Then Dan’l noticed there was one body missing from the pile of human and animal remains in the corner.
‘Where’s Saul?’ he asked.
‘What, eh, what?’ Stoke said.
We left the dining room.
In the foyer, we saw Saul — reddled and torn from head to toe — on the stairs, supporting himself on a banister, trying to work his wrecked mouth.
There were six wolves. Only four bagged.
When he saw us, Saul’s remaining eye shone with rage. He uttered strange, angry sounds.
Moriarty nodded polite acknowledgement to the bloodied heir of Sir Pagan and Red Shuck. We no longer had business with him.
Behind us, the dining-room doors opened again. Stoke charged out, waving Gertie.
‘There you are, you c--sucker!’ Stoke shouted at Saul. ‘Prepare for a complete skull-f--ing!’
Saul managed a shrill screech. Two red wolves, larger than their slain comrades, charged down the stairs towards the Master of Trantridge. Their eyes shone, as if with nightshade drops.
Mod was at the dining-room doors. Dan’l held her back with tender restraint which suggested she’d suffer less at his hands than his employer’s.
Saul sank to his knees, bleeding. His whistle became a rattling sigh. He kept trying to raise his hands. Stoke struck one of the red, snapping beasts with the stick, but the other was on him, forepaws to shoulders, jaws around his face. Gouts of gore sprayed the wallpaper.
Moriarty helped me out of the house and closed the door behind us.
Across the lawn, stepping out from The Chase, was a woman in a long black veil, head hung to one side. I lifted my splinted hand to wave at her, and she darted back into the trees.
From inside the house came a howling.
We walked away from Trantridge Hall, leaving claimants to settle disputes among themselves.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX MALEDICTIONS
I
Professor Moriarty did not readily admit his mistakes. Oh, he made ’em. Some real startlers. You were well advised not to bring up the Tay Bridge Insurance Fiasco in his gloomy presence. Or the Manchester and Provincial Bank Robbery (six months’ brain work to set up, a thousand pounds seed money to pull off: seven shillings and sixpence profit). The Professor was touchy about failures. Indeed, he retained me to keep ’em quiet.
However, one howler he would own to.
He was ruminating upon it that morning, just as the sensational events I’ve decided to call ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ got going. Jolly good title, eh, what? Makes you want to skip ahead to the horrors. But don’t… you won’t fully appreciate the gut-slitting, dynamiting, neck-breaking, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones business without understanding how we got neck-deep in it.
In our Conduit Street rooms, we were doing the books, perhaps the least glamorous aspect of running a criminal empire. Once a mathematics tutor, Moriarty enjoyed balancing ledgers — as much as he could enjoy anything, the sad old sausage — more than robbing an orphanage trust fund or bankrupting a philanthropic society. He opened a leatherbound book and did that side-to-side snakehead thing which I’ve had cause to mention before. Everyone else who met him remarked on it too.
‘I should not have taken Mr Baldwin as a client,’ he declared, tapping a column of red figures. ‘His problem was of minimal interest, yet has caused no little inconvenience.’
The uninteresting, inconvenient Ted Baldwin was a union ‘organiser’ in Pennsylvania coal country. As ever in America, you can’t tell who were the worst crooks: the mine-owning robber barons or the fee-gouging workers’ brotherhood. In our Empire, natives dig dirt, plant tea and fetch and carry for the white man. However, Red Indians don’t take to the lash and the Yanks fought one of the century’s sillier wars over whether imported Africans should act like proper natives.
Nowadays, America employs — which is to say, enslaves — the Irish for such low purposes. A sammy takes only so much field-slog before up and cutting your throat and heading into the bush. Your bog-trotter, on the other hand, grumbles for 700 years, holds rowdy meetings, then decides to get very, very drunk instead of doing anything about it.
On the whole, I prefer natives. They might roast you on a spit, but won’t bore the teats off you by blaming it on Cromwell and William the Third. Yes, I know Moran is an Irish name. So is Moriarty. That comes into it later, too.
Our client Baldwin’s union — the Vermissa Valley Scowrers (don’t ask me what that means or if it’s spelled properly) — were undone by a Pinkerton operative who, when not calling himself John McMurdo, went by the unbelievable name of Birdy Edwards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a disgrace to the profession of Murder for Hire. If you operate in a country where captains of industry and hogs of politics make murder legal so long as it’s a union organiser being murdered, what’s the point, eh? Moriarty never lobbied for laws to make it all right for him to thieve and murder and extort.
Posing as a radical, Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers. As a result, most of the reds wound up shot in their beds or hanged from mine-works, but our man Baldwin was left in the wind at the end of the bloodletting with a carpet bag full of union funds. In his situation, I’d blow the loot on women and cards, but Baldwin was of the genus bastardii vindice.
Just to rub it in, this Birdy flew off to England with Baldwin’s sweetheart. Hot on the trail and under the collar, Baldwin came to London and called on the Firm. A wedge of greenback dollars hired us to locate the Pink, which we did sharpish. Sporting the more plausible incognito of John Douglas, Edwards was sunning himself at Birlstone, a moated manor.
An easy lay! Shin up a tree in the grounds and professionally pot the blighter through the leaded library window as he sits at his desk, perusing La Vie Parisienne. Aim, pull, bang… brains on the wall, ‘Scotland Yard Baffled’, notice in The Times, full fee remitted, thank you very much, pleasure to do business with you!
But, no, the idiot client got all het up and charged off to Birlstone to do the deed himself. Upshot: one fool face blown through the back of one fool head. Yes, sometimes they have guns too. A careful murderer is mindful of the risk inherent in 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!