The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  By contrast, there had been nothing of this sort in the present case. Just then my friend was still engrossed in the matter of the Moat Farm murder. Nothing in that afforded a reason for attempted assassination! Yet at the time of the earlier threats—and often since then—Holmes had talked of the great criminal conspiracies underlying crimes that might appear separate and unconnected. He called it ‘some deep, organizing power which forever stands in the way of law, and throws its shield over the wrongdoer.’ The men who wielded such power would surely give all they possessed to eliminate Sherlock Holmes. He claimed that he had felt their presence even when the mystery of a case had been solved—and in other cases in which he was not personally consulted. When Professor Moriarty had been unmasked, Holmes thought at first that he had beheaded the monster of criminal conspiracy. Instead, like the Hydra, it had lost one head only to grow many more.

  Moriarty was dead, there were no two ways about that. Yet I now began to speculate on the names of men who had particular cause to wish the destruction of Sherlock Holmes or, as was often the case, had paid with their lives but had left behind others who might be no less passionate for his downfall. In the recent past he had been the means of sending to prison for fifteen years Herr Hugo Oberstein, the international agent in the case of the secret Bruce Partington submarine plans. He had protected and exonerated those who rid the world of Giuseppe Giorgiano of the Red Circle, a fiend who had earned the nickname of Death in southern Italy. Oberstein was behind bars and Giorgiano was dead, but the one had a foreign government loyal to him and the other a gang of cutthroats sworn to vengeance. I confess that, at this stage, the name of Charles Augustus Milverton had not so much as crossed my mind.

  After three weeks there was one person whose assistance I had not sought and to whom I must confide my fears. Mycroft Holmes, of Pall Mall and the Diogenes Club, was now the government’s chief interdepartmental adviser. He must be told of his younger brother’s disappearance. ‘Not only is he an adviser to the British government,’ Sherlock Holmes had once said to me, ‘on occasion he is the British government.’ All the same, I did not see what Brother Mycroft could do now. It was a terrible thing to admit to myself, but after a few weeks instinct assured me that I should never more see him whom I have always known to be the best and wisest of men.

  If you have the patience to read what follows, you will find that I was wrong, though in what condition I saw him was another matter. By then Sherlock Holmes appeared as a man who has the shadow of the hangman’s rope upon him. You will also understand why this narrative could not have been made public at an earlier date. Even now, I have wondered from time to time whether it would not be best to burn all the notes and the evidence, to let the tale die with me. It was never one that we discussed often in the future. Yet I hear that voice again in my mind. ‘If you are an honest man, Watson, you will set this record against my successes.’ It may be that, in this case, posterity will judge that Sherlock Holmes succeeded to an extent he never equaled, either before or since.

  * For an account of this adventure see ‘The Case of the Naked Bicyclists’ in Donald Thomas, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice from the Crypt, Carroll & Graf, 2002.

  THE TRIBUNAL

  ‘William Sherlock Scott Holmes! You stand charged that you, with other persons not in custody, did willfully murder Charles Augustus Milverton, at Hampstead in the County of Middlesex, upon the sixth day of January in the year 1899. How say you? Are you guilty or not guilty of the charge wherewith you have been indicted?’

  Holmes had known from the first that they meant to murder him, come what might. The semblance of a trial continued during the evenings of three days, but these preliminaries to his execution had been devised solely to make his death more gratifying to them. When the ritual was over, the memory of the proceedings haunted his sleep every night in the time they allowed him before he was to be hanged. Ever y night, in that well-ordered mind, the nightmare took a precise form.

  ‘The dream,’ as he afterwards called it, began invariably with a jolt, like a great heartbeat of warning or fright, which brought him from the depths of unconsciousness to the mists of a drugged hyoscine sleep. Then there began the calling of his names and the indictment.

