The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (40 page)

We followed him up a broad flight of marble stairs and a little distance along a wide passageway. He stopped outside a double door of stout oak panels furnished with an impressive selection of locks and bolts.

‘Here, gentlemen, are the rooms always set aside by the Lord Mayor as robing apartments for ceremonial occasions. Royalty and majesty, of course, have apartments of their own. At other times we use these as aldermen’s committee rooms of the Common Council. They run along this side of the building and look down into the courtyard at its center. This door is the only way in. On the day of the royal visit, it will have a guard of two sergeants and two reserves from the Provost Marshal’s Corps under the command of a senior captain. Once the rooms are locked after disrobing and the guests have gone down to lunch, no person will be permitted to enter until the function is over and the robing begins again.’

He took out a key, unlocked the oak doors, and led us into a spacious oblong room. This was the area where each courtier in turn removed his robe with the assistance of his attendants and put it on again after the luncheon. Three tall sash windows along the left-hand side looked down into the courtyard. A large table at the centre, equipped with upright chairs padded by black horsehair, certainly had the air of a committee room. At the far end a second locked door led into the room where the robes were to be kept after they had been taken from their wearers. All furniture had been cleared from this second room and it was now occupied by three ranks of tailor’s dummies in pale brown canvas set out as precisely as soldiers on parade.

‘Here we have a second room almost identical to the first,’ said Jago reassuringly, ‘occupied at other times by the filing staff of the Clerk to the Common Council. There is no access but by the way we have just come. A mouse could not get in or out on the great day without authority.’

‘It is not a mouse that concerns me,’ said Holmes mildly. ‘A rat, perhaps, but a rat bearing such authority as you and your men might defer to without a second thought.’

Jago laughed as uproariously as he could manage.

‘Well and good, Mr. Holmes, if you say so. I am sure we must all be guided by you in this matter. In this second room, the cloaks will be mounted on these dummies; they will be safe as in the Bank of England. It is divided from the first room and the room beyond by doors securely locked.’

‘In the light of the case upon which you and I were engaged so many years ago,’ said Holmes coolly, ‘“safe as the Bank of England” appears to me an unfortunate choice of simile.’

The thirty or forty tailors’ dummies consisted of stuffed canvas bodies, from neck to hips, mounted on black-painted iron poles. Inspector Jago had bounced back from Holmes’s rebuke with the aplomb of a rubber ball. He brushed his moustache confidently on the edge of his hand and beamed proudly.

‘This, gentlemen, is what our frog-eating friends on the far side of the English Channel would call the
garde-robe
. Because, indeed, it is where the robes are guarded.’ He spread his empty hands like a conjurer performing an impossible trick. ‘Once again, there is no access except by the way we have come, which will be guarded as tight as the Tower of London. Safe as the Tower itself!’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘I think so, Mr. Holmes. I believe I am entitled to think so.’

‘And what of the third room beyond this?’

‘You may see that, if you please, sir. Of course you shall. It is not in commission just now—quite
hors de combat
and locked up, in fact. For it is the post-room. Not much to the purpose, except when the clerks are here. But you wish to see it, sir, and so you shall. Not much to the purpose on the great day, we may safely say, but you shall see it indeed.’

‘I doubt very much,’ Holmes replied caustically, ‘if you may safely say anything.’

Jago slipped his key into the Yale lock and opened the door. Here was a room about half the size of the first two, a dead-end with no entrance or exit but by the way we had come, as Inspector Jago hastened to assure us. There was only a single sash window. The further wall, an exterior wall of the building, was filled by cupboards floor to ceiling. For further security, these were built some way into the wall itself. The cupboards appeared to be locked, perhaps by a single key that fitted the entire suite. Holmes surveyed them in a long single glance.

‘I think we have seen enough,’ he said, ‘except for the matter of the windows.’

‘The windows?’ For the first time, Jago lost a little of his bounce.

‘The windows,’ Holmes repeated. ‘You have done so thorough a job, Inspector, creating a strong room from these three offices, ensuring that the only access—and, indeed, the only exit—is by way of a heavily guarded exterior door. Come now, you have surely seen that the only remaining weakness can be the windows. You were teasing us—or testing us—by not mentioning them, were you not? Putting us to the proof!’

