The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (6 page)

That last thrust went home. There was silence for a full minute. Holmes had said all that he proposed to say and did not break it. At last McIver looked up.

‘What will you do?’ he asked, and his voice shook. He no longer doubted that if Holmes spoke to Crellin or Milverton, he would most certainly be dead before sunset, perhaps after such retribution as should make that death itself a blessing. Holmes was in no hurry to reply. He waited a moment longer. The cross-legged graven image sitting at the head of the bed lacked only the curled pipe that he used to smoke in this posture in our Baker Street rooms.

‘No,’ said Holmes at length, ‘I believe the question is, Corporal McIver, what will you do?’

The man had stumbled into a quicksand of panic and knew not how to get out.

‘I cannot save you, Mr. Holmes. How can I? I am searched every time I leave and enter. For days I am not allowed to leave at all.’

‘I do not suggest you should save me. In any case, I do not fear my death. Yet I might ask for those dignities and comforts that are the right of any man, even one under sentence.’

He told me that there was no mistaking the relief on McIver’s face. The man was far more weak than wicked and now saw that he might escape, whatever the fate of his prisoner.

‘What comforts?’ he asked, suddenly eager to know the price.

‘Water,’ said Holmes, ‘a glass of water that is free from any drug, a glass which stands upon your table and which you will bring me to drink from when I require it.’

‘You shall have that, by all means. You might have had that anyway, by merely asking.’

‘And then,’ said Holmes thoughtfully, ‘confined as I am, held by a chain and deprived of movement, I feel it a toll on my physical well-being.’

‘I cannot free you from that chain, Mr. Holmes!’

‘I would not ask it. So far as you are my friend, I am yours, and I do not willingly put my friends in danger.’

At this, he half thought McIver might kneel and say, ‘Bless you, Mr. Holmes,’ or some other stage nonsense.

‘I feel a dreadful lethargy,’ he e xplained. ‘Food sits on my stomach, kills my appetite, and I sense a great lassitude.’

McIver was far out of his depth as he stared back.

‘What is it that you want, sir?’

‘More than anything,’ said Holmes slowly, ‘I should like the most ordinary remedy in the world. I have no means of escape and you cannot set me free. Yet for as long as I am permitted to live, I should like a packet of charcoal biscuits every day. You may obtain them at any pharmacy or any druggist. I believe they would do me great good.’

After what had passed between them, this request appeared so trivial that McIver seemed to doubt his good fortune. How could a condemned man who nonetheless held the corporal at his mercy ask for so little?

‘Is that all?’ he said hesitantly.

‘For the moment,’ said Holmes. ‘There may be other little things. Rest assured, I shall not put you in danger. What should I gain by that?’

McIver almost laughed with relief as he spoke.

‘Of course I shall bring a store of charcoal biscuits, a supply for a week or two. That is nothing. I can bring them as if they were for my own use. You shall have water whenever you want it.’

Then his face darkened a little.

‘How do I know you w ill say not hing of what you have discovered?’

‘You have my word,’ Holmes said icily. ‘I have never broken it yet, for good or evil, not even to Professor Moriarty and his kind. Besides which, to betray you would not save me. So long as you are obedient in these little matters, you shall be safe.’

That night, before he left, McIver brought the glass of water, unseen by the others. Crellin, knowing nothing of this, followed a few minutes later with the hyoscine solution. Holmes took that glass in his hand while the bully moved the bedside chair and table from his reach. Then Crellin turned and, standing over his prisoner, watched him drink down the glass. No one who had seen Holmes’s sleight-of-hand with far more difficult objects could doubt that the contents of the glass he had drunk was water. The hyoscine, no more than half a glass, had been disposed of under cover of the blanket.

That night, after the gas had guttered and the glow of the mantel had dwindled like a dying sun, it was Crellin who slept, the man’s bulk against the table, while the oil lamp spluttered and faded. Almost silently in the darkness, Holmes felt for the seams and the threads of the cheap mattress. Before dawn, with teeth and nails, he had made an opening no more than a few inches long and well concealed in the fold of the canvas beading. Even had they found it, the rent he had made in the material might have seemed like wear and tear. Yet they never searched. He had begun to depend upon this. After all, he was a prisoner whom they saw chained to the wall, drugged by night, with the eyes of his guards constantly upon him, in a cell that was locked, inside and out, by keys always beyond his reach. Nothing was passed to him but food and drink. Even the food was first cut into pieces so that he need not be allowed the use of a knife or a fork. What could he have that would be worth searching for?

