clients — spikes in the backrest could extrude at the touch of a button on Moriarty’s desk, and doesn’t that make the eyes water! — and shoved his face into his hands.

‘Privacy, please,’ Moriarty decreed. Mrs Halifax pulled superfluous spectators away, not forgetting to tug the pisspot boy’s collar, and closed the door. Listeners at the keyhole used to be a problem, but a bullet hole two inches to the left indicated Moriarty’s un-gentle solution to unwanted eavesdroppers.

Carew was a man at the end of his tether and possessed of a fortune. An ideal client for the Firm. So why did I have that prickle up my spine? The sensation usually meant a leopard prowling between the tents or a lady of brief acquaintance loosening her garter to take hold of a poignard.

Before he said any more, I knew how the story would start.

‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,’ began Mad Carew…

Lord, I thought, here we go again.

III

Some stories you’ve heard so often you know how they’ll come out. ‘I was a good girl once, a clergyman’s daughter, but fell in with bad men…’ ‘I fully intended to pay back the rhino I owed you, but I had this hot tip straight from the jockey’s brother…’ ‘I thought there was no harm in popping in to the Rat and Raven for a quick gin…’ ‘I must have put on the wrong coat at the club and walked off wearing a garment identical to — but not — my own, which happens to have these counterfeit bonds sewn into the lining…’

And, yes, ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu…’

I’ve a rule about one-eyed yellow idols — and, indeed, idols of other precious hues with any number of eyes, arms, heads or arses. Simply put: hands off!

I don’t have the patience to be a professional cracksman, which involves fiddling with locks and safes and precision explosives. As a trade, it’s on a level with being a plumber or glazier, with a better chance of being blown to bits or rotting on Dartmoor — not that most plumbers and glaziers wouldn’t deserve it, the rooking bastards! Oh, I have done more than my fair share of thieving. I’ve robbed, burgled, rifled, raided, waylaid, heisted, abducted, abstracted, plundered, pilfered and pinched across five continents and seven seas. I’ve lifted anything that wasn’t nailed down — and, indeed, have prised up the nails of a few items which were.

So, I admit it — I’m a thief. I take things which are not mine. Mostly, money. Or stuff easily turned into money. I may be the sort of thief who, an alienist will tell you, can’t help himself. I steal (or cheat, which is the same thing) just for a lark when I don’t especially need the readies. If a fellow owns something and doesn’t take steps to keep hold of it, that’s his lookout. But even I know better than to pluck an emerald from the eye socket of a heathen idol… whether it be north, south, east or west of Kathmandu.

Ever heard of the Moonstone? The Eye of Klesh? The All-Seeing Eye of the Goddess of Light? The Crimson Gem of Cyttorak? The Pink Diamond of Lugash? All sparklers jemmied off other men’s idols by fools who, as they say, ‘Suffered the Consequences’. Any cult which can afford to use priceless ornaments in church decoration can extend limitless travel allowance to assassins. They have on permanent call the sort of determined, ruthless little sods who’ll cross the whole world to retrieve their bauble and behead the infidel who snaffled it. That also goes for the worshippers of ugly chunks of African wood you wouldn’t get sixpence for in Portobello Market. Pop Chuku or Lukundoo or a Zuni Fetish into your game bag as a souvenir of the safari, and wake up six months later with a naked Porroh man squatting at your bed-end in Wandsworth and coverlets drenched with your own blood.

Come to that, common-or-garden, non-sacred jewels like the Barlow Rubies, the Rosenthall Diamonds and the Mirror of Portugal are usually pretty poison to crooks who waste their lives trying to get hold of ’em. Remember the fabled Agra Treasure which ended up at the bottom of the Thames? [34] Best place for it.

Imagine stealing something you can’t spend? Oversize gems are famous, thus instantly recognisable. They have histories (‘provenance’ in the trade, don’t you know? — a list of people they’ve been stolen from) and permanent addresses under lock and key in the coffers of dusky potentates or the Tower of London where Queen Vicky (long may she reign!) can play with them when she has a mind to.

Even cutting a prize into smaller stones doesn’t cover the trail. Clots who loot temples are too bedazzled by the booty to take elementary precautions. Changing the name on your passport doesn’t help. If you’re the bloke with the Fang of Azathoth on your watch chain or the Tears of Tabanga decorating your tart’s décolletage, you can expect fanatics with strangling cords to show up sooner or later. Want to steal from a church? Have the lead off the roof of St Custard’s down the road. I can more or less guarantee the Archbishop of Canterbury won’t send implacable curates after you with scimitars clenched between their teeth.

Ahem, so, to return to the case in hand. Since the tale has been set down by another (one J. Milton Hayes — ever heard of anything else by him?), I’ll copy it longhand. Hell, that’s too much trouble. I’ll shoplift a Big Book of Dramatic and Comic Recitations for All Occasions from WH Smith & Sons and paste in a torn-out page. I’ll be careful not to use ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, ‘The Face on the Bar-Room Floor’ or ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck (His Name Was Albert Trollocks)’ by mistake. Among the set who stay away from music halls and pride themselves on ‘making their own entertainment’, every fool and his cousin gets up at the drop of a hat to launch into ‘The Ballad of Mad Carew’. You’ve probably suffered Mr Hayes’ effulgence many times on long, agonising evenings, but bear with me. I’ll append footnotes to sweeten the deal.

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

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

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

And the yellow god forever gazes down.

He was known as ‘Mad Carew’ by the subs at Khatmandu,

He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;

But for all his foolish pranks*, he was worshipped in the ranks,

And the Colonel’s daughter§ smiled on him as well.

e. g.: setting light to the bhishti’s turban, putting firecrackers in the padre’s thunderbox… oh how we all laughed! — S.M.

§

Amaryllis Framington, by name. Fat and squinty, but white women are in short supply in Nepal and you land the fish you can get. — S.M.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,

The fact that she loved him was plain to all.

She was nearly twenty-one* and arrangements had begun

To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

forty if she was a day. — S.M.

He wrote* to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;

They met next day as he dismissed a squad;

And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do

But the green eye of the little yellow god§.

since they were at the same hill station, why didn’t he just ask her? Even sherpas have better things to do than be forever carrying letters between folks who live practically next door to each other. — S.M.

§

that’s colonel’s daughters for you, covetous and stupid, God bless ’em. — S.M.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance*.

And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars;

But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,

Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

kif, probably. It’s not just the natives who smoke it. Bloody boring, a posting in Nepal. — S.M.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,

And a gash across his temple dripping red;

He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day*,

And the Colonel’s daughter watched beside his bed.

lazy malingering tosser. — S.M.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;

She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;

He bade her search the pocket saying ‘That’s from Mad Carew’,

And she found the little green eye of the god*.

if you saw this coming, you are not alone. — S.M.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do*,

Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;

But she wouldn’t take the stone§ and Mad Carew was left alone

With the jewel that he’d chanced his life to get.

here’s gratitude for you: the flaming cretin gets himself half-killed to fetch her a birthday present and she throws a sulk. — S.M.

§

which shows she wasn’t entirely addle-witted, old Amaryllis. — S.M.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,

She thought of him* and hurried to his room;

As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air

Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro’ the gloom.§

the least she could do, all things considered. Note that M.C. being stabbed didn’t stop her having her bally party. — S.M.

§

poetic license at its most mendacious. You imagine an orchestra conducted by Strauss himself and lilting, melodic strains wafting across the parade ground. The musical capabilities of the average hill station run to a corporal with a heat-warped fiddle, a boy with a Jew’s harp and a Welshman cashiered from his colliery choir for gross indecency (and singing flat). The repertoire runs to ditties like ‘Come Into the Garden, Maud (and Get the Poking You’ve Been Asking For All Evening)’ and ‘I Dreamt I Dwelled in Marble Halls (and Found Myself Fondling Prince Albert’s Balls)’. — S.M.

His door was open wide*, with silver moonlight shining through;

The place was wet and slipp’ry where she trod;

An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew§,

’Twas the vengeance of the little yellow god.

where were the guards? I’d bloody have ’em up on a charge for letting yak-bothering clod-stabbers through the lines. — S.M.

§

how much worse than being stabbed with a pretty knife, eh? — S.M.

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

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

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

And the yellow god forever gazes down§.

yes, J. Milton skimps on his poetical efforts by putting the first verse back in again. When Uncle Bertie or the bank manager’s sister read it aloud, they tend to do it jocular the first time, emphasising that rumty-tumty-tum metre, then pour on the drama for the reprise, drawing it out with exaggerated face pulling to convey the broken heartedness and a crack-of-doom hollow rumble for that final, ominous line. I blame Rudyard Kipling. — S.M.

§

Have you noticed the ambiguity about the idol? Is it only one eyed because M.C. has filched the other, or regularly configured like Polyphemus and now has its single eye back? Well, Mr Hayes was fudging because he plain didn’t know. To set the record straight, this was always a Cyclopean idol. And the poet didn’t hear the end of the story. — S.M.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking — if Mad Carew’s emerald-pinching escapade led to a twit-tended grave north of Khatmandu, how did he fetch up un-stabbed in our London consulting room, presenting a sickly countenance? Ah-hah, then read on…

IV

‘I took the eye from the idol,’ Carew admitted. ‘I don’t care what you’ve heard about why I did it. That doesn’t matter. I took it. And I didn’t give it away. I can’t give it away, because it comes back. I’ve tried. It’s mine, by right of… well, conquest. Do you understand, Professor?’

Moriarty nodded. If he understood, that was more than I did.

‘I had to fight — to kill — to get it. I’ve had to do worse to keep alive since. They’ve not let up. They came for me at the hill station. Nearly had me, too. If letting them have the stone would save my hide, I’d wish it good riddance. But it’s not the gem they want, really. It’s the vengeance. Blighters with knives have my number. Heathen priests. That’s an end to it — they think, at any rate. Some say they did get me, and I’m a ghost…’

I’d not thought of that. He didn’t look like any ghost I’d run across, but, then again, they don’t, do they. Ghosts? Look like what you’re expecting, that is.

‘I didn’t just take this thing. I copped a fortune in other stones and gold doodads, too. Not as sacred, apparently. Though most folk who bought from me — chiselled at a penny in the pound, if that — are dead now. Even with miserly rates of fencing, I netted enough to buy out and set myself up for life. Thought I could do a lot better than Fat Amy Framington, I tell you.

‘Resigned my commission, and left for India… with the little brown men after me. More of ’em than I can count. Some odd ones, too — brown in the face, but hairy all over. White hairy, more brute than man. There are a few of ’em left in mountain country. Mi-go or yeti or Abominable Snowballs. They’re the trackers, when the priests let them off their leashes. They dogged me over India, into China… across the Pacific and through the States and the Northern Territories. Up to the Arctic with them after me on sledges… they have yeti in Canada too, Sasquatch and windigo. I heard the damned beasts hooting to each other like owls. Close scrape in New York. Had to pay off the coppers to dodge a murder charge. Steam-packet to Blighty.

‘They nearly got me again in a hotel in Liverpool, but I left six of ’em dead. Six howling bastards who won’t make further obeisance to their bloody little yellow god. Now I’m here, in London. The white man’s Kathmandu. I’ve still got this green lump. Worth a kingdom, and worth nothing…’

‘This narrative is very picturesque,’ Moriarty said, ‘though I would quibble about your strict veracity on one or two points. You could place it in the illustrated press. What I fail to perceive, Major Carew, is what exactly you want us to do?’

Carew’s eyes became hooded, shifty. For the first time, he almost smiled.

‘I heard of you in a bazaar in Peking, Professor. From a ruined Englishman who was once called Giles Conover…’

Him, I remembered. Cracksman, and a toff with it. Also enthusiastic about precious stones, though pearls were his line. Why anyone decided to set a high price on clams’ gallstones is beyond me. Conover went for whole strings. Lifted the Ingestre Necklace from Scotland Yard’s Black Museum to celebrate the centenary of the burning down of Mrs Lovett’s Fleet Street pie shop. I’ll wager you know that story. [35]

The Firm had done business with Conover. Before his spine got crushed.

‘You are… what was Conover’s expression… a consultant? Like a doctor or a lawyer?’

Moriarty nodded.

‘A consulting criminal?’

‘A simple way of stating my business, but it will suffice. Professionals — not only doctors and lawyers, but architects, detectives and military strategists — are available to any who meet their fees. Individuals or organisations have problems they have not the wits to solve, and call on those with expertise and experience to do so. Criminal individuals or organisations have problems too. If sufficiently interesting, I apply myself to the solution of such.’

‘Conover said you helped him…’

‘Advised him.’

‘…with a robbery. You — what? — drew up plans he followed? Like an engineer?’

‘Like a playwright, Major Carew. A dramatist. Conover’s problem required a certain flamboyance. Parties needed to be distracted while work was being done. I suggested a means of distraction.’

‘For a cut?’

‘A fee was paid.’

The Prof was being cagey about details. We arranged for a runaway cab to collide with a crowded omnibus at the corner of Leather Lane and St Cross Street. This convenient calamity drew away night guards at Tucker & Tarbert’s Gemstone Exchange long enough for Conover to nip in and abstract a cluster known as ‘the Bunch of Grapes’. Nobody died except a drunken Yorkshireman, but seven passengers were handily crippled — including a Member of Parliament who couldn’t explain why he was in the hansom with two tight-trousered post office boys and had to resign his seat. A fine night’s work all round.

Carew thought about it for a moment.

