The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (42 page)

‘Despite the pillar between us in the Venetian Parlor, it is best to be inconspicuous. The best way is to dress as most people here are dressed. Lord Holder was kind enough to arrange it.’

‘Then who is at lunch?’

‘With Colonel Piquart’s assistance, I went to some trouble over the photographs he was kind enough to send me. I observed that each was marked with the date on which it was taken. One of those dates was no other than the day on which Colonel Moriarty paid his call upon our jeweller, Raoul Grenier, in Brussels. Therefore the man in the photographs could not be he. I had doubts about it from the first. On Colonel Piquart’s recommendation I applied to that most useful organisation in Paris, the Deuxieme Bureau. They were able to identify the man in the photographs as an accomplished swindler and fluent linguist, known in their records as Colonel Lemonnier. In his line of business, he naturally has a number of pseudonyms. Perhaps he sometimes calls himself Colonel Moriarty—I doubt it. Perhaps Colonel Moriarty sometimes calls himself Colonel Lemonnier, I doubt that too.’

‘And Lemonnier, no doubt, was one of the lesser breeds for whom a champagne buffet was provided and where no one would notice if a man was missing or not!’

‘Excellent, Watson. As for appearances, Colonel Moriarty has seldom been in England for the past seventeen years, since the so-called white-slave scandals. Few people would have much recollection of what he looked like. Fewer still would care to be his friends.’

‘But the theft has not been prevented. That seems the long and the short of it.’

Holmes sighed and leant back against the marble balustrade.

‘I have said, until I am wear y of saying so, that I have no wish to prevent it. If it is prevented, Colonel Moriarty goes to prison for a short term. If it is committed, he and I may settle matters in our own way.’

He now drew out his notebook and laid upon it three tiny wafers of steel, unfolded from tissue paper. The metal was dark and pliable, speckled by bright dust.

‘The other day, while you assisted our friend Jago by swinging a weight from his garde-robe window, I made a quick but meticulous survey of that room, the anteroom, and the post-room, whose doors were conveniently open. These wafers are magnetized steel. The powder is metallic dust, easily attracted when a delicate magnetized probe is inserted into a keyway. I obtained it by using one steel wafer in the Yale lock on the door that passes from the anteroom to the garde-robe, a second on the door between the garde-robe and the post-room, a third in the locks on the post-room cupboards until I found one which produced a similar result. It was the work of a minute.’

‘What is the dust?’

‘Bright steel with a low carbon content. The low content makes it easier to work in the construction of Yale-pattern locks. This is the residue from an attack on the mechanism of the three locks. The weapon was almost certainly a very fine diamond-head drill. The brightness of the dust confirms that the attacks were recent, no doubt while the rooms were still being used as offices and without a special guard. Even today, the post-room has no part in the ceremonial.’

He folded the metal wafers into his notecase again.

‘The Yale works on a novel principle. Other locks open by the key lifting the levers that hold the bolt in place. Unless the outline of the key matches the position and shape of the levers, it will not lift them. In a Yale, the entire lock turns, provided the contours of the key match those of the interior. Otherwise the key may not even thread the lock. With other locks a burglar may use two or three picks simultaneously. In the narrow Yale key way a thief can only insert one pick, which makes the method almost impossible.’

‘You presume that Colonel Moriarty prepared these locks in advance?’

‘There would have been no metal dust in the keyways otherwise. The interior of a Yale is a series of steel pins. Drill them all and there is no obstruction to a key of that make. It will turn the lock. For ever y pin you drill, the more likely that any other Yale key will turn it. Drill them all and there is no resistance to your key, but the lack of resistance would betray you. The trick is to drill two or three pins and work a fourth with a single pick. The two pins remaining provide to make it seem the lock is in order, moving easily as if freshly oiled.’

‘Every lock, surely, is different.’

‘Very few keys and locks are unique. Each firm has quite a small number of patterns. The odds that your door key will open another particular one are many thousands to one. You would not know which to try. That is of no use to a criminal. Yet every pin removed shortens those odds. When three have been removed and a fourth can be manipulated with a needle-probe, a man with a hundred keys of general stock pattern could probably open a lock. Indeed, the latchkey of 221b Baker Street came within an ace of moving the lock that separates the anteroom from the garde-robe.’

