On a morning in early December, three years before the Great War, Mrs Hedges brought us the unusual story of a yellow canary. By this time of the year, the branches of the great elms and beeches were bare. Beyond Clarence Gate, on my morning walk, the avenues of the Regent’s Park echoed to the scuffling of pedestrians striding through drifts of dried leaves, as if they were wading through the shallows of a holiday beach.
When the rain began that morning, at ten minutes before ten o’clock, I had just returned to our rooms, stopping only at my tobacconist for two ounces of Navy Cut. Sherlock Holmes had still been at the breakfast table in his dressing gown when I set off. Now he was rigged out in a tweed suit with a belted Norfolk jacket. As I entered the sitting-room, he drew aside a corner of the Paddington Gazette and looked at me from his arm-chair.
“You had not forgotten, Watson, that the mysterious Mrs Hedges is to call upon us at ten-thirty precisely?”
“No,” I said, a little irritably, “I had not forgotten.”
I sat down at the table in the window and began to rub the moist tobacco leaves, crumbling them into my leather pouch.
Holmes and I had reached that stage of our history when the clatter of omnibus engines in the street below had begun to eclipse the more homely beat of hooves and the grinding wheels of the hansom cabs.
“Good,” said Holmes in a tone that irritated me somewhat more, “I am glad you had not forgotten. The romance of crime has grown stale of late, Watson. Villainy is at a discount. Let us hope that Mrs Hedges can bring a challenge into our too-sedentary existence.”
I thought that was most unlikely. Mrs Hedges had been recommended casually by John Jervis, the new young curate of St Alban’s Church, Marylebone, a stone’s throw from Baker Street. Mr Jervis with his scrubbed nails and shining face had presumed, on a very slight acquaintance, to send a note recommending the lady to our attention and suggesting that an appointment at ten-thirty on the morning in question might be convenient. He described her as a worthy woman who was in some difficulty over a matter concerning a yellow canary. And that was all. It scarcely sounded likely to restore to our lives the drama of major crime. In that, not for the first time, I was to be mistaken.
It was a measure of our present idleness that Holmes had welcomed the young curate’s suggestion.
“Depend upon it, Watson, there is nothing so indicative of true villainy as the commonplace. The song of a yellow canary is quite capable of heralding the arrival of gangsters of the most atrocious kind.”
He spoke more truly than even he could possibly have known. For the moment, I sat and rubbed tobacco while the sky darkened. Then the rain swept along Baker Street in a winter storm for half an hour. As suddenly as they had darkened, the heavens cleared again. A little before ten-thirty, Holmes got up and stood at the window, his tall spare figure veiled from the outside world by net curtains. He was gazing at a wooden bench outside the florist’s shop.
“It appears to be a characteristic of our working classes, Watson, that their greatest fear is not of murder or highway robbery but that they may be late for an appointment at which such things are to be discussed. Hence, they are always early. Unless I am mistaken, our visitor is already in attendance. See there.” He reached for his ivory-rimmed opera-glasses, which were kept on a bookshelf conveniently close to the window, and unbuttoned their case. “A worthy woman of the less fortunate class, as Mr Jervis promised. Do you not observe?”
I studied the figure sitting on that public bench. If this were she, Mrs Hedges was the type who is about forty-five years old but has been made by toil and deprivation to look more like fifty-five. Her dress of polka-dot cotton, her white blouse, boots and dark-blue straw hat secured by a pin of artificial pearl, spoke of thrift, hard-work and economy. She also wore a dark outdoor coat which had seen better, not to say more fashionable, days.
“Mr Jervis told us little enough,” said Holmes quietly, “but by the aid of strong glasses and at comparatively short range one may deduce a little more. Mr Jervis may hail from Marylebone but I fancy that the slums of Whitechapel or Stepney are this lady’s parish.”
I laughed at him.
“How can you tell?”
“Observe the sky. A glance at its movements suggests that the clouds and rain are moving eastwards at about five miles an hour. Our visitor has escaped the rain. Her coat you will see is quite dry. The umbrella she carries is not even unrolled. The welt of her boots is a little damp from walking in Baker Street where rain has already fallen. Yet there is no drop of water on the uppers nor even a mark where a drop has dried. Therefore she did not arrive in Baker Street until after the rain stopped ten minutes ago. She evidently came by omnibus as a matter of economy, since we have heard no sound of a cab drawing up. Moreover, it cannot have been raining at the point where she boarded the bus for her journey, shall we say forty minutes ago? That would put her just clear of the oncoming rain from the west. Let us say she was some three and a half miles to the east or south-east of us. I believe that would place her at Whitechapel or possibly Stepney. Had she come from the west she would have been rained upon, probably twice.”
“And what if she came by the underground railway?”
“I think not. That journey would have been quicker, which means she would have caught the rain at one end of it or the other.”
We drew back from the window. At half-past ten to the minute, there was a knock at the sitting-room door. Our landlady Mrs Hudson announced Mrs Hedges. Sherlock Holmes was on his feet at once. In a couple of strides he was shaking our visitor’s hand and simultaneously gesturing her to a buttoned lady-chair which was now at one side of the fireplace.
“Mrs Hedges! How good of you to come all the way from Stepney to see us. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my friend and colleague, Dr John Watson, before whom you may speak as freely as to myself.”
For all his bonhomie, she was a nervous type.
“I hope, sir,” she said quietly, “it’s no inconvenience. It was Whitechapel, rather than Stepney, to tell the truth.”
Holmes glanced at me with a look of reproach, which said on behalf of Whitechapel, “Oh ye of little faith.” Then he spread out his hands, gallantly dismissing any suggestion that her arrival might be an imposition.
“Pray be assured, Mrs Hedges, that no service we can do you will be an inconvenience.”
“Not Whitechapel, precisely,” she continued awkwardly, “Houndsditch, more like. Perhaps I should tell you a little…”
Holmes gave her a nod of reassurance and another deprecating gesture. My heart sank, for I felt he might be in the mood for sport.
“Let me see if I can deduce a little, Mrs Hedges. That is, after all, the profession of a criminal investigator. You have come from Houndsditch and that is all we know, beyond the fact that you were evidently a seamstress until you retired from that occupation because, as is sadly so often the case with sewing, you suffered a loss in your near-sight. You are plainly left-handed and you have a little girl who has lately suffered an infectious disease. She is not at present attending school. The poor little mite is a nervous child and apt to be lonely.”
“You could not know so much, Mr Holmes, sir! Not even Mr Jervis knows about my little girl. Though, to tell the truth, it’s the canary that began it.”
Holmes paused, then laughed gently at the unease in her face.
“There is no black magic here, my dear Mrs Hedges. A certain quickness in the movements of your fingers, a fine mark imprinted on the left forefinger and thumb, a fuller development of the left-hand musculature would suggest something more than fireside stitching. You do not wear spectacles just now, so it seems evident that you do not require them all the time. Yet there are the marks at the bridge of your nose to indicate that you require glasses for close work. Were you still systematically engaged in it, the marks would be more definitive. Therefore you have retired from an occupation which, in anything but the best light, damages the near sight.”
He could be as charming sometimes as he could be misanthropic at others, usually more charming with a poor seamstress than with a peer of the realm or a captain of finance. With his guessing game, he had certainly charmed Mrs Hedges. Now that everything had been explained she relaxed-and even smiled. Holmes smiled back at her and continued with the same reassurance. The game had been played to good purpose.
“After all, Mrs Hedges, I deduced nothing about the yellow canary. As to your little girl, there are still two fair hairs adhering to the darker wool of your outdoor coat. You would hardly see them where they are. They are shorter than your own and of a lighter hue. They have adhered to the material a little above waist-height. That is where they would have attached themselves had they been brushed from the head of a child who is some twelve inches shorter than you. Or had she clung to you very determinedly just before you left her. That suggests you have been obliged through circumstances to leave her on her own.”
Mrs Hedges shook her head in admiration, pleased now but wondering. Holmes continued.
“The two strands of hair are on your outdoor coat. This indicates that you brushed her hair shortly before leaving home. By then it was much too late for her to go to school today. Yet the Education Act would require her attendance there, except in the case of a communicable or other disease. I could be more elaborate but I really think we must proceed to business.”
Again Mrs Hedges relaxed a little.
“Louisa,” she said at last, “Our Louisa is just gone eight years old. Whooping-cough was what she had. They won’t have her back until the doctor signs a certificate.”
Holmes touched his fingertips together and became the listener.
“And what is it that troubles you?”
Our visitor looked at him doubtfully.
“The foreigners, Mr Holmes. They moved in at the back four weeks ago.”
“At the back?”
“Yes, Mr Holmes. We live at Deakin’s Rents in Exchange Buildings, in what they call a cul-de-sac off Cutler Street that runs off Houndsditch. It’s no use pretending it’s a palace, one room up and down at the front and the same at the back. At the back we look straight out on the opposite backs of the fancy-goods makers and tailors in Houndsditch. Their windows ain’t ten feet from ours. In between us, each of our tenements has a yard with a privy and a bit of paved space about ten foot square, for a washing line.”
“Yes,” said Holmes quietly, as Mrs Hedges outlined the domestic arrangements of her poverty, “I understand. Please continue.”
“Well, sir,” she leant forward now, anxious that he should miss no word, “In consequence, the back upstairs window of each tenement overlooks the yard next to it as well as its own. When you see other people in their yard, it’s about the only time you do see them, now that so many are foreigners. Russians and Germans, I should think.”
“Those in the tenement adjoining yours are Russian or German?”
“About a month ago,” said Mrs Hedges, “some new people moved in there, German or Russian, as I say. Them being at the very end of the row, only us overlooks their yard.”
“I understand.”
“Not a family. About eight or ten of them just come and go. I never know who’s stopping there. There’s one plays music in the house-and in a club they go to, in Jubilee Street.”
“Have they bothered you?”
She shook her head.
“Not at first, sir. I’m at work all day, so’s my man Harry. I don’t do close work any more, but I help with packing. He works down Millwall docks. The long and the short of it is-Louisa has to be indoors on her own just now.”
“And they have bothered her?”
“About three weeks ago a man-Russian, perhaps-came round one morning. He offered my girl a threepenny bit if she’d run an errand for him. She was to go down to the bird-shop in the Commercial Road and buy a canary for him. It had to be pure yellow with no brown on it. If they hadn’t got such, they was to tell her where she might get one and she was to go there instead. They hadn’t got a pure yellow in Commercial Road, as it happened, but she found one in St Mary Axe.”
Up to this point Holmes had treated her visit good-naturedly. At the account of the yellow canary, he was alert and attentive. He drew out his small black notebook and began to make jottings.
“And how long was she away upon this errand?”
“I should think perhaps an hour and a half,” said Mrs Hedges, “perhaps a little longer even. Next day, the man it turned out was called something like Mr Lenkoff came round again. He asked Louisa if she wouldn’t mind going and getting a cage and some seed for his little bird, from the same shop in Commercial Road. So she did. Later that week he asked her to go again for some seed and to get him a twist or two of tobacco. Promised her threepence for herself again. Not wishing to disoblige, she went.”
Mrs Hedges paused and Holmes looked at her as keenly as if she was revealing a plan to rob the Bank of England.
“Pray continue, madam. Take your time. Omit no detail. This is most, most interesting.”
His keenness seemed to disconcert her a little and I caught a glance of alarm.
“Two things happened, sir. On the evening of the day when the bird was bought in the morning, the lady on the other side of us found a yellow canary in her yard, like it was lost or someone had let it out. She took it in and cared for it. But still the next day, and the next, Mr Lenkoff sent my little girl for bird-seed. My friend kept the little bird because she thought they put it out unkindly. Deliberately.”
“Perhaps it was not the same bird?”
Mrs Hedges almost guffawed at the absurdity. “There ain’t that many yellow canaries round Deakin’s Rents! Anyhow, Louisa swore the one she bought had a white and blue ring on his leg-sort of pedigree-and so had this one. Why should they want bird-seed and a cage for a canary they hadn’t got any more?”
I intervened at this.
“You cannot be certain that it had not escaped of its own accord.”
Mrs Hedges sat back and folded her arms.
