Holmes had read it three times over breakfast, which was how I knew he found it genuinely interesting rather than merely curious. He read things he found merely curious once. “A man confesses to one murder in order to prove his innocence of another,” I said. “It is the most original approach to the problem I have encountered,” Holmes said. “Which is itself a point in his favour. Innocent men who have spent twenty years in prison generally write letters about their innocence. They do not generally introduce a previously unknown corpse.” He folded the letter along its original creases. “I want to see him Thursday. And I want you to find everything published about the Satterthwaite case before then.”
I spent Wednesday at the newspaper archive at the British Museum, which is a task I find less romantic in practice than in description. The reading room is cold in February and the volumes for 1869 had clearly been handled by a great many people over the years and showed it. The Satterthwaite murder had been reported thoroughly at the time, the trial covered in reasonable detail, and the conviction noted with the satisfied brevity that newspapers reserve for conclusions that confirm their earlier coverage. Reading back through it with twenty years of distance was an odd experience. The certainty of the original reporting sat uncomfortably against the knowledge that the man convicted had spent two decades denying it from a prison cell, which is the kind of thing that is easy to ignore when the reports are fresh and less easy when you are sitting in a cold reading room with nothing to do but think about it. The evidence, laid out in the columns of the trial reports, was not overwhelming but it was solid enough. The witness was a Mrs. Alma Pegg, a charwoman who worked in the building and had seen Grice on the stairs at the approximate time of death. The bloodstained cuff had been found in a box under his bed. Three colleagues had testified to the quarrel over wages, which had apparently been heated enough to be remembered clearly two years later. Grice had had a barrister who did what he could, which was not much. The jury had taken two hours. I brought my notes back to 221B Baker Street and laid them out for Holmes, who read them standing at the window with his coat still on, having returned from somewhere he declined to specify. “Mrs. Alma Pegg,” he said. “The charwoman. Yes.” “Trace her if you can. I want to know where she is now.” He set the notes on his desk. “And the barrister. Who was it.” I found the name. “A Mr. Cornelius Fetch. I don’t know him.” “Nor do I,” Holmes said, “which is itself informative. A barrister sufficiently obscure that I have never encountered his name in twenty years of practice.” He dropped his coat over the back of his chair in the way that made Mrs. Hudson despair of him. “Someone chose him deliberately. Someone who wanted Grice represented just adequately enough to satisfy the formality and no more.” I said nothing. It was the kind of observation that, once made, could not be unmade.
Pentonville on a Thursday morning in February is not an easy place to feel cheerful about. The sky was the colour of old pewter and the prison rose above the surrounding streets with the grim self-assurance of an institution that has never needed to advertise. Holmes and I were admitted after a period of waiting in a room that smelled of carbolic and bureaucratic patience, shown down a corridor by a warder who had the particular walk of a man who has made the same journey several thousand times and stopped thinking about it, and eventually brought to a small room with a table and three chairs and a window that admitted a quantity of grey February light that seemed to have given up some time before it got there. Edmund Grice was brought to us after a few minutes. He was a slight man, and prison had made him more so. Twenty years of it had not broken him, I thought, but it had worn him down to something harder and less, the way water wears stone, and what was left was very still. He had pale eyes that did not move much. He was clean and neat in the manner of a man who has decided that self-respect is the one variable remaining entirely in his own control. His hair was white and his hands, when he folded them on the table, stayed folded and did not move again. He looked at Holmes for a moment. “I expected you sooner,” he said. “The letter required some consideration,” Holmes said. “Not a great deal, but some. Tell me about Peter Cloth.”
“Peter Cloth was a receiver of stolen goods,” he said. “He worked out of a yard in Bermondsey, off the Old Kent Road. In the spring of 1866 I was twenty years old and I was not yet working for Satterthwaite. I was doing things I should not have been doing, which I will not dress up. I was running errands for a man named Vickers. Do you know that name.” “Thomas Vickers,” Holmes said. “Southwark. Died 1871.”