The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

Yet it was a waste of time. Crellin might squirm, but he would not squeal. He had taken Milverton’s shilling and must do as he was told. After an hour he growled threats of coming to do for Holmes with his heavy fists, but he never dared to set foot within reach of the prisoner’s chain.

Mac was a different case. The line of the mouth was far more sullen, but it was the self-doubting sullenness of the uneasy child. Perhaps, when he took the same shilling, he had not bargained on being the instrument that would prepare an innocent man for the hangman’s noose. Not that Mac would compromise his own safety or risk his own skin to save him, but he squirmed far more readily than Crellin. The cross-legged inquisitor gave him not a moment’s rest from the steady eyes. At first Mac pretended not to notice, but in the confined dimensions of the cell he could not help it. He got up and stood at the opaque window glass, for all the world as if he could see through it and admire the view. He turned his chair and sat sideways to the man he was guarding. He pretended to read. He clasped his hands behind his back and with head lowered paced an absurd eight-foot sentry-go across the cell and back, as if in deep thought. And then he turned to Holmes and shouted,

‘Look somewhere else, will you? Look somewhere else, blast your eyes!’

But the man whom he must help to kill spoke not a word from Mac’s entry at morning until his departure at evening. After his first two days it was plain that Mac dreaded the cell. Holmes had found a weakness in their scheme, not in chains or locks, or in hyoscine. It existed in the man they called Mac. The man’s flaw was a tender conscience, and the poor devil dreaded that any of the others should detect it. Holmes could tell this by the way he loudly and unevenly, with his fellow jailers before entering the cell, laughed for Holmes to hear him and know that he cared nothing. Once inside, before the keen-eyed inquisitor, it was a different story.

Sherlock Holmes, for all his fame, was a mortal man. Neither I nor any other living soul was ever to know what terrors he may have felt in these long hours. Yet not by a word or the blink of an eyelid did he betray them. There are those who will scoff and tell you that all this was the bravado of a schoolbook hero. It was nothing of the kind but, rather, his inner concentration on the nub of a plan formed in a mind that was hard as a diamond and by thoughts clear as perfect cr ystal. He must judge to the minute when the silence was to be broken. There would be one chance and one chance only. The moment came on the fourth day, in the middle of a long afternoon. His words were spoken loudly but not too loudly. The tone, however, was sharp as the crack of a circus whip and Mac jumped at the sound of them.

‘Listen to me, McIver!’

Perhaps it was the sound of his own name, spoken by a man who could never have heard it used, that broke the fellow’s composure. Cross-legged and still, Sherlock Holmes spoke again. His voice was too soft to be heard beyond the cell, and it now seemed intended to comfort the man who had been set to keep watch on him.

‘I think, Corporal McIver of the 21st Lancers, that it is time for you and me to exchange a few words.’

The reddened skin grew tight as a mask on the cheekbone, and the elongated eyes looked straight at Holmes, stilled by fear, like a rat before a basilisk.

‘I understand entirely,’ Holmes continued. ‘The first thought in your mind is that Mr. Milverton—or by whatever name your master calls himself—will cut your throat once he knows that you have revealed your identity to me. You are, or rather were, Corporal McIver of the 21st Lancers, a veteran of the cavalry charge against the Sudanese rebels at the Battle of Omdurman, lately discharged from the Army as the victim of a distressing medical complaint—Egyptian ophthalmia. All you wish now is to marry your childhood sweetheart. But that is not easy, is it?’

Holmes had softened him up carefully over many hours. Now the mesmerised incomprehension in McIver’s eyes turned to outright fear.

‘You cannot have set eyes upon me until you saw me in this place,’ he said in a stage whisper, fearful of being heard by those outside the cell, ‘and I know nothing of you. You cannot tell me who I am.’

‘Quite so,’ said Holmes soothingly. ‘However, let me assure you I know enough—if not all—about you. The 21st Lancers, the Battle of Omdurman, your discharge from the Army on medical grounds. The woman you had hoped to marry. I know more than enough to have left a hidden message already, scratched somewhere and somehow—in the plaster of a wall perhaps. When this building is dismantled, as it soon will be, such a message including your name would lead the police straight to you. It has even been known for a prisoner in this very gaol—Benson was his name—to leave a dampened paper message on the floor where one of the guards would tread on it unwittingly and just as unwittingly lose it on the dry pavement outside these walls. Have no fear. I am sure you have been warned against such tricks. There are far better ones than that, believe me.’