‘They are in London. The brown priests. The yeti. They mean to kill me and take back their green eye.’

‘So you have said.’

‘They nearly had me in Paddington two nights ago.’

The Professor said nothing.

‘Consider this an after-the-fact consultation, Moriarty,’ Carew said, taking a plunge. ‘I don’t need help in planning a crime. The crime’s done with, months ago and on the other side of the world. I need your help in getting away with it.’

It became clear. The Professor ruminated. His head oscillated. Carew hadn’t seen that before and was startled.

‘You will be killed,’ the Professor said. ‘There’s no doubt about it. In all parallel cases — you have heard of the Herncastle Heirloom, I trust [36] — the, as you call them, “little brown men” have prevailed. Unless some other ironic fate overtakes him first, the despoiler is routinely done to death by the cult. Did Conover tell you of the Black Pearl of the Borgias?’

‘He said he’d lost the use of his legs and been driven from England because of the thing, and he didn’t have it in his hands for more than a minute or two.’

‘That is so,’ Moriarty confirmed. ‘There are differences between your circumstances, between your Green Eye and his Black Pearl, but similarities also. With the Borgia pearl, the attendant problem was not presented by brown men, but by a white man, if man he can truthfully be called. The Hoxton Creeper. He has haunted the pearl through its unhappy chain of ownership, breaking the backs of all who try to keep hold of it. He crushed Conover’s bones to powder, though the prize was already fenced. I dare say the Creeper, a London-born Neanderthal atavism, is as abominable as any Himalayan snowman.’

Some in dire situations are gloomily happy to know others have been in the same boat. Not Carew.

‘Hang the Creeper,’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s only one of him. I’ve a whole congregation of Creepers, Crawlers and Crushers after me!’

‘So, you must die and that’s all there is to it.’

The last remaining puff went out of Mad Carew. He might as well change his daredevil nickname to Dead Carew and be done with it.

‘…and yet…’

Now the Prof’s eyes glowed, as other eyes glowed when the emerald was in view. His blood was up. Profit didn’t really stir Moriarty. He loved the numbers, not the spoils they tallied. It was the problem. The challenge. Doing that which no one else had done, which no one else could do.

‘All indications are that you must die, Carew. The raider of the sacred gem is doomed, irrevocably. Yet, why must that be? Are we not greater than any fate or superstition? I, Moriarty, refuse to accept any so-called inevitability. We shall take your case, Major Carew. Give Colonel Moran a hundred pounds as a retainer.’

Surprised and suspicious, Carew blurted out ‘Gladly!’ and produced a cheque book.

‘Cash, old fellow,’ I said.

‘Of course.’ He nodded glumly, and undid a money belt. He had the sum about him in gold sovereigns.

I piled them up and clinked them a bit. Sound. Coin, I can appreciate!

‘You are to take lodgings in our basement. There is a serviceable room, which has been used for the purpose before. Meals are provided at eight shillings daily. Breakfast, dinner, supper. Should you wish high tea or other luxuries, make private arrangements with Mrs Halifax. I need not tell you only to eat and drink what comes to you from our kitchen. We must preserve your health. I prescribe Scotch broth.’

Now, he was talking like a doctor. The Moriarty Cure, suitable for maiden ladies and gentlemen of a certain age.

‘One other thing…’ he added.

‘What? Anything?’ Carew said.

‘The Green Eye. Sell it to me for a penny down and a penny to pay at the end of the week, with the stone returned to you and the first penny forfeit if I fail to make the second payment. I shall have a legal bill of sale drawn up.’

‘You know what that would mean?’

‘I know what everything would mean. It is my business.’

‘I’ve sold it before. It comes back, and the buyers… well, the buyers are in no position to come back. Ever.’

The Professor showed his teeth and wrote out a legible receipt.

‘Moran, give me a penny,’ he said.

Without thinking, I fished a copper from my watch pocket and handed it over. Seconds later, it struck me! I’d roped myself in along with Moriarty on the receiving end of the curse. Don’t think the Prof hadn’t thought of that, because — as he said — he thought of bloody everything.

Moriarty exchanged the coin for the emerald.

It lay on his desk like a malign paperweight.

So, we were all for the high jump now.

V

Our client was snug in the concealed apartment beneath the storerooms — a cupboard with a cot, where we stashed tenants best advised not to show their faces at street level. Mrs Halifax, alert to the clink of a money belt, supplied tender distractions and gin at champagne prices. When Swedish Suzette (who was Polish) went downstairs, Mrs H. called it a ‘house call’ and charged extra. If Mad Carew wasn’t dead by the end of the week, he’d be dead broke.

Professor Moriarty disappeared into the windowless room where he kept his records. We were up to date on the Newgate Calendar, the Police Gazette and Famous Murder Trials. The Professor knew more about every pickpocket and high-rip mobster than their mothers or the arresting officers. The more arcane material was in code or foreign languages, or translated into mathematics and written down as page after page of numbers. [37] He said he needed to look into precedents and parallels before deciding on a plan. I had an intimation that would be bad news for some — probably including me.

While the Prof was blowing the dust off press cuttings and jotting down cipher notes, I had the afternoon to myself. Best to get out of the flat and beetle about.

I decided to scratch an itch. On constitutionals through Soho, I had twice had my trouser cuffs assaulted by a pup in Berwick Street Market. The tiny creature’s excessively loud yapping was well known. It was past time to skewer the beast. You could consider it a public service, but the truth is — and I don’t mind if it shocks more delicate readers — killing an animal always perks me up. I’d prefer to stalk big game in the bush, but there’s none of that in London except at the zoological gardens. Even I think it unsporting to aim between the bars and ventilate Rajah the Lion or Jumbo the Elephant, though old, frustrated guns have tried to swell their bags this way when gout or angry colonial officials prevent them from returning to the veldt.

A small annoying dog should take the edge off this hunter’s bloodlust. The prey would be all the sweeter because it was the pet of a small annoying boy. I’ve a trick cane which slips out six inches of honed Sheffield steel at a twist of the knob. The perfect tool for the task. The trick was to stroll by casually and perform a coup de grâce in the busy street market without anyone noticing. In Spain, where they appreciate such artistry, I’d be awarded both ears and the tail. In London, there’d be less outrage if I killed the boy.

I swanned into the market and made a play of considering cauliflowers and cabbages — though drat me if I know the difference — while idly twirling the old cane, using it to point at plump veggies at the back of the stalls, then waving it airily to indicate said items didn’t come up to snuff under closer scrutiny. The pup was there, nipping at passing skirts and swallowing titbits fed it by patrons with a high tolerance for noisome canines. The boy, who kept a tomato stall, was doting and vigilant, his practiced eye out for pilferers. A challenge! Much more than the fat, complacent PC on duty.

For twenty minutes, I stalked the pup. I became as sensible of the cries and bustle of the market as of the jungle.

Which is how I knew they were there.

Little brown men. Not tanned hop pickers from Kent. Natives of far shores.

I didn’t exactly see them. But you don’t. Oh, maybe you glimpse a stretch of brown wrist between cuff and glove, then turn to see only white faces. You think you catch a few words in Himalayan dialect amid costermongers’ cries.

At some point in any tiger hunt, you wonder if the tiger is hunting you — and you’re usually right.

I approached the doggie, en fin. I raised the stick to the level where its tip would brush over the pup’s skull. My grip shifted to allow the one-handed twist which would send steel through canine brain.

From a heap of tomatoes, red eyes glared. I looked again, blinking, and they were gone. But there were altogether too many tomatoes. Too ripe, with a redness approaching that of blood.

The moment had passed. The pup was alive.

I rued that penny. Though not strictly the present possessor of the Green Eye of the Yellow God, I had financed the transfer from Carew to Moriarty. I was implicated in its purchase.

The curse extended to me.

I hurried towards Oxford Street.

The pup knew not how narrow its escape had been. I only left the market — where it would have been easy for someone to get close and slip his own blade through my waistcoat — because I was allowed to. The bill wasn’t yet due.

Eyes were on me.

I used the cane, but only to skewer an apple from a stall and walk off without paying. Not one of my more impressive crimes.

Hastening back to our rooms by a roundabout route, I forced myself not to break into a run. I didn’t see a yeti in every shadow, but that’s not how it works. They let you know there is a yeti in a shadow, and you have to waste worry on every shadow. Invariably, you can’t keep up the vigilance. Then, the first shadow you don’t treat as if it had a yeti in it is the one the yeti comes out of. Damn strain on the nerves, even mine — which, as many will attest, are constituted of steel cable suitable for suspension bridges.

Only when I turned into Conduit Street, and spotted the familiar figure of Runty Reg — the beggar who kept lookout, and would signal on his penny whistle if anyone official or hostile approached our door — did I stop sweating. I flicked him a copper, which he made disappear.

I returned to our consulting room, calm as you like and pooh-poohing earlier imaginings. Professor Moriarty was addressing a small congregation of all-too-familiar villains. The Green Eye shone in plain sight on the sideboard. Had he summoned the most light-fingered bleeders in London on the assumption one would half-inch the thing and take the consequences?

‘Kind of you to join us, Moran,’ he said, coldly. ‘I have decided we shall assemble a collection of Crown jewels. This emerald is but the first item. You might call this gem matchless, but I believe I can match it.’

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out something the size of a rifle ball, which he held up between thumb and forefinger. It glistened, darkly. He laid it down beside the Green Eye.

The Black Pearl of the Borgias.

VI

Before Moriarty, the last person unwise enough to own the Black Pearl was Nicholas Savvides, an East End dealer in dubious valuables. Well known among collectors of such trinkets, he was as crooked as they come — even before the Hoxton Creeper twisted him about at the waist. When the police found Savvy Nick, his bellybutton and his arse crack made an exclamation mark. His eyes were popped too, but he was dead enough not to mind being blind and about-face.

The peculiar thing was that the Creeper didn’t want the pearl for himself. He was the rummest of customers, a criminal lunatic who suffered from a glandular gigantism. Its chief symptoms were gorilla shoulders and a face like a pulled toffee. He lumbered about in a vile porkpie hat and an old overcoat which strained at the seams, killing people who possessed the Borgia Pearl, only to bestow the hard-luck piece on a succession of ‘French’ actresses. These delights could be counted on to dispose of the thing to a mug pawnbroker, and set their disappointed beau to spine twisting again. He’d been through most of the cancan chorus at the Tivoli, but — as they say — who hasn’t?

The Creeper had been caught, tried and hanged by whatever neck he possessed, and walked away from the gallows whistling Offenbach. To my knowledge, he’d been shot by the police, several jewel thieves and a well-known fence. Bullets didn’t take. Once, he’d been blown up with gelignite. No joy there. Something to do with thick bones.

I had no idea Moriarty had the Black Pearl. Since his arse was still in its usual place, I supposed the Creeper hadn’t either. Until now. If the prize were openly displayed, the Creeper would find out. He lived rough, down by the docks. Eating rats and — worse — drinking Thames water. Some said he was psychically attuned to his favoured bauble. Even if that was rot, he had his sources. He would follow the trail to Conduit Street. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the vengeance of the little yellow god.

Moriarty’s audience consisted of an even dozen of the continent’s premier thieves. Not the ones you’ve heard of — the cricketing ponce or the frog popinjays. Not the gents who steal for a laugh and to thumb their noses at titled aunties, but the serious, unambitious drudges who get the job done. Low, cunning types we’d dealt with before, who would do their bit for a share of the purse and not peach if they got nobbled. When we wanted things stolen, these were the men — and two women — we called in.

‘I have made “a shopping list”,’ announced the Professor. ‘Four more choice items to add lustre to the collection. It is my intention that these valuables be secured within the next two days.’

A covered blackboard — relic of his pedagogical days — stood by his desk. Like a magician, Moriarty pulled away the cloth. He had written his list clearly, in chalk:

1. The Green Eye of the Yellow God

2. The Black Pearl of the Borgias

3. The Falcon of the Knights of St John

4. The Jewels of the Madonna of Naples

5. The Jewel of Seven Stars

6. The Eye of Balor

Simon Carne, a cracksman and swindler who insisted on wearing a fake humpback, put up his hand like a schoolboy.

‘You have permission to speak,’ the Professor said. It’s a wonder he didn’t fetch his mortar board, black gown and cane. They had been passed on to Mistress Strict, one of Mrs Halifax’s young ladies; she took in overage pupils with a yen for the discipline of their school days.

‘Item three, sir,’ Carne said. ‘The Falcon. Is that the Templar Falcon?’

‘Indeed. A jewelled gold statuette, fashioned in 1530 by Turkish slaves in the Castle of St Angelo on Malta. The Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem intended it to be bestowed on Carlos the Fifth of Spain. It was, as I’m sure you know, lost to pirates before it could be delivered.’

‘Well, I’ve never heard of it,’ Fat Kaspar said A promising youth: his appetite for puddings was as great as his appetite for crime, but he’d a smart mind and a beady eye for fast profit.

‘It’s been sought by a long line of adventurers,’ explained Carne. ‘And not been seen in fifty years.’

‘So some say.’

‘You want it here within two days?’

Moriarty was unruffled by the objection.

‘If there’s no fog on the Channel, the Templar Falcon should join the collection by tomorrow morning. I have cabled the Grand Vampire in Paris with details of the current location of this rara avis. It has been in hiding. A soulless brigand enamelled it like a common blackbird to conceal its value.’

‘The Grand Vampire is stealing this prize, and giving it to you?’ Carne said.

