The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (23 page)

At about noon on Saturday, the elderly woman who kept watch on the door in the little court was surprised by the arrival of the gasman. He was a rather stooping grey-haired figure who had seen his best days, his moustache straggling and his eyes owl-like behind rimless spectacles. Someone had reported a smell of gas. The good woman had not herself noticed it. On being invited out of her cubby-hole, however, she found a distinct smell of gas on the stairs. Holmes the Gasman had prepared a tin of coal-tar, adding to it such ingredients as would enhance the smell of gas, when the lid was surreptitiously removed.

It was almost 1
P
.
M
., while the woman was on the top floor making her final tour of the building, when the gasman found his leak and noisily tightened the joint of a pipe with a spanner, which he took from his leather bag of tools. He shouted up to her and ambled off down the stairs. She heard him close the courtyard door as he went out. Holmes, of course, had closed the door and remained in the building. On his first visit, he had noticed a cupboard under the stairway with a sloping ceiling, where the cleaners deposited brooms and buckets. It had a little bolt on the outside, just sufficient to serve as a catch and held in place by tacks. There was no reason for the female guardian to look in there but, to make assurance doubly sure, my part was to enter the courtyard door with my tray of matches and push the little bolt across. If the good woman glanced at all, she would think it quite impossible that anyone could be in there while it was bolted from the outside. To distract her a little further, I shouted up the stairs from the doorway to inquire whether any of the tradesmen on the floor above might care to support a worthy cause. She replied abruptly that they had all left for the weekend.

Within ten minutes, she had gone, locking Holmes alone in the building, the safe-breaker's tools in his gasman's bag. To force open the cupboard door which concealed him, wrenching out the slot of the little bolt, was the work of a moment. Then, for appearance's sake, he had tacked the metal fitting back into place.

He made his way to the work-room at the back of the tailor's shop, secure in the knowledge that he would scarcely be disturbed before Monday. Freeing the carpet at the rear wall, he folded it back, taking up two short lengths of board. Lowering himself through the gap, he was in the unlit foundations, rubble underfoot and boards above, divided from the Cornhill Vaults by a rough stone wall.

This wall was a crude division rather than a load-bearing support. There was even a ventilation grille between the two premises. In the next hour, Holmes was able to tap out the grille and two stones adjoining, which gave a sufficient space to slither through. By two o'clock, as I took up my sentry-go with the collecting box and the matches, he was in the space that served as foundations for the Cornhill Vaults.

From his previous visit to the Vaults, Holmes told me that he had a good idea of where the attack must be made. To try the strong-room floor above him was out of the question. The floor, like the walls, would surely be reinforced by iron. Behind the strongroom, however, was an office with a carpet at its centre, stretching almost to the walls, where varnished boards formed a surround a few inches broad. It was possible, from underneath, to use the old jack-in-the-box safe-breaker's tool which lay in his gasman's bag. The jack could bring pressure of a quarter of a ton against a safe and as its iron thread extended upwards the nails holding down the floorboards burst from the joists. By half-past two, Holmes was in the rear office of the Cornhill Vaults.

I could picture him as he confronted the strong-room door. His long experience and the sensitivity of his tools would put a locksmith to shame. I had watched him practise his skill on the latest locks, laying them on the table in Baker Street. Once, as his accomplice, I had seen him tackle a safe that was almost identical to the strong-room lock of the Cornhill Vaults. I pictured him now, as then, unrolling his case of instruments and choosing each one with the calm scientific accuracy of a surgeon who performs a delicate operation. He would work with concentrated energy, laying down one tool, picking up another, handling each with the strength and unhurried delicacy of the trained mechanic. You might have exploded a bomb outside and he would not have heard it. Yet he could read in his mind, as if it were the softest music, the tiny whisper of steel touching steel in the mechanism. One after another, he patiently guided five metal probes into the lock, each covered with lamp-black and each designed to show the position of one of the levers as the probe was turned and the lamp-black scraped off by contact with the metal.