‘Mr. Milverton knows of all your tricks,’ said McIver hastily.

‘Not quite all of them, I think,’ said Holmes amiably. ‘What Mr. Milverton does know, however, is that once in the hands of the police, you would betray him and his entire conspiracy. And you know perfectly well, Corporal McIver, that were I to say as much to him as I am saying to you now, you would be dead before this evening’s sun had set.’

‘What can you tell?’

‘Enough to end your life even before mine. If your master knew that I had identified you and had already taken measures to pass on that knowledge, you would not live the hour. He would not dare allow it. Whether I inform him or not is a matter for you.’

The eyes that had fled from Holmes’s scrutiny before could not bear now to leave his face. In a sudden flood of panic, the discharged soldier had fallen victim completely to Holmes’s precept that ‘What you can do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe that you have done.’ He had not half finished with the wretch, while McIver struggled to imagine how a total stranger could have known so much about him.

‘When you were invalided home from Egypt,’ Holmes continued, ‘and discharged from your regiment, you were thrown upon your own resources. Had you held the rank of sergeant, a pension might have been procured for you. Yet a sergeant is, shall we say,
rara avis in terra
—a rare bird. If I am not mistaken, a cavalry troop consists of some sixty troopers plus six corporals and one sergeant. You were not he. It is not to be wondered at that you have failed to find regular employment since your return. Your malady sits plainly upon you.’

As Holmes was talking, McIver’s face showed the contending emotions of a man who feels himself ever more securely snared and yet hopes that the snare may break and set him free.

‘You may guess, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ he said, mingling scorn with trepidation, ‘but you cannot know. Mr. Milverton would see your tale for what it is.’

‘I do not guess,’ said Holmes mildly. ‘I never guess. Mr. Milverton knows that, to his cost. You appear to forget that while you have watched me in the past few days, I have also watched you. You are a mere prison guard, but it is my profession to observe. Your name was easy to discover. Indeed, at my arrival I heard distinctly one of your accomplices call you Mac.’

McIver got up from his chair and stood as if he might advance upon his prisoner. ‘That is nothing!’

‘In itself. …’ There was something like steel in Holmes’s voice that made the man sit down again. ‘In itself it is nothing. However, I have had ample opportunity of observing you, even when you were out of earshot. I had a distinct view on the second day, as I was led back down the corridor. The man I believe you call Crellin stood behind you and spoke. You turned to him. He had spoken a name—or a word—to make you turn. I assumed it was your name and, of course, lipreading is necessary in my walk of life. Indeed, I have written a little monograph on the production of sound from labial distortion. From the chuckle to the scream.’

McIver was staring at him now, as if he dared not miss a word.

‘Well, now,’ Holmes went on, ‘I had no doubt that the first syllable of the word spoken by Crellin was ‘Mac.’ I would expect that anyway, for I had heard you called by it. Try forming it for yourself. There is a characteristic compression of the lips followed by a sideways opening of the mouth. Crellin’s lips then made the shape of an ‘i.’ This is easily read, being the letter which opens the mouth higher and narrower than any other. Quite unmistakable. Then his upper teeth touched his lower lip harder than they would to make an ‘f.’ Therefore, the sound could only be a ‘v.’ Finally, the lips protruded in a flute-like way and the skin on his throat was strained a little tighter. To the trained eye, this could only be ‘er.’ It was not difficult.’

‘Very clever!’ The man was shaken but still scornful.

‘And then there are your boots,’ said Holmes.

‘What of ’em?’

‘Army boots,’ Holmes said, ‘still worn by you after your discharge.’

‘Any man could buy boots like these. Workmen’s boots, more like than army ones.’

‘Indeed,’ said Holmes indulgently. ‘However, such boots are made of black pimpled leather and are worn as such by civilian workmen. Yet consider this. Any man who has been a soldier knows that the first command to the unfortunate recruit is to take a hot iron and to iron out the pimples of the toe caps so that they are perfectly smooth. They can then be polished for the parade ground until, if you will forgive the cliché, the poor recruit can see his face in them. Your boots are not those bought by a civilian worker. Rather, they are boots worn by a man who has lately been a soldier and can afford no others.’

