The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

  Holmes waited until the young man had turned the corner to the second flight of steps and then walked slowly after him. I saw my friend pause and begin studying a dark van Eyck landscape on the half-landing. He had his back to the flight of stairs up which Henschel had gone to the floor above. Yet as Holmes stood there, I could see that in the palm of one hand he held a small round pocket mirror, reflecting the stairs behind him and the gallery above.

  I followed cautiously up the staircase, well lit by its roof lights, to the wide and airy exhibition hall of the first floor. Before me lay a vista of Italian Renaissance art, to which we and our quarry were the only visitors just then, except for two ladies talking quietly together and a middle-aged gentleman on his own. There were display cases ranked in the center of the gallery and paintings along the walls to either side. I am no expert in such matters, but the small brass plates on each frame identified for me two Botticelli sketches of nymphs in woodland and a dimly lit papal portrait by Fra Lippo Lippi. How such things could be connected with espionage and naval codes defied explanation.

  Holmes had disappeared from view. However, I became aware that Henschel was paying very little attention either to the paintings or to the Florentine ceramics and silverware that filled the glass display cases between them. He walked to the far end of the gallery and there helped himself to one of the small green canvas stools that filled a metal rack. These stools are commonly supplied in the great museums and art galleries for those amateurs who choose to spend a day sketching or copying some work by a master. The Ashmolean is next door to Mr. Ruskin’s School of Drawing and Fine Art, which provides an ample supply of pupils. You will see such students busy every day in the galleries, as if they might be in the Louvre or the Uffizi.

  Yet Henschel did not sit down to sketch any of the paintings. He held the folded green canvas of the stool in one hand and his black bag in the other as he walked through a side turning into a set of smaller exhibition rooms. This area was devoted to archaeological displays and, once more, the tall glass cases afforded ample cover. Each of them was layered with shelves on which were set out fragments of pots, amphorae or pithoi, small votive objects, here and there what appeared to be a rusted blade or implement.

  Karl Henschel passed ‘Mesopotamia,’ ‘Ancient Egypt,’ ‘Anatolia,’

  ‘Ancient Cyprus,’ and stopped at a display of cases along the far wall marked ‘Ancient Crete and the Aegean.’ There he opened out his little stool of green canvas and sat down. From his leather bag he took a small copying board to which was clipped a pad of paper.

  I believe he had not the least idea that anyone else was there and probably he did not care. Why should he? He got up and walked away, into another room. He must have opened his pocketknife, for I heard him sharpening a pencil into a basket that had evidently been provided. The polished boards of the wooden floors acted as an excellent soundboard and I knew I should hear him coming back the moment he moved. While the coast was clear, I strolled past the case where his stool was parked and paused like a casual visitor to see which display meant so much to him that he had come from Sheerness to make a sketch of it.

  I would not have crossed the road to copy what I now saw before me. Imagine, if you will, a few dozen scraps of old clay tile. Most were the colour of slate, a few looked like dark terra cotta, rather the colour of burnt sealing wax. Some were roughly square and a smaller number were oblong but sandy-colored and tapering at one end. None of them was more than five inches square. There was also a small ornament that I noticed was labelled as a seal ring.

  This entire collection was described on its plaque as ‘Linear B’ tablets, most from the ruins of the Minoan palace at Knossos on the island of Crete. I remembered, from my schooldays, that this was the location of the labyrinth where Theseus slew the Minotaur in the famous legend. A small printed card informed the visitor that these clay tablets dated from a time before the Trojan War, probably about 1500 B.C. They had been found during the past ten years by Sir Arthur Evans, in his excavations of the site.