I didn’t believe that either.

‘Of course not. In point of fact, he won’t have to steal it. The Falcon lies neglected in Pére Duroc’s curiosity shop. The proprietor has little idea of the dusty treasure nestling in his unsaleable stock. We have a tight schedule, else I would send someone to purchase it for its asking price. If any of you could be trusted with fifteen francs.’

A smattering of nervous laughter.

‘I have offered the Grand Vampire fair exchange. I am giving him something he wants, as valuable to him as the Falcon is to us. I do not intend to tell you what that is.’

But — never fear — I’ll release the feline from the reticule. On our St Helena excursion, Moriarty took the trouble to validate a rumour. As you know, Napoleon’s imperial bones were exhumed in 1840 and returned to France and — after twenty years of lying in a cardboard box as the frogs argued and raised subscriptions — interred in a hideous porphyry sarcophagus under the dome at Les Invalides. You can buy a ticket and gawp at it. However, as you don’t know, Napoleon isn’t inside. For a joke, the British gave France the remains of an anonymous, pox-ridden, undersized sailor. The Duke of Wellington didn’t stop laughing for a month.

On the island, the Prof found the original unmarked grave, dug up what was left of the Corsican Crapper and stole Boney’s bonce. That relic was now on its way to Paris by special messenger, fated to become a drinking cup for the leader of Les Vampires, France’s premier criminal gang. A bit of a conversation piece, I expect. Les Vamps run to that line of the dramatic the Frenchies call Grand Guignol. Supposed to make their foes shiver in their beds, but hard to take seriously. Grand Vampires don’t last long. There’s a whole cupboard full of drinking cups made out of their skulls.

‘Moran, you’re au fait with the Jewel of Seven Stars.’

I had heard of item five. It was an Egyptian ruby with sparkling flaws in the pattern of the constellation of the plough, set in a golden scarab ring, dug out of a Witch Queen’s Tomb. Most of the archaeologists involved had died of Nile fever or Cairo clap. The sensation press wrote these ailments up as ‘the curse of the Pharaohs’. I knew the bauble to be in London, property of one Margaret Trelawny — daughter of a deceased tomb robber. [38]

Just for a jolly, while idly considering the locations of the most valuable prizes in London, I’d cased Trelawny House in Kensington Palace Gardens. Fair-to-middling difficult. But, see above, my remarks on famous gems: Thorny Problem of Converting Same into Anonymous Cash. Also, the place had a sour air. I’m not prey to superstition, but know a likely ambush from a mile off. Trelawny House was one of those iffy locations — best kept away from. Might I now have to take the plunge and regret the fancy of planning capers one didn’t really wish to commit?

‘The Jewels of the Madonna are of less intrinsic interest,’ continued Moriarty. ‘These gems — mediocre stones, poorly set, but valuable enough — bedecked a statue hoisted and paraded about Naples during religious festivals. I see I have your interest. A notion got put about that they were too sacred to steal. No one would dare inflict such insult on Mary — who, as a carpenter’s wife in Judea, was unlikely to have sported such ornament in her lifetime.

‘As it happens, the real reason no one tried for the jewels was that the Camorra decreed they not be touched. Italian banditti who would sell their own mothers retain a superstitious regard for Mother Mary. They wash the blood off their hands and present pious countenances at mass on Sunday. However, as ever, someone would not listen. Gennaro, a blacksmith, stole the jewels to impress his girlfriend. They have been “in play” ever since.

‘Foolish Gennaro is long dead, but the Camorra haven’t got the booty back. [39] At this moment, after a trans-European game of pass the parcel with corpses, the gems are hidden after the fashion of Poe’s purloined letter. One Giovanni Lombardo, a carpenter whose death notice appears in this morning’s papers, substituted them for the paste jewels in the prop store of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Signorina Bianca Castafiore, “the Milenese Nightingale”, rattles them nightly, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday, in the “jewel scene” from Gounod’s Faust. It is of scientific interest that the diva’s high notes are said to set off sympathetic vibrations which burst bottles and kill rats. I should be interested in observing such a phenomenon, which might have applications in our line of endeavour.’

‘What about the eye-tyes?’ asked Alf Bassick, a reliable fetch-and-carry man. ‘They’ve been a headache lately.’

‘Ah, yes, the Neapolitans,’ the Professor said. ‘The London address of the Camorra, as you know, is Beppo’s Ice Cream Parlour in Old Compton Street. They present the aspect of comical buffoons but, by my estimation, the activities of their Soho Merchants’ Protective Society have cut into our income by seven and a half per cent.’

The SMPS was a band of Moustache Petes selling insurance policies to pub-keepers and restauranteurs: don’t agree to cough up the weekly payments and your place of business has trouble with rowdy, window-breaking customers; stop paying and you start smiling the Italian smile. That’s a deep cut in your throat, from ear to ear; it really does look like a red clown’s grin.

‘Hitherto, the London Camorra has merely been an inconvenience. Now they know their blessed jewels are in the city, they will be more troublesome. It is a cardinal error to classify the Camorra as a criminal organisation, an Italian equivalent to Les Vampires…’

Or us, he didn’t say. He liked to think of the Firm as an academic exercise: abstruse economics, sub rosa mathematics.

‘…at bottom, the Camorra — and their Sicilian and Calabrian equivalents, the Mafia and the ’Ndrangheta — are a romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement, as remorseless and unreasonable as the priests of the yellow god. They care not about dying, as individuals. This makes them exceedingly dangerous.’

He let that sink in.

‘Don Rafaele Corbucci, chief of chiefs of the Camorra, has vowed to return the jewels to the Madonna. He has taken an oath on the life of his own mother. He has personally followed the jewels across Europe and is presently in London. He paid a call on the late Signor Lombardo at his place of business yesterday. Measures must be taken to pluck the fruit before he can get his hands on it.’

To scare each other, criminals told stories about Don Rafaele. You can imagine how they run. It is said that when a devoted lieutenant thoughtlessly spit out a cigar end in church on a saint’s day, the pious Don had him strangled with his only son’s entrails. He took his culture seriously, too — and had a sense of humour. While infatuated with that bitch Irene Adler — yes, he’s another of her leavings — he took against a critic who ridiculed her performance as Duchess Hélène in I Vespri Siciliani. The man wound up with his own ears cut off and a donkey’s ears nailed onto his head in their place.

I was surprised to learn this monster had a mama. If it were a matter of keeping his word, Don Rafaele would personally sink the old biddy in the Bay of Naples.

‘What about item six?’ Carne chipped in.

‘The Eye of Balor,’ Moriarty said. ‘A gold coin, named for a giant of Irish mythology, reputed to have been taken from a leprechaun’s pot… Lately the “lucky piece” of “Dynamite” Desmond Mountmain, General-in-Chief of the Irish Republican Invincibles, which brought him only poor luck, since last week an infernal device of his own manufacture went off in his face when he thumped the table too hard at a meeting of his Inner Council of Immortals.’

I told you Ireland would come into it.

‘The Eye of Balor is currently among Mountmain’s effects, in the possession of the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard. Half a dozen sons, cousins and brothers would like to obtain the coin. It’s said that, if “the wee folk” approve, the owner will ascend to the office of Mage-King of Ireland, whatever that means. The chief contestant for the position is Desmond’s son, Tyrone.’

That was foul news. Another ‘romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement’. Your paddy bomber though concerned with his own individual skin is too hot-headed as a rule to preserve it. Dynamite Des wasn’t the first Fenian to blow himself up with his own blasting powder.

Tyrone Mountmain, the heir apparent, figured high on my list of people I hoped never to meet again.

So, now we had to worry about brown priests and marauding mi-go, the Hoxton Creeper, Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, the Knights Templar, the Naples Mob, the little people and the bloody Fenians! It was a wonder Malvoisin’s Mirror, the Monkey’s Paw, Cap’n Flint’s treasure and Sir Michael Sinclair’s Door were off the ‘shopping list’.

How cursed did Professor Moriarty want to be by the end of the week?

VII

Recall my remarks re. nuisance value attendant on one little murder carried out in the service of a trade union?

Ask anyone who knows us (and is still in a position to talk) and you’ll be told we are a mercenary concern. We kill anyone, of whatever political stripe or social standing. For a price. It’s not true that money is all that interests us. The thrill of the chase is involved. If nothing else is on, I’d cheerfully pot someone or steal something just to keep my hand in.

Moriarty claims pure intellectual interest in the problem at hand, and can be inveigled into an enterprise if it strikes him as out of the ordinary. He feels pepper in the blood too, in the planning if not the execution. The moment of clear thrill which burns cold — as a perfect shot brings down a tiger or an archduke — is the closest I can get to the fireworks which go off in the Prof’s brain when his reptile head stops oscillating… and he suddenly knows how an impossible trick can be brought off.

We have no cause but ourselves. We have no politics. We have no religion. I believe in Sensation. Moriarty believes in Sums. That’s about as deep as it needs run.

It was an irritant when the misconception set in that we were in sympathy with the working man. That inconvenience was as nothing beside the notion that fellows with names like Moriarty or Moran must support Irish Independence.

From time to time — usually when an American millionaire who’d never set foot on the isle of his ancestors for fear of being robbed by long-lost cousins decided to fund the Struggle — one or other of the many branches of Fenianism secured our temporary services. If Desmond Mountmain weren’t so all-fired certain he could handle his own bombmaking, he might have been buried in one piece. It takes a more precise touch to blow the door off a strongroom than the medals off a chief constable. Dynamiters on our books have names like ‘Steady Hands’ Crenshaw, not ‘Shaky’ Brannigan.

As a rule, Irish petitioners were much more trouble than they were worth.

Over the years, half a dozen proud rebels had tried to enlist us on the never-never in fantastic schemes of insurrection. You could separate the confidence men from the real patriots because simple crooks venture sensible-sounding endeavours like stealing cases of rifles from the Woolwich Arsenal. Genuine Irish revolutionaries run to crackpottery like deploying an especially made submarine warship to overthrow British rule in Canada. We decided against throwing in with that and you can look up how well it turned out. [40] Canada is still in the Empire last I paid attention, though I’ve no idea why. The place has nothing worth shooting (unless you count Inuit and Sasquatch which, at that, I might) and boasts 50,000 trees to every woman.

When a bold Fenian’s proposal of an alliance — with our end of it providing the funds — is rejected, he acts exactly like a music hall mick refused credit for drink. Hearty, exploitative friendliness curdles into wheedling desperation then turns into dark threats of dire vengeance. Always, there’s an appeal to us as ‘fellow Irishmen’. If the Prof or I have family connections in John Bull’s Other Island, we’d rather not hear from them. We’ve sufficient unpleasant English relatives to be getting on with.

It is possible the Professor is a distant cousin of Bishop Moriarty of Kerry, though rebels know better than to raise that connection. The Bishop — in one of the rare sensible utterances of a churchman I can recall — once declared: ‘When we look down into the fathomless depth of this infamy of the heads of the Fenian conspiracy, we must acknowledge that eternity is not long enough, nor Hell hot enough to punish such miscreants.’ Far be it from me to agree with anything said in a pulpit, but the Bish was not far wrong.

So: Tyrone Mountmain.

Here’s why he wasn’t at the meeting of the Inner Council of Immortals of the Irish Republican Invincibles which ended with a bang… he was the only man in living memory to devote himself with equal passion to the causes of Irish Home Rule and Temperance.

A paddy intolerant of strong drink is as common as a politician averse to robbing the public purse. An Irishman who goes around smashing bottles and barrels has few comrades and fewer friends. If he weren’t a six-foot rugby forward and bare-knuckle boxer, I dare say Tyrone wouldn’t have lasted beyond his first crusade, but he was and he had. Dear old Da, whose favoured tipple was scarcely less potent than the dynamite which did for him, could not abide a teetotaller in his home and exiled his own son from the Invincibles. They had a three-day donnybrook about it, cuffing each other’s hard heads up and down Aungier Street while onlookers placed bets.

After the fight, Tyrone quit the Irish Republican Invincibles and founded the Irish Invincible Republicans. He attracted no followers except for his demented Aunt Sophonisiba, who advocated the health-giving properties of drinking from her own chamberpot, the tithing of two pennies in every shilling to establish an Irish Expedition to the Planet Mercury and (most ridiculous of all) votes for women.

Tyrone promulgated a plan for bringing Britain to its knees by dynamiting public houses. The Fenian Brigades would never countenance such a sacrilegiously un-Irish notion. With Desmond dead, Tyrone rallied the unexploded remnants of the IRI and folded them into the IIR. Claiming Aunt Soph was in touch with his Da on the ethereal plane, Tyrone relayed the story that if Dynamite Des hadn’t been so annoyed at a wave of recent arrests made by the Special Irish Branch he wouldn’t have hit the table so hard. That made Desmond a martyr to the Cause. Tyrone declared war on the SIB.

As has been said about any number of conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War and the Gladstone-Disraeli feud, it’s a shame they can’t both lose.

Tyrone had a bee in his bonnet about the Eye of Balor.

Soph put it into his head that he must have the coin to rise to his true position. Desmond had thought it an amusing relic to show off to his drinking cronies. Tyrone, who had no drinking cronies, believed it possessed supernatural powers.

The only reason he hadn’t yet tried to steal it back from Scotland Yard was that Soph said she knew from ‘a vision’ that if the Eye of Balor were not in the hands of its rightful owner, the ‘little people’ would bring about the ruination of anyone who had the temerity to hang onto it. So, the Irish Invincible Republicans were waiting for the Special Irish Branch to be undermined by leprechauns. I assumed they were all down the pub, against Tyrone’s orders, leaving him home with only a vial of his own piddle, as recommended by potty aunts everywhere, to warm his insides.