“That’s true, sir. But why go on buying the seed? See here. They could buy birds or not, for all I cared. Even if they let them go free, that was their business. I got plenty to worry me apart from that. But I swear they were up to something else. What if this was some plan to steal my Louisa?”
“Louisa was too useful to them as she was,” said Holmes softly, “That was three or four weeks ago and they have not harmed her, you say. What happened next?”
“I arranged for Louisa to stay all day with my sister-in-law in Altmark Square or at home while I was out. That was the finish of running errands for them. But then I came home last Friday and the back drainpipe next to our little yard had gone.”
There was a slight flush in Holmes’s customary pallor and a pulse beat visibly in his cheek.
“Be very careful, Mrs Hedges, I beg you. Let me have this from you in precise detail.”
Her bounce had gone now and I thought she looked a little frightened.
“Well, sir, there’s a water pipe goes down from each tenement at the back, from the rainwater gutter on the roof to the drain in the yard. Halfway down, it goes into an iron box with water from both tenements. Then it goes in a single pipe to a drain in their yard, just the other side of our party wall. That pipe had been there in the morning and it was gone by that evening-though it was dark then and we didn’t see until next day. By that time it was raining. Both yards was collecting water, and it was rising round our back-door step.”
“Did you ask Mr Lenkoff what had happened?”
“My Harry did. Mr Lenkoff said it was all right. The pipe was leaking and the London council had taken it away. When I asked the council’s man, he said they hadn’t taken anything away. What’s more, the lady on the other side of us said she’d heard a noise most of that Friday, as if someone was using a hacksaw on iron. That drainpipe would have been too long for them to take indoors without cutting it up. My Harry happened to look down into their yard next evening and saw one of them carrying something from the privy to the house. It was round and heavy. He swears that it was a two-foot length of the pipe. I don’t know what their game is, Mr Holmes, stealing for scrap I daresay. And I’d take an oath they were trying out my Louisa with that errand lark. We should have come home one evening and found her gone-sold in Russia or somewhere.”
Quite unpredictably, after her earlier self-assurance, Mrs Hedges began to weep. I understood now why our young curate had been discreet in passing her on to us. Sherlock Holmes stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, glancing at the notes he had taken and clipping the pencil back in his breast-pocket. He was not much experienced in comforting the distressed but he did his best.
“I beg you not to upset yourself, Mrs Hedges. I believe you may put child-stealing absolutely from your mind. You say that your upper window is the only one with a view of the little yard at the rear of this adjoining house?”
“It is, sir.”
“And you and most of the other people living around you would be out at work during the day?”
“Just about every one, Mr Holmes.”
“It is as I supposed. The object of the errands was that your little girl should be away from the scene for as long as possible. I doubt if they meant her any harm otherwise. The less she saw, the less she threatened them. However, you are quite right to take every precaution for her safety.”
“And the drainpipe, Mr Holmes?”
My friend paused. “That, I think, is a matter for the police. If you will leave it to me, it shall have immediate attention. I fancy that my friend Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard may find the missing drainpipe to be of considerable interest. Concern yourself only with the safety of your little girl. I do not believe she is in any danger. However, for your own peace of mind, it will be better not to leave the child in the house on her own.”
“Considerable interest!” Mrs Hedges was off the premises now and I was able to vent my scepticism. “Inspector Lestrade will find a stolen drainpipe to be of considerable interest? He will find it to be no such thing! It is a matter for the local constable and the council!”
After seeing Mrs Hedges to the door, Holmes was now lounging on the sofa, a pipe-rack within reach, balancing on the edge of his hand a stout bulbous-headed walking-stick, as though this was an aid to thought. The December sky had darkened again, so dramatically that it had been necessary to light the gas. Without taking his eyes off the balanced stick, Holmes said,
“Unless I am greatly mistaken, Watson, we may stand on the verge of a considerable criminal conspiracy. It may well be a story that parents will tell their children for many years to come.”
“A yellow canary and a stolen drainpipe?”
“A drainpipe stolen and sawn into two-foot lengths. Now why should that be?”
“They could not carry it to a scrap-metal dealer in any other form. What more common crime is there than for thieves to rent premises, strip them of all that can be sold and move on? These scamps will have flown the coop by now.”
“I daresay. However, it occurs to me that heavy iron drain-pipes have another purpose, especially when those who steal them are criminal Anarchists. Read a little political history of the past century, my dear fellow. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the attempted assassination of Napoleon III. You may then concede that a two-foot length of cast-iron drainpipe packed with explosive and blocked at either end will make one of the most efficient bombs that the criminal world has yet devised.”
It was two days later when Inspector Lestrade paid us an evening visit in response to the story of Mrs Hedges, which Holmes had forwarded to him. The Scotland Yard man with his “bulldog features,” as Holmes called them, was sitting before the fire with us, a glass in his hand. He was in philosophical mood.
“I must acknowledge you were right, Mr Holmes, when you said the birds-except for the canary-would have flown by the time our inquiry was made. So they had. Nor do I think they will be back, which is the best news for Mrs Hedges and her little girl. These scoundrels have been a little in front of us all.”
“A little in front of you, to be precise,” Holmes said coolly.
Lestrade shot him a glance, shook his head, and lit the cigar which had been offered him.
“We could make very little of them. They appear to have been Russian, rather than German, but then so is half the population of that area. They call themselves Anarchists but, to tell the truth, their real enemies are the brutes who persecuted and ill-used them back in Russia. A few of them may be criminals born. The rest have no cause for a quarrel with us.”
“Precisely,” said Holmes, “and the born criminals are those who now seem to have slipped through your fingers.”
This bickering ran on for a moment or two, then the whisky took its effect. Before the evening was over, my two companions had settled back into a discussion of the late Dr Crippen, hanged three weeks earlier for the poisoning of his wife. Lestrade had played a part in tracking him down. Holmes rode his latest hobby-horse, insisting that Crippen was unjustly executed-indeed, wrongly convicted. He had never intended to kill Belle Elmore with hyoscine, merely to render her unconscious while his young mistress Ethel Le Neve was in their house. Rather than put Miss Le Neve in jeopardy by calling her to the witness-box, he had saved her and taken a terrible penalty upon himself.
It was well past nine o’clock and we were deeply immersed in this debate before a well-laid fire. Holmes had just reached for the poker, when there came an extraordinary hammering at the front door of 221 B Baker Street, accompanied by repeated ringing of the door-bell. My friend was out of his chair and down the stairs before our landlady, Mrs Hudson, could reach the hall. He had guessed, correctly, that this was no caller of hers. We heard voices and then the tread of two men on the stairs. Holmes entered, followed by a uniformed constable.
“A visitor for you, Lestrade.”
“Mr Lestrade, sir? 245D Constable Loosemore, Paddington Green. An urgent message, sir, relayed from Commissioner Spencer, Scotland Yard. A suspected major safe-robbery is in progress in the City of London.”
“Where?” asked Holmes sharply.
Loosemore handed a police telegraph form to Lestrade.
“Exchange Buildings, sir, back of Houndsditch. They think it must be a safe-breaking. Constable Piper, the beat officer, put through a call to Bishopsgate police-station after complaints from local residents. Bishopsgate called Scotland Yard. Officers are on their way from Bishopsgate but the commissioner understands Mr Lestrade has a current inquiry in Houndsditch. If you could be found, sir, he would be obliged if you would attend to co-ordinate the investigation at Houndsditch itself.”
Lestrade did not look as if he welcomed this diversion from a warm fireside and a glass of hot toddy on a cold December night. Holmes, however, was already half-way into an Inverness cape.
“There’s only a police van available,” Loosemore explained, “but that’s at the door. The driver says he can have you at Houndsditch in twenty-five minutes.”
“Come on, Lestrade!” said Holmes cheerfully, “Watson and I have a stake in this inquiry as well. We must go, whether you do or not. Much better make up your mind to it, old fellow.”
The three of us were presently following Constable Loosemore down the stairs to the street. Holmes, just behind me, said sotto voce,
“It will be no bad thing, Watson, if you have remembered to pack your service revolver in your overcoat pocket.”
“I have,” I said aloud, “I have no intention of venturing into the alleys of Houndsditch at this time of night without its protection.”
The police motor-van was no more than a “Black Maria” commonly used for transporting prisoners from the cells to the criminal court, two benches facing one another down its length. There was little view of the city outside, as the motor clattered down the Euston Road and City Road, until it stopped abruptly in Houndsditch. We scrambled out at the back into a dark and cavernous thoroughfare. Most of its tall buildings housed jewellers and fancy-goods merchants on the ground floor with warehouses above. Yet if Houndsditch seemed menacing in the darkness, the cul-de-sacs which ran off it were far less welcoming.
The only blaze of light was down Cutler Street, where a gin palace called the Cutlers’ Arms was doing a busy trade.
In Houndsditch itself there were three lanterns showing, from officers who had already arrived. The man who approached us was Constable Piper. He saluted Lestrade.
“Mr Lestrade, sir? We had a report just after nine o’clock from Mr Weil, owner of the fancy store at number 120, just over the road there. He and his sister live above the shop. There’s noises from somewhere at the back of building, sir. Drilling and sawing, and someone using a crowbar on brick. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary when I walked round there, but after I came away the noise started again.”
“How many men have you got?” Lestrade demanded.
“I left Constable Woodhams and Choat to watch the front here and went straight to Bishopsgate. Sergeant Bentley and a constable came back with me. Martin and Strong from the plain-clothes patrol are on their way. There’s seven of us all told.”
“Enough to deal with common robbery, in all conscience,” said Lestrade irritably. He shivered in the cold wind of the December night. If the dark street was eerie, that was precisely because there was at present nothing to be seen or heard of the suspects. Yet they must still be somewhere close at hand.
Sherlock Holmes walked across to the window of Harris the Jeweller, next to Mr Weil’s premises. At the rear of the shop stood a large and efficient-looking safe with an electric light shining above it night and day. Anyone who tried to attack the lock must do so in full view of the street. Holmes turned back, hands thrust deep into his overcoat pockets for warmth. However much hammering and drilling there may have been earlier, there was no sound of it now. I said as much.
“No sir,” said Constable Piper, “The noise stops the minute anyone goes near Mr Weil’s counting house. It’s the safe next door they’re after, I’ll be bound.”
Lestrade looked about him.
“We’ll take a good look at the back alley-way. Sergeant Bentley and you men, come with me.”
Our bulldog set off with Sergeant Bentley and five constables following, leaving Piper to watch the front. Holmes and I followed at a little distance, denying Lestrade the opportunity to tell us to keep back. The Cutlers’ Arms was immediately ahead, down the side street, and its glaring gas-lamps blinded us to all else. Having reached it, Lestrade turned right into Exchange Alley, whose tenements ran along the back of the Houndsditch shops and warehouses. It was very probable that safe-breakers would make their attempt from the rear of one of these cramped dwelling houses.
In this cul-de-sac of Exchange Buildings, several of the dingy tenements were decrepit in the extreme, lightless and apparently deserted. My abiding memory is of a damp cold in the air and a chill street-wind between tall shabby buildings. At the far end, the alley was blocked off by a tall packing-case warehouse. We reached its wooden doors without hearing any sound of drilling or sawing. There was only the same cold and eerie stillness. Then, as we faced the doors of the packing warehouse, there was a shout from somewhere on our right and a little behind us. I guessed it came from one of our men who had got through the ground floor of a deserted tenement into a yard at the back, sharing a wall with the rear of the Houndsditch shops. The cry came again.
“They were almost through! There’s only the inner wooden lining of the jeweller’s wall left!”
Holmes and I turned round. It was so dark that one could not readily identify anyone. There were figures moving quickly, but visible only as silhouettes against the harsh gaslight of the Cutlers’ Arms at the far corner. In quick succession there was a flash here and there, a crack and a snap. I felt a sudden blow that sent me sprawling on the cobbles. It was not a bullet but a mighty shove from Sherlock Holmes.
“Get down!” he shouted-and not for the first time he may have saved my life at that moment.
