The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (41 page)

Four hundred of the noblest were to sit with King Edward, Queen Alexandra, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen of the City of London in the grandeur of the Egyptian Hall. Lesser chamberlains, heralds, and those who could not be accommodated in such splendour were to take lunch either in the Venetian Parlour or Wilkes’s Parlour. Lower still were those officers and officials who would be accommodated with little more than a buffet.

‘You would do me the greatest service,’ said Holmes as we made our itinerary of the upper floor, ‘if you were to take up your position in Lord Holder’s room. From there, you will have a direct view across the courtyard into the windows of the garde-robe and a room to right and left. That is to say, the anteroom on the left, the garde-robe, and the post-room on its right, as we saw them on our tour of inspection. On Lord Holder’s desk you will find a pair of field-glasses with Zeiss precision lenses. Train these on the opposite windows. Leave nothing unobserved.’

As an afterthought, he added, ‘No matter what you see, remain there until the appointed time. You may observe what looks like a crime in progress, but it may be nothing of consequence.’

‘It would help a good deal if I knew what I am supposed to see.’

‘I anticipate there will be a crush in the anteroom when the royal procession from Buckingham Palace breaks up in the courtyard and the minor nobility enter to disrobe for lunch. That will dwindle, everyone will leave to go down to the Egyptian Hall, and the doors will be locked and secured by the provost guard. The rooms will remain quiet for an hour or more during the royal lunch. The two armed sergeants and the captain of the Provost Marshal’s Corps will stand guard on the only door giving access, with two more sergeants in reserve. Jago and several of his men will be in the courtyard. A blue-bottle fly, I suggest, will not get in or out during that time.’

‘And you, Holmes?’

He shrugged. ‘I shall await events and keep my eye on Colonel Moriarty throughout lunch. He with his co-chamberlain will attend in the robing-room as grooms of the chamber to Lord Dorset. Then he will be seated in the Egyptian Parlour. Lord Holder has placed me there as well, with a convenient pillar between us. When the meal is over, you will make your way to the doors where the provost sentries stand. The keys are guarded by the Lord Mayor’s chamberlain. He will hand them to the guard commander, who will open the doors and stand back for the minor courtiers to enter. The two sergeants will unlock the garde-robe, enter, and hand out the robes to the attendants in a strict order.’

‘And you?’

‘I shall be there. You have your revolver with you and it is loaded?’

‘Of course. All the same, I cannot see that there is the least opportunity for Colonel Moriarty to lay hands on the Queen of the Night!’

‘That is precisely how he would wish it to seem. You understand your instructions.’

‘Such as they are.’

‘Capital! We may have ever y confidence that this will end well.’

I had not the least confidence of any such thing. I had no clear idea of what Colonel Moriarty looked like except from shadowy photographs of a tall black-coated man coming and going in a dingy courtyard. As one of the grooms of the chamber to the Earl of Dorset, he would be dressed in a scarlet tunic with a little gold piping, but almost every man in the building would be wearing one of those. He would have no robe of his own, being merely a servant of the earl.

I calculated that the distance across the courtyard was about eighty or ninety feet. My field-glasses were rather of the Barr & Stroud pattern with precision-ground lenses. They brought the opposite windows sharply into view and gave me a clear enough image beyond them for the canvas texture of the naked tailor’s dummies to be plainly visible. As yet there was nothing to observe. I remained in position until I heard the deep bell of St. Paul’s in the distance, striking noon. Presently the buzz of conversation from Inspector Jago’s men in the courtyard gave way to the first rumble of carriage wheels.

Briefly, I trained my glasses on the arrivals below: King Edward and Queen Alexandra in an open brougham, she graceful and he majestic; the Prince and Princess of Wales, he in royal blue as befitted the occasion; Lord Longstaffe behind him with the Queen of the Night—the cause of all the trouble!—at his throat. I brought it into focus. There was no mistaking this as the genuine article when the August sun flashed upon it. Surrounded by its cluster of twelve sapphires, the twelve planes of the great stone glittered and dazzled alternately. A sapphire may vary from pale blue to indigo, and generally the lighter cornflower blue fetches the highest prices. In this case, the effect of stones of the deepest blue was far more dramatic. As Lord Holder had remarked, what might be lost in price was made up for by the value of the clasp as a work of the jeweller’s art. Behind the stout figure of Lord Longstaffe, I made out princes and princesses, several crowned heads, the shah of Persia, ambassadors and diplomats. Though less grand than the coronation ceremony, it was in some ways more lavish.