  In his dream, he struggled to repudiate the two self-appointed judges who sat beyond a sunburst of arc light. Except for the brief moments when they seated themselves or left their places, he had seen them only as an actor sees the rows of an audience through a haze of limelight. In the nightmare of light, his mouth moved but his throat remained silent and impotent to answer. During his waking ordeal, a week previously, he had said simply and clearly, ‘It is a matter of fact that I killed Charles Augustus Milverton. I did so to rid the world of a noxious villain. I did it alone. I would do it again and think my own life not too great a price to pay.’

  ‘Your gallantry in protecting your friend Dr. Watson is commend- able,’ the voice said sardonically. ‘It is wasted, however. It will not prevent him from standing where you stand now. You fled in his company and were seen to do so. The matter of a young woman on the premises is also under our investigation.’

  ‘You are in error. Charles Augustus Milverton died by my hand and I required no assistance.’

  ‘Guilty or not guilty!’ the voice rapped out. ‘Make your plea!’

  ‘A man does not plead to gangsters and impostors.’

  ‘Then you shall be entered mute of malice, as if pleading not guilty,’ said the voice behind the arc light, ‘and your trial shall proceed at once.’

  He could have sworn he recognised the voice of this presiding ‘judge.’ Yet it had belonged to that man whom he had seen most efficiently shot dead at Appledore Towers, Hampstead, by a young woman’s silver revolver three years earlier. Indeed, we had read the report of the inquest on Charles Augustus Milverton in the Times with its verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown.’

  Two dimly defined figures faced him from behind a broad oak table. Beyond them stood a man in a prison warder’s uniform of some kind, a person whom they addressed as Master-at-Arms. He was to guard and, if necessary, subdue the handcuffed prisoner. Holmes, seated on an upright wooden chair, had been weakened by the hypnotic that had kept him unconscious for many hours. He might have been a lone prisoner at the far end of the earth for all that he could tell.

  As the voice behind the light talked on, in its mockery of the judicial process, he strove to calculate how long he had been kept in a drug-induced coma. The opening of his ‘trial’ was the first day of full consciousness. Even then, his coldly rational intellect was at work behind the fuddled eyes. Holmes had no memory of how he came to be there, apart from recalling a taste in his mouth. Yet that taste was everything to him just now. It had been sweetish, partially disguising something salt and harsh. That was his first clue. He knew that the sweetness was merely sugar of milk, universally employed to make medicine palatable. The harshness that it veiled was surely hyoscine hydrobromide, an hypnotic that can wipe from the patient’s mind all memory of events heard, seen, or felt during the period of its operation.

  Sherlock Holmes the analytical chemist, with his extensive apparatus in our Baker Street rooms, had tested hyoscine once or twice with a fingertip taste. The memory of it was as securely catalogued in that invincible mind as if it had been entered in the files of St. Mary’s Hospital or the Radcliffe Laboratories. He knew better than any man how powerful a weapon the narcotic might be in the hands of the criminal world. Those who had drugged him evidently knew no more than that it would erase the memor y of subsequent events and had made the mistake of believing that the memory of tasting and taking it would be lost as well. Meanwhile, Holmes confronted them behind their shield of light. He must first discover who these enemies were, where he was, and how they had brought him there.

  In the course of his ‘trial,’ he understood that it was not their plan to kill him at once. Others who sought revenge upon him had been invited to watch him die. In the meantime the m
en who sat in judgment would break his spirit, so that the witnesses of his death might see him kneel for mercy and plead for his life as he was dragged to a beam from which the heavy rope of the gallows dangled. The story of Sherlock Holmes as a coward and a weakling in the end would do more to exhilarate and encourage this criminal brotherhood than any other coup.

  Every night they gave him a choice as he lay on the wooden bed in his condemned cell. He might either drink the contents of the medicine glass, which would render him unconscious until morning, or be held down while a hypodermic syringe sedated him. He drank from the glass, if only to determine the drug they used. One touch on the tongue was enough.