Several more shots came in quick succession, reverberating in the darkness between the tall buildings. My revolver was in my hand but I dared not fire. I could see only silhouettes against a glare of gas. Which were Lestrade’s men and which the robbers? Worse still, the disturbance had brought out a crowd of spectators from the public house. To fire now would almost certainly mean hitting one or other of them. For twenty or thirty seconds, the obscure alley of Exchange Buildings was a scene of commotion and chaos. Where were the gunmen and who were they firing at? I picked myself up and walked cautiously forward. My presence as a marksman had been of no use but as a medical man I might now be in demand.
If anyone had told me that in such a brief burst of gunfire-less than half a minute-five policemen could have been shot, I would not have believed it. Yet by the light of our lanterns I saw Constable Choat lying motionless outside the doorway of a tenement that had looked deserted. Constable Tucker staggered out through the same doorway and fell, almost across his comrade. Sergeant Bentley was lying on his back on the cobbles with his head on the pathway. Constable Bryant leant against the wall of the tenements. He was, at any rate, still alive. Constable Woodhams had been on his feet when I first saw him but now he fell on the cobbles, as if his legs had given way under him.
Because our policemen do not carry guns, it is rare for criminals to do so. I had never heard of any robbery in which an entire gang had been armed, as seemed to be the case here. In my first examination of the wounded, I found that Choat had been shot six times, through the body and the legs. Tucker was wounded over the heart. Sergeant Bentley was shot through the throat and unconscious. For these three men, the only hope was a hospital. Woodhams was shot through the thigh and could not stand. Bryant was injured in the left arm and chest but less severely. I looked about for Lestrade. He had been hit in the shoulder but the bullet had lodged in the thickness of his overcoat and he had escaped with superficial injuries.
I ordered the survivors to alert the nearby motor-ambulance at Bishopsgate, for Sergeant Bentley and Constable Choat. Even before that, a hansom cab was flagged down in Houndsditch. Its passengers alighted and the driver took Constable Tucker to St Bartholomew’s hospital at his best speed. I gave my attention to the injuries of Bryant and Woodhams.
Such was the disorder and confusion in that half-minute of gunfire. Though we did not know it at the time, one of the criminals had shot another-Gardstein-in error. His companions managed to carry him away but he died on the following morning and a doctor who was called to attend him brought the police to his bedside. Two young women, the only other occupants of the house, were arrested.
Such were the events of that night, confused and unexplained. However, there had not been a newspaper story to rival the “Houndsditch Murders” for many years. Safe-breakers who shot their way to freedom in this manner had been quite unknown. Holmes was with Lestrade for most of the following day and when he returned to Baker Street in the evening it was with a story that even then I had not expected to hear. He threw himself down in his chair, as if it were too great an effort to remove his unbuttoned overcoat.
“A bad business, Watson, and the press do not yet know the half of it.”
“What they know is bad enough.”
He shook his head.
“No, my dear fellow. This outrage may be a precursor to civil war, a war against us all, the Anarchists against the world. Lestrade, thank God, is not badly hurt. I have sometimes been critical of his abilities but he never lacks pluck. His sergeants and I have spent much of the day in the tenement at Exchange Buildings, behind the Houndsditch jewellers. It seems the criminals had made themselves very much at home there. The remains of a fire were still smouldering in the grate when we arrived.”
“What was their plan?”
“They were cutting through the wall of the outside privy, which is a party-wall shared with the rear of the jeweller’s showroom. The hole they had made in the brickwork was diamond-shaped and about two feet square. They were so nearly through it that one can reach in and touch the matchboard lining of the jeweller’s back room, just where the safe stands against it. That was why we heard no more drilling or hacking at the brickwork. In five minutes more they would have been in the showroom, though concealed from the street window by the bulk of the safe. They were so accurate in their measurements that they could have touched the rear of the safe without stepping through the wall.”
“But how would they have opened the safe?”
Holmes stood up, shrugged off his overcoat and stooped to warm his hands before the fire.
“They certainly did not propose to pick the lock. How could they with the strong electric light illuminating them to the street? However, a gas pipe runs through the tenement. We found that they had tapped it, using black tape and a rubber tube sixty-three feet long, still in place. It was more than enough to reach the back of the jeweller’s safe. When they fled, they also abandoned three diamond angle-pointed drills, a large cold-steel chisel, three crowbars and a combination wrench and cutter. This collection was enough to burn or hack a hole in the rear of the safe without being seen from the street. The light illuminating the front of the safe as it faced the window would eclipse the glow of the flame as they cut through the back.”
As we sat that evening in the quiet of our Baker Street rooms, it was hard to imagine that the horrors of the previous night were anything but a bad dream. Holmes went on to describe how an urgent call that morning had brought Scotland Yard men to a house in Grove Street, a mile east of Exchange Buildings. In an upper room, a young man lay dead upon a blood-soaked mattress. He was George Gardstein, a young Russian Anarchist gunman and one of the police-murderers. He had been accidentally shot in the darkness by one of his own friends as he struggled with Constable Choat, receiving a bullet aimed at the policeman.
“Gardstein would have certainly been hanged,” said Holmes philosophically, turning from warming his hands at the fire, “had one of his companions not saved us the trouble. When his pockets were turned out there was a seven-cartridge magazine clip for a 7.65mm. pistol, a drill, a pair of gas-pliers, welder’s goggles and a key to fit the new lock which they had put on the door of the tenement to prevent unwelcome interruptions of their work.”
“Damning evidence,” I said reassuringly.
His lips contracted.
“And yet not the most interesting. The true discoveries, my dear Watson, were a violin and a small oil-painting of a Parisian street scene, showing considerable skill. It bore a signature that is not unknown.”
“Was Gardstein a painter-or a collector?”
Holmes shook his head again and sighed.
“For several years I have made it my business to be an unobtrusive listener to talk in the political clubs of Whitechapel and Stepney. Few people had met or even seen George Gardstein. Like all the Anarchist leaders, he is a ‘name’ as they call it. In this case he is Poloski Morountzeff, a revolutionary and a fugitive from the police in Warsaw. In that city he is better known as a robber and murderer.”
“And what of the painting?”
He stood up and vawned
“That, my dear Watson, is the work of a man who is far beyond Morountzeff and his kind. A man who might be a leader of nations if revolution should ever enthrone the philosophy of Anarchism or Communism. His name sends a shiver down the backs of Kings, Kaisers and Tsars. He warms the blood of political debaters and cut-throats alike. He is Peter Piatkoff and he is known in the Anarchist underworld as Peter the Painter. Oh yes, he might have made his name as an artist but he is too pure for that. In the name of the stern justice of a virtuous republic, he would cut a throat as readily as you or I would slice an apple.”
“Another Robespierre!”
He looked at me as if I had not understood.
“Robespierre wanted only France. Piatkoff will settle for nothing less than the world.”
“And he is here, in England?” I asked uneasily.
Sherlock Holmes smiled to himself.
“He is not here-but he is coming. Oh yes, he is coming. And when he comes, England will know all about it. My information is recent and particularly reliable.”
I was more than a little unnerved by this. Holmes seemed to take a strange pleasure in his promise. It was as if he anticipated single combat of some kind, alone against a terrible enemy. I went to bed and slept badly. There was something in the air-or rather in the manner-of Sherlock Holmes, which disturbed me. It was rare indeed that in any of our cases he had thrilled to the prospect of a personal duel. But now I was reminded of the terrible day when he went to meet his fate at the hands of Professor Moriarty, remarking that the world could no longer hold both of them and that if his own life must be forfeit to destroy his enemy, he would think the price well worth paying.
Two days later, I came down to breakfast to find Holmes already there and unusually cheerful. As I sat down, he put aside his knife and fork, extending his palm.
“And what, Watson, do you make of this? I fear I purloined it yesterday in Morountzeffs room. Lestrade and his merry men had overlooked it on their visit.”
I saw a round lead bullet for a muzzle-loading rifle, which I recognised from my days of military service.
“A twelve bore!” I said at once. He chuckled.
“Well done, Watson! It was not at all what Lestrade and his sergeants expected to find. Because they did not expect it, they overlooked it.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Evidently Gardstein and his friends are looking for rifles of any sort. So far they have been content with revolvers. After all, you cannot carry rifles through the streets of London without causing comment! Yet rifles mean something quite different to handguns. They can be used to defend a strong-point. They will do it with a terrible accuracy which revolvers lack. Lee Enfields are the easiest to come by and our opponents are clearly in the market for them. But if they are prepared to defend-or even to attack-strong-points in this manner, then the revolution is probably much closer than we believe.”
This did not reassure me in the least. Holmes, however, was in excellent spirits. He glanced through the newspaper and then said,
“Here is something for your scrapbook, my dear fellow!”
It was a report of the incident on Friday night, the terrible night-time drama of Exchange Buildings and Houndsditch. Holmes waggled his fork at me with a little impatience.
“The third paragraph in the editorial, old fellow. This is precisely what I had hoped to avoid.”
A curious coincidence in the terrible events of Friday night was the presence among the police officers in Houndsditch of the well-known consulting detective, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Scotland Yard will say only that Mr Holmes chanced to be in company with Inspector Lestrade at the time and was in no way connected with the case. Most of our readers will surely hope that this is not the truth. Our nation and our society are under attack by the scourings of Europe ’s political gutters. We have tolerated too much for too long on our own soil. If Mr Sherlock Holmes were to purge England and the civilised world of such unprincipled villainy, the civilised world would rally to him and he would earn the sincere gratitude of all decent men and women. If Mr Holmes has not been invited to exterminate this menace, let that invitation be issued now.
I laid the paper down. Never had I read an editorial which adopted so strident a tone.
“A little strongly put,” said Holmes brightly, “but then I have not been invited to do anything except to have dinner this evening.”
“Where?”
“I was remiss in not mentioning it last night. By-the-by, I shall be a little late home. Lestrade, sensible fellow that he is, has decided to call upon the advice of brother Mycroft in this case. Our friend is in deeper water than is usual. Even the Political Branch at Scotland Yard has not been able to help him much. Mycroft, on the other hand, lives, moves and has his being in the world of politics and conspiracy. He keeps an eye upon it, on the government’s behalf.”
“An eye upon Russia?” I inquired sceptically. Holmes smiled.
“Mycroft is particularly fluent in the Russian language, and deeply read in Russian history and culture. His translations of the poetry of Alexander Blok are, I understand, highly regarded. I have also agreed to do what I can for Lestrade. In consequence, Brother Mycroft is giving us dinner in a private room of the Diogenes Club. Please, do not wait up.”
And that was all. After he had gone out, I was left to wonder what labyrinth we were invited to explore. By the time that evening came, I was ready for an early dinner. Then I took down a volume of Sir Walter Scott from the bookshelf-The Heart of Midlothian-and was presently far away in the North, the Edinburgh of a hundred years since and the drama of the Porteus riots. The narrative carried me along so easily that at the end of every chapter, I resolved to read just one more before the early night that I had promised myself.
It was, I think, gone eleven o’clock when I first heard the noise in the street outside-or rather on the outside wall of the room. Something like an empty tin-can hit the wall of the building with a clang and clattered back into the street.
“Mr Hoolmes! Mr Share-lock Hoolmes!”
A first blow of the knocker on the front door was followed by a second.
“Mr Hoolmes, it is I-You know who I am!-and I know you for a lackey and a lick-spittle! A craven flunkey of your monarch and his ministers! An oppressor of the people, one who must share the fate of his paymasters!”
It was so preposterous and unexpected that for a moment I sat and was not sure what to do. There was a pause and I thought the bawling lout had gone on his way. Perhaps he was disconcerted at getting no response. Perhaps he thought it was the wrong house, though the address of Sherlock Holmes was certainly no secret. The curtains were closed. I moved carefully towards them and, at the side, made a tiny gap which gave me a view of the street below by lamplight.
The man was still standing on the far side of the roadway, outside the unlit florist’s shop. He was not in the least the ragged trousered fellow I had expected. His smart black overcoat had what looked like an astrakhan collar and he carried a broad brimmed hat in his left hand. There was something in his right hand which looked like a stone. He was tall, neatly and quite expensively dressed. His hair was dark and trim, he had fine whiskers, his features were more aristocratic than not, indeed his nose was beaked almost to the point of disfigurement.
