The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (9 page)

At length the flat and rusted underside of the tank was close above him. Sherlock Holmes used to say, modestly, that he was stronger than most men, but the truth was that he was not strong in a conventional way. It was in his sinewy arms and legs that he had such power. I had seen him not merely bend a poker into a semicircle but straighten out one which had been recently bent by a threatening visitor. Had all else failed him, I daresay my friend could have made his living as Hercules at a fairground. Such power served him well in moments like these.

Two hundred feet from the little shops housing mapmakers and ships’ chandlers, he fought for his life on the prison wall. Where the iron angle supporting the tank was fixed, the stone had been coarsened by damage and he found a better hold. He reached and caught the metal strut. The purchase of his feet against the wall levered him. Praying to whatever gods might be that the bracket was not rusted through, he snatched again and hung by both hands, his feet dangling as if from the summit of a church tower.

The long reach of his arms and legs proved to be his salvation. He swung until he could kick out with both feet and find leverage across the angle of the walls once more. With one hand gripping the bracket, he stretched upwards and sideways with the other, found a metal bar for one foot and hoisted himself, facedown on the cover of the tank. The worst of the climb was over, and the ordeal of the sharpened wire lay ahead.

The length of a long wall separated him from the rooftop that led the way to freedom. Yet with the self-confidence which irritated so many of his rivals, Sherlock Holmes never doubted that what he had just done, he could do again. Now he had only to stand upright and stretch to one side, in order to touch the wooden axle with its sharp metal wire where it ran along the wall. It was the only link to the first rooftop above the street.

His shirt or whatever cloth he might wrap round his hands to protect them from the sharpened wire would weaken the sureness of his grip on the wooden axle. ‘The blades may hurt you,’ Henry Williams had said, ‘but they won’t kill you. Not unless you let ’em. What you must do is make up your mind, tell yourself there’s a hundred feet to get past. P’raps it ain’t so many. Then you hang on for dear life and count. After ten, there’s only ninety to go, after forty there’s only sixty. You’ll do thirty and you’re more than halfway to fifty, so you mustn’t give up. You do fifty-one, and you’ve got less to go than you’ve done already, having come through so much. You’re nearer the finish than the start. So you ain’t going to give up and drop now, are you? Not having come through all that and with less to go! That’s common sense.’

For a brief moment, Holmes stood on the metal surface high above the yard and smiled at the old man’s wisdom. He said aloud to himself for the second time that morning, ‘Fortune favours the brave.’ Though he never boasted of it, he knew as he prepared for his ordeal that to fail now would very probably make my own life forfeit to Henry Milverton and, possibly, that of the young woman whose silver revolver rid the world of the villain’s elder brother.

Each change of handhold would bring him six inches closer to his goal. At every change, as his weight hung from the axle, he might shed blood from his hands. Whatever the pain, it was not an eternity. Perhaps no more than a few minutes. Closing his mind, as if all this was happening to another man in another world, he gave his concentration to counting the changes of grip, measuring what must still be endured, and seeing in his mind the dwindling numbers ahead. When he passed fifty, he heard the old man’s voice again, ‘So you ain’t going to give up and drop now, are you? That’s common sense.’

Working hand over hand along the axle, he thought only of the roof he must reach. Far from the pain in his hands he continued to count the growing number of wounds that were past and the dwindling number to be endured. At last he hung above the abandoned cell block, the flat roof a dozen feet below him. There was nothing for it but to release his grip on the end of the wooden axle. Most of those who met him found Sherlock Holmes physically languid rather than agile. Only when circumstances required did he exercise his phenomenal dexterity. He had the suppleness of a cat, and nothing less would have enabled him to drop so accurately and without injury to the rooftop below. He landed squarely on the flat lead of its surface. It was the first prison block, whose roof led towards the street.

He knelt for a moment, then pulled himself upright and listened. There was no light in the yard below. The voices which he could hear at a distance were surely those of market porters setting out their street-stalls, nothing more than the men talking as they walked to and fro with baskets on their heads.

