Lassiter nodded. He didn’t see how that helped.
‘Stop thinking of Jane and Rache as your family,’ I said. ‘Start thinking of them as hostages.’
If he didn’t take umbrage and shoot me, we might have a chance.
VIII
‘We’re coming out,’ I announced. ‘Hold your fire.’
Rache giggled. I held the baggage round the waist, gun in her ear, and stood in the doorway.
To the girl, it was a game. She had Missy Surprise hugged to her chest.
Lassiter and Jane were more serious, but desperate enough to try.
They had objected that the Danites would never believe their man would harm his beloved wife and daughter. I told them to stop thinking like their upright, moral, tiresome selves and put themselves in the mind-skins of devious, murderous, greedy blighters. Of course they’d believe it — they’d do the same thing with their own wives or daughters. Unspoken but obvious was that I would too.
Indeed, here I was — ready to spread a pretty little idiot’s brains on the road.
It’d be a shame, but I’ve done worse things.
I took a step out into the garden. No one killed me, so I took another step down the path.
Lassiter and Jane came after me, backwards. The Danite perched on the roof wouldn’t have a shot that didn’t go through the woman.
Hooded men came out of the shadows. Five of them, carrying guns. All their weaponry was kitted out oddly. The barrels were as long again as they ought to be, and swelled into thick, ceramic Swiss-roll shapes. Silencers. I’d heard of the things, but never seen them. Cut down the accuracy, I gathered. The cat couldn’t hear you firing, but you’d probably miss. I’d rather use one of Moriarty’s airguns than a ridiculous contraption like that.
‘Parley,’ I said.
The leader of the band nodded, silly hood-point flopping.
The funny thing was that the hood was useless as disguise. Most masks are. You remember faces first of all, but people are a lot more than their eyes and noses — hands and legs and stomachs and the way they stand or hold a gun or light a cigar.
I was facing Elder Enoch J. Drebber.
I assumed our agreement was voided.
‘You don’t want these lovely ladies harmed,’ I said.
‘I only need one,’ Drebber responded, raising his gun.
At this range, he could plug Rache in the breast and the shot would plough through her and me, killing us both.
‘Rache not like mans,’ she said. ‘Rache poo on you!’
Drebber’s eyes widened in his hood-holes. Rache held up Missy Surprise, and angled the rag-doll, her fingers working the hard metal inside the soft toy.
Lassiter’s second gun went off and Missy Surprise’s head flew apart.
The Danite on Drebber’s right fell dead.
‘You’re next,’ I told Drebber.
I was sure she’d been aiming at him in the first place, but he wasn’t to know that.
The man on the roof decided it was time to take his shot. His finger had probably been itching all evening. I’ve had trouble with fools like that on safari, so keen on not coming home without having cleaned the barrel, they need to fire an elephant gun at the regimental water bearer just so they could say they’ve killed something.
Lassiter was quicker than a Bhishti, and not struggling with a ridiculously overweighted yard-and-a-half of rifle.
The keen rifleman tumbled dead into the flowery bower around the front door.
Seven, minus three. Four.
‘Drop the ironmongery, Elder,’ I ordered.
Rache blew a loud raspberry.
Drebber was shaking. He nodded, and guns fell onto the road.
‘All of them,’ I said.
Hands went to belts and inside pockets and boots and special compartments and a variety of hold-out single-shots and throwing knives rattled down as well.
‘Now, take your dead folks and scarper.’
The four surviving Danites did as they were told. The fellow in the bower was a sixteen-stone lump of his many wives’ cooking and it took two to lift him.
They had a carriage down the road, and it trundled off.
Not a bad night’s work, I thought. Providing it was over.
Rache was dancing around, and I thought it a good idea to relieve Missy Surprise of her.45 calibre insides. I gave the doll back and the girl loved it none the less for not having a head.
Jane was looking at me with something like rapt gratitude. Usually a good moment to make a proposition. I doubted my currency with Jim Lassiter stood as high as that.
‘Colonel Arbuthnot, what can we ever do to repay you?’
‘You can die,’ said a voice I recognised. ‘Yes, die.’
IX
I was fuming.
Moriarty didn’t deign to explain, but I had caught up on it.
Of course, he knew the Danites would try to save the fee and go for the kills on their own.
Of course, he had mentioned the Laurence address deliberately, to prompt fast action.
Of course, he had followed me and watched my travails all evening long, not intervening until the danger was over.
Of course, he had found a way to profit.
He strolled up the street, head bobbing. He was dressed all in black, for the night-time. He also had a carriage parked nearby, with Chop, his Chinese coachman, perched up on the box. He enquired solicitously after the neighbour, who was still making a performance of being slightly shot. Somehow, the man got the notion he had been saved by my intervention from a conspiracy of high-ranking Masons who wanted him dead over some imagined slight. It would be a risky proposition to complain officially about such well-connected villains since they owned the police. He bustled inside and drew his curtains, hoping to hide from inescapable doom under his coverlets.
Then Moriarty applied himself to the murders.
I was not privy to the arrangements the Professor made with Lassiter and Jane. I had to be in the still-smoky parlour, while Rache — excited to be up long past her bedtime — banged at the gutshot piano while singing more verses of her butterfly song.
At the conclusion of negotiations, Moriarty was proud owner, through hard-to-trace holding companies, of the Surprise Valley Gold Mine. Amusingly, he was now a major employer in Amber Springs, Utah.
Jim Lassiter/Jonathan Laurence, Jane Withersteen/Helen Laurence and Little Fay Larkin/Rachel Laurence were dead, burned to crackling in the smoking ruins of The Laurels, Streatham Hill Road. It was the gas mains, apparently. And the neighbours had some stories to tell.
What amazed me most was that the Professor had the corpses ready. Chop and I had to wrestle them into beds before the fatal match was struck. I suspected three strangers of the right ages had been ‘burked’, but Moriarty assured Jane the substitutes were ‘natural causes’ paupers rescued from anatomists’ tables. She believed him, and that’s what counts with women like her.
He had a satchel full of documents: passports, birth certificates, twenty-year-old letters, used steamer tickets, bank books, even photographs. If the Lassiter/Laurences wanted to assume other identities, they should have come to him in the first place — when it would have cost less than a gold mine. He let Mr and Mrs Ronald Lembo of Ottowa keep a private fortune of, amusingly enough, £205,000, deposited at Coutts. Not unlimited wealth, but most people should be able to live comfortably on the interest. I’d run through it inside a week.
Jane said the Professor was a wonderful man, but Lassiter knew better. He went along, but knew he’d been bushwhacked. I now think Moriarty even contrived for Drebber to come across the Laurences in the first place. For him, a fugitive in possession of a fabulous gold mine is someone who needs their exile life turned upside down.