“You know me! You know me, Mr Hoolmes. When I tell you the name Piatkoff, you will know. You cannot answer? That you are a friend of tyrants, I have known. That you are such a coward, I did not think! A policeman’s lackey!”
I had been completely caught on the hop, as they say, dragged from the comfortable pages of Scott’s novel to face this ruffian. I tried to remember what Holmes had said about Piatkoff the previous night. At that moment, the fellow’s long right arm hurled the stone with the power of an out-fielder returning a cricket ball towards the wicket-keeper. There was an impact and a sound of glass falling on the floor below. I thought of Mrs Hudson but just then dared not take my eyes off this hooligan. He was lounging against the opposite wall now, not the least concerned for the disturbance he had caused. Lights had sprung up in two windows opposite and, at this quiet time of night, the din would surely attract a policeman on his beat.
I remembered that, among his souvenirs, Holmes had a police whistle which he had acquired during our pursuit of Dr Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner. I pulled out the drawer below the bookcase to rummage for it. By then, however, someone in the opposite house was shouting into the night to draw the attention of the Baker Street constable, who must therefore be in view.
I went back to the window, astonished to find that Piatkoff, or whatever his name might be, was still leaning against the florist’s wall as if he had not a care in the world. I had a terrible fear that perhaps he carried a revolver in his overcoat pocket and was waiting to shoot any policeman dead, as his compatriots had done on the previous Friday night. However, he was cleverer than that. With his Bohemian broad-brimmed hat on his head he waited a moment. He was evidently able to see something of which the policeman who strode towards him in helmet and gleaming waterproof was unaware.
The lighted interior of a red double-decker motor-bus was coming down from the Regent’s Park towards the Metropolitan underground railway, like a ship illuminated in the darkness. The man waited until it was almost level and the policeman was hardly twenty feet away. Then, in two or three steps, he came forward and sprang on to the moving platform at the rear of the bus, as deftly as if he had practised for this moment all his life. He and the constable stared at one another as the distance between them widened. I could not be sure but I believe he dropped off again as the bus stopped at the railway station, which was just in sight. The policeman had seen the last of him.
I thought of Holmes’s last instruction to me. “Do not wait up.” I was in no mood to do anything else. He came in a little before midnight, full of Mycroft’s ideas, though curious about the broken pane of glass in the downstairs window. I told him my story and he became more subdued, though caring nothing for his own safety.
“We had not counted on his arriving so soon,” he said at length, “though of course if they plan some spectacular violence he was bound to be close at hand. Our people have been watching him in Paris. Indeed Monsieur Hammard, the Chef du Service at the Sûreté, has a private line to the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard on such matters. Brother Mycroft assures me that Piatkoff was last seen in Paris not a week ago. For he really is a painter and had two pictures hanging in an exhibition which opened in a private gallery near the Quai d’Orléans.”
He sat quietly for a moment like a gaunt brooding bird and I knew, by instinct, that he did not wish to be interrupted. At last he let out a long breath.
“I will not deny that this changes matters somewhat. I shall speak to Mycroft tomorrow morning. The greatest service, you can render, my dear fellow is in identifying Piatkoff as he now is. If Lestrade will put a vehicle and two plain-clothes officers at our disposal, you and they may tour Houndsditch, Whitechapel and his likely London haunts. See if you can pick him out, Watson, for you may be the only person who can. His appearance is seldom the same on any two occasions but he will hardly be able to change it so often. Even his confederates in London cannot be sure of his identity during his recent masquerade in Paris. If we can pick him up and follow him, he may lead us to the heart of the entire conspiracy in London.”
Grave though the situation had become, there was little more to be done that night. I slept with my revolver close at hand but I did not really suppose our enemy was likely to make an early return to Baker Street.
On the following morning there was a further unwelcome development. The late edition, which a few days earlier had been so quick to report the presence of Sherlock Holmes at the police murders in Exchange Buildings, was after us again. There had just been time to include a garbled “Stop Press” account before the paper was “put to bed.” Whatever secrets we may have held were secret no longer.
ANARCHIST DISTURBANCE IN BAKER STREET “PETER THE PAINTER” IN ENGLAND
Late last night the international Anarchist Communist leader, who goes by the name of Peter Piatkoff or “Peter the Painter,” brought the threat of revolution to the very doorstep of Mr Sherlock Holmes, the well-known consulting detective. The man who calls himself Piatkoff shouted abuse from the street for at least ten minutes and threw various objects, causing damage to a ground-floor window. He fled at the approach of a policeman on the beat and escaped on a motor-bus. The prophet of revolution and the defender of our liberties appear well-matched.
Piatkoff is described as tall and thin with prominent features, dark hair and whiskers, wearing a dark overcoat with Astrakhan collar and a broad-brimmed felt hat of “Rembrandt” design.
“Which will make him almost indistinguishable from a hundred thousand other men in our city,” said Holmes philosophically.
I felt a little heat at the newspaper’s familiarity.
“The whole thing is written with tongue in cheek, I said, ”A piece of damned
impertinence and a handy tip for Piatkoff! His friends will be reading the paper this morning, even if he is not.”
Holmes continued to butter his toast before spreading marmalade.
“I have not the least doubt that he and they will be reading it.”
Soon afterwards he left to give his assistance to the nation, as represented by his brother William Mycroft Holmes. For many years the ungainly but brilliant Mycroft had dominated the British Civil Service, as the Chief Adviser on Inter-Departmental Affairs. Wherever there was trouble, Mycroft was soon on the spot. As his younger brother Sherlock had once remarked to me, “Not only is he an adviser to the British government, on occasion he is the British government.
I was left to cool my heels for an hour or two while the brothers made arrangements with Lestrade for my tour of Holborn, Houndsditch, Whitechapel, Mile End and wherever else we might find Piatkoff or tales of Piatkoff. Within half an hour there were stories enough. To the Anarchist Communists, if not to the world of art, his arrival was nothing less than a messianic event.
My companions, who arrived at Baker Street that morning in a nondescript cab, were Sergeant Wiley and Constable Parks of the Plain Clothes Division. In their grey flannel suits and bowler hats, their neatly-cut hair and clipped whiskers, they might excite the suspicion of the criminal world by their uniform ordinariness. However, that was no business of mine. The cabby who, for all I knew, might be another plain-clothes officer, drove us briskly down the length of Baker Street and then eastwards towards Holborn and the poorer districts of the city.
Except for the dreadful incident in Exchange Buildings, I knew absolutely nothing about the geography of Anarchism in London ’s East End. My companions were better informed. I had only to keep my eyes “skinned” as we passed down street after street, repeatedly, throughout the day. It was impossible to let me out of the vehicle, for fear that I should be recognised by someone who had seen me on the night of the shootings. Dark though it was, I had spoken to a considerable number of people in the dreadful aftermath, as I did my best for the injured and the dying.
Fortunately my companions were well informed. In the wastes of the Mile End Road, with its drab commercial premises and the narrow streets of dockers’ terraced houses running to either side, Sergeant Wiley called a halt. We had stopped by a hemp merchant’s warehouse to pick up a shabby young fellow whom I would have avoided at all costs. In his brick-red wind-cheater jacket and his corduroy trousers, a careless scarf flapping at his neck, this idler proved to be Sergeant Atherton of Scotland Yard, in plain clothes suited to this habitat. It was no surprise to me after the shooting of five policemen that officers were active in the area, disguised as boot-blacks, pedlars and street-hawkers.
We turned off the main highway and dropped Atherton in the narrow thoroughfare of Jubilee Street to the north. Between the terraces of little houses was what appeared to be a dilapidated church hall. In reality it was, as a board announced, “The Hall of the Friends of the Workers.” This had been founded by the most famous Anarchist of all, Prince Kropotkin, during his long exile in England. It had a reputation for preserving anonymity. Even with his pseudonym of George Gardstein, Poloski Morountzeff was never known here as anything but “The Russian.”
The building was dilapidated but the gossipers gathered inside and outside its doors every day. That afternoon we again picked up Sergeant Atherton, or Volkoff as he was known in the club. He met us several streets away and confirmed that the sole topic of conversation among his comrades had been the arrival of Peter the Painter and the triumph that was to come. Men and women who associated at the club were by no means all in support of assassination but every one of them seemed to hail Piatkoff as the leader of a promised revolution.
Of Piatkoff himself there was still no further sign. Our driver turned his horse’s head from Whitechapel to Houndsditch, then to High Holborn. For the rest of the day, we pulled up at various cab-stands, as if waiting for a pre-arranged fare. At length we were drawn up in High Holborn, almost at half-past four with the lamps lit in a growing fog. I was watching the slow parade of pedestrians who sauntered past the illuminated shop-fronts with their lavish displays behind plate-glass windows.
We had been there almost ten minutes when I noticed a man moving more quickly and purposefully than the rest. He was walking away from us on the left-hand pavement. A broad-brimmed artist’s hat covered his head and the collar of his dark coat bore a strip of Astrakhan. I could not be sure that he was our quarry. As Holmes remarked, the coat, the hat, and the man’s height matched thousands of others.
Just then he began to cross the street and in doing so naturally turned in our direction to see that the way was clear. For about ten seconds I saw his face-the time was long enough. The steady eyes, the pointed nose, even the dangerous flush at the cheek-bones, were those I had fixed in my mind the evening before. He reached the far side, turned away from us again and almost at once entered a smartly equipped shop with its window brightly lit. Before I spoke to Sergeant Wiley I looked up to see which shop this might be. The name was there in polished brass, set into mahogany. “E. M. Reilly & Co.-Guns & Rifles.”
My escorts were under orders not to approach the subject. He was likely to be armed. I could not say whether Sergeant Wiley or Constable Parks carried a gun but such a thing is rare, even on plain-clothes duty. In any case, Holmes had insisted that a man suspected of being Piatkoff was not to be seized immediately. He was of more use at liberty, leading us to the rest of the conspiracy. Acting on my information, the sergeant and his constable now stepped quietly down from the cab, went separate ways, and closed in upon their prey from opposite points of the compass.
That was the last I saw of the drama. It would never have done for Piatkoff to recognise me-if he could. Much to my chagrin, the day now ended with a drive back to my club, the Army and Navy in St James’s Square, where I dined alone. Winter had come with the darkness. The breath of muffled passers-by beyond the dining-room windows condensed into clouds of mist. At half-past nine, another cab took me to Baker Street, where I slid my latch-key into the lock of 221 B just as the clock of St Mary’s, Upper York Street, struck ten on the cold and foggy stillness of London’s sooty air. Mrs Hudson’s maid had put up the gas and there was a welcome fire in the grate-but of Sherlock Holmes there was no sign. He had dined again with his brother Mycroft and I was content to pour myself a glass of whisky and reach for The Heart of Midlothian.
About twenty minutes later I heard voices and footsteps on the stairs. Sherlock Holmes came in first with Lestrade just behind him.
“Ah!” said Holmes, sliding his stick into the rack and taking the inspector’s coat, “our sleuth-hound Watson is here before us. We have heard from Mycroft of your invaluable piece of detection today, old fellow. My congratulations.”
He poured a measure from the decanter into each of two glasses and handed one to the inspector.
“He is our man, Watson, and you have tracked him down. Single-handed, last night and today, you have put Piatkoff within our reach.”
“Then had Scotland Yard better not arrest him while he remains within your reach?”
Lestrade had been bursting to say something important and now took his chance.
“Watch him, doctor! Shadow him. Those are the orders. Not just orders from the higher ranks in Scotland Yard. Not even from Mr Mycroft Holmes. They come from the Home Office and the Home Secretary himself-Mr Winston Churchill.”
I needed no account of this Home Secretary in Mr Asquith’s government. At the Colonial Office and the Board of Trade he had already shown a refusal to let problems stand in his way. “Do not argue that there are difficulties,” he told his protesting subordinates, “the difficulties will argue for themselves.”
“The duel between Churchill and Piatkoff is something of a personal matter,” Holmes remarked, “but Winston, as his minions call him when he is not present, is determined to have the entire bunch of Anarchists in his bag. His instructions are that nothing is to be done to alert them until we can get them all. Anarchism is what he describes as the hydra of revolution. If you merely cut the head from it, it will sprout twenty more.”