By keeping below the parapet of the roof, he would be hidden from the street. It would not do to come this far and then be taken for a rooftop burglar, seized and delivered to the prison gate by hopeful reward-hunters. The flat roofs of the prison and the street lay ahead of him in succession, with several alleyways below. It was now that he took the greatest care. Somewhere, the old sweep had told him, there was a low brick wall belonging to a bookbinder. It marked the first rooftop beyond the prison. Two men who had followed Williams in his attempt to escape the gallows had made the mistake of coming down before they reached this wall. They had found themselves trapped in the old press yard behind the prison wall, where reluctant suspects had once upon a time been pressed to death, if necessary, with increasing iron weights on their chests to make them give evidence.

The voices below him, whoever they had come from, were now silent. He crawled forward, close to the parapet with his head well down, taking cover in the angle of deeper shadow which the early sun had not as yet dispersed. Time might be against him, but Holmes was a man of exceptionally acute hearing and he still heard no sound of alarm or pursuit. Instead, he looked up a few minutes later and saw, across the flat roof, a dividing wall no higher than his waist. It was painted with white letters, ‘Bindery.’

He made his way to the roof-hatch, put on his shoes, and slipped quickly and unnoticed through the bookbinder’s premises. Assuming the purposeful air of a journeyman, he crossed the street below and was lost among the sooty tenements of the city. Just then, in the yellow light of the new day, there was a brief lightning flash behind him, reflected in the sky ahead. The cold air and even the paving under foot shook with a monstrous roll of thunder, rattling the glass of the shopfronts. A deep and resonant roar sounded across the rooftops, as if the sound had taken a second or two to catch up with the tremor of a blast. Then all around there was a pattering like hail, as fragments of stone rattled down from the sky. From somewhere else came a clatter of glass broken by the force of the detonation. The carters and the costermongers at their stalls looked up, as if waiting for a sequel and a gathering of storm clouds. But the single shuddering roar fell to a rumble and faded. There was silence, a caustic stench of burnt fabric, and then the unmistakable flickering and lapping sounds of flame.

As the ill-clad figure of the fugitive made his painful way, slow and stooping among the market traders in the shabby streets, he calculated that the lantern flames of the execution party had ignited more than a thousand cubic feet of water-gas with a detonation like a howitzer shell.

Having given you the account of Sherlock Holmes’s ordeal, as I later heard it from his own lips, I must now return to the circumstances of my own life during his curious disappearance.

To most of those who recall that spring of 1902, it was a time of celebration. A little more than a year earlier Victoria, the great Queen Empress, had gone to her reward, after sixty-four years on the British throne. Few people had ever known what it was to be alive except when she reigned over them. That New Year had been a time of solemn pomp, a great funeral, and commemoration. Now the flags flew in the bright spring air among the preparations that went forward for the coronation of her eldest son as Edward VII in August.

Such public jollity made my own despondency all the deeper. The columns of the
Morning Post
had brought me nothing, and in the circumstances, I cared very little for flags and bunting, for crowned heads and fireworks.

A further week or so passed, after I had spoken to our friends at Scotland Yard about the strange disappearance, and still I heard nothing of Holmes. Even if I went back to Lestrade or Gregson and told them that he was still missing, what could they do? Worst of all, I now faced the disagreeable task of informing Mycroft Holmes that some accident or villainy had surely overtaken his younger brother. By the middle of April, the matter could no longer be put off. We were to lunch together at his club, the Diogenes, in Pall Mall. All that I knew—or rather did not know—must be put before him. Yet what he or the entire government could make of it was beyond me.

During this time, I had gathered no positive evidence of being spied upon—and yet I felt sure it must be so. If Holmes was right in believing that a wide criminal conspiracy was at work in London, my enemies would arrange matters so that I should never see the same shadow twice as they followed me about. There would be enough of them for one to watch me for a mile or an hour at a time and then be replaced by another. For this reason, I gave up hansom cabs and had taken to traveling by the new electric underground railway. A man may be followed easily in a cab, but I had mastered the art of getting on a train as it pulled in and getting out at the last minute to see if any other passenger did the same, thus forcing my follower to reveal himself. Sometimes I was quick enough to do this and still board again if the coast remained clear. At other times I waited alone on the platform for the next train or the one after. Yet another of my shadows might be waiting at a station further on and I should be none the wiser.