  His captors took no chances with him. A steel anklet and a light, five-foot steel chain locked him to a ring and a wall plate, whose four screws were deeply set into the stonework of the cell wall. This chain was just long enough for him to reach a small alcove with a basin and a drain behind the head of the wooden bed and too short for him to reach the guard who watched him while he was waking or sleeping. The anklet, almost tight to the skin, scraped flesh and bone whenever he moved.

  As for his surroundings, the door from the cell to the passageway and the door to the exercise yard outside were both locked and barred. In the corridor sat two more guards who would enter immediately to their colleague’s assistance at the first sound of a disturbance and who, meantime, scrutinized the length of the cell through a glass spy hole every ten or fifteen minutes. For good measure, there was a bell within the guard’s reach. If pressed, it would bring immediate assistance from the men who sat outside.

  It seemed useless for a man to fight against the effects of a nightly potion of hyoscine. Holmes knew this well enough. Yet after the first dose he knew something more. A sweet vegetable taste on his tongue suggested that hyoscine had been reduced and mingled with another drug. In order that it should have a more powerful effect, they had fortified it with an opiate. It was precisely in making doubly sure he was in their power that they gave Sherlock Holmes his first hope of defeating them.

  I believe I was the only man on earth who knew of my friend’s pernicious addiction to narcotics at times of idleness, a secret compulsion that is now common knowledge to those who have read of him. So long as he was alive this was never revealed to another living soul. Much has since been made of his use of cocaine and the hypodermic syringe, somewhat less of his use of opium. It was opium which took him to those dens of Wapping or Shadwell, of which I have already written elsewhere. Medical men will know, if others do not, that the use of opiates habituates a man to them. It is notorious that the greater the use, the less potent the effects. It would have been absurd to suppose that, even then, he could have fought off the effects of such a dose as they administered each night. Yet even before his ‘trial’ ended, by an effort of subconscious will and as the hours of the night wore on, he was able to rouse himself to the level of ‘twilight sleep,’ the effect of hyoscine alone.

  My friend confessed to me that the labour of this partial awakening was atrocious. Each time that he attempted to rise from the drugged depths of consciousness, he went through a period of delusion. It seemed that he was manacled to a monstrous engine of some kind, whose wheels or piston rods he was forced to turn with more pain and effort than he had ever known. At last he overcame the resistance of the mechanism and gained a momentum through which he floated free of his labour. Then, with a thump of the heart, his dream would begin again.

  As in the repeated showing of a film or the constant rehearsal of a play, his accusers took their seats in his dream. A curiosity of his twilight sleep was that Holmes began to see details hidden from him in conscious reality. It seemed that the effects of the narcotics forced upon him had dulled part of his waking brain during his trial. Only in this hyoscine sleep did he identify his ‘judges’ from the shadows beyond the arclight brilliance. As these accusers took their seats on the previous evening, Holmes now recalled that he had made out a smooth-shaven moon face, the features veiled from further identification by the brilliance of light. In the world of a waking dream, his subconscious mind endowed this blank moon with a fixed smile that conveyed malign cruelty. Imagination added hard gray eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses; memor y recalled spite in a voice that was smooth and suave. Among the wraiths of semi-consciousness he heard the man address him. Holmes could not tell at first whether the words were an invention of his own fancy or whether he had heard them in the drugged torpor of his ordeal.

  ‘You think us impostors, Mr. Holmes. Yet no men alive have a better right to demand the forfeit of your life. Charles Augustus Milverton, whom you murdered, was my elder brother. I am Henry Caius Milverton, and you might have verified my existence had you chosen to do so. Do not deny your crime, I beg you. The silver revolver, caliber .22, was found. It was child’s play to compare the fingerprints upon it with those upon several objects obligingly but unwittingly handled by you.’

  Holmes strove after the reality of the voice. Was he merely deducing the identity of Henry Caius Milverton from a dream? He knew instinctively that the words were real, spoken to him and blotted out by the next onset of hyoscine. In his mind he turned a little from the glare of light, trying obliquely to see beyond it. The voice continued, introducing a second judge.

