The Execution of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas

supported on the trap and hanged on time.
    The old iron tank was high above him on a bracket in the angle of two walls. A rusty stain of water down the stonework below showed where it had overflowed from time to time. Above the metal cover of the tank and a little to one side of it, the wooden axle set with sharpened wire ran round the three walls that enclosed the cell block. It was this device which would throw the climber downwards, if his fingers lost their grip on the steel wire.
    When they brought him back from his tribunal, Holmes had made a passing and surreptitious study of this device. The prison authorities had not supposed that any prisoner could gain such a height or that, if he did, he would keep a grip on such a vicious deterrent as the axle. At the best, he might hope to dangle there if he chose, at a dizzy height above the paving of the yard unable to climb up or down. Milverton’s men had not prevented my friend from studying such defences. Nothing would have pleased them more than to watch him calculating the hopelessness of an escape and breaking down from weariness, Sherlock Holmes pleading for his life at the end.
    If he sometimes showed little mercy to others, it was certain that he now showed none to himself. He would not fear to go where the humble chimney-sweep had gone before. Crossing to the angle of the wall in which the now disused iron tank had been installed, high overhead, he touched the surface of the stone again. It was beyond reason that they could have raised an object of such weight and bulk as a metal tank to so great a height, and fixed it there, without using scaffolding and thereby defacing the masonry in that angle. There were certainly no convenient crevices for the hands or feet, but Henry Williams had described to him how the broken face of the stone might prevent a hand or foot from slipping if the pressure of the climber’s body could hold him in place. Like a sweep’s boy or an acrobat, Sherlock Holmes now stood barefoot in the cold morning and prepared himself for an assault on the towering wall. Williams had never mastered the art of the chimney-sweep or the prison fugitive more surely than Holmes, his last apprentice.
    It was, the old man had told him, a matter of lodging in the corner and working your hands behind you ‘like a crab,’ braced by the feet where the two walls came narrowly together. The dying sweep boasted of having worked to the top inside a great factory chimney.
    ‘And keep yer boots and stockings orf,’ he added. ‘That’s what does for most that tries it.’ Immediately after this conversation, my friend had been intrigued enough to try the method and found that with practise, it could be made to work. Without that practise, it is doubtful that even Holmes could have accomplished such a climb. In the angle behind him, however, he could feel that the stonework was ‘rusticated,’ as builders call it, that is to say broken and ridged from the devices of the water engineers. With his back to the icy wall, he now prepared to put the old man’s wisdom to its final test.
    As yet there were no sounds from the gaunt prison building. A guard who shone a light through the spy-hole of the cell door would still see a dark-haired figure asleep under the blanket and would have no reason to enter. Crellin’s chair was to one side of the spies’ field of vision. They would assume that he was still sitting there. Where else should he be?
    Putting the danger of pursuit from his mind, Sherlock Holmes took up his position. It required both hands against the surface behind him and one foot across the narrow meeting of the walls to brace himself. Yet it was a trick that a thousand sweeps’ boys learnt before their childhood was over. He drew up the other foot and used it as a lever across the angle. The soles of his feet felt the slight contours of the stone and for a moment he clung motionless, clear of the ground.
    The art was to move the hands, as the old man