Death on a Pale Horse by Donald Thomas

a local nabob, was the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced.
    So much may stand to his credit. He was also endowed with a perverted ingenuity and a warped moral instinct. Like his father, he was an aberrant growth from an honourable ancestral tree. Discreditable stories were told in Bengal. They asserted that Rawdon Moran was a cheat at the gaming-table and an evil demon in the lives of several women. I believe, from the facts before me, that the unexplained self-destruction of Mrs. Stewart of Lauder after a matrimonial scandal fifteen years ago also stands to his account.
    Though a cheat at cards and in financial matters generally, he was fierce and indomitable. To challenge him to a duel with pistols would have been madness. He had proved his skill on regimental mess nights by putting five successive pistol shots through the centre of an ace of spades at a range of thirty-seven paces. These bullets, from a .22 target pistol, were so closely placed that they entered one on top of the other, leaving a single hole. A man would therefore accept his losses rather than confront such an antagonist on a charge of dishonesty.
    It was his conduct with women that ended his Indian career. You will no doubt recall the tragic case of the young military wife, Mrs. Emmeline Putney-Wilson. She it was who attempted to poison her infants and then hanged herself after the scorn and humiliation to which he exposed her. A clandestine “subalterns’ court-martial” of the 109th Foot convicted him of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. A permanent injury was inflicted upon him by the officers of this “court,” rather worse than being drummed out of the regiment to the accompaniment of the “Rogues’ March.” His departure in this manner made India too hot to hold him.
    Returning to England, via the Zulu and South African Wars, he nursed a passion for revenge against the world and those to whom he owed his injury. London did not yet know the worst of him. He posed there as the gallant Indian officer he had once been. Indeed, he boosted his reputation by two books of reminiscences written by a journalist on behalf of himself and his brother. Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas appeared in 1881 and Three Months in the Jungle a few years later. He lived in the West End, with some extravagance, just off Bond Street. The clubs knew no positive ill of him. Until his death he remained a member of the Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, and the Bagatelle Card-Club.
    About the year 1884 he was sought out by the late Professor James Moriarty. Two or three years earlier, this luminary of crime had been dismissed with ignominy from his post in mathematics at one of our ancient universities. His offences were such as the college authorities could not get themselves to describe. The Professor got wind of the Indian scandals but also read of Colonel Moran’s courage and enterprise.
    These two scoundrels struck inspiration from one another. Professor Moriarty seldom exposed himself to danger but used Rawdon Moran as his brilliant aide-decamp. Their network of infamy embraced the Transvaal diamond swindles of the 1880s and the so-called Pall Mall “white slave” conspiracies of 1885–6. In the course of his South African activities in the sphere of Illicit Diamond Buying, Moran left a foolish but innocent young woman to face the gallows on his behalf for the death of her master, Andreis Reuter. At my prompting, my brother Sir William Mycroft Holmes, Permanent Secretary for Cabinet Office Affairs, intervened successfully with the Transvaal government to save her life.
    Your predecessors have been sceptical of my belief in a criminal brotherhood organised for war against society. I remain convinced of its existence, upon positive evidence, and could name most of its leaders. Some of those names belong to men high in society and public life. The great prosper. As in the world of angling,