“I will go one better,” said Holmes. “Help us apprehend Dr Pentecost, and I will argue strenuously for clemency for you from the authorities, and even exoneration, if possible.”
“You are a true gent,” said Quigg. “I am your servant.”
As Holmes and Quigg moved off towards the knot garden and the octagonal building, I turned to Hannah.
“Are you going to insist I stay behind, Dr Watson,” said she, correctly interpreting my expression, “while the men do manly things?”
“I was,” I replied. “But seeing the look on your face, not any more.”
“Good.”
She trotted off after the other two, and I, with a bemused shake of the head, took the rear.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
The labyrinth’s control room – the so-called panopticon – reminded me somewhat of the cab of a locomotive. There were levers, dials, pipes, gauges and valve handles, all of brass or steel. These fringed the walls in a fantastic, prolific array, along with horn-shaped mouthpieces for the speaking-tube system and bulbous lenses that magnified the images relayed by the periscope mirrors.
To reach the room, we entered the octagonal building via its low door, which gave onto a spiral staircase. As we descended the stairs single file, with Holmes leading the way, my friend commented that Dr Pentecost in all likelihood still had my revolver.
“We must therefore proceed with caution,” said he. “He may not be adroit with the use of guns, nor any kind of marksman, but a bullet is a bullet and has the same effect on its target whether fired clumsily or with skill.”
Some ten feet underground, there was Dr Archibald Pentecost. He had heard our footfalls on the stairs and knew we were coming, but where could he go? There was only one way in or out. He was cornered like a fox run to earth. His demeanour was crestfallen and wistful.
“Mr Holmes. Dr Watson. Ah, Quigg. And Miss Woolfson. Your presence, my dear, tells its own story. Malachi has been bested. I trust he has not come to permanent harm?”
“That would depend,” said Hannah, “on the thickness of his skull.”
“The game is well and truly up. Eheu, as the Greeks might say. Alas.”
“Very much so, Doctor,” said Holmes, “and in that spirit I would advise you to come quietly. Do not do anything rash. Watson’s revolver is in your pocket. The outline of it is plain. You should either leave it there or hand it over.”
“Or perhaps I shall do neither.”
Dr Pentecost’s hand flashed to his pocket. Holmes darted towards him, swift as a striking snake, but not quite swiftly enough. Out came the gun.
“You will forgive me if I do not wish to make it easy for you,” Dr Pentecost said, thumbing back the hammer.
Holmes froze on the spot, as did the rest of us.
“Since last we met, Sergeant-Major Hart has given me some instruction on the use of this weapon,” the classicist continued. “I am now more adept than I was. Besides, at such close quarters, one does not have to be a terribly good shot.”
It was true. In the confined space of the panopticon, the classicist could hit any of us and barely need to take aim.
“You may be ruthless but you are no assassin, Dr Pentecost,” said Holmes. “I have met a fair few of those in my time, and I know the type. You do not have it in you. I do not see it in your eyes.”
“Try me,” said Dr Pentecost. “I am a desperate man. Perhaps, in extremis, I will find it in me to go down fighting.”
“Nonetheless, direct bloodshed is not your way. If it were, you would have had Hart kill the three of us – Watson, Hannah and me – when you had us at your mercy. That or you would have done the deed yourself. Since you could manage neither, one may reasonably infer that you lack the requisite barbarous streak.”
“Hart refused to be a party to killing you, when I put the proposition to him. He said he would assist me in detaining you but would go no further.”
“Your sway over him was insufficient to persuade him otherwise.”
“He is compromised,” said Dr Pentecost. “Compromised in the same way that Mr Quigg there is. Disposing of dead bodies. I am not sure if it is a capital offence, but it certainly must carry a stiff gaol sentence. One night last year, when he was in his cups, Hart admitted to me what he and Quigg had done the previous summer – carting two bodies into a distant corner of the estate and interring them there. Covering up Sir Philip’s sins.”
“You knew, if you ever needed Hart’s assistance in any endeavour, that that was something you might use against him.”
