The House Of Silk (19 page)

‘He was a tidewaiter?’

‘That was what he said, Lestrade, but I fear he was dissimulating, as in the rest of his story.’

‘He may be innocent. You cannot say what happened at Creer’s Place.’

‘It’s true that I was not there, but nor was Henderson, and his very absence gives me cause for concern. Looking at everything that has occurred, I believe this was a deliberate trap to incriminate Holmes and to bring an end to his investigation.’

‘But what is this House of Silk? Why would anyone go to such lengths to keep it secret?’

‘I cannot say.’

Lestrade shook his head. ‘I am a practical man, Dr Watson, and I have to tell you that all this seems a very long way from the point where we started – a dead man in a hotel room. That man, as far as we know, was Keelan O’Donaghue, a vicious hoodlum and bank robber from Boston, who came to England on a mission of revenge against the picture dealer, Mr Carstairs of Wimbledon. So how do you get from there to the deaths of two children, this business of the white ribbon, this mysterious Henderson and all the rest of it?’

‘That was exactly what Holmes was trying to discover. Can I see him?’

‘Harriman is in charge of the case and until Mr Holmes has been formally charged, nobody will be allowed to speak with him. They are taking him to a police court this afternoon.’

‘We must be there.’

‘Of course. You understand that no defence witnesses will be called at this stage, Dr Watson, but even so I will try to speak for him and attest to his good character.’

‘Will they keep him at Bow Street?’

‘For the time being, but if the judge thinks there’s a case to answer – and I can’t see him thinking otherwise – he will be put in prison.’

‘What prison?’

‘I can’t say, Dr Watson, but I will do everything in my power on his behalf. In the meantime, is there anyone to whom you can apply? I would imagine that two gentlemen like yourselves must have friends of influence, especially after being involved in so many cases of what you might call a delicate nature. Perhaps among Mr Holmes’s clients there is someone to whom you can turn?’

My first thought was of Mycroft. I had not mentioned him, of course, but he had been in my mind before Lestrade had begun to speak. Would he agree to see me? He had issued a warning in this very room, and he had been adamant that he would be powerless if it was ignored. Even so, I made the decision to present myself once more at the Diogenes Club as soon as the opportunity arose. But that would have to wait until after the police court. Lestrade rose to his feet. ‘I will call for you at two o’clock,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Lestrade.’

‘Don’t thank me yet, Dr Watson. There may be nothing that I can do. If ever a case looked cut and dried, this is it.’ I remembered that Inspector Harriman had said much the same to me the night before. ‘Harriman wants to try Mr Holmes for murder and I think you should prepare yourself for the worst.’

Never before had I attended a police court and yet, as I approached that solid and austere building on Bow Street in the company of Lestrade, I felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if it was right that I had been summoned and that my coming here was somehow inevitable. Lestrade must have seen the look on my face for he smiled mournfully. ‘I don’t suppose you expected to find yourself in a place like this, eh, Dr Watson?’ I told him that he had taken the very thought from my head. ‘Well, you have to wonder how many other men have passed this way thanks to you – by which, of course, I mean you and Mr Holmes.’

He was quite right. This was the end of the process which we had so frequently begun, the first step on the way to the Old Bailey and then perhaps the gallows. It is curious to reflect now, at the very end of my writing career, that each and every one of my chronicles ended with the unmasking or the arrest of a miscreant, and that after that point, almost without exception, I simply assumed that their fate would be of no further interest to my readers and gave up on them, as if it was their wrongdoing alone that justified their existence and that once the crimes had been solved they were no longer human beings with beating hearts and broken spirits. Never once did I consider the fear and anguish they must have endured as they passed through these swing doors and walked these gloomy corridors. Did any of them ever weep tears of repentance or offer prayers for their salvation? Did some of them fight on to the end? I did not care. It was not part of my narrative.