  ‘My colleague Captain James Calhoun, denounced by you as the head of a murder gang in Georgia, was not lost at sea, as you sup- posed. Because the sternpost of his ship’s boat was found floating in mid-ocean after a severe gale, you thought him drowned. Had you been as clever as you would have the world believe, you would have seen at once that the debris was deliberately set adrift where it would be found. The Lone Star, for whom your minions waited at Savannah, entered Bahia three weeks later, unremarked, as the Alcantara. A lick of paint, Mr. Holmes, was sufficient to defeat you.’

  ‘You have the conceit of clever men, Holmes’—the well-fed drawl was Calhoun—‘but you were watched as soon as you accepted the case against me, even when you were reading ships’ registers and insurance files at Lloyd’s of London.’

  Henry Milverton chuckled at t he colonel’s pleasantry and resumed.

  ‘Somewhere beyond these walls,’ the voice continued, ‘is Colonel James Moriarty, who is detained for the time being over matters relating to a family heirloom. Unusually, he bears the same first name as his brother, the professor whom you sent to his death at the falls of Reichenbach eleven years ago. It is a long time, is it not? And yet no doubt, Mr. Holmes, you are familiar with the old Italian proverb. Revenge is a dish which persons of taste prefer to eat cold. Before the melancholy conclusion of your history, Colonel Moriarty will demand certain satisfactions for his brother’s death—satisfactions which you will be in no position to deny him.’

  The voice uttered a rich chuckle, as if in appreciation of its own consummate wit, and then proceeded.

  ‘Consider the matter of the Greek interpreter. On the basis of a newspaper cutting, you believed Harold Latimer and Wilson Kemp, whom you sought for murder, had stabbed one another to death in a railway carriage near Budapest. You should not, Mr. Holmes, believe all you read in the papers. These gentlemen and others will be invited to watch you dance your last half hour in the noose.’

  ‘Mr. Latimer is a knave,’ said Holmes mildly, ‘one who tortured and murdered the brother of the girl he had promised to marry, in order to extract from him the family fortune.’

  ‘So you say, Mr. Holmes.’

  Sherlock Holmes endured this banter in the world of a dream, but his mind was elsewhere. Scrutinizing the architecture of his ‘courtroom,’ drawing out the half-remembered details with an effort that approached physical pain. Despite the central glare of light, he had seen that it was not a room but a vaulted space, the meeting of four massively built and stone-flagged passageways. Each was faced by a gothic arch. Nothing in the shadowy perspectives told him whether he was in England or in Europe, in a remote fastness or at the centre of a great city. Piece by piece, he reassembled the image of
it. He woke next morning with the central enigma unraveled in his mind. The key to it had been a name, Henry Caius Milverton. He repeated that name over to himself silently, as if fearing that another sleep would wipe it from his mind.

  During several days, whenever the ‘court’ was not in session, he was to remain in the cell, his last refuge until they led him out to the gallows. It was a bare whitewashed room with a slightly arched brick roof supported on iron girders and tunnel-like in shape. At one end, behind the head of his bed, was the small, open alcove with its basin, a gutter, and running water. He was watched day and night by one or other of Milverton’s ‘warders.’

  His furniture consisted of the solid wooden bedstead about nine inches in height from the floor, with a thin mattress and a single blanket. There was a table and a wooden upright chair by the bed and another table and chair at the farther end of the cell for the use of the warder. The table and chair by the bed were removed at night, as if for fear he might make some use of them to escape. The cell was lit on its long outer wall by two iron-grated windows with small panes of opaque fluted glass. Its floor was laid with red polished tiles. His food was already cut up and brought to him on a white tin plate, without cutler y. No doubt they feared he would cheat them by using a knife to escape or to make away with himself before the appointed date.