Caution, as well as skill, brought him his reward on these occasions. Taking the measurements, Holmes would adjust a skeleton key, until its five teeth met exactly with the five levers in the lock. After a few minutes, the steel skeleton turned freely and the lock of the door rolled back.

The Cornhill Vaults provided another obstacle. Within the next few paces, Holmes would be revealed to the spy-holes of the iron shutter by the mirrors that covered the approaches to the safes and stacks of steel document drawers. Outside, the street of banks and commercial premises was clear, except for an elderly man and a middle-aged couple strolling on the far pavement. I could not help turning and caught the reflection of the ‘gasman' standing by a tall stack of deep metal drawers, each locked by its own key. They were not, of course, identified by the names of the customers but only by their numbers. However, each drawer contained a little frame with a card, which indicated when the drawer had been opened by its tenant, the initials of the visitor verifying this. Holmes first eliminated all those that had not been opened at least twice on the previous Tuesday, once to take the ‘specimen document' out and once to return it. There were two drawers remaining. He would have broken open both, had not one card borne the initials ‘J. M.'

‘The Last of the Light Brigade!'

I shouted the warning even before I rattled the collecting box, which as yet held only the coins I had put in at the start. The policeman on his beat was walking slowly along this side of the street, glancing at doors and windows, sometimes testing the handle of a door. Prudently, I moved a little away down the pavement from the iron shutter of the Cornhill Vaults so that I might not appear to be concealing anything. It seemed an age before he reached the spot where I had been standing. He stooped a little and put his eyes to the holes in the iron shutter. Then he straightened up, saluted as he passed me, and walked slowly on with his rolling gait. I let him get twenty or thirty yards away before I shook the box once more. Holmes, who had moved out of range of the mirrors, stepped back and resumed his task.

To break open a document drawer, as to break open a safe, two implements are used. The first is a metal wedge known as an ‘alderman'. It is heavy and will widen the gap between the door and the frame of almost any safe that has ever been built, provided there is time enough and power enough behind the hammer-blows that are struck. It may take six or seven hours where the safe is of the strongest kind but the gap will open in the end. To avoid more damage and more labour than is necessary, several smaller wedges, known as ‘citizens', are employed second to force clear the tongue of the lock.

Holmes used the ‘alderman' once and with great delicacy. He followed this with three ‘citizens' spaced along the top aperture between the drawer and the frame. Twice more I had to interrupt him but at last, doing as little damage as possible, he felt the drawer move. The documents that had threatened so much now lay before him in the depth of the metal drawer. There was a slim journal-volume, two packets of letters in their envelopes, tied with ribbon, and several papers in a folder.

The hardest part, he told me, was to manipulate the lock of the drawer so that it gave some semblance of being fastened again. A bank official or a locksmith would know at once that it was not working properly. So would our adversary but he dared not say so. He would find the drawer empty and would know that he had got the worst of the battle, hoist by his own petard.

For the next few hours, as the afternoon mellowed into sunset and evening came, Holmes retraced his steps. He could not, he told me, leave everything perfectly in order. His aim was to leave such an
appearance
of order that he would cause no alarm nor even curiosity among the guardians of these premises. His greatest concern was for the steel document drawer. Yet if its tenant did not complain that it had been tampered with or that its contents were missing, what reason had the guardians of the vault to suggest it?

The closing of the strong-room door was as meticulously effected as the opening of it. Holmes then wrapped a probe with lint soaked in surgical spirit. Using this, he wiped away as much of the lamp black as was possible. Regaining the office behind the vault, he dropped down through the gap in the floorboards, drew the edge of the carpet into place and slid the two boards into the gap. He could not force the nails of the last board into the joist but trusted to the first man who walked across the carpet to do that for him. At the worst, it would merely be taken for a loose board.

