Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

I had reached a point in my paper where I describe the calculations for the two points on a sphere that correspond to any given point of the curved line upon a curved surface.

‘Hah!’ Moriarty’s exclamation interrupted my musings. ‘This is all very interesting to me.’ The flickering sneer had gone, replaced by an intense, dark gaze. ‘It’s not often people ask for me by name these days,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair, glancing upwards at the portrait on the wall. ‘Mathematics,’ he said. ‘The purest of the sciences. Gauss charted the path of the asteroid, not by looking outwards at the skies, but by looking inwards at the numbers. That’s what we mathematicians do. We find the glory of the heavens in the pure, abstract truths of calculation.’ He turned to look at me again. ‘The workings of numbers,’ he said. ‘So much more reliable than the workings of the human heart. I shall be happy to tutor you.’

And so began our collaboration.

Moriarty was not a warm person. There was something hidden about him, a coolness, a distance. But his brilliance was indisputable. He was often occupied with his own writings, a reworking of his early work on the binomial theorem. ‘Mere footnotes to Plato,’ he said to me once with a wry smile. ‘The balance between positive and negative, almost Manichean in its dualism.’ Sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mr Gifford, I’m an old man. It’s 1921. We have a new mathematics, we have general relativity, we have Hilbert and his unsolved problems. Worse than that, we have the legacy of this terrible war, the world turned upside down …’ An air of weariness would cross his face, and his eyes would appear hooded, almost blank. But then something in my calculations would awaken his interest again, and we’d be off, and I would once again be impressed at the quickness of his mind, and his deep love of his subject.

It was a friendly department. The tutors’ common room was oakpanelled and convivial, full of smoke and conversation. There was a fellow who had joined at the same time as me, a young Oxford chap named Roland Sadler, working on quadratic forms, and we used to share a pot of tea together most afternoons. I noticed that Moriarty was rather left alone. One of the tutors, when I said I was working with him, simply said, ‘Poor you.’ ‘Ah,’ someone else chipped in, ‘the arch nemesis, or so he likes to think,’ and there was laughter, not altogether kind. I was glad that the Professor wasn’t there to hear.

The head of the department was a Scotsman, Dr Angus McCrae. Amongst the other tutors was a new star, a woman named Dr Eveline Brennan. She had made her name at Girton, and had worked with the famous Isabel Maddison, teaching at Trinity College Dublin before joining our department. Some of the men were wary of her, but I liked her directness, her disregard for the social niceties. She called herself a New Woman, and rumour had it that she had studied martial arts with the suffragette Edith Garrud. She also was alone in being kind about Moriarty. ‘It’s thanks to him I got this position here,’ she confided in me once. ‘He said he admired my work on c- and p-discriminants.’

One can always see a pattern in retrospect, of course. But, at the time, to a mere observer, the unfortunate events unfolded in a succession that appeared to be entirely random. It all started in such a peculiar way. It was a sunny Monday morning, and we were variously engaged with our teaching, enjoying the sense of spring in the air, when there was a terrible noise from the quad. We ran to the windows to see two men fighting, right in the middle of the neat lawn. Real punches were being thrown, and we could see that one man was getting the worst of it, with a nasty cut across his jaw.

We ran down to the quad, Eveline ahead of us all. ‘Stop that now,’ she was shouting.

‘It’s the college porter,’ someone was saying. ‘Old Seamus.’

‘Who’s the other chap?’

‘No idea.’

‘Stop.’ It was Eveline’s voice ringing out. ‘Stop that. Stop that now.’

Her words had an extraordinary effect. The punches stopped. The strange man was standing, panting, staring at her, his fists clenched at his side. He had a shock of black hair, a cheap ragged jacket. Seamus the porter began to crawl away, one hand across his bleeding jaw.

Still the man’s dark eyes were fixed on Eveline. Then he spoke. ‘I came to find you,’ he said. ‘I’d heard you were here. But I didn’t dare to believe it.’

She was standing, illumined in the May sunlight, upright in her long black skirt, her starched white blouse. She spoke to him quietly, but, as I was nearby, I heard what she said. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said. Then she turned and strode away into the college, without looking back.

Roland had gone to help poor Seamus. The rest of us stood, awkwardly. The brawling man had slipped away. People began to drift back to their teaching. I was aware of someone standing at the windows above, and I looked up. Moriarty was staring down at the scene. I could see him, framed by the window of his room. And I could see that he was smiling.

That evening I went to meet Angela at the library. We would often go to a little Italian restaurant and I would buy her dinner, even if it meant eating nothing but toast for the rest of the week. This evening she insisted on paying for her own dinner. ‘You’re a New Woman,’ I teased her. ‘Like Eveline. You’ll be learning ju-jitsu soon too.’ Angela laughed in her sweet, shy way, her brown eyes half hidden behind her dark curls. I almost asked her to marry me there and then.

The next morning was damp and drizzly, and the atmosphere in the college was rather muted too. People whispered in corners. Roland told me that poor Seamus was clearly terrified, even though the strange man seemed to have disappeared. Moriarty too was distracted. I had come to show him my calculations on the isometric simplification of the two-body problem, but his gaze was often drawn to his own papers. ‘Dualism, Mr Gifford,’ he said to me, suddenly. ‘In Manichean terms, there is always the opposite. For every positive, the negative. The force that reaches upwards towards heaven is always balanced out by Lucifer, the fallen angel.’ Then he gave a strange, short laugh, reached for my calculations, scanned them with a glance and said, ‘Ah, but you see, remember your Kepler – given that we know the value of “M”, here, you still need to calculate the eccentric anomaly, here …’

And we were off again.

The next odd thing that happened was that later on that morning, while I was still with Professor Moriarty, we were interrupted by a knock on the door and Seamus appeared, carrying a large parcel of papers. ‘These were left at the lodge for you, sir,’ he said.

‘Hah!’ Moriarty seized the brown paper bundle. ‘Very good. How are the bruises?’ he asked.

‘On the mend, thank you, sir.’

‘You knew your attacker?’ Moriarty watched Seamus closely as he replied.

‘Oh yes, sir. Never thought I’d see him again though.’

‘An old grudge, perhaps?’ Moriarty yawned, and his eyes drifted back towards the newly delivered papers.

‘You could say that, sir.’ Seamus, seeing that Moriarty’s interest had waned, gave a brief bow and departed.

Moriarty placed his hand on the papers. ‘An explanation, Mr Gifford,’ he said. ‘I have a brother. Well, I have two, but this concerns my younger brother. He’s a stationmaster in Dawlish. There’s an old family matter outstanding that he’s trying to clear up. He always was the guardian of these things. A mild-mannered, moral sort of man, never leaves the West Country, but he has deemed this business sufficiently important to visit the capital. Our other brother is a colonel and mostly overseas.’ He flicked briefly through the first of the files then turned back to me. ‘Enough. To work, Mr Gifford. Kepler’s equation awaits us.’