The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

  ‘Come, Watson! It is gone six o’clock and we must be up and doing! If the game is being played as I suspect, our birds will have flown before long.’

  He was talking about Professor Chamberlain and Madame Elvira, of course. Despite the ungodly hour, he had already been downstairs, roused the night porter, and sent a further telegram to Inspector Gregson at Scotland Yard, to follow his letter as soon as the post offices should open.

  ‘We ourselves cannot wait for such offices to open, my dear fellow. We must be on the Chain Pier as soon as its gates are unlocked for the seven o’clock steamer to Boulogne.’

  ‘They surely cannot be going to Boulogne. Their last performance is tonight.’

  ‘I have just taken the precaution of walking a little distance down to the theatre billboard. Another flyer was pasted across it late last night or early this morning. There is to be no more mesmerism nor mindreading. The Aquarium management regrets that tonight’s performance is cancelled in consequence of the indisposition of Madame Elvira. If they attempt to take the steamer, we shall catch them. More to the point, the deck of the pier looks diagonally across to those apartments on the Marine Parade. They cannot leave without our seeing them.’

  I was wide awake now and soon ready for the pursuit of our suspects. A little before seven o’clock, we were at the pier, where the steamer for Boulogne was alongside and the first passengers were filing aboard over her paddlebox. It was a fine cool morning, the mist still clinging over the sea and a band of pale sun along the eastern horizon. None of the passengers was recognizable as Chamberlain or Madame Elvira. Presently the ropes were thrown off, the gangway was pulled aboard, and the paddles of the Sea Breeze churned the green channel water to a hissing froth as she went astern and swung round towards the French coast.

  Holmes and I were the first to take deck chairs on the pier that morning. I had with me my neat Barr & Stroud precision field-glasses in their military leather case, with which he could almost have read a newspaper headline on the promenade. We waited, under the pretext of reading our copies of the Times and the Morning Post, as the sunlight grew warmer and the first promenaders appeared on the esplanade. I was about to say pessimistically that we might sit there all day and see nothing, when Holmes exclaimed quietly, ‘There he is! And so is she! I would say that she looks worried but not indisposed.’

  He handed me the glasses. I saw that Chamberlain and the girl had come out of the doorway of the apartments and were standing on the pavement in earnest conversation. Holmes snatched the glasses back and adjusted the focus a little.

  ‘He is going, I think, and she is staying. Let us be thankful there are two of us. She is giving him a pair of books.’

  ‘I daresay he will find a chair in the sun and spend the day reading.’

  ‘No, Watson, no! One book might be for reading. If he has two, the odds are that he is taking them somewhere.’

  ‘At this hour of the day? The libraries will not be open, nor will the bookshops.’

  ‘Then his destination is evidently a place where such institutions will be open by the time of his arrival. There is, I think, a label pasted on the cover of one book. An orange oval with black writing. We have him!’

  I was intrigued by this, but still far from understanding how we had him!

  ‘The St. James’s Street Library, in the shadow of the great palace, founded by John Stuart Mill and his friends for the public good almost fifty years ago. A treasure house of learning and the arcane, a scholar’s paradise. For many years I have been a member. So it seems has friend Chamberlain, though I imagine he has only temporary privileges there. You may depend upon it, Watson, he is going to London—and so are we.’

  It was hard to realise that we had only left London two days before. Yet every instinct told me that Holmes was right. Chamberlain was opening a Gladstone bag and adding the two books to whatever else it might contain. Then he swung round, striding toward West Street and the long climb that leads to the railway station at the top.

  ‘Watson! Quick as you can! Cut through the little streets to the side, past the Royal Pavilion! Book two first-class returns to London before he can get to the railway ticket office and see you. I doubt whether he will recognise us among so many of his audience, but we must not take the chance. I shall follow him, in case he should have other plans, but I swear that Gladstone bag has the look of the London and Brighton railway about it.’

