Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (44 page)

‘To all of you?’

‘To a son who pleased him. It is my understanding that, upon my birth, he was pleased. In the nursery, as I began to show aptitude... with sums... he continued to be pleased. My mother also, I believe, though she never said as much. She never said much of anything, I recall. Father would review each week with me and declare himself pleased. Then, when I reached the age of six, he found himself less pleased. Then, not pleased at all. I went over my sums again and could find no error in my workings. So I reasoned that the failing was not in me, but in Father. I did not tell him as much, for I knew he would not see it that way.

‘Then, when I was seven, my brother was born. My brother James. Father was pleased with James. From the day of my brother’s birth, I believe my father spoke not one word to me. I was fed and clothed and schooled, but in the house, I was a ghost. My brother did not know who I was, but eventually gathered he would not be punished if he visited trifling nuisances and afflictions on me. Father was still pleased with James. In the nursery, and for some while after, he continued to be. My brother was James. He would not believe that was my name too. He only truly realised who I was, what my name was, when our brother was born. Our brother James. I was fourteen and James was seven. He lost the name too.

‘Young James was the only James. We were ghosts separately, James and I. Not together. That was not possible after what had passed between us when I was the only ghost. Young James was
the
James and Father was pleased with him. In the nursery, and afterward... He never became a ghost, and – as you can tell – lacks firmness of character, if not craft and cunning. Had Father and Mother not been lost at sea, they might have had another child, another James. That might have been the making of Young James.’

‘How did your parents come to be “lost at sea”, Moriarty?’

The Professor paused, and said, ‘Mysteriously, Moran.’

I drank my coffee. Remember I said the Professor wasn’t the worst of his family. Wasn’t the worst James in his family. Neither were his brothers. The worst, so far as I could see, was James the first.

‘James, James and I have taken different paths,’ Moriarty said. ‘We have never been fond, but we are family. I am not given to calculations with no outcome. But I have considered the question of how things might have differed if I’d been the only James born to my parents’ union, or if my brothers were named, say, Robert and Stuart. Then, might I – the sole James Moriarty – have been different? Much of what I might have been was taken away, taken back with my name, and failed to survive successive attempts to transplant it to my brothers. James and James, also, are not whole, have had to share with me something that should be one man’s alone. But there is a strength in that. Some qualities, some possessions, are distractions.

‘Young James had a comfortable settlement from our parents, but it did him little good and is all gone now. He will never be more than a functionary. A poor one at that. James went into the army, to find an order, system and path. He is respectable. My first inclination was to join the clergy. That I see no mathematical proof whatsoever for the existence of God is no drawback. Rather, atheism is likely to help advance in the Church of England. No distracting beliefs. Then, I saw what could be done with numbers and have made my life’s work the business which employs you and so many others. Had I been the only James Moriarty, I would not be what you see before you.’

I looked into his clear, cold eyes. His head was steady.

I had no doubt of what he had told me. No doubt at all.

In that compartment, it was cold. Around Moriarty, there would never be warmth.

We were well past Reading.

‘We’re nearing our final destination, Moriarty.’

‘Yes, Moran. I believe we are.’

You know how this ends. Someone goes over a waterfall.

A lot of rot has been spouted about what happened to Moriarty in Switzerland. One of his brothers and that medical writer in
The Strand
muddied the waters with a public row
^[1]
. It was a surprise to me when Colonel Moriarty of ‘f--k off back to your blackboard’ fame put the Professor up for posthumous sainthood.

In letters to the press, Moriarty
medius
tossed off accusations about his brother’s demise, which he laid at the door of ‘an unlicensed, semi-professional adventurer’. This Watson oik piped up with a spume of ‘most dangerous man in London’ piffle to exonerate his long-nosed, trouble-making former flatmate. Lawsuits were threatened. Arguments raged in clubs, letter columns and the streets.

In a battle which might interest scholars of modern urban warfare, the Conduit Street Comanche whipped the tar out of an irregular band of crybaby destitutes who pledged allegiance to the Watson’s departed mucker-wallah.

The third James Moriarty – with bloody cheek! – sold the
Pall Mall Gazette
personal, intimate memoirs of all the wickedness his brother the Professor was behind. Even with an Irish spinster scribbler as a ghost
^[2]
, Young James was unable to cough out anything publishable and became the only Moriarty ever convicted in court of anything. The
Gazette
had him up for breach of contract and reclaimed the advance fee.

Colonel Moriarty and the Fat Man of Whitehall – who turned out to be the brother of the Thin Man of Baker Street – exchanged cryptic, terse, bitter
communiqués
under the letterheads of the Department of Supplies and the Diogenes Club, respectively. No one outside ‘most secret’ circles will be allowed to read these until one hundred years after the death of someone called ‘Billy the Page’
^[3]
.

Holding myself aloof from this hullaballoo, I found it expedient to continue a continental holiday with pleasant companions. I followed the controversy via week-old newspapers left in hotel lobbies. Always good sport on the French Riviera. You can see North Africa from there, which offers exotic game and fragrant souks.

My longstanding curiosity about whether those Mississippi riverboat gamblers were half as sharp with the pasteboards as their reputation has it, still pricked. And, not satisfied by two go-rounds with the yeti (home court advantage helped neither of us to better than a draw each time), I still felt honour bound to make a third attempt at bagging a big shaggy
mi-go
pelt from the Himalayas.

Many – indeed, most – surviving members of the Firm were, by then, in police custody. Only one, Charlie Vokins of the Royal Opera House, came close to naming the Prof – whom he called Macavity – in his statement. He was subsequently killed in his cell, bitten by a venomous spider hitherto unknown outside the tropics. Its presence in Holborn has set the world of arachnology afire. The rest of the gang took a sensible ‘don’t know nuffink’ line from arrest to arraignment and beyond. Chop uttered only his name, which he shouted in response to every question – usually with a violent hand gesture.

