The Secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes (20 page)

Our little excursion had evidently stimulated my old friend into renewed action, for hardly had we returned to Baker Street than he was off again, bustling out of the sitting-room and down the stairs, pausing only to call back at me, ‘By the way, be a good fellow and make sure you have a pair of light boots with rubber soles and heels!’

‘Why, Holmes?’ I called back, much mystified.

But he had gone. All I heard in reply was the slam of the street door as he hurried out to whistle for a hansom.
17

He was back about an hour after my own return from my bootmaker’s with the prescribed footwear, bearing the fruits of a shopping spree of his own, which consisted of a small valise and a coil of strong cord which he placed inside the valise, together with a selection of implements from his burglar’s kit.
18
He had
also bought, as I discovered later, the components of disguises for both of us.

‘And you have the rubber-soled boots I recommended?’ he asked me.

‘Indeed, I have,’ I assured him. ‘But why should I need them?’

‘You will find that out tomorrow night, my dear fellow, when Baron Kleist attends the opera and we shall scale the heights of the Hotel Imperial,’ was his enigmatic reply.

Before I could question him further, he had disappeared inside his bedroom, taking Charlie Peak’s picklocks and his copy of the Medici lock with him where, I assumed, he spent the next few hours practising opening the lock, a task which continued to occupy him for most of the following day as well. 

We had decided to set out for the hotel at seven o’clock and before we left we put on our disguises, simple ones on this occasion, although Holmes is an expert in changing his appearance and had, at various times, taken on the identity, among others, of an elderly Italian priest, a French workman and an old woman.
19

For himself, he had chosen a dark waxed moustache which gave him the air of a stylish man-about-town. Mine was a brown wig
en brosse
and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Thus disguised, we set off by cab for the Hotel Imperial, where we were to make use of the suite of rooms adjacent to Baron Kleist’s where Nils and Oscar, the King of Scandinavia’s agents, were already installed.

Oscar, who opened the door to us, seemed already
acquainted with Holmes and I assumed that part of Holmes’ expedition on the previous day was to inspect the lie of the land, as he expressed it, from the closer quarters of the interior of the hotel suite. Oscar was a tall, very blond young man, too conspicuous to be seen in public, whose role seemed to be to keep watch on the Baron’s rooms. The small, dark agent, Nils, whom we had already seen the day before, sitting downstairs in the lounge, was not present. Presumably he was following the Baron as he spent the evening with the actress at the opera and dining at Claridge’s.

Oscar showed us into the drawing room of the suite and from there into an adjoining bedchamber, the master bedroom, I assumed, judging by the opulence of its furnishings, including a huge mahogany wardrobe which occupied almost the whole of one wall. Holmes examined the lock on its doors in an almost negligent manner.

‘That will be easy enough to pick,’ he remarked with a shrug. ‘Now I understand the servant’s room where the Baron’s bodyguard will be keeping watch is next door to the Baron’s bedroom.’

‘That is so, sir,’ Oscar replied in almost perfect English. ‘The one opens into the other. I can show you quite easily how the rooms are arranged, for this suite is like a mirror-image of the Baron’s.’

Opening a door in the far wall, he led us into a much smaller and more simply-furnished bedroom containing a single bed where presumably an attendant valet or lady’s maid would sleep.

Crossing to the window, Oscar raised the lower sash and then stood back to allow Holmes and me to inspect the route we would have to take in order to gain access to Baron Kleist’s quarters.

It was the first time I had seen it and I confess my heart sank at the sight of it. It would be a dangerous approach indeed and I understood Holmes’ remark about scaling the heights of the Hotel Imperial and also the need for rubber soled boots. No other footwear would have given one the necessary purchase on the route Holmes apparently intended we should take.

Unlike the front of the hotel, which was stuccoed, the rear façade was built of brick ornamented with stone cornices running horizontally across it, broadening out at regular intervals to form the sills of the windows which extended in tiers across the whole of the back of the building. Above each window was a triangular stone pediment which also jutted out a few inches from the brickwork, thus becoming part of a general geometric pattern of straight lines and angles.

