The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

That night he had heard E natural four times, B flat in the octave below, and then G natural in the octave higher. No man ever knew the streets of London and their great buildings as he did. In campanology, those three bells and those intervals between them occur only in the striking of St. Sepulchre’s, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the descant of St. Martin’s-le-Grand. He woke next morning with the exultation of a child at Christmas. What might have been inaudible in the remote ‘courtroom’ or when the streets were crowded could be heard in the silent hours between the last drunkards shouting their way homeward and the carts at dawn making their way to market. He knew, as surely as if he had drawn lines of triangulation on a map, that he was in the grim and disused limbo of Newgate prison. The vaulted space forming the ‘courtroom’ was at the meeting of the four great passageways, like aisles and transepts under a cathedral tower.

Until a few months before, as my readers may recall, Newgate had been the most feared and fearful gaol in England’s history, filled with many of the worst specimens of mankind. It was a detentional prison where they were held during their trials. Those condemned to death or corporal punishments remained until the dates of their executions or whatever form of penalty had been ordered. A corridor with fifteen death cells and the execution shed in the yard outside had a simple motto on its archway: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ Holmes now had not the least doubt that it was in one of these cells that he was held prisoner. No one in the world outside would think of searching for him in this disused fortress of despair.

His enemies had timed their revenge with devilish precision. Parliament and the City of London had resolved to pull down the ancient prison in Newgate Street and build the court of the Old Bailey on its site. The last man in the condemned cells had been hanged in 1901, as had the last woman, Ada Chard the baby-farmer. Other prisoners were transferred to nearby gaols. The building and its contents passed from the prison board to the city corporation. For several months, prior to demolition, it stood empty, ‘in the hands of the contractors.’ A supply of gas to the lamps was maintained and the unused gallows of the execution shed still remained in working order.

How easy it must have been for the contractors to pass the custody of the empty building to subcontractors in those last weeks. Henry Milverton and his accomplices had devised a poetic extermination for Sherlock Holmes, a warning to others who might interfere with the workings of a mighty criminal empire. Yet Holmes was not naive enough to believe that all this had been done merely to destroy him, when they might as easily have run him down in the street or dropped a boulder on his head. His death delighted these men, but it was a mere pastime that coincided with some greater plan. Behind the charade of a court and a Newgate hanging lay a criminal enterprise that might shake the entire world. It was something that perhaps only he had the power to prevent. Whatever the plot might be, it depended on a criminal gang having possession of the prison for some weeks or months. What the objective might be, Holmes could not at the moment deduce. But he swore to himself that he would find out.

The most curious aspect of his plight was that when sentence was pronounced upon him on the following day, he felt lighter in his heart than he had done since the nightmare began. It came as no shock to him, not even a surprise, to hear the ritual words in Henry Milverton’s oily tones. ‘You are to be taken back to the place whence you came and from thence to a place of lawful execution. And there you shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead.’ Any other man chained to the wall of the condemned cell, with guards outside and within, far from help and with the gallows waiting in the yard, must surely have given up hope. Yet Holmes put his faith in one indisputable fact. The power of his mind, the strength of his reason, the obser ving and analytical machine that he became at such times, were stronger than all his captors put together.

The man whom they called the master-at-arms, a burly and grizzled fellow, led him away in handcuffs from the last act of the trial. This time he was not immediately returned to his cell, but taken in an opposite direction. The prisoner and his escort came to an iron-faced door topped by steel spikes. The master-at-arms produced a heavy key and opened the largest Bramah lock that Holmes had ever seen, drawing back its bronze bolt with a massive rumbling. They crossed the paved floor of a somber high-roofed lodge, from which it was possible to hear the sound of traffic in the street, and passed through a doorway leading to what had evidently been the prison governor’s office. The walls were still hung with notices by the Court of Aldermen forbidding liquors to be brought into the prison or setting out rules for clerks and attorneys who were visiting their clients.