But as I look back on that iron-cold December day when Holmes himself faced the forces that he had so often unleashed, I think that perhaps I did them an injustice; even villains as cruel as Culverton Smith or as conniving as Jonas Oldacre. I wrote what are now called detective stories. By chance, my detective was the greatest of them all. But in a sense he was defined by the men and, indeed, the women he came up against, and I cast them aside all too easily. Entering the police court they all returned very forcibly to mind and it was almost as if I could hear them calling to me: ‘Welcome. You are one of us now.’

The courtroom was square and windowless, with wooden benches and barriers and the royal arms emblazoned on the far wall. This is where the magistrate sat, a stiff, elderly man whose demeanour had something wooden about it too. There was a railed-off platform in front of him and it was here that the prisoners were brought one after the other, for the process was rapid and repetitive so that, to the onlooker at least, it became almost monotonous. Lestrade and I had arrived early, taking our places in the public gallery with a few other onlookers, and we watched as a forger, a burglar and a magsman were all remanded in custody to await trial. And yet the magistrate could also be compassionate. An apprentice accused of drunken and violent behaviour – it had been his eighteenth birthday – was sent away with the details of his crime placed in the Refused Charge Book. And two children, no more than eight or nine years old, brought in for begging, were handed over to the Police Courts Mission with the recommendation that they should be looked after either by the the Waifs and Strays Society, by Dr Barnardo’s orphanage or by the Society for the Improvement of London’s Children. It was odd to hear the last of these three named for this was the organisation responsible for Chorley Grange, which Holmes and I had visited.

Everything had proceeded at a pace, but now Lestrade nudged me and I became aware of a new sense of gravity in the courtroom. More uniformed policemen and clerks entered and took their places. The usher of the court, a plump, owl-like man in his black robes, approached the magistrate and began to mutter to him in a low voice. Two men that I recognised came in and sat down a few feet apart on one of the benches. One was Dr Ackland, the other a red-faced man who might have been in the crowd outside Creer’s Place but who had made no impression upon me at the time. Behind them, sat Creer himself (Lestrade pointed him out), wiping his hands as if attempting to dry them. They were all here, I saw at once, as witnesses.

And then Holmes was brought in, wearing the same clothes in which he had been arrested, and so unlike himself that had I not known better I might have thought that he had deliberately disguised himself so as to baffle me as he had so often done before. He had clearly not slept. He had been questioned at length and I tried not to imagine the various indignities, all too familiar to common criminals, which must have been heaped upon him. Gaunt at the best of times, he appeared positively emaciated, but as he was led into the dock he turned and looked at me and I saw a glint in his eye that told me that the fight was not over yet and reminded me that Holmes had always been at his most formidable when the odds seemed to be stacked against him. Beside me, Lestrade straightened up and muttered something under his breath. He was angry and indignant on Holmes’s behalf, revealing a side of his character I had never seen before.

A barrister presented himself, a well-rounded, diminutive sort with thick lips and heavy eyelids, and it soon became clear that he had assumed the role of prosecutor, although ringmaster might be the better description from the manner in which he directed the proceedings, treating the court almost as a circus of the law.

‘The accused is a well-known detective,’ he began. ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes has achieved public renown through a series of stories which, though gaudy and sensational, are based at least partly on truth.’ I bristled at this and might even have protested had Lestrade not reached out and tapped me gently on the arm. ‘That said, I will not deny that there are one or two less capable officers at Scotland Yard who owe him a debt of gratitude in that, from time to time, he has helped direct their investigations with hints and insights that have borne fruit.’ Hearing this, it was Lestrade’s turn to scowl. ‘But even the best of men have their demons and in the case of Mr Holmes it is opium that has turned him from a friend of the law into the basest malefactor. It is beyond dispute that he entered an opium den which goes by the name of Creer’s Place in Limehouse just after eleven o’clock last night. My first witness is the owner of that establishment, Isaiah Creer.’

Creer took the witness stand. There was no swearing-in at these proceedings. I could only see the back of his head, which was white and hairless, folding into his neck in a way that made it hard to see where one ended and the other began. Prompted by the prosecutor, he told the following tale.