  I did as he asked, Holmes following the fugitive westward while I strode at my best pace past the lawns and Georgian houses of the Steyne, the oriental onion domes of the Prince Regent’s palace by the sea. My years of playing rugby for Blackheath have served my constitution well. I cut through quickly by way of the little streets where our client Mrs. Deans and her family lived. I came out at the lower level of the station, the smoky air leaving a gritty deposit of soot between the teeth. The booking hall was empty when I arrived and took our tickets for London. I had beaten Chamberlain to it! I saw him approach up the long slope of Queens Road, and by loitering I overheard him take one single ticket for London. Holmes was right. Professor Chamberlain had no intention of coming back to Brighton. What of Madame Elvira?

  There was no sign anywhere of Holmes as the pursuer. Only when I walked toward the departure platform did I hear a quiet voice behind me.

  ‘The ticket, if you please, Watson. We shall travel as strangers and meet at the far end in an hour’s time.’

  And so it was. I chose a compartment on one side of Chamberlain with Holmes on the other. He could not leave the train without being seen by us both. As our train crossed the Thames below Chelsea Bridge and began drawing into Victoria Station, our quarry was on his feet, the bag in his hand, ready to be one of the first to alight.

  Then the chase began, though it was one in which we must not allow our fugitive to suspect that he was followed. Chamberlain had commandeered the only hansom cab just then upon the station rank. By the time that another had arrived and we swung ourselves aboard, his had turned away down Victoria Street and taken the corner into the long curve of Grosvenor Place. Holmes lifted the little trap in the roof and shouted to our driver, ‘Follow that fare in front! As hard as you can go down Grosvenor Place! Five sovereigns for you if you still have him in sight when he reaches his destination!’

  Happily for us, we had a sportsman on the driver’s perch. Wrenching the horse’s head round, he drove it at a hand-gallop after the receding hansom. He slowed briefly as the observant eye of a policeman glanced in our direction, then picked up speed as we turned the corner. We were nearly done for at the next junction, as a lumbering railway van pulled out in front, but we carried on round the stern of it. Then we were bumping and bouncing over the cobbles towards Hyde Park Corner. Unless Chamberlain looked back, for which there was no occasion, he would have no idea of our cab swaying and lurching in his wake.

  We seemed to be in a mad stampede, in and out of the vehicles as we careered round the busy crossing of Hyde Park Corner with the grand park trees and handsome terraces to either side. Once or twice in our zigzag course the horse’s hooves slipped on the greasy cobbles, but we came to no harm. Once a man, taking the horse for a runaway, tried to grab its bridle. Then a bread delivery van came out of a side street. But now we were in Piccadilly. If we were blocked in among the traffic, so was our quarry. For a moment I thought we had lost him, but our driver shot through a gap, almost grazing the pole of an omnibus. As Chamberlain turned into the Haymarket, we were very nearly on his tail. His cab stopped at the bottom, opposite the Duke of York’s Place, and I went after him on foot while Holmes emptied seven golden sovereigns into the cabman’s palm and I heard the cry of, ‘You’re a toff, sir, you are! A real gent!’

  Unaware of all this, Chamberlain had entered the offices of the Messageries Maritimes, whose vessels link metropolitan France with North Africa, Indo-China, Southampton, and New York. Holmes gestured to me to enter, while he remained outside. Under the pretext of consulting the company’s timeta
ble, I was able to hear Chamberlain claiming the ticket that he had booked for the next day’s sailing from Southampton to Cherbourg and New York.

  As he emerged, Holmes and I observed our usual routine for keeping a fugitive in sight without alerting him. I do not think I had been recognised by Chamberlain but, in any case, I now hung back, and it was Holmes who kept pace at a steady distance behind him as we moved westward down the handsome avenue of Pall Mall towards the ancient brick work of St. James’s Palace at the far end. Chamberlain still carried his Gladstone bag.

  Our little procession went the entire length of Pall Mall and then turned into St. James’s Street. About half way up, Chamberlain stopped, looked about him, and then went up the steps of the St. James’s Street Library. Holmes followed him discreetly. Through the window, I saw Chamberlain standing in the vaulted entrance hall, which might have graced one of our larger banks, and handing a clerk the two volumes from his leather bag.

