The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

  This rigmarole continued on the stage. Then, without warning, Holmes began to mutter each correct name even before Madame Elvira could begin to type it. I was alarmed that he might be overheard and that we might be identified as spies. Presently, however, we received another instruction from the hereafter. Triumph in false strife makes power destroy itself. This was followed at once and even more dramatically by I pledge my name for truth.

  ‘The seat is number thirty-two and the occupant is Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’

  His name meant nothing to the performers or their audience, I think, though I believe I heard a laugh from someone who perhaps thought him to be a wag playing a joke on the professor.

  ‘Am I right, sir?’

  ‘Indeed you are,’ said Holmes in his most charming manner, ‘and, of course, I have never had the pleasure of your acquaintance until now.’

  The scrap of typing was brought and he thrust it into his pocket.

  The rest of the performance was a variant of this game. Cards were drawn from a pack and correctly guessed at. Once or twice Madame Elvira even pronounced in advance which card a volunteer would draw. Yet in all this there was nothing much beyond the manipulation of a deck of cards as a skilled poker cheat might have done it. The deck was torn from a manufacturer’s wrapper each time, but that would not prevent it being tampered with. The whole thing reeked of the gaming saloon.

  All the same, the audience seemed well pleased. Yet the second-sight act had soon become what they call ‘dead lead’ to them. A moment later they were noisily applauding the return of the mesmerized when young men stooped, were kicked, and turned round to thank their assailant, as ‘Dr. Mesmer’ had commanded them in advance, or young women barked like dogs and scuffled on all fours. This was far superior to messages from ‘the beyond’ that sounded as if they might have a profound meaning and yet tortured the brain unendurably in any attempt to draw common sense from them.

  I was ready to leave long before the end of the show, but Holmes seemed determined to see it through to the finish. Afterwards we took a final stroll along the deck of the Chain Pier while a crescent moon formed a thin path of pale glittering light all the way to Boulogne. I took the scrap of paper with my name typed upon it, screwed it up, and was about to throw it over the rail into the water.

  ‘No!’ said Holmes sharply. ‘That is our first trophy of the battle.’

  ‘A trophy of a wasted evening!’ He chuckled at this.

  ‘A trophy of time well spent. You really could not see how it was done?’

  ‘I suppose there was a trick,’ I said grudgingly. ‘All I saw was the fellow staring at a card, mumbling so-called philosophical remarks about knowledge, power, and staking one’s soul for truth. Then the girl typed out the answer—the name on the card and the messages. Professor Chamberlain cannot have been a muscle-twitcher, that much is evident, for she could not see him. As for those spoken messages, how could there be a meaning in all that foolish babble?’

  ‘Very easily, my dear fellow. In the first place, he talked a great deal, but only the messages from the spirit world were important.’

  ‘Did you hear mine? Knowledge protects its opposite. Experience brings understanding. Time precedes oblivion.’

  ‘Quite so. The kind of gibberish that seems to the simple-minded to be the wisdom of the ages. It quite occupies one in trying to decipher it while the real trick is pulled. Our Professor Chamberlain is a clever fellow, make no mistake of that. A clever fellow, although a ruffian and a fraud.’

  ‘Then there is a message in the gibberish?’

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘Oh, there is, Watson! Indeed there is. Try the first letter of each word in your own message. Knowledge protects its own. Experience breeds understanding. Time precedes oblivion.’

  ‘K-P-I-O. X-B-U. T-P-O. It makes worse gibberish than ever.’

  ‘I confess that it took me until the third attempt to work it out. All the same it is a commonplace device. Now, replace each letter with the one in the alphabet which precedes it.’

  ‘J-O-H-N. W-A-T-S-O-N.’