Ireland! I ask you, was ever there such a country of bastards, priests and lunatics?

VIII

As promised, another item for our collection arrived first thing the next morning. Hand-delivered by an apache from Paris, who took one sniff at an English breakfast, muttered, ‘Merde alors’, and hopped back on the boat train. Can’t say I blamed her.

1. The Green Eye of the Yellow God

2. The Black Pearl of the Borgias

3. The Falcon of the Knights of St John

4. The Jewels of the Madonna of Naples

5. The Jewel of Seven Stars

6. The Eye of Balor

The fabulous gold, jewel-encrusted Templar Falcon looked like a dull black paperweight. A label attached by string to one claw indicated decreasingly ambitious prices. Generations of Parisian tat connoisseurs had not nibbled. On principle, the Grand Vampire had stolen the bird — murdering three people, and burning the curiosity shop to the ground — rather than meet the asking price (which, I’m sure, Pére Duroc would have lowered yet again, if pressed). I trusted our esteemed colleague was enjoying his afternoon anis from the skull of the Emperor Napoleon.

‘Are you sure there are jewels in that?’ asked Fat Kaspar, who was trusted with dusting the sideboard.

Moriarty nodded, holding the thing up like Yorick’s skull.

‘What was the point of it again?’ I enquired.

‘After the Knights of St John were driven off Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent, the Emperor Carlos let the order make stronghold on Malta and demanded a single falcon as annual rent. He expected a live bird, but the Knights decided to impress him by manufacturing this fantastically valuable statue… which was then stolen.’

Fat Kaspar prepared a spot for the bird, and Moriarty set it down.

‘What happened afterwards?’ the youth asked.

‘What usually happens when rent isn’t paid. Eviction. The Templars were booted out of Malta. In shame. Later, they were excommunicated or disavowed by the Pope. In Spain and Portugal, they practiced “unholy” rites — the usual orgiastic behaviour such as you’d find in any brothel when the fleet’s in, but with incense and chanting and vestments. Other orders made war on them, hunted them down. It is said the last of them were hung on cartwheels and left for the crows to peck out their eyes.

‘But the Knights of St John still exist, and I am sure they wish the return of their property. I doubt the present Grand Master feels any obligation to deliver it to the Spanish Crown.’

‘Who’s this Grand Master wallah?’ I asked.

‘Marshall Alaric Molina de Marnac.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘That would be why it’s called a secret society, Moran. The Knights of St John have many other names in the many territories where they operate. In England, they are a sect of Freemasons, and have conjoined with several occult groups. Their Grand Lodge, in the catacombs under Guildhall, is abuzz with preparations for a visit from the Grand Master. The call has gone out and the Holy Knights will answer. De Marnac heard that the falcon had surfaced in Paris…’

‘What little bird whispered that in his ear?’

Moriarty’s thin lips approximated a sly smile. ‘He set out by special train from the Templar fastness in Cadiz, but arrived too late… as the embers of the Duroc establishment were settling. A troop of men-at-arms, in full armour, clashed with Les Vampires in Montmartre. Lives were lost. I calculate they delayed the arrival of de Marnac on these shores by eighteen hours. The Grand Vampire will be less inclined to do us favours in the future. I had taken that into account — we shall have to do something about France when this present business is concluded.’

I did not think to remind him that our purpose was simply to save one rotten Englishman’s hide. Moriarty had not forgotten Mad Carew. He was playing a much larger game, but the original commission remained.

Fat Kaspar looked at the falcon. He brushed its jet wings with his feather duster, and the thing’s dead eye seemed to glint.

Something was going on between boy and blackbird.

Moriarty had already assigned the day’s errands. Simon Carne was off in Kensington ‘investigating a gas leak’. Alf Bassick was in Rotherhithe picking up items Moriarty had ordered from a cabinetmaker whose specialty was making new furniture look old enough to pass for Chippendale. Now, it was my turn for marching orders.

‘Moran, I have taken the liberty of filling in your appointment book. You have a busy day. You are expected at Scotland Yard for luncheon, the Royal Opera for the matinee and Trelawny House for late supper. I trust you can secure the items needed to complete our collection. Take whoever you need from our reserves. I shall be in my study until midnight — calculations must be made.’

‘Fair enough, Prof. You know what you’re doing.’

‘Yes, Moran. I do.’

IX

So, how does one steal a coin from a locked desk in Scotland Yard? A castle on the Victoria Embankment, full to bursting with policemen, detectives, gaolers and ruthless agents of the British State. An address — strictly, it’s New Scotland Yard — lawbreakers would be well advised to stay away from.

Simple answer.

You don’t. You can’t. And if you could, you wouldn’t.

For why?

If such a coup — a theft of evidence from the Headquarters of Her Majesty’s Police — could be achieved, word would quickly circulate. The name of the master cracksman would be toasted in every pub in the East End. Policemen drink in those pubs too. Even if you left no clue, thanks to the brilliance of your foreplanning and the cunning of the execution, your signature would be on the deed.

Rozzers don’t take kindly to having their noses tweaked. If they can’t have you up for a given crime, they take you in on a drunk and disorderly charge, then tell anyone foolish enough to ask that you ‘fell down the stairs’. Once inside the holding cells, any number of nasty fates can befall the unwary. When the Hoxton Creeper was in custody, the peelers got shot of seven or eight on their most-hated list by making felons share his lodgings.

No, you don’t just breeze into a den of police with larcenous intent and a set of lock picks. Unless you’ve a yen for martyrdom.

You walk up honestly and openly, without trace of an Irish accent. You ask for Inspector Harvey Lukens of the SIB and buy whatever you want. Not with money. That’s too easy. As with the Grand Vampire, you find something the other fellow wants more than the item they possess which you desire. Usually, you can cadge a favour by giving Lukens the current addresses of any one of a dozen Fenian troublemakers on the ‘wanted’ books. The Branch was constituted solely to deal with a rise in Fenian activity, specifically a bombing campaign in the eighties which got under their silly helmets — especially when the pissoir outside their office was dynamited on the same night some mad micks tried to topple Nelson’s column with gunpowder.

Here’s the thing about the Special Irish Branch: unlike their colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Department, they didn’t give a farthing’s fart about English crime. As far as Inspector Lukens was concerned, you could rob as many post offices as you like — abduct the postmistresses and sell ’em to oriental potentates if you could get threepence for the baggages — just so long as you didn’t use the stolen money in the cause of Home Rule.

When it came to Surrey stranglers, Glasgow gougers, Welsh wallet-lifters, Birmingham burglars or cockney coshers, the SIB were remarkably tolerant. However, any Irishman who struck a match on a public monument or sold a cough drop on Sunday was liable to be deemed ‘a person of interest’, and appear — if he survived that far — at his arraignment with blacked eyes and missing teeth.

Shortly after luncheon — a reasonable repast at Scotland Yard, with cold meats and beer and tinned peaches in syrup — I left the building, frowning, and made rendezvous with a band of fellows. Thieves, of course. Not of the finest water, but experienced. All persons of special interest:

Michaél Murphy Magooly O’Connor, jemmy-man.

Martin Aloysius McHugh, locksmith.

Seamus ‘Shiv’ Shaughnessy, knife thrower.

Pádraig ‘Pork’ Ó Méalóid, hooligan.

Patrick ‘Paddy Red’ Regan, second-storey bandit.

Leopold MacLiammóir, smooth-talker.

They did not think to wonder what special attributes qualified them for this particular caper. The Professor was in it, so there’d likely be a payout at the end of the day.

‘It’s no go, the bribery,’ I told them. ‘Lukens won’t play that game. So, it’s the contingency plan, lads. The coin’s in the desk, the desk’s in the basement office. I’ve left a window on the latch. When the smoke bomb goes off and the bluebottles run out of the building, slip in and riffle the place. Take anything else you want, but bring the Professor his item and you’ll remember this day well.’

Half a dozen nods.

‘Ye’ll not be regrettin’ this at all at all, Colonel, me darlin”,’ Leopold said. His brogue was so thick the others couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was an Austrian who liked to pretend he was an Irishman. After all, whoever heard of a Dubliner called Leopold? It’s possible he’d never even been to the ould sod at all.

Ó Méalóid pulled out a foot-long knotty club from a place of concealment and Regan slipped out his favourite stabbing knife. McHugh’s long fingers twitched. Shaughnessy handed around a flask of something distilled from stinging nettles. The little band of merry raiders wrapped checked scarves around the lower halves of their faces and pulled down their cap brims.

I left them and strolled back across the road. Pausing by the front door, I took out a silver case and extracted a cylinder approximately the size and shape of a cigar. I asked a uniformed police constable if he might have a lucifer about him, and a flame was kindly proffered. I lit the fuse of the cylinder and dropped it in the gutter. It fizzed alarmingly. Smoke was produced. Whistles shrilled.

My thieves charged across the road and poured through the open window.

And were immediately pounced on by the SIB Head-Knocking Society.

The smoke dispelled within a minute. I offered the helpful constable a real cigar he was happy to accept.

From offstage came the sounds of a severe kicking and battering, punctuated by cries and oaths. Eventually, this died down a little.

Inspector Lukens came out of the building and, without further word, dropped a tied handkerchief into my hand. He went back indoors, to fill in forms.

Six easy arrests. That was a currency the SIB dealt in. Six Irish crooks caught in the process of committing a stupid crime. As red-handed as they were redheaded.

This might shake your belief in honour among thieves, but I should mention that the micks were hand-picked for more than their criminal specialties and stated place of birth. All were of that breed of crook who don’t know when to lay off the mendacity… the sort who agree to steal on commission but think for themselves and withhold prizes they’ve been paid to secure. Dirty little birds who feather their own nests. Said nests would be on Dartmoor for the next few years. And serve ’em right.

It didn’t hurt that they were of the Irish persuasion. I doubt any one of them took an interest in politics, but the SIB would be happy to have six more heads to bounce off the walls or dunk in the ordure buckets.

You might say that I had done my patriotic duty in enabling such a swoop against enemies of the Queen. Only that wouldn’t wash. I’ve a trunkful medals awarded on the same basis. Mostly, I was murdering heathens for my own enjoyment.

I unwrapped the handkerchief and considered the Eye of Balor. It didn’t look much like an eye, or even a coin — just a lump of greenish metal I couldn’t tell was gold. In legend, Balor had a baleful, petrifying glance. On the battlefield, his comrades would peel back his mighty eyelids to turn his Medusan stare against the foe. Stories were confused as to whether this treasure was that eye or just named after it. Desmond Mountmain claimed it had been given to him during a faerie revel by King Brian of the Leprechauns. I suspected that the brand of pee-drinking lunacy practised by his sister ran in the family. It was said — mostly by the late Dynamite Des — that any who dared withhold the coin from a true Irish rebel would hear the howl of the banshee and suffer the wrath of the little people.

At that moment, an unearthly wail sounded out across the river. I bit through my cigar.

A passing excursion boat was overloaded with small, raucous creatures in sailor suits, flapping ribbons in the wind. The wail was a ship’s whistle. Not a banshee. The creatures were schoolgirls on an outing, pulling each other’s braids. Not followers of King Brian.

Ever since the tomato stall, I’d had my whiskers up. I was unused to that. This business was a test for even my nerves.

After a few moments, I carefully wrapped the coin again and passed it on to a small messenger — Filthy Fanny, not a bloody leprechaun — with orders to fetch it back to Conduit Street. Any temptation to run off with the precious item would be balanced by the vivid example of the six Irishmen. The professional urchin took off as if she had salt on her tail.

I summoned the not-for-hire cab I had arrived in.

‘The Royal Opera House,’ I told Chop, the Firm’s best driver. ‘And a shilling on top of the fare if we miss the first act.’

X

Some scorn opera as unrealistic. Large licentious ladies, posturing villains, concealed weapons, loud noises, suicides, thefts, betrayals, elongated ululations, explosions, goblets of poison and the curtain falling on a pile of corpses. Well, throw in a bag of tigers, and that’s my life. If I want treachery, bloodshed and screaming women, I can get enough at home, thank you very much.

I dislike opera because it’s Italian. The eye-tyes are the lowest breed of white man, a bargain-priced imitation of the French. All hair oil and smiling and back-stabbing and cowardice, left out in the sun too long.

This brouhaha of the Jewels of the Madonna of Naples was deeply Italian, and thoroughly operatic. The recitative was too convoluted to follow without music.

The gist: a succession of mugs across Europe got hold of the loot first lifted by Gennaro the Blacksmith, also known as Gennaro the Damned and Gennaro the Dead. The Camorra — a merciless, implacable brotherhood — was sworn to kill anyone who dared acquire the treasure, but no fool thought to return the loot and apologise. They all tried for a quick sale and a getaway, or thought to hide the valuables until ‘the heat died down’. Under the jewels’ spell, they forgot about the only institution ever to combine the adjectives ‘efficient’ and ‘Italian’. The Camorra carries feuds to the fifth generation; there’s little to no likelihood of anyone or their great-grandchildren profiting from Gennaro’s impetuous theft.

