The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

  And Other New Aventures of the Great Detective

  Donald Thomas

  For my parents

  Justin Melville Gwyn Thomas 1900–92

  Doris Kathleen Thomas, née Serrell, 1906–55

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

  The Case of the Greek Key

  The Case of the Peasenhall Murder

  The Case of the Phantom Chambermaid

  The Queen of the Night

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  I am most grateful for information kindly provided on Johann Ludwig Casper and Carl Liman by Ms. Helen D’Artillac Brill of the University of Cardiff and on respirators of World War I by Mr Martin Boswell of the Imperial War Museum, London.

  The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

  PROLOGUE

  by John H. Watson, M.D.

  Before setting out on my story, I must say something of the late Charles Augustus Milverton of Appledore Towers, Hampstead. Those of my readers who have read the story of that title may recall a little of what follows. Though dead for three years, the ghost of this scoundrel threatened greater harm to Sherlock Holmes than Professor Moriarty himself had done.

  Charles Augustus Milverton! My friend called him the worst man in London, more repulsive than fifty murderers with whom we had dealings. A reptile, said Holmes, a slithery, gliding venomous creature with deadly eyes and an evil, flattened face. This king of blackmailers lived in luxury by bribing treacherous valets or the maidservants of men and women in a high position. The most virtuous soul need only be guilty of a trivial error of conduct, no more than a mere indiscretion. Once in Milverton’s hands, a single thoughtless letter or even a note of two lines had been enough to ruin a noble family.

  Once or twice his fame as a poisoner of reputations reached the columns of the sporting magazines. I recall Sherlock Holmes pointing out to me a couplet in Turf Life in London.

  A viper bit Milverton—what was his plight?

  The viper, not Milverton, died of the bite.

  Such was our enemy. As Holmes remarked, that round smiling face concealed a heart of marble. Milverton squeezed his victims little by little, by holding a threat over them and a false promise before them. One or two more payments and the poor wretches thought they would be safe. They never were. Only when no more was to be got, or in two cases when the victim retired to his dressing room carrying a revolver loaded with a single bullet, did this villain’s prisoners gain their release.

  Milverton’s last extortion was to be £7,000 from Lady Eva Brackwell, shortly before her marriage to the Earl of Dovercourt. This was the price asked for several imprudent letters written by the young woman a year before. These were addressed to a country squire, ending a fond childhood friendship which had briefly blossomed into romance. Unfortunately for her, it was an easy matter to cut off or otherwise alter the date on some of these notes. The ‘warm friendship’ was thus represented as continuing secretly long after her betrothal to Lord Dovercourt. A dishonest ser vant of the squire’s, amply rewarded, placed the papers in Milverton’s hands. Unless young Lady Eva paid the price, Milverton swore the Earl of Dovercourt would receive this correspondence a week before the wedding. He insisted to her ladyship that he always carried out his threats. To weaken would destroy his reputation and profession.

  To any decent mind, the conduct of such a villain is so monstrous that there is a temptation to think it cannot be true of any man. From the evidence of my own eyes and ears, I know it to be true. I was present at our Baker Street rooms in January 1899, when Milverton adjusted his cravat with a plump little hand and said to Holmes in a voice like soft but rancid butter, ‘You may be assured, my dear sir, that if the money is not paid promptly by the fourteenth, there will certainly be no marriage on the eighteenth.’

  How supple and skillful a blackmailer is! How knowing in his choice of victims! Many a bridegroom might forgive a past flirtation, and Holmes suggested as much to our visitor. But Milverton was accustomed to choose his prey with care and to infuse his own peculiar venom into the falsehood and rumour that attended the cancellation of an engagement in high society. A year earlier Captain Alexander Dorking had defied him over jewellers’ receipts and hotel bills relating to a long-dead liaison with a fast woman. Two days before the captain’s wedding to the Honourable Miss Clementina Miles, an announcement in the Morning Post informed the world that the marriage would not, after all, take place. The bride’s forgiveness of the groom was not enough to repair the damage caused by the incriminating documents. Milverton had also insinuated a tainted gossip into the clubs of Pall Mall so that it might reach the ears of the young lady’s family and society in general. This hinted at a loathsome disease, contracted by the captain ten years earlier in an act of undergraduate folly. In January 1899, Lady Eva well knew the sort of tales that would circulate if she called Milverton’s bluff. There could be no marriage to any man after that.