“I called in my marker last night. Hart was disgruntled, to be sure, and muttered that if he were to go down, he would take Sir Philip with him and all of Charfrome, but I could see this was a patent bluff. Hart knows when he is onto a good thing, and his job as a Hoplite is just that. He will do anything to protect it, and Sir Philip’s integrity, as he has already amply demonstrated.”
“Getting rid of Dr Watson and me, then, was something which he was content to leave to you.”
“And which I, in turn, was content to leave to the labyrinth. The labyrinth would accomplish for me what I could not. All I had to do was disable the locking wheel in the ceiling of the final chamber. I had no doubt that you would get that far.”
“It was to be murder, but at one remove,” said Holmes. “Just as with Sophia Tompkins.”
“All to keep your hands clean,” Hannah chimed in. Her lip was curled in a bitter sneer.
Dr Pentecost nodded. “I was surprised, not that Sophia died, but that I was able to get away with it. If Greek tragedy teaches us anything, it is that fate always catches up with murderers. Violence begets violence, in an endless cycle. Yet days went by after Sophia’s death, and nothing came of it.”
“Not nothing,” said Holmes. “Tobias Nithercott, her fellow graduate, could not live with himself for failing to save her. He, at least, had a conscience, and it led him to blame himself for her drowning and ultimately take his own life. That poor, innocent man’s death is as much your responsibility as Sophia’s.”
“And our deaths too, nearly,” I said, “for what that’s worth.”
“Yet here you are, alive and well,” said Dr Pentecost, then snapped, “Oh no, Mr Holmes!” He levelled the revolver at my friend. “I saw you inching towards me. While you had me busy talking, you were hoping to pounce. I think not!”
Holmes smiled grimly. “I invite you once more, Doctor, to put the gun down. You are only making things worse for yourself. We outnumber you four to one. You will manage to get off a single shot at most. Whosoever your target may be, the rest of us will have no difficulty bringing you down and disarming you.”
“Are any of you willing to die, simply to guarantee that I shall be apprehended and made to pay for my crimes? Are you, Mr Holmes?”
“I am,” said Holmes resolutely, and I am quite certain he meant it. “I have nearly given my life several times so that justice may be served. Do not think that I am not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
For a moment, just a moment, Dr Pentecost’s defiance wavered.
I spied my chance. The classicist’s attention was wholly on Holmes. He stood just a short leap away from me. If I moved fast, I could jerk his gun arm up to the ceiling, then lay him low with a swift right hook to the jaw.
I tensed, all set to leap.
Dr Pentecost must have caught sight of this from the corner of his eye. He swung towards me.
“Ah-ah, Doctor!” The revolver waved like a wagging finger. “Don’t even think about it.”
“You fool,” I said. “The pistol is not even loaded. I can see it from here. There are no cartridges in the chambers.”
“There are. As I said, Hart has taken it upon himself to teach me the basics of how to use the thing. You cannot bamboozle me like that, Doctor.”
“It would seem that Hart has emptied the cylinder without your knowing,” I said, “precisely so that you would not hurt yoursel
f, or by accident him.”
That got him. Briefly, ever so briefly, Dr Pentecost hesitated. His gaze flicked down to the Webley.
I sprang.
Perhaps I was a fraction too slow. Perhaps some reflex reaction caused his trigger finger to tighten.
The gun went off. The report was almost inconceivably loud in that cramped room.
I struck him bodily, in a rugby tackle, and together we crashed against one bank of levers. I imagined that I had been shot. I was practically on top of him when the gun fired. I felt no impact, but in the thick of the moment, when the fire is in his belly, a man is not wholly aware of everything that is happening.
It was only when a shrill scream came from behind me that I appreciated that someone other than me had been hurt.
Hannah.
I heaved myself off Dr Pentecost and whirled round. Hannah was staggering backwards, one hand clutched to the front of her blouse. Blood was spilling out between her fingers.
