Beale and Inspector Lewis rallied their men and formed a perimeter around the crypt. Conrad was caught off guard, trapped underground with no escape. When constables and government agents first descended, Conrad gave up his ruse and drew his thin-barreled Luger pistol. He fired off a few shots to cover his retreat, deeper into the crypt. After a long standoff, he surrendered, and was taken in by the Kent County Constabulary.
Conrad was not the talkative type. I suspected that he was trained to withstand interrogation techniques, and perhaps torture, during his career as a soldier and special operative. Mycroft's men were quick to move him from Kent County to an undisclosed location. I later learned that they gleaned his true name: Hr. Nicolas Vogel. I never learned much else about Vogel's time in England.
Beale swept the house in search of any remaining pages. Holmes didn't care to stay, confident in his assertion that Thomson had burned all of the documents in his stove. We rode back to London by Thursday night. We were free men, once again!
Mycroft was not particularly happy with the results of the investigation, though to be fair, for as long as I knew him, Mycroft was not a happy man. He was at least somewhat relieved, I think, to learn that the papers were probably destroyed, as opposed to being snatched away onto a foreign ship, whisked away in the night. I'm sure Hr. Vogel held some bargaining power with the German government, if they ever admitted that he was one of their own.
A few days after our return, I found Holmes in our Baker Street sitting room, burning through a pipeful of tobacco. Instantly, I could tell that something weighed heavily on his mind. On the table to his right, there was a thick, hardcover bible. I had never noticed it before in our flat.
"Have you finally found religion?" I said.
"No," said Holmes.
"Where did that bible come from?" I said.
"Stolen," said Holmes.
"Stolen?" I said. "That must be a sin."
"The real sinner is the man who burned the original pages of this bible," said Holmes.
I paused, realizing that the case of the stolen documents was not truly resolved. "You don't mean to say…?"
"Yes, Watson, the documents survived," said Holmes. He tapped his finger on the bible's cover. "Did you notice the pair of scissors and the glue in room 3B?"
"I remember," I said.
"Thomson didn't burn the government documents," said Holmes. "He cut out the pages of an unused, dusty bible from the back corner of the chapel, and then rebound the government documents within the bible's empty hardcover shell. He burned the loose pages of the bible in his stove to cover his tracks, not the government documents, and then put the false bible back on the shelf in the chapel. It was a bold trick to hide the documents from Vogel without removing them entirely from the Hillyard House."
"But what about the scrap of burnt paper?" I said. "The one that you showed to us outside the crypt? W, sixth hour, dark."
"King James Bible, Matthew 27:45," said Holmes. "Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour."
"Oh, Christ," I muttered.
"Precisely," said Holmes. "It was the burnt scrap of a page from the bible."
"How long did you know of this?" I said.
"I had my suspicions early on, upon discovering the paper ash, the scissors, and the glue," said Holmes. "Contrary to what I told Beale, Thomson did not develop a conscience. No, I think he risked hiding the documents temporarily so that he could leverage Vogel for more money on the day of their meeting. The attempt to coerce Vogel failed tragically. Thomson was killed, and Vogel was unsure of where to look. He thoroughly searched Thomson's room, and then the two other rooms on the third floor the following day, but he didn't have a chance to search all of the common areas of the house in detail. He must have thought that Thomson wouldn't risk such a brazen hiding place as the open chapel. I performed a search of my own on Wednesday night, away from Beale's prying eyes, and found the false bible tucked away on the backmost shelf."
Holmes hadn't retired early that night after all. While Inspector Lewis was tracking a suspect in Rochester, and Beale was looking for the discarded disguise, Holmes located the missing documents in full.
"Ironic, isn't it?," said Holmes. "Thomson disguised himself as Schaper, the German traveler; Vogel disguised himself as Conrad, the Englishman; and the documents were disguised as an old bible."
"Why, Holmes?" I said. "Why would you steal the documents instead of handing them back over to Mycroft?"
"I'm not my brother's dog," said Holmes.
"He'll try us for treason over this!" I said.
"And I didn't think you were his dog, either. Perhaps I was mistaken." Holmes let out a long breath, and took a puff of his pipe. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. It's just… Watson, you haven't yet read the documents." He placed his hand flat on the false bible.
"What do they say?" I said. I had rarely, if ever, seen Holmes so disturbed. So enraged.
"You'll recall, when we first took the case I wanted to gauge how serious Mycroft felt about recovering the documents," said Holmes.
"Very serious, was your conclusion," I said.
"I now understand why," said Holmes. "And you will also recall that Mr. Beale watched me like an owl watches a mouse for the majority of our time in Gravesend. I can only assume that he was instructed to keep me from reading the documents in full, should I stumble up on them. He was there to snatch them away from me.
"Mycroft wasn't completely untruthful about the contents. These pages detail weapon designs, cryptography methodologies, and covert agent activities. But the Devil is in the details. The advances in biological and chemical warfare were gleaned through criminal experimentation on British citizens. Prisoners were purposely infected with diseases and subject to poisons, for the sake of understanding the viability of biological weaponry."
Holmes rubbed the bridge of his nose. I slumped down into the chair beside him. I felt sick to my stomach.
"Several lords and government officials are complicit," said Holmes. "But the chief orchestrator of the trials was a man named Dr. Culverton Smith."
"That name sounds familiar," I said.
"I wouldn't be surprised if you've heard of him, given your medical background," said Holmes. "He is a leading mind in the realms of toxicology and virology. I admit that I myself had high praise for his research on synthetic poisons and antidotes. He is scientifically brilliant, as well as morally bankrupt."
"And the state condoned his human experiments?" I said.
Holmes nodded. "Including my own brother. At least at first, before the diseases spread outside the prison. By then it was too late. You mentioned that there was a startling spike in infectious diseases this year, including a meningitis epidemic in northern London."
"That's true," I said.
"You even had the unfortunate fate of contracting meningitis yourself while practicing medicine," said Holmes.
"There were days when I thought I might perish from it," I said.
"Dr. Smith's campaign was a driving factor in the sudden epidemic," said Holmes. "In an effort to study the potency of various diseases, including a highly contagious strain of meningitis, he unleashed a horrible plague upon the country. He tortured dozens of prisoners to death, and indirectly tormented and killed countless other British citizens."
"Utterly foul," I said. "What's become of him?"
"His prison experiments ceased, allegedly," said Holmes. "But he remains otherwise unimpeded. The state has been attempting to sweep all evidence away. Smith continues working for them as a top scientist."
"That cannot stand," I said.
"If we pursue this, then there will be serious backlash," said Holmes. "We would be up against the British government, a formidable foe. Mycroft may lose his position. He may go to prison."
I paused for a moment. I thought of my close encounter with a feverish death. I thought of so many of my patients who did not escape the clutches of disease. I held firm. "That can't be helped."
Holmes nodded. "I'm glad to hear you say as much. I agree, absolutely. I will see to it that Smith and his cohorts are exposed for their crimes. If Mycroft keeps his position, then I hope he never again aligns himself with a malignant psychopath."
Mycroft was a calculating man. I never thought of him as particularly cruel or benevolent, rather machine-like and stubborn. I wondered what calculation inspired him to allow Smith's human experiments. He must have seen a vision of the future so grim that Smith's horrors in the present were worth the cost in his mind. Mycroft had an uncanny ability to see from a global perspective, predicting imminent trends and eventualities.
I cannot excuse his judgement in 1901—no fear of the future should warrant such a massive violation of human life. That said, when the world went to war thirteen years later, and human casualties measured in the tens of millions, I started to fathom the weight of Mycroft's fears.