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required. After that it would be a matter of dealing with the guilty party, silencing forever the man who was betraying him and those who trusted him.
    There were three of them and Spear.
    Through the same man, the solicitor, who was named Perry Gwyther, senior partner in the firm of Gwyther, Walmsley and Mercer, solicitors of unimpeachable good name, he arranged to have some of his own furnishings brought out of storage and taken to the house, where he personally oversaw the work of the good and honest man charged with making the rooms comfortable and to the Professor’s liking: by name George Huckett of Hackney, Builder & Decorator, as he styled his business. In due course Moriarty would have the whole house restored, decorated, and furnished to his satisfaction, but for now the rooms in which he lived were enough and in good order. He had this living and working room, a bedroom, and a small room where simple food could be prepared. Next to the bedroom, George Huckett arranged for his plumber, by name “Leaky” Lewis, to fit up a bathing room with a hand washbasin and a deep, raised bath on stylish claw feet—the water heated by a coke-burning stove under a great tank in the house’s old basement kitchen and pulled upstairs by one of the newfangled electric pumps.
    The house was only partially wired for the electric light, and in due course, when the entire house had been done, he thought he would perhaps have the revolutionary new telephonic apparatus connected. Moriarty was a man who rarely dismissed new inventions as passing fads. He was farsighted and could see how things like electricity and the more recent form of telephone communication, even wireless, couldwell assist him in his endeavours. The solicitor, Gwyther, maintained that within a couple of decades everyone would possess wireless receiving sets through which they would listen to the world’s great symphony orchestras and outstanding actors. This would, Gwyther contended, hail the advent of a new understanding of great music, drama, and literature, for the most common of men would have access to the arts, in their own homes. Moriarty did not know how he felt about this, for he imagined that a universal entrée to the arts might well lead to them being devalued, and he liked things to retain their value.
    Turning back into the room, Moriarty lit a wax taper from the fire, adjusted the wicks, and lighted his two oil lamps, simple brass pieces, each with a tall classic column on which stood the oil reservoir and lamp, each capped by a tall glass funnel rising from inside a decorated opaque glass globe. The light from the two lamps, one on his desk—a davenport with a piano front—the other on a drum table at the rear, spilled out as though filling the room with warm sunlight, giving the illusion of an added depth to the cream, gold-flecked heavy wallpaper and a fresh gleam to the polished furniture. Somehow, James Moriarty preferred the soft lamplight to the harsher glare from the electric light.
    Now, the Professor advanced to the fireplace, above which hung the most striking item in the entire suite of chambers: the painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, possibly Thomas Gainsborough’s greatest portrait, painted in the 1780s and missing since May 25, 1876, when, on a warm, misty midnight, the Professor, with the help of Albert Spear and Philip Paget, gained access to the upper art gallery of Thomas Agnew & Sons, at 39a Old Bond Street in the heart of the West End of London, where he had cut and removed the priceless painting from its frame.
    On that night, almost a quarter of a century ago, the famous painting hung alone in Agnew’s first-floor gallery in Old Bond Street, acrimson silk rope keeping the more inquisitive viewers at a distance. This was where Moriarty first saw the painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, visiting 39a Old Bond Street on the very morning of its theft, joining the line of people