The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

  The two fish tails on the nearer wall were more easily within his range, but it had been necessary to make sure of the more distant ones first. With a single flick of the cotton shirt he caught the swinging links. Silently he pulled at this chain controlling the burners behind the fishtails. The whisper of water-gas became a rush. Much was still in the hands of fate but now only one path lay ahead of him, for better or for worse. Stripping the rough canvas cover from the prison pillow, he arranged the under-blanket and the pillow to give some semblance of a sleeping figure beneath the thin upper layer. Enough to satisfy McIver. Then he groped in the thin mattress for the packets of medicinal charcoal that the corporal had brought him.

  Lighter than air, the whispering gas was filling the upper layers of the cell and time was beginning to run against him. The length of the chain at his ankle allowed him to move into the alcove with its basin and drain, where the flame of the oil lamp still wavered. In a few moments he must extinguish it. Holmes knelt down where the waste pipe ran into a gully that led to the grating of the drain outside. However faint and tainted, it was the one supply of air. Using the canvas pillow cover, he worked quickly to form a hood that might be worn like a surgeon’s mask, tied by its tapes behind his head. It was common knowledge from his own experiments that charcoal was the best air filter, absorbing the poisonous compounds of gas. How much it would absorb or with what effect, only the next hour would tell. As he was making his preparations the bell of St. Sepulchre’s tolled three times, as if hurrying on the dawn.

  Now I must break a confidence that is no longer of great matter. Sherlock Holmes contributed much to chemistry and science in general but did not care to do so under his own name. He intended that his enemies should have no idea of these interests. The world did not know that under the name of the chemist Hunter he had contributed a paper, ‘On the Effects of Pressure on the Absorption of Gases by Charcoal,’ to the Journal of the Chemical Society in 1871, where the world may still read it. In his study of history he had been much taken by the startling proposal of Lord Cochrane in 1812 to defeat Napoleon three years before Waterloo by an invasion of France under cover of ‘sulphur ships.’ To effect this, however, the attackers must be protected by a mask of some kind—and there was none. However, my friend had corresponded with the late Dr. John Tyndall in 1878, following that great man’s invention of a respirator. This enabled firemen to breathe for thirty minutes or more in smoke that would otherwise have killed them, and allowed coal miners to survive who must otherwise have been suffocated by gas.

  Dr. Tyndall’s respirator consisted of a hood attached to a metal cylinder or pipe, packed with charcoal, surrounded by a layer of cotton wool, moistened with glycerine, and fitted with a piece of wire gauze at the end to hold the pad and the charcoal in place. Holmes turned down the wick and took the extinguished Hesperus lamp. He removed its glass lantern. Working with the deft fingers of a craftsman, he found the two buttons of the screw heads that tightened the metal wick holder to the base and shielded the reservoir of fuel. He undid them and carefully drew the metal sheath from its base. It tapered to a hole at the top, round which he could just measure forefinger and thumb. It was enough. Further down was a slot that admitted air to the base of the wick.

  Though time was short, Holmes worked characteristically, always with haste but never in a hurry. Within the metal cylinder of the wick holder he formed a lining of loosened woolen padding from the mattress. Though he had no pure glycerine, it was a principal ingredient of the soft soap allowed him. He used the soap and a palmful of water to moisten the cotton waste at the open end of the metal cone and the lower air slot, sufficient to catch grosser particles of carbon in the air. The broken biscuits of Mostyn’s Absorbant Medical Charcoal, like small pebbles, then filled the metal cone through which he must draw breath.

  Using the water jug again, he moistened the canvas pillow cover and formed it into a hood about his head. His mouth and nostrils were enclosed in the larger end of the conical wick holder, the wet canvas about his head forming a crude seal against contaminated air. Then he lay on the chill stone of the tiles, the tapered end of the metal wick holder directed to the waste-pipe hole at the end of the gutter that ran from the basin. Whatever air reached him from the yard outside would lose some of its impurities in his makeshift filter. So would the gas that began to fill the cell. He held fast to the hope that the floor of that alcove was almost the last area that the silent and swirling deadliness of the carbon monoxide would reach.

