The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

‘The villains may trace the gun to you instead.’

‘I hope they may,’ he said, lighting his pipe from a long spill.

‘They will find me well prepared for them.’

Such chivalry was characteristic of my friend, but, as you shall see, he was to pay dearly for it.

Three years had passed since that windy January night on Hampstead Heath and I had long ago assured myself that we and the world had heard the last of Charles Augustus Milverton. How mistaken I was!

There are few greater horrors in life than when a constant companion, a husband, wife, or child, sets out from home in the most usual way and never returns. It is surely worst of all when there is no message, no report of a death, injury, derangement, or desertion. I had not even seen Sherlock Holmes set out from our Baker Street rooms on a spring morning in 1902, though the sound of his feet on the stairs and his shout to Mrs. Hudson told me he was going.

He did not return that evening. I was used to his mysterious absences for several days when he had an important investigation in hand. We had recently been occupied in ‘The Case of the Naked Bicyclists,’ which led to the bizarre circumstances of the Moat Farm Murder.
*
Yet there was nothing in this investigation to take Holmes away so unaccountably.

All the same, I waited. After a few days longer, I began each morning by running my finger down the small ‘wants’ and ‘offers’ in the personal column of the
Morning Post
. This was our regular means of communication in such emergencies. The codes we used were known only to each other and might be seen in the press by millions of readers who would be none the wiser. Each of these little announcements was prefaced by the two letters NB for ‘nota bene.’ To the uninitiated, they appeared to be mere puffs for well-known products or services, unusual in a column of this kind but without being exceptional. NB marked them out.

The signal that invariably opened our communication was ‘Rowlands Antimacassar Oil.’ Since one example saves many words, let me suppose that Holmes had gone suddenly to a secret address in London and wished me to join him. After the antimacassar oil advertisement, the next NB would name a city or county. In this case it might be ‘“London Pride” Pipe Tobacco. Threepence an ounce.’ So much for that day’s column, which gave me ‘London.’ Next day NB might add ‘Grand Atlantic Hotel, Weston-super-Mare. Preferential Rates Available.’ Knowing already that he was in London, I would merely count the letters of this second message and make a total of 60. From our folders of London maps I would draw sheet number 60 of the Ordnance Survey’s invaluable microcosm of the capital. As those who use it will know, sheet 60 covers the Paddington area from Hyde Park in the south to the Regents Park canal in the north and from Chepstow Place, Bayswater, in the west to Seymour Place in Marylebone. Further down the column might be a second NB announcement. ‘Bisto Makes Tasty Soups.’ That would be all. Counting the letters in each word I would find 5 +5 +5 +5.

We had divided the vertical and horizontal edges on our maps into 100 equal lengths. Therefore 5 +5 and 5 +5 would stand for 55 by 55. On this basis I would take sheet 60 and measure 55 from the east, along the bottom of the map, and 55 from the north, down its left-hand side. Using a ruler, I would discover that the two lines from these points would intersect on the west side of Spring Street, almost within the shadow of the great railway terminus at Paddington station. The invaluable Ordnance Survey marks each dwelling house, though no more than a millimeter in size. For whatever reason, in this example Holmes would be found at 8, Spring Street, Paddington, to which I must make my way.

It was rarely indeed that we had recourse to such secret and unbreakable codings, which covered not only locations but a variety of necessary information. By this time, I had been Holmes’s companion and colleague for more than a dozen years. You may imagine that we had planned for most contingencies. Yet no one outside an insane asylum could have anticipated the horrors which beset us in the spring of this fateful year. The days passed and the
Morning Post
personal column bore no messages.

A week went by, ten days, a fortnight. I inquired after those ‘found drowned,’ after victims of road accidents, the subjects of inquests from murder to suicide. I visited mortuaries in Lambeth, St. Pancras, and Chelsea. It was to no avail. I put aside my aversion to my friend’s addictions, and gained entry to dockside lofts and cellars frequented by the opium smokers of Limehouse and Shadwell. I half mentioned my fears to our friends at Scotland Yard, saying that Holmes had gone off I knew not where. Lestrade and Gregson pulled wry faces, chuckled, and suspected that Mr. Holmes was ‘up to his old tricks.’ After all, what could they do with such information as I had to offer them? I did not think he was up to any tricks.

