Chapter 772 - 772: 0772 The Name

"This is a rare occasion, Holmes."

Severus Snape looked at the Sherlock who had come to seek him out, a trace of mockery in his eyes.

"That you would come looking for me of your own accord."

Sherlock did not rise to the jibe. He simply said.

"The name."

Snape arched an eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?"

"That man's name," Sherlock said calmly. "I know you already have it."

Watching him, something weary and indifferent crossed Snape's face. "I can't say for certain the name is real, but the Dark Lord calls him Moriarty."

"Moriarty."

Sherlock repeated the name to himself under his breath, then, without another word, turned on his back and left.

Snape said nothing further either, and by the time the office door had swung shut, it was as though nothing had happened at all.

For a while after that, the others noticed that Sherlock had suddenly grown busy.

By rights this shouldn't have seemed strange—exams were approaching, and every student at Hogwarts had begun to revise.

But applied to Sherlock Holmes, it was more than a little odd. After all, from first year through sixth, he had never once altered his daily habits on account of an exam, and even so, he had come away every year with excellent marks.

There was even a rumour going round that if Sherlock had simply taken an interest in a few more of his subjects, Hermione Granger would never have placed first in their year.

This state of affairs went on for several days, until Hermione could no longer hold her tongue.

"Sherlock, what on earth have you been so busy with?"

"Research," Sherlock said, without so much as lifting his head.

Before him lay a great heap of papers, none of which, as it happened, had anything to do with the end-of-term exams—nor, for that matter, anything to do with magic at all.

Almost all of it was notes he had written out in his own hand, and even Hermione could only make out a portion with effort.

The trouble was that his thoughts leapt about too wildly—rather like a maths problem, where an ordinary person needs five steps to reach the answer and a genius needs only two or three. Under such circumstances, it was only natural that Hermione found it hard to follow.

Even so, she had gathered, more or less, what he was up to.

"So, you've already found him, haven't you?" she asked cautiously.

Sherlock smiled.

Partly for fear that others would disturb his train of thought, and partly for the sake of secrecy, he had not set foot in the common room this whole while, taking instead to spending every day in the Room of Requirement.

At present there was no one in the room but the two of them. Under ordinary circumstances, a lone man and a lone woman shut up together like this ought to have carried at least some faint air of impropriety.

Unfortunately, that lone man's name happened to be Sherlock Holmes—which had the effect of turning an otherwise perfectly ordinary situation thoroughly abnormal. Between them there was not the slightest hint of impropriety; quite the opposite, in fact. The air was filled with nothing but knowledge.

"My dear Hermione, I don't suppose you've ever heard of a Professor Moriarty?"

Rather than answering her directly, Sherlock put a question of his own.

"Never," said Hermione, shaking her head before catching herself. "Is he the mystery man you mentioned? You call him 'Professor'—don't tell me he was at Hogwarts once too?"

"No, no, no, you misunderstand. The reason he's called 'Professor' has nothing to do with magic." Sherlock's voice rose.

"Having spent this while studying the matter, I can say only one thing—truly, the world does produce men of genius, and wonders along with them! This man's influence extends across the whole of London, and yet not a soul has ever heard of him—which is precisely what has let his record of crime reach such dizzying heights.

I tell you in all seriousness, Hermione. even without Voldemort, even had I never come to the wizarding world at all, if I could defeat this man—if I could rid society of this piece of human refuse—then I should consider my own career to have reached its summit.

"And on the day that truly comes to pass, I mean to take up a rather quieter sort of life. Just as I've told you before, I could try my hand at love, as you're all so keen for me to, and devote myself properly to my chemistry besides. But—"

Here his gaze turned abruptly grave.

"So long as I have only to think of a man like Professor Moriarty still running unchecked through the streets of London, I cannot rest easy. I cannot sit idle in an armchair and do nothing. And of course, now that he has thrown in his lot with Voldemort, that fact alone makes it impossible for me to simply leave him be.

