“That is him. Cloth worked for Vickers in a different capacity. Vickers believed Cloth had begun to talk about what he knew of the operation. I was not told beforehand what was going to happen. I was told to help afterward.” Grice paused. “I was twenty years old and I was frightened and I helped, and I have thought about it most days since.” “Where,” Holmes said. “There was waste ground behind the yard. It was built over afterward, a tannery. The tannery is gone now too.” “Where precisely.” Grice told him. He gave the location in the steady careful way of a man who has held a piece of information in his memory for so long that it has worn grooves, coming out now exactly as it went in twenty-three years ago. Holmes wrote it down without comment. “Now,” he said, setting down his pen. “Tell me about Gerald Satterthwaite.”
The story Grice told was this. He had gone to work for Satterthwaite in 1867, having removed himself from Vickers’s operation with some difficulty and a firm intention to do something more legitimate with whatever remained of his prospects. Satterthwaite was not an admirable employer but he was a legal one, and Grice had worked for him without serious incident for two years. In the autumn of 1869 Satterthwaite had been killed. Grice had not done it. The man who had, Grice believed, was a junior partner in the legal firm that handled Satterthwaite’s accounts. A young man named Hector Fallow, who had been stealing from those accounts for the better part of a year and had killed Satterthwaite when it became clear the theft was about to be discovered. “How do you know this,” Holmes said. “Because Fallow told me. Not directly. Not as a confession. He came to see me in the cells before the trial.” Grice’s hands were still on the table. “He told me he knew about Peter Cloth. That if I said anything about him, anything at all, he would ensure Cloth came to light and I would hang for that as well as for Satterthwaite.” A pause. “I believed him. So I said nothing and I was convicted of a murder I did not commit.” “And Fallow is now a justice of the peace in Surrey.” “He was knighted four years ago. I read about it in a newspaper someone had left in the library.” Grice was quiet for a moment. “I cut the notice out and kept it for a while. Then I decided that was not a healthy thing to be doing and I threw it away.” Holmes looked at him with the focused quality he took on when a case had his full attention, not aggressive, not sympathetic particularly, just completely present. “You understand,” he said, “that by telling me about Cloth you have placed yourself in considerable legal jeopardy. Whatever happens with Fallow, the matter of Cloth will require addressing.” “I am sixty-two years old,” Grice said, “and I have been in this room for twenty years. Legal jeopardy is not something I find very alarming at this stage of things.” Holmes looked at him for another moment. Then he picked up his pen. “Tell me everything you remember about Alma Pegg,” he said.
What Holmes did in the ten days following our visit to HM Prison Pentonville I can only partially account for, as he shared very little of it and I had my practice to attend to. I know he spent two days in Bermondsey, one of which involved, by his own sparse account, a considerable amount of digging in the company of a man he described only as reliable. I know he visited the Surrey court records. I know he found Alma Pegg, now a Mrs. Alma Suthers, living in Deptford with a married daughter, because he mentioned it at dinner one evening with the casual tone he used when something had gone exactly as he expected. “She was paid,” he said, reaching for the bread. “Not extravagantly. Enough.” “To lie at the trial,” I said. “To be certain of what she saw when she had in fact seen very little. There is a distinction and it matters. She believed herself to be telling the truth. She had simply been very carefully helped to arrive at it.” He broke the bread. “The bloodstained cuff is more interesting. It was placed in Grice’s lodgings by someone with access to both the scene and his room. The landlady of 1869 is dead, but her son remembers a well-dressed man asking to see the rooms on the day before the body was found.” “Fallow,” I said. “Almost certainly. Though a twenty-year-old memory from a man who was then a boy will not satisfy a court on its own.” He ate for a moment in the absent way he sometimes did when the meal was secondary to thinking. “The body will satisfy a court. Or rather, what was found with it.” I looked up. “Cloth had papers on him when he died,” Holmes said. “Vickers’s operation, documented in some detail, which is presumably why Vickers decided he had become a liability. They were in an oilskin wallet in his coat pocket and they survived rather better than he did.” He reached for his wine. “Among the names in those papers is Gerald Satterthwaite, which establishes a connection between Satterthwaite and Vickers that Fallow did not know about. And among the transactions recorded is one that places a payment in 1866 to a legal clerk matching Fallow’s description, for services rendered in relation to a property matter that Vickers needed handled discreetly.”