I was by her side in a trice. She collapsed in my arms and I helped her to the floor. The bullet had entered her shoulder, just below the collarbone. The blood was coming fast and I feared the subclavian artery had been breached. I tore off my jacket, bundled it up and pressed it to the wound.
“Hannah,” I said, “you are not going to die. I swear it. Just lie still and be calm. I will stop the bleeding. You are not going to die.”
She, dear creature, looked up at me trustingly. I am sure she believed me. I only wished that I believed myself.
“Dr Watson…” she said.
There was a commotion elsewhere in the room. I glanced round to see Holmes grappling with Dr Pentecost. Another gunshot sounded. The round went wild, ricocheting harmlessly off a wall.
I caught only glimpses of the rest of the contest between Holmes and Dr Pentecost, for my attention was directed mainly upon Hannah. I believe – and Holmes has affirmed it – that it was less a struggle, more the unfolding of the inevitable. The gun lay between the two of them, a bone of contention. There was no way that the classicist could have overcome my friend. Physically he was outmatched, by some considerable degree.
That was when he canted the barrel of the pistol up towards his own chin.
Holmes, I daresay, could have wrested the gun off him. That he chose not to, and instead let events take their course, suggests to me that he knew as well as Dr Pentecost did what lay in the classicist’s future. At the end of a long path stood, inexorably, the gallows. Holmes was simply allowing an abbreviation of the journey.
The gun went off a third and final time. I heard, but did not see, Dr Pentecost’s brains spattering the wall and ceiling of the panopticon. Thereafter I devoted myself exclusively to Hannah, whom I would keep alive, whom I refused to lose, whom death would not steal today, not if I could prevent it.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE AFTERMATH
Events in the immediate aftermath of Hannah’s shooting are muddled in my recollection. I have, with Holmes’s help, been able to piece them together. I shall rehearse them as succinctly as I can, but readers should bear in mind that I was not a direct participant in them. My focus was only on Hannah.
Charfrome Old Place awoke that morning to a bustle of untoward activity that shortly escalated to become pandemonium. Sherlock Holmes despatched Quigg to Waterton Parva, whence he sent for the police in Dorchester. In the meantime Holmes himself went to confront Sir Philip Buchanan. He set out before the architect, who was still in pyjamas and dressing-gown, a list of his crimes: his culpability in the deaths of the Elysians called Simms and Kinsella, and of Sophia Tompkins and, by extension, Tobias Nithercott. Buchanan did not attempt to deny any of it. It was as though, Holmes told me, he was relieved to have it all out in the open at last. “I suppose,” Buchanan said, “that I have been anticipating this moment for a while – ever since you first showed your face, in fact, Mr Holmes. It was inevitable, given your famed propensity for unearthing the truth. I can only say that what I have done, I have done for my country. For the benefit of all. I hope that that is enough.”
You may remember, if you followed the trial, that Buchanan’s defence rested largely upon that argument: he wanted to improve Great Britain and prolong the tenure of the Empire indefinitely, and some people may have died in the realisation of that dream, and he regretted it, but, if he had his time over again, he would do nothing differently. The families of Sophia Tompkins and Tobias Nithercott, of course, vehemently disagreed, as did those of Jerome Simms and Dennis Kinsella, something that the lawyers representing all four made quite plain both to the jury and to the journalists outside the Old Bailey.
Quigg gave evidence on the stand that helped secure Buchanan’s conviction. It also earned the former sailor just a short spell in Pentonville, a matter of months. His willingness to comply with the law, and a signed affidavit from Holmes that attested to his usefulness in foiling Dr Pentecost’s machinations, won him leniency from the judge.
Buchanan did not get the noose, as many expected and predicted. His death sentence was commuted on appeal to ten years’ penal servitude, with the possibility of time off for good behaviour. Was Buchanan’s knighthood a factor in that decision? Did his status as a pre-eminent member of the establishment incline the establishment to go easy on him? It is not for me to say. As for Sergeant-Major Hart, a mere commoner, his punishment was twenty years’ hard labour without chance of parole.
