The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (44 page)

I need not have worried. He swung round almost at once and there was another crack. A bullet chipped the woodwork of the carriage door about two feet from my head. Then I saw the reason for the previous shot. From the far end of the bridge, where the track ran into Waterloo station, a dozen men were working their way slowly in our direction, keeping their heads down and ready to throw themselves flat. All but two of them wore blue serge tunics and trousers with the tall helmet and silver star marking them out as officers of the Metropolitan Police. In the lead, a man in grey sidled along the parapet. In front of him, wearing a short summer-weight overcoat and a bowler hat, walked the cautious figure of Inspector Lestrade.

It was impossible to see whether any of these men carried guns. I could see none. Whether they did or not, Colonel Moriarty would hardly have bullets enough to kill them all. In any case, he would surely be overpowered while he tried to reload. He now looked at them and then threw the black leather bag after its contents. Had the Queen of the Night gone the same way? If it had, there was an end of the evidence that might prove a charge of theft!

His way back was as securely blocked as his way forward so long as Holmes had my revolver in his hand. If I was correct, Colonel Moriarty had one live round in his gun and Holmes had all six. On both sides, the colonel’s captors moved forward, hemming him in. What followed was the work of a few seconds. He jumped onto the wide iron ledge of the balustrade and looked downstream toward Waterloo Bridge. His gun was in his hand. No one could have said what use he might make of the final bullet.

Lestrade and the men behind him stopped. Much as they wanted their man, they wanted the contents of his pockets still more, if these should include the splendid Brazilian diamond and its clusters of sapphires. Sherlock Holmes paced slowly forward, the gravel of the track shifting and grating under his steps, his aquiline features calm in the presence of a glare of pure hatred from the last Moriarty. He held the borrowed revolver at his side, pointing at the ground from his right hand as he walked. Deliberately and slowly he strode into the range of the colonel, the last of those men who had planned his ritual murder in the execution shed of Newgate Gaol.

The tall figure of the colonel was motionless. He was surely judging the moment when his antagonist would be close enough for the remaining bullet to find its mark. No one else moved. Holmes had wished for a final settling of accounts and it seemed that his wish had been granted. If Moriarty should miss him, the bullet that was fired back would settle the matter. Standing against the sky, the colonel presented the clearest possible target.

Holmes was about thirty feet away when his antagonist raised his arm. My friend took one more step, the revolver still pointing at the ground, and then our hearts jumped with a sense of sickness as Moriarty fired. Holmes swayed, not as if he had been hit but as though he had heard the bullet coming and had moved out of its way. Then he took another step and moved slowly on. I do not know what the phrase ‘mad with terror’ customarily implies, but to me it described the expression of Colonel Moriarty’s features to the last detail.

The only sound now in the warm afternoon was the distant hiss of escaping steam from the boiler of the little engine and the measured sound of gravel at every stride that Sherlock Holmes took. At about ten feet he raised the gun. Moriarty spat out some curse or expletive that I could not distinguish at the distance separating us. At the same moment, the revolver in Holmes’s hand jerked briefly. Colonel Moriarty went forward at full length, toppling and then cartwheeling through the air into the current below.

Even so, I could not tell whether the last of Sherlock Holmes’s would-be executioners fell with a bullet in his brain or threw himself to his death in defiance of those who had cornered him at last, casting the Queen of the Night into the oblivion of the deep river mud. His body was never found—or rather, if it was found, it was never identified. Among the poor wretches found drowned in the following weeks, two or three had been terribly mutilated by the steel paddles of passing river steamers or other accidents. Some had been carried far down the broad estuary and been given to the sea. I choose to believe that the colonel was one of them.

Even after that, fate had been crueller to him than any contrivance of our own. While Holmes faced this final duel, two of Jago’s men had arrested Colonel Lemonnier in his cabman’s cape as he left Charing Cross. Lemonnier protested his innocence of any crime, beyond having changed places at the Mansion House lunch at the request of an acquaintance he had known for only a few days. He had never heard of the Queen of the Night, and offered no resistance. In his pocket, however, lay two small packages containing the two portions of the famous jewel, the unclipped diamond and the sapphire clusters. By what means he had robbed Colonel Moriarty of these in the final exchange of the traveling bag was never revealed. Lemonnier insisted that the colonel had given him the packages as a parting gift and that he understood them to be mere paste, intended as a
pourboire
for an obliging street girl in Piccadilly.

On the evening of that memorable day, Inspector Lestrade was our guest in the Baker Street sitting-room.

‘You see, Mr. Holmes?’ he said genially. ‘We’re always there when we’re needed. Why, now, if I hadn’t used a bit of policeman’s plain common sense, we wouldn’t have had that bridge cordoned off as it was. And in that case, gentlemen, I needn’t remind you that the late Colonel Moriarty would have reached Waterloo Station on the far bank of the river. Once he was there, he might have been on a train to anywhere in a few minutes. By now—who knows?—he might have been sitting in Paris, admiring his trinket—as Lemonnier insists it is.’

Holmes muttered something but kept his peace. Lestrade leant forward in his chair.

‘And you’ll both recall that case, gentlemen, when you were both walking through the park a little while back and happened to see a man get his head cut off by a galloping soldier. Well, do you know what?’

