Free Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles by Kim Newman Page B

gone to a run-of-the-mill safe-breaker like that cricket-playing fathead [5] , the caper would have run to after-midnight window-breakage and a spot of brace-and-bit boring, with perhaps a cosh to Colonel Sapt’s dome as an added extra.
    Moriarty scorned such methods as too obvious and not sufficiently destructive.
    First, he wrote to the Westminster Gazette, which carried his angry letter in full. He harped on about the sufferings of the slum-dwellers of Strelsauer Altstadt – some of which weren’t even made up, which is where the clever part came in – and labelled Ruritania ‘the secret shame of Europe’. More correspondence appeared, not all from the Professor, chiming in with fresh tales of horrors carried on under the absolute monarchy of the Elphbergs. A long-nosed clergyman and an addle-pated countess formed a committee of busybodies to mount a solemn vigil in Boscobel Place. The protest was swollen by less dignified malcontents – Ruritanian dissenters in exile, louts with nothing better to do, crooks in Moriarty’s employ.
    Hired ranters stirred passers-by against the vile Ruritanian practice (invented by the Professor) of cleaning the huge cannons of Zenda Castle by shoving little orphan girls into the barrels and prodding them with sticks until their wriggling wiped out the bore. A few of the Conduit Street Comanche – that tribe of junior beggars, whores, pickpockets and garrotters whose loyalty the Professor had bought – got themselves up as Zenda Cannon Girls, with soot on their faces and skirts, and threw dung at anyone who so much as dared step outside the Embassy.
    After typical foreign bleating and whining, Scotland Yard sent two constables to Boscobel Place to rap truncheons against the railings and tell the crowd to move along quietly. To the Comanche, a bobby’s helmet might as well have a target painted on it. And horse dung is easily come by on the streets of London.
    So, within three days, there was the makings of a nice pitched battle outside the Embassy. Moriarty and I took the trouble to stroll by every now and then, to see how the pot was boiling.
    Hawk-eyed, the Professor spotted a face peering from a downstairs window.
    ‘That’s Sapt,’ he said.
    ‘I could pot him from here,’ I volunteered. ‘I’ve a revolver in my pocket. It’d be a dicey shot, but I could make it.’
    Moriarty’s head wavered. He was calculating odds.
    ‘He would only be replaced. We know who Sapt is. Another secret police chief might not be such a public figure.’
    My right hand was itching and I had a thrill in my water.
    I had a notion to haul out and blast away, just for sport and hang the scheme. There were enough bearded anarchists about to take the blame. Sometimes an idea takes your fancy, and there’s nothing to do but give in.
    Moriarty’s bony hand was on my wrist, squeezing. Hard.
    His eyes shone. Cobra eyes.
    ‘That would be a mistake, Moran.’
    My wrist hurt. A lot. The Professor knew where to squeeze. He could snap bones with what seemed like a pinch. He let me have my hand back.
    Moriarty rarely smiled, and then usually to terrify some poor victim. The first time I heard him laugh, I thought he had been struck by deadly poison and the stutter escaping through his locked jaws was a death rattle. That day’s Times report from Ruritania solicited from him an unprecedented fit of shoulder-shaking giggles. He wound his fingers together like the claws of a praying mantis.
    The prompt for this hilarity was Black Michael’s vow to free the Zenda Cannon Girls.
    ‘Let us wish him luck in finding them,’ the Professor said. ‘How delicious that the duke should be our staunch ally in this enterprise. Then again, Queen Victoria has also expressed sympathy for our imaginary orphans.’
    Flashes came from the Embassy. My hand was on my revolver.
    ‘More photographs,’ the Professor said. ‘Colonel Sapt’s hobby.’
    Sapt’s face was gone, but a box-and-lens affair was pressed against the