Edwin Fairbrother, slippery to the last, managed to escape justice, at least the justice of the courtroom. He had fled from Charfrome while the household was in uproar. Some animal instinct had warned him that trouble was brewing and that he might bear some of the brunt of it, so he had raced off into the countryside with nothing but the clothes on his back. I do not know with any surety what has become of him since, but Holmes did draw to my notice a short article in the international column of The Times a year or so later. A young Englishman matching Fairbrother’s description had been fatally stabbed in a fight at a bar in Buenos Aires. His name was unknown to the Argentine police, but the cause of the fracas was a young señorita, and the killer was her father, a local cattle rancher of high standing.
“If it was Fairbrother,” Holmes opined, “then the circumstances of his death hardly give one pause. Ever the libertine, what he did not count on was the hot-blooded Latin temperament. Where in his homeland one may bring about a woman’s downfall more or less with impunity, in South America one is apt to reap violent rewards.”
Charfrome Old Place presently stands untenanted and is, so I am told, lapsing into ruin. Its Hellenic outbuildings are overgrown with weeds and ivy. Its labyrinth, that marvel of misapplied genius, gathers mildew and rust. A huge, elaborate monument to one man’s folly, it moulders like the broken statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.
And what of Hannah Woolfson?
For three days she languished in a Dorchester hospital, hovering close to death. Not once did I leave her bedside. Finally, after three days of vigil, my reward was to be there when Hannah opened her eyes. Mine was the first face she saw and the first she, albeit feebly, smiled at.
Dealing with her father was no easy task. Sir Osbert Woolfson took amiss – understandably – the fact that his daughter had been shot, which he learned about via telegram from Holmes. The day after the incident he came down to Dorchester in a paroxysm of bilious outrage, which the sight of Hannah lying pale and unconscious in bed did little to allay. He threatened me with a lawsuit; Holmes too. “If she dies, sir,” he thundered, “I will see to it that you and your friend are held to account at the highest levels. You will never practise medicine again, and Sherlock Holmes will be run out of London on a rail. I swear this on my wife’s grave.” He left barely consoled by my reassurances that I would not rest until Hannah was whole and well and restored to him.
I am delighted to report that a week later Hannah was out of danger and within the month she was back home, safe under her father’s roof, with a nurse to tend to her in her convalescence. I
visited her a couple of times and was received by Woolfson with an animus that his daughter’s imprecations on my behalf just barely kept in check. I will confess that I took the opportunity to make love during the moments Hannah and I spent alone in the drawing-room, but it soon dawned on me that the bond we two had so tentatively formed at Charfrome had been damaged, seemingly to the point of irreparability. My overtures were rebuffed with all sweetness and civility, in such a way that I was not made to feel foolish for making them.
“You saved my life, Dr Watson,” Hannah said, “and for that I am eternally in your debt. As is my father, if only the silly old goat would bring himself to admit it. You have my gratitude and my respect. I will continue to enjoy your writings, of course, but…”
There was much packed into that last monosyllable, a freight of sorrow and apology. It was a conjunction that was also a separator.
“I have had an experience of your and Mr Holmes’s world first-hand,” she resumed after a pause, “and it is a place of misery, death and pain. I do not envy you it. I admire that you stick with it, day after day. I find, though, that I would rather read about it than participate in it, and I fear that were you and I to become affianced, participating is indeed what I would end up doing. Not only that but I would live in constant dread that a man dear to me was facing foes who would not hesitate to do him harm. Am I a terrible coward for not wanting that? Do you hate me for it?”
“Hate you?” I said, aghast. “My dear Hannah, I could never hate you for anything. Your decision is courageous and I can do naught but honour it.”
“You are not going to try to make me change my mind?”
“Do you wish me to?”
For a moment it seemed as though she might say yes. Then, with sadness, she shook her head. “I have my fight to fight,” said she. “The fight for women. You have yours. The fight for justice. I shall watch you from afar, cheering you on. May I hope that you might do the same for me?”
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