I put down my fork. “Fallow was working for Vickers,” I said. “In a limited capacity. But working for him. Which means that when Cloth died, Fallow had a reason to ensure it stayed buried that had nothing to do with Grice. And when Satterthwaite died three years later, he had a reason to ensure the investigation went no further than the most convenient suspect.” Holmes set down his glass. “He was protecting himself on two fronts. Grice’s history with Vickers made him a plausible candidate for one crime and a coercible witness to the other. A situation Fallow had done very little to arrange and had only to maintain.” “What will you do,” I said. “I have written to Lestrade,” Holmes said. “And to a barrister of considerably more substance than Mr. Cornelius Fetch.”
He returned to his dinner. I sat for a while thinking about Grice, the stillness of him, the pale eyes, the way he had given the location of a dead man from twenty-three years ago without pausing or checking himself, as though he had been over it so many times it had become something close to ordinary. And about the knighthood notice, cut out and kept and then thrown away. That detail stayed with me more than anything else had. “Holmes,” I said. “Mm.” “Did Grice know about Fallow’s connection to Vickers. When he wrote to you. Did he know what you would find with Cloth.” Holmes looked up. “What do you think.” I thought about the letter. Its plainness, its precision. Not a word in it that appealed to sympathy or asked for anything beyond the specific. A man who had waited twenty years and then written, when the moment came, with the economy of someone who had long since stopped wasting anything. “Yes,” I said. “I think he knew.” “So do I,” Holmes said. “Which is why I found the letter interesting.” He reached for his wine. “An innocent man who is also guilty of something. A guilty man who is also a victim of something. And a third man who is neither innocent nor guilty of the things the world currently believes about him.” He seemed genuinely pleased by this, not by the suffering involved, I do not think he was indifferent to that, but by the way the pieces fitted together after twenty years of sitting separately. “It does concentrate the mind,” he said. “Twenty years in a prison cell.”
The exhumation was carried out in the second week of March. The waste ground in Bermondsey had become a yard behind a chandler’s supply warehouse whose owner cooperated with the police with the baffled goodwill of a man who has no idea what is happening but is not the sort to obstruct it. The remains of Peter Cloth were found where Grice had said they would be. The oilskin wallet was with them, twenty-three years in the ground having done less damage to its contents than might have been expected. Lestrade came to Baker Street the evening before the exhumation and Holmes laid it all out for him across an hour and a half and three cups of tea that went cold in sequence while Lestrade listened and said very little. He asked two questions, both practical, and left without committing himself to anything, which was his way when he was genuinely uncertain rather than merely resistant, and Holmes said afterward that this was a good sign. Lestrade followed the evidence once he had satisfied himself it was there, and he was practical enough to understand that a knighted justice of the peace was not beyond the law simply by virtue of being knighted, though I suspect it gave him pause.
Fallow was arrested in April. He was sixty-one years old and had managed a distinguished legal career and a respected public presence for twenty years with what must have been, from the inside, a considerable ongoing effort. He had a wife, three adult children, four grandchildren, and a house that had been written about favourably in a county journal. When the police came he was in his study after breakfast reading his correspondence with a cup of tea gone cold at his elbow. He said nothing when they told him why they were there. I was not present but the detail of the cold tea stayed with me when I heard it, the ordinary morning interrupted and left exactly as it was, everything still in its place. Edmund Grice’s conviction was reviewed and overturned in June. He had served twenty years. Holmes read the judgment in the papers on a Saturday morning and set them aside. He had moved on to three other cases in the intervening months and was currently absorbed in something involving a shipping company and doctored manifests. The Grice matter did not seem to require comment from him. I felt it required some. “Twenty years,” I said. “Yes,” Holmes said. “Is that all you have to say about it.” Holmes put down his papers and thought about it, genuinely, in the way he did when something was harder than it was complicated. “Grice is out,” he said. “Fallow will answer for what he did. Cloth has been found, which is something, at whatever distance.” He was quiet for a moment. “The part that does not resolve is the twenty years. And that part does not resolve regardless of what one says about it, which is why I generally prefer not to say anything about it.”