It was Holmes who noticed it first, as it was Holmes who noticed everything first, though on this occasion I maintain the observation was not entirely fair given that I had been awake since the previous morning and had only sat down at the breakfast table approximately four minutes before he began. It was early May morningin 1883, shortly after the episode with the snake and Holmes had been watching me eat for some time. I became aware of this gradually, in the way one becomes aware of a draught, not all at once but as a slow accumulation of mild discomfort. I was eating devilled kidneys and making no attempt at conversation, which seemed to me a reasonable position for a man who had not slept, and which Holmes was apparently finding interesting. “You might simply say good morning,” I said, without looking up. “Good morning,” Holmes said. “Typhoid. A boy, I think, or a young man. You have been at it since yesterday morning and he turned the corner sometime in the last two or three hours.” I put down my fork. “How.” “Your cuffs are still damp. Not wet, but not dry either, which puts the last cold application somewhere between two and four hours ago and suggests you were doing Brand’s method through the night rather than simply sitting with him. There is some redness on the backs of your hands consistent with repeated cold water contact over a sustained period.” He glanced at my coat on the hook by the door. “Your coat has been on and off all night rather than left somewhere, which means you were not expecting to stay as long as you did. And there is camphor on your right hand, faint but present, which tells me his heart gave you a fright at some point and you reached for the spirits.” “About two in the morning,” I said. “He steadied.” “The kidneys confirm the rest,” Holmes said. “What do the kidneys tell you.” “That you feel you have earned them.” He picked up his coffee. “You only order kidneys when you feel you have earned something. A routine call does not produce that feeling.” I ate for a moment. The fire was going well and Mrs. Hudson had left toast and the morning papers and the room had the particular comfortable quality it sometimes had at that hour, before the day had properly started and before Holmes had found something to make it complicated. He found something approximately four minutes later. “Watson,” he said, without looking up from his letters. “How do you feel about Pentonville Prison.” I looked at him. “Not today,” he said. “Thursday, I should think. There will need to be arrangements.” He held up an envelope. “A convicted murderer wishes to confess to a second murder. One I have never heard of.” I looked at my kidneys. I looked at Holmes. I reached for the coffee pot. “Tell me,” I said.
The letter had been written on prison paper in a hand that was careful and small, the hand of a man who has learned in confined circumstances to take up as little space as possible. It was addressed to Holmes by name and had been passed through the prison authorities with a note from the governor indicating that its contents had been read, found to be neither threatening nor seditious, and forwarded at the prisoner’s request. The governor’s note had a slightly baffled quality that I found sympathetic. The prisoner’s name was Edmund Grice. He was fifty-four years old and had been at Pentonville for twenty years, convicted in 1869 of the murder of a man named Gerald Satterthwaite, a money-lender of Clerkenwell, found beaten to death in his office on a Wednesday evening in October of that year. Grice had been a clerk in Satterthwaite’s employ. The evidence against him had been substantial: a witness who placed him at the scene, a bloodstained cuff found in his lodgings, and a history of quarrels with the victim over wages withheld. He had maintained his innocence throughout the trial and had continued to maintain it for twenty years without, apparently, convincing anyone. The letter did not revisit this. It did not protest or petition or rehearse the arguments of the original trial. It said, plainly and without preamble, the following: Mr. Holmes. My name is Edmund Grice and I am serving a life sentence at Pentonville for the murder of Gerald Satterthwaite, of which I am innocent, as I have said for twenty years to no effect. I am not writing about that. I am writing to confess to a different murder entirely, one that has never been investigated because the body has never been found. The man’s name was Peter Cloth. He was killed in March of 1866, three years before Satterthwaite, and I know where he is buried. I am telling you this because I am sixty-two years old and I do not expect to leave this prison alive, and because the man who actually killed Satterthwaite is currently a justice of the peace in Surrey and has spent twenty years sleeping soundly while I have not. I would like that to change before I die. If you find Cloth’s body where I tell you it is, you will understand the rest. I will tell you where it is when you come.