  If it were my purpose to make a fine hero of Sherlock Holmes, I might say that he lay on the cold tiles, breathing steadily but economically through the device he had fashioned, and that he prayed. Yet one had only to be in his company for five minutes to recognise in him the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen. He was not devoid of faith or human warmth, but at that moment, if ever, only cold reason and critical observation would save him.

  Once he had told me that logic alone would lead a man to the deep truths of religion. Then, again, he asked what is the meaning of this circle of misery, violence, and fear in which we live? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There, he said, is the great outstanding perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.

  How long he lay there, the cold striking like a steel blade to his bones, I never knew. He heard St. Sepulchre’s deep notes twice more, at least, and the cathedral bell that followed. He saw a flickering reflection beyond the alcove, a lantern shining through the spy hole. But he had calculated the risks with his customary inhuman precision. Whoever looked through the spy hole would see a shape under the blankets and, knowing that Crellin was keeping guard, would also know that the shape must be that of the prisoner. Had there been no guard in the cell, they would have looked him over thoroughly at short intervals.

  In the iron chill of that night Holmes waited for the pale yellow lantern light to play again on the wall by the alcove. But he had seen it for the last time. He waited and listened. As he did so, if he is to be believed, Sherlock Holmes soothed his nerves by rehearsing in his mind a book that had shaped much of his character since he first read it at the age of ten. It was no fairy story of giants or goblins but the Prior Analytics of Aristotle. ‘A syllogism is a form of words in which, when certain assumptions are made, something other than what has been assumed necessarily follows from the fact that the assumptions are such. …’

  Cold reason told him that the plan must work, but reason may fly away or be flawed in the lonely dark hours of such a night. An undetected current of air might draw the gas astray from Crellin and toward the alcove. Holmes had calculated, as surely as any hangman, the direction in which his victim’s body would fall. When the muscles no longer held the frame, Crellin would slide from the chair. He could not fall to his right, because the table would stop him. If he fell to the left, his body lying on the floor with the keys at its belt would surely be within the prisoner’s reach. It was most likely that Crellin would do neither but would fall forward. In that case, if the fall was forward and slightly to the left, Sherlock Holmes might be saved. If it was somewhat to the right, he was certainly destroyed. In the gas-filled cell, he would have become his own executioner. It was not a matter of cold reason, after all, but the spin of a gambler’s wheel.

  Such precision of thought would have been preposterous in any other man who lay perspiring on the cold tiles with a fear that at any moment he might scent the faint rotting smell of water-gas seeping through the suffocating wad of charcoal. If Crellin had not fallen by then, Holmes was as good as dead. Yet Holmes was not any other man. He was surely the only one alive who might have escaped from such captivity. St. Sepulchre’s tolled again and then he heard a thud, easily audible in the alcove but not in the corridor beyond the thick walls and stout door of the cell. At that moment, he who had breathed so economically in the past hours stopped altogether and held his breath as he wait
ed for the louder clatter of the chair. But there was no clatter. Crellin alone had fallen. After lying immobile for so long, Holmes moved with the speed of a cloud crossing the moon.

  Only the reflection of the night sky through the uncurtained window glass lit the cell. He took the deepest breath of air his lungs would hold and crossed the threshold. Through the swirling spirit odour of gas, he saw the dark shape of Crellin’s body. The man might still be alive or already dead. Had he fallen toward the table, the keys on his belt would be far out of reach. Then there was nothing but the hope that prisoner and jailer might die together in a blast that would shake Newgate Street. The odds were finely balanced. Yet on this occasion, Fortune and mathematics had favored the brave. Crellin’s body had toppled away from the table to the left, toward Holmes, head and shoulders within reach of the ankle chain and the extended arms.