The cornice was no more than three inches wide and the only visible hand-holds were those stone pediments above the windows. But, unlike the cornice, they were not continuous and between them there was a terrifyingly barren stretch of brickwork, offering no hand-holds whatsoever. Immediately below lay a sheer drop of two storeys, terminating in the glass and iron-work dome of the Winter Garden, for which the Hotel Imperial was famous. Lights shone up through the panes and
I thought I could faintly discern the moving shapes of waiters and hear the sound of voices and violins rising up from among the potted palm trees.

If we fell, I thought, with a sudden rush of mingled terror and hysteria, we would crash spectacularly down among the wine glasses and the starched napery to the sound of a Viennese waltz. I dared not think of the injuries we might cause both to ourselves and to others, nor of the headlines in the morning newspapers.

Holmes seemed unperturbed by such considerations. He was calmly unpacking the small valise he had brought with him and distributing the picklocks and other burgling devices about his person, including a small jemmy should he need to force open the window of the Baron’s bedroom. The blue and gold leather case containing the copy of the Gustaffson Stone was placed in his inside pocket, which he then fastened with a large pin.

Catching my eye, he said with a smile, ‘It would be a complete disaster if I dropped the whole object of our little excursion, would it not, my dear fellow?’

My mouth was so dry with fear at the thought of our ‘little excursion’ that I could only nod my head in agreement.

Lastly, Holmes took out the coil of strong rope and, passing one end round his waist and across his left shoulder, he handed the other to Oscar, who tied it securely to the foot rail of the bed. Then he softly
slid the lower sash of the window upwards and climbed nimbly over the sill.

It was several seconds before I dared approach the window to look out. When I did so, I had to force myself not to look down but to glance to the right where Holmes was balanced on the narrow cornice, his body pressed against the rear wall of the hotel and his arms spread-eagled as with one hand he supported himself by clinging to the stone architrave above the window, while his other hand crept inch by inch across the brickwork, straining to reach the similar pediment above the adjoining window which I realised, from Oscar’s account of the arrangement of the hotel rooms, was the bedchamber belonging to the Baron’s bodyguard, Igor.

For a few seconds, Holmes stood there motionless, his heels projecting over the edge of the cornice, his arms stretched out wide like a victim subjected to some hideous medieval torture. I thought he would never move. Then with a massive contortion of his shoulder muscles, which I could actually see taking place beneath the taut fabric of his coat, the fingers of his right hand touched and then tightened over the projecting border of the architrave above the adjacent window and, little by little, he was able to loosen the grip of his left hand and to inch his feet along the cornice ledge, the rope crawling along behind him.

Its presence should have been a comfort, but watching as it slowly dragged its way from the bed, across the
floor to the window and from there out into the night, it seemed far too flimsy to support Holmes’ weight should he lose his balance.

After what seemed an eternity, Holmes reached the comparative safety of the adjacent windowsill, where he stood for several long moments flexing his fingers which must have been aching with the strain of clutching the pediment. His face was pressed close to the glass and I had the impression that he was using this pause not just as a respite but as a chance to peer inside the room. Seconds later, his head turned in my direction and I saw him raise two fingers of his left hand to his lips as a warning gesture for silence. Then his head turned away and he again began the same laborious effort of stretching out for the architrave above the neighbouring window which offered the next hand-hold.

To take my mind off his perilous journey, I counted off the seconds under my breath and reached the total of two hundred and sixteen before Holmes arrived at his goal and once more was able to step off the narrow cornice and stand upright on the broader ledge of the window to the Baron’s room.

The window, thank God, was not fastened, a lucky chance which I fervently hoped could be taken as a good omen for the successful outcome of the whole enterprise. Within seconds, Holmes had slid the lower sash upwards and had disappeared over the sill into the room. Moments later, there came a slight tug on the
rope indicating that he had untied it and, at the signal, Oscar and I drew the rope in hand over hand until the full length of it lay coiled up upon the floor.

