Moriarty (8 page)

“Yes, but I'll talk about it to the Professor.”

“Good.” Terremant nodded, no feeling in his voice.

“None of our business.” Spear shook his head.

“Oh, I think you'll find it is,” Daniel Carbonardo said with the ghost of a smile.

P
ROFESSOR
J
AMES
M
ORIARTY
sat back in his favourite chair, facing the fire and looking up at the Duchess of Devonshire, who always calmed his mind when things became difficult and his thoughts were frayed. He often wondered how a painting had the power to calm him, but there was no denying it. The Duchess did have that effect.

The whole business with Carbonardo naturally worried him. One of his young shadows had followed the assassin to the Glenmoragh Private Hotel with instructions to report back once Carbonardo had taken his leave.

The lad had, of course, returned with the startling news that his mark had been hustled out and into a hansom—an unexpected turn of events.

Moriarty had chosen these boys, some fifteen lads aged between thirteen and sixteen years, mainly for their fitness. They had to have stamina, he told them, and Terremant had brought him unusually good specimens—unusual because most street boys of that age were poor cases, what with the hard life and unappetizing and sometimes meagre victuals. Terremant's lads were in the main fit, strong, and intelligent.

The particular boy on the Carbonardo watch, a fourteen-year-old called William Walker, was a runner, able to keep up with the cab in which Carbonardo was spirited away, or at least keep it in sight so eventually he was there, watching the doors of the notorious house to which the assassin was taken. He also had the presence of mind to stay hidden nearby, even during the cloudburst that came an hour or so later. So he was quite near to the door when the bedraggled and shaken Carbonardo was brought out of the house, and he clearly heard one of the brutish rampsmen tell a cabbie to take him back to Hoxton. “To his own gaff. He'll show you the way,” the tough had added.

Billy Walker quite clearly heard the cabbie reply, “All Sir Garnet, Sidney,”
*
and he noted that the rampsman was a burly oaf with a shaved head and a nasty scar running from the corner of his mouth, “as if someone had tried to enlarge his norf and sarf.”

Billy Walker then showed intelligence by coming straight back to the Professor, who had quickly summoned another of the boys—Walter Taplin—and sent him, posthaste, to Poplar to seek out the Praetorians.

Many men in Moriarty's position would have worried, counting the minutes—all dragging like hours—before his old lieutenants reappeared with or without the hapless Carbonardo. But James Moriarty had trained himself to sterner stuff. He was not a man to chew his fingernails or worry himself into all manner of stews. There was nothing he could do about the situation, so he sat back, enjoyed looking at the Duchess, and thought how comparatively lucky he was. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as the Good Book says.

As he sat, warmed by the fire and the balloon glass of good brandy at his elbow, he thought long about times gone by, musing on his childhood back in Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin, some thirty-five or -six years previously; and before that, dimly, as if through a mist, he remembered the farm, out in County Wicklow, where he had been born. Then he thought of his mother, God rest her, Lucy Moriarty, the kind and saintly woman who was one of the best cooks ever to come out of the Emerald Isle. How did she find the time to do everything? For she also taught the piano and, oddly, he was the only son who had any talent in that direction. As he thought of his dearly loved
mother, Moriarty absently ran his right thumbnail down his cheek, from just below the eye to his jawline.

Lucy Moriarty did not tie herself to one particular family, but hired herself out to households and organizations, having a set tariff for banquets, meals of celebration, or special occasions—
any number of guests, from three to three hundred upwards
, as her advertisement proclaimed. She had, it was known, been called to cook for royalty and for great men of the land, and many of her dishes could never be beaten by other equally talented cooks. It was said that her steak-and-kidney pie was the food of angels (the pastry being the lightest and most meltingly succulent that even truly knowledgeable palates would ever taste); that her lobster cocktail was ambrosia; and that a man would have to walk the length and breadth of Europe to enjoy the equal of her beef Wellington and horseradish.

