by Kim Newman
Moriarty continued to talk at her, head bobbing as usual. ‘Do you own a black dress and veil? You are to be a widow this afternoon. If you do not have such items in your wardrobe, Mrs Halifax will provide. You will be furnished with a wedding ring, photographs of your late husband, and keepsakes of your two children – who were lost in a boating accident on the Serpentine. Since I don’t need to remember them but you do, you may choose their names. Your husband, Benjamin Thoroughgood, was English, so I suggest you do not choose Greek names.’
‘Will and Harry,’ she said.
Moriarty paused in his oscillation, elevating an eyebrow. He picked up the reference. Told you he memorised crimes from all over the world.
‘Very apt. My condolences on your loss, Mrs Thoroughgood. Colonel Moran and I will accompany you to Kingstead Cemetery this afternoon for the funerals. I suggest you put something in your eyes. You will have been crying for days.’
Sophy set down her teacup, sat up straight and arranged herself neatly on the divan. She put her hands in her lap, took a deep breath, paused... and let out a banshee wail. She tore her hair, screwed up her eyes, and slapped her cheeks. Tears poured out in floods. Mrs Halifax and Polly looked in, startled... but backed off when they saw Moriarty impassively watching the show. Sophy clawed the air and howled. Her screech set the teeth on edge more than la Castafiore’s high notes. I applauded and would have tossed roses if any had been to hand. Moriarty nodded approval and told our new employee to give Mrs H. her measurements.
III
Lot of rum doings in Kingstead Cemetery. The real Thomas Carnacki has a whole evening’s worth of spook anecdotes about the place. The management have had to double the night guard since the Van Helsing scandal broke in the Westminster Gazette. An old Dutch crank was arrested for repeatedly breaking in, vandalising the tombs and desecrating the corpses. Especially young, relatively fresh lady corpses. No accounting for taste, but – really? – is there nothing foreigners won’t sink to?
As it happens, we should have seen that coming. The degenerate quack was a regular of Fifi’s in Amsterdam and London. His particular jolly involved his lady companion of the evening sitting in a bath of ice water for half an hour to get her temperature down, then lying still, cold, silent and unresponsive on a garlanded bier while he did something unmentionable with a length of wood. I suppose this performance was all very well to take the edge off, but in the long run it didn’t quite slake the appetite. If I ever run into the johnny, I’ll give him a length of wood all right... and fill his mouth with garlic.
The Thoroughgood funeral was at three o’clock.
From their crowded tomb in the cemetery’s Egyptian Avenue, you’d reckon the Thoroughgoods must be the most unfortunate family in the land. Never were such people for dying. It seemed to be all they ever did. That was, indeed, the case. There was no Thoroughgood family. It was an account established with Bulstrode & Sons, undertakers. Said account was settled, generously and promptly, in cash.
Moriarty also supplied illicit and expensive materials to the senior Mr Bulstrode, an enthusiast of obscenity reckoned to have the finest collection of pornography in private hands in Europe. The Bulstrode Archive of Smut perhaps rivals the legendary section of the Vatican library at the personal disposal of the college of cardinals. I am proud that a presentation copy of My Nine Nights in a Harem reposes in a coffin-shaped bookcase in Bulstrode’s private mausoleum between The Secret Life of Wackford Squeers and The Intimate Encounter of Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders.
The Firm was tied in with Bulstrode because, on occasion, we found ourselves inconvenienced by a corpse who would not do for the river. Those fortunates were entombed with all due solemnity, as members of the Thoroughgood family. After many an enjoyable funeral, Moriarty, Moran and party had popped into Jack Straw’s Castle for pies, pints and ironic toasts to the dear departed. Not a few folk down on the lists as ‘disappeared without trace’ have ‘Thoroughgood’ in marble over their final resting places. If you ever wondered where to find Baron Maupertuis, the Belgian who tried to corner quap, you could have done worse than enquire after poor old Uncle Septimus Thoroughgood [6].
I wasn’t aware of any surplus stiffs on the premises – though I’d not have been surprised if one or two decedents showed up under the sideboard or in the window-seat. That had happened before. I was given pause by the two smaller coffins sharing the second funeral carriage. To my knowledge, the Professor had only ever murdered one circus midget... and that was in the way of an experiment. He wished to determine whether a child-sized corpse ‘burned beyond recognition’ in a bread-oven could be proved in autopsy not to be a particular missing heir. Guess what? It can. It was back to the drawing board in the Finsbury Disinheritance Caper.
