Free The Execution of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas

the chill stone of the tiles, the tapered end of the metal wick holder directed to the waste-pipe hole at the end of the gutter that ran from the basin. Whatever air reached him from the yard outside would lose some of its impurities in his makeshift filter. So would the gas that began to fill the cell. He held fast to the hope that the floor of that alcove was almost the last area that the silent and swirling deadliness of the carbon monoxide would reach.
    If it were my purpose to make a fine hero of Sherlock Holmes, I might say that he lay on the cold tiles, breathing steadily but economically through the device he had fashioned, and that he prayed. Yet one had only to be in his company for five minutes to recognise in him the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen. He was not devoid of faith or human warmth, but at that moment, if ever, only cold reason and critical observation would save him.
    Once he had told me that logic alone would lead a man to the deep truths of religion. Then, again, he asked what is the meaning of this circle of misery, violence, and fear in which we live? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There, he said, is the great outstanding perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
    How long he lay there, the cold striking like a steel blade to his bones, I never knew. He heard St. Sepulchre’s deep notes twice more, at least, and the cathedral bell that followed. He saw a flickering reflection beyond the alcove, a lantern shining through the spy hole. But he had calculated the risks with his customary inhuman precision. Whoever looked through the spy hole would see a shape under the blankets and, knowing that Crellin was keeping guard, would also know that the shape must be that of the prisoner. Had there been no guard in the cell, they would have looked him over thoroughly at short intervals.
    In the iron chill of that night Holmes waited for the pale yellow lantern light to play again on the wall by the alcove. But he had seen it for the last time. He waited and listened. As he did so, if he is to be believed, Sherlock Holmes soothed his nerves by rehearsing in his mind a book that had shaped much of his character since he first read it at the age of ten. It was no fairy story of giants or goblins but the Prior Analytics of Aristotle. ‘A syllogism is a form of words in which, when certain assumptions are made, something other than what has been assumed necessarily follows from the fact that the assumptions are such. …’
    Cold reason told him that the plan must work, but reason may fly away or be flawed in the lonely dark hours of such a night. An undetected current of air might draw the gas astray from Crellin and toward the alcove. Holmes had calculated, as surely as any hangman, the direction in which his victim’s body would fall. When the muscles no longer held the frame, Crellin would slide from the chair. He could not fall to his right, because the table would stop him. If he fell to the left, his body lying on the floor with the keys at its belt would surely be within the prisoner’s reach. It was most likely that Crellin would do neither but would fall forward. In that case, if the fall was forward and slightly to the left, Sherlock Holmes might be saved. If it was somewhat to the right, he was certainly destroyed. In the gas-filled cell, he would have become his own executioner. It was not a matter of cold reason, after all, but the spin of a gambler’s wheel.
    Such precision of thought would have been preposterous in any other man who lay perspiring on the cold tiles with a fear that at any moment he might scent the faint rotting smell of water-gas seeping through the suffocating wad of charcoal. If Crellin had not fallen by then, Holmes was as good as dead. Yet Holmes was not any other man. He was surely the only one alive who might have escaped from such