As mentioned, the latest idiot to acquire the Jewels was Giovanni Lombardo, a propmaker for the Royal Opera. He’d received the package from an equally addled cousin, who expired from strychnine poisoning at a Drury Lane pie stall a few hours later. Lombardo had been victim of a singular, fatal assault in his Islington carpenter’s shop. His head chanced to be trapped in a vice. Several holes were drilled in his brain-pan. A bloodied brace and bit was found in the nearby sawdust.

An editorial in the Harmsworth Press cited this crime as sorry proof of the deleterious effects of gory sensationalism paraded nightly in Italian on the stage, instead of daily in English in the newspapers as was right and proper. That Faust was sung in French didn’t trouble the commentator. Generally, the French are to be condemned for license and libertinism and the Italians for violence and cowardice. When foreigners copy each other’s vices, it confuses the English, so it’s best to ignore the facts and print the prejudice.

The Harmsworth theory, which Scotland Yard was supposedly ‘taking seriously’, painted the culprit as a demented habitué of the opera, sensibilities eroded by addiction to tales of multiple murder and outrageous horror. No longer satisfied with the bladders of pig’s blood burst when a tenor was stabbed or the papier maché heads which rolled when an ingénue was guillotined, this notional fiend had become entirely deranged. He doubtless intended to recreate gruesome moments from favourite operas with passing innocents cast in the roles of corpses-to-be. No one was safe!

This afternoon, a gaggle of ladies loitered outside the Royal Opera House with banners. One pinned a ‘suppress this nasty foreign muck’ badge on my lapel. I assured the harridan I’d sooner send my children up chimneys than expose their tender ears to the corrupting wailing of the so-called entertainment perpetrated inside this very building. If there were still profit in selling brats as sweeps, I’d be up for it. Only the mothers of my numberless darling babes, mostly dark-skinned and resident in far corners of the Empire, would insist on their cut of the purse and render such child-vendage scarcely worth the effort.

While chatting with the anti-opera protester, I cast a casual eye about Covent Garden. No more suspicious, olive-skinned loiterers than usual. Which is to say anyone in sight could — and perhaps would — turn out to be a Camorra assassin. One or two of the protesting ladies wore suspicious veils.

Lombardo’s wounds consisted of two medium-sized holes, one small (almost tentative) hole and one large (ultimately fatal) hole. He had kept the secret of the jewels until that third hole was started. Then, the final hole was made to shut him up. All very Italian.

Lombardo had asked around London fences for prices on individual stones, so the spider in the centre of his web heard of it. Moriarty also knew the carpenter had been commissioned to provide props for the current production, and saw at once where the loot was hidden. In act three of Faust, Marguerite, the stupid bint who passes for a leading lady, piles on a collection of tat gifted her by the demon Méphistophélès and regards herself in a mirror. She gives vent to the ‘Jewel Song’ (‘Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir!’), an aria which sets my teeth on edge even when sung in tune (which is seldom). It’s about how much lovelier she looks when plastered with priceless gems.

Thanks to Moriarty’s learned insight, we knew about the jewels. Thanks to strategic cranial drilling, Don Rafaele knew about the jewels. The Camorra could have saved some elbow-work if they’d read their Edgar Allan Poe. [41] The only person in the case — I dismiss Scotland Yard, of course — who didn’t know about the jewels was Bianca Castafiore, the young, substantial diva enjoying a triumphant run in the role of Marguerite.

When the Milanese Nightingale performs the ‘Jewel Song’, the unkind have been known to venture she would look lovelier still with a potato sack over her head. However, la Castafiore had a devoted clique of ferocious admirers. I knew the type: several of Mrs Halifax’s regulars couldn’t get enough of the Welsh trollop known as Tessie the Two-Ton Taff.

As I entered the foyer of the Opera House, I thought the banshee associated with the Eye of Balor had pursued me. A wailing resounded throughout the building.

Then I recognised the racket as that bloody ‘Jewel Song’.

A commissionaire was worried about a chandelier, which was vibrating and clinking. A small, crying boy was led out of the auditorium by an angry mama and a relieved papa. I swear they were bleeding at the ears. In the garden, dogs howled in sympathy. The silver plugs in my teeth hurt.

Vokins, the Professor’s useful man at the opera, awaited me. Not an especially inspiring specimen: all pockmarks, bowler hat and whining wheedle. His duties, mostly, were to fuss around the petticoats of chorus girls who no longer believed they’d be whisked off and married by a baronet — usually, being whisked off and something elsed by a baronet put paid to that illusion — or could rise to leading roles by virtue of their voices. Alternative methods of employment were always available to such. A modicum of acting ability came in handy when seeming to be delighted at the prospect of an evening — or ten expensive minutes — with Mrs Halifax’s more peculiar customers. Vokins, officially an usher, also scouted out the nobs in the boxes and passed on gossip… ‘All part of the great mosaic of life in the capital,’ Moriarty was wont to say.

First off, I asked if there’d been any break-ins or petty thefts lately.

‘No more’n usual, Colonel,’ he replied. ‘None who didn’t tithe to the Firm, at any rate.’

‘Seen any remarkable Italians?’

‘Don’t see nothing else. The diva has a platoon of ’em. Dressers and puffers and the like.’

‘Anyone very recently?’

‘We’ve a ’ole new set o’ scene-shifters today. The usual lot ’oo come with the company didn’t turn up this morning. Took sick at an ice cream parlour, after hours. All of ’em, to a man ’ad cousins ready to step in. Seventeen of ’em. Now you mentions it, they are a remarkable bunch, for eye-talians. Oh, you can’t mistake ’em for anythin’ else, Colonel. To look at ’em, they’re eye-tye through and through. Waxy ’taches, brown complexions, glittery eyes, tight trews, black ’air.

‘But there’s a funny thing, a singular thing — they don’t squabble. Never met an eye-tye ’oo didn’t spend all the hours o’ the day shoutin’ at any other eye-tye within earshot. Most productions, scene-shifters come to blows five or six times a performance. Someone storms out or back in. Elbow in the eye, knee in the crotch, a lot o’ monkey-jabber with spitting and hand gestures ’oose meanin’ can’t be mistook.

‘There’s been woundin’, cripplin’, even, all over ’oo gets to pick up which old helmet. But this lot, the substitute shifters, work like clockwork. Don’t say anythin’ much. Just get the job done. No arguments. Management’s in ’eaven. They wants to sack the no-shows, and keep this mob on permanent.’

So, the Camorra were already in the house.

They couldn’t have the jewels yet, because the song was still going on, and it would last a while longer. The Castafiore clique would call at least two encores. The rest of the house might be impatient to get on with the story — especially the bit in act five where Marguerite is hanged — but the diva would milk her signature tune for all it was worth.

I peeped through the main doors. Marguerite’s jewels sparkled in the limelight and her mirror kept flashing.

‘When she goes offstage, what happens to her props?’ I asked Vokins.

‘A dresser takes the jewels and the mirror off her. ’Attie ’Awkins. She’s took ill, too; must be somethin’ goin’ round. But ’er sister turned up with the others. Not what you’d expect, either. Funny that a yellow-’aired Stepney bit called ’Awkins ’as a sister called Malilella who’s dark as a gypsy. I made ’umble introductions and proffered my card, enquiring as to whether she’d be interested in a fresh line of work. This Malilella whipped out one o’ them stiletters and near stuck me Adam’s apple. You can still see the mark where she pricked.’ He pulled back his collar to show me a red welt. ‘She’s in the wings, waiting for the jewels.’

I saw where the snatch would be made. There was no time to be lost.

‘Vokins, round up whoever you can bribe, and get ’em in the hall. I need you to reinforce the Castafiore clique. I must have as many reprises as you can get out of her — keep the “Jewel Song” going!’

‘You want to ’ear it again?’

‘It’s my favourite ditty,’ I lied. ‘I want to hear it for twenty minutes or more.’

Enough time to get round to the wings, minding out for the girl with the stiletto and her seventeen swarthy comrades.

‘No accountin’ for taste,’ Vokins said. I gave him a handful of sovereigns and he rushed about recruiting. Confectionary stalls went unmanned and mop buckets unattended as Vokins lured their proprietors into an augmented clique.

Bianca Castafiore, up to her ankles in flowers tossed by admirers, paused to take a bow after concluding her aria for the third time. Even she looked startled when the crowd swelled with cries of ‘Encore, encore!’ Never one to disappoint her public, she took a deep breath and launched into it once again.

‘Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir…’

Groans from less partisan members of the audience were drowned out, though more than a few programs were shredded or opera glasses snapped in two.

This is where the Moran quick-thinking came into it.

The situation was simple: upon her exit, the diva would surrender the Jewels of the Madonna without knowing they were real. The valued new staff of the Royal Opera House would quit en masse.

So, why hadn’t the jewels been lifted before the performance? Well, if Don Rafaele Corbucci held one thing almost as sacred as the Virgin Mary, it was opera. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the jewel scene performed with real jewels was an overwhelming temptation. He would be in one of the boxes, enjoying the show before fulfilling his obligation to avenge the indignity perpetrated by Gennaro. I hoped his brains had been boiled by la Castafiore’s sustained high notes, for I needed him distracted.

Once the jewels were offstage, they were lost to me.

So, what to do?

Simple. I would have to seize them before they made their exit.

By a side door, I went backstage. In a hurry, I picked up items as I found them on racks in dressing rooms. When I told the story later, I claimed to have donned complete costume and make-up for the role of Méphistophélès. Actually, I made do with a red cloak, a cowl with horns and a half-facemask with a Cyrano nose.

I noticed several of the new scene-shifters, paying attention to the noise and the stage and therefore not much interested in me. I found myself in the wings just as la Castafiore, whose prodigious throat must be in danger of cracking, was chivvied into an unwise, record-setting seventh encore.

A little man with spikes of hair banged his fists against the wall and rent his shirt in red-faced fury, screeching ‘Get that sow off my stage!’ in Italian. Carlo Jonsi, the producer, had little hope his pleas would, like Henry II’s offhand thoughts about a troublesome priest, be acted on by skilled assassins. Though, as it happened, the house was packed with skilled assassins.

The dresser’s supposed sister Malilella — she of the stiletto — was waiting impatiently for her moment. I wouldn’t have put it past her to fling her blade with the next jetsam of floral tributes and accidentally stick the star through one prodigious lung.

‘Can’t someone end this?’ Maestro Jonsi shouted, in despair.

‘I’ll give it a try,’ I volunteered, and made my entrance.

To give her credit, the Camorrista sister was swift to catch on. And her knife was accurately thrown, only to stick into a scenery flat I happened to jostle in passing. I boomed out the Barrack Room lyrics to ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, lowering my voice to deep bass and drawing out phrases so no one could possibly make out the words or even the language.

Marguerite was astonished at this demonic apparition.

Most of the audience, who knew the opera by heart, were surprised at the sudden reappearance of Méphistophélès but, after eight renditions of the ‘Jewel Song’, were happy to accept whatever came next, just so long as it wasn’t a ninth.

‘Those joooo-oooo-wels you muuuuu-ust give baaaa-ack,’ I demanded. ‘Your beau-uuuuu-ty needs no suuuu-ch adorn-meeee-ent!’

I picked up the prop casket in which the jewels had been presented and pointed into it.

With encouragement from Vokins’ clique, who chanted ‘Take them off!’ in time to the desperately vamping orchestra, Bianca Castafiore removed the necklaces and bracelets and dropped them into the casket.

I was aware of commotion offstage. A couple of scene-shifters tried to rush the stage but were held back by non-Italians.

As the last bright jewel clinked into the casket, I looked at the woman in the wings. Malilella drew her thumb across her throat and pointed at me. I had added to my store of curses. Again.

There were Camorra in the wings. Both sides.

So I made my exit across the orchestra pit, striding on the backs of chairs, displacing musicians, knocking over instruments. I didn’t realise until I was among the audience that I had trailed my cloak across the limelights and was on fire.

I paused and the whole audience stood to give me a round of applause.

Clapping thundered throughout the auditorium. Which is why I didn’t hear the shots. When I saw holes appear in a double bass, I knew Don Rafaele was displeased with this diversion from the libretto.

I shucked my burning cloak and dashed straight up the centre aisle, out through the foyer — barging past a couple of scene-shifters on sheer momentum — and out into Covent Garden, where Chop awaited with the cab.

I tossed my mask and cowl out of the carriage as it rattled away.

Cradling the jewel casket in my lap, I began to laugh. The sort of laugh you give out because otherwise you’d have to scream and scream.

That is how I made my debut at the Royal Opera.

XI

After such a day, with two coups to the credit, many a crook would feel entitled to a roistering celebration. It’s usually how they get nabbed.

Your proud bandit swaggers into his local and buys everyone drinks. Asked how he comes to be suddenly in funds, he taps the side of his hooter and airily mentions a win on the dogs. No track in London pays out in crisp, freshly stolen banknotes. Every copper’s nark in the pub recalls a sick relative and dashes off into the fog to tap the plods ‘for a consideration’.

So, in my case, no rest for the wicked.

However, before proceeding to the evening’s amusement, I had Chop drive back to Conduit Street.

I chalked off the latest item myself.

1. The Green Eye of the Yellow God

2. The Black Pearl of the Borgias

3. The Falcon of the Knights of St John

4. The Jewels of the Madonna of Naples

5. The Jewel of Seven Stars

6. The Eye of Balor

Moriarty emerged from his thinking room with sheets of paper covered in diagrams. Finding the celebrated circles and clown-smile squiggles named for the mathematician John Venn inadequate to the task, he had invented what he said — and I’ve no reason to doubt him — was an entirely new system for visually representing complex processes. He was delighted with his incomprehensible arrays of little ovals with symbols in them, stuck together by flowing lines interrupted by arrows.

