Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (49 page)

Raggedly, the company sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. To me.

I was less surprised the time I spotted the Bishop of Bath and Wells using the kink-wrist Mississippi shuffle and dealing from the bottom of the deck.

‘Happy birthday, Colonel Basher,’ Mrs H. said. ‘And many more of ’em.’

I was less surprised the time the Pirate King of the Lepers turned out to be my old Eton whipping boy Porky Sourbright, duffer of the second eleven.

The Madame passed the cake off to Two-Ton Tessie – not someone I’d have trusted it with – and lurched up to me. Harriet Halifax administered a ginny kiss which left powder on my cheeks and lip-rouge in my moustache. She still had the eight-inch tongue that made her name in her Stepney youth.

I was less surprised the time the Burmese Python Lady turned out to be a bloke.

In the ten years – god, ten years! – I’d been with the Firm, Professor Moriarty had given no indication he was even aware I had a birthday, let alone knew when it was (it’s in
Who’s Who,
of course). Since being fleeced of my birthday money by Rosie at fifteen, I’d not made much of the day myself. I bagged a white tiger on my thirty-fifth birthday after all the bearers had fled. Captain Jellinek served nicely as tethered kid, having hobbled himself by twisting his ankle. I personally skinned my cat, thinking a white winter coverlet would be my fine present to myself. That fur went missing, stolen by dirty natives, and Jammy Jelly died without settling his gambling debts, so the day was a curate’s egg. The look in the tiger’s eyes, though, as she raised her head with Jellinek’s heart in her jaws and saw me sighting on her... that was an exquisite moment. Not a day goes by that I don’t think at least once of those magnificent tiger eyes, the ropes of blood dangling from her maw, that contemptuous snarl of kill-me-if-you-must-but-you’ll-never-come-close-to-knowing-what-I-am
^[7]
. If I were back in school again, perish the thought, that would be my ‘Most Memorable Birthday’ essay topic. Otherwise, while I was out of the country, Augusta and Christabelle – the blessed unmarriageable – annually dispatched knitted socks or scarves to my postings. I’d neglected to inform them of my London address. Really, I had meant to dash off a postcard, but just hadn’t got round to it... for ten years. It had been a busy decade, I supposed, and it was now a trifle late to tell my sisters I’d returned to Merrie Olde England. I imagined I’d worn out my heroes’ welcome at their rented hearth, if I’d ever have had one.

Somehow, even I had forgotten my birthday.

‘Blow them out, blow them out,’ chanted the girls and Purbright. If he kissed me, I’d knock his bobby’s helmet off.

I puffed and extinguished all but three of the candles. Mrs Halifax pretended I’d managed the clean sweep and earned my wish. She pinched them out while the Ranee of Ranchipur distracted me with a peck on the cheek.

Purbright turned up the gaslight again. I winced at the details which sprang up when the room was properly lit. There were mirrors.

‘Fifty years old,’ Mrs Halifax said, as if commiserating with a sufferer from a deadly disease. ‘It comes to us all, or at least all of us as is fortunate not to get killed off otherwise...’

Fifty! At that age, old Sir Augustus – for whom I was now a veritable twin – died of apoplexy. His once-iron constitution was weakened by the lingering effects of the brain fever which cut short his appointment as Minister to Persia in the forties – my first spoken language was Fārsi, have I ever mentioned that? But in the end a towering rage did for pater. He was set off by something snide Lord Palmerston’s undersecretary said when Prime Minister Pam was too busy dealing with Gladstone’s latest resignation to bother with a petition from a diplomatic corps warhorse who felt he should have been made ambassador to somewhere more important and less flyblown than Paraguay. Sir Augustus had been in a bate for years, probably his whole life – certainly, I can only remember him in states of dudgeon ranging from high to stratospheric – and his lid was forever on the point of boiling over. He was red in the face and steaming from the ears when he booted me out of the family home after I was sent down from Oxford for boxing a bursar’s ears and throwing the oik through a leaded Elizabethan window. He threw a threepenny bit in my eye and said it was the last coin I’d ever get from him. On the day of his funeral, the 19th of October 1864, I lost seventeen quid at Ascot, got drunk on Scotch whisky I couldn’t pay for and was jugged for the night on a drunk and disorderly. In Windsor clink, I roomed with Prince Stanley, a gypsy who later taught me how to thieve like a champion but took a knife to my face when he found I’d tupped his sister from behind. I first let my moustache grow to cover the scar Prince gave me; that, I realised now, was what had begun my slow transformation into a double for my father.

