‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ Harriman snapped. ‘Do you not recognise your own chief warder?’
‘Open the gate!’ Hawkins added. ‘There’s not a moment to lose.’
The guard did as he was bidden and the five of us passed through.
And yet, even as we went, I found myself reflecting on the number of strange circumstances that had come together to effect my friend’s escape. He had feigned illness and managed to fool a trained doctor. Well, that was easy enough. He had done much the same to me. But he had inveigled himself into a room in the infirmary at exactly the same time as a coffin had been delivered and had, moreover, been able to count on an open door, a coughing fit and the clumsiness of a mentally backward orderly. It all seemed too good to be true. Not, of course, that I cared one way or another. If Holmes had truly found a miraculous way out of this place, I would be nothing but overjoyed. But even so I was sure that something was wrong, that we had leapt to a false conclusion and, perhaps, that was exactly what he had intended.
We found ourselves in a broad, rutted avenue that ran along the side of the prison with the high wall on one side and a line of trees on the other. Harriman let out a cry and pointed. A wagon stood waiting while two men loaded a box into the back: from the size and the shape it was evidently a makeshift coffin. I must confess that I felt a moment of relief at the sight of it. I would have given almost anything right then to see Sherlock Holmes and to reassure myself that his illness had indeed been feigned and not the result of deliberate poisoning. But as we hurried forward, my brief euphoria was replaced by utter dismay. If Holmes were found and apprehended, he would be dragged back into the prison and Harriman would make sure that he was never given a second opportunity and that he remained well beyond my reach.
‘Hold there!’ cried he. He strode up to the two men who had manhandled the box into a diagonal position and were holding it, about to lever it into the wagon. ‘Lower the coffin back to the ground! I wish to examine it.’ The men were rough and grimy labourers, a father and son from the look of them, and they glanced at each other quizzically before they obeyed. The coffin lay flat upon the gravel. ‘Open it!’
This time the men hesitated — to carry a dead body was one thing but to look on it quite another.
‘It’s all right,’ Trevelyan assured them, and the strange thing is that it was at that very moment that I realised how I knew him, where we had met before.
His full name was Percy Trevelyan and he had come to our Baker Street lodgings six or seven years before, urgently in need of my friend’s services. I remembered now that there had been a patient, Blessingdon, who had behaved in a mysterious fashion and who had eventually been found hanged in his room… the police had assumed that it was suicide, an opinion with which Holmes had at once disagreed. It was strange that I had not recognised him immediately for I had admired Trevelyan and had studied his work on nervous diseases — he had won the Bruce Pinkerton prize, no less. But circumstances had not been kind to him then, and had clearly become worse since, for he had aged considerably, with a look of exhaustion and frustration that had changed his appearance. As I recalled, he had not worn spectacles when we first met. His health had clearly deteriorated. But it was certainly he, reduced to the role of prison doctor, a position that was well beneath a man of his capabilities, and it occurred to me, with a sense of excitement that I was careful to conceal, that he must have colluded in this attempted escape. He certainly owed Holmes a debt of gratitude and why else would he have pretended not to know me? Now I understood how Holmes had got into the coffin in the first place. Trevelyan had placed his orderly in charge quite deliberately. Why else would he have trusted a man who was evidently unfit for any such responsibility? The coffin would have been placed nearby. Everything would have been planned in advance. The pity of it was that the two labourers had been so slow in their work. They should have been halfway to Muswell Hill, by now. Trevelyan’s assistance had been to no avail.
One of the labourers had produced a crowbar. I watched as it was placed under the lid. He pressed down and the lid of the coffin was torn free, the wood splintering. The two of them stepped forward and lifted it off. As one, Harriman, Hawkins, Trevelyan and I moved closer.
‘That’s him,’ Rivers grunted. ‘That’s Jonathan Wood.’
It was true. The corpse that lay staring up was a grey-faced, worn-out figure who was definitely not Sherlock Holmes and who was definitely dead. Trevelyan was the first to recover his composure. ‘Of course it’s Wood,’ he exclaimed. ‘I told you. He died in the night — a coronary infection.’
He nodded at the undertakers. ‘You may close the coffin and take him up.’
‘But where is Sherlock Holmes?’ Hawkins cried.
‘He cannot have left the prison!’ Harriman replied. ‘Somehow he tricked us, but he must still be inside, waiting his opportunity. We must raise the alarm and search the place from top to bottom.’
‘But that will take all night!’
Harriman’s face was as colourless as his hair. He span on his heel, almost kicking out in his vexation. ‘I don’t care if it takes all week! The man must be found.’
He wasn’t. Two days later, I was alone in Holmes’s lodgings, reading a report of the events that I had myself witnessed.
Police are still unable to explain the mysterious disappearance of the well-known consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, who was being held at Holloway Prison in connection with the murder of a young woman in Coppergate Square. Inspector J. Harriman who is in charge of the inquiry has accused the prison authorities of a dereliction of duty, a charge that has been strenuously denied. The fact remains that Mr Holmes somehow managed to spirit himself out of a locked cell and through a dozen locked doors in a manner that would appear to deny the laws of nature and the police are offering a reward of £50 to anyone who can supply information leading to his discovery and apprehension.
Mrs Hudson had responded to this strange state of affairs with a remarkable degree of indifference. She had, of course, read the newspaper accounts and had spoken but one brief sentence when she had served my breakfast. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense, Dr Watson.’ She seemed personally offended and it is somehow comforting to me, all these years later, to reflect that she had complete faith in her most famous lodger, but then she perhaps knew him better than anyone and had put up with all manner of peculiarities during the lengthy period that he was with her, including desperate and often undesirable visitors, the violin playing late into the night, the occasional seizures induced by liquid cocaine, the long bouts of melancholy, the bullets fired into the wallpaper and even the pipe smoke. True, Holmes paid her handsomely, but she hardly ever complained and remained loyal to the end. Although she flits in and out of my pages, I actually knew very little about her, not even how she came to occupy the property at 221 Baker Street (I believe she inherited it from her husband, although what became of him I cannot say). After Holmes left, she lived alone. I wish I had conversed with her more and taken her for granted a little less.
At any event, my sojourn was interrupted by the arrival of that lady, and with her, another visitor. I had indeed heard the doorbell ring and a footfall on the stair but preoccupied as I was, these sounds had barely registered so I was unprepared for the arrival of the Reverend Charles Fitzsimmons, the principal of Chorley Grange School, and greeted him, I am afraid, with a look of blank puzzlement, as if we had never met before.