In a well-lit anteroom, where descriptions of prisoners were taken, an open cupboard displayed the irons worn by the notorious burglar, highwayman, and prison-breaker of a century before, Jack Shepherd—iron bars an inch and a half thick and fifteen inches long. Holmes noticed irons for the legs, about an inch in diameter and clasped with strong rivets. On the wall of the office there still hung two old paintings of the penal colony at Botany Bay. Yet his attention was held by three rows of faces arranged along the top of a low cupboard. They were the death masks of men and women who had been hanged at the prison for a hundred years past.

Henry Milverton was behind him now, pointing out a prize specimen among the masks. ‘There, Mr. Holmes, is Cour voisier, publicly hanged more than sixty years ago for the murder of Lord William Russell. You will see that the brow is low, the lower part of the face sensual. The upper lip, like that of most of the group, is abnormally thick. As your lip will be, Mr. Holmes, for it is congestion caused by the process of hanging—or rather of strangling. You will observe that some, like Cour voisier, have died with their eyes open and some with them shut. Those whose necks are broken by the drop have their eyes closed, those who drop short and choke to death have them open, as yours will be, Mr. Holmes.’

Holmes said nothing, but he noticed for the first time a weighing machine in one corner of the room.

‘You will oblige us,’ said Milverton, ‘by standing upon the scales. Your weight is of importance to the master-at-arms, so that the end may be as we wish it to be. Many people, Mr. Holmes, have looked forward to this spectacle and it would never do for your final appearance to be too brief. You must expect us to have some sport with you after you have put us to so much trouble. A short drop and a long dance for you, I fear, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’

Holmes stood upon the metal plate of the machine but still said nothing. The grizzled brute, whom they called the master-at-arms, fiddled with the bronze disks of the weights—first he added one, then replaced it with a smaller one—until the metal arm of the balance oscillated slightly and was still. Milverton pretended to busy himself with some papers but as soon as the weighing was over he looked up.

‘Good-bye, Mr. Holmes. We shall not meet again until the morning of the great occasion. It is the custom, is it not, to allow a man three clear Sundays before his execution? That we cannot do. However, it will be a week or more before some of our friends are here, so you may make whatever peace you can in that time with whatever gods you think may spare you their attention. There will come a point, however, when you will wake each morning not knowing whether this is—or is not—to be your last. A morning when you are merely allowed one more day to live will make you think yourself the luckiest man alive. Fancy that, Mr. Holmes! At such times, as your despair becomes unendurable, you will consider us as your dearest benefactors for allowing you one more brief day! You have no idea how well we shall get on!’

Holmes fixed the man with his sharp but steady gaze. Milverton held his eyes for a moment, then smirked and looked down at his papers.

The way back to the condemned cells was not by the route they had come. It led down an ill-lit corridor and over a covered bridge. There was a glimpse of four galleries of cells under a glass roof, all deserted and silent. Holmes and his escorts passed through an iron gate and along a small passage, paved with slate, beside an exercising ground that he calculated must border on Newgate Street. There was not an inch of that short journey that was not catalogued in his mind. I daresay he could have told you the number of paving slabs they had crossed, how many were chipped, and where the cracks were.

He noticed, a little beyond the bridge and the glass roof, a side opening with several sets of clothes or uniforms hanging upon wall-hooks. Next to it was a recess with a sink, three razors and brushes, a hand-mirror face-down upon a stone surface. At such moments, I had often observed, he became an invincible brain without a heart or the tremor of a ner ve or a pang of affection. Perhaps it was as well for him that this should be so. As they came out under a covered arch he saw for the first time what lay beyond his opaque cell windows. It was a yard beyond reach of the sun with the cell block on one side. Its walls rose sleek as marble to what Wilde, the prisoner-poet, had called ‘that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.’

Abandon hope. … The builders had chosen an apt text for the condemned block. Even a man who could free himself from the chain at his ankle, render himself invisible to the guard in his cell, open the prison locks on the outer door, spirit himself from the cell into the yard, might just as well have surrendered to the hangman. The smooth expanse of the great walls was almost unbroken. In the northwest corner, halfway from the ground to the summit was an old water tank, neglected since the days when it had provided the first water supply to the buildings below. Above it, just below the top of each wall ran a stout wooden axle set with sharpened steel wire. A man who attempted it would find that he could scarcely hang by as much as a finger without encountering the savage metal.