  There were marks upon these baked clay tablets. A few were single downward strokes, which looked like some method of counting. For the rest, imagine tiny representations of an axe head, a five-barred gate, a wigwam, a fish, a star, and so forth. Such was the writing of Linear B. A further display card attempted to describe the pronunciation of certain words. I learnt that ‘at-ku-ta-to’ signified ten working oxen and ‘at-ku-do-nia’ fifty of the same beasts. Then I heard a movement in the next room and walked quietly but quickly away, behind the screen of another case. I took a glance presently and saw that Henschel was now sitting before this curious display and making small neat sketches of the tablets.

  For the next three hours, taking turns, we kept up our scrutiny. It was not difficult since we had Henschel bottled up in the set of smaller exhibition rooms. He could not come out except by returning through the displays of antiquities and then down the avenue of Renaissance paintings to the grand staircase. From where he sat, he could hardly be aware that we were, at varying levels, always within sight of that exit route.

  Holmes even equipped himself with one of the canvas stools and chose the portrait of an amiable Venetian courtesan by Carpaccio, before which he became the model of concentration. He sat with his notebook and pencil as other visitors came and went. Presently, a thin elderly man with pince-nez, walking stick, a rather rusty frock coat, and a neat gray beard took a stool from the rack and sat before a Piranesi sketch of the Coliseum. He paid no attention to anyone but, after almost an hour of noting and sketching, he stood up, polished his pince-nez with a blue silk handkerchief, dabbed his watery eyes, and returned his canvas stool to the rack. Holmes sketched angles and features, lost to the world in Carpaccio’s portrait, until the old man had shuffled past him on his way out.

  At the instant that the tapping of the old scholar’s walking stick reached the half-landing of the staircase, Holmes sprang up and approached the rack of stools in a dozen quiet strides. I followed him as he added his folded stool to the rest. His eyes scanned the metal frame rapidly and came to rest on the four metal tubes that were its corner posts.

  ‘As I thought!’ he breathed sharply. His forefinger entered the nearest of these upright supports and screwed out a coiled piece of paper, no more than a single sheet of manuscript. As he unrolled it, I had just time to see:

  57-09-83-62-15||19-80-05 …

  His finger was to his lips as he returned it to its hiding place. Though his voice rose no higher than a whisper, its urgency was never in doubt.

  ‘After him, Watson! He is not agile enough to have got far!’

  ‘Henschel?’ I gasped.

  ‘Leave him. It is best that he should not see us again.’ He strode to the staircase and went down it, two at a time, closing on the hobbling frock-coated gentleman with his stick, who was just going out into the museum courtyard. Then my friend slackened his pace and sauntered a dozen yards behind him, like a casual visitor once more. We took up our vantage point behind one of the stone pedestals and watched the old man walking across Beaumont Street and turning down it the way we had come. Then, to my surprise, he suddenly drew a key from his pocket, slid it into the latch of a white-painted door beside him, and disappeared into one of the handsome plain-fronted houses.

  Sherlock Holmes was triumphant.

  ‘And that, Watson, is how they do it! Now let us have no more of this until Monday morning. We have done all that is required of us for the time being.’

  It seemed to me that we had done nothing of the kind. However, Holmes was in no mood to listen to argument. He insisted that we should not hurry back to London at once, or indeed the next day. Monday would be time enough. That evening we dined in the lamplit parlour of the Mitre with its low beams and memories of the coaching inn it had been until half a century before. Holmes pronounced the food and wine excellent. He talked of archaeology and the stupendous discoveries at Mycenae by the great German Heinrich Schliemann. How three gold-ma
sked figures, warriors of the Trojan War, had been unearthed and how, when the masks were removed, their perfectly preserved faces had been recognizable for some minutes before they crumbled into dust.

  ‘“Today I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon,”’ he recited with a chuckle. ‘No wonder Herr Schliemann sent that telegram to the King of Greece. Now, one pipe before my bed, my dear fellow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

  We retired to the sitting room that he had reserved for our use, while the groups of tall-hatted undergraduates began returning to their colleges before lockup and the life of the university passed by in the lamplit street below us. Great Tom began to toll his hundred strokes from Christ Church tower, at the end of which time the porters would shoot the iron bolts across to close the main gates and those who were not inside their colleges must face the justice of the dean or the proctors on Monday morning. Only now were we solitary enough to discuss the afternoon’s events.