Indeed, the diagrams excited him more than his latest acquisition. He waved aside the casket of jewels in his eagerness to show off a form of cleverness I was incapable of making head or tail of. If he hadn’t been distracted, he might have taken steps to introduce his system to the wider world. Schoolboys destined for the dunce cap could curse him as the inventor of Moriarty Charts. As it is, Mr Venn rests on his inky laurels.

Mrs Halifax reported that Mad Carew was given to noisy spasms of terror. He was losing faith in the Professor’s ability to save his hide. She’d sent Lotus Lei to the basement with a sixpenny opium pipe which would cost the client seven shillings, in the hope that a puff might calm his nerves. However, at the sight of the celestial poppet, the loon took to gibbering, ‘The brown-skin monks of Nepal have slant eyes.’ In the gloom of the basement, Lotus reminded him of the sect sworn to avenge the stolen eye.

‘Funny thing is,’ I remarked. ‘The Chinese are about the only fanatic race we haven’t offended this week.’

‘I considered adding the Sword of Genghis Khan to our shopping list,’ said the Professor. ‘The hordes of Asia will rally to any who wield it, and I know where it can be found. The Si-Fan would certainly view it falling into Western hands as sacrilege. But the tomb in Mongolia would take months to reach. For the moment, it can stay where it is.’

That was a relief. I’ve reasons for not wanting to go back to Mongolia. Under any circumstances. It’s a worse hole than Bognor Regis.

Discarded on the desk were the cartes de visite of Marshall Alaric Molina de Marnac, Don Rafaele Corbucci and Tyrone Mountmain, Bart. A wavy Nepalese dagger lay beside them, gift of the priests of the little yellow god. The Creeper didn’t run to cards, but the broken-backed corpse left on our doorstep in a laundry basket probably served the same function. Runty Reg wouldn’t be at his post from now on. So, I gathered the interested parties all knew their most precious preciouses were arrayed on our sideboard.

‘I trust we’ve reinforcements coming,’ I said.

The Professor arched an eyebrow.

‘This little lot don’t play tiddlywinks,’ I continued. ‘Runty’s liable to be just the first casualty. Consider that stand which has just set up across the road, feller who’s bawling “Get-a ya tutsi-frutsi ice-a cream-a,” could be a noted opera lover dressed in a white hat and apron. The monks soliciting alms for the poor on the corner creak under their robes — steel jerkins and chain mail long-johns. The friends and relations of the Irishmen we handed over to the peelers this lunchtime are drunker and rowdier than usual in the Pillars of Hercules.

‘It’ll be the Battle of Maiwand out there soon. I doubt that Mrs Halifax standing on our doorstep looking stern will keep the blighters out long.’

Moriarty mused, making more calculations.

‘Not quite yet, I think, Moran. Not quite yet. The constituent elements are volatile, but one more is required for combustion. Now, off with you to Kensington to fetch the Jewel of Seven Stars.’

He patted me warmly on the chest — a unique gesture from him, with which I was not entirely comfortable — and disappeared back into his den.

As few men, I had his trust. Which was terrifying.

Outside, I found Chop by his cab, just about to stick his tongue into an ice cornet freshly purchased from the furious Don Rafaele.

‘Don’t eat that,’ I warned, dashing the cornet into the gutter. It fizzed surprisingly.

More than the usual amount of rubbish and rags were in the street. Some of the piles were shifting. I saw glittering eyes in the trash heaps. Our original Nepalese admirers remained foremost among the array of annoyed maniacs which came along with our Crown jewels.

I climbed into the cab, ignoring the gypsy death signs chalked on the doors, and we were away — for more larceny.

XII

The streetlamps were on, burning blue. Autumn fog gathered, swirling yellow. Chop’s cab rattled down Kensington Palace Road, and drew up at a workman’s hut erected beside a grave-sized hole in the gutter. Signs warned of a gas leak. Simon Carne had watched Trelawny House all day from inside the hut. He wore another of his disguises, as an old Irishman he called ‘Klimo’. Dialect humour was superfluous to the simple lookout job, but Carne was committed.

Other residences on the street had stone roaring lions flanking their driveways. Trelawny House favoured an Egyptian motif: sphinxes stood guard at the gate, the columns beside the front door were covered in hieroglyphs, and a pyramid topped the porch.

Carne gave a brief report. This evening, Margaret Trelawny was entertaining. Carriages had come and gone, depositing well-dressed people who took care not to let their faces be seen. Their coaches were of quality, many with their distinctive coats of arms gummed over with black paper. Vaguely musical sounds and rum, spicy smells emanated from the house.

‘I’ve managed to secure an invitation,’ Carne said.

He led me into the hut, where two of our associates sat on a purple-faced fellow who was securely bound and gagged.

‘Isn’t that Henry Wilcox? The colossus of finance?’ I asked.

At mention of his name, Wilcox writhed and purpled further, about to burst blood vessels. Known for sailing close to the wind in his business and personal life, he had just capsized. I kicked him in the middle. When an opportunity to boot the goolies of capital presents itself, only a fool misses it. Karl Marx said that, and it is the only socialist slogan which makes sense to me.

Carne’s men had taken a gilt-edged card bearing the sign of the ram from their captive, and Wilcox’s bag contained a long white robe and a golden mask with curly horns and a sheepish snout.

Obviously, this was my day for fancy dress.

I got into the ridiculous outfit and took the card.

Wilcox protested into his gag. Another kick quieted him.

I climbed back into the cab and Chop made great show of delivering me to the door of Trelawny House.

The knocker was in the shape of a green-eyed serpent. At a rap, the door was opened by a gigantic black prizefighter wearing harem pantaloons. His face and chest were painted gold. I handed over the ram card, which he dropped into a brazier. He stood aside.

I followed the noise and the — slightly intoxicating — smell. Through a hall filled with the usual clutter of elephant’s foot umbrella stands and potted aspidistras gone to seed, down stone steps into a cellar, where scented oil-lamps cast odd shadows. People dressed like silly buggers gyrated to the plinkings of instruments I couldn’t put names to. A proper knees-up.

The large cellar was decorated like an Egyptian tomb. I should say, decorated with an Egyptian tomb. All around were artefacts looted from the burial place of Queen Tera in the Valley of the Sorcerer. Each item cursed seven ways to sunset.

The guests were all of a type with Wilcox. Robes and masks didn’t conceal thick middles, bald pates and liver-spotted, well-manicured hands. Well-to-do and well connected, I judged. Members of Parliament and the Stock Exchange, commanders of manufacturing empires and shipping lines, high officers of the law and the armed forces, princes of the church and our ancient institutions of learning. More money than sense, more power than they knew what to do with.

So, the hostess was working a high-class racket. With marks like these on her lists, Miss Trelawny was well set-up.

Mixed among the robed, masked guests were professional houris of both sexes, immodestly clad in gold paint and little else. They sported Egyptian fripperies: hawk headdresses, golden snake circlets, ankhs and scarabs, that eye-in-the-squiggle design. Some might have been imported from Eastern climes, but I recognised a body or two from the city’s less exotic vice establishments. Mrs Halifax had mentioned a few of her younger, prettier earners had gone missing lately; that mystery was now solved.

At the far end of the cellar was an altar. Two little black boys waved golden palm fronds at the high priestess of this congregation.

Margaret Trelawny dressed to show off her person, though she would stop traffic in a nun’s habit. Already a tall girl, she towered well over six-and-a-half feet with the famous crown of Queen Tera set on her masses of jet-black hair. The headdress consisted of seven intertwined, jewel-eyed serpents with onyx-inlaid cheekguards.

As a connoisseur, I would venture her frontage — judged by size, firmness and ‘wobble factor’ — finer than Lily Langtry’s… and, after a couple of gins, Lily could crack walnuts between her knockers. To display the goods, Miss Trelawny wore an intricate yet minimal bustier composed of interlinked gold beetles. A transparent skirt gathered in a knot under her bare belly. If tautness of tummy were your prime requirement in womanly form, she’d pass the bounce-a-sixpence-off-it test with flying colours.

A big sparkling ruby was set in a ring on her forefinger. The Jewel of Seven Stars looked like a congealed gobbet of blood. Her eyes had a mad, green-and-red lustre. Her commanding — indeed demanding — beauty was uncommon among the milk-and-water ladies of Kensington.

Miss Trelawny danced, which is to say undulated, in a shimmy which drew further attention — as if attention were required — to her broad hips, serpentine stomach and generous bosom.

Beneath an exotic arrangement, I recognised the tune her three-piece slave band was playing. ‘The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid’. You probably don’t know the title — I had to ask a cocaine-injecting trumpet player from the Alhambra — but it’s sung the world over by dirty-minded little boys. You can hear many, many variations on the rhyme ‘oh, the girls in France/do the hoochy-koochy dance… and the men play druu-u-ums/on the naked ladies’ buu-u-ums,’ et cetera, et cetera.

For the moment, I entertained the possibility that Margaret Trelawny was — as she claimed — wicked Queen Tera reborn. She possessed at least one demonstrable supernatural power. In her presence, I suffered a prominent inconvenience in the trousers. I believe this condition was shared by not a few of the other gentlemen present.

I was drawn through the crowd, as if by magnetic attraction… or an invisible thread knotted about my gentlemen’s parts. I was gripped by tantalising, almost painful desire. I had to concentrate on the real object of my visit — the ruby. Its redness grew large, tinting my whole view. I suspected there was something funny in the incense.

All about, houris were groped by guests and responded with a fair simulation of wild abandon. Divans were set aside for continuance of these activities, several already in use by knots of two or three — or, in one rather dangerous-looking conjunction, five — dedicated, conscience-free revellers.

Some masks had slipped. A prominent social reformer and a tiresomely staunch advocate of female emancipation were sandwiching a slave-boy; the maiden ladies who signed their petitions and wore their banners would probably disapprove. A magistrate known for harsh sentences was bent over a wooden horse, taking a spirited whipping from two Cleopatra-wigged tarts.

Jam jars of sweet, sticky cordial were passed around, suitable for drinking or smearing. I forgot myself and took a swallow of the stuff, which seemed laced with gunpowder.

I had a notion that Margaret Trelawny wouldn’t give up her prize as easily as Bianca Castafiore.

The music rose in frenzied crescendo. The dancing — and other activity — in the room became faster and faster. Someone indeed played drums on the posteriors of unclad maidservants, slapping with more enthusiasm than skill.

I was near the altar-dais now, and the crowd was thicker. A girl with bared teeth and wide eyes tore at my robe, but I discreetly kneed her in the middle and threw her aside. She was pounced on by a provincial mayor who wore his chain of office and nothing else.

Miss Trelawny’s exertions were extraordinary.

My inconvenience throbbed like a hammered thumb.

Then, a gong was struck, resounding throughout the cellar. Everything stopped.

Masks came off, en masse. I made no move to doff mine, but it was gone anyway.

Margaret Trelawny took a scimitar and lashed, precisely, at my head. I was unharmed, but unmasked. No, not quite unharmed. A line across my forehead dribbled blood. I clamped a hand to the wound.

My imperious hostess held a blade to my throat.

‘Balls,’ I said, with feeling.

XIII

I woke in darkness, wearing clothes not my own. Not even clothes, I realised as my senses crawled back. Tight wrappings which smelled of mothballs. I wriggled and found my legs tethered together and my arms bound to my chest. I was bandaged all over! I shifted my shoulders and banged against confining walls.

With a grinding sound, darkness went away. Something heavy shifted and I was looking up at Margaret Trelawny. Next to her stood a fork-bearded cove I didn’t recognise, wearing a steel balaclava. I lay in an Egyptian sarcophagus, trussed like a mummy.

‘Apologies for the “rush job”, Colonel Moran,’ my hostess said. ‘Before wrapping, you should have had your heart, lights and liver removed to be placed in canoptic jars and your brains pulled out through your nostrils. Revival of the arts of Egypt proceeds slower than I would like.’

Why had they wrapped and entombed me, then taken the trouble to reopen the sarcophagus? Miss Trelawny must want something from me before I was buried for the archaeologists of 3,000 years’ hence to exhume and put on display. I swear, the maledictions upon Moriarty’s Crown jewels are a Sunday stroll compared to the curses I’ll lay on those fellows. Beware the wrath of Basher Moran, you unborn tomblooters!

The party had broken up. I hoped not on my account.

I couldn’t get that da-da-daaaah-da-da ‘Streets of Cairo’ whine out of my head. Oh, the girls in France…

‘I’ll be humming it for days,’ I said. ‘Don’t you hate it when you get a tune stuck?’

Margaret sneered, magnificently. She still wore her queenly vestments. This angle afforded me a fine view of those excellent teats. With every breath, metal scarabs seemed to crawl over all that pink poitrine. My bandages stirred, which was all I needed. My hostess was less likely to be flattered by the response than swat the swelling with her scimitar.

She dangled a hand in front of my face. My eyes and mouth were free of bandages.

That bloody jewel loomed like the sun and the moon and — most particularly — the stars. I saw the sparkling flaws, in the shape of the constellation of Ursa Major. I’ve never been able to see the Plough or Bear in it, just seven dots which look like a saucepan with a too-long handle. Now I had cause to wish myself upon some far star, rather than in a Kensington basement at the mercy of this monumental (if decorative) cuckoo.