Behind us, on the stairs rose a hubbub of voices as the minor courtiers returned to be robed. The Lord Mayor’s chamberlain in black breeches and buckles, lace cuffs and collar, passed us with Inspector Jago in uniform and a City of London police superintendent. The chamberlain presented a key to the captain of the provost guard. The captain unlocked the oak double doors, than pushed them inward and wide to either side. The first dozen dignitaries whose cloaks or robes were mounted on the tailor’s dummies made their way into the anteroom, among them the tall and dignified Lord Holder and the stout gray-mopped figure of Lord Adolphus Longstaffe. The two provost sergeants who were to unlock the garde-robe at the far end and hand out the garments followed them respectfully.

Holmes motioned me onward, while he hung back. I kept to one side, in a corner of the anteroom by the window. The sergeants had unlocked the next door and now brought forward the robes, one at a time, and handed them to the chamber-grooms who would assist their patrons to put them on.

There were still fifteen or twenty minor courtiers in tunics and breeches, awaiting their cloaks or robes. To one side stood a belted earl and two attendants in scarlet with black braid. One of them caught my attention, as I watched from a little behind him and out of his present range of vision. He was tall, thin, no more than fifty, but with a dry look to him and the skin-texture of a wrinkled prune. It was not this that held my gaze, but rather the way his reddened forehead seemed to curve outwards, the look of his sunken eyes, and his manner of letting his head turn slowly from side to side, as if in time to some inner music or the demands of a deep intellectual problem. I had seen such movements before and knew that they betrayed concealed agitation. They had been a compulsion of the late Professor Moriarty, whose bulging forehead and sunken eyes I seemed to see before me now. There was only one man in that room who could be Colonel Moriarty.

How easy it would be for Colonel Lemonnier, whom nobody knew, to masquerade at lunch as Colonel Moriarty, whom nobody knew either, while there was one guest fewer, unnoticed, in the crush of the champagne buffet. I turned away, sure that he had not noticed me, and went to find Holmes, who was standing next to Jago. I noticed that the inspector’s color was rather high, his moustache appeared to bristle, and he had withdrawn into a dignified silence.

‘Thanks to official incompetence,’ said Holmes to me behind his hand, ‘Lemonnier left the Venetian Parlour unobserved, before luncheon was over, and has disappeared. Nonetheless we will wait here, if you please, and be ready to move quickly. If you wish to witness my
pièce de resistance
, keep your eyes on Lord Holder.’

Lord Holder stood an inch or two taller than anyone in his immediate vicinity. He was walking towards us, smiling contentedly, and the little crowd of courtiers drew back a little before his regal person. He was escorting the bowed figure of Lord Adolphus Longstaffe. The whole appeared to have been staged so that among the front rank of onlookers was Colonel Moriarty. As if by instinct, my fingers closed on the cold metal of the revolver butt in the pocket of my black morning coat. What followed took only a few seconds and seemed like a lifetime.

Lord Holder and his protégé came on, their heads and necks visible above the others. As they drew closer, their epaulettes and then their lapels came into view. When I stared at Lord Longstaffe, I felt the wonder of a small child witnessing the first miracle of a birthday conjurer. There, on his left lapel, blazed a white diamond fire and a deep indigo of surrounding sapphire. The outline of the Queen of the Night, an irreplaceable treasure that Holmes had assured me was on its way to Paris, shone brilliantly among us.

My gaze swung to the gaunt but inflamed face of Colonel Moriarty, whom I quite expected to draw a gun and tear the gem from Lord Longstaffe’s breast. But if my face reflected utter astonishment and disbelief, the colonel’s betrayed only the deepest horror. He did not reach forward to snatch the jewel but recoiled at the sight of it.

At that moment Sherlock Holmes beside me doffed the black cocked hat of the uniform that he had borrowed and made an exaggerated and eye-catching gesture. Colonel Moriarty, with a stony fear still flooding his sunken eyes, for all the world as if Don Giovanni’s devils were dragging him down to hell, turned his heavy head and saw us. He knew well enough who we were. Beside us he saw the unmistakable figure of Inspector Jago in his ceremonial uniform, flanked by a superintendent of the City of London Police. My revolver was half way out of my pocket before our adversary could reach for his. I did not doubt that he was carrying a gun, but, to my surprise, he made no attempt to reach for it. Instead, he turned and ran, pushing aside those behind him, and disappeared down the marble corridor with Jago and the superintendent in pursuit.

