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.
QUIET AS THE GRAVE
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.
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.
He knew to the inch and to the minute what must be done. Like all drunkards, Crellin would fall at first into a deep sleep that would leave him insensible for half the night. Then he would become restless and, finally, would wake suddenly and without warning. During the first of these phases the plan must be carried out. As Holmes listened, he heard the breathing grow slower and deeper, almost dwindling into silence. The man’s head remained pillowed on his arm, which in turn still rested on the table beside him.
During his first hours in the cell Holmes had reckoned its dimensions as nineteen feet long, by eight feet wide and seven feet high. One thousand and sixty-four cubic feet. Some of that capacity was taken up by furnishings and fittings, notably a solid three-foot-square stone table at the far end and the wooden bed. The total space remaining was about a thousand and fifty cubic feet. He had even estimated the capacity of the wooden chair, now removed beyond his reach for the night. It seemed designed for the death cell, its joints being carefully dovetailed, without a single nail that might be used as a key or the condemned man’s means of self-destruction.
As for the fittings, the four fishtail gaslights, a pair on each of the long walls, were of the common type with a Sugg-Letherby’s No. 1 burner. Each of the four would be fed by ten cubic feet of gas an hour. A slight odour of spirit as they were lit had assured Sherlock Holmes that they were fed by that cheaper type of fuel known as water-gas, commonly used in public buildings. If released unlit, its high concentration of carbon monoxide would be enough to poison almost all the air in the cell by the end of sixty minutes. Those who breathed it might not be dead at the end of the hour, but they would never regain consciousness unaided. Yet even had his enemies thought Holmes capable of reaching the draw chains of the burners, they knew that he must be the first to die.
Among the volumes frequently taken down from his Baker Street bookshelves by my friend were the varied works of Dr. Daniel Haldane of Edinburgh, including Haldane on Poisons. Newgate prison, like most such institutions, tendered for the cheapest sources of fuel. These included this old-fashioned water-gas piped from a mains supply. It had once been produced by the decomposition of water, now often replaced by the use of petroleum as its origin, which gave it that spirituous odour on lighting. Its economic brightness was caused by the high concentration of carbon monoxide. Its use was more easily and carefully regulated in old and ill-ventilated public buildings than in private homes. It was seldom supplied to private citizens because of a greater danger of explosion if it should be misused.
It was the duty of the two guards in the corridor to shine a lamp through the spy hole of the cell door from time to time to make sure that all was well within. Holmes had noticed in the past night or two that they did this every half hour or so to begin with and then, as they took their chance to sleep, they seemed content to shine the beam on the prisoner’s bed at inter vals of an hour or more. He waited until one of the men outside had shone the lamp through the spy hole. It was past midnight and he judged that it would be the best part of an hour before they did that again.
No man ever moved as silently and with such economy of movement as Sherlock Holmes. With no more sound than a shadow he stripped off his shirt and held it in one hand. In the other hand he carried the light steel ankle chain clear of the floor so that it made no more noise than a silk rope. At the limit of the chain he stared down at Crellin, several feet away. The man, now palefaced from drink, was sleeping so deeply that his breathing was scarcely audible. There was a sickly perspiration on his forehead and his mouth sagged open. Holmes knelt silently and then measured his length across the cold paving of the tiled floor, reaching his arms at full stretch toward the Hesperus lamp by Crellin’s chair. The bully heard no more sound than if a bird had glided overhead.
My friend’s calculations were correct. The lamp stood about a foot beyond the tips of his fingers. Using the buttons of the shirt cuffs to link the arms together as a lasso, he held the garment by its tails and cast it like a frail noose. It hit the glass chimney silently but slithered down without effect. For the first time the measured and controlled beat of Sherlock Holmes’s heart began to quicken. He cast again and this time saw the cotton arms snag on the top of the lamp’s glass chimney. Controlling his breath, as if for fear of waking the guard, he shook and worked the loop of cloth gently until he saw it slide down the far side of the glass to encircle the lamp at its base.
His remarkable hearing was tuned to every nuance in Crellin’s breathing. He knew that he must now draw the lamp toward him without rousing the sleeping warder. The Hesperus lamp had been constructed so that the oil and the wick sat in a smooth metal bowl that formed its base. Yet to drag smooth metal roughly toward him would cause a rasping on the tiled floor that might wake the sleeper.
Crellin gulped air into his throat and Holmes stopped at once. He waited until the sound of the man’s breathing was regular again and then tilted the lamp a little by pulling on the cotton noose. Only the smooth and rounded edge of its metal base now touched the tiles as it ran in a series of three brief crescents, as if on the rim of a wheel. It made no more sound than the feet of a rat hurrying across the dark yard outside. Once only in the next ten minutes did Crellin shift against the table with another heaving breath.
Holmes eased the lamp quietly toward him and still there was no further movement from his guard. Presently his fingers touched the warm metal of the lamp base. As he drew back to the darkness of his bed, he held in his hands a treasure greater than the wealth of kings.
Without hesitation he carried the lamp silently into the little alcove with its basin and drain, where he turned down th
e wick as low as he dared without extinguishing the flame. Then he heard the movement of the metal cover on the spy hole and had just time to slip back and draw the blanket over him on the bed before a tunnel of watery light illuminated the cell. He thought that he had little more to fear from this hourly inspection. Two men in the corridor guarded the cell door that night. One was McIver. The other was either the brutal master-at-arms or one of his assistants. When two men performed such a duty, it was the weaker who was given the chore of an hourly inspection while the other slept. He had no doubt, in this case, that the weaker was McIver.
In the faint light that illuminated the cell from the alcove, he moved toward the draw chain controlling the supply of gas to the fishtails on the far wall, just on the near side of Crellin’s chair. The chains were closer to him than the lamp had been, but higher on the wall. The ankle chain was too short for his purpose, but by turning his body sideways he could reach a point a foot from the wall and a foot short of the metal pull. With a quiet breath he flicked the cotton noose of the shirt at its full length until he caught the chain and started it swinging like a pendulum against the wall. Keeping the metal links free of the wall, he flicked it harder, so that it swung further away from him and came further back.
The extent of its nearer swing was eight inches short of his stretched fingers, as he measured it by sight, then six inches as he flicked it again, then four. Four inches would doom him as surely as four miles. Then the thin metal links brushed his fingertips, but he lost them again. And then, as it came swinging back, he snatched with all the energy of his being and just held it. Now he had only to draw gently on the thin chain. A moment later, he heard the first whisper of escaping gas issuing from the double jet above Crellin’s head as he slept.
The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Page 5