  With aching lungs Holmes held his breath and drew the heavy burden of the body further toward him until he could reach the half-dozen keys on the ring at Crellin’s belt. The keys to the corridor and the yard outside would surely be there. Unless the game was to be lost, the key to the metal cuff round the prisoner’s ankle must be with them.

  With his throat compressed and veins swelling, logic and probability fighting the weight of fear, Holmes touched the keys in the darkness and knew that three of them were too big to fit the steel anklet. The image of a fox gnawing through its leg to escape the trap flashed like fire behind his eyes. He tried the first of the other three keys and felt it jam in the lock of the leg iron. While fighting against the beating in his skull and the pain at his breastbone, he slowly and judiciously eased it clear. The second was far too loose a fit. That left only one more.

  But in the darkness he had started at the wrong end of the row of keys and now, as he tried the last of all, the lock moved. For the first time since his arrival in that place, the steel fell away and his leg was free of the anklet. The first of the three larger keys failed in the lock of the door to the yard. The next turned the lock, and he took the handle in a strong but noiseless sweep. To his dismay, the unlocked door stuck fast and, in his bursting chest, he felt a chill of incomprehension. A bubble burst from his throat; he took in a mouthful of poisoned air, and he forced it out again by naked willpower. As his throat closed, choking, a part of his mind that seemed far removed from the agony told him that he had not yet drawn the door bolts free. Holmes snatched for them, drew them carefully and silently back, gently freed the door, and stumbled into the cold night air of the yard, muffling the convulsions of his throat in the pad made from the canvas pillow cover. Yet this was not his escape. It was a mere chance of escape, a chance that most men would have contemplated—and despaired.

  HENRY WILLIAMS’S LEGACY

  How long he lay outside the yard door he did not know, nor whether the jailer who had fallen from his chair was alive or dead. When he opened his eyes, the door to the cell had swung shut under its own weight. Sherlock Holmes pulled himself up and tried the handle. The lock had not closed again. He covered his mouth and nostrils with the wet canvas of the pillow cover and went into the darkness. With the door open, the air began to clear. A first predawn lightness was in the sky, enough to make out the lineaments of furniture and other objects.

  The shape of Crellin was lying facedown by the chair in the place where Holmes had left him. It seemed evident in an oblong of reflected moonlight that the guard must be dead. His head lolled stupidly to one side, the eyelids half open and half shut. Dixon Mann’s Forensic Toxicology was as familiar to Sherlock Holmes as the English dictionary was to others. From what he could see in faint light from the yard, Crellin’s cheeks were a healthy cherry pink. The lips were moist, no doubt from a froth that had dispersed when breathing ceased. The eyes, as he raised the lids, were wide and staring. He did not need to look for a pulse in order to know that carbon monoxide poisoning had killed Milverton’s bully stone dead long before the prisoner had made his escape into the yard.

  Though the open door had cleared the air immediately around it, the water-gas floated sluggishly in the rest of the long cell. It had saturated the air and the fabric. Holmes stepped out into the yard, drew a hard breath, and closed his smarting throat. Back in the cell, he dragged the body across to the bed. It took all his strength to lug Crellin onto the hard surface and cover him with the blanket. Then he went back through the door to the yard, closed it, and locked it from the outside. In the cell the gas still bubbled from the four unlit jets. Having warned McIver to let the others enter first, Holmes was prepared to let them take their chance. They had carried out their inspection every morning before it was fully light, lamps in hand. There was so little daylight in the deep well of the prison yard that the cell needed light long after sunrise. The blast from a gas explosion, touched off by the flame of their lamps, might make the body on the bed and those of the intruders conveniently unrecognisable. His enemies would not know whether he was one of the victims. Nor could he be certain at once which of them might have perished. As a final touch, he had locked the anklet round the leg of Crellin’s corpse. An inspection lamp shining through the spyhole of the door would show them a figure lying under a blanket with a crown of dark hair visible and the chain in place.