To defeat Voldemort, one must first face this professor. To put it more precisely even should we one day defeat the Dark Lord himself, if Moriarty is not brought to justice, then the criminal will not, in truth, have vanished at all."

Hermione drew a deep breath. "So—what exactly has he done? From what you're saying, his dealings have mostly been in the Muggle world, haven't they?"

"From what I've learned in this time, his record is far from ordinary. He comes of a good family, was excellently educated, and possesses an extraordinary gift for mathematics. At barely twenty-one he wrote a treatise on the binomial theorem that enjoyed a European vogue, and on the strength of it won a mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities. By all appearances, a brilliant career lay ahead of him.

"But just as I deduced before, the man inherited a most virulent strain from his forebears, and thanks to his extraordinary intellect, that criminal taint in his blood was not diminished but magnified, and rendered infinitely more dangerous. In that respect he is rather like Voldemort—a born criminal, plain and simple.

"At the university where he once held his chair, certain dark rumours about him circulated as well, and in the end he was compelled to resign and come to London, where he set himself up as an army coach.

"I must say, our Professor Snape has proven himself thoroughly trustworthy. Had he not tracked down this name, I daresay it would have been some while yet before I learned any of it. And of course, this much I was able to trace through various connections once I had the name Moriarty in hand—it is, in fact, all that most people know of him. What I mean to tell you now, however, is what I discovered on my own."

Hermione sat up at once, sensing that what came next was the crux of the matter.

"Hermione, you know me well."

"Yes, Sherlock. I know you very well."

"When it comes to the higher criminal circles of London, there is no one who knows them better than I do. I told you once before—over these past years I had already come to sense that behind those criminals lay some power, some deep and treacherous power that stood forever as an obstacle to the law, sheltering the men who did evil.

With the help of our dear Professor Snape, I seized upon the thread and followed it, hunting it down, and at last I found him—the eminent mathematician, the retired professor, Moriarty. And I owe no small part of this, of course, to the help of my dear brother."

At his words, something suddenly clicked into place for Hermione.

So that was it!

Had it been nothing more than learning a single name, then, going by the picture Sherlock had painted of this Professor Moriarty, dragging the man out into the open could never have been an easy task. But once Mycroft was brought into it, it was no longer any wonder at all.

"He is the Napoleon of crime, Hermione—I do not exaggerate in the slightest. Fully half the criminal activity in the whole of London is organised by him; one might almost say that nearly every crime that goes unsolved is his doing.

He is a genius, a philosopher, a thinker of the most profound depths—his is one of the very first order of minds our species has produced. He is like a spider crouched at the very centre of its web, perfectly still, and yet that web has a thousand radiating threads, and he can feel the quiver of every single one of them.

"He himself does little—he merely plots and advises. His agents are numerous, and organised with the greatest rigour. Say, for instance, that someone wishes to commit a crime, to steal a set of papers, to rob a household, even to murder a man.

One word passed to the Professor, and the matter is organised down to the last particular and carried through. Should one of his agents be caught, there is money enough to see him bailed out, or to mount his defence.

But the central figure directing these agents has never once been arrested—has never even come under suspicion. That, at least, is the structure of his organisation as I have deduced it.

"You'll recall that two years ago, Voldemort, having returned, suffered a heavy blow. That episode bought us precious time as well—time enough to find several of the Horcruxes and destroy them, one by one. But it was precisely in that same span of time that the Professor finally extended his reach into the wizarding world and struck an alliance with him. From that point on, Voldemort's manner of operating began to change.

"He broke into Azkaban, orchestrated a whole series of crimes across both the wizarding and Muggle worlds at once, and got control of Thickness early enough that we ourselves put the man in the seat of Minister for Magic. In the time that followed, he deceived every one of us—myself and Mycroft included—and drew the Ministry ever closer to the Order of the Phoenix and to Hogwarts.

