The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (39 page)

‘You may rest easily, Watson. I have deduced everything about this robbery—where it will happen and when, as well as the name of the man who will carry it out. It is only his method that still eludes me.’

‘I call that a pretty large exception!’

‘Not at all. If Colonel Moriarty proposes to steal the Queen of the Night, it is of the first importance that we should dictate the method to him.’

Naturally, he did not explain to me how that could be done.

It was most unfortunate that at this juncture Mycroft Holmes should have muddied the waters by certain conversations with Inspector Lestrade, whom he was apt to regard as his luggage porter or bootblack, and whom he was also apt to chivvy or bully as though it were a sport. From his lofty perch as the government’s chief accountant and interdepartmental adviser, Brother Mycroft now raised the matter with Lestrade of security at the coronation festivities, as it affected the crown jewels and those of visiting royalty. He then suggested to the Scotland Yard man that Sherlock Holmes might be retained to super vise or implement whatever security seemed advisable.

Inspector Lestrade, who hoped one day to be Superintendent Lestrade or even Commander Lestrade, was aware of the considerable influence exercised in such promotions by Mycroft Holmes. So the inspector spoke to his superintendent, who spoke to his commander, who spoke to the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, who spoke to the Home Secretary, who, in his turn, spoke to his interdepartmental adviser, Mycroft Holmes, who commended it as a capital idea—and so the message was relayed all the way back down again.

As a result, Mycroft Holmes and Lestrade paid us a visit soon afterward, on an otherwise sunlit afternoon, to inform us of the decision that had been taken. The inspector was already briefed and prepared to discuss the particular arrangements for Coronation Day, 2 August. In what manner did my friend think he might best protect the jewels of the state at Westminster?

‘By sitting here in my chair with my pipe and reading the death-chamber memoirs of some criminal of rare distinction, I daresay,’ Holmes replied without a glimmer of humour. ‘A French Bluebeard would promise something more in the way of style than our own marital assassins.’

Lestrade went red in the face, but Brother Mycroft was not to be denied.

‘This will not do!’ he boomed at his fractious sibling. ‘On the subject of your protection of the regalia, I have given my word!’

‘But not mine,’ said Sherlock Holmes humbly.

‘Why, for heaven’s sake? Why will you not do it?’

‘Because I should dance attendance to no purpose and that is something I decline to do. There is a great and most interesting robbery in prospect. The papers will be full of nothing else if it happens. Yet it has nothing to do with Coronation Day. I have seen that for myself.’

‘What have you seen?’

‘Only what you or anyone else might have noted, with a little care and a modicum of common sense. I know that there will be an attempt. I know the item to be stolen and I know the name of the man who will steal it. That is nothing. Any fool might guess at it. Unlike any fool, however, I now know how it is to be done and where. I know the time of the theft to within five minutes.’

‘Five minutes!’

‘Oh, very well, let us be generous and say within ten minutes. There remains merely the question of whether the thief can screw his courage to the sticking point when it comes to the moment. I cannot be answerable for his nerve. However, I think you and Lestrade had far better leave the whole thing to me.’

‘Then at least tell me where, when, how, and by whom!’

‘No.’

I knew he was talking about the Queen of the Night but did not dare to say a word. Mycroft Homes seemed to swell beyond his normal size.

‘Then, I am to take it, you do not trust your own brother!’

How I wished I had been somewhere else just then. I had a vivid impression of their nursery tantrums in days long gone by.

‘I trust my own brother implicitly,’ said Sherlock Holmes evenly.

‘But you do not trust him sufficiently to prevent this criminal outrage, whatever it may be.’

Sherlock Holmes stared at him and then spoke very quietly.

‘You have understood nothing, Mycroft, if you believe that. I do not wish to prevent what you call an outrage. In fact, I would encourage it, if I could. There is a personal affair that must be settled and this theft is the occasion of it but no more. It cannot be resolved in any other way.’

Mycroft had evidently heard something from Lestrade about his brother’s subversive political outbursts, for now he asked, ‘This is not some trumpery, I hope, which involves stealing the crown jewels and giving them back to the princes of India?’