“Then what has happened?” I asked.
Lestrade gave a satisfied smile.
“Sergeant Wiley had a chat, as you might call it, with the manager of E. M. Reilly. Their customer did not call himself Piatkoff but Schtern. Despite that name, he claimed to be a Frenchman. According to the Home Office files, over which Mr Churchill has given us free range, Piatkoff sometimes uses the name Schtern in Paris and is known to most of the underworld simply as The Frenchman.”
“More to the point,” said Holmes impatiently, “their customer purchased three Enfield rifles, muzzle loading but deadly accurate, to be delivered as a parcel in the name of Schtern to 133 Jubilee Street, Stepney.”
“But that is the same street as the so-called Anarchist Club!” I said.
“It is better than that-it is the Anarchist Club. If we can keep absolute surveillance there, we may have them all before any harm can be done.”
Lestrade knocked his pipe out and looked up.
“With revolvers or handguns, they can only be sure of hitting their targets at close range. With rifles, a first-class marksman can hit a target a hundred yards off. Rifles, gentlemen, are the stuff of assassination. Mr Churchill has now taken measures over the Prime Minister’s movements between Downing Street and the House of Commons, as well as the appearance of the King and Queen at the opening of parliament in the New Year. We know that Gardstein and his friends already had ammunition for rifles. Now, it seems, they also have the weapons.”
“Only because you allow them to buy rifles from a gunsmith!” I said with some little indignation.”
To my astonishment, Lestrade tapped the side of his nose, though he did not exactly give me a wink.
“As to that, doctor, this is one occasion when you really must allow us to know our own business best.”
Holmes said nothing and at last Lestrade, standing up, wished us good night. At the door, however, he turned back.
“When you read the paper tomorrow morning, doctor, you will see the face of your Peter the Painter from last night, as our plain-clothes men saw him close up this afternoon. You must let me know what you think of it-as a work of art.”
I could hear him chuckling all the way to the foot of the stairs. I tucked The Heart of Midlothian under my arm and stumped off to bed, muttering, “Blasted impertinence!” or something of the kind. Holmes made no reply but continued to gaze in deep thought at the dying fire.
I felt, as I believed I was entitled to, that I had been treated with something less than the consideration I deserved. Next morning I found that, once again, Holmes was at breakfast before me. I was about to make a protest of some kind when I looked at him and saw how ragged his face appeared. I swear that he had not been to bed all night. All the same there was no sign of nocturnal activity in the sitting-room. Thinking about it afterwards, I thought I had smelt something like the hot acrid and metallic smell of a soldering iron in a workshop.
All this was put out of my mind as I laid down my knife and fork for a moment and took up the Morning Post. There, on an inner page, a face stared out at me. It was the twin of the one I had seen two nights earlier, shouting abuse across Baker Street as a tin-can and a stone hit the house. Above the sketch, in bold type, was the inscription, “Peter the Painter.”
“That is he!” I exclaimed.
“Is it?” said Holmes listlessly. “Only you can tell, my dear fellow, you and your two plain-clothes men.”
“They have got him to a tee!” I insisted, “He will hardly be able to stir out of doors in London without being recognised! ”
His fork was idle and he showed none of his usual morning appetite.
“One thing of which you may be certain, Watson, is that as soon as our artist’s drawing appeared in the newspaper, the fugitive changed his appearance beyond recognition.”
He was right, of course.
“Far better,” Holmes added, “had Lestrade and his boobies kept this to themselves for the time being.” At the word “this” he stabbed the face in the newspaper with his finger. Then he left his breakfast unfinished and went to the window, watching the street below. I thought it best to let the matter drop. With a show of great attention to the day’s news, I finished my toast and marmalade and drank my coffee.
Ten minutes passed in silence. Then he turned from the window and reached for his waterproof, drawing it on and buttoning it.
“I shall be with Mycroft today,” he said, crossing to the door, “We are required to give an account of ourselves to Mr Churchill and his advisers. I see that you and I have no immediate engagements of any other kind. However, it is possible that you may receive a call from Mr Chung Ling Soo. If so, be good enough to ask him to leave a card with his present address and assure him that I will communicate with him forthwith.”
Mr Chung Ling Soo! What madness or nonsense this might be I could not tell and Holmes did not say. It was evidently some case that he had picked up and neglected to mention. It hardly seemed worth bothering about by comparison with the threat from the Revolutionary Anarchists.
As Holmes went down the stairs, I stood up and replaced him at the window. There was a cab waiting outside and he was about to step into it. I now saw that he was in the company of two Army officers. I recognised from my own military service that their lapels and hat-bands proclaimed one to be a colonel and the other a brigadier. Whatever game Holmes and his associates were playing seemed too rich for my blood, as the saying goes.
I kept an appointment for lunch in the refectory of the London Hospital with my friend and colleague Alfred Jenkins, who had been a lieutenant with me in Afghanistan-and who had pursued his military career as surgeon major for several years after I was invalided out after Maiwand. When his time was up and he returned to civilian life, he had been offered a senior post as surgeon at the London Hospital.
As we were eating our steak and kidney pie, a colleague of Jenkins came up and sat down beside us.
“We’ve got him!” he said excitedly, “There was great competition and he’s as handsome as Adonis-a very beautiful corpse.” The acquisition, I discovered, was the body of Poloski Morountzeff, who had gone by the name of George Gardstein. His corpse was of great importance, because few people had met him or had any idea what he looked like. In order that he might now be identified it was necessary for his remains to be preserved intact for a further three months. The task of accomplishing this had been awarded to the London Hospital, who had arranged to keep him in a formaldehyde-fume preservation-chamber with glass windows. His eyes had been carefully opened, while a policeman photographed his face for a life-like poster which soon appeared on public display.
When I returned to our lodgings, I Holmes was already there. He was not very communicative beyond saying that Lestrade’s men had been watching the East End. They had picked up the trail of Piatkoff who, contrary to Holmes’s expectations, had evidently not changed his appearance as yet. Possibly, as I remarked humorously, he was not a reader of the Morning Post. Holmes stared back at me, unsmiling. He remarked that Piatkoff had been seen in Jubilee Street. He had been watched by Atherton, alias Volkoff, at the Anarchist Club, where other members present had at first seemed so in awe that no one spoke to him. Then he had conversed at random, not as if he had a rendezvous with anyone.
No carter’s van had called at any address in Jubilee Street to deliver rifles. For all their cleverness, Mycroft Holmes and the pursuers had lost the scent of that consignment. I stood up, stretched, and wished my friend good-night. I noticed, as I did so, a carte-de-visite on the sideboard. It showed a tiny head-and-shoulders photograph of an expressionless Englishman in a suit and hat, under the inscription: “Memorandum from Chung Ling Soo: Marvellous Chinese Conjuror.” Written underneath were the words, “Wood Green Empire until Saturday. Always a pleasure to see you in the stalls.” What on earth Holmes wanted with a stage conjuror I did not know and, at that moment, I did not care.
If Sherlock Holmes and his brother had an idea of what was going on, they seemed in no hurry to do anything about it. Then a few mornings later I went down to breakfast and once again sensed a smell of solder or hot metal in the sitting-room. It did not seem to emanate from the room itself. Sherlock Holmes had it on his clothes. But where had he been that night? Who had he been with and what had they been doing? He certainly looked, once again, as if his head had never touched the pillow.
I thought perhaps I should become my own detective but I did not suppose I should get very far. Even Scotland Yard had accomplished little. Thanks to an innocent couple who came forward because they wondered what had happened to their lodger, the CID had located Poloski Morountzeffs workroom. The chemicals found there, chosen for the manufacture of bombs, he had explained away to the credulous landlord as a formula for his patent fire-proof paint. There was a supply of rifle cartridges, though no rifles, and clips of ammunition for a Mauser pistol. Morountzeff had been well-behaved, an ideal lodger, who sometimes locked his rooms and travelled to the Continent.
During the next week, thanks to such “information received,” the City of London police arrested three men and two women. Fedoroff, Peters and Duboff were charged with the Houndsditch murders, Sara Milstein and Rosie Trassjonsky with conspiring to assist them. Unfortunately, it seemed that the informants against them were more attracted by the rewards offered than by any allegiance to the truth. When the evidence was examined, all the defendants were set free. Murder could not be proved against the three men, much less against the two women.
It was difficult to establish the identity of any of the suspects. The internal security system of the Anarchist movement discouraged the use of names. Where necessary it still preferred to allude to “The Frenchman” or “The German” or “The Russian.” For every man who knew the sobriquet of “Peter Piatkoff” there seemed to be a thousand who knew “Peter the Painter.” What was not known could be betrayed, even under police questioning.
A few names were known to the police, among them such men of violence as Fritz Svaars and Yoshka Sokoloff. They had not been caught, as Holmes remarked with a sigh, and it seemed likely that they were in Russia or France by now.
Such was the situation when I went to bed a few nights later and, somewhen after midnight, had that unusual sensation of waking from a dream within a dream. After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably more like ten or twenty seconds, of dreaming about dreaming I was fully awake. It was almost four o’clock in the morning and, so far as I knew, Sherlock Holmes was in bed and asleep. He had certainly retired before midnight. Now, however, I heard voices in the sitting-room below me.
I had missed whatever they were discussing but I was quite clear in my mind that one of the voices was Sherlock Holmes and another was his brother Mycroft. There were at least two more, probably four but I could not be sure. I did not recognise these other speakers, though one of them had a very distinctive tone of voice. His words were spoken rather slowly but emphatically and, at times, with something like a growl. The voice was rather slurred on occasion, as if the tongue might be a little too large for the mouth. When this visitor concluded a rather lengthy remark, another speaker whose voice was unfamiliar to me addressed him as “Winston.”
I began to wonder whether I was not, after all, still dreaming. What were the government’s most senior civil servant, Mycroft Holmes, the Home Secretary, and someone who knew the Home Secretary well enough to call him “Winston,” doing in our sitting-room at four o’clock in the morning? The discussion was less intense now. They dropped their voices and I could make out only a rumble of talk.
Instinct told me that it would not do to walk in on their debate. On the other hand, I must be dressed and ready in case my presence should be necessary. I was just fumbling with a collar stud and tie when a board outside creaked and Holmes, perhaps seeing light under the door, tapped gently as he entered.
“I heard you moving about,” he said quietly, “I fear there is trouble boiling up near the Anarchist Hall in Jubilee Street, or rather about two hundred yards away. It seems as if we may have an insurrection on our hands. If Sergeant Atherton’s information from the underground is correct, the aim is to kill as many of our officers and officials as possible, and of as high a rank as possible. In other words, assassination under cover of a general outbreak. Rifles for the one, pistols for the other.”
I began to unscrew my trouser-press.
“What will you do?”
“Major Frederick Wodehouse of the War Office is here. So is the Home Secretary-Wodehouse picked up Mr Churchill from his house in Eccleston Square on the way. Nothing is to be said, at this stage, about either of them. It would not look well for the military to be involved.”
“And you will go with them?”
His profile, in the gaslight, looked leaner and tauter than ever I had seen it.
“This minute, old fellow. We also have a captain of the Scots Guards in attendance. Theirs is the nearest regiment, at the Tower of London. This is likely to be more than the police can deal with. We have no more room in the motor, so you must follow on as quickly as you can. Take a cab from the Metropolitan line for Stepney police station, just off Commercial Road. Ask for directions there. The desk sergeant will know where we are.”
With that he was gone. I heard footsteps and voices going down the stairs from our sitting-room to the front door. Then I took out my watch and looked at it. The hands were at just five minutes past four. Ten minutes later I was walking up Baker Street towards the rank at the underground railway. A single cabby was dozing on his perch. He was awake and alive in a second.
We did the journey to Commercial Road in less than half an hour, through a ghost-like city of empty streets and half-lit avenues. I told the cabby to wait and went up the steps, illuminated by the blue police lamp. Inside, it was as though I had stepped into the foyer of the Alhambra theatre five minutes before the curtain went up. This was plainly the headquarters of the operation, police officers pushing this way and that. I found my way to the sergeant’s desk and was answered in two words which would soon travel round the world.