  ‘Just so. John Watson. She could not see him, therefore it had to be a spoken code. Even then, the girl could not possibly have deciphered his endless verbiage; therefore, the clue must be contained in a few of the words. What else could provide it but those messages from the beyond? She is, I imagine, a simple soul, therefore the method must be consistent. The first letter of each word seemed likely. As I listened, I realized that it was not the first letter but that the number of words in the spirit messages exactly matched the number of letters in the customer’s name. Ten in your case. Chamberlain did not, you observe, choose long names. I believe mine was the longest. Interesting, by the way, that it appeared to mean nothing to him. I daresay he has been abroad or in the colonies.’

  ‘And then?’ I inquired.

  ‘Quite. I deduced that it could not be the first letters of the words after all. That would have been too obvious to anyone in the audience with an ounce of sense. However, it would not be difficult for the girl to transpose each letter in the alphabet by one place. That would do it. Most of those people would give up after finding the initial letters did not work. For the rest, Chamberlain could alter the system a little each week during the weeks of their engagement. To be sure, he and the girl would probably be caught out in the end if they remained in one place long enough. That, however, they did not propose to do.’

  ‘He called me a man of learning.’

  ‘And so you are. We will not go into the matter of the way in which the brushing of your medical stethoscope wears away the nap of your waistcoat as it dangles there. Chamberlain is not clever enough to observe that. However, look at you against a sea of cockneys and yokels in such a place. Why, Mrs. Hudson’s cat would appear a figure of learning in such company.’

  ‘With whom we have wasted an entire evening!’

  He stopped and lowered his voice.

  ‘Watson, our time has not been wasted. It is plain to me that our two pigeons are about to take wing. I should give a great deal to know why.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘You will have observed that there was scarcely an empty seat in that auditorium. They cannot be taking flight for lack of custom. Had they arranged another engagement, they would have known long before now and there would be no need to paste an urgent sticker across their advertisements. They have every reason to remain here. Moreover, why such haste to be gone? Today is Tuesday and it now seems they are obliged to close on Saturday.’

  ‘They must close somewhen and must announce it.’

  ‘Precisely but why was the paste on the closure stripper across their bill still wet? They are leaving a successful run with a minimum of notice. If you ask me, that has the mark of two people doing a bunk.’

  We reached the pier turnstile again and crossed the esplanade toward the hotel. In the lobby, Holmes went to the desk and began negotiations with the night porter. A large cream envelope embossed with a post office stamp was produced. A few coins changed hands. Holmes, dipping the pen in the white china inkwell, wrote a brief message on hotel notepaper and addressed the envelope. The night porter beckoned an infant pageboy who took the envelope, received a further coin, and disappeared into the night at a run.

  When Holmes came back across the lobby, I noticed that he no longer carried the theatre program for Professor Chamberlain’s antics, prefaced by photographs of the performer and his medium, the ‘professor’ looking a good deal younger than he appeared in reality.

  ‘Where has it gone?’ I asked. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

  ‘Little Billy, or whatever his name may be, is running for the midnight post from the railway station. I have every hope that by tomorrow morning those two most interesting faces will be on the desk of Inspector Tobias Gregson at Scotland Yard.’

  We withdrew to our quarters where we settled ourselves with whisky and tobacco. Holmes still kept up an irritating pret
ence that I had been taken in by Chamberlain’s performance, merely because I had not at first seen how the tricks were done.

  ‘Surely, my dear fellow, you did not believe that a common young fellow and girl like that were capable of reading one another’s minds.’

  ‘I had not given the matter much thought,’ I said a little irritably.

  ‘It seemed scarcely worth it.’

  ‘Let us be thankful that it is not,’ he said, yawning. ‘If men and women up and down the land became capable of reading the thoughts in one another’s minds, murders would be as common and disregarded as sixpenny coins. We, my dear fellow, might be looking for some other means of livelihood.’

  ‘And what of Miss Deans in all this? That poor child has lost her employment.’

