The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (7 page)
He knew to the inch and to the minute what must be done. Like all drunkards, Crellin would fall at first into a deep sleep that would leave him insensible for half the night. Then he would become restless and, finally, would wake suddenly and without warning. During the first of these phases the plan must be carried out. As Holmes listened, he heard the breathing grow slower and deeper, almost dwindling into silence. The man’s head remained pillowed on his arm, which in turn still rested on the table beside him.
During his first hours in the cell Holmes had reckoned its dimensions as nineteen feet long, by eight feet wide and seven feet high. One thousand and sixty-four cubic feet. Some of that capacity was taken up by furnishings and fittings, notably a solid three-foot-square stone table at the far end and the wooden bed. The total space remaining was about a thousand and fifty cubic feet. He had even estimated the capacity of the wooden chair, now removed beyond his reach for the night. It seemed designed for the death cell, its joints being carefully dovetailed, without a single nail that might be used as a key or the condemned man’s means of self-destruction.
As for the fittings, the four fishtail gaslights, a pair on each of the long walls, were of the common type with a Sugg-Letherby’s No. 1 burner. Each of the four would be fed by ten cubic feet of gas an hour. A slight odour of spirit as they were lit had assured Sherlock Holmes that they were fed by that cheaper type of fuel known as water-gas, commonly used in public buildings. If released unlit, its high concentration of carbon monoxide would be enough to poison almost all the air in the cell by the end of sixty minutes. Those who breathed it might not be dead at the end of the hour, but they would never regain consciousness unaided. Yet even had his enemies thought Holmes capable of reaching the draw chains of the burners, they knew that he must be the first to die.
Among the volumes frequently taken down from his Baker Street bookshelves by my friend were the varied works of Dr. Daniel Haldane of Edinburgh, including
Haldane on Poisons
. Newgate prison, like most such institutions, tendered for the cheapest sources of fuel. These included this old-fashioned water-gas piped from a mains supply. It had once been produced by the decomposition of water, now often replaced by the use of petroleum as its origin, which gave it that spirituous odour on lighting. Its economic brightness was caused by the high concentration of carbon monoxide. Its use was more easily and carefully regulated in old and ill-ventilated public buildings than in private homes. It was seldom supplied to private citizens because of a greater danger of explosion if it should be misused.
It was the duty of the two guards in the corridor to shine a lamp through the spy hole of the cell door from time to time to make sure that all was well within. Holmes had noticed in the past night or two that they did this every half hour or so to begin with and then, as they took their chance to sleep, they seemed content to shine the beam on the prisoner’s bed at inter vals of an hour or more. He waited until one of the men outside had shone the lamp through the spy hole. It was past midnight and he judged that it would be the best part of an hour before they did that again.
No man ever moved as silently and with such economy of movement as Sherlock Holmes. With no more sound than a shadow he stripped off his shirt and held it in one hand. In the other hand he carried the light steel ankle chain clear of the floor so that it made no more noise than a silk rope. At the limit of the chain he stared down at Crellin, several feet away. The man, now palefaced from drink, was sleeping so deeply that his breathing was scarcely audible. There was a sickly perspiration on his forehead and his mouth sagged open. Holmes knelt silently and then measured his length across the cold paving of the tiled floor, reaching his arms at full stretch toward the Hesperus lamp by Crellin’s chair. The bully heard no more sound than if a bird had glided overhead.
My friend’s calculations were correct. The lamp stood about a foot beyond the tips of his fingers. Using the buttons of the shirt cuffs to link the arms together as a lasso, he held the garment by its tails and cast it like a frail noose. It hit the glass chimney silently but slithered down without effect. For the first time the measured and controlled beat of Sherlock Holmes’s heart began to quicken. He cast again and this time saw the cotton arms snag on the top of the lamp’s glass chimney. Controlling his breath, as if for fear of waking the guard, he shook and worked the loop of cloth gently until he saw it slide down the far side of the glass to encircle the lamp at its base.
