Free Moriarty by John Gardner Page A

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 organizationalskills 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” isthe 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