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

Author:Maxim Jakubowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Fulham Strangler

Keith Moray

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

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