Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

‘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.’

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 [46]. 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 [47], 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’ [48].

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.

46

See: John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Final Problem’, The Strand Magazine, 1893; and ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, Collier’s Weekly, 1903. It is evident that Moran wrote his memoir after both these reminiscences — which offer differing accounts of the incident at Reichenbach Falls — were published. In ‘The Final Problem’, the narrator writes that ‘the best and wisest man I have ever known’ died at the Falls; in ‘The Empty House’, it is alleged that Watson’s friend survived but, for reasons no else has ever found convincing, decided to let the world think him dead for a few years. Moran barely touches on the many other theories which have been advanced as to what actually happened… that Moriarty was merely an alternate personality of a mentally ill man who threw himself alone off the mountain… that Moriarty survived to take his dead opponent’s place in the world, and thereafter fought against crime as he had previously fought for it… that Moriarty evaded death by mentally projecting himself into a succession of other bodies and has lived on as a series of masterminds; the names of Carl Peterson, Gregory Arkadin, Alexander Luthor, Arnold Zeck, Professor Marcus, Peter Cornelius, Ernst Blofeld, Justin Sepheran, Derek Leech, Hannibal Lecter and ‘Count Jim Moriarty’ have been mentioned — and some of those aren’t even real people… that Moriarty was never in Switzerland and faked his death so he could rebuild his just-shattered criminal empire. He also reveals nothing which will comfort the many theorists who have advanced the notions that Moriarty was a total innocent persecuted by a paranoid cocaine fiend, an alien invader (this might arise from dim rumours associated with The Red Planet League), a vampire, one of his brothers in disguise, a multiple personality (in this scenario, the Professor, the Colonel and the Stationmaster are aspects of the same person), a self-aware hologram, a giant rat (either from Sumatra or somewhere else), a woman, a clone from the future, gay, or (like every eminent Victorian from Alfred Tennyson to Vesta Tilley) Jack the Ripper. It’s unlikely that Moran was blithely unaware of this feverish speculation, which was well underway during his later life.

47

As the author of Katie Reed: A Turbulent Life (Virago, 1988), I am satisfied that Moran here solves a significant mystery about the identity of the person with whom the feminist writer attempted collaboration in the summer of 1891. At some point, she — or another party — went through her journals and filleted the pages which cover this thorny business. We only know she was working as a ghost from the letters of her friend (and, later, lover) Charles Beauregard — to whom she complained extensively about her collaborator’s ‘uselessness, unreliability and octopus hands’. The assignment was thrust on Katharine Reed by Edward Tyas Cook, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, on the still-commonplace principle of ‘do one for me now and I’ll give you something you want to do later’. Since 1988, a great deal of material about Reed — one of the most interesting women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — has come to light. It’s my hope that an enlightened publisher will eventually enable me to issue a comprehensively revised edition of my biography. Paul Forrestier’s What Kate Reed Did (University of Brighton Press, 2003) and Kim Newman’s ‘The Gypsies in the Wood’ (The Fair Folk, SFBC, 2005) are, respectively, inadequate and fanciful.

48

This would seem to refer to William Houlston (1882–1973). It took seven months of enquiries to find out which government departments presently fulfil the functions of the nineteenth-century Department of Supplies and the Diogenes Club. A D-notice prevents me from revealing even their current acronyms, though I have been given special leave to say that the Diogenes Club traded as Universal Exports in the 1950s which — at this stage of paranoia — inclines me to question whether this is true. Needless to say, attempts to ascertain whether either hold a bundle of red-taped documents marked ‘Sealed until 2073’ — let alone requests for premature access on academic grounds — have been unrewarding. A minor puzzle arises: if the exchanges were secret, how did Moran know they were ‘cryptic, terse, bitter’? Had he read them?