Turning the field-glasses to the windows opposite, I saw the locked double doors of the anteroom swing open. The royal party and its distinguished guests were disrobed elsewhere. In the anteroom, as Jago called it, the lesser aristocracy—heralds and chamberlains—presented themselves to the dressers who drew off each robe and entrusted it to a uniformed provost sergeant at the doorway of the garde-robe. It was carried through and arranged on its allotted tailor’s dummy. There was an air of slow ceremony and none of that rush, disorder, or confusion that enables a thief to snatch a treasure and run.

After fifteen minutes at the most, the last of the lords and ladies-in-waiting had left and the three rooms opposite me were quiet, as Holmes had prophesied. The garde-robe itself had undergone a transformation. Its forty or so canvas dummies were now a glittering parade, robes of scarlet and gold, blue and gold, green and silver, adorned with clusters of brilliants. Black cocked hats, some gold-braided and some not, sat upon the round canvas polls of the heads, uniformly tilted forward to secure their balance. Yet these canvas figures reminded me not so much of court splendour as of carcasses strung up for dissection in an anatomy theatre.

For half an hour I scanned the three rooms through my glasses with little idea of what I might expect to see. Once I fancied that I caught a movement. It startled me almost as much as if a corpse had winked at me during an anatomy class. There was nothing more. Surely a thief would not choose to be trapped with two burly provost sergeants guarding the only door and police under the windows.

I settled down for a moment and then—there it was again! Just a fleeting sight of red moving among the rows of dummy torsos which obscured most of the view. One thing was certain: if anyone was in the garde-robe, he would be in full view the moment he came out into the antechamber. But how would he have a key to let himself out? Perhaps I was only seeing what I feared to see. Possibly a provost sergeant had been left to patrol the room. Holmes had told me the garde-robe would be quiet. He did say it would be empty or unoccupied. Who knows what last-minute instructions had been issued?

I had taken up my position so as to have a full view of the garde-robe, a three-quarter view of the anteroom to the left, and perhaps a quarter view of the post-room to the right, which contained only drawers for stationer y and was not involved in the present arrangements. In any case, that was also locked. I tried to locate the royal-blue cloak of Lord Longstaffe, the Prince of Wales’s herald, among the files of those mounted on the dummies. In the spaces between the first ranks I caught glimpses of dark blue, scarlet, emerald-green, and gold on the figures behind. Of the rear two ranks I could see little or nothing. Through one gap there was the left shoulder and lapel of a dark, blue cloak. It might have been one of a dozen, but beyond question the blue nap of the velvet was bare of any ornament. Either it was not Lord Longstaffe’s cloak, or else the Queen of the Night had been removed.

For what seemed like an age but was probably no more then thirty seconds, I was torn between unease and the fear of making a monumental fool of myself by getting into a panic over a cloak that never carried an insignia in the first place! Through the field-glasses, I studied as much of the gold braid on the epaulette as I could see. It was no great help, because all these robes and cloaks had gold-braided epaulettes of some pattern. Even if this was Lord Longstaffe’s cloak, perhaps the diamond and its sapphire cluster had been laid in a locked drawer for further security.

I could see three or four inches of the upright collar and a gold-embroidered frieze upon it. I looked again. Just within my range of vision and no more than an inch high, the gold embroidery formed a motif of three feathers—beneath, in letters so tiny that I could not be sure of them, I swear were the two words ‘
Ich dien
.’ You may believe that this is the ‘I serve’ motto of the King of Bohemia, slain by the Black Prince at Crecy in 1346, or the Welsh ‘
Eich dyn’
—‘Behold the man’—with which Edward I presented his son to the people at Carnarvon. In either case, it was the Prince of Wales’s motto and his emblem of three feathers on the tunic of its herald! And where the Queen of the Night should have sparkled and glittered, there was only bare blue velvet! My heart and entrails sank with panic.

