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.”