When the work was done, Sherlock Holmes lay back and thought of the mountain he must climb. To escape from the cell was only a beginning. There was no way out through the prison building with the first guards a few feet outside the cell door and many more beyond them. The sixty feet of smooth granite that rose from the yard were his only hope. His enemies knew much of Sherlock Holmes the public man, but his private life was as secret as only he could make it. His adversaries knew little of Sherlock Holmes and his chemical researches and nothing whatever of Sherlock Holmes the disciple of Paganini and scholar of polyphonic music. Nor did they know of him as a mountaineer who had attempted the so-called Widow-Maker glacier of the Matterhorn. He had yet to conquer it, but he was one of few who had come back alive from the attempt.

It was not in any of these accomplishments that he now placed his hope, but in another area of expertise. No man in the world was as well-informed in the minutiae of sensational and criminal literature as Sherlock Holmes. His extensive library, shelved on the walls of our Baker Street rooms, would have been so much dry reading to those who sought his destruction. Yet he knew and could recall every page that was of interest to him.

Somewhere in all those pages were two or three devoted to Henry Williams, a childhood chimney-sweep and an adult burglar, sixty years ago. Holmes had read of him and visited the old man on his deathbed. There it was that Henry Williams, whose adventures grace the twentieth chapter of the
Newgate Chronicles
, imparted to my friend the secrets of his craft. For Henry Williams, all those years ago, had lain in the death cell of this same great prison when burglary was still a hanging matter. And Henry Williams had escaped the gallows by becoming the one man who had scaled those fearful walls of Newgate Gaol.

It was only the moral insanity of Milverton and his accomplices that had allowed Sherlock Holmes a lease on life until the ‘witnesses’ of his murder should arrive to enjoy a gallows tableau of vengeance. Brief though the time left to him might be, and however urgent the necessary action, he knew that he must wait until the conditions were exactly right for what he intended. Once again, he would have one chance—and one chance only. He required a night when Crellin was the warder in his cell after McIver had carried out his evening duties and withdrawn. Holmes wished the corporal of horse no harm. McIver had been essential to him, the one man over whom he could exercise command. Whatever this ex-trooper suspected, he dared not report it to Crellin or Milverton, for fear of the story that Holmes had to tell. Captive and captor were indissolubly bound by their pact.

Two days later a half-caught murmur from one of the guards in their purloined prison board uniforms suggested to Holmes that Henry Milverton himself was in Newgate that night. If Milverton was there, the master-at-arms and the execution shed might have been prepared for the next morning. Holmes knew that this night was the only one on which he could count. He would be free or he would die in his own way. If death was the choice, he would take with him Milverton and as many of his accessories as possible. Nine years earlier he had faced Professor Moriarty with the same resolve at the falls of Reichenbach. He remarked then that his own life was an easy price to pay for the destruction of such evil.

McIver had done his duty in the cell by day and was to be one of the two men to keep watch in the corridor that night, sleeping by turns but ready to assist Crellin in the cell if need be. Just before the change of guards, the corporal brought a glass of the sweet and oily hypnotic.

‘The water, if you please,’ said Holmes quietly. ‘I find the taste of this draft quite as abominable as its effects.’

The man’s ner ve withered in his presence. He could not meet the dark and penetrating gaze, perhaps knowing that murder was intended in the morning. He turned away to fill the water glass. For the benefit of anyone else who might chance to see him, Holmes raised the glass of hyoscine to his lips, then threw back his head as if to swallow the contents and be done with it. Before McIver could turn, in one flowing downward movement of his arm to suggest exhaustion, he had tipped the eggcupful of fluid between the wall and the bed. The sickly mixture had merely wet his lips to give off its sour-treacle odour. McIver brought the glass of water. Whether he suspected what had become of the drug, Holmes never knew. Yet, with the prisoner chained and watched in a locked cell, what did the sleeping draught matter? It was intended to prevent a condemned man from giving trouble.