  ‘That old man was not our Admiralty spy,’ I said incredulously. ‘He cannot be!’

  Holmes laughed and lit his cherrywood pipe from the fire.

  ‘No, my dear fellow. The game is played in three moves, not in two. There is the spy who passes information. There is the old man who encodes it. Then there is Henschel who transmits it. Perhaps Henschel is also useful in formulating the language of the code.’

  ‘A language that no one has used for more than three thousand years?’

  ‘Precisely. In the present case, its rarity is what makes it unique. Almost nothing was known about Linear B until Sir Arthur Evans discovered the first tablets at Knossos. The meaning of the language is virtually unknown today. A string of meaningless ciphers. What better code could there be? It is not necessary to know its ancient meaning in order to give it a new one for purposes of espionage. It is the last thing in the world that anyone would think of!’

  ‘But the code is written in numbers.’

  ‘Quite right, Watson. On Monday morning I propose to put that difficulty to someone who can answer with rather more authority than either the Admiralty or Scotland Yard.’

  On Sunday he was content with a riverside stroll round the circuit of Addison’s Walk, where that famous essayist of the Spectator used to take his constitutional as an undergraduate at Magdalen. I noticed, however, that after breakfast he had withdrawn to the hotel writing room and penned a note. As he handed it to the page boy I was able to read the address: ‘J. L. Strachan-Davidson, Esquire, The Master’s Lodging, Balliol College.’ On our return, as the river mists began to halo the lamps of the street, Holmes inquired of the concierge and was handed a small neatly written envelope in reply.

  On Monday morning we set out to walk a few hundred yards down ‘The Turl’ in search of our adviser. I knew little of the Master, as I must now call him, except as a younger man, ‘the lean, unbuttoned cigaretted dean.’ He was a tall and angular Scot of luxuriant eyebrows and formidable reputation, an authority on Cicero and Roman criminal law. Holmes assured me that I should find all I needed to know of him as a tutor in one of the famous college rhymes.

  Take a pretty strong solution

  Of the Roman constitution,

  Cigarettes not less than three

  And mix them up with boiling tea.

  Then a mighty work you’ve done,

  For you’ve made Strachan-Davidson.

  ‘I was once able to do the Master a small service concerning a scrape that one of his undergraduates was in—a nasty but petty blackmail. As you know, I do not expect favor returned for favor. However, he is good enough to write to me that he welcomes the opportunity to renew our rather slight acquaintance.’

  Once inside the lodgings on the college’s Broad Street front, we were shown up immediately to the Master’s sitting room. The door stood open and from within came the sounds of a tutorial in progress. Two young men were sitting in arm chairs and Strachan-Davidson, his back to the fireplace and his arms stretched out at either side along the mantelpiece, was in full flow on the subject of Sparta’s invasion of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

  ‘Do come in!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Lord Wroughton and Mr. Sampson are just construing for us book four of Thucydides. Find chairs, if you can.’

  We found them among the comfortable disorder of the room, books piled here and there, papers gathered untidily.

  ‘Now, my lord, if you please.’

  Lord Wroughton was a dark-haired and fresh-faced young man with the embarrassed look of one who had spent the previous evening dining not wisely but too well, when he should have had Thucydides as his sole companion.

  ‘Tou de-pe-gig-no-menou therou,’ he muttered, ‘Peri sitou ek-boleen … ‘In the following summer, when the corn was in full ear.”’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Master with Scots impatience, ‘and when was that?’

  ‘It was … that is to say, Master, I believe. …’

  Sherlock Holmes took pity on the unfortunate young nobleman and intervened.