‘Jago!’ Holmes’s voice rang out like a parade-ground command. ‘Let him go but lay a trail for us!’

My friend now pushed through the crowd of astonished onlookers. In a few strides he was through the anteroom and the garde-robe, swooping into the post-room, opening a cupboard with a key that Lord Holder had given him. The cupboard contained a machine of some kind, a cast-iron box with a brass-framed, air-tight lid, inset with a glass panel. To one side of this rose a white porcelain handle, like a small beer pump. Inside the box I saw through the glass a three-inch bell-mouthed opening at one end, an incoming air pipe at the other. Lightweight envelopes of black rubbery gutta-percha in felt covers lay to hand, ensuring that each exactly fitted the tube.

Thought I had never seen such a thing before, I knew what this apparatus must be. This was a house tube connecting the office in the Mansion House with the pneumatic dispatch system—the system that carries telegrams and small post through forty miles of London’s underground postal system. The pipe at one end of the box would exert a pressure of some ten pounds to the square inch on sending, or a vacuum of six pounds on receiving. It could transport bundles of seventy-five telegrams in a gutta-percha envelope, and would cover a mile through a three-inch tube in about two minutes. The diamond and the surrounding sapphires, unclipped, would be light enough to fit into two envelopes.

Sherlock Holmes checked the list of possible destinations framed on the inside of the cupboard door.

‘I hardly think he will have communicated with the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, or Scotland Yard. I prefer Charing Cross Station! That is quite another matter. I will bet a pound to a penny on the next ferry train to Paris.’

He scrawled a message on a dispatch form, inserted it into a fold of gutta-percha, and addressed it. Over his shoulder, I saw the words, ‘Lestrade. Scotland Yard.’ All this, which takes so long to tell, occupied less than a minute in reality!

‘I have had my doubts,’ I gasped as we raced down the stairs to the courtyard, ‘but I confess them ill-founded. The manner in which you have duped this last Moriarty rivals the best you have done. I shall never forget his face when he stared at Lord Longstaffe’s lapel and knew he had stolen the fake that you planted for him!’

He stopped dead at the turning of the staircase and looked at me.

‘Have you understood nothing? That bauble on Longstaffe’s lapel was the fake! The Moriarty family knows a counterfeit when it sees one plainly. However, in the half-light of the passageway, he could not tell. He thought he saw the very thing he had stolen half an hour before, as a murderer sees a ghost. It shook him! By God, you saw how it shook him! Then he turned his head to find the two of us and two policemen staring at him. After that, it mattered nothing whether the bauble was a fake or not. Your revolver was half out of your pocket and he knew he was almost caught.’

We flew through the doorway into the courtyard and Holmes shouted at a constable for a closed brougham to follow Inspector Jago. As we clattered out of the courtyard, he turned to me more calmly.

‘I will borrow your revolver, old fellow, if I may.’

I handed him the cold butt of the gun.

‘Charing Cross?’ I said.

‘Think of it. Moriarty easily contrived to be locked in the ante-room or garde-robe, and quite possibly hid himself in the post-room, when everyone else had left. Colonel Lemonnier represented him in the Venetian Parlour. Within five minutes, the colonel came out of hiding and removed the Queen of the Night from the lapel of Lord Longstaffe’s cloak, unclipped the diamond center from the sapphires, and dispatched two small envelopes in the pneumatic tube. When the minor courtiers returned, what was easier than for the thief to stand back against the wall behind the open doors or step out from the concealment of a long curtain when the coast was clear and mingle with them. Up to that time, there was no cause for alarm. When that alarm was raised, there would not be a shred of evidence against him.’

‘The hunt would be up as soon as the theft was discovered.’

‘Those cloaks were brought out one by one. Half the people there would have drifted away. Colonel Moriarty would have ample time to slip away before Lord Longstaffe noticed his loss. He might prefer to stay. The Queen of the Night would not be found on him, whereas any one of the twenty or thirty people who had left might have it. Colonel Lemonnier would be the first to reach Charing Cross. Have no fear, his freedom is important to our plans.’