Sherlock Holmes shook his head.

‘No. If it were merely that, I should tell you everything and invite you to join me in the venture. I have already pledged my word to Lord Holder in the matter of securing the Lord Mayor of London and the Mansion House during the festivities. What you propose would create the most flagrant conflict of interests.’

This was news to me. I did not know that he had seen Lord Holder again.

‘I cannot see it, Sherlock,’ said Mycroft Holmes ominously.

‘I daresay not.’

It was, as they say, the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Mycroft Holmes swept from the room without another word, Lestrade at his heels, and was driven away into the summer dusk. That was as far as anyone could get with my friend.

After they had gone, I tried to soothe Holmes by reverting to the Queen of the Night, in whose safety he had a real interest. I thought this might please him. In the course of conversation, I said:

‘It seems extraordinary, does it not, that all this magnificence was created just to button the neck of a man’s cloak?’

He had just picked up the evening paper and glanced at it. Now he threw it down again and got to his feet, striding restlessly across to the window and turning back.

‘Just so, Watson. Magnificence and flummery. Whether flummery is the price one must pay for magnificence or whether magnificence is the cost of flummery, I should not care to say. Let it suffice for the moment that I swear Colonel Moriarty means to have the Queen of the Night and I care for nothing else. To be sure, he has money enough, the reward of human bondage. To him, I daresay, theft is a way of vengeance against those who have wronged him and his martyred brother ever since birth. I am one of the guilty. You might call it a matter of justice by his own perverted lights, against the Longstaffe family and society as a whole.’

‘He will be caught.’

Holmes sat down again and shook his head.

‘Not by Lestrade and his kind. Colonel Moriarty is that most dangerous type, a criminal who is not known to be one and who works alone. Curiously, it is a species encountered often in what Professor von Krafft-Ebing calls lust murders. Because he works alone, there is no one to betray him, which is far the commonest method of detection. He works in utter secrecy, deep in the bomb-proof shelter of his skull.’

One of my most uncomfortable evenings drew to an end at this point. For the next few weeks, however, during his visits to us Lestrade became slyly witty in a manner that was most provoking. He would refer, with a wink at me over the rim of his glass, to the value of the jewels on display at the ceremony in Westminster Abbey and the dangers they must be exposed to. Then he would add that the humble efforts of Scotland Yard might prove sufficient to keep them safe without the assistance of a higher intelligence. It was galling in the extreme, and I feared there must be an explosion.

Holmes kept himself in check for longer than I had expected. However, when these pleasantries were repeated for the fourth or fifth time, he remarked casually, ‘I do not imagine that the disappearance of the royal jewels would be regarded as theft by those Indian princes from whom they were looted by British power in the first place. Indeed, if I could be quite sure that they were stolen only to be returned to their rightful owners, I daresay I should be ready to put my meagre talents at the disposal of those who perpetrated such a robbery.’

Lestrade’s bluff laughter in response to this had a false note about it. I believe that he had been truly shocked by the utterance of these subversive comments, whatever their intent. The anarchic and radical element in Holmes’s character was one with which our visitor could never get to grips. We heard no more from him on the subject of the royal regalia. However, when the inspector left us that night, Holmes burst out in anger.

‘It is quite obvious now, if it never was before, that Lestrade and his crew are utterly unsuited to dealing with a threat of this kind. I lose all patience with such people! Thank God I have never mentioned Colonel Moriarty to Lestrade. One might as well hand over the Queen of the Night to the robber and be done with it!’

A day or two later, he was absent from morning until evening. On his return, he revealed that he had spent the day with Lord Holder. Despite his outburst to Mycroft Holmes and Lestrade, my friend so far relented as to permit his lordship to conduct him upon a tour of the coronation routes and to introduce him to those buildings where the great jewels of state and their wearers might be gathered. Apart from the royal apartments of Buckingham Palace, which neither Colonel Moriarty not any other thief would get near, these consisted of the ceremonial area in Westminster Abbey, as well as its antechambers, and the robing-rooms of the House of Lords. As a chamber-groom to the Earl of Dorset, our adversary would have brief and limited access to these. In company with Lord Holder, Holmes had examined these rooms and their adjacent reception areas. Here, if anywhere, a surreptitious theft might be possible or a sudden attack might take place on Lord Adolphus Longstaffe as the Prince of Wales’s herald. But Holmes came home disgruntled and sat in his chair biting a thumbnail with vexation.

