to me, with a sense of excitement that I was careful to conceal, that he must have colluded in this attempted escape. He certainly owed Holmes a debt of gratitude and why else would he have pretended not to know me? Now I understood how Holmes had got into the coffin in the first place. Trevelyan had placed his orderly in charge quite deliberately. Why else would he have trusted a man who was evidently unfit for any such responsibility? The coffin would have been placed nearby. Everything would have been planned in advance. The pity of it was that the two labourers had been so slow in their work. They should have been halfway to Muswell Hill, by now. Trevelyan’s assistance had been to no avail.
One of the labourers had produced a crowbar. I watched as it was placed under the lid. He pressed down and the lid of the coffin was torn free, the wood splintering. The two of them stepped forward and lifted it off. As one, Harriman, Hawkins, Trevelyan and I moved closer.
‘That’s him,’ Rivers grunted. ‘That’s Jonathan Wood.’
It was true. The corpse that lay staring up was a grey-faced, worn-out figure who was definitely not Sherlock Holmes and who was definitely dead. Trevelyan was the first to recover his composure. ‘Of course it’s Wood,’ he exclaimed. ‘I told you. He died in the night — a coronary infection.’
He nodded at the undertakers. ‘You may close the coffin and take him up.’
‘But where is Sherlock Holmes?’ Hawkins cried.
‘He cannot have left the prison!’ Harriman replied. ‘Somehow he tricked us, but he must still be inside, waiting his opportunity. We must raise the alarm and search the place from top to bottom.’
‘But that will take all night!’
Harriman’s face was as colourless as his hair. He span on his heel, almost kicking out in his vexation. ‘I don’t care if it takes all week! The man must be found.’
He wasn’t. Two days later, I was alone in Holmes’s lodgings, reading a report of the events that I had myself witnessed.
Police are still unable to explain the mysterious disappearance of the well-known consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, who was being held at Holloway Prison in connection with the murder of a young woman in Coppergate Square. Inspector J. Harriman who is in charge of the inquiry has accused the prison authorities of a dereliction of duty, a charge that has been strenuously denied. The fact remains that Mr Holmes somehow managed to spirit himself out of a locked cell and through a dozen locked doors in a manner that would appear to deny the laws of nature and the police are offering a reward of ?50 to anyone who can supply information leading to his discovery and apprehension.
Mrs Hudson had responded to this strange state of affairs with a remarkable degree of indifference. She had, of course, read the newspaper accounts and had spoken but one brief sentence when she had served my breakfast. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense, Dr Watson.’ She seemed personally offended and it is somehow comforting to me, all these years later, to reflect that she had complete faith in her most famous lodger, but then she perhaps knew him better than anyone and had put up with all manner of peculiarities during the lengthy period that he was with her, including desperate and often undesirable visitors, the violin playing late into the night, the occasional seizures induced by liquid cocaine, the long bouts of melancholy, the bullets fired into the wallpaper and even the pipe smoke. True, Holmes paid her handsomely, but she hardly ever complained and remained loyal to the end. Although she flits in and out of my pages, I actually knew very little about her, not even how she came to occupy the property at 221 Baker Street (I believe she inherited it from her husband, although what became of him I cannot say). After Holmes left, she lived alone. I wish I had conversed with her more and taken her for granted a little less.
At any event, my sojourn was interrupted by the arrival of that lady, and with her, another visitor. I had indeed heard the doorbell ring and a footfall on the stair but preoccupied as I was, these sounds had barely registered so I was unprepared for the arrival of the Reverend Charles Fitzsimmons, the principal of Chorley Grange School, and greeted him, I am afraid, with a look of blank puzzlement, as if we had never met before.
The fact that he was wrapped in a thick black coat with a hat and scarf across his chin did help to make a stranger of him. His clothes made him look even more rotund than he had before.
‘You will forgive me interrupting you, Dr Watson,’ he said, divesting himself of these outer garments and revealing the clerical collar which would have at once jogged my memory. ‘I was unsure whether to come but felt I must… I must! But first I must ask you, sir. This extraordinary business with Mr Sherlock Holmes, is it true?’
‘It is true that Holmes is suspected of a crime of which he is completely innocent,’ I replied.
‘But I read now that he has escaped, that he has managed to spring himself from the confinement of the law.’
‘Yes, Mr Fitzsimmons. He has also managed to evade his accusers in a manner which is a source of mystery, even to me.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘And the child, Ross, do you have any news of him?’
‘In what sense?’
‘Have you found him yet?’
Evidently, Fitzsimmons had somehow missed the reports of the boy’s terrible death — although, it occurred to me, sensational though they had been, Ross had not actually been named. It therefore fell to me to tell him the truth. ‘I am afraid we were too late. We did find Ross, but he was dead.’
‘Dead? How did it happen?’
‘Somebody had beaten him very badly. He was left to die by the river, close to Southwark Bridge.’
The headmaster’s eyes fluttered and he fell heavily into a chair. ‘Dear God in Heaven!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who would do such a thing to a child? What wickedness is there in this world? Then my visit to you is redundant, Dr Watson. I thought I might be able to help you find him. I had come upon a clue — or rather, my dear wife, Joanna, had discovered it. I brought it to you in the hope that you might know the whereabouts of Mr Holmes and pass it to him and that even given his own exigencies, he might…’ His voice trailed off. ‘But it is too late. The child should never have left Chorley Grange. I knew no good would come of it.’
‘What is this clue?’ I asked.
‘I have it with me. It was, as I say, my wife who found it in the dormitory. She was turning the mattresses — we do it once a month to air and to fumigate them. Some of the boys have lice… we wage a constant war against them. At any event, the bed occupied by Ross is now taken by another child, but there was a copybook concealed there.’ Fitzsimmons took out a thin book with a rough cover, faded and crumpled. There was a name written in a childish hand, in pencil on the front.
‘Ross could not read or write when he came to us, but we had endeavoured to teach him the rudiments. Each child in the school is given a copybook and a pencil. You will see inside his that he has forsaken his exercises. It is all very messy. He seems to have passed much of his time scribbling. But on examining it, we discovered this and it seemed to us to have significance.’
He had opened the book in the middle to show a sheet of paper, neatly folded and slipped inside as if the intention had been deliberately to conceal it. Taking it out, he unfolded it and spread it on the table for me to see. It was an advertisement, a cheap flyer for an attraction of the sort that I knew had once sprung up around such areas as Islington and Cheapside but which had since become rarer. The text was decorated by images of a snake, a monkey and an armadillo. It read:
‘I would, of course, discourage my boys from ever entering such a place,’ the Reverend Fitzsimmons said. ‘Freak shows, music halls, one penny gaffs… it astonishes me that a great city such as London will tolerate such entertainments, where everything that is vulgar and unnatural is celebrated. The lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah spring to mind. I say this to you, Dr Watson, as it may be that Ross concealed this advertisement for no other reason than that he knew it was against the very spirit of Chorley Grange. It may have been an act of defiance. He was, as my wife told you, a very wilful boy—’