  Sherlock Holmes had reluctantly agreed to act as intermediary on the young woman’s behalf, offering the scoundrel her little fortune of £2,000. Milverton laughed in his face and would take nothing less than the £7,000 demanded. He suggested that her ladyship might easily raise an extra £5,000 by taking the family jewels inherited from her grandmother and exchanging them for imitations done in paste. Even had she done so, Holmes warned her that the reptile would return for more. So long as a penny remained in the victim’s purse, there was never an end to blackmail. This was one of few occasions when Holmes and I resolved to do wrong in order that right should prevail. There could be no compromise. A viper’s nest can be cleared in only one way.

  A week later we set out for Hampstead on a bluster y winter’s night, carrying what Holmes called his ‘up-to-date burgling kit with ever y modern improvement which the march of civilization demands.’ We judged that Milverton would be in bed by the time we made our way through the laurel bushes of the extensive garden. It took only a few minutes to find the weak point in the defences. Holmes’s diamond-tipped glass cutter silently removed a circle from a pane in the conser vator y door. By turning a key on the inside we passed into the drawing room, our identities concealed by black velvet masks, like a pair of Limehouse footpads. Ahead of us, the study was sufficiently illuminated by a well-banked fire for Holmes to work on the tall green safe without turning on the electric light.

  He would leave no trace, no scratches on the steel mirrors of the lock. With the skill and accuracy of a surgeon he used his instruments upon the somewhat antiquated Milner device. His strong yet delicate hands showed the quiet competence of a trained mechanic. After twenty minutes, the lock clicked. He drew the door of the safe half open to reveal a score of packets, each labeled and tied with pink tape, like a lawyer’s brief. At that moment a door slammed somewhere deeper in the house and we heard footsteps approaching us. Holmes closed the safe, though without locking it, and we drew back behind the long velvet curtains drawn across the windows. The door to the inner room opened and the snick of an electric switch filled the air with a harsh brilliance.

  He was visible through a crack in the curtains! Not a shadow of suspicion touched his features as Milverton in his claret-colored smoking jacket sat down in a red leather chair with a cigar in one hand, a document in the other, and began to read. The back of his broad grizzled head with its patch of baldness was towards us. My fingers tingled at the thought of how easily a blow to the skull from Holmes’s jemmy might rid the world of this genteel blackguard. But that would not serve our purpose. How long we might be trapped behind the velvet drapery was therefore impossible to guess. I noticed
, however, that our unwitting host looked at his watch with growing frequency and impatience. He was clearly expecting something—or someone. Presently there was a footfall on the veranda and we heard a gentle tapping. He got up, crossed the room, and went out to open the door.

  I heard little of the conversation at that distance beyond recognizing his quiet visitor as a woman. As they turned to come in, I heard him say, ‘Half an hour late!’ and ‘Made me lose a good night’s sleep!’ Then a little more clearly, ‘If the countess is a hard mistress, this must be your chance to get even with her. Five letters which compromise the Countess d’Albert? You want to sell and I want to buy. It only remains to agree on the price.’

  They were both in the study now, she a tall, slim, dark woman with a veil over her face and a mantle under her chin. Milverton was saying, ‘I should want to inspect the letters, of course.’ She had her back to us, but presently I could see her making the gestures of raising her veil and dropping the mantle from her chin. He turned to her and looked startled at first; then he seemed about to laugh. There was no hint of fear in his voice. ‘Great heavens, it is you!’

  ‘The woman whose life you have ruined!’ she said without the least tremor in her voice. ‘The wife whose husband broke his gallant heart and died by his own hand!’