If you have read my account of his final encounter with Professor Moriarty in 1891, the dreadful struggle on the brink of the falls of Reichenbach, the plunge into the swirling waters, you may recall that this was preceded by weeks—perhaps months—of anticipation. Holmes would close the shutters on entering a room, as if against an assassin’s bullet, saying, ‘It is stupidity rather than courage to ignore the danger when it is close upon you.’ This was so unlike his usual self-assurance that I worried, all those years ago, if he was well. He looked even paler and thinner than usual.

Then, on a single day in the course of that year, there had been three attempts on his life. In the morning, as he walked the short distance from our rooms to the corner of Bentinck Street and Welbeck Street, a two-horse van was driven straight at him, full-pelt. He sprang for the footpath and saved himself by a fraction of a second as the van disappeared. Within the hour, walking down Vere Street, he escaped death by an even smaller margin when a large brick from one of the house roofs shattered at his feet. The police were summoned but concluded that the two-horse van was driven by a madcap and that the wind had blown the brick from a pile of materials waiting to be used in repairing the upper storey of the house. That very evening there was a direct attempt against him in a dark street, when a ruffian with a bludgeon tried to knock his brains out. The fellow found to his cost that he was knocked cold instead by his intended victim and given in charge to the police.

By contrast, there had been nothing of this sort in the present case. Just then my friend was still engrossed in the matter of the Moat Farm murder. Nothing in that afforded a reason for attempted assassination! Yet at the time of the earlier threats—and often since then—Holmes had talked of the great criminal conspiracies underlying crimes that might appear separate and unconnected. He called it ‘some deep, organizing power which forever stands in the way of law, and throws its shield over the wrongdoer.’ The men who wielded such power would surely give all they possessed to eliminate Sherlock Holmes. He claimed that he had felt their presence even when the mystery of a case had been solved—and in other cases in which he was not personally consulted. When Professor Moriarty had been unmasked, Holmes thought at first that he had beheaded the monster of criminal conspiracy. Instead, like the Hydra, it had lost one head only to grow many more.

Moriarty was dead, there were no two ways about that. Yet I now began to speculate on the names of men who had particular cause to wish the destruction of Sherlock Holmes or, as was often the case, had paid with their lives but had left behind others who might be no less passionate for his downfall. In the recent past he had been the means of sending to prison for fifteen years Herr Hugo Oberstein, the international agent in the case of the secret Bruce Partington submarine plans. He had protected and exonerated those who rid the world of Giuseppe Giorgiano of the Red Circle, a fiend who had earned the nickname of Death in southern Italy. Oberstein was behind bars and Giorgiano was dead, but the one had a foreign government loyal to him and the other a gang of cutthroats sworn to vengeance. I confess that, at this stage, the name of Charles Augustus Milverton had not so much as crossed my mind.

After three weeks there was one person whose assistance I had not sought and to whom I must confide my fears. Mycroft Holmes, of Pall Mall and the Diogenes Club, was now the government’s chief interdepartmental adviser. He must be told of his younger brother’s disappearance. ‘Not only is he an adviser to the British government,’ Sherlock Holmes had once said to me, ‘on occasion he
is
the British government.’ All the same, I did not see what Brother Mycroft could do now. It was a terrible thing to admit to myself, but after a few weeks instinct assured me that I should never more see him whom I have always known to be the best and wisest of men.

If you have the patience to read what follows, you will find that I was wrong, though in what condition I saw him was another matter. By then Sherlock Holmes appeared as a man who has the shadow of the hangman’s rope upon him. You will also understand why this narrative could not have been made public at an earlier date. Even now, I have wondered from time to time whether it would not be best to burn all the notes and the evidence, to let the tale die with me. It was never one that we discussed often in the future. Yet I hear that voice again in my mind. ‘If you are an honest man, Watson, you will set this record against my successes.’ It may be that, in this case, posterity will judge that Sherlock Holmes succeeded to an extent he never equaled, either before or since.

*
For an account of this adventure see ‘The Case of the Naked Bicyclists’ in Donald Thomas,
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice from the Crypt
, Carroll
&
Graf, 2002.

