Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

‘You want to ’ear it again? ’

‘It’s my favourite ditty,’ I lied. ‘I want to hear it for twenty minutes or more.’

Enough time to get round to the wings, minding out for the girl with the stiletto and her seventeen swarthy comrades.

‘No accountin’ for taste,’ Vokins said. I gave him a handful of sovereigns and he rushed about recruiting. Confectionary stalls went unmanned and mop buckets unattended as Vokins lured their proprietors into an augmented clique.

Bianca Castafiore, up to her ankles in flowers tossed by admirers, paused to take a bow after concluding her aria for the third time. Even she looked startled when the crowd swelled with cries of ‘ Encore, encore!’ Never one to disappoint her public, she took a deep breath and launched into it once again.

‘Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir…’

Groans from less partisan members of the audience were drowned out, though more than a few programs were shredded or opera glasses snapped in two.

This is where the Moran quick-thinking came into it.

The situation was simple: upon her exit, the diva would surrender the Jewels of the Madonna without knowing they were real. The valued new staff of the Royal Opera House would quit en masse.

So, why hadn’t the jewels been lifted before the performance? Well, if Don Rafaele Corbucci held one thing almost as sacred as the Virgin Mary, it was opera. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the jewel scene performed with real jewels was an overwhelming temptation. He would be in one of the boxes, enjoying the show before fulfilling his obligation to avenge the indignity perpetrated by Gennaro. I hoped his brains had been boiled by la Castafiore’s sustained high notes, for I needed him distracted.

Once the jewels were offstage, they were lost to me.

So, what to do?

Simple. I would have to seize them before they made their exit.

By a side door, I went backstage. In a hurry, I picked up items as I found them on racks in dressing rooms. When I told the story later, I claimed to have donned complete costume and make-up for the role of Méphistophélès. Actually, I made do with a red cloak, a cowl with horns and a half-facemask with a Cyrano nose.

I noticed several of the new scene-shifters, paying attention to the noise and the stage and therefore not much interested in me. I found myself in the wings just as la Castafiore, whose prodigious throat must be in danger of cracking, was chivvied into an unwise, record-setting seventh encore.

A little man with spikes of hair banged his fists against the wall and rent his shirt in red-faced fury, screeching ‘Get that sow off my stage!’ in Italian. Carlo Jonsi, the producer, had little hope his pleas would, like Henry II’s offhand thoughts about a troublesome priest, be acted on by skilled assassins. Though, as it happened, the house was packed with skilled assassins.

The dresser’s supposed sister Malilella — she of the stiletto — was waiting impatiently for her moment. I wouldn’t have put it past her to fling her blade with the next jetsam of floral tributes and accidentally stick the star through one prodigious lung.

‘Can’t someone end this?’ Maestro Jonsi shouted, in despair.

‘I’ll give it a try,’ I volunteered, and made my entrance.

To give her credit, the Camorrista sister was swift to catch on. And her knife was accurately thrown, only to stick into a scenery flat I happened to jostle in passing. I boomed out the Barrack Room lyrics to ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, lowering my voice to deep bass and drawing out phrases so no one could possibly make out the words or even the language.

Marguerite was astonished at this demonic apparition.

Most of the audience, who knew the opera by heart, were surprised at the sudden reappearance of Méphistophélès but, after eight renditions of the ‘Jewel Song’, were happy to accept whatever came next, just so long as it wasn’t a ninth.

‘Those joooo-oooo-wels you muuuuu-ust give baaaa-ack,’ I demanded. ‘Your beau-uuuuu-ty needs no suuuu-ch adorn-meeee-ent!’

I picked up the prop casket in which the jewels had been presented and pointed into it.

With encouragement from Vokins’ clique, who chanted ‘Take them off!’ in time to the desperately vamping orchestra, Bianca Castafiore removed the necklaces and bracelets and dropped them into the casket.

I was aware of commotion offstage. A couple of scene-shifters tried to rush the stage but were held back by non-Italians.

As the last bright jewel clinked into the casket, I looked at the woman in the wings. Malilella drew her thumb across her throat and pointed at me. I had added to my store of curses. Again.

There were Camorra in the wings. Both sides.

So I made my exit across the orchestra pit, striding on the backs of chairs, displacing musicians, knocking over instruments. I didn’t realise until I was among the audience that I had trailed my cloak across the limelights and was on fire.

I paused and the whole audience stood to give me a round of applause.

Clapping thundered throughout the auditorium. Which is why I didn’t hear the shots. When I saw holes appear in a double bass, I knew Don Rafaele was displeased with this diversion from the libretto.

I shucked my burning cloak and dashed straight up the centre aisle, out through the foyer — barging past a couple of scene-shifters on sheer momentum — and out into Covent Garden, where Chop awaited with the cab.

I tossed my mask and cowl out of the carriage as it rattled away.

Cradling the jewel casket in my lap, I began to laugh. The sort of laugh you give out because otherwise you’d have to scream and scream.

That is how I made my debut at the Royal Opera.

XI

After such a day, with two coups to the credit, many a crook would feel entitled to a roistering celebration. It’s usually how they get nabbed.

Your proud bandit swaggers into his local and buys everyone drinks. Asked how he comes to be suddenly in funds, he taps the side of his hooter and airily mentions a win on the dogs. No track in London pays out in crisp, freshly stolen banknotes. Every copper’s nark in the pub recalls a sick relative and dashes off into the fog to tap the plods ‘for a consideration’.

So, in my case, no rest for the wicked.

However, before proceeding to the evening’s amusement, I had Chop drive back to Conduit Street.

I chalked off the latest item myself.

1. The Green Eye of the Yellow God

2. The Black Pearl of the Borgias

3. The Falcon of the Knights of St John

4. The Jewels of the Madonna of Naples

5. The Jewel of Seven Stars

6. The Eye of Balor

Moriarty emerged from his thinking room with sheets of paper covered in diagrams. Finding the celebrated circles and clown-smile squiggles named for the mathematician John Venn inadequate to the task, he had invented what he said — and I’ve no reason to doubt him — was an entirely new system for visually representing complex processes. He was delighted with his incomprehensible arrays of little ovals with symbols in them, stuck together by flowing lines interrupted by arrows.

Indeed, the diagrams excited him more than his latest acquisition. He waved aside the casket of jewels in his eagerness to show off a form of cleverness I was incapable of making head or tail of. If he hadn’t been distracted, he might have taken steps to introduce his system to the wider world. Schoolboys destined for the dunce cap could curse him as the inventor of Moriarty Charts. As it is, Mr Venn rests on his inky laurels.