Moriarty and I, hats ringed with black crepe, sat either side of the faux widow in an open calêche, holding up black umbrellas against the drizzle. Sophy sniffled like Eleanora Duse upon learning her fiancé has been assassinated in Fédora. Chop, suitably top-hatted and dour, sat up on the box, holding the reins as two fine black horses, with plumed headdresses, drew us up Kingstead Hill. At least one of the nags from Bulstrode & Sons was dappled, but soot-blacked every morning to fit the mood. In the rain – and have you noticed how it always rains at funerals? – the blacking began to run.
Other mourners awaited in Egyptian Avenue. Select souls, mostly in crow black. Sombre faces, betokening the friends of bluff Ben Thoroughgood and poor little lost Willy and Harry. Even I was shocked to see who’d turned out. I didn’t know ’em all straight off, but recognised enough faces to take a guess as to who else might be signing the condolence book. There were veiled ladies in the party, none making as much effort as Sophy.
I had, of course, brought my Gibbs side arm and pearl-handled pocket razor. In addition, a coil of piano wire nestled inside my hat – a trick I learned from the late Nakszynski, the Albino. In case of special circumstances, the ferrule of my umbrella came off to unsheath a needle which was envenomed by squeezing a bulb in the handle. Judging from the cut of everyone’s mourning clothes at this send-off, I wondered if I’d not come underarmed.
Grimes, a well-paid sexton, had the tomb opened and berths cleared for the three newcomers. Coffins were stacked up like child’s building bricks, suggesting that the Thoroughgood family would soon have to purchase another wing for their needs. I gallantly assisted the widow down, while Moriarty held the umbrellas. One or more of the mourners whistled.
A pair of Bulstrode sons shifted the coffins into the tomb. Mr Beebe, an entirely legitimate – if myopic in everything – clergyman, droned a sermon. We used to ask Mrs Halifax’s girls to come along for a pleasant outing, but their giggles and rude remarks put the parson off his stroke. Now, only those who could remain ‘in character’ – like the estimable Sophy – were entrusted with invitations.
Several of the Thoroughgood men were interred anonymously by the terms of contracts they had signed with Mrs H. It was a service she provided to any clients who died of a coronary, asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion in the pursuit of their pleasures, and would rather disappear than have loved ones know the exact circumstances of their deaths.
Solemn duties done, the morticians tactfully withdrew. Beebe hung about soliciting donations to a restoration fund or home for indigent seamstresses or somesuch. A pay-off mollified him and he left too.
Inside the tomb, mourners stood around glass-topped coffins. Some doffed hats, some raised hankies, some lit cigars and muttered, impatient with the performance. The beloved dead looked like Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, for the very good reason that the same artisans made both. Benjamin Thoroughgood was a spare head of General Gordon.
Moriarty told Grimes to seal the tomb doors behind us, and return in an hour. The sexton – who had never been able to account for the Dutch guilders he tried to pay for drink with on the night Van Helsing was arrested – had complied with stranger requests. I wish I could say this was the only time I’d heard the rasp and scrape of heavy s
tone tomb doors closing with me still on the inside and corpses for company.
‘Gentlemen, ladies, I bid you welcome,’ Moriarty addressed the mourners. ‘You know why I’ve invited you here. Several of you have travelled great distances, at no little inconvenience to your continuing interests. Your presence betokens the seriousness with which you take this matter. Most of you are familiar with each other, but some are new to this rarely convened circle. We all know who we are. Do I need to make introductions? Some of us prefer titles to names... so, the Lord of Strange Deaths and the Daughter of the Dragon... the Grand Vampire of Paris and Mademoiselle Irma Vep... Doctor Nikola of Australia and Madame Sara of the Strand... Miss Margaret Trelawny and the Hoxton Creeper... Doctor Mabuse of Berlin and Fraulein Alraune ten Brincken... Arthur Raffles of the Albany and his, ah, friend, Mr Manders... Théophraste Lupin and Josephine, Countess Cagliostro... Doctor Jack Quartz of New York and Princess Zanoni... Rupert, Count of Hentzau, and... Miss Irene Adler.’