Holmes had been careful never to give trouble.

‘My time is short and I think we may not speak again,’ he said softly to the corporal, handing back the glass. ‘You are a weak and foolish man but not, I think, a wicked one. From now on you must follow your conscience. I daresay I shall never be in a position to help you, but, should it happen, you may depend upon it that I will do my best to set you free.’

McIver’s eyes betrayed his helplessness and he murmured even more softly in his turn.

‘You must not speak to me now, sir. You must not, if you wish me well.’

Holmes smiled. It was the second time that McIver had called him ‘sir,’ the instinctive deference of the old soldier to his commander. Given a few more days, he might have turned this jailer into an ally.

‘One more thing,’ he said quietly. ‘On no account enter this cell tomorrow morning before others have done so. Mind you see to that.’

It was as much as he could do for the frightened corporal of horse. Perhaps it was because they had heard something about the hour of his death that the others seemed a little more careless with him that night. It must have seemed to them that they had only to keep an unconscious man safely in his cell for another eight or nine hours. Perhaps soon after dawn, in the presence of Milverton and his criminal associates, three warders and the master-at-arms would drag their half-conscious captive to the execution shed twenty yards away across the exercise yard.

Crellin entered to find Holmes already lying on his side with the upper blanket drawn over him. The man locked the door with his bunch of keys, returned it to his belt, and made a perfunctory search of the prisoner. An oily sweetness of the drug hung in the close air and the jailer’s nostrils could detect it. Neither man spoke. For his part, Holmes sensed the customary odour of drink on this ruffian’s breath. Crellin inspected the manacle on the left ankle of his prisoner and pulled hard against the fastening on the wall to check its strength. He crossed the room to the wooden chair on which he had sat during every night of his vigil, in profile, with his back to the wall, his right arm resting on the bare wooden table beside him.

Sherlock Holmes had calculated his reach as a matter of simple mathematics. It was too short to touch Crellin. The chain allowed him five feet, enough to reach the little alcove behind him with its washing basin and drain. In the other direction, by lying flat, he could add a further six feet and at least two feet more for his extended arms. Measuring the paving tiles beside his bed by rule of thumb and allowing for the width of the floor, he had calculated that he would be almost two feet short of the chair on which Crellin sat. Henry Milverton did not make the mistake of underestimating his captive. The jailers would always be beyond his range.

Crellin lit his warder’s night lamp, which Holmes had identified at first sight as the ‘Hesperus’ model made by Jones & Willis of Birmingham. It was lit or extinguished without any need to remove the glass chimney. The reservoir when full might last for several hours, but on previous nights it had guttered and faded after no more than two. As on all those other nights, Crellin now came closer and shone the lamp on the sleeping figure of the prisoner. Satisfied by what he saw and sure that it was safe to sleep, he went back and set the lamp down on the tiles beside his chair. Before sitting down, he went through the usual ritual of crossing the cell and pulling down the draw chain beside the gaslight on the opposite wall. Behind the three glass fishtails of its shade, the double flame dwindled to a dying glow. Without a glance at the sleeping figure under the blanket, he went back and stood by his chair to extinguish the second double gas lamp above him. He turned down the wick on the Hesperus oil lamp and positioned it beside his chair again, perhaps eight inches away. The cell was in shadow, no better lit now than by the gentlest nursery nightlight.

Sherlock Holmes lay motionless, waiting impatiently rather than fearfully to begin his work. Unless he could extinguish the low flame of the conical burner, his hopes were at an end. Twice in the next hour one of the men outside shone a lantern through the spy hole of the cell. The path of light missed Crellin, nodding on his chair, but illuminated the prisoner’s bed and the upper half of the little alcove behind it. There was no sound from the passage, and during the half hour that followed, the light did not appear again. If ever a man possessed his soul in patience, it was Sherlock Holmes in the depth of that night. Twice more, far beyond the prison walls, the bell of St. Sepulchre’s tolled and the deeper notes of the great cathedral followed it.