Still dreading that I had somehow made an utter fool of myself, I bolted out of Lord Holder’s room and raced for the main doors of the garde-robe where the two sergeants and captain of the Provost Marshal’s Corps were on duty. In one of Holmes’s famous exhortations, there was not a moment to be lost. But what was I to do? The provos would not open the oaken double door at my mere request. Almost certainly they would not have been entrusted with the key to do so. To denounce Colonel Moriarty as a thief who was ransacking the rooms would expose us to him completely, if the figure I thought I had seen proved to be somebody else.

I had the sudden thought that I must flush him out—whoever he was—and as I came within sight of the provost guard I thought I knew how to do it. I now see that I had little time to consider the wisdom of my action. Yet one thing was certain. If Colonel Moriarty was in the garde-robe he could not be simultaneously eating lunch in the Venetian Parlour or any other venue. I confronted the young provost captain.

‘It is imperative that I should speak at once to Colonel Moriarty, chamber groom to the Earl of Dorset. He is at lunch, I believe, in the Venetian Parlour.’

If he was in the garde-robe, this would betray him. The young captain coloured a little.

‘If Colonel Moriarty is at luncheon, it is impossible for him to be called away.’

‘I am Dr. John Watson, surgeon-major of the Northumberland Fusiliers. It is imperative that I should speak to the colonel at once! The matter cannot wait!’

The truth was I had been regimental surgeon-major fifteen years ago in Afghanistan. I was so no longer. The white lie seemed a forlorn hope, but I had the most prodigious stroke of luck. As a medical man, I am used to reading from their facial expressions the thoughts of those who learn what my calling is. The young captain plainly sensed a medical emergency. He inquired no further.

Striding to the corner of the passageway, he barked out a name. A young trooper came to attention before him, received his command, and doubled away. As I followed the captain, I saw in a shadowy alcove to one side three Martini-Henry rifles stacked wigwam-style. The defenders of the realm and the monarch were taking no chances!

For a minute or two I paced the marble balcony above the broad staircase until I heard the sound of distant footsteps. My heart sank. It seemed plain that Colonel Moriarty had the unshakeable alibi of having been at lunch in the Venetian Parlour during every minute of the time that I had been telling myself stories about the Queen of the Night.

I drew back. He came up the first flight of the staircase, the rear view of his scarlet tunic and dark trousers marking him out as what he was. The plain cocked hat, left off in the Venetian Parlour, was now on his head again. I knew not what to expect as he came up the second flight to the level of the balcony, his head bowed. As he turned towards me, I strode forward, displaying far more confidence than I felt. He looked up and my heart almost stopped dead. I found myself staring into the face of Sherlock Holmes!

‘Congratulations, my dear fellow,’ he said sardonically. ‘Your inability to follow the simplest instructions is, happily, something I might have depended upon. You have very nearly ruined everything.’

‘Where is Colonel Moriarty and why are you wearing that uniform?’

‘This is not a uniform, merely an ordinary military tunic, borrowed for the occasion. Colonel Moriarty is, I trust, in the process of robbing the nation of the Queen of the Night. Indeed, I imagine that by now the gem must be on its way to its destination.’

‘On its way? The outer door is still locked and guarded by the provost sergeants. The door between the anteroom and the garde-robe is still locked, so for that matter is the last one between the garde-robe and the post-room. Anyone in there is still there—trapped.’

Then I saw the certain answer.

‘Is our man in his place at the luncheon-table?’

‘There is no doubt of it. Indeed, he has not been out of my sight since before the garde-robe was closed and locked.’

‘Then what the devil is going on?’

My friend merely chuckled.

‘Poor old Watson. I fear you would never make an international jewel thief—let alone catch one. I have not the least doubt that Colonel Moriarty has somehow had the run of the garde-robe and the rooms either side of it at some time in the recent past. Perhaps long before the coronation, when no one was paying attention to them. Indeed I have been counting on this, and I have kept his secret for him. As to the diamond and sapphires, I imagine they are on their way to Paris.’

How this was possible, or why Holmes made light of it, was beyond me.

‘Why are you in that tunic?’