  Presently Sherlock Holmes stood in the cold mist of the morning by the locked outer door of the cell. If he got no further than this, then despite all his ingenuity he would be caught and killed before the sun lit the great cathedral cross half a mile away. In his white shirt, dark trousers, and socks, his shoes tied together by their laces round his neck, he prepared to test the truth of Henry Williams’s story.

  This was the moment of predawn greyness, half an hour before the watery gold in the east and the first long shadows of the early spring sky. In a far corner of the yard he could make out the low elongated shed with its beam above the gallows drop. On three sides, Newgate’s walls rose above him, high and sheer, smooth and deadly with a patch of a pale cloud far overhead, still touched by late moonlight. The fourth side of the yard contained the condemned cells with three rows of barred windows above them. The roof of this structure was a dozen feet lower than the tops of the walls on the other three sides, but Holmes turned his back on it. At roof level, a thin metal canopy extended a dozen feet along its entire length. It was designed to trap a climber beneath it, being too frail to take a man’s weight. The wall face, as Henry Williams had promised him, was the only way.

  He glanced up at the polish of a blank wall, laying his hand on it and touching an icy smoothness. It was useless to look for crevices that might bear the pressure of a foot or the grip of fingers. The weight of stone blocks pressed them so tightly together that even a gap in the mortar would scarcely have given lodging to a fingernail.

  Holmes was better versed in prison lore than any other man. His copy of the Newgate Chronicles commemorated a number of felons whose time had come and who tried in their last hours to climb these walls by studs or hessian on their shoes. One or two had started well, only to fall back into the yard. They were supported on the trap and hanged on time.

  The old iron tank was high above him on a bracket in the angle of two walls. A rusty stain of water down the stonework below showed where it had overflowed from time to time. Above the metal cover of the tank and a little to one side of it, the wooden axle set with sharpened wire ran round the three walls that enclosed the cell block. It was this device which would throw the climber downwards, if his fingers lost their grip on the steel wire.

  When they brought him back from his tribunal, Holmes had made a passing and surreptitious study of this device. The prison authorities had not supposed that any prisoner could gain such a height or that, if he did, he would keep a grip on such a vicious deterrent as the axle. At the best, he might hope to dangle there if he chose, at a dizzy height above the paving of the yard unable to climb up or down. Milverton’s men had not prevented my friend from studying such defences. Nothing would have pleased them more than to watch him calculating the
hopelessness of an escape and breaking down from weariness, Sherlock Holmes pleading for his life at the end.

  If he sometimes showed little mercy to others, it was certain that he now showed none to himself. He would not fear to go where the humble chimney-sweep had gone before. Crossing to the angle of the wall in which the now disused iron tank had been installed, high overhead, he touched the surface of the stone again. It was beyond reason that they could have raised an object of such weight and bulk as a metal tank to so great a height, and fixed it there, without using scaffolding and thereby defacing the masonry in that angle. There were certainly no convenient crevices for the hands or feet, but Henry Williams had described to him how the broken face of the stone might prevent a hand or foot from slipping if the pressure of the climber’s body could hold him in place. Like a sweep’s boy or an acrobat, Sherlock Holmes now stood barefoot in the cold morning and prepared himself for an assault on the towering wall. Williams had never mastered the art of the chimney-sweep or the prison fugitive more surely than Holmes, his last apprentice.

  It was, the old man had told him, a matter of lodging in the corner and working your hands behind you ‘like a crab,’ braced by the feet where the two walls came narrowly together. The dying sweep boasted of having worked to the top inside a great factory chimney.

  ‘And keep yer boots and stockings orf,’ he added. ‘That’s what does for most that tries it.’ Immediately after this conversation, my friend had been intrigued enough to try the method and found that with practise, it could be made to work. Without that practise, it is doubtful that even Holmes could have accomplished such a climb. In the angle behind him, however, he could feel that the stonework was ‘rusticated,’ as builders call it, that is to say broken and ridged from the devices of the water engineers. With his back to the icy wall, he now prepared to put the old man’s wisdom to its final test.