‘William Sherlock Scott Holmes! You stand charged that you, with other persons not in custody, did willfully murder Charles Augustus Milverton, at Hampstead in the County of Middlesex, upon the sixth day of January in the year 1899. How say you? Are you guilty or not guilty of the charge wherewith you have been indicted?’

Holmes had known from the first that they meant to murder him, come what might. The semblance of a trial continued during the evenings of three days, but these preliminaries to his execution had been devised solely to make his death more gratifying to them. When the ritual was over, the memory of the proceedings haunted his sleep every night in the time they allowed him before he was to be hanged. Ever y night, in that well-ordered mind, the nightmare took a precise form.

‘The dream,’ as he afterwards called it, began invariably with a jolt, like a great heartbeat of warning or fright, which brought him from the depths of unconsciousness to the mists of a drugged hyoscine sleep. Then there began the calling of his names and the indictment.

In his dream, he struggled to repudiate the two self-appointed judges who sat beyond a sunburst of arc light. Except for the brief moments when they seated themselves or left their places, he had seen them only as an actor sees the rows of an audience through a haze of limelight. In the nightmare of light, his mouth moved but his throat remained silent and impotent to answer. During his waking ordeal, a week previously, he had said simply and clearly, ‘It is a matter of fact that I killed Charles Augustus Milverton. I did so to rid the world of a noxious villain. I did it alone. I would do it again and think my own life not too great a price to pay.’

‘Your gallantry in protecting your friend Dr. Watson is commend- able,’ the voice said sardonically. ‘It is wasted, however. It will not prevent him from standing where you stand now. You fled in his company and were seen to do so. The matter of a young woman on the premises is also under our investigation.’

‘You are in error. Charles Augustus Milverton died by my hand and I required no assistance.’

‘Guilty or not guilty!’ the voice rapped out. ‘Make your plea!’

‘A man does not plead to gangsters and impostors.’

‘Then you shall be entered mute of malice, as if pleading not guilty,’ said the voice behind the arc light, ‘and your trial shall proceed at once.’

He could have sworn he recognised the voice of this presiding ‘judge.’ Yet it had belonged to that man whom he had seen most efficiently shot dead at Appledore Towers, Hampstead, by a young woman’s silver revolver three years earlier. Indeed, we had read the report of the inquest on Charles Augustus Milverton in the
Times
with its verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown.’

Two dimly defined figures faced him from behind a broad oak table. Beyond them stood a man in a prison warder’s uniform of some kind, a person whom they addressed as Master-at-Arms. He was to guard and, if necessary, subdue the handcuffed prisoner. Holmes, seated on an upright wooden chair, had been weakened by the hypnotic that had kept him unconscious for many hours. He might have been a lone prisoner at the far end of the earth for all that he could tell.

As the voice behind the light talked on, in its mockery of the judicial process, he strove to calculate how long he had been kept in a drug-induced coma. The opening of his ‘trial’ was the first day of full consciousness. Even then, his coldly rational intellect was at work behind the fuddled eyes. Holmes had no memory of how he came to be there, apart from recalling a taste in his mouth. Yet that taste was everything to him just now. It had been sweetish, partially disguising something salt and harsh. That was his first clue. He knew that the sweetness was merely sugar of milk, universally employed to make medicine palatable. The harshness that it veiled was surely hyoscine hydrobromide, an hypnotic that can wipe from the patient’s mind all memory of events heard, seen, or felt during the period of its operation.

Sherlock Holmes the analytical chemist, with his extensive apparatus in our Baker Street rooms, had tested hyoscine once or twice with a fingertip taste. The memory of it was as securely catalogued in that invincible mind as if it had been entered in the files of St. Mary’s Hospital or the Radcliffe Laboratories. He knew better than any man how powerful a weapon the narcotic might be in the hands of the criminal world. Those who had drugged him evidently knew no more than that it would erase the memor y of subsequent events and had made the mistake of believing that the memory of tasting and taking it would be lost as well. Meanwhile, Holmes confronted them behind their shield of light. He must first discover who these enemies were, where he was, and how they had brought him there.