‘Contrary to the urgings of Brother Mycroft and Lestrade, it is out of the question that there will be an attempt to steal the Queen of the Night during the coronation.’

‘Then the treasure is safe?’

In the frustration of the moment, he cried out:

‘Good God, Watson! This scoundrel was prepared to murder me to gain his ends! Do you not understand that if there is no attempt at robbery during the coronation, it will be made in some other manner? That is our certain hope!’

‘Or perhaps the entire story of the theft is a fairy tale.’

He looked at me more calmly but sadly, as if I had failed to listen to a word.

Next morning he went again to Lord Holder, who had been created an alderman of the City of London the previous year and had now been accommodated by the Lord Mayor with a room at the Mansion House for the course of the celebrations. The coronation itself was only the first of several occasions at which the royal regalia and state jewels were to be worn. A monarch who is crowned in the City of Westminster must also take possession of the City of London a few days later. The second processional route would lie through the districts of law and finance. At noon a grand luncheon was to be held in the great Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor of London would play host to His Majesty and where Lord Holder would have much to do with the arrangements and the custody of the jewels.

‘Since you are already acquainted with Lord Holder,’ said Holmes to me next morning, ‘you may find it instructive to see for yourself the areas of the Mansion House that must be guarded.’

An hour or so later we stood in his lordship’s room, which looked through a round-arched window towards the river and London Bridge. Our host then indicated a slightly built man who had just come in, an individual in a brown suit that was almost a match in color for his luxuriant mustache and eyes.

‘It would have given me great pleasure, gentlemen, to show you the banqueting hall and the anterooms myself. Unfortunately, I am sitting in the Lord Mayor’s court this morning. Therefore I must leave you in the capable hands of Inspector Jago of the City of London Police.’

‘Inspector Jago and I are old friends,’ said Holmes graciously. ‘I am sure we shall get along admirably.’

The inspector extended his hand to each of us in turn.

‘It is a year or two since then, Mr. Holmes. A matter of the Bank of England, as I recollect, robbed handsomely by three enterprising young American gentlemen.’

He took us straight to the Egyptian Hall, lofty as a cathedral nave, whose plan had been based upon an Egyptian chamber of the ancient world. Inspector Jago opened the double doors and waved us in, as if he were the owner of the place. Two tables, each a hundred dinner places long, ran down either side with a high table across the far end. Side screens of lofty Corinthian columns supported a vaulted roof and framed the great classical arch of the west window. I was quite unprepared for such magnificence as this. The niches between the columns at either side were filled by sculptured groups or single figures in the manner of Grecian antiquity. Royal banners and shaded flambeaux hung before each alcove. Gilt chandeliers on triple chains were suspended at intervals from the roof down the entire length of the hall. Here the newly crowned King Edward would take lunch.

‘Four hundred guests at a time, gentleman,’ said Inspector Jago quietly, for all the world as if we were in church. ‘Even this will be too little for His Majesty’s visit. We shall be using the Venetian Parlour, Wilkes’s Parlour, and ever y hole and corner. In short, we shall hardly know what to do with everyone.’

I glanced at Holmes, hoping he was not about to denounce flummery again. He merely inquired, with a little impatience, ‘And what of the other offices appointed for the day?’

Inspector Jago touched his forehead briefly, as if to indicate a lapse of memory.

‘Quite right, Mr. Holmes. Follow me and you shall see what we have by way of robing-rooms and the like. With space so tight, it would never do for our guests to be seated at luncheon in their robes! We have provided the most secure accommodation for cloaks, robes, and insignia. This way, if you please.’