Yes, the accused had entered his house – a private and legal establishment, my lord, where gentlemen could indulge their habit in comfort and security – just after eleven o’clock. He had said very little. He had demanded a dose of the intoxicant, paid for it, and smoked it immediately. Half an hour later, he had asked for a second. Mr Creer had been concerned that Mr Holmes, for it was only later that he had learned his name and, he assured the court, at the time of their meeting he had been a complete stranger, had become agitated and aroused. Mr Creer had suggested that a second dose might be unwise but the gentlemen had disagreed in the strongest terms and, in order to avoid a scene and to maintain the tranquillity for which his establishment was noted, he had provided the essentials in return for another payment. Mr Holmes had smoked the second pipe and his sense of delirium had increased to the extent that Creer had sent a boy out to find a policeman, fearing there might be a breach of the peace. He had attempted to reason with Mr Holmes, to calm him down, but without success. Wild-eyed, beyond control, Mr Holmes had insisted that there were enemies in the room, that he was being pursued, that his life was in danger. He had produced a revolver, at which point Mr Creer had insisted that he leave.

‘I was afraid for my life,’ he told the court. ‘My only thought was to have him out of the house. But I see now that I was wrong and that I should have let him remain there until help arrived in the shape of Constable Perkins. For when I released him onto the street he was out of his mind. He didn’t know what he was doing. I have seen this happen before, your honour. It is rare, freakish. But it is a side effect of the drug. I have no doubt that when Mr Holmes gunned down that poor girl, he believed he was confronting some grotesque monster. Had I known he was armed, I would never have supplied him with the substance in the first place, so help me God!’

The story was corroborated in every respect by a second witness, the red-faced man I had already noticed. He was languid and overly refined, a man of exceedingly aristocratic type with a pinched nose that sniffed at this common air with distaste. He could not have been more than thirty and was dressed in the very latest fashion. He provided no fresh revelations, repeating almost verbatim what Creer had said. He had, he said, been stretched out on a mattress on the other side of the room, and though in a very relaxed state was prepared to swear that he had been perfectly conscious of what had been taking place. ‘Opium, for me, is an occasional indulgence,’ he concluded. ‘It provides a few hours in which I can retreat from the anxieties and the responsibilities of my life. I see no shame in it. I know many people who take laudanum in the privacy of their own homes for precisely the same reason. For me, it is no different to smoking tobacco or taking alcohol. But then I,’ he added, pointedly, ‘am able to handle it.’

It was only when the magistrate asked him his name for the record that the young man created a stir in the court. ‘It is Lord Horace Blackwater.’

The magistrate stared at him. ‘Do I take it, sir, that you are part of the Blackwater family of Hallamshire?’

‘Yes,’ replied the young man. ‘The Earl of Blackwater is my father.’

I was as surprised as anyone. It seemed remarkable, shocking even, that the scion of one of the oldest families in England should have found his way to a sordid drug den in Bluegate Fields. At the same time, I could imagine the weight that his evidence would add to the case against my friend. This was not just some low-life sailor or mountebank giving his version of events. It was a man who could quite possibly ruin himself by even admitting he had been at Creer’s Place.

He was fortunate that, this being a police court, there were no journalists present. The same, I hardly need add, would be true for Holmes. As Sir Horace stepped down, I heard the other members of the public muttering to each other and perceived that they were here only for the spectacle and this sort of salacious detail was bread and butter to them. The magistrate exchanged a few words with his black-robed usher as his place was taken by Stanley Perkins, the constable whom I had encountered on the night in question. Perkins stood stiffly, with his helmet at his side, holding it as if he were a ghost at the Tower of London and it was his head. He had the least to say, but then much of the story had already been told for him. He had been approached by the boy that Creer had sent out and asked to come to the house on the corner of Milward Street. He had been on his way when he had heard two gunshots and had rushed to Coppergate Square which was where he had discovered a man, lying unconscious with a gun, and a girl lying in a pool of blood. He had taken charge of the scene as a crowd had gathered. He had seen at once that there was nothing he could do for the girl. He described how I had arrived and identified the unconscious man as Sherlock Holmes.