The House Of Silk (33 page)

We knocked on the door. It was opened by Patrick, the Irish scullery boy whom I had met in the kitchen. He looked blankly at Holmes, then at me. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he scowled. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you back here again.’

Never had I been greeted on a doorstep with quite such insolence but Holmes seemed amused. ‘Is your master in?’ he asked.

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘My name is Sherlock Holmes. We are expected. And who are you?’

‘I’m Patrick.’

‘That’s a Dublin accent if I’m not mistaken.’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Patrick? Who is it? Why is Kirby not here?’ Edmund Carstairs had appeared in the hallway and came forward, clearly agitated. ‘You must forgive me, Mr Holmes. Kirby must still be upstairs with my sister. I did not expect the door to be opened by the kitchen boy. You can go now, Patrick. Go back to your place.’

Carstairs was as immaculately attired as he had been on every occasion that I had seen him, but the lines that days of anxiety had drawn were clearly visible on his face and, like me, I suspected that he had not been sleeping well.

‘You received my wire,’ Holmes said.

‘I did. But you evidently did not receive mine. For I clearly stated, as I had already intimated to Dr Watson, that I had no further need of your services. I am sorry to say it, but you have not been helpful to my family, Mr Holmes. And I must add that I understood that you had been arrested and were in serious trouble with the law.’

‘Those matters have been resolved. As to your wire, Mr Carstairs, I did indeed receive it, and read what you had to say with interest.’

‘And you came anyway?’

‘You first came to me because you were being terrorised by a man in a flat cap, a man you believed to be Keelan O’Donoghue from Boston. I can tell you that I am now in command of the facts of the matter which I am happy to share with you. I can also tell you who killed the man that we found at Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel. You may try to persuade yourself that these things are no longer important, and if that is the case, let me put it very simply. If you wish your sister to die, you will send me away. If not, you will invite me in and hear what I have to say.’

Carstairs hesitated and I could see that he was fighting with himself, that in some strange way he seemed almost afraid of us, but in the end his better sense prevailed. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let me take your coats. I don’t know what Kirby is doing. It sometimes seems to me that this entire household is in disarray.’ We removed our outer garments and he gestured towards the drawing room where we had been received on our first visit.

‘If you will permit me, I would like to see your sister before we sit down,’ Holmes remarked.

‘My sister is no longer able to see anyone. Her sight has failed her. She can barely speak.’

‘No speech will be necessary. I wish merely to see her room. Is she still refusing to eat?’

‘It is no longer a question of refusal. She is unable to consume solid food. It is the best I can do to make her take a little warm soup from time to time.’

‘She still believes she is being poisoned.’

‘In my view, it is this irrational belief that has become the main cause of her illness, Mr Holmes. As I told your colleague, I have tasted every single morsel that has passed her lips with no ill-effect at all. I do not understand the curse that has come upon me. Before I met you, I was a happy man.’

‘And hope to be again, I am sure.’

We climbed back up to the attic room that I had been in before. As we arrived at the doorway, the manservant, Kirby, appeared with a tray of soup, the plate untouched. He glanced at his master and shook his head, indicating that once again the patient had refused to eat. We went in. I was at once dismayed by the sight of Eliza Carstairs. How long had it been since I had last seen her? Hardly more than a week and yet in that time she had visibly deteriorated to the extent that she put me in mind of the living skeleton that I had seen advertised at Dr Silkin’s House of Wonders. Her skin was stretched in that horrible way that attends upon patients only when they are close to the end, her lips drawn back to expose her gums and teeth. The shape of the body beneath the covers was tiny and pathetic. Her eyes stared at us but saw nothing. Her hands, folded across her chest, were those of a woman thirty years older than Eliza Carstairs.

Holmes examined her briefly. ‘Her bathroom is next door?’ he asked.

‘Yes. But she is too weak to walk there. Mrs Kirby and my wife bathe her where she lies …’

Holmes had already left the room. He entered the bathroom, leaving Carstairs and myself in an uneasy silence with the staring woman. At last he reappeared. ‘We can return downstairs,’ he said. Carstairs and I followed him out, both of us bemused, for the entire visit had lasted less than thirty seconds.

We went back down to the drawing room where Catherine Carstairs was sitting in front of a cheerful fire, reading a book. She closed it the moment we entered and rose quickly to her feet. ‘Why, Mr Holmes and Dr Watson! You are the last two people I expected to see.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘I thought …’

‘I did exactly as we agreed, my dear. But Mr Holmes chose to visit us anyway.’

‘I am surprised that you did not wish to see me, Mrs Carstairs,’ Holmes remarked. ‘Particularly as you came to consult me a second time after your sister-in-law fell ill.’

‘That was a while ago, Mr Holmes. I don’t wish to be rude, but I have long since given up any hope that you can be of assistance to us. The man who came uninvited to this house and stole money and jewellery from us is dead. Do we want to know who stabbed him? No! The fact that he can trouble us no more is enough. If there is nothing you can do to help poor Eliza, then there is no reason for you to stay.’

