The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF

last woman, Ada Chard the baby-farmer. Other prisoners were transferred to nearby gaols. The building and its contents passed from the prison board to the city corporation. For several months, prior to demolition, it stood empty, ‘in the hands of the contractors.’ A supply of gas to the lamps was maintained and the unused gallows of the execution shed still remained in working order.
    How easy it must have been for the contractors to pass the custody of the empty building to subcontractors in those last weeks. Henry Milverton and his accomplices had devised a poetic extermination for Sherlock Holmes, a warning to others who might interfere with the workings of a mighty criminal empire. Yet Holmes was not naive enough to believe that all this had been done merely to destroy him, when they might as easily have run him down in the street or dropped a boulder on his head. His death delighted these men, but it was a mere pastime that coincided with some greater plan. Behind the charade of a court and a Newgate hanging lay a criminal enterprise that might shake the entire world. It was something that perhaps only he had the power to prevent. Whatever the plot might be, it depended on a criminal gang having possession of the prison for some weeks or months. What the objective might be, Holmes could not at the moment deduce. But he swore to himself that he would find out.
    The most curious aspect of his plight was that when sentence was pronounced upon him on the following day, he felt lighter in his heart than he had done since the nightmare began. It came as no shock to him, not even a surprise, to hear the ritual words in Henry Milverton’s oily tones. ‘You are to be taken back to the place whence you came and from thence to a place of lawful execution. And there you shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead.’ Any other man chained to the wall of the condemned cell, with guards outside and within, far from help and with the gallows waiting in the yard, must surely have given up hope. Yet Holmes put his faith in one indisputable fact. The power of his mind, the strength of his reason, the obser ving and analytical machine that he became at such times, were stronger than all his captors put together.
    The man whom they called the master-at-arms, a burly and grizzled fellow, led him away in handcuffs from the last act of the trial. This time he was not immediately returned to his cell, but taken in an opposite direction. The prisoner and his escort came to an iron-faced door topped by steel spikes. The master-at-arms produced a heavy key and opened the largest Bramah lock that Holmes had ever seen, drawing back its bronze bolt with a massive rumbling. They crossed the paved floor of a somber high-roofed lodge, from which it was possible to hear the sound of traffic in the street, and passed through a doorway leading to what had evidently been the prison governor’s office. The walls were still hung with notices by the Court of Aldermen forbidding liquors to be brought into the prison or setting out rules for clerks and attorneys who were visiting their clients.
    In a well-lit anteroom, where descriptions of prisoners were taken, an open cupboard displayed the irons worn by the notorious burglar, highwayman, and prison-breaker of a century before, Jack Shepherd—iron bars an inch and a half thick and fifteen inches long. Holmes noticed irons for the legs, about an inch in diameter and clasped with strong rivets. On the wall of the office there still hung two old paintings of the penal colony at Botany Bay. Yet his attention was held by three rows of faces arranged along the top of a low cupboard. They were the death masks of men and women who had been hanged at the prison for a hundred years past.
    Henry Milverton was behind him now, pointing out a prize specimen among the masks. ‘There, Mr. Holmes, is Cour voisier, publicly hanged more than sixty years ago for the murder of Lord William Russell. You will see that the