Donald Thomas - Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

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.