Sometimes I would come up into the daylight from the underground station and perhaps notice that a man who had been reading his newspaper by a lamppost now folded it and walked in the direction that I had taken. Of course, it was a hundred to one that he was an honest fellow who had stopped to check the price of gilt-edged stock or the odds offered on the favorite in the 2:30 at Epsom races. How, in any case, could a spy know that I would leave the train at this place? Yet there are only six stations on the line from Baker Street to Waterloo, and they could set a dozen men after me, if they chose, so that one waited at each stop of the train. If Holmes was right in describing the extent of such a criminal conspiracy—and if it mattered enough to them—they could watch me day and night, even from other premises in Baker Street.

I had lived like this for a few weeks, trusting no one and looking ever ywhere about me. At first I took it for granted that those who shadowed me would be men. Then one day I had the thought—what if one or more of them was a woman? I had been entirely unprepared for that. I wondered whether I should challenge them when there was a policeman standing by to see fair play. Once I saw a fellow coming after me as I left the street door in Baker Street. My blood was up. I turned to confront him and damn the consequences. Moreover, I had a vague recollection of seeing that face and figure before! At the last moment I recognised him as Fothergill, a medical student at Cambridge and Barts Hospital, who had been scrumhalf for Harlequins half a dozen times when I played rugby football for Blackheath.

In the end I knew this would not do. I must assume that they were always watching—and make the best of it. On an April morning I left the train at Trafalgar Square to keep my appointment with Mycroft Holmes. I went up the steps and into the open sunlit space with Admiral Nelson on his column far above the chestnut trees in bud.

Pall Mall is surely the home of the gentleman’s club. I left the square by Cockspur Street and passed the Regency grandeur of the Royal United Service Club with its full-dress portraits of Crimean generals seen through long Georgian windows. I passed the intellectual elegance of the Athenaeum with its philosophers and men of letters, the Travellers Club, and last of all the Reform with its air of literary periodicals and Liberal statesmen. Yet our times have changed and not much for the better, as it seems to me. The air of the wide avenue from Cockspur Street to St. James’s Palace was raucous to a point that would have shocked Sir Robert Peel or Lord Palmerston. An organ-grinder, of all things, was rolling out the favorite of the music halls, ‘Rosy, you are my posy. … You are my heart’s bouquet.’ Worse than that, a uniformed constable was standing by amiably and listening, as if giving the performance his blessing.

Three times, in that promenade of taste and decorum, I was accosted by beggars. One thrust himself in my way, the smell of beer upon his clothes, and complained of a wife and three little ones to find a living for. I dismissed him with the injunction to find work at the dockside hiring yard in Wapping or Shadwell. The second complained of needing a sub until Saturday, which was as good as to say he had drunk his week’s wages already and had a tidy sum due for payment on the slate at some tavern in Lambeth or Clerkenwell.

Finally, there was a one-armed beggar sitting against the wall between the Reform Club and the Diogenes. I am not a medical man for nothing, and I could see plainly that his second good arm was carefully concealed by his coat. He rattled a tin cup and complained of being an ‘old sojer wot lorst a limb’ at Maiwand in the Afghan campaign. If you know anything about me, you will know that Maiwand was the battle in which I sustained a wound which ended my career as an army surgeon. If this fellow had ever been nearer to Maiwand, or Afghanistan, or India, than Clapham Junction, I would eat my hat.

I do not as a rule see red, but I did so now. How could I not, when I thought of fallen comrades exploited by this mean cheating? I thundered at him that he was a disgrace to the nation, a wretch who sullied the name of honours won in that campaign—and that I should do such things—I knew not what they were, but they should be the terror of such as he! At this point, in his sly and insinuating manner, he said, ‘You’ll have to speak close, guv. I don’t hear so well as I used.’