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

“I waste nothing,” Moriarty told him. “But branded pigs are difficult to sell whole.”

Irving stared at the fork, raised it into his mouth, then chewed and swallowed the mouthful of flesh.

“My offer does not include any of the value from the ship or cargo,” Moriarty clarified. “You did not assist in their acquisition.”

“Well, I reckon we might accept the job offer then,” Irving replied, once his mouth was clear, glancing at Nora for her approval. They had both agreed that they would make the decision together.

“Yes, we shall,” Nora agreed.

“Of course, you will.” Moriarty nodded. “What other choice could you make? I shall organise rooms and money in London for you. I have plans there.”

As he sat at the table, finishing his breakfast, Irving Beck glanced at Nora Crogan and James Moriarty and realised that he had been mistaken in his previous beliefs. The world was not full of victims. The world was full of conniving thieves and villains, who were sophisticated and organised, constantly pursuing a chance to progress in the world, unconcerned about how they affected anyone else.

He could be one them, or he would be nothing at all.

London, 1888

Life had been extinguished in an instant. A single sharp blow with a wooden cube, an executioner’s block, and whatever sentience a spider might have was either obliterated or immediately sent into a higher plane to join the creatures who had lived before it and trapped millions of assorted insects in their webs. It was the penalty it paid for having the temerity to walk over the desk where the experiment was being conducted.

At other times, Professor James Moriarty might have given the creature’s life and that of its ancestry some academic thought. A mathematical genius, whom some said rivalled the great Fibonacci himself, Moriarty had written a treatise on the binomial theorem at the age of twenty-one, a book on The Dynamics of an Asteroid and numerous academic papers on subjects as diverse as the invention of zero and the limits of growth of the human brain. His mind revelled in both pure and applied mathematics and sought distractions in abstruse problems such as the population explosion of spiders. Yet on this bleak, smoggy day in London, when other more mundane problems demanded his attention, he was less inclined towards frivolous pursuits.

He wiped the mangled arachnid body from the bottom of the die, one of the three pairs of dice that he had been experimenting with, and immediately cast the dice on the desk.

‘Two and five and three. Ten again!’

He added the total to the row of figures he had been recording, each entry precisely made in his scholarly hand. Had anyone been looking in on his study, that is precisely what they would have seen. A scholarly gentleman with pince-nez spectacles resting on an aquiline nose. An aesthetic man with a Shakespearean brow, receding black hair swept back and piercing, unemotional eyes. His posture was slightly stooped, presumably from years of bookish study. Indeed, the impression of a man of learning would have been entirely correct, for Professor James Moriarty had previously held the chair of mathematics at Durham University for several years, before his contretemps with the university senate that saw his departure for London, a spell of private tutoring of prospective Army candidates while he established and built his somewhat unique business empire.

There was a tap on the door that evoked a curt call to enter from the professor. The oak door opened and an elderly manservant with neutral, almost transparent hair entered. He was carrying a silver tray upon which were a glass of claret and an envelope.

‘Are your dice calculations going well, Professor?’

Moriarty eyed the servant dispassionately. As he did so his head oscillated slightly from side to side in a manner evocative of a reptile sizing up its prey. It was a look that the man knew well, but which never failed to produce a disagreeable shiver of discomfort at the base of his spine.

‘They are, Joshua. Entirely as Galileo predicted, with three dice the total of ten will show up more often than the total of nine. Totally predictable, of course, since there are two hundred and sixteen possible combinations with three dice. Of these, there are twenty-seven combinations that form a total of ten and twenty-five that form a total of nine.’ He sat back and sneered. ‘Unbelievable that the Duke of Tuscany paid the greatest scientist of his day to solve such a minor problem.’

Joshua, a family servant since the professor’s childhood, who had seen to his master’s personal needs since then, placed the glass of claret on the desk and laid the envelope in front of him. ‘And does this mathematical curio alter the instructions that are given to your gaming house managers, Professor?’

‘Not a whit, Joshua! Not one whit. They will still use the Fulhams and the tappers as usual to give the houses an edge. And they will be backed up by the enforcers if anyone is inadvertently caught in the act. The usual disposal methods are to be used.’

He sat back and sipped his wine, his eye falling momentarily upon the blank area on the wall where, until so recently, his prized painting La Jeune Fille à l’Agneau , by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, had resided. Losing it only a few days before had been partly responsible for his present state of irritability, manifested in the ruthlessness with which he was prepared to dispense death to spider or any creature who dared to cross his path, and the reason why he had sought to distract his mind with dice problems. He found that when he wanted to develop a plan his mind worked best when it had several things to think about.

‘So, tell me, has O’Donohue received the consignment?’

‘He has, Professor. He said that it will be ready for you whenever you are ready.’

Idly, Professor Moriarty reached for the envelope, neatly labelled with his name, but without postage or other markings. ‘How did this message come?’

‘The usual courier.’

The professor opened it and drew out the note from within. It was written in code, which, as the inventor, he could read as if he were merely reading in one of the dozen languages in which he was fluent.

Joshua noticed the pinpoints of colour develop on his cheeks, a sure sign of anger, which could have any of a dozen consequences for someone.

‘They dare send me this!’ he said after a moment, his voice calm, but with a steely edge that was apparent to Joshua.

‘Is it ill tidings, Professor?’

‘For someone, Joshua. For anyone who thinks that I am someone that can be given instructions like a hireling.’

Sherlock Holmes had not bothered to remove his old grey dressing gown all day. Indeed, it had been his companion over most of the preceding three days, ever since he had solved the case of the missing cavalryman, to much acclaim from the journalists of the Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle , to say nothing of the gratitude passed on from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria’s inner circle, via a runner from Downing Street. Yet all this meant little to the great detective, who made no secret of the fact that he selected his cases for the sheer intellectual challenge they presented rather than for any promised honour or fiscal reward.

In the absence of a suitable case or conundrum to occupy his mind, he was wont to lapse into a fit of melancholy, which he assuaged either by playing his Stradivarius, or by using a seven per cent solution of cocaine or by smoking copious quantities of tobacco.

It was the latter that he had opted for on this occasion, thanks mainly to a promise he had made to his friend and chronicler, Dr John Watson, before he had departed to visit his ailing uncle in Norfolk. The violin lay unused in its case.