  He came out and walked away down the street. What was Holmes doing? Why were we not in pursuit? Presently he appeared on the steps and looked at the disappearing figure.

  ‘We can find him when we need to,’ he said quietly. ‘Our first task must be to save Edmund Gurney.’

  I then noticed that he had, under his arm, a volume borrowed from the library on whose steps we stood. It was a slim book in royal blue cloth stamped with gold, which Chamberlain had handed to the library clerk a few minutes before. The author’s name meant nothing to me at first. Comte Henri-Gratien Bertrand. Then I remembered dimly that he had been an aide-de-camp of some kind to the Emperor Napoleon. Even in the labyrinthine world of Sherlock Holmes’s scholarship, this seemed far removed from the matter in hand. I saw the title: Journal Intime: Recueil de pieces authentiques sur le captif de Ste.-Helene. I was none the wiser, beyond gathering that Bertrand had kept a private journal as a companion of the emperor in his last years of exile on St. Helena. Abstruse works of this kind were meat and drink to Holmes. Among other readers, I doubt if one in ten thousand had heard of the Comte Bertrand.

  Then he opened the pages and I saw a slip of paper with writing on it. It appeared to have been left there inadvertently by a previous reader of the book and so, presumably, was Professor Chamberlain’s. ‘Pages 464 & 468. The whole worth reading twice. 19A + 1C. 19th to the 28th June.’ The pages referred to were toward the end of the book and presumably described the emperor’s last days. The 28th of June was today’s date.

  ‘19A + 1C. 19th to the 28th of June,’ Holmes murmured. ‘To obtain this effect, it is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily. Watson, we must go at once! Let us pray we are not too late.’

  ‘Back to Brighton?’

  He looked at me as if I had lost my senses and hailed another cab as it came sailing down from Piccadilly.

  ‘To Brighton? By no means! To Kentish Town, driver! Fortess Road! As fast as you can go!’

  If the race to follow Chamberlain had been a madcap drive, this was worse. We flew down Dover Street, across Oxford Street to the Euston Road, up the Hampstead Road, through Camden Town, and presently drew up in Fortess Road. Throughout the journey Holmes had been muttering to himself, as if for fear that he might forget, ‘It is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily.’

  We had stopped outside the North London Manufactory of Propter’s Nicodemus Pills. It was a drab redbrick building whose signboard was visible through a veil of soot. Holmes led the way, demanding to see the proprietor upon a matter of life and death and uttering threats of prosecution before the fact upon a charge of attempted murder.

  The proprietor was not there, or if he was he had taken shelter. We were shown into the office of the manager, a room that had a good deal to do with ledgers and invoices but little with the healing of the sick. It was just the accommodation I had supposed that vendors of quack medicine would inhabit.

  Holmes ignored the invitation to take a chair. He stood before the manager, the aquiline profile now hawk-like and the eyes burning, as it were, into those of his adversary. He did not even inquire the man’s name.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said quietly, ‘and think very carefully before you reply. Unless I have the truth now, it is very probable that you may face a charge of attempted murder and not impossible that you may be tried for murder outright. This is my colleague, Dr. Watson of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He will recognize any attempt at evasion or imposture, and in that event you will be in very serious trouble.’

  The manager looked at first as though he thought Holmes was an escaped lunatic of some kind. After the brief introduction of my name, however, he began to appear gratifyingly frightened.

  ‘I am Jobson and I have done nothing!’ he said.

  ‘Very well, Jobson who has done nothing, listen to me. Have you at any time in the past few months sent to your regular customers a complimentary sample of an improved version of Nicodemus Pills?’

  Jobson looked as if this might be a joke or a trick.

  ‘No,’ he said at length, ‘of course not. We don’t send out complimentaries.’

  ‘Let me give you the wording. The box of twenty improved capsules is ‘designed to prevent the nighttime restlessness that may previously have been consequent upon their use. To obtain this effect, it is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily.”’

  ‘I never heard of such a thing.’ To look at Mr. Jobson was to believe that he spoke the truth.

  ‘What are the principal ingredients of your Nicodemus Pills?’