Maniac Marge took the Queen of Ancient Egypt business seriously. To her, it wasn’t a racket, but a religion. Another lunatic, albeit more tempting… I’ve no idea why anyone would be willing to blow themselves up for Irish Home Rule or get their throat cut for the honour of a tatty Neapolitan statue, but a tumble with the fleshly incarnation of wicked Queen Tera might well be worth small discomfort. Though at this point, that was a distant prospect.

I tried to sit up, but had no joy. You think of mummy wrappings as rotten old things, but new linen bandages are stout stuff.

Then rough hands grabbed handfuls of bandage where my lapels would have been and hauled me half out of the coffin. The angry man beside Miss Trelawny had lost patience. He snarled in my face. He wore iron gauntlets and a tabard with a crusader cross.

‘Calm down, Marshall Alaric,’ said our hostess, both soothing and commanding.

‘He must be put to the Question! The Falcon must be recovered!’ the man demanded fiercely.

I thumped back into my coffin, bumping my head on a stone pillow.

Margaret patted me on the chest. If the ring had a smell, it would have been in my nostrils.

I realised I’d just met Marshall Alaric Molina de Marnac, Grand Master of the Knights of St John. It should have come as no surprise these people knew each other. There were occult, Masonic ties between the Templars and Queen Tera’s orgiastic cult. Rivalries, too, but a lot in common. They would have friendly competitions, like the Oxford — Cambridge boat race or the Army — Navy rugby match but with more sacrificed virgins and obscene oblations. Though — even after an evening in the basement of Trelawny House — it was hard to credit that Margaret could preside over anything more chaotically perverted than the piss-up which follows the Army-Navy brawl.

De Marnac, a foreigner, spat.

‘I won’t tell you where the Falcon is,’ I swore — knowing that, realistically, I’d tell him before he got to the fingers of my right hand. I can stick more pain than most but I’ve tortured enough to know everyone talks in the end.

‘It’s on your Professor’s sideboard, silly,’ Miss Trelawny said. ‘All London knows. Among other trinkets, you also have the Green Eye of the Yellow God and the Jewels of the Madonna of Naples. Once Moriarty took to collecting, word got round.’

Again, I should have known that would happen.

My hostess made a fist and pressed her ring to my forehead.

‘I can’t think what goes on in that head of yours, Colonel,’ she said. ‘Did you really believe you could just wander in here and take the Jewel of Seven Stars? It’s the focus of aetheric forces which have enabled me to endure centuries in darkness and enter this shell to live anew. I was hardly likely to give it up.’

‘You all say that…’

She slapped me, lightly.

‘You are asking yourself why we’re having this conversation. Why are you not screaming in a tomb, using up precious air?’

I did my best to shrug.

‘While we were going through your clothes, an odd item came to light…’

I had French postcards in my wallet, but nothing likely to shock Queen Tera Redivivus. The two-shot pistol holstered in my sock, perhaps?

‘Why was this in your waistcoat lining?’

She held up a shiny black oval. The Borgia Pearl. I remembered Moriarty patting me, and thinking it an odd gesture. Now, I realised he had slipped me one of his Crown jewels. However, I had no idea why…

‘Swapsies?’ I suggested.

Would she have the thing set in another ring? Wearing the Jewel of Seven Stars and the Black Pearl of the Borgias would be asking for double trouble… I’d been collecting cursed items for two days, and what had I got for it? Mummification and the prospect of burial alive.

The Marshall made an iron fist and aimed at my face.

‘Steady on, old man,’ I said, ‘try not to lose your rag.’

Of course, that was calculated to inflame him further. I’d the measure of the Grand Master. Wrath was his presiding sin. He launched a punch. I shifted my head to the side of the sarcophagus. Metalled knuckles rammed the stone pillow. He swore in French and Spanish and bit his bluish beard.

‘You mustn’t let things get on top of you, chummy. Try whistling,’ I suggested.

This time, he put his hand flat on my chest and pressed down. That hurt. Quite a bit. I didn’t consider whistling.

‘You are a puzzle, Colonel,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t suppose you would consider… an arrangement?’

She pouted, prettily. The snakes set off her face.

In disgust, de Marnac left me alone. He had disarranged my bandages and, as I’d hoped, torn through a few. If you loosen one, you loosen ’em all. My sister Augusta knitted me a cardigan for my twelfth birthday which suffered from the same flaw. A tiny dropped stitch and the whole thing unravelled. I made a play of breathing heavily, expanding and contracting my chest inside the bandages. I fancied I’d be able to get my arms loose.

’employment with me offers “benefits” I doubt you get from that dried-up maths tutor,’ Margaret said, trailing fingers over my face. ‘A desirable package is offered.’

Leaving Moriarty’s employ wasn’t as simple as she suggested. And, when working for him, I wasn’t likely to be transformed into an ass simply by a wink and a shimmy. I knew myself well enough to know this would not be the case if I became an attendant to Queen Tera. When there’s a woman in the crime, you always anticipate ‘benefits’ but get dirked in the arras. I speak from sorry experience, to whit: Irene ‘that bitch’ Adler, Mrs Sarah ‘the Black Widow of Lauder’ Stewart, Hagar ‘Thieving Pikey’ Stanley, et cetera, et cetera.

‘The Falcon, the Falcon,’ muttered the Marshall, obsessively. There was something about these objects. You set out to own them and they end up owning you. Tera Trelawny was a ring wearing a woman.

Above, outside, there was a crashing, and a drawn-out scream.

I hoped for Simon Carne leading an army of Moriarty’s hand-picked roughs in a well-armed, brilliantly conceived frontal assault, intent on my rescue. But the quality of the screams suggested otherwise. No matter what disguise Carne wore, he wasn’t that terrifying.

Margaret and de Marnac exchanged anxious looks. I managed to sit up, arms free under the bandages, and wasn’t instantly slapped down.

‘What is that?’ said the Grand Master.

A huge shape blocked the doorway. A huge shape topped with a porkpie hat. A knocked-over lamp underlit a jowly, pig-eyed face which seemed to have melted. Big fists opened and closed.

De Marnac drew a sword.

The Hoxton Creeper tottered into the cellar, eyes fixed on Margaret, but not for the reason most blokes stared at her. In her open palm glistened the Black Pearl.

‘Who are you?’ demanded de Marnac.

The Creeper whistled the ‘Barcarolle’ from Tales of Hoffman. He had a tune in his head, too. As he advanced, he loomed bigger. His shadow grew.

‘Here,’ said Miss Trelawny, ‘Grand Master, you’d better have this.’

She popped the pearl into the back of his tunic and it disappeared. He reached awkwardly for the back of his neck, but couldn’t trap it. He wriggled, as if a bug were burrowing under his armour.

The Creeper wheeled about and stared at the Knight of St John. He raised his arms.

Margaret’s black prizefighter, blood streaming from his broken face, came into the room and laid hold of the Creeper’s shoulder, only to be shrugged off and thrown against the wall.

All the while, I was unpicking my bandages. I rose from the coffin. Bereft of jewels, I was of no interest to anyone.

De Marnac slashed at the Creeper, who blocked with his arm. The blade bit into the giant’s knotted sinew like an axe in wood, then wouldn’t come free. The Creeper got a hold of the Grand Master and twisted him round. The crack of spine snapping was louder than the squeak of scream he managed before the angry lamps went out in his eyes.

Something small, like a marble, rolled from his armour onto the floor.

Miss Trelawny looked at the dropped pearl. It fascinated her as she fascinated me — a nigh-irresistible urge to seize. The Creeper, too, sighted the object of his fixation.

I saw where this was going. And rooted around for the scimitar, which was lying on the altar. I doubted it’d be any more use against the Creeper than the sword he prised out of his arm.

The Creeper bent down and tried to take the Borgia Pearl.

It had not occurred to me, but fingers thick as bananas were a handicap when it came to picking up something the size of a boiled sweet. The Creeper scrabbled, rolling the pearl this way and that, unable to get a grasp.

I had a good two-handed grip on the scimitar. I judged the distance to the door.

The hostess took pity on the monster. She plucked the pearl in her delicate fingers and dropped it into the Creeper’s cupped palm. He peered at it, content for the moment — but also perplexed. He didn’t know what to do now. Then he saw Queen Tera. She stood up, magnificent. Her fluence struck the brute man like a bucketful of ice water. The Creeper’s eyes glowed too, with fresh adoration. Could Margaret cancan? With her long legs and that costume, high kicks would be worth seeing.

Like a queen, Miss Trelawny extended her hand. She snapped her fingers.

Shyly, the Creeper gave away his precious and stood back in worship. Would the transference take? I’d not be surprised if from now on, the giant’s heart beat to follow Queen Tera. If so, I was about to land myself in his bad books.

Margaret Trelawny again made a fist around the Borgia Pearl.

I ran towards her and scythed my blade down on her wrist, neatly lopping off her hand. She shrieked and blood gouted into the Creeper’s face. I snatched up the hand — still shockingly warm — before its grip could relax, and bolted for the stairs.

The giant was temporarily blinded. Miss Trelawny was temporarily distracted. The Grand Master was permanently dead.

I ran through the hallway, naked but for a bandage loincloth, streaking past dazed houris — the gilt had mostly rubbed off — and a sticky law lord. I nearly tripped over a spine-snapped corpse.

Why didn’t people just get out of the Creeper’s way when they had the chance? Miss Trelawny’s cringing staff would have to clear up more mess than usual. Mr Pears’ soap is recommended for getting blood out of your Egyptian altar hangings, by the way.

Still clutching my gruesome prize, I bounded out of Trelawny House. My cab was still waiting. The Creeper hadn’t done away with Chop on his way in.

‘Conduit Street,’ I ordered. ‘Chop-chop, Chop!’

I laughed. Chop-chop, Chop! I’d only needed one chop. In my lap, Margaret Trelawny’s hand opened like a flower. I took the pearl and the ring, and tossed the thing into the gutter for the dogs to fight over. If Queen Tera had all the powers she claimed, her hand might take to crawling after me like a lopsided, strangling spider. I could do without that.

It had been an interesting, eventful day.

XIV

I had a teeth-gnasher of a rage on. Often in the course of our association, I felt an overwhelming urge to box Professor Moriarty’s ears. Or worse. He had taken me into the Firm because — not to put too fine a point on it — I had proven myself more than willing to gamble my skin on any number of occasions, just to feel the iron rise in my blood and cock a snook at death. So, by his lights, I had volunteered to be put repeatedly in harm’s way and shouldn’t complain about it.

However, that little trick with the Borgia Pearl — slipped into my supposedly undetectable secret pocket — was typical high-handedness. Admittedly, things had sorted themselves out in our favour. Equally admittedly, if the Prof had troubled to inform me of the stratagem, I’d have refused to go along with it. All for risk, disinclined to suicide: that’s me.

Deep down, despite his genius, I couldn’t help but think Moriarty threw the pieces up in the air and hoped for the best, then claimed it had come out exactly to plan. It’d have been the same to him if the Creeper had crushed my spine or Maniac Marge had mummified me or the Grand Master had done whatever it is Grand Masters do to those who annoy them. He wasn’t notably upset by the fate of Runty Reg, and the lookout had been with the Firm longer than I.

Still, with a balloon of brandy and a fresh set of clothes, I calmed down and could even feel a pride of achievement. Every item on the shopping list was scored through:

1. The Green Eye of the Yellow God

2. The Black Pearl of the Borgias

3. The Falcon of the Knights of St John

4. The Jewels of the Madonna of Naples

5. The Jewel of Seven Stars

6. The Eye of Balor

Any one of these keepsakes would have been a premier haul, but six within forty-eight hours was a miracle.

The Professor stood in front of the glittering sideboard, hands out as if feeling the warmth of a fire. His head oscillated. Then, he clapped his hands.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No detectable supernatural power. These objects effect no change in temperature or barometric pressure. Miracles or malign mischances do not occur in their vicinity. They are simply trouvées men have arbitrarily decided to value.’

‘I don’t know, Moriarty,’ I said. ‘I’ve been feeling rum all day. I don’t say it’s the curses, but your Crown jewels have something. If enough people pray to the things, maybe they pick up juju the way a blanket gets wet if you empty a bucket of water on it?’

The Professor’s lip curled.

‘Whatever you or I think, plenty have invested so much belief in these prizes they’d kill or die to get ’em back,’ I said. ‘If that’s not supernatural, I don’t know what is.’

‘Foolishness, and a distraction,’ he said.

I conceded, with a shrug, he might be right. The wallahs who were after these pretties grew stupider as they neared their objects of desire. Even the Creeper, who was already an imbecile. At a glimpse of the sparklers, they lost habits of self-preservation. A fanatic flame burned in the lot of ’em. You could see it in their eyes.

‘One thing puzzles me yet,’ I admitted.

Moriarty raised a hawkish eyebrow, inviting the question.

‘What has this collection got to do with saving Mad Carew’s worthless hide? The heathen priests are still after him. After us, too, since we’ve got their Green Eye. Now, we’ve also to worry about the Creeper, the Templars, the Fenians, the Camorra and the Ancient Egyptian mob. We’re more cursed now than when we started and Carew’s no better off.’

Using a secret spyglass — which meant not presenting a tempting silhouette in the front window — Moriarty had kept up with the comings and goings in Conduit Street. Mostly comings.

We were besieged.