At the rough wall, dividing the foundations from those of the tailor's, he replaced the two stones and the grille. By the time he had finished, it appeared that the mortar holding them might have crumbled but without giving cause for suspicion. Then it was simple enough to pull himself up through the gap and into the work-room behind the tailor's shop, replacing the boards and treading them down. The lamps had scarcely begun to glimmer down the length of Cornhill when he let himself out quietly into the darkness of the courtyard at the back of the building. The skeleton key was adjusted to three simple levers and the door was locked after him.

Next day, Sherlock Holmes begged an appointment with Sir Arthur Bigge at Windsor. He reported that the plot consisted of Howell and his ‘client', the professor. There had been other men hired by them to carry attaché cases here and there—but without knowing why. Yet Holmes was sure that only those two conspirators had known the secrets of the stolen papers. Howell had met a sudden death. Professor Moriarty, in the next few days, discovered that the documents by which he set such store were no longer in his possession. He did not complain of this, for he dared not. If our information was correct, our adversary paid his final bill for rent at the Cornhill Vaults and fled.

IX

Our adversary had fled! Would that he had! Months passed and then a dreadful ordeal, what I have called elsewhere ‘The Final Problem', was upon us. One meeting of Holmes and his adversary was described in that narrative as a mere report. In truth, I witnessed it but could scarcely bear to think so.

A week or so after the visit to the Cornhill Vaults, I was with Holmes in the Baker Street sitting-room when a cab stopped outside. My friend stood up.

‘That voice!' he said, as the passenger dismissed the cab. ‘It is he, Watson. You had better leave. No! You had better stay. Go into the bedroom and wait. He will not, I think, try violence here but it is as well to be prepared.'

I did as he said. Holmes had been lounging at ease in his dressing-gown and now made no attempt to change for there was scarcely time. As I went into the next room, I heard him call out to Mrs Hudson to show the visitor up. Then I heard him open a drawer and there was the bump of metal against wood. This guest, then, was the professor of reptilian face, as Holmes described him, who had won his youthful laurels by a commentary upon the binomial theorem. I heard the new arrival say, ‘It is a dangerous habit, Mr Holmes, to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one's dressing-gown.'

There was a sound of the pistol being laid on a table.

‘Pray take a seat,' said Holmes coldly. ‘I can spare you five minutes, if you have anything to say.'

‘All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' the visitor remarked.

‘Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' Holmes replied equably.

‘You stand fast?'

‘Absolutely.'

Through the crack in the door I saw that the other man, whom I first set eyes upon walking down the steps of Drummonds Bank with Howell, had clapped his hand into his pocket and Holmes raised the pistol from the table. But his guest merely drew out a memorandum-book in which he had scribbled some dates.

‘You crossed my path on the fourth of January, Mr Holmes. On the twenty-third of January you incommoded me. By the middle of February I was seriously inconvenienced by you. At the end of March I was absolutely hampered in my plans. Now I find myself placed in such a position through your continual persecution that I am in danger of losing my liberty. You must drop it, Mr Holmes, you really must, you know.'

Holmes said something which I did not quite catch.

‘It is necessary that you should withdraw,' the other insisted. ‘It has been an intellectual treat to me to see the way in which you have grappled with this affair of Prince George's marriage—for I am assured he really was married, you know—and it would be a grief to me to take any extreme measure. I anticipated that you must surely be the one man to whom Sir Arthur Bigge would turn. It was my hope that such a design as mine would draw you out and that we should meet at last—that we should meet upon equal terms and perhaps become partners in some great enterprise. My mistake, I confess, was in allowing Mr Howell to impose himself upon me.'

‘A mistake on his part too,' Holmes said drily, ‘though certainly a far greater mistake on yours. There is a world of mathematics where you might enjoy such fame and such respect as you never will among common criminals.'

‘I had hoped,' the professor said, ‘that our recent test of skills might bring us into harmony. Come, now, do not play the outraged subject of the Queen! You care no more for flummery and majesty than I do! Confess it!'