The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

In the course of his ‘trial,’ he understood that it was not their plan to kill him at once. Others who sought revenge upon him had been invited to watch him die. In the meantime the men who sat in judgment would break his spirit, so that the witnesses of his death might see him kneel for mercy and plead for his life as he was dragged to a beam from which the heavy rope of the gallows dangled. The story of Sherlock Holmes as a coward and a weakling in the end would do more to exhilarate and encourage this criminal brotherhood than any other coup.

Every night they gave him a choice as he lay on the wooden bed in his condemned cell. He might either drink the contents of the medicine glass, which would render him unconscious until morning, or be held down while a hypodermic syringe sedated him. He drank from the glass, if only to determine the drug they used. One touch on the tongue was enough.

His captors took no chances with him. A steel anklet and a light, five-foot steel chain locked him to a ring and a wall plate, whose four screws were deeply set into the stonework of the cell wall. This chain was just long enough for him to reach a small alcove with a basin and a drain behind the head of the wooden bed and too short for him to reach the guard who watched him while he was waking or sleeping. The anklet, almost tight to the skin, scraped flesh and bone whenever he moved.

As for his surroundings, the door from the cell to the passageway and the door to the exercise yard outside were both locked and barred. In the corridor sat two more guards who would enter immediately to their colleague’s assistance at the first sound of a disturbance and who, meantime, scrutinized the length of the cell through a glass spy hole every ten or fifteen minutes. For good measure, there was a bell within the guard’s reach. If pressed, it would bring immediate assistance from the men who sat outside.

It seemed useless for a man to fight against the effects of a nightly potion of hyoscine. Holmes knew this well enough. Yet after the first dose he knew something more. A sweet vegetable taste on his tongue suggested that hyoscine had been reduced and mingled with another drug. In order that it should have a more powerful effect, they had fortified it with an opiate. It was precisely in making doubly sure he was in their power that they gave Sherlock Holmes his first hope of defeating them.

I believe I was the only man on earth who knew of my friend’s pernicious addiction to narcotics at times of idleness, a secret compulsion that is now common knowledge to those who have read of him. So long as he was alive this was never revealed to another living soul. Much has since been made of his use of cocaine and the hypodermic syringe, somewhat less of his use of opium. It was opium which took him to those dens of Wapping or Shadwell, of which I have already written elsewhere. Medical men will know, if others do not, that the use of opiates habituates a man to them. It is notorious that the greater the use, the less potent the effects. It would have been absurd to suppose that, even then, he could have fought off the effects of such a dose as they administered each night. Yet even before his ‘trial’ ended, by an effort of subconscious will and as the hours of the night wore on, he was able to rouse himself to the level of ‘twilight sleep,’ the effect of hyoscine alone.

My friend confessed to me that the labour of this partial awakening was atrocious. Each time that he attempted to rise from the drugged depths of consciousness, he went through a period of delusion. It seemed that he was manacled to a monstrous engine of some kind, whose wheels or piston rods he was forced to turn with more pain and effort than he had ever known. At last he overcame the resistance of the mechanism and gained a momentum through which he floated free of his labour. Then, with a thump of the heart, his dream would begin again.

As in the repeated showing of a film or the constant rehearsal of a play, his accusers took their seats in his dream. A curiosity of his twilight sleep was that Holmes began to see details hidden from him in conscious reality. It seemed that the effects of the narcotics forced upon him had dulled part of his waking brain during his trial. Only in this hyoscine sleep did he identify his ‘judges’ from the shadows beyond the arclight brilliance. As these accusers took their seats on the previous evening, Holmes now recalled that he had made out a smooth-shaven moon face, the features veiled from further identification by the brilliance of light. In the world of a waking dream, his subconscious mind endowed this blank moon with a fixed smile that conveyed malign cruelty. Imagination added hard gray eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses; memor y recalled spite in a voice that was smooth and suave. Among the wraiths of semi-consciousness he heard the man address him. Holmes could not tell at first whether the words were an invention of his own fancy or whether he had heard them in the drugged torpor of his ordeal.