  ‘You were so obstinate,’ he said softly, wheedling her almost as if offering a caress to console her. ‘I put the price well within your means. Yet you would not pay.’ Then his face changed, as if he had seen something concealed from us. ‘I warn you that I have only to raise my voice, call my servants, and have you arrested!’

  She turned a little and I caught the suggestion of a smile on her thin lips. There was a crack, no louder than the snapping of drywood. He stared at her, as if turned to stone, but did not fall. The sharp sound cracked again; her arm was stretched out and now the muzzle of a small silver revolver was not two inches from his shirt front. A third and fourth time she fired. He remained motionless for a moment longer, as if the shots might have been blanks. Then he fell forward, coughing and scrabbling among the papers on the table. ‘You’ve done me!’ he gasped and at once lay still.

  The woman dropped the gun and hurried into the darkness of the veranda. Holmes strode from behind the curtain and turned the key in the door that connected us with the rest of the house. There were now several voices and sounds of movement. Without a word he flung open the safe door. In two or three armfuls he carried the packets of papers across the room and dropped them onto the banked coals of the fire, which blazed up in sudden brightness as it consumed them. Finally he scooped up the silver revolver and said, ‘This may be useful, Watson. I rather think there are two shots left.’

  With that we raced for the brick wall dividing the garden from its surrounding heathland. Even as we sprinted across the lawn, we were illuminated, for shafts of white electric light shone suddenly from every uncurtained window of the house. Several pursuers were almost at our heels. They so nearly caught us that one of them snatched and held my ankle as I went over the top of the wall. He might have brought me back into their grasp but Holmes chose this moment to fire over their heads the two last shots from the little gun. They flung themselves down, and a run of two miles in the darkness across Hampstead Heath took us clear.

  The beautiful assassin, though still unknown to me, was picked out by Holmes a few days later from an Oxford Street photographer’s display of the beauties and celebrities of the previous London season. As for the silver revolver, I never saw it again. When I asked him what had become of it, he said, ‘I tossed it away, just after we cleared the wall. It was empty.’

  ‘It may be found!’ I protested.

  ‘I do hope so, my dear fellow. Do you not see? The lady who rid the world of that reptile stood in danger. In her confusion, she dropped the weapon on his carpet and that might have been her undoing. It was plainly the gun that had killed him and, if it were traced to her, might have put her life in peril from the law or from the criminal underworld. Now she is safe, and so she deser ves to be after suffering so much at his hands. They will hardly think she was one of the pair who scrambled over a six-foot wall and sprinted across the heath.’

  ‘The villains may trace the gun to you instead.’

  ‘I hope they may,’ he said, lighting his pipe from a long spill.

  ‘They will find me well prepared for them.’

  Such chivalry was characteristic of my friend, but, as you shall see, he was to pay dearly for it.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  Three years had passed since that windy January night on Hampstead Heath and I had long ago assured myself that we and the world had heard the last of Charles Augustus Milverton. How mistaken I was!

  There are few greater horrors in life than when a constant companion, a husband, wife, or child, sets out from home in the most usual way and never returns. It is surely worst of all when there is no message, no report of a death, injury, derangement, or desertion. I had not even seen Sherlock Holmes set out from our Baker Street rooms on a spring morning in 1902, though the sound of his feet on the stairs and his shout to Mrs. Hudson told me he was going.

  He did not return that evening. I was used to his mysterious absences for several days when he had an important investigation in hand. We had recently been occupied in ‘The Case of the Naked Bicyclists,’ which led to the bizarre circumstances of the Moat Farm Murder.* Yet there was nothing in this investigation to take Holmes away so unaccountably.

  All the same, I waited. After a few days longer, I began each morning by running my finger down the small ‘wants’ and ‘offers’ in the personal column of the Morning Post. This was our regular means of communication in such emergencies. The codes we used were known only to each other and might be seen in the press by millions of readers who would be none the wiser. Each of these little announcements was prefaced by the two letters NB for ‘nota bene.’ To the uninitiated, they appeared to be mere puffs for well-known products or services, unusual in a column of this kind but without being exceptional. NB marked them out.