‘I have not the least idea what, Lestrade, but you are no doubt about to enlighten us. You were not fortunate enough to identify the assassin, I suppose?’

The inspector sipped his whisky and water, then leant forward again.

‘No, Mr. Holmes. I was fortunate enough to identify the owner of the head, despite his efforts to remain anonymous by having nothing in his pockets.’

‘My felicitations,’ Holmes closed his eyes. ‘Pray continue.’

‘Alker was his name. A former petty officer of the Royal Navy provos, identified almost by chance during a visit to the pathological laboratory where the head rests in a jar of formaldehyde. On several melancholy but necessary occasions of overseas service, the records tell us, Alker acted as a military and even a civil hangman. What do you say to that, now?’

‘At least, Lestrade, you may be certain that he was not murdered in revenge by someone he had hanged. Beyond that, I do not think I can assist you.’

Lestrade puffed himself up a little at our lack of appreciation.

‘I may say that I have sent a few criminals to the gallows,’ he said portentously, ‘but I can’t say I’ve ever met a hangman at work.’

‘No,’ said Holmes dryly. ‘No more have I. With or without his head.’

p. 587
E. Harris Ruddock,
The Homoeopathic Vade Mecum
, Roericke & Tafel, 1889, discusses the treatment of Egyptian ophthalmia at page 373.

p. 621
‘The Resolution of Enclitic δε’ was a problem in classical Greek grammar to which the subject of Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Grammarian’s Funeral,’ like Mycroft Holmes, had devoted his energies.

p. 628
‘The Five Orange Pips’ appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for November 1893.

p. 632
Examples of those who rivaled Sherlock Holmes in building fugues upon popular themes and nursery rhymes include Alec Templeton in the Benny Goodman number ‘Mr. Bach Goes to Town’ and Sidney M. Lawton, Music Master of Queen’s College, Taunton, England, in his ingenious fugue upon ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’

p. 633
‘The Red-Headed League’ appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for August 1891.

p. 641
The phenomenon of the body remaining upright after decapitation was witnessed by hundreds of onlookers when Captain Nolan remained upright in the saddle for some time after his head was taken off by a Russian shell, before the ill-fated ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava on 25 October 1854.

p. 645
‘
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto
.’ Sherlock Holmes was, as always, correct when he ascribed this to the Roman playwright Terence in
Heauton Timorumenos
I, i, 25.

p. 647
Nelson’s attack on the ‘armed neutrality’ of Copenhagen, on 2 April 1801, was the occasion on which he put his telescope to his blind eye and refused his commanding officer’s signal to withdraw, saying to his subordinate, ‘You know, Foley, I have only one eye—I have a right to be blind sometimes. … I really do not see the signal.’

p. 647
‘The Naval Treaty’ appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for October and November 1893.

p. 652
The case of Irene Adler was the first story in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ which originally appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for July 1891. ‘The Bruce-Partington Submarine Plans’ appeared in the same magazine for December 1908.

p. 688
‘Cold fowl and cigars, Pickled onions in jars’ was the midnight feast offered by a London tavern known as the Magpie and Stump. The poet recalled by Watson is by R. H. Barham, whose verses, ‘The Execution: A Sporting Anecdote,’ appeared in
The Ingoldsby Legends
(1840).

p. 703
By the Peace of Vienna in 1864, after the British and French failure to support Denmark against Prussia, Christian IX renounced his claim to Schleswig and Holstein, first occupied and then annexed by the Prussians.

p. 763
‘
Fiat justitia ruat coelum
’ was pronounced by William Murray, 1st Earl Mansfield (1705–93), Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, in overturning the sentence imposed on John Wilkes in 1768 for publishing an antigovernment newspaper. Four years later, in a momentous judgment, Mansfield freed a slave, James Somersett, who had set foot on English soil during his master’s visit to London. ‘Every man who comes to England is entitled to the protection of the English law, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered, and whatever may be the colour of his skin, whether it is black or whether it is white.’

p. 788
In his comment on murder by chloroform, Holmes is evidently thinking of Carl Liman’s 1876 edition of
Practishes Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin
by Johann Ludwig Casper (1796-1864), a pioneer in forensic medicine.

p. 791
John Nevil Maskelyne (1839–1917), born in Cheltenham, England. A stage conjurer at sixteen, he was lessee of St. George’s Hall, London, and exposed the stage magic of the Davenport Brothers’ so-called Cabinet and Dark Seance. He appeared at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 1873–1904. His techniques were employed to great effect in the art of camouflage during both world wars.

p. 795
Propter’s Nicodemus Pills were made famous by Edward Lear in his poem for children, ‘Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly.’

Like the Ancient Medes and Persians.

Always by his own exertions

He subsisted on those hills;—

Whiles,—by teaching children spelling,—

Or at times by merely yelling,—

Or at intervals by selling ‘Propter’s Nicodemus Pills.’

p. 824
‘The Final Problem’ appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for December 1893.

p. 824
Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81), politician and rake, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Postmaster General. As organizer of the Hellfire Club from 1755, he was reputed to have staged orgies with other ‘monks,’ including John Wilkes and the poet Charles Churchill, first among the pastoral ruins of Medmenham Abbey on the bank of the Thames and then nearby in caves on the estate of his fine Palladian mansion at West Wycombe.

p. 842
‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for January 1892.

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