His remarkable hearing was tuned to every nuance in Crellin’s breathing. He knew that he must now draw the lamp toward him without rousing the sleeping warder. The Hesperus lamp had been constructed so that the oil and the wick sat in a smooth metal bowl that formed its base. Yet to drag smooth metal roughly toward him would cause a rasping on the tiled floor that might wake the sleeper.
Crellin gulped air into his throat and Holmes stopped at once. He waited until the sound of the man’s breathing was regular again and then tilted the lamp a little by pulling on the cotton noose. Only the smooth and rounded edge of its metal base now touched the tiles as it ran in a series of three brief crescents, as if on the rim of a wheel. It made no more sound than the feet of a rat hurrying across the dark yard outside. Once only in the next ten minutes did Crellin shift against the table with another heaving breath.
Holmes eased the lamp quietly toward him and still there was no further movement from his guard. Presently his fingers touched the warm metal of the lamp base. As he drew back to the darkness of his bed, he held in his hands a treasure greater than the wealth of kings.
Without hesitation he carried the lamp silently into the little alcove with its basin and drain, where he turned down the wick as low as he dared without extinguishing the flame. Then he heard the movement of the metal cover on the spy hole and had just time to slip back and draw the blanket over him on the bed before a tunnel of watery light illuminated the cell. He thought that he had little more to fear from this hourly inspection. Two men in the corridor guarded the cell door that night. One was McIver. The other was either the brutal master-at-arms or one of his assistants. When two men performed such a duty, it was the weaker who was given the chore of an hourly inspection while the other slept. He had no doubt, in this case, that the weaker was McIver.
In the faint light that illuminated the cell from the alcove, he moved toward the draw chain controlling the supply of gas to the fishtails on the far wall, just on the near side of Crellin’s chair. The chains were closer to him than the lamp had been, but higher on the wall. The ankle chain was too short for his purpose, but by turning his body sideways he could reach a point a foot from the wall and a foot short of the metal pull. With a quiet breath he flicked the cotton noose of the shirt at its full length until he caught the chain and started it swinging like a pendulum against the wall. Keeping the metal links free of the wall, he flicked it harder, so that it swung further away from him and came further back.
The extent of its nearer swing was eight inches short of his stretched fingers, as he measured it by sight, then six inches as he flicked it again, then four. Four inches would doom him as surely as four miles. Then the thin metal links brushed his fingertips, but he lost them again. And then, as it came swinging back, he snatched with all the energy of his being and just held it. Now he had only to draw gently on the thin chain. A moment later, he heard the first whisper of escaping gas issuing from the double jet above Crellin’s head as he slept.
The two fish tails on the nearer wall were more easily within his range, but it had been necessary to make sure of the more distant ones first. With a single flick of the cotton shirt he caught the swinging links. Silently he pulled at this chain controlling the burners behind the fishtails. The whisper of water-gas became a rush. Much was still in the hands of fate but now only one path lay ahead of him, for better or for worse. Stripping the rough canvas cover from the prison pillow, he arranged the under-blanket and the pillow to give some semblance of a sleeping figure beneath the thin upper layer. Enough to satisfy McIver. Then he groped in the thin mattress for the packets of medicinal charcoal that the corporal had brought him.
Lighter than air, the whispering gas was filling the upper layers of the cell and time was beginning to run against him. The length of the chain at his ankle allowed him to move into the alcove with its basin and drain, where the flame of the oil lamp still wavered. In a few moments he must extinguish it. Holmes knelt down where the waste pipe ran into a gully that led to the grating of the drain outside. However faint and tainted, it was the one supply of air. Using the canvas pillow cover, he worked quickly to form a hood that might be worn like a surgeon’s mask, tied by its tapes behind his head. It was common knowledge from his own experiments that charcoal was the best air filter, absorbing the poisonous compounds of gas. How much it would absorb or with what effect, only the next hour would tell. As he was making his preparations the bell of St. Sepulchre’s tolled three times, as if hurrying on the dawn.
