Free The Execution of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas Page B

the guard must be dead. His head lolled stupidly to one side, the eyelids half open and half shut. Dixon Mann’s Forensic Toxicology was as familiar to Sherlock Holmes as the English dictionary was to others. From what he could see in faint light from the yard, Crellin’s cheeks were a healthy cherry pink. The lips were moist, no doubt from a froth that had dispersed when breathing ceased. The eyes, as he raised the lids, were wide and staring. He did not need to look for a pulse in order to know that carbon monoxide poisoning had killed Milverton’s bully stone dead long before the prisoner had made his escape into the yard.
    Though the open door had cleared the air immediately around it, the water-gas floated sluggishly in the rest of the long cell. It had saturated the air and the fabric. Holmes stepped out into the yard, drew a hard breath, and closed his smarting throat. Back in the cell, he dragged the body across to the bed. It took all his strength to lug Crellin onto the hard surface and cover him with the blanket. Then he went back through the door to the yard, closed it, and locked it from the outside. In the cell the gas still bubbled from the four unlit jets. Having warned McIver to let the others enter first, Holmes was prepared to let them take their chance. They had carried out their inspection every morning before it was fully light, lamps in hand. There was so little daylight in the deep well of the prison yard that the cell needed light long after sunrise. The blast from a gas explosion, touched off by the flame of their lamps, might make the body on the bed and those of the intruders conveniently unrecognisable. His enemies would not know whether he was one of the victims. Nor could he be certain at once which of them might have perished. As a final touch, he had locked the anklet round the leg of Crellin’s corpse. An inspection lamp shining through the spyhole of the door would show them a figure lying under a blanket with a crown of dark hair visible and the chain in place.
    Presently Sherlock Holmes stood in the cold mist of the morning by the locked outer door of the cell. If he got no further than this, then despite all his ingenuity he would be caught and killed before the sun lit the great cathedral cross half a mile away. In his white shirt, dark trousers, and socks, his shoes tied together by their laces round his neck, he prepared to test the truth of Henry Williams’s story.
    This was the moment of predawn greyness, half an hour before the watery gold in the east and the first long shadows of the early spring sky. In a far corner of the yard he could make out the low elongated shed with its beam above the gallows drop. On three sides, Newgate’s walls rose above him, high and sheer, smooth and deadly with a patch of a pale cloud far overhead, still touched by late moonlight. The fourth side of the yard contained the condemned cells with three rows of barred windows above them. The roof of this structure was a dozen feet lower than the tops of the walls on the other three sides, but Holmes turned his back on it. At roof level, a thin metal canopy extended a dozen feet along its entire length. It was designed to trap a climber beneath it, being too frail to take a man’s weight. The wall face, as Henry Williams had promised him, was the only way.
    He glanced up at the polish of a blank wall, laying his hand on it and touching an icy smoothness. It was useless to look for crevices that might bear the pressure of a foot or the grip of fingers. The weight of stone blocks pressed them so tightly together that even a gap in the mortar would scarcely have given lodging to a fingernail.
    Holmes was better versed in prison lore than any other man. His copy of the Newgate Chronicles commemorated a number of felons whose time had come and who tried in their last hours to climb these walls by studs or hessian on their shoes. One or two had started well, only to fall back into the yard. They were