Then he put forward Umbridge, a woman we all took for a failure, and set his plan moving one careful step at a time, like a frog brought slowly to the boil. And by the time we finally noticed something was wrong, he had already struck, and struck hard."

At this, Hermione couldn't help a shiver of dread. "So, the way things have suddenly taken such a turn for the worse these past months—all of that's been because of him?"

"It looks sudden. The trouble was laid long before," Sherlock said, with a short snort. "I imagine you still remember Black Light?"

"You mean the very first case we handled after coming to Hogwarts—the theft of Hannah Abbott's father's documents?" Hermione said at once, without pausing to think.

"Just so. The very man who slipped through the fingers of that useless Ministry, and who later, under the alias John Smith, masterminded the Greek Interpreter case. He, too, counted as a criminal of no small intellect, and a thoroughly vicious one at that and yet set beside Professor Moriarty, he is nothing more than a young baby.

"Having had two attempts at crime foiled in a row—the second, admittedly, not a clean success on our part—he fled into the Muggle world. And it was precisely then that he crossed paths with Professor Moriarty. I said a moment ago that he counted, in his own right, as a criminal of considerable intelligence and yet before Moriarty he simply did not measure up at all.

"It was under precisely these circumstances that Moriarty came to learn of the wizarding world's existence. One can well imagine how delighted this news must have made him. By my reckoning, from that point on he set about expanding his business into the wizarding world. Of course, being a Muggle with no magic of his own, Moriarty needed more time to lay his plans but time was all he needed.

"My deduction is this. it is Moriarty, and not Black Light, who was the true key to Voldemort's return. Indeed, for a very long stretch he kept himself concealed behind the scenes and never once showed his face to Voldemort—which is precisely what reveals how careful a man he is.

"On the night of the Triwizard Tournament's final task, the Death Eaters Voldemort had originally counted on were all but wiped out. However formidable his own personal power might be, there was no way for him, alone, to stand against the whole of the wizarding world.

And just when he found himself with almost nothing left to rely on but the Malfoy family, Moriarty finally stepped forward. By this time, he already understood Voldemort well enough, and Voldemort, for his part, needed precisely a man like him to furnish sufficient support. Drawing on Moriarty's intelligence, the two of them very nearly hit it off at once.

"Just as I have pointed out before, the resurrected Voldemort, for all he appeared to possess magical power and an army of Death Eaters, in truth carried a fatal flaw in his own designs.

He has always been governed by his fear of death, his fixation on Harry, and his obsession with pure-blood supremacy—his actions riddled with holes born of emotion. Take, for instance, how time and again his fixation led him to spare Harry, how his contempt for Muggle intelligence made him overlook the strength of the Muggle world, and how his own cruelty drove the Death Eaters to grow estranged from him.

Moriarty, by contrast, as a purely rational architect of crime, excels at precisely this. cold, emotionless, meticulous design, the manipulation of men's hearts, and the weaving of a web of influence with not a single gap in it. And this happens to be exactly the ability Voldemort lacks most."

Here Sherlock paused, a look of contempt crossing his eyes.

"I'll wager you a Galleon, Hermione, that the two of them are each merely using the other. As for Professor Moriarty—having discovered the wizarding world, this whole new, unexploited blue ocean of crime, he means to plant his feet firmly in it as quickly as possible, and to build a criminal network spanning both the Muggle world and the wizarding one. And Voldemort, who wants nothing less than to overturn the wizarding world's present order, is likewise the best possible instrument for that purpose.

"But in his eyes, Voldemort's magical power is merely a more potent tool for doing evil, and the Death Eaters nothing more than low-level pieces to be seized and set moving anew. His aim was never to help Voldemort conquer the wizarding world—it is, rather, to use Voldemort's own hand to turn the wizarding world into his private criminal garden."

Here Sherlock's gaze grew heavier than ever.

"In the end, he may even mean to supplant Voldemort himself, and become the uncrowned king of both the Muggle world and the wizarding one."

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