One of the veiled ladies lifted her black gauze.
‘Hello, boys,’ said that bitch.
IV
So there you have it. The worst people in the world. All in the same tomb. If Grimes fell down a manhole and left us there to rot, or – more likely – eat each other, well... every detective, do-gooder and right-thinking prig in Christendom could get sloshed and break out their party hats.
I wouldn’t know how to send a telegram to someone like Dr Nikola, who favoured Asian mountain fastnesses and Pacific island hideaways, and I’m not deranged enough to invite the Lord of Strange Deaths to tea. As the loyal reader knows, I’m afraid of very little, but if anyone gives me pause it’s that dome-headed, bloody clever Chinaman. Being not afraid of death isn’t the same thing as not caring about hours – in some cases, weeks – of preliminary discomfort. The cellars of the Si-Fan were known as places to avoid. The mad mandarin had a marmoset on his shoulder, if you can believe it. His Eurasian companion – supposedly his daughter, as if that spared her anything – occasionally fed the chittering beast nuts from a packet. The Celestial pair wore white robes, because they do everything sideways out East and that’s the custom for attending the funerals of folks who aren’t in your immediate family.
As for the others... by now, you’ve heard of most of them. Those you don’t know you’re better off for it, but I’ll fill in the dance card anyway.
The second biggest surprise was the presence of my old friend Mad Margaret – Queen Tera as was – and her pet goon. The bandages were off. She now wore a smooth white alabaster mask which matched her replacement hand – eyebrows and lips picked out in gold. God knew what she looked like underneath, though her luxuriant raven hair had either re-grown or was a wig left over from the Princess Theatre’s last Antony and Cleopatra. She’d retrieved the Jewel of Seven Stars and wore it on her meat hand. The Black Pearl of the Borgias – which I happen to know Countess Cagliostro once coveted – winked from a brooch on her lapel. I doubted she’d forgiven or forgotten our previous encounter and she can’t have felt kindly towards the Professor after the mêlée in Conduit Street and the dismantling of her Kensington Temple. If she was here, keeping her resentments to herself, then she must have a very good, or very insane, reason to join the circle.
I’d never seen Jack Quartz before. Can’t say I was impressed. He sported an ostentatious cigar and the flashiest girlfriend. Princess Zanoni had more paint, powder and wax on her face than the fake heads in the coffins. The American mad doctor was tubby round the middle and running to jowls that made him look as if he were hiding cotton balls in his cheeks. Yanks never know when to stop, whether their passion is vivisecting beautiful women – which was how Dr Jack passed his leisure hours when running New York’s criminal underworld became too burdensome – or eating yard-across slabs of beef with fried potatoes washed down with brown carbonated health tonic. Nikola sliced people and animals up alive too, with obscure scientific end – the Prof tried to explain it to me once – but Quartz played with scalpels just for larks.
Lupin and Raffles were just jumped-up thieves, useful enough if you wanted a diamond necklace abstracted, but essentially lightweights. Then again, next to Moriarty, Nikola or the Lord of Strange Deaths, I was just a jumped-up murderer, and only got to sit on a slightly higher chair than the burglars.
Title or not, Rupert Count of Hentzau – a Ruritanian Michaelist, if your memory goes back that far – was just like me. Call him a dashing rogue or laughing daredevil if you must, but he was your basic assassin in comic opera uniform. His moustache was waxed to points which could have your eye out and he seemed forever on the point of bursting out laughing. We were both all-rounders, though he was a sword and I a shot. I daresay if we met under different circumstances, we’d each cede the other supremacy with our favoured tools and look for a third weapon to settle the question of who was the deadliest man in Europe. The jaunty cad reminded me of a young version of myself, which naturally inclined me to hate the fellow. He further antagonised me by showing up with that bitch as an arm adornment.