For some reason, the revelation about his boots shook McIver more thoroughly than the discovery of his name.

‘Why are you not afraid?’ he asked Holmes suddenly. ‘I do not understand it.’

Holmes smiled at him, the lips thin and hard.

‘If I were afraid, not you or any man should know it. For fear merely begets fear, and that would never do. Allow me to proceed. Boots of that kind are not worn by a sergeant, whose footwear gleams all over and is of an easier type. Therefore, you could only be a corporal or a private trooper. Oh, do not ask me how I knew you were a horseman. Merely watch the way you walk, when next you pass a plate-glass window. You have recently done some years of foreign service. Your complexion tells one at a glance. I deduce that you went with Lord Kitchener’s expedition to reconquer the Sudan six years ago. A soldier who suffers, as you do, from Egyptian ophthalmia can scarcely dispute that. All the other mounted regiments of that force were Egyptian levees. Any man who reads his morning newspaper knows that the 21st Lancers were drafted in to lead the charge at Omdurman and that they were the only British mounted regiment sent for that purpose.’

It was with some gratification that Holmes saw the man bow his head and stare at the floor of the cell to hide his confusion.

‘Solar discoloration of the epidermis is a phenomenon essential to the work of the criminal expert,’ Holmes assured him quietly.

‘In your case, the effects of the Egyptian sun have been prolonged and have hardly begun to fade. The inner surfaces of your wrists remain white, as does a thin margin along the hairline of your forehead, which was covered by your helmet. There is a marked degree of permanency in the burning elsewhere. I judge that this would not have been acquired in less than five or six years, which approximates to the departure of the 21st Lancers for service in the Sudan campaign. You are evidently a man of some capability, and such a man does not usually serve in a single posting for six years without rising to the rank of corporal or, at any rate, of acting corporal. There are significant losses among a regiment overseas for six years, more from sickness than from battle, and significant vacancies for promotion. In either rank you would be referred to as Corporal McIver. Your modest advancement suggests to me a satisfactory character as a soldier and that you have lately turned to crime from particular necessity and not from mere viciousness.’

The unhappy wretch looked up at him again, desperate now to prove his tormentor mistaken on any point at all. If he could knock down one of Holmes’s deductions, perhaps the rest would follow like skittles.

‘You cannot tell why I came home. You are no doctor.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Holmes in the same quiet and sympathetic voice. ‘Yet you bear unmistakable marks of a disorder upon the lids and rims of your eyes. For many years the contagion known as Egyptian ophthalmia has been brought back by soldiers who have served in that country and have had the misfortune—or imprudence—to mix there with certain forms of low company. Moreover, I have observed that when your duty is to guard me at night, you take a white tablet from each of two bottles, evening and morning. They are plainly homeopathic powders, which are customarily compressed into tablets for convenience. My eyesight is not deficient, and in passing I have read the labels on the bottles.’ By looking at McIver now, it was evident the fight had gone from him.

‘
Argentum nitricum
and
Hepar sulphuris
,’ said Holmes, ‘are each admirable treatments for a number of complaints but are seldom combined, as the good Dr. Ruddock tell us in his “Vade Mecum,” except in the treatment of this ophthalmic condition or of an ulcerated throat. It seems obvious that you do not suffer from the latter, and therefore it follows, from simple observation, that you are a prey to the former. Soldiering has been taken from you as a result of your complaint and you have been returned to your native country.’

He paused and McIver said nothing. Holmes continued his explanation.

‘For some reason you have felt obliged to turn to villainy, a profession to which it seems you have proved to be singularly ill-suited. It cannot be from destitution, for you showed a good character as a soldier and your indisposition is not such as to preclude you from all employment. What is the thing that most often makes a man of your age and condition act, contrary to character, in return for the promise of a substantial sum of money? Why, surely, the most common reason is to provide for a future with a woman whom you love. You have not long returned and have had little time to find a partner for life. This suggests that you knew one another before you sailed to Egypt and that she has waited faithfully for you during your absence. Now, how long do you suppose she would be safe if Milverton settled accounts with you?’