‘You think us impostors, Mr. Holmes. Yet no men alive have a better right to demand the forfeit of your life. Charles Augustus Milverton, whom you murdered, was my elder brother. I am Henry Caius Milverton, and you might have verified my existence had you chosen to do so. Do not deny your crime, I beg you. The silver revolver, caliber .22, was found. It was child’s play to compare the fingerprints upon it with those upon several objects obligingly but unwittingly handled by you.’

Holmes strove after the reality of the voice. Was he merely deducing the identity of Henry Caius Milverton from a dream? He knew instinctively that the words were real, spoken to him and blotted out by the next onset of hyoscine. In his mind he turned a little from the glare of light, trying obliquely to see beyond it. The voice continued, introducing a second judge.

‘My colleague Captain James Calhoun, denounced by you as the head of a murder gang in Georgia, was not lost at sea, as you sup- posed. Because the sternpost of his ship’s boat was found floating in mid-ocean after a severe gale, you thought him drowned. Had you been as clever as you would have the world believe, you would have seen at once that the debris was deliberately set adrift where it would be found. The
Lone Star,
for whom your minions waited at Savannah, entered Bahia three weeks later, unremarked, as the
Alcantara.
A lick of paint, Mr. Holmes, was sufficient to defeat you.’

‘You have the conceit of clever men, Holmes’—the well-fed drawl was Calhoun—‘but you were watched as soon as you accepted the case against me, even when you were reading ships’ registers and insurance files at Lloyd’s of London.’

Henry Milverton chuckled at t he colonel’s pleasantry and resumed.

‘Somewhere beyond these walls,’ the voice continued, ‘is Colonel James Moriarty, who is detained for the time being over matters relating to a family heirloom. Unusually, he bears the same first name as his brother, the professor whom you sent to his death at the falls of Reichenbach eleven years ago. It is a long time, is it not? And yet no doubt, Mr. Holmes, you are familiar with the old Italian proverb. Revenge is a dish which persons of taste prefer to eat cold. Before the melancholy conclusion of your history, Colonel Moriarty will demand certain satisfactions for his brother’s death—satisfactions which you will be in no position to deny him.’

The voice uttered a rich chuckle, as if in appreciation of its own consummate wit, and then proceeded.

‘Consider the matter of the Greek interpreter. On the basis of a newspaper cutting, you believed Harold Latimer and Wilson Kemp, whom you sought for murder, had stabbed one another to death in a railway carriage near Budapest. You should not, Mr. Holmes, believe all you read in the papers. These gentlemen and others will be invited to watch you dance your last half hour in the noose.’

‘Mr. Latimer is a knave,’ said Holmes mildly, ‘one who tortured and murdered the brother of the girl he had promised to marry, in order to extract from him the family fortune.’

‘So you say, Mr. Holmes.’

Sherlock Holmes endured this banter in the world of a dream, but his mind was elsewhere. Scrutinizing the architecture of his ‘courtroom,’ drawing out the half-remembered details with an effort that approached physical pain. Despite the central glare of light, he had seen that it was not a room but a vaulted space, the meeting of four massively built and stone-flagged passageways. Each was faced by a gothic arch. Nothing in the shadowy perspectives told him whether he was in England or in Europe, in a remote fastness or at the centre of a great city. Piece by piece, he reassembled the image of it. He woke next morning with the central enigma unraveled in his mind. The key to it had been a name, Henry Caius Milverton. He repeated that name over to himself silently, as if fearing that another sleep would wipe it from his mind.

During several days, whenever the ‘court’ was not in session, he was to remain in the cell, his last refuge until they led him out to the gallows. It was a bare whitewashed room with a slightly arched brick roof supported on iron girders and tunnel-like in shape. At one end, behind the head of his bed, was the small, open alcove with its basin, a gutter, and running water. He was watched day and night by one or other of Milverton’s ‘warders.’