More interesting to the connoisseur of criminal masterminds was the young German the Prof had called Dr Mabuse, though that was only one of his preferred names. I’ve mentioned him before. Remember, the ardent imitator who was wont to present a sham of Moriarty’s own face and manner? He’d come to this party in his Moriarty costume, head bobbing atop an enormous fur collar, chalk on his cuffs and something in his eyes to make them glint. I had a sense I’d met him before, wearing another face or faces, and inwardly cursed this disguise craze... Simon Carne and Colonel Clay had started it, and now it was likely nobody was who they said they were or who you wanted them to be. Except the Hoxton Creeper – he could pass for a Stone Age Man or an Easter Island statue come to life, but otherwise had an extremely limited range. Others weren’t so distinctive. Anyone could wear an alabaster glove and mask, shove footballs down her blouse and claim to be Margaret Trelawny. However, most of the women in the world twisted enough to pull it off were in the present company as their own saucy selves. Mabuse’s moll – who looked no more than twelve, except for eyes that might have seen Babylon fall – was a strange duck, all angles and poses, with dramatic hair. I took her for another dagger-under-the-pillow damsel. It’s a sign of this age of emancipation that so many girls take to the trade.
Countess Cagliostro and Madame Sara were senior adventuresses, who had attained their station by stepping over the corpses of dozens of men who’d not thought to take them seriously. Most women – bless ’em – try to take a couple of years off their age, but Jo-Jo Balsamo put it about that she was decades older than she looked, and privy to the alchemical secrets of le Comte de Saint-Germain and her supposed ancestor the mountebank Cagliostro. Over a long weekend in a Valparaiso boudoir in ’63, she’d put my back out – nearly thirty years on, she seemed not a day older, while my back hurt more with every passing year. What was she doing with a perfumed lout like Lupin?
Sara, no last name given, ran a series of odd little rackets from a beauty shop on the Strand, and had her tithe to the Firm delivered in scented envelopes nestled in gift baskets of salves, unguents and creams the Prof had no use for. I’d tried her hair-restorer on a thinnish patch on my crown, but it hadn’t helped. Lately, her envelopes had been so fat I wondered if she was paying us over the odds in an attempt to persuade us she was a more notable crook than we took her for. Moriarty assured me she really was raking in as much as her payments indicated, and could claim financially to be the most successful female criminal of the age. Though she had Nikola at her side, the Madame generally had no use for masculine company. She worshipped at the altar of Sappho; or, if Sappho were unavailable, a bloomers-wearing, monocle-sporting saleslady in the bicycle department of Derry & Toms.
This Grand Vampire was new to me, successor to the fellow we’d given Napoleon’s brainbox and the fellow who’d retained Sophy’s stabbing prowess. Bald as an egg, he took the gang’s name seriously enough to have his eye-teeth filed to
points. Showing up in Kingstead surely put him at risk of getting holy water dashed in his face. No Frenchman likes to wash, so it was just as well Van Helsing had been deported. His young companion – who stuck around as Grand Vampires came and went – was dressed and coiffed as a boy. No one was fooled. Even the light-fingered Raffles and the dimwitted Manders, queer as eight-bob notes, knew Irma Vep was no lad. Madame Sara must also have noticed her tight-cut black knickerbockers and shapely silk-stockinged calves. The ephebic, anagrammatical vampire bore watching... though in this company she had stiff competition, in both the general bounce-worthiness and deadly-as-a-mamba stakes.
Ah, yes, Irma, so sorry... also, profuse apologies to elusive Alraune, tempting Tera, experienced Jo-Jo, serpentine Sara (a cursory nod in her case), zestful Zanoni, and the by-no-means-hideous Daughter of the Dragon. Even Sophy Kratides, the woman I’d come with, would have to step aside.
‘Hello, boys,’ indeed.
So, here she was again. I knew I would forget everything I’d learned since Rosie the pot-girl in The Compasses told me she was ‘with child’ to get me to cough over the money I’d been sent from home for my fifteenth birthday. Which she then spent on gin and sailors before giving birth only to the bolster she’d shoved under her pinafore.
I’d rather have met Kali’s Kitten again.
But, even in a tomb, surrounded by arch-fiends... that smile... those eyes... that twist of the end of the lip... that artfully stray curl...
Irene Adler. Damnation.
I’d have turfed Ben Thoroughgood out of his last resting place and stretched out in his stead if she’d asked me to.
I’d have garrotted the Lord of Strange Deaths’ pet marmoset if she’d asked.
I’d have snatched the Black Pearl and swallowed it, daring the Creeper to cut me open to get it back.
I’d have... well, I I’d have made a fool of myself. Again.