This caught Mr. Jago nicely, on one leg, as it were. It was plain he had never given a thought to the danger of attack at such a height by way of the windows which were on view to the courtyard. However, to admit that now would demolish him.

‘I have had the windows in mind, Mr. Holmes,’ he said uneasily.

‘To be sure you have,’ replied Holmes consolingly.

‘I did not, however, consider them the most likely approach.’

‘Did you not? Surely they are the only approach, once your guards are in place.’

‘I was about to mention them, however.’

‘To be sure you were. I did not suggest the possibility of an attack down through the ceiling or up through the floor, for I was quite certain that you must have taken precautions against that too.’

‘Indeed so,’ said Jago hastily. ‘Police constables are to be posted in rooms above and below.’

‘Excellent! In that case you can have no objection to assisting me in a small experiment with the windows. Would it be possible for one of us to go down into the courtyard and maneuver a small weight attached to a piece of string?’

He drew from his pocket a ball of thin cord, to the end of which a one-pound scale weight with a hook had been attached.

‘It would be possible, Mr. Holmes, only. …’

‘Only your instructions are to trust no one, not even Dr. Watson and myself. You must not leave us alone up here to wander about at will. Equally, you could not send one of us alone to roam the building on our way down to the yard. You are quite right, you have thought of everything, and you have passed the first test—loyalty to those in command of you. I should not dream of compromising you. Indeed, I insist that if you would be so good as to go down and manipulate the weight as I shall instruct you, you must lock us both in here and, if possible, one of your constables should keep surveillance upon us. However, it is imperative that I should have this assistance with my little experiment, and I would prefer not to involve anyone but the three of us.’

In the end, as Holmes had foreseen and contrived, Jago went down to the courtyard after locking us in, with a pantomime of reluctance. As soon as he was gone, my friend said:

‘Quick about it, Watson. That wretched fellow is worse than Lestrade. If we leave it to them, there will not be a jewel left in the entire royal collection. I must make a survey of the rooms. Open the window over there and lower the little weight on the cord—as slowly as you can. That will occupy him for a moment.’

I pushed up the window and began to pay out the cord. While doing this, it was not easy to watch what Holmes was up to, but he was striding about the anteroom, the garde-robe, and the post-room while pausing briefly from time to time. Once or twice I heard a tiny rasping sound of metal on metal. Then he appeared at the window beside me and began to shout instructions at Jago, thirty feet below. I cannot bear to repeat them all, for some were so idiotic, but at last he called down:

‘Take the weight! See how far it will swing side to side, along the wall. If our man comes down over the roof, he may gain a window ledge by descending to one side and swinging across. We must take measurements of that possibility.’

‘But the windows can be locked, Mr. Holmes.’

‘With a small steel jimmy, he can wrench them from their frames.’

‘In the City of London and in broad daylight, Mr. Holmes?’

‘He may carry a cloth and pail and masquerade as a window-cleaner.’

‘During His Majesty’s visit?’

‘Or he may enter by night.’

However low Jago’s opinion of my friend’s detective skill, it was lower still by the time the inspector returned to what he called facetiously his garde-robe. He must surely have suspected something from this farce but he could not see, let alone prove, anything amiss. I had been a little put out when Holmes made his tour of Westminster Abbey and the House of Lords without me. Now I wished that I had also spent the day of the Mansion House visit at home.

The world knows that Coronation Day came and went without the loss of a single jewel. This enabled Lestrade to be still more witty at our expense, ruminating over his evening whisky and water
at the manner in which the bumbledom of the Scotland Yard force had triumphed without the assistance of a detective genius. Sherlock Holmes remained unruffled, favouring him only with a quick humourless smile that was more than anything a grimace of impatience.

My thoughts still turned from time to time to Colonel Moriarty. Though Holmes and I knew of his criminal intent, he had surely missed the boat now that the main coronation ceremony was over. Even Holmes himself, when he sent a final refusal to stand guard at the coronation itself, remarked, ‘The whole alarm over the coronation and the jewels is a fuss about nothing.’