Lucy Moriarty's one failing in life was her marriage. Her husband, Sean Michael Moriarty, the schoolmaster, was a man of irrational temper and a drunkard to boot. Sean Moriarty gave his wife three fine sons and precious little else. He treated his sons as though they were whipping boys to his conscience, and when he had finished leathering them he would, often as not, take his belt to his wife.

Until she could stand it no longer.

Moriarty could still clearly remember the night when his mother gathered up all three children and stole out of the house, leaving the cruel and unruly Moriarty asleep in his chair, deep in an alcoholic stupor. Which was how he spent most Saturday nights.

Lucy Moriarty had managed to squirrel away a substantial nest egg from her cooking jobs, and on that fateful night she had money enough to pay the fares for herself and the three boys on the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, where her sister Nelly lived in comparative peace with her kind and hardworking docker husband.

Sean Moriarty never came in search of his family, and Lucy paid her parish priest for Masses of thanksgiving (never, of course, telling the priest the details or reason for her giving thanks lest Father O'Flynn counsel her to return to Sean and make good their marriage). She also said countless novenas to the Blessed Virgin, praying that Sean Moriarty would continue to be absent from hearth and home.

The strange thing about the Moriarty family, growing up in Liverpool, was that the three boys were all blessed, or more likely cursed, with the same Christian name—an eccentricity that could be laid at the door of their bibulous father.

The eldest was James Edward, the middle boy was James Ewan, and the youngest had been baptized James Edmund Moriarty. Among themselves they differentiated by using mainly diminutives—James, Jamie, and Jim. All three, however, seemed to have inherited some talents from their clever, but flawed, father. The eldest, James, was a natural scholar, specializing early in mathematics. The middle son, Jamie, had organizational skills, plus a natural aptitude for the mathematics of war; he excelled in such things as the game of chess, and had a deep knowledge of history of famous battles, his favourite books being the works of great military thinkers such as von Clausewitz's
On War;
the great Chinese classic, Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
, and the similarly named
Art of War
by Machiavelli; while the ninth-century work
The Tau of War
by Wang Chen was his favourite bedside book (not unexpectedly, these books were also favourites of the youngest Moriarty). Inevitably, James was marked early in life for an academic career, while Jamie seemed destined for a military life.

So what of James Edmund, Jim to his brothers? Jim was the most secretive of the trio, guarded, with a cold touch of his father's legendary brutality. The one difference was that he kept that coldness and innate cruelty in check. He was also blessed with organizational
skills that showed at an early age, when he drew around him boys whom he could lead into skulduggery—real skulduggery, not simply high-spirited youthful japes. By the age of fifteen, Jim Moriarty had led his cronies in a robbery that made the headlines in Liverpool, the theft of over three hundred bottles of fine wine and brandy from a secure warehouse in the docks area. A few months later, the same gang broke into a city jeweller's strong room and lifted thousands of pounds' worth of necklaces, rings, and other items. These are among the first things mentioned in the
Moriarty Journals
, which he began writing at the age of fifteen.

Back in Dublin, Sean Moriarty died suddenly of an unexpected ailment—a street robbery—when Jim was only sixteen years of age. Interestingly, he does not confess to this wanton crime (in the
Journals
), but he does admit to being away from home for five days coinciding with his father's death. Sean Moriarty was found beaten with iron bars and robbed of what little money he had on him. The crime brought a comment from a Dublin coroner, who remarked, “A man can hardly walk the length of his own shadow these days without being set upon by hooligans or rampers: getting as bad here as it is reported in England. Which is saying something.”

James, the eldest, flourished academically, eventually studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, and quickly making his way in the world of academe, while Jamie joined the army and was eventually commissioned. For a time, Jim disappeared and was rumoured to be working for the railways as a stationmaster in the West of England.
*

The one thing that is, to quote Albert Spear, “plain as Salisbury” is
the growing pathological jealousy that grew in the youngest Moriarty's heart against his eldest brother. That, combined with the increasing suspicions of the authorities, led him to take the terrible steps that began to form the great plan for his future as a superlative criminal mastermind.