The convention is that drowning makes your life flash past your eyes... now, at this surprise party, my life flashing past my eyes made me feel as if I were drowning. Blowing out candles had taken more out of me than it should. I lit a Joy’s cigarette. No Sullivans in my case – they’re for ponces, poofs and parvenus. I filled my lungs with smoke, which ought to have made me feel better, but didn’t
^[8]
.

So, fifty years and still alive. Half a century, not out – though I did feel knocked for a six. Three-quarters of the lads I was at school with were bones on battlefields, rotten in fever pits or stuffed under marble in Kingstead. Most of those who were alive had white hair, if they’d kept it... false teeth... and grandchildren. I suppose I have grandchildren. If you run into a scamp in Kathmandu or Amritsar or Zula who looks a quarter like me, a quarter like some dusky tart and a half like an unknown personage, then kick his or her arse before he or she robs you or rooks you. The Basher blood will run true.

Almost as an afterthought, I did the sums. Born 1840. Mrs H. was wrong. I was past fifty-one. F--k me for a French tart, that was older than Old Sir Augustus got to be!

The cake was sawed into chunks. Moriarty didn’t trouble to conceal his impatience with this social occasion. It was my birthday, but Mrs Halifax followed the chain of command and offered the Prof a slice of cake first. Brusquely, he turned it down. The attentions of the girls who were there – Fifi was ‘busy,’ with some damned subaltern due to ship out for parts East in the morning who wanted to be up all night before departure – were welcome, but palled as quickly as the cake. Corks popped – I didn’t think to scrabble in the corners for them, and check for hypodermic needle punctures – and champagne was poured. The fizz was passed around. I couldn’t taste mine.

I looked at Sophy, my most promising recent acquaintance. She avoided my gaze. I fancied that passing this milestone made me of less interest to her in my cranky old age than I might have been in my roaring forties. I watched her drink champagne and talk with Lotus Lei. The girls warmed to their subject, trading the whereabouts of spots in a man’s body where a long needle or a stiletto can slide in unnoticed then produce the most excruciating pain.

As a birthday treat, I wondered if I could ask for that bloody subaltern to be hauled up here in his drawers, then turned over to the Greek and the Celestial as a sort of dressmaker’s dummy. They could stick needles into his balls for an hour or two. After that, I might relax by punching him in the face until it looked like meat. Then, on the morrow, it might be amusing if the young terrier’s cronies came to see him aboard the ship, which was supposed to bear him off to the Empire to make his name and fortune, and he didn’t make an appearance until the anchor was pulled up with him tied to it upside down.

‘Moran, get to it and open that, would you? Before we all die of old age.’

Moriarty reminded me of the parcel. His birthday present to me, I realised.

I had my penknife to the string before it occurred to me there might be a trick. It would be just like the Prof to test out some new explosive device – a bomb, sent through the mail! – on whoever happened to be handy, i.e. me. That would make way for Sophy the Knives to take my berth.

There was a bit of a hush, and folks – chewing their cake like cows chew the cud – gathered around to see what I found inside the wrapping paper.

It was a locked wooden case. Varnished cherrywood. Moriarty handed me a key. The custom-made lock had a left-hand turn – you’d be surprised how many people don’t even try to twist the key the ‘wrong’ way before giving up – and lifted the lid. Nestled in velvet recesses were the components of a device which distantly resembled a gun. Barrel and breech were conventional, but the stock was swollen to accommodate a rubber lung. Also included were a pump-handle and some lengths of rubber tube.

Sophy was interested, but it was too manly a contraption to enthral the other girls. They drifted away. A bell tinkled, and Mrs Halifax sent Polly and the Ranee to take care of gentlemen callers. Party or no, there was a business to run.

‘I had Von Herder make this,’ Moriarty explained. ‘It is an air rifle.’

‘I know, Moriarty,’ I said. ‘The shadow man on the
Kallinikos
had a toy pop-pistol like it.’