It was said the Moriarty Firm was smashed completely, but you have to pay attention to who’s saying it. To whit... Scotland Yard, who’d only just been forced by this nagging Thin Man to admit such an outfit even existed. On the whole, the Yard would rather not have known about it because (adopt the proper brandy-soaked drone), ‘These things can’t happen in London, don’t you know, and if they can, they couldn’t last out the week because Great Britain has the finest police force in the world.’ Depressingly, this may be true – foreign rozzers generally make imbeciles like Lestrade, Mackenzie and MacDonald seem towering geniuses.

The only other person to declare the Firm defunct was a certain John H. – or
James
H., to cloud an already fogbound issue – Watson, MD, whose literary prospects had just washed over the Falls. I have it on good authority that
The Strand
doesn’t care to run reminiscences about beastly bad backs, mysterious gammy legs or interesting appendicitis.

Oh, we’d had setbacks, but I wasn’t the only one of the Firm in the wind. Parker the garrotter, for one, escaped notice. Simon Carne came up with another disguise, and posed as a private detective who swore to bring ‘that scoundrel Carne’ to book. ‘PC Purbright’ was working a scam with Filthy Fanny, shaking down monied toffs the faux waif accused of molesting her in Seven Dials. When the raid came, PCP mingled with the real coppers and ‘arrested’ Filth. He said he’d get her swiftly to the Yard for questioning. They hopped on the Brighton Belle and vanished from history. After a good wash and dressed in grown-up clothes, Filth would have been unrecognisable.

Mrs Halifax willingly confessed to crimes from gross indecency through baby-farming and living off immoral earnings to impersonating a Mother Superior, but swore up and down that the old gent and his military pal who rented her upper rooms were complete innocents and unaware of what went on at her now-notorious address. I like a trollop who knows her business – you don’t pay ’em just for the tumble, you also pay ’em to keep their mouths shut about it afterwards. Her girls were all credits to the oldest profession. It brings a tear to the eye, a tickle to the loins and an irresistible urge to check the inside pocket to see if the wallet’s still there when I think of any of ’em.

Polly Chalmers, ‘the occasional maid’, claimed she had just woken from a horrible dream and had no memory of the last seven years. Ceridwen Thomas, ‘Tessie the Two-Ton Taff’, put three constables in hospital (one permanently) during her arrest and swore no gaol cell could hold her (fit her, more like). Halina Staniewiczowa, ‘Swedish Suzette’, answered questions only in Polish, to the confusion of the Swedish interpreter Scotland Yard had brought in at great expense for her interrogation.

Wing Liu Tsong, ‘Lotus Lei’, was released after mysterious strings were pulled and got a job lighting joss sticks in Limehouse for the Lord of Strange Deaths... whom, truth to tell, she’d been working for all along; her new duties sound innocent enough, but you don’t know what happens to the mandarin’s guests if they don’t comply with his polite requests for cooperation or information by the time the stick has burned down.

Molly Duff, ‘the Ranee of Ranchipur’, formed a Thuggee strangling sisterhood in Aylesbury Women’s Prison and queened over the place for twenty years. Lady Deborah Hope-Collins, ‘Mistress Strict’, went up before a judge she recognised as one of her overgrown schoolboy regulars; she was given a good character by the court after all charges were dismissed. Marie-Françoise Lely,
ma belle
Fifi, slipped through the net by marrying Inspector Patterson, the plod in charge of the Conduit Street round-up, then disappearing with the wedding presents two days into the honeymoon... at that, Pie-Eye Patterson was lucky to have had forty-eight hours service from the finest truncheon-polishing lips in Europe.

Neverthehowsoever, the cat was at least halfway out of the bag.

During his long career as an evildoer, Moriarty shrugged off rumours about his true enterprise and maintained a respectable false front to the outside world. All through our association, even as he cut himself into crimes and netted one of the highest private incomes in the Empire, he kept at a dull teaching job which brought in just £700
per annum.
The Devil knows where he found the time to give lectures, mark papers and expel slackers, but he did.

None of his former students or present colleagues spoke up in his favour when the press had a field day maligning him. I gather the inkies were as terrified of the dear old soul as anyone who met him in his criminal capacity – once, I know for certain, he slowly put a youth to death for misplacing a decimal point – even before it came out that he was, as the sensation papers have it, ‘a diabolical mastermind’.

So, the world now knows – or thinks it knows – the truth about the terrible Professor James Moriarty.

Well, that’s fair, so far as it goes.

Still, in Fleet Street terms, I’ve an ‘exclusive’. Only two people really know how Moriarty died. One took that long plunge into the foaming torrent, and is in no position to reveal anything. The other is me. I’ve kept
schtumm
so far, but now it’s time to tell the end of the story of the worst and wildest man I have ever known. Have I your attention? Good, let us continue...

On our return from Cornwall – early in January, 1891, for those who like to mark off the dates – Professor Moriarty bunged himself into his work. Oh, he was still in one of his moods... brooding on family matters, I’ll be bound, redoubling his efforts to achieve abstruse goals in a triply vain effort to earn back his name. All he wanted was the recognition of a sire who was a) plainly an out-and-out maniac incapable of human feeling, b) unlikely to appreciate the Prof’s high standing in any of his chosen fields and c) long since drowned.

After one glimpse behind the curtain, I knew better than to ask for more. I was on hand with the Firm for my sure eye, cold nerve and lack of scruple, not as sob shoulder or scratching post for an unknowable conundrum of a man. In those days, Moriarty spent more time with his wasps – remember them? – than his lieutenants, but popped out of his study periodically to issue orders and pass comment. I made sure his instructions were carried out, though even after long experience I was puzzled by some of his moves...