The immortality of the eldest brother, James, was assured early with his treatise on the binomial theorem, coupled with the Chair of Mathematics at one of Britain's smaller universities, and it was only when the youngest brother first visited James in that quiet intellectual backwater that he realized what fame his brother had already achieved. Moriarty would never forget that day: the tall and stooping boy he remembered now transformed into a man to whom deference was shown on all sides. The letters from famous men, congratulations and flattery; the already half-completed work on
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
lying on the smugly neat desk facing the leaded window looking out onto the quiet courtyard.

He thought now, as he waited in his makeshift rooms on the edge of Westminster, that it was during that visit so many years ago that he knew the full flush of envy as he saw James's real potential. His brother would undoubtedly become a great and respected man—and this at a time when he, Jim Moriarty, was harried on all sides, desperately trying to build himself into a man to be feared and respected within the criminal hierarchy of, first, London, and then the whole of Europe.

At the time of that first visit to the up-and-coming professor, young Moriarty had suffered a number of setbacks and more than anything, he needed some way of showing the underworld that he was truly a man of strength, a force with which to be reckoned, a leader with unique skills.

It was only after Professor James Moriarty was acclaimed for his
work
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
that the professor's youngest brother saw clearly the way in which he could both further himself and scour the torment of envy from his brain. After all, he, more than any other person, knew his elder brother's weaknesses.

By the later 1870s, the tall, gaunt, and stooped professor, old before his time, was becoming a public figure. His mind, it was claimed, bordered on genius, his star seeming to be set ready for a rapid rise into the academic stratosphere. The newspapers wrote of him and there were predictions of a new appointment: the Chair of Mathematics would shortly be vacant at Cambridge, and it was common knowledge that the professor had already turned down two similar posts on the Continent.

The time was ripe for the youngest Moriarty to act, and, as with all things, he laid his plans as meticulously as the professor in his world used science.

Among his acquaintances, the young Moriarty had fostered the friendship of an elderly actor of the blood-and-thunder school, Hector Hasledean, a thespian whose one-man performances, in which he presented a striking range of Shakespearean characters from the hunchback Richard III to the old and embittered King Lear, were still much in demand.

Hasledean was by this time in his late sixties, and drew freely upon a lifetime of theatrical experience. A flamboyant figure in both private and public life, the actor, though much given to the bottle, had a huge well of talent, still retaining the ability to move audiences with his range of emotions but also dazzling through his ability to change his appearance. Audiences marvelled at this talent, and young Moriarty set out to learn from him the tricks of that particular trade.

Always certain of his victims' weaknesses, young Moriarty became an invaluable friend to the ageing actor, plying him with gifts of good
wines and expensive spirits. He quickly won the actor's confidence, and one night before Hasledean lapsed into total fuddlement, Moriarty made his first approach.

He explained that he would like to play a trick on his famous brother and now sought the actor's help in teaching him the art of disguise—in particular, how he could appear before his famous brother as a replica of the great man. The idea appealed to the actor, who totally entered into the spirit of things, working with the younger man and teaching him the rudiments of disguise: choosing the right kind of bald-pate wig with the assistance of the greatest expert of the day, supervising the making of special boots with “lifts” to give the added height, and designing a harness to help the young man maintain the required stoop. He also bade his pupil study the best books on makeup and disguise: Lacy's
Art of Acting, A Practical Guide to the Art of Making-Up
by Haresfoot and Rouge, and the more recent
The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts
by A. J. Cooley.

In a matter of some four weeks, the youngest Moriarty was able to transform himself into an almost unbelievable likeness of his revered brother. But this was only half the task, for Hasledean was now able to teach him the deeper secrets of becoming another character: the hours of preparation, the steeping himself in the known facts and thoughts of the professor, immersing himself in his brother's way of life: his past, present, and the goals and desires of his future.