“ Sidney Street.”
I was not given the number of the building but, if even half of what Holmes had told me was true, I should not need one. My cabby drove the half-mile through Stepney, past the deserted Anarchist Club, down Hawkins Street -and then no further. A helmeted constable stepped out into the roadway ahead of us, swinging his bulls-eye lantern side to side to bring the cab to a halt. As he did so, I noticed in the beam of light that snow had begun to fall. There were no tracks of other wheels to be seen.
“No way through, sir,” The policeman’s face was at the window. “The road ahead is blocked off. If you want to drive west, you must turn back and go down to Commercial Road.”
“I am a medical man, Dr John Watson. I have a rendezvous with Mr Sherlock Holmes. I understand he is with Major Wodehouse and Mr Churchill.”
“That’s different then,” the policeman said, opening the cab door, “I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t needed presently.”
I paid off the cabby and followed the policeman through the thin drifts of the falling snow. I had not brought my medical bag with me but just then I could see-or hear-no reason why I should need it. Nor had I packed my revolver in my pocket.
Perhaps it was the snow which gave Sidney Street its sinister appearance as the clocks struck five. More probably it was the sight of a formation of men standing absolutely motionless in a side-street and uttering no sound. If this was Anarchist Communist revolution, it seemed just then to be a remarkably silent affair.
Sidney Street, as we came to its corner, was at least forty feet wide. Its terraces of plain red-brick working men’s houses faced one another. The block of eight houses which was now the centre of attention, Martin’s Buildings, was named after its owner and had been built ten years earlier. Each house had about ten rooms located on several floors. At the rear they overlooked a jumble of yards, sheds, and alleyways. At the front, the windows had a clear view across the street but only restricted visibility along its length. Immediately opposite the house which had become the focus of interest was a yard with a wooden fence and gate. Its paintwork dimly proclaimed “Isaac Dickholtz, Coal Merchant and Haulier.” On either side of the street, some of the houses had little shops on their ground floors with grilled windows and shabby black paint.
Further off, at the next road junction north, stood the tall buildings of Mann and Crossman’s Brewery with a yard and stables to the rear. The van gates also opened opposite Martin’s Buildings. In the other direction, the Rising Sun public house, which we were now approaching, occupied the next corner site on the other side of the road. The flat roofs of the Rising Sun and the cooling tower of the brewery both offered a vantage-point, looking respectively north and south along the thoroughfare towards 100 Sidney Street. There was still no sight nor sound of a gang of Anarchist assassins.
In the dim lamplight of the early morning, the large but silent body of dark-clad police cutting off the thoroughfare at either end was concentrated in two side streets, out of view of the windows of houses in the middle of the block. As to the suspect house itself, there might be fifty armed gunmen ready to fight to the death-or one-or none.
Just as we drew level with a back lane, running along the rear of the houses, I saw three figures. Two of them were uniformed police officers and between walked a young woman, barefoot in her underclothes, her white petticoat immediately visible.
“They are evacuating the other houses in Martin’s Buildings,” said Sherlock Holmes, just behind me. I gave a start for I had neither seen nor heard him approach. “The Home Secretary is here with Major Wodehouse, but that is for your ears only. We do not want every reporter in London getting under our feet or betraying his presence to the enemy, for he would immediately be at risk.”
“How many gunmen are there?”
He drew me towards the street corner outside the bar-room windows of the Rising Sun, on the opposite side of the street from Martin’s Buildings.
“No one knows. We have the names of two. Fritz Svaars and Yoshka Sokoloff, otherwise known as The Limping Man. They are not in Russia after all, it seems, and both are very efficient shots. Others who will try to come and go may keep up an impressive fusillade. Piatkoff, if he is in there, will be their commander. ”
“And the police?”
“Lestrade is on his way but this is a matter for marksmen and the police have none. Twenty or thirty constables have occupied the houses on the far side of the street, as well as the vantage-points of the brewery and the flat roof of the Rising Sun. Several of their men are armed but that will not do.”
“And Mr Churchill?”
Holmes chuckled.
“He has taken command from the Commissioner of Police, as he always meant to do. Major Wodehouse tells me that ‘Winston likes a straight fight.’ A telegraph has gone to the Secretary of State for War requesting the immediate release of a detachment of the Scots Guards from duties at the Tower of London. That too is for your ears only, though they will be here within the hour.”
As we groped our way up the dimly-illuminated staircase of the Rising Sun to the darkness of its flat roof, I thought of the repercussions of Scots Guards and straight fights, if this should prove to be a fuss about very little. As we came out into the open air, a city clock across the quiet streets struck quarter-past five. It crossed my mind that at this time of year it would hardly be light much before eight.
Close at hand there were three small groups, engaged in quiet conversation. One of these included Major Wodehouse and the Home Secretary, who was dressed in his long coat with its velvet collar and cuffs and his tall hat of black silk. From the gruff confidence of Winston Churchill’s voice and his face as I had seen it in a magazine photograph, I had imagined a much taller man. Yet, though he was burly in build, I guessed that Sherlock Holmes topped him by almost a foot.
For the next hour or so we were pestered at intervals by the landlord, who had hoped to hire out his flat roof to newspaper reporters at a sovereign a time. Major Wodehouse’s aide told him briskly to “cut along” and leave us to our business. It was no part of the plan to have the press in attendance before there were events to report. Mr Churchill’s instructions were also positive in another matter. There was to be no battle until the sky was light enough for us to see who we were shooting at and to make it more difficult for our opponents to enter or escape from the houses on the far side of the street.
“It will be the easiest thing in the world, sir,” interposed Sherlock Holmes, “for those opponents to break through the ceilings of the upper rooms and travel from one house to the next. In the roof spaces there may be no proper dividing walls and, if there are, they will be no more than a single thickness of brick, easily broken through. If that happens, the battlefront will be eight houses long.”
“Quite so, Mr Holmes,” the Home Secretary said gruffly, “I am obliged to you for your very salutary reminder.” Mr Churchill then stepped behind the shelter of a chimney stack and presently I noticed the faint glow of a cigar, concealed by the brickwork from the street below.
We had a bitter couple of hours, waiting for the sky to lighten. At intervals, the landlord appeared with tots of rum and sandwiches of ham or tongue. Finally, when the steeple clocks had struck seven, the Home Secretary said,
“Very well gentlemen, let us proceed. Everyone, unless instructed otherwise, will remain under cover and out of sight.”
He descended the stairs, followed by Major Wodehouse and his aide, then by Captain Nott-Bower, who was Commissioner of the City of London Police. Sherlock Holmes and I had been bidden to bring up the rear. I could not say what use we might be but when my friend went down I kept him company. In the saloon bar of the public house, Lieutenant Ross of the Scots Guards in his greatcoat and cap was already in attendance. Though it had taken some time to rouse the Secretary of State for War and obtain permission, a detachment of the regiment, including two sergeants who were musketry instructors and nineteen private soldiers, had volunteered for this duty. Lieutenant Ross had come on ahead and the volunteers were on their way.
In the street, the snow had turned to slush. Our party moved quietly along the far side, out of view of the windows of 100 Sidney Street, behind which might lie an entire Anarchist gang or a single gunman. We crossed over to the exposed side, where Major Wodehouse, Holmes and I drew into the shelter afforded by the stone pillar at the gate of the brewery’s stable-yard. To my astonishment, the Home Secretary remained with head and shoulders in view, his identity plain, staring up at the closed curtains of Martin’s Buildings. He spoke sideways, confirming an instruction. At this, a uniformed constable walked across and banged on the front door of 100 Sidney Street. There was silence. The policeman stooped, retrieved a handful of small stones and threw them at one of the upper windows.
It was at this moment that I saw the slow and sinister protrusion of a rifle barrel from the slit of a partially opened upstairs window. Had they been hand-guns, the chance would have been doubtful but a rifle fired by a trained shot could scarcely miss Mr Churchill at this short range. There was a flash of fire from the gun barrel and a crack that reverberated like thunder between the two rows of houses. I expected to see the Home Secretary fall but he ducked his head and then straightened up again, still standing against the wall close to us. Why did he not keep down?
Now there was a second rifle barrel, protruding from a gap in the adjoining casement. I have read often enough the cliché of a man whose heart was in his mouth with fear but I never knew the truth of it more certainly until that moment. A second crack and a spurt of flame from a rifle barrel came in Mr Churchill’s direction. It was often said afterwards that he had to be compelled to take cover and this, I believe, was the source of that story. A third rifle snout appeared and again there was a bolt of fire and a crack that made the ears ring.
Like a stage magician, after three rifles had missed him at such short range, the gruff figure in the long coat and tall hat turned and walked the few yards to shelter, close to our stone pillar. It was as if the gunmen had recognised who he was, which was quite possible, and were determined to silence him at all costs. For this they paid a heavy price, by giving away their positions and numbers to the firepower which now faced them. Had they held their fire, on seeing the Home Secretary, they might have escaped in the darkness or perhaps even shot their way out before the Scots Guards were in position.
A few minutes later came the crash of a first fusillade from our side. Bullets streamed from the first of the Guards as they hastily scrambled into place. They were aiming from front rooms at street-level, where they shot from behind overturned sofas, or else had climbed up among the chimney stacks. The windows from which the Anarchist rifles had fired at first were now smashed to pieces. Their net curtains were in shreds and one of them was on fire. Then there was a command to the Guards of “Cease fire!” though our ears still rang with the echoes. Presently a further sequence of shots was exchanged, the gunmen this time keeping up the greater rate of fire. I saw one of the constables go down suddenly, among a group who were too close to the far side for their own good. “Jack, I am done!” he cried to his comrade as he spun and fell. He was taken to hospital at once and happily survived his wound.
After the first rifle shots, the weapon of the assassin, our opponents’ fire came from handguns. They laid down a barrage with which we could not at first compete. I could make out the long barrels of their Mauser automatic pistols, firing two shots every second. But while their hand-guns might be deadly in intensity they were less accurate than the rifles which their marksmen had used at first. Why had they abandoned those? As it was, their rifle barrels had merely revealed their positions. They had drawn a ferocious fire into the two upper windows of Martin’s Buildings, possibly killing half of those within. Had it been the Home Secretary’s intention to make them show themselves by offering his familiar figure as a target?
The events that followed during the next few hours were printed large in every newspaper across the land. What schoolboy did not know of “The Siege of Sidney Street” and the famous part played by the Scots Guards and Winston Churchill? Even as it progressed, the crowds and the pressure grew behind the police cordons at either end of the street, raising cheers every time our men fired back. It seemed impossible that this was the heart of London on a peaceful weekday morning, when office clerks and shop walkers were on their way to work and schoolchildren trudging to their classes. All had now played truant to watch the drama being played out.
Holmes and I remained under cover for the moment behind the gate-pillar of the coal merchant’s yard. What struck me most of all was the way in which many of the inhabitants of the street went about their normal lives as the two sides exchanged fire and the bullets sang round them. An old women with a shawl over her head crossed the street a little further down to fetch her washing, as indifferent to those bullets as if they had been the falling snow flakes.
In the coal merchant’s gateway a young journalist, the first I had seen that morning, was standing beside me leaning on his stick. He gave a lurch and almost fell as the stick was neatly cut in half by a bullet which we neither saw nor heard-and which was within inches of ending his life and depriving the world of the genius of Sir Philip Gibbs. A piece of stone flew from the corner of the wall beside me as a shot nicked it and another fragment bounced from the metal helmet of a startled policeman. Before long a reek of burnt cordite hung in the damp air and the acrid tang of it scorched one’s throat. The sharp cracks of the service rifles were answered by the snaps of pistols from the besieged Anarchists. This was the point at which we were ordered to remove ourselves to safety.
It was not a time to indulge in irony but I could not help noticing, above the level of the gunmen’s positions, an attic floor running along the eight houses of Martin’s Buildings. In its window was a sign showing, of all things, the Union Jack flag on a large card with the slogan of “Union Jack Tailoring.” Much tailoring would be done that day!