  ‘You may be sure that I have not forgotten the plight of our young Miss Effie Deans. If I am to help her, however, I now require what our legal friends call further and better particulars. Let us turn our attention next to the mysterious Mr. Edmund Gurney to whom she is said to have made advances. A man whose life is devoted to phantasms of the living rather than voices of the dead and who seems to be that most interesting person—a chloroform addict who is either an eater or an inhaler. It is said that the girl was seen trying to enter his room at an unseemly hour. I should greatly like to know why the accusation was made, and, I daresay, the answer lies within that room. I believe that our next task must therefore be to search Mr. Gurney’s room and his possessions quite thoroughly but without his knowledge. We should lose no time in doing so.’

  3

  ‘The thing is quite impossible,’ I said, for the fourth or fifth time.

  ‘There is no suggestion that Gurney has done anything criminal or improper. You cannot simply burgle a fellow guest in a respectable hotel! Even if a chambermaid entered his room during the night, that is the affair of the management. For its part, the management appears to feel that the question is settled. You may be sure that they will not let you in there.’

  ‘Burglary by night and housebreaking by day,’ he said, his eyebrows drawn down as if in deep thought. ‘It would, I suppose, be termed breaking and entering on premises such as these—were it not for the fact that you, my dear Watson, are the man to do it.’

  You may imagine that I was appalled by the suggestion.

  ‘I shall do no such thing. Whatever you think we might find in there. …’

  ‘I have no precise idea what we might find. However, let us drop the matter of burglary and consider the peculiar self-anaesthesia of Edmund Gurney.’

  I made no immediate answer to this, but the matter remained fixed in his thoughts. Presently he tried to revive the topic.

  ‘It is a matter to interest a medical man, Watson. Mr. Gurney appears to be an habitué of chloroform, very probably an addict by this time. Oh, very well, let us put it more kindly and say that the poor fellow suffers from neuralgia. The anaesthetic dulls his pain sufficiently for him to enjoy a night’s rest.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The practice may nonetheless be lethal,’ Holmes insisted.

  ‘It is foolish in the extreme but also difficult to prevent. Once a man is habituated to sleeping under the influence of chloroform, he may find it impossible to do without it.’

  ‘Precisely. If memory serves correctly, anything over two fluid ounces swallowed or inhaled is liable to prove fatal. The quantities are very small—so is the difference between life and death. In the hands of a layman, it must be a threat to life under any circumstances.’

  I began to see what was coming as he leant back in his chair.

  ‘If someone approached you, Watson, and told you that there was a very strong smell of chloroform coming from a room where a man was sleeping, you would be prepared to investigate, as you would if there were an odor of escaping gas or a smell of smoke.’

  ‘I daresay. But who is going to tell me that?’

  ‘The hotel manager, once I have had a word with him. You may be sure that he will not risk having one of his guests found dead in the morning. He is, after all, not the owner of the hotel and I fancy he would not keep his job long after an incident of that sort. Mr. Gurney, I have no doubt, lies sedated by fumes. He will be your patient for a few hours, if that seems reasonable. We shall both keep him company and I shall look around me.’

  I confess that I was filled with curiosity. What Holmes had first proposed now began to sound less heinous. Any medical man must thoroughly disapprove of these amateur experiments with anaesthetics, however great the discomforts of neuralgia. Such misuse will lead to addiction and the victim will never break himself of it. I might still have jibbed at what Holmes suggested. However, it would certainly give me the authority to have a straight talk with Gurney over the folly of these practices and a chance to put him on the proper path for treatment. That at least was in keeping with a doctor’s Hippocratic oath. Moreover, Holmes’s intention of merely looking around him seemed to fall far short of burglary.

  So it was that on the following night, just after eleven o’clock, Holmes went to the hotel desk and alerted the manager to a strong smell of chloroform in the corridor outside Gurney’s room. He voiced his fears of a tragedy but added that a doctor of considerable experience was his companion on this visit. Unless he was a complete fool, the Italian restaurateur who had been appointed by the owners to manage the hotel must have realized that his guest practised something like self-anaesthesia. Five minutes later the three of us stood in that corridor and I allowed myself to be persuaded that I could detect a sickly sweetish whiff of chloroform in the enclosed air, sufficient to suggest that a man breathing the enclosed air of the room was in danger.