His furniture consisted of the solid wooden bedstead about nine inches in height from the floor, with a thin mattress and a single blanket. There was a table and a wooden upright chair by the bed and another table and chair at the farther end of the cell for the use of the warder. The table and chair by the bed were removed at night, as if for fear he might make some use of them to escape. The cell was lit on its long outer wall by two iron-grated windows with small panes of opaque fluted glass. Its floor was laid with red polished tiles. His food was already cut up and brought to him on a white tin plate, without cutler y. No doubt they feared he would cheat them by using a knife to escape or to make away with himself before the appointed date.

Holmes had taken measurements with a sure eye. The cell was almost nineteen feet long by eight feet wide and seven feet tall at the lowest point, where the roof and walls met. The long wall adjoining the corridor was blank, apart from the plate to which the anklet and chain were attached and a double gas bracket for illumination after dark. The narrow wall at the far end, facing the bed, had a door leading at right angles to the corridor. On the other long wall were the two narrowly barred windows and a door to a yard. This wall was also lit from a double gas bracket. The narrow wooden bed with its rough prison-issue blanket and a canvas pillow stood along the wall adjoining the corridor at the far end from the door.

The light anklet chain, when stretched at full length, allowed him to reach the basin in the alcove behind him. In the opposite direction, he could stretch to a point almost halfway down the length of the cell. It stopped short of the door to the yard and the wooden chair with its table where the guard sat. As well as the guards in the corridor, two men took it in turns to watch him within the cell. With the chain on his ankle he could not have reached them, even if an attack would have made escape possible. Such food as he was brought was put on a plate just within his reach and then the guard drew back. It was made plain to him that he would never leave this cell, except for sittings of the ‘court,’ until the morning when they took him out to the gallows shed in the yard. It was equally plain to them that no one could save him, least of all Holmes himself. This belief he considered to be their greatest weakness.

Even at night as he slept his drugged sleep, there was a guard in his cell, as well as the others in the corridor outside, within easy call. Yet night and his dreams offered him hope. Though he was required to drink the glass of hyoscine hydrobromide, it must have seemed to his guards a superfluous precaution. He could scarcely move from the bed. Both doors were beyond his reach, and though he might stretch out an arm to touch the nearer barred window with his fingertips, he would be seen and heard at once.

With such precautions, it mattered little to his guardians whether he swallowed the hyoscine hydrobromide or not. All the same, they were instinctively obedient to Milverton and would make him do it. Holmes understood that he had been given the sedative merely so that he should not be troublesome in the hours of darkness by arguing or pleading. He was careful to give no trouble. After a couple of nights they took less interest, and the man who brought the glass sometimes glanced away if distracted by sound or movement. It was possible for Holmes to tip a little from his glass so that it fell upon the woolen socks covering his feet while he sat crossed-legged. The man who came to take the empty glass away would lean toward him, perhaps to smell the sweetness on his breath. It was always there, and this seemed to satisfy them that they had reduced their captive to obedience. They would not risk giving him an overdose without Milverton’s authority, and it seemed that Milverton was usually elsewhere.

After he had spent several nights battling against the drug’s effects, the upper level of what he called his twilight sleep became easier to attain. In this state, Holmes knew that he had once heard the rumble of a man’s breath. With their prisoner helpless, the guards usually spent the night sleeping on the wooden chair. This item of intelligence began to form the basis of their captive’s plan. A night or two later, lying half-conscious, he heard something more. It would have meant little to most men, but to Sherlock Holmes it made clear a large part of the mystery of his abduction.

At first he was not quite sure, in the fog-like vapours of hyoscine, that he had truly heard it. Yet he knew that if it were real, it must come again. It seemed like the boom of the dreadful engine to which he was attached as he struggled to consciousness. He now heard it again, four times in quick succession. It was no engine, but a large clock. If it had struck four, he would wait until five to judge its direction. Yet, to his surprise, the four booms came again in much less than a minute. This time it had a deeper tone and, almost at once, he heard it four times more in a note higher than either of the other two. Holmes, the musician, composer, and author of a critique on the motets of Orlando Lassus, enjoyed the gift of perfect pitch. He had only to hear a sound in order to pick out its equivalent on a keyboard.