The gelato stand was open, well after the usual hours and in contravention of street trading laws. Don Rafaele Corbucci was at his post, though he’d dropped the tutsi-frutsi call. A gang of scene-shifters gathered around, including dark-eyed Malilella of the stiletto. They all stared up at the building, licking non-poisonous ice cream cornets.

The Pillars of Hercules had fallen ominously silent, but stout Sons of Erin loitered outside, whittling on cudgels. Among them, I distinguished a tall, better-dressed goon with a bright-green bowler hat and a temperance ribbon. Tyrone Mountmain, with a pocketful of dynamite. Aunt Sophonisiba was there too. No one quaffed from the flask she offered round, disproving the old saw that an Irishman will drink anything if it’s free.

The armoured monks held their corner. Bereft of a Grand Master, they still had vows to uphold. Moriarty said a new Grand Master would be elected within hours. The Knights of St John openly held swords and crossbows. We’d already had a bolt through the window.

A dark carriage was parked across the street. In it, a veiled woman with an alabaster hand sat alongside a grim giant. Margaret Trelawny and the Creeper remained, at least for the moment, an unlikely item. How had she got the hand so quickly? A few of her cult-followers stood about, fancy dress under their coats. Slaves, I suppose.

As for our original persecutors, the priests of the little yellow god… some of the rubbish heaps stood up on brown legs. A troupe of Nepalese street jugglers put on a poor show. Did they feel crowded by the presence of so many other groups of our enemies?

A pair of constables, on their regular beat, took a look at the assembled factions, about-turned and strolled away rapidly.

‘I suppose we can only die once,’ I said. ‘I’ll fetch out the rifle with telescope sights. I can put half a dozen bastards down before they take cover. Starting with Temperance Ty, I think…’

‘You will do no such thing, Moran.’

The Professor had something up his sleeve.

The doorbell rang. I adjusted the spyglass to see which fanatic was calling. It was only Alf Bassick, with a large carpet bag, back from Rotherhithe.

I pulled a lever which — by a system of pulleys and electric currents — unlocked our front door. Moriarty had designed the system himself. Wood panelling over sheet steel, our entrance was more impregnable than the vaults of Box Brothers. Even the dynamite boyos would have trouble shifting it.

Bassick didn’t immediately come upstairs.

Moriarty told me to go down and determine the cause of the delay.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw Bassick was stretched out on our hall mat with a Nepalese dagger stuck between his shoulders. If we’d sent Carne on Bassick’s errand, he might have come through it — that fake hump at least protected his back. It was after midnight. The besieging forces were bolder.

I turned Bassick over and ignored his gasped last words — blather about his mother or money or the moon — to get the bag. Whatever Moriarty had sent him for, death was no excuse for failure.

Returning upstairs, I didn’t need to tell the Prof what had happened. I assumed he’d taken it into account in his squiggle charts.

Moriarty opened Bassick’s bag and took out six identical caskets. He lined up the boxes on his desk and flipped each of their lids open. Inside, each container was custom-made to contain a different treasure, with apertures ranging from a bird-shaped hole for the Templar Falcon to a tiny recess for the Borgia Pearl. Every Jewel of the Madonna had a nook. The Professor fit his acquisitions into their boxes and shut the lids.

‘There should be keys,’ he said.

I rooted about in the carpet bag and found a ring of six keys. Moriarty took a single key and locked all the boxes with it. He shuffled the boxes around on the table.

‘Moran, pick any two of these up.’

They weighed the same.

‘Shake them.’

They rattled the same.

‘In addition to their respective jewels, each box has a cavity holding loose weights,’ the Professor explained. ‘Any would balance a scale exactly with any other. They sound alike. They look alike. Tell me, Moran, could an object-worshipper differentiate between them?’

‘If they can, they’re sharper pencils than me.’

‘Is it possible some may be supernaturally attuned to the contents? They’ll be able to pick out their own hearts’ desires through magic?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I say not, Moran. I say not.’

I tapped a knuckle on a box. It was not just wood.

‘A steel core, like our front door, Moran,’ Moriarty said. ‘The boxes will take considerable breaking.’

I still didn’t know what he was up to.

He put the boxes back in the carpet bag. And pulled on his ulster and tall hat. He regarded himself slyly in the mirror, checking his appearance but also catching his own clever eye. Odd that someone so unprepossessing should be a monster of vanity, but life is full of surprises.

‘We shall go outside… and surrender our collection. But, remember, only one box to each customer.’

‘What’s to stop us being killed six ways as soon as we open the door?’

‘Confidence, Moran. Confidence.’

Terrifyingly, that made sense. I stiffened, distributed three pistols about my person, and prepared to put on an almighty front.

XV

Professor Moriarty opened wide our front door and held up his right hand.

It seemed everyone was too astonished to kill him.

He walked down our front steps, casual if a little too pleased with himself. I followed, my thumb-cocked six-shot Gibbs in one hand, a Holland & Holland fowling piece tucked under my other arm. If this was where I died, I’d take a bag of the heathen down with me.

Moriarty signalled for the interested parties to advance. When they moved en masse, he shook his head and held up his forefinger. Only one of each faction was to come forward. There was snarling and spitting, but terms were accepted.

Tyrone Mountmain, chewing a lit cigar. That meant he had dynamite sticks about him, with short fuses.

Don Rafaele Corbucci held back, and sent my old girlfriend. Malilella spat at my boots and I noticed inappropriately that she was damned attractive. Shame she was a bloody Catholic.

A Templar Knight unknown to me crossed himself and advanced.

Margaret Trelawny let the Hoxton Creeper help her down from her carriage. She was more modestly dressed than on the occasion of our last meeting, but her veil was pinned to the snaky headdress. She looked no fonder of me than the stiletto sister.

They stood on the pavement, wary of each other, warier of us.

‘One more, I think,’ Moriarty said.

A heap of rags by the rubbish bins stirred. A brown, lean beggar crept forth. He had a shaved head and a green dot in the centre of his forehead. The high priest of the little yellow god.

‘You each wish something which is in our possession,’ Moriarty said.

Mountmain swore and his cigar-end glowed. Malilella flicked out her favourite blade. Margaret Trelawny flipped back her veil with her alabaster hand — she must have been practising — and glared hatred.

‘I intend to make full restitution…’

‘Ye’ll still die ye turncoat bastard,’ Mountmain declared.

‘That may be. I do not ask payment for the items you believe you have a right to. Nothing but a few moments’ truce, so Moran and I might return to our rooms and set our affairs in order. After that, we shall be at your disposal.’

I held up the sack like Father Christmas. The boxes rattled.

Six sets of eyes lit up. I wondered again if the fanatics could sense which box held which desired, accursed object.

Don Rafaele gave the nod, accepting terms, binding the others to his decision. That made him the biggest crook in the assembled masses, if only the second biggest on the street.

‘Moran, do the honours of restitution.’

I was at sea. How was I to know which box went to which customer?

‘Do you await a telegram from the Queen, perchance?’ Moriarty said.

He was enjoying himself immensely. I wanted to kill him as badly as anyone else.

Without fuss, I took out a box.

‘Ladies first,’ I said, and shoved it at Margaret Trelawny. She tried to take it with the hand whose fingers wouldn’t close and it nearly fell, but then caught it with her remaining hand and clutched it to her ample chest.

‘And you, big fellah,’ I said, delivering a box to the Creeper. He considered it as an ape might consider a carriage clock.

‘Malilella, grazie.’ Giving her a prize.

‘The gentleman from Nepal,’ I addressed the little brown priest.

‘Worthy Knight,’ I said to the Templar.

‘And you, Tyrone. Fresh from the pot at the end of the rainbow.’

Mountmain took his box.

Recipients examined their gifts and thought about trying to get into them. Suspecting trickery, not unreasonably, Tyrone handed his box to a follower and told him to open it with a cudgel.

Moriarty took a step backwards. I did too.

Eyes were on us again. I shot out a streetlamp as a diversion, and we whipped inside. The door slammed shut. A Templar sword thudded against it, splitting wood and scratching steel.

From the hall, we heard the commotion outside.

We went back upstairs and took turns with the spyglass. The Creeper had the wood off his box, but it was still shut. A long-fingered Camorra man worked a set of picklocks. Tyrone’s cudgel man gave his box a good hammering.

‘Let’s make it a little easier,’ said the Professor.

He opened our front window a crack, sure to stay out of the line of fire, and tossed six loose keys into the street.

The brown priest was first to pick one up. And first to be disappointed. He was the new owner of the Black Pearl of the Borgias.

The Creeper threw his own box into the gutter and strode towards the little man, arms outstretched. Nepalese jugglers got in the giant’s way, but were tossed aside, twisted into shapes fatal even to a full-fledged fakir. Before the giant could get a grip on the pearl-clutching priest, another — larger — bundle of rags stirred. Something the acromegalic Neanderthal’s own size, red-eyed and white-furred, barrelled across the road to protect its master. The Creeper and the mi-go locked arms in a wrestler’s grip, then rolled out of sight.

Other keys were found. Other discoveries made.

The knight was rewarded. He opened his box and found what he wanted. The Falcon was at last restored to the Order of St John! He was shot by a blind-drunk Irishman anyway, setting off a Fenian — Templar scrap. Cudgels against swords wasn’t an equal match, but when dynamite came into it, armour didn’t hold up. Tyrone tossed fizzing sticks at the monks, who were hampered by heavy armour and confining robes.

The Camorra pitched in with knives and garrottes. Mountmain and Don Rafaele tried to throttle each other over a prize neither of them wanted: the Jewel of Seven Stars. Malilella and Margaret Trelawny circled each other, stiletto against scimitar. Maniac Marge had surprising left-handed dexterity with the blade, but shocked the Camorrista by lashing her across the face with her new, unyielding hand. Malilella responded with unkind words in Italian and a series of stabs which struck sparks off Tera’s serpent crown.

Blood ran in the gutters. It did my heart good. My nerves were back. We settled in to enjoy the show.

There were alarums and a great deal of smoke. A few fires started. Even the police would have to show up soon.

The Templars, who initially got the worst of it, threw over the handcart from which they had been soliciting alms to reveal one of Mr Gatling’s mechanical guns. Evidently, the mediaeval order kept up with the times. Fire raked the pavement, throwing up chips of London stone. Irishmen, faux Egyptians, Neapolitans and Nepalese scattered. Dead bodies jittered back into a semblance of life as bullets tore into them.

Half of me wanted to be out in the street, stabbing and shooting and scything with the rest. A more cautious urge, carefully cultivated, was that I should stay well out of this. Still, it was a jolly show!

The barrel organ of death chattered for a long minute, until an asp-venom dart from an Egyptian blowpipe paralysed the gunner. Then, things quieted a little.

The fight wasn’t out of everyone, but few were in a condition to continue.

Moriarty took the speaking tube and ordered Mrs Halifax to bring him his nightly cocoa.

I was not surprised he could sleep.

This time, he really had thrown all the pieces up in the air just to see where they’d come down.

XVI

Most of the rest of it was in the newspapers. I can’t give you a thrilling first-hand account because I wasn’t there. However, here’s a rundown of the outrages.

In the next two days, fifty-seven people were murdered. Irish, blacks, knights, innocent parties, Nepalese itinerants, well-regarded members of society with Masonic connections, scene-shifters, fences, fortune-hunters, policemen, a white hunter who set out to bag the mi-go for the Horniman Museum, and so on. Two members of the Castafiore clique fought a duel with antique pistols, and blew each other’s chests out — tricky shooting with unreliable weapons, considered a draw. Some smiled the Italian smile. Not a few displayed the Killarney Cudgel Cavity. Others expired from wounds not associated with any particular region.

The ice cream parlour on Old Compton Street was destroyed by a supposed act of God. Don Rafaele returned to Naples, accompanied by Malilella — they came out of the wars with the best loot, though they didn’t get back the Jewels of the Madonna. These days, the virgin of Naples is paraded about with the Jewel of Seven Stars and the Eye of Balor. An influx of Irish and Anglo-Egyptian tourists might not let that situation continue. Corbucci later got himself poisoned, to nobody’s surprise. [42]

The Hoxton Creeper had vitriol dashed at his chest. He was seen falling into the Thames, clutching the Templar Falcon. I knew better than to think him dead.

With the Falcon lost, reputedly in the mud with the Agra treasure, the party of the late Grand Master Alaric Molina de Marnac had to gouge out their own eyes and flagellate for six days and six nights to atone. Rumours persist that the blackbird has turned up in Russia or China and the search goes on. There may be more than one flapping about on the market. The Templars aren’t the only interested party. Fat Kaspar, who had never heard of the rara avis before the Professor mentioned it, was struck queer by an obsession and took off after the statue. He didn’t believe it was in the river. Another promising career ruined. [43]

Margaret Trelawny’s house was blown up, supposedly due to a gas leak. Found barely alive in the ruins, she’s in hospital now, mummified in bandages and speaking a tongue not heard on the Earthly plane in thousands of years. The membership list of Queen Tera’s Circle happened to be delivered to the Pall Mall Gazette with scandalous photographs. Resignations, retirements, suicides and scandal ensued.

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

XVII

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

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

The street was full of trash.

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

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

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

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

‘Just the Green Eye?’

‘We’ll have the Black Pearl, too.’

‘We’d better hope the Creeper drowned.’

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

Moriarty was pleased with his handiwork.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it over? Am I safe?’

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

Carew laughed, still mad — but happy, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We watched him leave.

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

‘True.’

‘So you lied to him?’

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

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

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

XVIII

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

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

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

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

And the yellow god forever gazes down.