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moving steadily through the main gallery and up the stairs to where Gainsborough’s masterpiece was the sole item on display in the long upper room.
    He was drawn to look at the painting not through any desire to observe a work of art, but to view something that had already sold for ten thousand pounds sterling, the highest price so far ever paid for a painting. And at that time it was reliably rumoured that Agnew was about to sell the work to Junius Spencer Morgan as a gift for his son J. Pierpont Morgan—now, almost a quarter of a century later, the prime controller of American Finance, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the United States of America.
    Indeed on that very afternoon in the present—January 15, 1900—James Moriarty had heard another whisper: that the original painting was about to be returned to the Agnew family, having been discovered in New York. Indeed he knew this to be “true” because he had arranged for an exceptional forgery to be smuggled into New York in the first place, and found in the second, plus identified in a roundabout way the original thief as being a confidence trickster called Adam Worth. * Once Worth was publicly accused and the forgery had changed hands, becoming the accepted true and original painting, the Professor could relax. †
    The forger, one Charlie “The Draughtsman” Dainton of Camber-well, had a head start on other copyists, for Moriarty allowed him to paint his brilliant replica while looking at the original; then, when everything was done and tidy, he took Charlie out on a celebratory picnic near the old university city of Oxford—ham, pickles, tomatoes, a large veal-and-ham pie with hard-boiled eggs, a flask of fruit salad, and an excellent bottle of Puligny-Montrachet that they cooled in the river, hanging the bottle in the water by a strong cord.
    They sat on a secluded, willow-screened patch of grass, close to a riverside public house called The Rose Revived, and when The Draughtsman was sated with food and mellow with the wine, Moriarty leaned over and thanked him for his expertise and friendship, clasping, for a second, both of the forger’s hands in his. Then, as the forger smiled happily, the Professor slit his throat, holding down his hands until he bled out and his lungs collapsed. After that he weighed down the body with chains and old pig iron—which he had conveniently brought with him in a large trunk strapped to the rear step of his gig—then tipped the body into the river, washing the blood from his hands as he did so.
    The body of Charlie Dainton was never recovered; it was as though he had never been.
    This was on a Sunday evening during July of the previous year, so, having disposed of the only other person who could have given the game away, James Moriarty repaired to choral evensong in the chapel of Christ Church College, where the choir sang an anthem suitably based on the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “And a Man Shall Be as Rivers of Water in a Dry Place,” a piece composed by Moriarty himself and sent, under an assumed name, to the choirmaster with a hint that he might be in the congregation on that day. After evensong, Moriarty walked around the corner to the Mitre Hotel, where hedined on roast beef followed by summer pudding, washed down with a pleasant burgundy.
    Moriarty rarely thought of The Draughtsman again, except for those occasions when he regretted the fact that the man was not there when he could have been of assistance in pulling off some criminal endeavour.
    And here, now, in the present, above his mantel in this suite of rooms close to Westminster, hung the true original, in all its glory: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, formerly Georgiana Spencer, half turned to her left with her right shoulder square to the spectator, a blue silk sash setting off her white dress, curls roiling from under a black feathered hat, her pert face closed as if holding a secret known only to