‘You cannot know that,’ I said. ‘No one can.’

‘You will recall my reply to the wretched thief in the Case of the Blue Carbuncle, as you chose to call it. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.”’

So it came to the week of the Lord Mayor’s luncheon. The street banners and loyal flags that had decorated the West End on Coronation Day now appeared in the great commercial streets of the City of London, around St. Paul’s cathedral, on banks and insurance offices, at commodity brokers’ and stock dealers’. Little rows of bunting also adorned the close-packed houses of the adjacent East End, as well as the docks of Wapping and Limehouse.

The behavior of Sherlock Holmes had created a dilemma for me. He would say nothing more, yet he appeared sure of everything. He had long ago left Lestrade and Brother Mycroft high and dry. Even my loyalty was put to the test. Had he got the wrong end of the stick, as the saying goes? All men are mortal, even Sherlock Holmes. It was not beyond possibility that he was in error over some vital detail. He had admitted errors in certain past cases.

How could Holmes know from the start that it was not the coronation but the Lord Mayor’s luncheon that would be the occasion of a sensational theft? Unless the colonel was to knock down the wearer of the Queen of the Night in full public view, the only opportunity must be while the robes, cloaks, and their insignia were locked away in the garde-robe during the official luncheon.

Unless our opponent had a team of labourers with pick-axes to break through a twelve-inch stone wall, the only approach to that room was by double doors securely locked and bolted, guarded by armed sergeants of the Provost Marshal’s Corps. Within the anteroom, the communicating door, which led into the garde-robe with its rows of tailor’s dummies, was also locked. There were the windows down one side, overlooking the courtyard thirty feet below. However, since Holmes had made such play of these to Inspector Jago, police guards in the courtyard were to keep constant surveillance to frustrate any attempt at the casements. The smaller post-room at the end would also be locked but its own cupboards, large enough for a cat but not for a man.

The integrity of the Provost Marshal’s Corps was unquestioned. Even if an intruder could hide himself in these rooms during the royal luncheon, any theft would be discovered once the minor courtiers and their attendants returned to assume their robes for the rest of the ceremonies—while the thief must still be there. The disappearance of the Queen of the Night would cause any suspect to be stripped to the skin—however discreetly. Then, if nothing was found, he must be free to go. Yet he would go without his trophy. Every room or cupboard would be taken to pieces, floorboards taken up. No one would be permitted to return, certainly not a thief who might have hidden his booty there.

Suspicion must fall primarily on the two unfortunate sergeants at the door of the garde-robe, who entered it alone when they collected and handed out the robes after lunch. Or perhaps it might fall upon a chamber-groom who assisted his master to disrobe and robe again. Holmes had calculated how such a crime might be carried out. If he could calculate it, so might someone else.

If ever there was a mystery in a locked room, this must be it, and I am not a great believer in such riddles. Colonel Moriarty would take one look at the provost sergeants and abandon his plan—if he ever had one. This would not suit Holmes, who intended a final encounter with his adversary, but Colonel Moriarty was not there to suit Holmes.

That evening after dinner I watched Holmes cautiously from behind my newspaper as he sat at his worktable. He unwrapped a chamois leather and took out what might have been the Queen of the Night, had the famous ornament been nothing but a Christmas-tree decoration or a glass fancy-dress trinket. Perhaps he hoped to trick Colonel Moriarty into stealing a mere gewgaw rather than a Brazilian diamond set among indigo sapphires. In the heat of the moment the colonel might be deceived, though I doubted it. In any case, a counterfeit may be of use to the thief. I could not see what help it would be to those who hunted him. I opened my evening paper, certain that this trumpery, as Mycroft would call it, seemed unlikely to warrant the duel to the death that Sherlock Holmes had set his heart on. I was wrong—but I could not know it then.

The sunshine on the Lord Mayor’s day of glory showed that first mellowing that comes with the turn of summer into autumn. Holmes and I were at the Mansion House by early morning. Lord Holder and Inspector Jago left us much to ourselves, his lordship believing we knew best and the inspector regarding our presence as unnecessary. We both wore formal court dress of black frock coat and white tie, striped trousers, and silk top-hat.