I regarded it with the same horror as I might a poisonous snake, for the terrible truth had at last to be faced. It was now my turn to secure it over my shoulder and lower myself backwards out of the window.

I hung there for what seemed like an eternity, feeling with the toes of my rubber-soled boots for the cornice, which gave me some purchase on the stone, thank God. At the same time I was clutching desperately to the pediment above the window, as a drowning man might grasp at a life-belt. Knowing that if I looked down I would lose my nerve completely, I kept my gaze fixed upwards, straight into the face of Oscar, who was standing at the open window looking down at me, ready to pay out the rope as soon as I began to inch my way along the ledge.

I think it was his expression which persuaded me to move. It was rigid with horror at my predicament, as if it were a mirror reflecting what I imagined was the expression on my own face, and I realised I had two choices: either to scramble back ignominiously into the room or to follow after Holmes.

I chose the latter, more out of pride than courage. If Holmes could do it, then so could I. Indeed, I
had
to do it.

At that moment of decision, my right foot found
the edge of the cornice, although its narrowness struck me with terror. But I knew I was now committed and I took my first shuffling step sideways, my body pressed inwards towards the hotel’s façade.

Bricks are familiar, commonplace objects. In London, or any town or city, one sees them everywhere and one assumes there is little more to find out about them other than their shape and colour. To see them less than an inch before one’s nose was like a revelation. I saw in close-up their gritty surfaces with their coarse, open pores, and their colour, predominantly a reddish brown which was streaked in irregular patches with lighter and darker shades ranging from a dusky pink to a purplish black. I saw, too, the paler bands of mortar which bound them together, not smooth as they appear from a distance but pitted and scabbed. I also smelt them, a mingled odour of soot and damp cinders.

I was aware of nothing else about me, neither the rest of the hotel stretching up above me nor the lighted glass dome of the restaurant below.

As my feet crept painfully sideways, my right hand, as if attached to my feet, made the same slow, oblique progress across the wall, like a crab, feeling for the edge of the pediment above the next window, that of the room where Igor, Baron Kleist’s bodyguard slept. My relief on reaching it and feeling my fingers grip the stonework is beyond description, except that I knew then the emotion a mountaineer must experience when
he successfully gains the summit of some dangerous, rocky cliff.

Seconds later, my shuffling feet had, so to speak, caught up with my hand and I was able to lift them slowly, one after the other, on to the broad safety of the window sill.

Like Holmes, I rested there for several moments, aware for the first time of the pain in the stretched muscles in my arms and the backs of my legs. I also copied the action I had seen Holmes make, pressing my face close to the glass, and saw what he must have seen which had induced him to signal for silence.

Although the curtains were drawn across the window, a pencil-thin gap between their edges allowed me a glimpse into the room beyond. I could see little except for a strip of flower-patterned wallpaper and part of a cream-coloured bedspread together with the wooden foot-rail of a bed, similar to the one in the adjacent room to which Oscar had attached the rope. I could see no one, but something about the manner in which the cover was disarranged suggested that someone, Igor presumably, was either lying on it or had been recently. The sight of it made me strongly aware that, although absent, the Baron’s malign influence was still potent, a thought which spurred me to move on, although I doubted if the occupant of the room could have heard anything above the sound of the orchestra below in the Winter Garden or the traffic passing by along Piccadilly.

The relief I had felt on reaching the first window was a mere tremor compared to the rush of emotion on my gaining the safety of the last.

Holmes had left the bottom sash open and was waiting inside the room to help me over the sill.

He said nothing, for he rarely expressed his feelings, but his face conveyed more clearly than words his own relief at my safe arrival. There was also both admiration and pride in his features as he took my hand in both of his and wrung it warmly, mouthing the words ‘Well done, Watson!’ as he did so. It was at moments like those that I felt closer to Holmes than to any other living person, my own dear wife excepted.