  ‘The largest is milk sugar, then liver salts, cream of tartar, liquorice, arsenic in homeoepathic dose, cantharis similarly, coffee, sarsaparilla. …’

  ‘Calomel?’

  It was evident from Jobson’s eyes that he had not the least idea what this was.

  ‘A substance derived from mercury,’ I said quickly, ‘used as a rule for laxative purposes.’

  ‘Never,’ he said earnestly. ‘That would never do.’

  ‘Nor do you use gelatine capsules for your potions?’

  ‘The price,’ he said, ‘would be too high. Our powders are compressed into tablet form.’

  Holmes looked at me. His eyes were gleaming with triumph.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘our cab is waiting for us. You may expect, Mr. Jobson, to hear from Scotland Yard. I daresay Inspector Tobias Gregson will want a word with you in the course of his investigations.’

  Holmes stopped the cab at the first post office and wired again to Gregson, instructing him to meet us at all costs upon our return at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton. If that was impossible, he was to send the ‘most competent’ of his men on a matter of life and death.

  We cabbed it direct to Victoria and then caught the Pullman to Brighton. Even so, it was six o’clock by the time of our arrival and the summer sun was already declining across the tract of sea beyond the canyon of Queens Road and West Street below us. We reached the Royal Albion as the early dinner guests were sitting down to their meal. Among them was the sad, dishevelled figure of Edmund Gurney who, presumably, still knew nothing of my ministrations to him during the previous night.

  Holmes watched him like a falcon through the open door of the dining room, though what he was waiting for was not yet plain. If there was such danger, why did he not go and speak to the man? We took armchairs in a corner of the lobby, by a dwarf palm growing in a copper tub. Gurney was coming to the end of his dinner. He poured a glass of water from the carafe, opened a little tin on the table beside him, and took out a gelatine capsule, which was the last of the complimentary set of Propter’s Nicodemus Pills. My own view remained that if the others had done him no harm, there was no reason why this one should.

  Holmes sprang from the chair beside me, crossed the dining room in a few swift strides, and with a blow of his arm knocked the tin and the capsule from Gurney’s hand. The invalid Gurney sat ashen and q
uivering with shock at the sudden attack. Other guests were motionless and silent, all staring in one direction. It was a complete study of still life, the lean and menacing figure of Holmes included, as he leant forward towards his victim. The shock was broken by a voice from the hallway behind me.

  ‘Mr. Holmes, sir! Mr. Holmes!’

  I turned and saw Inspector Tobias Gregson in his three-quarter topcoat and carrying his hat in his hand.

  5

  As the three of us sat together in our room later that evening, Inspector Gregson put his glass down and said, with a further shake of his head, ‘It was an assault, Mr. Holmes. It was as surely an assault upon the man as any that I have ever witnessed.’

  ‘Gurney held death in his hand, Gregson, as surely as if he held a bomb that was about to explode.’

  ‘And how can you say that, when you do not know what might be in the capsule?’

  Holmes held a flame to his pipe.

  ‘I have no doubt, my dear fellow, as to what is in that capsule, none whatever. When it is analyzed it will be found to contain calomel. At a guess, I would say about ten grains of calomel.’

  ‘Well, ten grains of calomel would not kill him,’ I said reluctantly. ‘At the worst, it would upset his digestion.’

  Holmes ignored this, refusing to rise to the bait. In the silence that followed, it was Gregson who began to tell a story that at first seemed to have little to do with the events we had witnessed.

  ‘As to Professor Chamberlain and Madame Elvira, Mr. Holmes. Upon receiving your wire and the theatrical program with the photographs of the two performers, I made one or two inquiries. Forewarned is forearmed, gentlemen. Madame Elvira’s photograph meant nothing to me, I must confess. Professor Chamberlain, however, I recognized. Indeed, we have our own photograph of him in the Criminal Record Office. Nothing to do with second sight, I assure you, but everything to do with forging two letters of credit on the Midland Counties Bank. He served six months for that, but he almost escaped us before the trial by taking passage for North America. He was brought back from Quebec at our request.’