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

Somehow, the notion that Professor Moriarty had parents — might have been a child — never sat right. A viper is a snake straight from the egg. I couldn’t help but picture little Jamie as a balding midget in a sailor suit, spying Cook and the baker’s boy rolling in flour on the kitchen table through his toy telescope, and blackmailing them for extra buns.

It had been a profitable season for the Firm. We’d done nicely out of the Mystery of the Essex Werewolf, come out of the lamentable business of the Four Lemon Drops with surprising credit, and salvaged more than could be expected from the disaster of Loki Tunnel. Lately, England was too confining a laboratory for Moriarty’s experiments in crime.

We were expanding on the continent, tactfully skirting — for the moment — territories claimed by others and offering consultant services to blackguards in Spain, Holland and Poland. Moriarty had put his stamp on a series of coups — kidnappings, major thefts, an assassination — which raised his stock as the premier criminal mastermind in Europe.

Queen Victoria could unroll a map of the world and take pride in the extensive red patches which mark the Empire; the Prof had similar ambitions for the globe in his study. Stuck with red-headed needles wherever a Moriarty crime had been accomplished, the globe increasingly resembled a pincushion.

I had recently greatly enjoyed murdering a Member of Parliament with a garrotte of red ribbon, then providing succor to his saucy widow, his blushing twin daughters… and, thanks to a fortuitous midnight encounter, his tweeny maid. I’d have done the prig for the bonuses alone, but that business put twenty thou in the coffers. You’d never believe who paid for that forced bye-election. My only regret was that I couldn’t mount an honourable head on the wall. I contented myself with draping the ribbon on some antlers and keeping intimate trophies from the ladies of the deceased’s household in a private drawer alongside like items.

It was a new year, a new decade: 1891. Life was fine. Crime was paying.

Then, early in January, Professor Moriarty asked me to accompany him to the Xeniades Club to meet with his brother, Colonel Moriarty.

Are you familiar with that breed of novel heroine who prefaces a chapter of awful experiences with ‘had I but known…’? Well, had I but bloody known, I’d have stayed in bed with or without a tweeny foot warmer. But I didn’t and got up. Cheerful as a goose-throttler the week before Christmas, I put on my hat, picked up my cane, and toodled along to Jermyn Street and Colonel Moriarty’s club.

A few words on the Xeniades Club — what a horrible place! I’m a member of the Anglo-Indian and the Tankerville myself, though I tend to let niceties like paying annual fees slide for the odd decade. As a cardplayer, yarn-spinner, hero of the Empire, big-game hunting bore (I admit it) and devotee of manly pursuits, I’ve been in and out of every gent’s club in London, from the Athaneum and the Beefsteak through the Troy Club and Boodle’s to the Club of the Damned and the Mausoleum Club (pronounced Mouse-o-layum, if you ever get the invite). I’m also known at exclusive gathering places catering to fellows who are most decidedly not gentlemen but can afford to pay for their pleasures and the privilege of having those who provide them keep quiet afterwards.

The Xeniades Club was founded by whining bounders who’d been blackballed at any number of established London clubs and decided that at least one should have no barriers at all to membership. You can imagine the shower that let in: grubby-fingered tradesmen, monomaniacs and cranks of every persuasion; plain-speaking provincial aldermen; foreigners, even. Furthermore, the Xeniades encouraged ‘lively debate’, and was thus one of the noisiest big rooms I have ever been in… not excluding the mess hall at Sing Sing Prison during a riot in which twelve inmates and three guards were killed, or the auditorium of the Paris Opéra after a chandelier fell on the audience during (what else?) that bloody jewel song from Faust.

If I were in the habit of thinking things through, I’d have made these deductions: the Xeniades was for blighters so objectionable no other club would have them. Colonel James Moriarty was a member. Colonel James Moriarty. What kind of colonel can’t even get into the Army and Navy, which is open to any serving officer on full or half pay? Any soldier who can rise to the rank of colonel — which is, admittedly, where they leave you when they tumble to what sort of a rotter or loon you are behind the medal ribbons and, yes, I am speaking for experience — ought to have distinguished himself in some manner which would at least get him into Stoats and Weasels.

No, Colonel James was in the Xeniades.

At least, we didn’t have our awkward introductions in the Loud Room but rather in a draughty, underused annexe I gathered was called the Cold Room.

The Professor was vague as to which regiment his brother was a colonel in, but had let on that the fellow was still serving. Somehow — and, again, I of all people should have known better — that made me imagine a younger, straighter-spined, suntanned version of the James Moriarty I knew. More hair on his head and a set of fierce whiskers, in full uniform, bristling with martial fervour. I envisioned a cruel, canny Moriarty brain applied to devastating pre-emptive strikes against the foe (always best to get your reprisals in first, I say).

Instead, the Colonel was a sallow, slouching fellow with a sunken chest, the ill-cared-for clothes of a clerk who no longer has hopes of advancement, a perpetual cold which required odd poultices and compresses which afforded no appreciable benefit, and a little square of moustache like a patch he’d missed with his cutthroat three days ago. He was seven years younger than the Professor, but seemed nearer death.

From one whiff of him, I knew he’d never set foot on a battlefield. Asked what army line he was in, he bluntly said ‘supplies’ and left it at that. I assumed he was less a soldier than a wholesale orderer and deliverer of boots, tins of bully and those greased cartridges which make Indians mutinous. Again, I leapfrogged to a conclusion. Throughout this whole affair, I did that. I wish I could say I learned my lesson, but plainly I didn’t.

So, minimal pleasantries aside, to the point: ‘It’s James, James.’

‘My youngest brother is a stationmaster in the west of England, Moran,’ the Professor stated.

‘Fal Vale Junction, in Cornwall,’ said the Colonel.

‘Where he can’t do any harm,’ said the Professor.

‘So you say, James.’

‘I do say, James.’

At that, the Professor’s head began its familiar oscillation. Unnervingly, the Colonel began to sway his head from side to side in mirror of his brother. It was a family habit! The two bobbed heads like Peruvian llamas working up to a spitting contest. My hands convulsed in a kind of terror. Was this a tussle of fraternal wills or some species of communication beyond other mortals? The brothers kept it up for several minutes.

I wondered if it was possible to get a drink in this place.

At length, they quit playing silly beggars.

‘Through my influence,’ the Colonel said, ‘James has secured his present position…’

‘He owes you his station, you mean,’ I interjected.

‘As I said… Colonel Moran, was that one of those, what are they called, jokes?… I have gone to no little trouble to put James where he is. I gather he is not satisfied, which will scarcely come as a surprise to you.’

‘James is seldom satisfied,’ the Professor said, addressing me as an aside.

I shrugged, unsure what was required.

‘James will attempt to rope you in, James,’ the Colonel said. ‘He has ever tried to play us off, one against the other. You remember when he was expelled from Greyfriars?’