He picked up his papers again. I sat with my coffee gone cold, thinking about what it takes to wait twenty years for something. To keep your evidence and your patience and your plan all in one piece, inside a prison, with nothing to do but think. I have never managed to be patient about anything for more than a fortnight. I mean that less as a confession than it might sound.
Grice was released on a Thursday morning in July. Holmes mentioned it in passing while looking for a paper he had mislaid, in the tone he used for things he did not want to make too much of. I asked if he had heard from him. “A note,” Holmes said, finding the paper under his chemical journals. “Brief. Adequate.” He did not offer to show it to me and I did not ask. I thought about writing to Grice myself and in the end did not, and have occasionally wondered since whether I should have. There is probably nothing very useful that a stranger can say to a man who has just been given back something taken from him twenty years ago. But there might have been something in it worth saying anyway, and I am not entirely sure that things need to be useful to be worth saying. Holmes, of course, would have disagreed with that entirely. Which is, I have always thought, both his greatest limitation and the thing that makes him what he is.
Sir Hector Fallow was tried in November 1889 on charges of murder, perversion of justice, and fraud. He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. His counsel argued that the evidence was circumstantial and the principal witness against him unreliable. The jury took three hours. Edmund Grice attended every day of the trial. He sat in the public gallery and I am told he was very still throughout, and that when the verdict was read he did not visibly react at all. I was not there myself. Holmes was, though he did not tell me so until afterward. When I asked why he had gone he said only that he had wanted to see the thing finished. I thought that was probably not the whole of it. But it was enough.