‘That was a Straubenzee, an inferior piece. For precision, the Von Herder will match your Gibbs, Moran. It is silent, has no recoil and fires revolver shells. Imagine... a man falls dead with a soft-nosed pistol ball in his head. He can’t have killed himself, for he has no gun in his hand. He is alone in a room or in an open space. No one is within pistol range. How can this be? The murderer is half a mile away, in a place of concealment. Who then shall take the blame? What a puzzle that will be, Moran. A challenge to the scientific detective, I should say.’

Of course, it would be me up a tree pumping like a loon to get the thing ready for a second shot. The Von Herder was for someone reasonably sure he’d shoot true the first time. Fair enough, I’m known for clean kills. I’ve almost always brought down the cat or the elephant or the barrister with a clean shot. But there are always
circumstances.
At long range, the wind plays tricks. Too many animals have a habit of resting still long enough for you to line up sights, then making sudden movements for no good reason except to avoid being shot in the head.

I assembled the air rifle, which fit together as neatly as a child’s model ship. On another birthday I recollected – my ninth or tenth – I was given a model ship, though I’d asked for a real gun. In a pet, I launched the ship in the ornamental ponds of the
khanum’s
palace at Mazandaran, and bombarded it with pebbles until it sank with all hands. I thought I was alone in the courtyard, but something made me turn round and I saw a raised trapdoor which had been concealed in a mosaic. A ghost poked his skull face up through it. Now, I realise it was just a white man with no nose and lips, but then I was convinced it was a genuine spook. Even at that age, I knew terrible deeds were done beneath the palace. It was then, with those fried-egg eyes staring and the exposed teeth snarling, I realised a curious thing about myself: I was brave. The ghost did not frighten me. I was excited, yet calm. Annoyed, but purposeful. Time slowed and I was its master. I still had some pebbles, and pitched one at the apparition, plonking him straight on the bony bonce. The trapdoor dropped shut and that was the last of my ghost
^[9]
. The women of the palace said no such spirit walked here, and Mama told me to shut up about it – though Augusta and Christabelle were agog for details, the more hair-raising the better – lest our quixotic hostess be offended and urge her suggestible son to trade agreements with the wicked Tsar instead of our good Queen.

All these birthdays on, it was the model ship again. I still didn’t have
a real gun,
no matter how deadly this puff-rifle might be. Moriarty missed the point. The
bang
!
Herons startled from the reeds! The echo, resounding in my ears! The animal keeling over, dropped and dead before the sound has died down. The pull of the bolt and the
ting of
the ejected cartridge case! All part of the
moment
of a perfect shot. Lost with the
limp phut
of this toy. A telescope sight was also included in the box. I looked through it, sighting on Moriarty’s globe. Before using the air rifle, I’d want to fire it in. I had confidence in Von Herder’s sensitive fingers when it came to mechanical parts, but knew better than to trust a blind engineer with optical jiggery-pokery, even if he did get his lenses ground in Venice.

I held the assembled airgun – it was light – and got the feel of it. It would do, I suppose. It would have its bag. Tradesmen and club bores and Australians and rats and detectives. Not tigers. Not wolves. Not sporting men. Not even natives. This was a tool for a job. No pleasure in it at all, really.

The company looked at me. Mrs Halifax said, ‘Aren’t you going to thank the Professor?’

Moriarty looked sour and turned away.

Something was called for, something needed to be said. No words came.

‘I shall be in with my wasps,’ he announced, and abandoned the party for his private study, the windowless room.

The champagne ran out, but there was beer and gin and Scotch. Purbright got squiffy and attempted to sing ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’ in imitation of Marie Lloyd. Two-Ton Tessie, a fervent admirer of Miss Lloyd, sat on him to shut him up.

I disassembled my present and fit the parts back into the case. Sophy Kratides cast a sceptical eye over it.

‘I prefer knife. For to get up close. To see eyes,’ she said.

Those tiger eyes came back to me. I thought of telling Sophy about it. I had never mentioned how that moment stayed with me to anyone. There had never been anyone to whom I
could
mention it. I didn’t. It might have made me seem, I don’t know,
weak.

‘How old are you, Sophy?’ I asked.

I know, I know... you never ask a lady her age, but it was my party and I had privileges and, lady though she was, Sophy Kratides was
foreign
and they have other standards.