‘Moriarty,’ I began, ‘I’m afraid we’ve been stung.’
I held up Irene’s photograph.
He spat out a word.
And that was how a great shambles broke out in Belgravia, shaking the far-off kingdom of Ruritania, and how the worst plans of Professor Moriarty were exploited by a woman’s treachery. When he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always as that bitch.
CHAPTER THREE: THE RED PLANET LEAGUE
I
Professor Moriarty excelled in two fields of human endeavour.
Mathematics, for one. Never was such a fellah as the Prof for chalking up sums. Or the rigmarole with more squiggles than numbers. Equations. Did ’em in his head, for fun… damn his eyes.
I would wager several pawn tickets held on the family silver that you lot have little or no interest in fractional calculus or imperfect logarithms. You’d all be best pleased if I yarned up the other field in which James Moriarty was top of the class.
Crime. Just the word gets you tingly, don’t it?
Well, tough titty… as the house captain who tried to roger me when I was a whelp at Eton used to say. Because this story is all about mathematics. I got my penknife to the house capt’s goolies, by the way. Preserved my maidenly virtue, as it were. Blighter is Bishop of Brichester these days. That’s beside the point: maths is the thing!
Get your thinking caps on, because I might put in some sums. Make you show your workings in the margin and write off for the answers. It will cost an extra 3d and a stamp just to find out if you’re as clever as you think you are. Probably, you ain’t. Most fellahs (including — I’m not ashamed to admit it — me) aren’t as clever as they think they are. Moriarty, though, was exactly that clever, a rare bird indeed. More dodos are around than blokes like that. According to Mr Darwin, that’s good joss [18] for the rest of us. Elsewise, we’d have long since been hunted to extinction by the inflated cranium people.
Drifting back to the subject in hand, Professor Moriarty was Number One Heap Big Chief in both his vocations. Which meant there was something he was even better at than complicated number problems or turning a dishonest profit — making enemies.
Over the years and around the world, I’ve run into some prize-winningly antagonistic coves. I recall several of that species of blood-soaked heathen who bridle under the yoke of Empire and declare war on ‘the entire White Christian Race’. Good luck to ’em. Pack off a regiment of curates and missionaries led by Bishop Bum-Banger to meet their savage hordes on the field of carnage and see if I care. In India, some sergeants wear armour beneath the tunic because no soldier serving under them can be trusted with a clear shot at their backs. I’ve also run into confidential police informants, which is to say: grasses. Peaching on one’s fellow crims to escape gaol is guaranteed to get you despised on both sides of the law. Fact is: no bastard born earned as many, as various, and as determined enemies as Moriarty.
First off, other crooks hated him. Get your regular magsman or ponce on the subject of Professor Jimmy Bleedin’ Moriarty, and you’ll expand the old vocabulary by obscenities in several argots. Just being a bigger thief than the rest of them was enough to get their goats. What made it worse was villains were often forced to throw in with him on capers, taking all the risk while he snaffled the lion’s share of the loot. If they complained, he had them killed. That was my job, by the by — so show some bloody respect or there’s a rope, a sack and a stretch of the Thames I could introduce you to. To hear them tell it, every cracksman in the land was just about to work out a foolproof plan to lift the jewels from Princess Alexandra’s knickers or riffle the strongboxes in the sub-basement of the Bank of England when Professor Moriarty happened by some fluke to think of it first. A few more tumblers of gin and their brilliant schemes would have been perfected — and they wouldn’t have to hand on most of the swag to some evil-eyed toff just for sitting at home and drawing diagrams. You might choose to believe these loquacious, larcenous fellahs. Me, I’ll come straight out and say they’re talking through a portion of their anatomy best employed passing wind or, in certain circumstances, concealing a robin’s egg diamond with a minimum of observable discomfort.
Then there were coppers. Moriarty made sure they had no earthly notion who he might be, so they didn’t hate him quite as personally as anyone who ever met him — but they sure as spitting hated the idea of him. By now, you’ve heard the twaddle… vast spider squatting in the centre of an enormous web of vice and villainy… Napoleon of Crime… Nero of Naughtiness… Thucydides of Theft, et cetera, et cetera. Detectives of all stripe loathed the unseen King of Krooks, and blubbed to their mummies whenever they had to flounder around after one of his coups. ‘Scotland Yard Baffled,’ as if that were news. Hah!
One man above all hated Professor Moriarty. And was hated by him.
Throughout his dual career — imagine serpents representing maths and crookery, twining together like a wicked caduceus — the Prof was locked in deadly survival for supremacy — nay, for survival — with a human creature he saw as his arch-enemy, his eternal opposite, his nemesis.
Sir Nevil Airey Stent.
I don’t know how it started. Stent and Moriarty were at each other’s throats well before I became Number Two Big-ish Chief in the Firm. Whenever the Stent issue was raised, Moriarty turned purple and hissed — and was in no condition to elucidate further. I know they first met as master and pupiclass="underline" Moriarty supervised young Nevil when the lad was cramming for an exam. Maybe the Prof scorned the promising mathematician’s first quadratic equation in front of the class. Maybe Stent gave him an apple with a worm in it. Upshot is: daggers drawn, eyes ablaze, lifelong enmity.
Since this record might be of some academic interest, here are a few facts and dates I’ve looked up in back editions of the Times:
1863 — Boyish twenty-three-year-old Nevil Stent, former pupil of James Moriarty, rocks the world of astronomy with his paper ‘Diffractive Properties of an Object-Glass with Circular Aperture’. Not a good title, to my mind — which runs more to the likes of
Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas
or
My Nine Nights in a Harem
(both, as it happens, written by me — good luck finding the latter: most of the run was burned by order of the crown court and the few extant volumes tend to be found in the collection of the judge who made the ruling).
1869 — Stent appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, succeeding brainboxes like Isaac Newton, Thomas Turton and Charles Babbage. Look ’em up — all gems, so I’m told. If said chair were a literal piece of furniture, it would be hand-carved by Chippendale and covered in a three-inch layer of gold flake. The Lucasian Professorship comes complete with loads of wonga, a free house, all the bowing and scraping students you can eat and high tea with the dean’s sister every Thursday. Stent barely warms the Lucasian with his bottom before skipping on to occupy an even more exalted seat, the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy. It’s only officially a chair — everyone in Cambridge calls it the Plumian