by Kim Newman
‘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.’
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PROBLEM OF THE FINAL ADVENTURE
I
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...
II
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...
Dynamiting a pillar box on the corner of Wigmore and Welbeck Streets just after the post had been collected and it was empty...
Bestowing one hundred pounds upon a respectable solicitor in Taunton on the condition that he dash acid at the portrait of a former alderman which hung in the local assizes (respectable or no, the shyster went through with it)...
Contriving a delay of twenty minutes on the City & South London Railway to ensure a minor government clerk did not keep an appointment with an optician in King William Street...
Injecting minute quantities of a bacillus into every bottle but one of a case of port wine – tricky thing, using a hypodermic needle on the cork without leaving an obvious hole – presented to the Chief Coroner of Cardiff, ostensibly by a grateful widow lately exonerated of husbandicide.
Whatever that little lot was all about went over the waterfall, so your guess is as good as mine. The Professor was always doing things like that. Usually, there would come a moment when I could see the point of these preliminary moves, and a grand scheme would be apparent. In these cases, that moment never eventuated. I think of this as Moriarty’s Unfinished Symphony of Crime.
In years to come, a mastermind as yet unborn might read this passage, see at once the design thick old Basher couldn’t make head nor tail of, and set out to complete Moriarty’s final coup. Good luck to you, mate. Post me my cut – care of Box Brothers Bank – if I’m still living.
The only profit to come from the Fal Vale excursion was a welcome addition to the Firm. Three weeks after the loss of the Kallinikos, who should present herself at Conduit Street but Miss Sophy Kratides, bearing the card Moriarty had given her. She sought employment suitable for her skills.
To reach our reception room, she had to climb the stairs past Mrs Halifax’s establishment, uncommonly busy at that time of the morning. Swedish Suzette and Mistress Strict, en deshabille, were riding a publisher and a merchant banker across the landing. Not a few of their gentlemen callers liked the bit between their teeth and the lash on their flanks. At the last formal event, I’d won seven guineas wagering on the Librarian of Jesus College to best a muscular Christian poet by a full length. Coming across this sporting event gave Sophy the wrong idea about the line of work on offer.
She charged into our rooms het up, red in the face and knife out, intent on avenging any slur against her virtue. Since the Prof did not emerge from his study to investigate the commotion – which was mostly in Greek – I was responsible for calming the tigress with assurances that we only wanted her to stick her knives into people. Eventually, I persuaded her to put away the blade and share a divan with me for a proper job interview. I had Mrs Halifax send in tea, without her deadly biscuits. Mercifully, Polly remembered to wear the full uniform – not just mob-cap and apron – when she brought in the tray.
‘Do you have references?’ I enquired.
Sophy opened her pocketbook and handed me a newspaper clipping from an English language periodical published in Hungary. The news item involved Harold Latimer and Wilson Kemp, two dissolute Englishmen, who were reckoned to have quarrelled and stabbed each other to death [4]. Kemp, also known as Davenport, was a familiar if unwelcome face. Crooked as a corkscrew but not half so handy, he’d done a share of minor minionage about town, obtaining compromising letters for the blackmailer Charles Milverton or suborning young idiots onto the books of the shylock Dan Levy [5]. Moriarty had several times turned down Kemp’s petitions to join the Firm, rating him unreliable, vile and inept. Getting stabbed in Budapest proved the Prof right again. Latimer was a new to me, but if he knocked about with Kemp it was a fair bet that he was a c--t of the first water.
Sophy claimed both for her bag. She’d been settling a personal score – avenging a murdered brother. One had to appreciate not only the dainty knife-work but the care taken to arrange matters so the Hungarian peelers had a cut-and-dried solution to the mystery and no need to trouble the lady said to be travelling with the deceased clots.
In finishing Kemp and Latimer, she’d discovered an aptitude for wet red work and had taken to it professionally. She had stabbed a French juge d’instruction through the lungs for Les Vampires on a freelance basis, but turned down the Grand Vampire’s offer of a permanent position. She shrewdly reckoned the rising Irma Vep would not take kindly to competition for the title of deadliest woman in Paris. A bureau of the Greek government gave her employment, on the condition that she stay out of Greece, then contracted her to look after the late George Lampros – mention of whom prompted me to hem and haw somewhat – as a liaison with the British Department of Supplies.
‘The death of Lampros counts as a black mark on your record,’ I said, making sympathetic moon-eyes from the other end of the divan. ‘I imagine you’re motivated to do better in your next posi
tion.’
She spat out a mouthful of tea.
‘You misunderstand my former commission, Colonel...’
‘Call me Sebastian, or Basher even, Sophy, if I may...’
I own I might have twirled my moustache. I know it’s a tiresome old look-at-me-I’m-a-roué stage gesture, but – dash it – I’ve got a moustache (a big one too), and it’s there for the twirling. I’d lick my thumb and twirl my eyebrows if I thought it’d produce the desired results. I mean, I was on a divan, with a trembling young miss (and her knives) prettily arranged on the cushions, in need of tea and sympathy and a job... and the warm possibility she might accommodate to an obliging gent who saw his way to help her in this wicked world. If you don’t twirl the old ’tache then, you might as well not have whiskers at all.
As it happens, the minx was all business.
‘My orders were to keep Lampros alive, unless it seemed probable that he, and the secret of Greek Fire, were at risk of becoming the property of another power... in which case...’
She made an expressive pass across her throat with a barbed thumb and pulled an unmistakable grimace.
‘I would have killed him myself, Colonel.’
That was a facer. Did she suspect what even Moriarty hadn’t tumbled to, that mine was the bullet that had done for the oily inventor? There was no time to further discuss the matter. For, at this point, Moriarty emerged from his bolt-hole. He did not seem surprised to find Sophy Kratides in our parlour.
‘Has Moran discussed terms?’ he asked. ‘£4,000 per annum, payable in advance every quarter. An account will be opened for you at Box Brothers. This is acceptable, yes?’
She nodded. This was acceptable, yes.
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.’