  The signal that invariably opened our communication was ‘Rowlands Antimacassar Oil.’ Since one example saves many words, let me suppose that Holmes had gone suddenly to a secret address in London and wished me to join him. After the antimacassar oil advertisement, the next NB would name a city or county. In this case it might be ‘“London Pride” Pipe Tobacco. Threepence an ounce.’ So much for that day’s column, which gave me ‘London.’ Next day NB might add ‘Grand Atlantic Hotel, Weston-super-Mare. Preferential Rates Available.’ Knowing already that he was in London, I would merely count the letters of this second message and make a total of 60. From our folders of London maps I would draw sheet number 60 of the Ordnance Survey’s invaluable microcosm of the capital. As those who use it will know, sheet 60 covers the Paddington area from Hyde Park in the south to the Regents Park canal in the north and from Chepstow Place, Bayswater, in the west to Seymour Place in Marylebone. Further down the column might be a second NB announcement. ‘Bisto Makes Tasty Soups.’ That would be all. Counting the letters in each word I would find 5 +5 +5 +5.

  We had divided the vertical and horizontal edges on our maps into 100 equal lengths. Therefore 5 +5 and 5 +5 would stand for 55 by 55. On this basis I would take sheet 60 and measure 55 from the east, along the bottom of the map, and 55 from the north, down its left-hand side. Using a ruler, I would discover that the two lines from these points would intersect on the west side of Spring Street, almost within the shadow of the great railway terminus at Paddington station. The invaluable Ordnance Survey marks each dwelling house, though no more than a millimeter in size. For whatever reason, in this example Holmes would be found at 8, Spring Street, Paddington, to which I must make my way.

  It was rarely indeed that we had recourse to such secret and unbreakable codings, which covered not only locations but a variety of necessary information. By this time, I had been Holmes’s companion and colleague for more than a dozen years. You
may imagine that we had planned for most contingencies. Yet no one outside an insane asylum could have anticipated the horrors which beset us in the spring of this fateful year. The days passed and the Morning Post personal column bore no messages.

  A week went by, ten days, a fortnight. I inquired after those ‘found drowned,’ after victims of road accidents, the subjects of inquests from murder to suicide. I visited mortuaries in Lambeth, St. Pancras, and Chelsea. It was to no avail. I put aside my aversion to my friend’s addictions, and gained entry to dockside lofts and cellars frequented by the opium smokers of Limehouse and Shadwell. I half mentioned my fears to our friends at Scotland Yard, saying that Holmes had gone off I knew not where. Lestrade and Gregson pulled wry faces, chuckled, and suspected that Mr. Holmes was ‘up to his old tricks.’ After all, what could they do with such information as I had to offer them? I did not think he was up to any tricks.

  If you have read my account of his final encounter with Professor Moriarty in 1891, the dreadful struggle on the brink of the falls of Reichenbach, the plunge into the swirling waters, you may recall that this was preceded by weeks—perhaps months—of anticipation. Holmes would close the shutters on entering a room, as if against an assassin’s bullet, saying, ‘It is stupidity rather than courage to ignore the danger when it is close upon you.’ This was so unlike his usual self-assurance that I worried, all those years ago, if he was well. He looked even paler and thinner than usual.

  Then, on a single day in the course of that year, there had been three attempts on his life. In the morning, as he walked the short distance from our rooms to the corner of Bentinck Street and Welbeck Street, a two-horse van was driven straight at him, full-pelt. He sprang for the footpath and saved himself by a fraction of a second as the van disappeared. Within the hour, walking down Vere Street, he escaped death by an even smaller margin when a large brick from one of the house roofs shattered at his feet. The police were summoned but concluded that the two-horse van was driven by a madcap and that the wind had blown the brick from a pile of materials waiting to be used in repairing the upper storey of the house. That very evening there was a direct attempt against him in a dark street, when a ruffian with a bludgeon tried to knock his brains out. The fellow found to his cost that he was knocked cold instead by his intended victim and given in charge to the police.