Before long the press had arrived in numbers, greatly to the satisfaction of the landlord of the Rising Sun, who was able to hire out his flat roof to the reporters after all. Captain Nott-Bower of the City Police stood beside us, watching the front of the besieged houses while his inspector organised a cordon at the rear. It was intended that there should be no reinforcements for the Anarchists and no escape. That, at least, was a matter of opinion in the confusion that existed. These were men capable of fighting the police through sewers and over rooftops, if necessity demanded. In Russian uprisings they had already done so.
Only now were the reporters allowed to know that shots coming from the houses on our side were fired by the Scots Guards and that the Home Secretary was directing the operations. I overheard an exchange between Mr Churchill and Lieutenant Ross, the latter asking whether it was intended that his men should presently storm the houses opposite.
“Nonsense!” said Churchill’s gruff and emphatic voice, “do you not see how easily you might trap yourselves in a bunch on those narrow stairways and confined passages? That is just what they would like you to do. I should prophesy the most grievous losses among your detachment. You have only two sergeant-instructors and nineteen men. You cannot afford to lose a single one. No, sir, you must fight it out where you stand.”
In truth, the Scots Guards were no longer standing. At either end of the street, newspaper boards had been thrown flat and guardsmen were using them to lie upon as they directed rifle fire against the windows. The Anarchists emptied their pistols repeatedly. From time to time we glimpsed the hand which held a gun as the grimy shreds of lace curtain were edged aside. Once I saw the side of a face, when the man who had fired drew back behind the wall. To have stood behind the curtain in the window opening would have been certain death, as the guardsmen’s bullets streamed in.
This inferno of small-arms fire was now so intense that most of the time it was almost impossible to make one’s voice heard. The revolutionaries were either using the shelter of the wall of the window-casement when they fired or shooting from far back, at the rear of the room, with no hope of an accurate aim. They dodged from window to window. One was shooting from so high up that I believe he must have been standing on a chair or a step-ladder.
I had been so absorbed by this that I had not noticed Sherlock Holmes move away. Now I turned and saw him approaching again.
“I have been talking to Wodehouse,” he said, “The Home Secretary is sending for a field-gun and its crew from the Horse Artillery in St John’s Wood. That will never do. This is London, not Moscow or Odessa.”
Still we saw nothing of the gunmen, except a hand with a gun at the corner of a window or a glimpse of eyes or chin as the net curtain blew aside. One of their bullets smashed through the brewery gates and there was a smell of escaping gas. Holmes scanned the attic floor of Union Jack Tailoring, above the windows which the gunmen were using. I doubt if any other pair of eyes was raised that high. There had been no movement there and no sign of life.
“I shall not be long,” he said.
I could only assume that he was going to find Lestrade, who was still not to be seen, and possibly to seek out Mycroft Holmes in case he had made the journey from Whitehall.
“I wondered why Holmes should care about Moscow or Odessa?” I asked Captain Nott-Bower beside me.
“Look around you,” said the captain grimly, “The windows are full of women and girls leaning out, there are men and boys watching from the chimneys, let alone the crowds at either end of the street. Artillery fire at this range would do untold damage and the shell splinters or fragments of debris would be lethal. Moscow and Odessa were proof of that. To clear all these buildings of people would take until darkness falls. I really wonder what Winston is thinking of.”
I was also about to wonder aloud where Holmes had gone, when the captain scanned the attic floor and said,
“Do you see that tailor’s workshop? The sign in the window, on a card?”
“I do.”
“It is upside down! It was not so when we took up our position.”
“I daresay one of the gunmen went up there to spy on our positions. He moved the sign away to peep out and replaced it incorrectly without realising it.”
“Why did he not simply look out of the window beside it or over it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Look at it!” said Nott-Bower impatiently, “Do you not see?”
“I see that it is upside down. What can that matter, in the middle of all this?”
He spoke very quietly.
“Do you not know, doctor, that the Union Jack flag, flown upside down, is the sailor’s international distress signal?”
At that moment I knew where my friend had gone. A few hundred pairs of eyes had watched Martin’s Buildings that morning and had noticed nothing. But a trivial oddity of this kind was the breath of life to Sherlock Holmes. Just then, there was a murmuring from the crowd. Their eyes were lifted, not to the attic windows but to the roof. White smoke was drifting thinly from the rear chimney of the house opposite where I stood. Just then a bullet smashed the window of a house at the side of the yard gates, not two feet from where we stood. Nott-Bower nudged me and we made our way, with heads down, running across the street to “dead ground” on the far side, out of the gunmen’s field of vision.
As we approached the street corner, trying to get round to the rear of Martin’s Buildings, the fusillade continued overhead. To my alarm, someone at a ground floor window of the Rising Sun shouted, “There they are! More of them! Let them have it!”
Then I saw that, just ahead of us, a shadow had fallen within the window of the ground-floor room at the street corner. That was what had caused the excitement to run higher. Several bullets shattered that window before a shout countermanded this action for fear that we might be hit. Stories ran through the crowd that two newspapermen had been killed by spent bullets flying off the walls. There were now said to be at least eight Anarchists occupying the houses and some had their women with them. Other spectators claimed to have seen hostages in the buildings. One thing was certain, as I looked back a second drift of white smoke eddied out round a window on the attic floor, above the gunmen’s strongpoint.
There was a fearful expectancy at this and the crowds fell silent. Was the house on fire? If so, had the gunmen set it alight in a last mad act of defiance? It seemed to me more likely that, as they kept up their attack from the floor below the attic, they knew nothing of it. As I drew out into the street a little, there was a brief, bright bloom of flame behind an attic window, and then it was gone. The spectators’ excitement was divided now between the duel of pistols against rifles and a subdued glow behind the upper windows.
We took a last view before turning the corner opposite the Rising Sun to get to the alleyway at the rear of Martin’s Buildings. There was another puff of flame in the attics, illuminating the interior, and another cry as the crowd recognised the shape of a man. From where I stood, he seemed to be lifting or pulling something, which vanished as the flame died down again. Yet his profile was graven in my mind-or had I seen what I expected to see? If it was Holmes, how had he got in and what was he doing? And how would he get out?
Ahead of Nott-Bower, I worked my way round to the back of the houses. It was a no man’s land of little yards and sheds, providing ample cover. Here and there were police officers in the nondescript plain clothes of city streets, carrying shotguns and sporting rifles, borrowed at short notice from a Whitechapel gunsmith. Any one of them might have been taken for an Anarchist, as was presumably intended, and I wondered that they had not shot one another by now. At last I hailed a uniformed inspector.
“There is a man in that house, a criminal investigator. He is coming out and I believe he is bringing someone with him. Hold your fire. I am a medical man and you may need me.”
The inspector appeared to chew this over for a moment before replying.
“There is no one in that house but the men who seized it. Please stand back, sir. Every room was checked last night and the residents removed. No one has come or gone since then.”
“There is a man in that house and his name is…”
“Sherlock Holmes.”
It was Captain Nott-Bower just behind me and the change which came over the inspector was wonderful to see.
“For what reason he entered I cannot imagine,” Nott-Bower continued, “but Mr Holmes was illuminated by the fire against an attic window just now. I do not see how we can get him out ourselves, but you will certainly not shoot him if he does so.”
“We saw no one enter, sir.”
“That does not surprise me in the least,” said Nott-Bower caustically
“The only man to pass this way was the gas company’s supervisor, to turn off the supply at the main behind us.”
Nott-Bower and I exchanged a glance but said nothing. Just then there was a puff of flame behind a rear window and a crack of timber under the roof. Even here, the exchange of gunfire in the street made the ears sing.
“Holmes was seen in the house at the far end,” I added as I followed the inspector and Captain Nott-Bower through the little yards at the back. We reached the end of the row. The door to a back room had been opened and from above us the sound of firing continued. Whatever else had brought Holmes here it was not a plan for silencing the gunmen. Looking through the open back door into that ground-floor room, I could see that it was filling with the same thin white smoke. It drifted like steam off the padded chairs, as if they might burst into flame without warning.
Then, as calmly as if this were Baker Street, Holmes came silently down the stairs, leading a girl by the hand. She was slightly-built, undernourished, about fourteen or fifteen years old, dishevelled, pale and terrified. My friend’s clothes were covered in dust and there were streaks of black about his face.
“This is Anna,” he said reassuringly, “she does not speak perfect English but she is no Anarchist. The next time you search a house of this kind, inspector, you might bear in mind that the upper floor is very likely to be a sweatshop. The girls or children who work for a pittance as seamstresses sometimes hide up there to sleep the night, rather then find their bed under the arches of the bridges or the corners of the markets. They know very well how to conceal themselves from a search.”
The inspector ignored him, shouting to his men to fall in with their shotguns and prepare to assault the gunmen’s strongpoint by the back door and the stairs. Holmes stared coldly at their sporting weapons.
“You will be slaughtered by their Mausers. They will get off twenty or thirty shots for every one of yours. In any case, you have left it too late. The building is ablaze. The bullets have hit the gas-pipes and set the fumes alight. Even if you are not ambushed on the stairs, you will not reach the room where the men are defending themselves. There are two of them left and they have made their choice of how to die. You had far better grant them that.”
As we stood in the yard, the flames were already eating at the edges of the wooden stairs. There was no more talk of storming the building. We soon heard that the crowds in the street had seen one gunman lit by the flames as he stood behind the glass panels of the front door. A burst of rifle-fire drove him back, grievously wounded or dead. A second surge of flame illuminated another of the defenders, face-down on a bed with his face buried in the pillow. It seemed he was already dead.
The firing from the blazing house stopped long before the arrival of the horse artillery. By the time that I had accompanied Holmes and his young charge to the front of the building, the shooting had stopped on both sides. A fire engine followed the artillery. It was impossible to imagine that anyone was left alive as the blazing attic, its timbers glowing and masonry crashing, collapsed into the floor below, where the defenders had been.
By now the guardsmen were firing into the front door and the street-level windows at point-blank range. There was no response. The house was a roaring column of flame as exploding gas fuelled the conflagration. The Scots Guards still knelt with rifles aimed at the doorway, lest a fugitive might bolt down the street but the time for that was long past. When the roof and the floors had fallen in and a volume of flame shot skywards, the besiegers formed themselves up to withdraw. Only the hoses of the firemen played on the remains.
How many of the gunmen died or whether any escaped, before or after the arrival of the police, was anyone’s guess. Later on, the remains of the house were searched. Among the burnt debris were the head and arms of one man and the skull of another with a bullet-hole in its back. Several Mauser pistols which had exploded in the heat of the fire lay close by. The remains of a dressmaker’s dummy and the bodies of several sewing-machines were all that remained of the Union Jack Tailoring shop. There were parts of metal bedsteads and containers for acetylene or gas, which had the shape of torpedoes and a usefulness as bomb-cases. From these fragments, the world was to construct what explanation it could.
Anna, the protégée of Sherlock Holmes, was handed over with all kindness to the Salvation Army matrons, who had set up their camp beyond the police cordon to minister as they might. They would return her to her mother and sisters in Whitechapel.
“But how could a girl like that know such a thing?” I demanded. “She is Polish? And yet she knows the seaman’s distress signal of a Union Jack flown upside down?”
Holmes smiled.
“Her father is Polish and served for many years in the merchant marine. On a humbler level than Mr Joseph Conrad, but no less usefully, he entertained her with the tales and customs of the sea. This one caught her imagination. It is not a custom that you had encountered?”
I was a little put out by this.
“It was one that I knew perfectly well. But with bullets flying in all directions I was hardly likely to keep watch as to whether someone had turned a tradesman’s card in a window upside down.”
He nodded indulgently.
“Indeed so. I fear that on such occasions, my dear Watson, you see but you do not observe. The distinction is quite clear and not unimportant.”
The fire had, as it seemed to me, destroyed many of the answers to the mystery which led to the “Siege of Sidney Street.” The most intriguing, if the press were to be believed, was what had become of the sinister and cold-blooded figure of “Peter the Painter.” Had he died in the fire or was he safely back in Paris, or Berlin, or Moscow? He was certainly real enough. He had a history of subversion and assassination in the police dossiers of the world. He also had a future in the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union, though Sherlock Holmes was one of the very few who predicted that. No one could agree as to who commanded him or who obeyed him, let alone in what disguise he might be found. In England, it seemed that he had come and gone, died perhaps, in the few weeks following the Houndsditch murders.