  The manager tapped lightly at the door, but Holmes had watched Gurney go up to his room after dinner and had timed his report accordingly. By now, I suspected, the foolish fellow was in the arms of Morpheus. Of course he was not anaesthetized as deeply as a patient would be for a surgical operation, but nor would he be easily roused within the next hour or two. I was not surprised when there was no response to the knock. We both looked at the manager, a Milanese of lean and cadaverous appearance, as if to imply that should there be a mishap, he was bound to be held accountable. To me, he looked more than ever like some mournful bird of prey.

  He motioned us back, then slid his passkey into the lock and pushed open the sitting room door. In truth, there was an odour but it was suggestive of operating theaters generally and not overwhelmingly evident as chloroform. We waited. As many of my readers will be aware, Brighton was the first town in England to have a supply of electricity under the Electric Lighting Act of 1882, so that the manager had only to turn a switch in order to illuminate the sitting-room. It was furnished with a pair of armchairs, a table with two upright seats at it, and a bureau. To one side was the bedroom door, which had been closed but not locked. Within that was a further division with separate doors for bedroom and bathroom.

  When the first inner door was opened, there was a definite odour of chloroform, so strong that I opened the bedroom door in fear of what I might find. The dose had been potent enough for Edmund Gurney to succumb to sleep even before he could turn off the light. Yet nothing had prepared me for the grotesque spectacle that I now saw. He lay on the bed in the stark electric glare, wearing his nightshirt, the upper part of his body propped against the headboard. His body had slumped at an angle and his head was almost entirely encased in a rubber sponge bag, which he had drawn down far enough to cover his nostrils and mouth. His practice was evidently to soak the rubber bag in a measure of chloroform and then draw it over his head as he lay down to sleep. It was dangerous and foolish in the extreme, for he had no means of controlling the amount he ingested. He was a perfect subject for ‘The Hypochondriac’s Tragedy.’

  First of all the sponge bag must come off. As I pulled it clear, he hardly stirred and I prayed that, this time, he had not gone beyond recall. His face was deathly pale, the countenance of a tall, lanky, big-boned fellow, perhaps forty
years old. His blue eyes were a fraction open, but I am sure he saw nothing. The moustache was lank and the hair combed like thatch down either side of his head. I took his wrist and felt a pulse, which was stronger and steadier than I had feared. Perhaps, like so many habitués, his constant use had hardened him to the effects of the fumes. Holmes meanwhile had opened the window and fresh air began to drift into the room. I turned to the manager, who was hovering over us. There was no need to use deceit, for what I told him was the perfect truth.

  ‘You had better leave him to me for an hour or so. His life is not in immediate danger from the chloroform, which will pass off slowly. However, it may sometimes act as an emetic. If that were to happen when he is deeply asleep, there is a risk that he might choke on his own vomit without waking.’

  I did not add that it was a remote risk. All the same, had such a thing happened after I had abandoned him to return to my room, matters would certainly not have gone well for me at an inquest. The manager’s relief was tinged with apprehension.

  ‘You do not ask for an ambulance or a doctor from the hospital? There will be no police?’

  ‘It would serve no purpose. He must be watched for an hour or two. That is all.’

  In his gratitude, I thought he might seize my hand and kiss it. He had, of course, dreaded the publicity that hospitals and ambulances—let alone the police—bring to an establishment like his. Holmes and I did not appear to him as the types who would tell the story round the streets of Brighton.

  ‘Mr. Holmes has some experience in medical matters,’ I said to him reassuringly. ‘He can watch for me if I should be out of the room at any time.’

  I did not add that my friend’s experience in medical matters, such as it was, usually concerned those who were already dead. Indeed, the manager with his thin, stooping gait and black clothes might have graced an undertaker’s parlour. He now withdrew in a fusillade of thanks and assurances while promising to be at beck and call if he were needed.