“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.

10

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.

11

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.”