Because I had seen him, I was pestered a little by the press but I could tell them nothing they did not know already. I thought he was one more paragon of evil who had set out to destroy Sherlock Holmes-and had failed.
So I sat down to compose our narrative of the Anarchist uprising. Holmes was out and it was a fine February afternoon with the rime of the frost still clinging to the grass of the Regent’s Park. Being a Saturday, our landlady Mrs Hudson had gone to visit her sister in Dulwich. Even Mary Jane, the maid-of-all-work, had gone walking with her “young man.” The house was quiet, the traffic subdued, and I had begun.
On a morning in early December, three years before the Great War, Mrs Hedges brought us the unusual story of a yellow canary…
I had written a page or two more when there was a ring at the front door. I cursed to myself but it is a “rule of business,” as Holmes says, to leave no summons unanswered. I put down my pen, descended the stairs, and opened the front door.
“Mr Hoolmes! Mr Share-lock Hoolmes!”
I froze with terror-and it was no cliché-or should I say my heart leapt to my throat. There was no mistaking who he was. He had not died in the fires of Sidney Street, whatever the authorities might hope. I thought helplessly that my Army revolver was locked in the desk upstairs and that I was alone in the house. Perhaps if I could make him believe that the landlady or the maid was within earshot he would not dare to murder me…
“You are alone, I think. But whoever you are, you are not Mr Share-lock Hoolmes. Perhaps when I tell you my name, Piatkoff, you will comprendre.”
It was the same coat with astrakhan collar, the same broad-brimmed hat. But now the voice was quiet and a fine scorn animated his features with his dark neat-cut hair, the aristocratic profile and beaked nose.
Had I known of his visit in advance, I could have prepared myself. For the moment the shock was so great that the power of speech was beyond me. He stood up a little taller, his head went back a little and he seemed about to utter a laugh of diabolical triumph.
Then, as if in my unconscious mind the entire mystery of the past few weeks was revealed, I exclaimed,
“Holmes!”
He laughed, drew breath, and then laughed again. It was not the satanic cackle of Piatkoff but the ebullient chuckle of my friend.
“Holmes, what the devil…”
“My dear Watson-I could not resis…” Laughter stifled him on the doorstep for a moment. “I could not resist one more little impersonation. I could not forgo the sight of your face when… Surely, my dear old fellow, you noticed that when Piatkoff materialised before you on previous occasions, I was always conveniently elsewhere? Truly, truly, you see but you do not observe! ”
I was so shaken that I simply stood back and watched him go up the stairs. He shrugged off the astrakhan-trimmed coat and sent the hat skimming on to the rack. The greasepaint that had subtly flushed his complexion was wiped off. The wads that had heightened those cheeks were pulled from above the gums, he disappeared into his room and disposed of the gum arabic and gutta percha which had made the alteration of his nose possible, and he peeled away the fine set of whiskers.
By the time that he returned I had almost finished the glass of whisky which the occasion demanded. Wiping his hands on one of Mrs Hudson’s clean towels, he remarked,
“You must save some of the blame for Brother Mycroft, Watson, for it was his apartment that I used as my dressing room. ”
“Your brother knows the truth of this charade?”
“Indeed.”
“And Lestrade?”
“The truth is not something that one always tells to a susceptible fellow like Lestrade.”
“But to what purpose?”
He sighed and sat down.
“No one in the Anarchist movement here is certain of Piatkoff. Nor of his appearance, for he has so many. Nor of his voice or manner, for it changes in a moment. Nor of his whereabouts. There are so many spies, so many Anarchist movements spying on one another, that he does not advertise when or where he comes and goes. He is like the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, though far less amiable.”
“But he cannot be so secret.”
Holmes reached for his pipe.
“Secrecy is all to these people. The names of the few are not known to the many, much less their disguises. They cannot betray, even if they wished to. Piatkoff is still in Paris but most of the Anarchist group in London -and the Metropolitan Police-believe him to be in England, dead or alive.”
“But to what end?”
“Mycroft and I devised a plan which we divulged to no other person. It hinged upon making the press, the police, and even you, my dear fellow, believe that Piatkoff was in London and that I in my impersonation was he. We were careful to deal only with those who had never met him. Sidney Street was the arsenal of those who sought European revolution and whose first weapon was assassination.”
“Assassination of whom?”
He pulled a face.
“I was told more of assassination than I expected. The list includes the King, the Prime Minister, and Winston Churchill as Home Secretary, who therefore commands the nation’s police force. Among many other names, my own appears. I confess I should have been disappointed had it not been so. You, for some reason, are omitted. My performance as Piatkoff in the street below us and the notoriety which the press gave me for that were of great assistance. The search which you and your two policeman undertook through the streets of Stepney was invaluable. I promise you, it was essential that you should all have believed in my masquerade. There are spies everywhere. Imagine trying to get Lestrade to act a part. He would not last five minutes.”
“You bought firearms from E. M. Reilly & Co in New Oxford Street and had them delivered to a contact at the Anarchist Club?”
“Indeed, several very efficient rifles of a kind which the trade of assassination thrives upon. You saw them in action at Sidney Street. One of them I managed to rescue during my visit to the burning house. The comrades come by hand-guns quite easily but they are remarkably short of rifles. I do not believe they possessed one until my gifts to them. Rifles, they believe quite correctly, are ‘the weapons of assassination.”’
“But this is madness!” I said.
He shook his head.
“No, Watson, this is cold and absolute sanity. Mycroft and I agreed that I should become their quartermaster. They would look to me for their supplies and they could not do that without telling me of their needs. By knowing of their needs, I should learn their plans and the objects of their campaign of assassination. I should become not their servant but their master.”
“And Lestrade?”
“Lestrade knows nothing of this and never will. As it proves, the charade is over.”
I tried to compose myself.
“Let me have this straight. You supplied these men with live ammunition and rifles, which as it turns out were used in an attempt to assassinate the Home Secretary in Sidney Street?”
“They were supplied for that purpose but we had no idea that Sidney Street would be the occasion. Mr Churchill, of course, was bound to be the target in the circumstances.”
“And did he know?”
“He insisted.”
I did not want to call my old friend a liar. Yet I could not swallow the story that anyone, Home Secretary or not, would agree to face marksmens’ live bullets at lethal range with no protection.
The last act of this farce, if I may call it that, was the most extraordinary. Holmes promised to convince me, but I did not see how. Next morning, he said only that we should have visitors that afternoon. Once again, it was one of those occasions when Mrs Hudson was engaged elsewhere. Just after four o’clock as the lamps were lit along Baker Street and the shops shone brightly, a cab pulled up and Holmes went down to answer the door.
There were several voices on the stairs. Into the room came Mycroft Holmes with two strangers who looked, to say the least, curious. I recognised one from his carte-de-visite, which he had left one day on finding that Sherlock Holmes was not at home. He was Chung Ling Soo, the Marvellous Chinese Conjuror of the Wood Green Empire Music Hall. With him was his wife, Suee Seen. My first impression was that they were not Chinese at all, indeed subsequent events revealed that they were William and Olive Robinson.
“In order that you may be convinced of the safety in which the Home Secretary stood,” Holmes said to me, “Mr Chung Ling Soo and his wife are now going to shoot me. Unless you would prefer to do so.”
Mycroft Holmes seemed entirely unperturbed.
“Certainly not,” I said.
The pantomime proceeded. Two rifles had been brought, one of them purchased by Holmes from E. M. Reilly, the other presumably supplied by the conjuror. Holmes handed me two bullets, inviting me to scratch some identifying mark on each. With growing unease I did so. He handed them to his brother. Each of the rifles was then loaded and the charge rammed home. There was no question that they were using live ammunition. Chung Ling Soo took one of the guns and Mycroft Holmes the other. I truly believed that I was about to see Mycroft Holmes try to shoot dead his younger brother.
“Stop this!” I said furiously, “Such trickery is dangerous!”
Gunfire had not been unknown in our sitting-room, as Holmes picked out patterns in the plaster with revolver shots from my own weapon. This was far from such amusements. Holmes took up a silver dish, a tribute from one of our clients, and walked to the far end of the room, a range of about twenty feet. He held the dish out at chest height, as if offering it. I sat in my chair and felt sick with anxiety. Mycroft and the conjuror raised their rifles, taking deadly aim at Holmes’s heart.
The barks of the guns were almost simultaneous. Flame shot from the barrels followed by a thin cloud of powder and a stink of burnt cordite. Holmes did not even flinch. Instead, there were two sounds, each like a “ping!” as something seemed to fall into the silver dish that he held out to receive it. He walked across and presented to me the two bullets which I had marked with my own initials. It was evident that he had somehow “palmed” these, yet two shots had surely been fired in earnest.
“Our Home Secretary was in no more danger than I,” he said gently. “By his coolness he drew their fire and gave us their positions before they could do us any damage.”
“And if they had used the Mausers first?”
“The gunmen could not aim without moving the curtain. The moment a Mauser barrel appeared, he would have been thrown behind a convenient steel screen. One was already in position. Happily, this was not the case.”
The secret of the “firing-squad trick,” performed twice nightly to great applause by Chung Ling Soo on the stage of the Wood Green Empire, was now revealed to me. It required a small alteration in the mechanism of a rifle. The barrel and its bullet were sealed off from the detonation. The gases and the force of the explosion were directed down the tube running along under the barrel of the rifle, the gun’s safety valve and a convenient place otherwise for keeping a cleaning rod. By the time that an assassin suspected such a trick, it would be too late.
As we sat in the aftermath of cordite fumes, I knew at once the answer to the mystery of the soldering-iron fumes at the breakfast-table and Holmes hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. Of course he had spent the night with brother Mycroft or the Wonderful Chinese Conjuror, preparing three or four Lee Enfield rifles for delivery to Jubilee Hall.
I cannot conclude without adding that some of the actors in the dramas of Houndsditch and Sidney Street were to be heard of again, not least the Home Secretary whose fame was to echo across the world. Chung Ling Soo, Wonderful Chinese Conjuror, fell victim to his own cleverness. Constant removal of his rifle’s breech-block at every performance had worn the mechanism dangerously. One night, the bullet in the barrel was accidentally fired. Our benefactor fell dying on the stage of the Wood Green Empire Music Hall before his Saturday night audience on 23 March 1918.
As for Peter the Painter, it was certain that before his arrival in Paris, he had been a medical student in his native Russia and that he returned there from Paris soon after the battle in London. Meantime he had worked as a theatrical scene painter and thereby acquired his nickname. To avoid being conscripted into the army of the Tsar in 1914, he travelled to Germany and was not heard of again publicly until the Communist Revolution of 1917 brought him back to Petrograd.
I have before me a cutting from The Times of 14 April 1920. It was Sherlock Holmes who noticed a letter from Russia and read it out to me at the breakfast table. Its author signed himself only as “S.” He revealed that a list of 189 workers had been published in Moscow, men who had been shot on the orders of the Extraordinary Committee for Combating Counter-Revolution. Their crime had been to hold a mass meeting in Petrograd, at the Poutiloff factory, where they denounced the Commissars and demanded “bread and liberty.” They accused the Bolshevists of offering them only, “prison, the whip, and bullets,” denying them even “the small political liberties enjoyed under the Tsarist regime.”
As the paper reported, Piatkoff, “the notorious Peter the Painter of Sidney Street fame,” had been despatched from Moscow to supervise the wholesale execution of these dissidents. Before being executed, they were informed that their crime had been to sully the name of liberty, which their great leader Lenin had re-defined as meaning the self-discipline of the proletariat.
I could not but shudder at this and at the name of the man who had taken up the trade of executioner. He was not the only ghost to haunt the future. Small wonder that when the Soviet Union created its secret service, the “Cheka,” it appointed as chairman the cousin of “The Limping Man,” Yoshka Sokoloff, who had died in the battle of Sidney Street. The new chairman, added The Times report, was “one of the cruellest of Cheka officers during the early years of the Terror.”