Now I must break a confidence that is no longer of great matter. Sherlock Holmes contributed much to chemistry and science in general but did not care to do so under his own name. He intended that his enemies should have no idea of these interests. The world did not know that under the name of the chemist Hunter he had contributed a paper, ‘On the Effects of Pressure on the Absorption of Gases by Charcoal,’ to the
Journal of the Chemical Society
in 1871, where the world may still read it. In his study of history he had been much taken by the startling proposal of Lord Cochrane in 1812 to defeat Napoleon three years before Waterloo by an invasion of France under cover of ‘sulphur ships.’ To effect this, however, the attackers must be protected by a mask of some kind—and there was none. However, my friend had corresponded with the late Dr. John Tyndall in 1878, following that great man’s invention of a respirator. This enabled firemen to breathe for thirty minutes or more in smoke that would otherwise have killed them, and allowed coal miners to survive who must otherwise have been suffocated by gas.
Dr. Tyndall’s respirator consisted of a hood attached to a metal cylinder or pipe, packed with charcoal, surrounded by a layer of cotton wool, moistened with glycerine, and fitted with a piece of wire gauze at the end to hold the pad and the charcoal in place. Holmes turned down the wick and took the extinguished Hesperus lamp. He removed its glass lantern. Working with the deft fingers of a craftsman, he found the two buttons of the screw heads that tightened the metal wick holder to the base and shielded the reservoir of fuel. He undid them and carefully drew the metal sheath from its base. It tapered to a hole at the top, round which he could just measure forefinger and thumb. It was enough. Further down was a slot that admitted air to the base of the wick.
Though time was short, Holmes worked characteristically, always with haste but never in a hurry. Within the metal cylinder of the wick holder he formed a lining of loosened woolen padding from the mattress. Though he had no pure glycerine, it was a principal ingredient of the soft soap allowed him. He used the soap and a palmful of water to moisten the cotton waste at the open end of the metal cone and the lower air slot, sufficient to catch grosser particles of carbon in the air. The broken biscuits of Mostyn’s Absorbant Medical Charcoal, like small pebbles, then filled the metal cone through which he must draw breath.
Using the water jug again, he moistened the canvas pillow cover and formed it into a hood about his head. His mouth and nostrils were enclosed in the larger end of the conical wick holder, the wet canvas about his head forming a crude seal against contaminated air. Then he lay on the chill stone of the tiles, the tapered end of the metal wick holder directed to the waste-pipe hole at the end of the gutter that ran from the basin. Whatever air reached him from the yard outside would lose some of its impurities in his makeshift filter. So would the gas that began to fill the cell. He held fast to the hope that the floor of that alcove was almost the last area that the silent and swirling deadliness of the carbon monoxide would reach.
If it were my purpose to make a fine hero of Sherlock Holmes, I might say that he lay on the cold tiles, breathing steadily but economically through the device he had fashioned, and that he prayed. Yet one had only to be in his company for five minutes to recognise in him the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen. He was not devoid of faith or human warmth, but at that moment, if ever, only cold reason and critical observation would save him.
Once he had told me that logic alone would lead a man to the deep truths of religion. Then, again, he asked what is the meaning of this circle of misery, violence, and fear in which we live? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There, he said, is the great outstanding perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
How long he lay there, the cold striking like a steel blade to his bones, I never knew. He heard St. Sepulchre’s deep notes twice more, at least, and the cathedral bell that followed. He saw a flickering reflection beyond the alcove, a lantern shining through the spy hole. But he had calculated the risks with his customary inhuman precision. Whoever looked through the spy hole would see a shape under the blankets and, knowing that Crellin was keeping guard, would also know that the shape must be that of the prisoner. Had there been no guard in the cell, they would have looked him over thoroughly at short intervals.
In the iron chill of that night Holmes waited for the pale yellow lantern light to play again on the wall by the alcove. But he had seen it for the last time. He waited and listened. As he did so, if he is to be believed, Sherlock Holmes soothed his nerves by rehearsing in his mind a book that had shaped much of his character since he first read it at the age of ten. It was no fairy story of giants or goblins but the
Prior Analytics
of Aristotle. ‘A syllogism is a form of words in which, when certain assumptions are made, something other than what has been assumed necessarily follows from the fact that the assumptions are such. …’