Holmes walked slowly between his guards, as if it were a great effort to move his legs in time with theirs. They did not hurry him. There was surely a satisfaction in showing him the hopelessness of his situation. He could only guess what part such men had played as common criminals before they put on the livery of Milverton’s prison officers.

Along one wall of the yard, the paving had been dislodged by the sinking of the ground. There were single letters engraved on the stone at intervals,
A G
, an
L
, and an
M
and another
G
. Holmes did not need to be told that he was walking over the graveyard of men and women who had been hanged at the prison and whose bodies, mouldering and rotting in quicklime, caused this subsidence in the ground. If his escorts smiled as they passed, it was with amusement at the famous Sherlock Holmes now walking over his own grave. At one end of the yard he noticed a shed, like a small stable. Through its open doors he glimpsed a black platform on wheels. Thirteen steps led up to its top, which was large enough for several men to stand upon. Though no rope was coiled on the beam above it, this was plainly to be the means of his death. Holmes glanced at it and knew what the way ahead must be.

While he sat on the bed in his cell, one of the escorts locked the anklet to the links that chained him to the wall, removed his handcuffs, and left him to his own contemplations. There was no mirror in the cell. Holmes knew only by touch that a beard had begun to establish itself on his face and that his hair was unkempt. Such things mattered nothing to him just then. As he sat on the edge of the narrow wooden bed, his thoughts were far away. His formidable intelligence was tuned only to victory over his adversaries. Without intending it, they had now shown him a path to freedom. It was not a certain path, but it was the only one. Even before he could begin upon it, there was a battle to be won.

He took up his usual position, sitting cross-legged and silent at the head of the bed, his gaze concentrated upon whichever guard sat at the table in the far end of the cell. The man who kept watch was beyond the range of Holmes’ capable and efficient fists but never beyond the reach of those unblinking and penetrating eyes.

There were two men who took it in turns to watch him as he woke or slept. They had divided their duty so that each kept vigil for two days and then two nights alternately. At night they slept in the wooden chair, beyond the range of the chain that held his anklet.

Holmes gathered that the name of the first man was Crellin. He was tall with a lantern jaw, dark hair piled on his head like an old-fashioned courtier’s wig, and a look of brutalised cunning. A movement of his mouth seemed at first to promise a skeptical smile. It was no more than a misalignment of the lips. Crellin might laugh, but he never smiled.

The other man was more slightly built, his complexion so deeply reddened by the sun, the skin so tight and shiny on the bones of his face, that he looked as if he had been boiled. Holmes heard him referred to as Mac. At a glance, this smaller man seemed the less pugnacious of the two. Holmes decided to put the matter to the test. It was not necessar y that he should defeat all his captors. One might be enough.

He had once remarked that from a single drop of water the logician could infer the existence of the Niagara Falls or the Atlantic Ocean without ever having seen either. It now seemed that by knowing the nickname of one jailer Sherlock Holmes proposed to find a path to freedom from the condemned cell of the most closely guarded prison in the world. The thing was so utterly impossible that not even Henry Milverton would feel that he needed to protect himself against it.

From the moment the warder who was his day time keeper entered until the man left at dark, Holmes was the hawkfaced, cross-legged idol whose eyes drilled into the guard’s mind and thoughts, scattering them like ninepins. I had seen him confront a practised trickster or a hardened scoundrel and with this same unblinking stare fix the unfortunate wretch for perhaps thirty seconds. None of them ever endured it longer. Some, like Professor Moriarty, tried to turn it to laughter, but the flame scorched them. To be burnt like an insect by such unblinking and brilliant fire for an entire day would beggar description! On the first occasion, Crellin glared back at the steady glitter of those eyes. He growled a threat, as if that settled the matter, and looked away. The eyes gave him no rest. Chained as he was, Sherlock Holmes pursued the sullen bully into the dark shadows of his mean soul.