Free The Execution of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas Page A

captivity. St. Sepulchre’s tolled again and then he heard a thud, easily audible in the alcove but not in the corridor beyond the thick walls and stout door of the cell. At that moment, he who had breathed so economically in the past hours stopped altogether and held his breath as he waited for the louder clatter of the chair. But there was no clatter. Crellin alone had fallen. After lying immobile for so long, Holmes moved with the speed of a cloud crossing the moon.
    Only the reflection of the night sky through the uncurtained window glass lit the cell. He took the deepest breath of air his lungs would hold and crossed the threshold. Through the swirling spirit odour of gas, he saw the dark shape of Crellin’s body. The man might still be alive or already dead. Had he fallen toward the table, the keys on his belt would be far out of reach. Then there was nothing but the hope that prisoner and jailer might die together in a blast that would shake Newgate Street. The odds were finely balanced. Yet on this occasion, Fortune and mathematics had favored the brave. Crellin’s body had toppled away from the table to the left, toward Holmes, head and shoulders within reach of the ankle chain and the extended arms.
    With aching lungs Holmes held his breath and drew the heavy burden of the body further toward him until he could reach the half-dozen keys on the ring at Crellin’s belt. The keys to the corridor and the yard outside would surely be there. Unless the game was to be lost, the key to the metal cuff round the prisoner’s ankle must be with them.
    With his throat compressed and veins swelling, logic and probability fighting the weight of fear, Holmes touched the keys in the darkness and knew that three of them were too big to fit the steel anklet. The image of a fox gnawing through its leg to escape the trap flashed like fire behind his eyes. He tried the first of the other three keys and felt it jam in the lock of the leg iron. While fighting against the beating in his skull and the pain at his breastbone, he slowly and judiciously eased it clear. The second was far too loose a fit. That left only one more.
    But in the darkness he had started at the wrong end of the row of keys and now, as he tried the last of all, the lock moved. For the first time since his arrival in that place, the steel fell away and his leg was free of the anklet. The first of the three larger keys failed in the lock of the door to the yard. The next turned the lock, and he took the handle in a strong but noiseless sweep. To his dismay, the unlocked door stuck fast and, in his bursting chest, he felt a chill of incomprehension. A bubble burst from his throat; he took in a mouthful of poisoned air, and he forced it out again by naked willpower. As his throat closed, choking, a part of his mind that seemed far removed from the agony told him that he had not yet drawn the door bolts free. Holmes snatched for them, drew them carefully and silently back, gently freed the door, and stumbled into the cold night air of the yard, muffling the convulsions of his throat in the pad made from the canvas pillow cover. Yet this was not his escape. It was a mere chance of escape, a chance that most men would have contemplated—and despaired.
HENRY WILLIAMS’S LEGACY
    How long he lay outside the yard door he did not know, nor whether the jailer who had fallen from his chair was alive or dead. When he opened his eyes, the door to the cell had swung shut under its own weight. Sherlock Holmes pulled himself up and tried the handle. The lock had not closed again. He covered his mouth and nostrils with the wet canvas of the pillow cover and went into the darkness. With the door open, the air began to clear. A first predawn lightness was in the sky, enough to make out the lineaments of furniture and other objects.
    The shape of Crellin was lying facedown by the chair in the place where Holmes had left him. It seemed evident in an oblong of reflected moonlight that