  ‘I believe, Master, that we are safe in dating the expedition of the Syracusans against Messina as 1 June 425 B.C.’ The Master’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Really, Mr. Holmes? After two and a half thousand years in which even the season has been a matter of debate, you are able to tell us the precise day?’

  ‘It is really very simple, Master. Climate and season of every kind are necessary subjects upon which the criminal investigator must be informed. In this case, given the dates of ripening corn in Attica lying between 20 May and 10 June, the corn in full ear would scarcely be before the end of May. No reference is made to harvest, however, which suggests that the date of sailing was well before the end of the first week in June. Though I would allow a little latitude, I believe you will find that the tides necessary for embarking and landing the invading force would give very little alternative to 1 June. The coastline is not an easy one for shallow draft.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said our host genially. ‘Well, if Thucydides is to become a matter of criminal investigation, perhaps we had better leave him there. Lord Wroughton and Mr. Sampson, I shall be pleased to receive you both at the same time next week, in the hope that the first five chapters of book four will be firmly in your minds by then. Good morning to you.’

  As the two young men excused themselves deferentially to Holmes and myself, the Master shut the door and turned to us.

  ‘My dear Mr. Holmes,’—only now did he shake our hands—‘though it is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance again, I confess I have been puzzling what use Linear B could have for you. One moment and I will put the kettle on.’

  Holmes stretched his dark-suited legs before him.

  ‘Every possible use, Master. The matter is in strict confidence, of course.’

  ‘Of course. I imagine you would not be here otherwise.’

  ‘You are a collector of seal rings and coins from the ancient world, I believe.’

  Strachan-Davidson turned round with the kettle in his hand, beaming at us.

  ‘You have heard of my winter journeys to the Middle East, I imagine. A numismatist in a dahabeeah, as my young men call me here, a coin collector in an Egyptian sailing boat. I have one or two seal rings. You may still pick them up from market stalls in Cairo and in western Crete, you know.’

  ‘And Linear B?’

  ‘I have followed the work of Sir Arthur Evans with great interest. A good many of the texts were published lately in his book Scripta Minoa. Unfortunately he is still in Crete, so you cannot very well consult him.’

  Holmes nodded.

  ‘The question is a simple one, Master. Could Linear B be used as the basis of a code? I beg you to consider the question most carefully.’

  The Master’s ample eyebrows rose once more.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed. Linear B is a code, Mr. Holmes. Nothing else. It is a code so remarkable that no one has yet resolved it. A few decipherments here and there but very few and amounting to very little. Much of the rest of our understandi
ng is guesswork. A school of thought, to which I am inclined to belong, believes these symbols to be early forms of classical Greek. From that there has been an attempt to evolve pronunciation. There is far to go.’

  ‘Deciphered or not, its structure might form a modern naval or military code?’

  The Master handed us tea in silence.

  ‘The subject matter is the palace of Knossos, particularly its ships and arsenal. However, to draw each pictogram would be laborious. Nor could you print them, for no printer’s type would be available.’

  ‘How do scholars make texts available to each other? I imagine that must often happen.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr. Holmes. The problem has been solved by certain scholars in Etruscan and Babylonian by reducing ancient symbols to modern numerals. Each symbol is given a number, as a kind of shorthand.’

  ‘Could each Linear B symbol be a letter of an alphabet expressed as a number?’

  The Master shook his head.

  ‘No, Mr. Holmes. It is early days but, it seems, each symbol is a syllable rather than a single letter.’

  Sherlock Holmes let out the long sigh of a man who is vindicated after all.

  ‘Thus,’ Strachan-Davidson continued, ‘a modern message in Linear B would consist of several double digit numbers in groups, each double digit representing a syllable or whatever unit the code-maker chose and each group making up a word. It could serve for whatever message you wished to send. You would not have to decipher Linear B to use its signs as such a form of communication, though you might choose to do so.’

  Holmes was in his familiar attitude, listening with eyes closed and fingertips pressed together.