‘I believe I can save Miss Carstairs. It may still be not too late.’

‘Save her from what?’

‘From poison.’

Catherine Carstairs started. ‘She is not being poisoned! There is no possibility of that. The doctors do not know the cause of her illness but they are all agreed on that.’

‘Then they are all wrong. May I sit down? There is much that I have to tell you and I think we would all be more comfortable seated.’

The wife glared at him but this time the husband took Holmes’s side. ‘Very well, Mr Holmes. I will listen to what you have to say. But make no mistake. If I believe that you are attempting to deceive me, I will have no hesitation in asking you to leave.’

‘My aim is not to deceive you,’ returned Holmes. ‘In fact, quite the contrary.’ He sat down in the armchair furthest from the fire. I took the chair next to him. Mr and Mrs Carstairs sat together on the sofa opposite. Finally he began.

‘You came to my lodgings, Mr Carstairs, on the advice of your accountant, because you were afraid that your life might be threatened by a man you had never met. You were on your way that evening to the opera, to Wagner, as I recall. But it was late by the time you left me. I imagine you missed the first curtain.’

‘No. I arrived on time.’

‘No matter. There were many aspects of your story that I found quite remarkable, the principal one being the strange behaviour of this vigilante, Keelan O’Donaghue, if indeed it was he. I could well believe that he had followed you all the way to London and found out your address here in Wimbledon, with the express purpose of killing you. You were, after all, responsible – at least in part – for the death of his twin brother, Rourke O’Donaghue, and twins are close. And he had already taken vengeance on Cornelius Stillman, the man who had purchased the oil paintings from you and who subsequently paid for the Pinkerton’s agents who tracked down the Flat Cap Gang in Boston and put an end to their careers in a hail of bullets. Remind me, if you will. What is the name of the agent you employed?’

‘It was Bill McParland.’

‘Of course. As I say, twins are often very close and it is no surprise that Keelan should have sought your death. So why did he not kill you? Once he had discovered where you lived, why did he not spring out and put a knife in you? That is what I would have done. Nobody knew he was in this country. He could have been on a ship back to America before you were even in the morgue. But, in fact, he did the exact opposite of that. He stood outside your house, wearing the flat cap that he knew would identify him. Worse than that, he appeared again, this time when you and Mrs Carstairs were leaving the Savoy. What was in his mind, do you think? It is almost as if he were daring you to go to the police, to get him arrested.’

‘He wished to frighten us,’ Mrs Carstairs said.

‘But that was not the motive on his third visit. This time he returned to the house with a note which he pressed into your husband’s hand. He asked for a meeting at your local church at midday.’

‘He did not show up.’

‘Perhaps he never intended to. His final intervention in your life came when he broke into the house and stole fifty pounds and jewellery from your safe. By now, I am finding his behaviour more than remarkable. Not only does he know exactly which window to choose, he has somehow got his hands on a key lost by your wife several months before he arrived in the country. And it is interesting, is it not, that he is now more interested in money than in murder, for he is actually standing in this very house in the middle of the night. He could climb the stairs and kill you both in your bed—’

‘I woke up and heard him.’

‘Indeed so, Mrs Carstairs. But by that time he had already opened the safe. I take it that you and Mr Carstairs sleep in separate rooms, by the way?’

Carstairs flushed. ‘I do not see that our domestic arrangements have any bearing on the case.’

‘But you do not deny it. Very well, let us stay with our strange and somewhat indecisive intruder. He makes his getaway to a private hotel in Bermondsey. But now events take a surprising turn when a second assailant, a man about whom we know nothing, catches up with Keelan O’Donaghue – again, we must assume it is he – stabs him to death, and takes not only his money but anything that might identify him, apart from a cigarette case which is in itself unhelpful as it bears the initials WM.’

‘What do you mean by all this, Mr Holmes?’ Catherine Carstairs asked.

‘I am merely making it clear to you, Mrs Carstairs, as it was to me from the very start, that this narrative makes no sense whatsoever – unless, that is, you start from the premise that it was not Keelan O’Donaghue who came to this house, and that it was not your husband with whom he wished to communicate.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. He gave my husband that note.’

‘And failed to appear at the church. It may help if we put ourselves in the position of this mysterious visitor. He seeks a private interview with a member of this household but that is not such a simple matter. Apart from yourself and your husband, there is your sister, various servants … Mr and Mrs Kirby, Elsie and Patrick, the kitchen boy. To begin with, he watches from a distance but finally he approaches with a note written in large letters and neither folded nor in an envelope. Clearly, his intention cannot be to post it through the door. But is it possible, perhaps, that he hopes to see the person for whom this correspondence is intended, simply to hold it up so that it can be read through the window of the breakfast room? No need to ring the bell. No need to risk the message falling into the wrong hands. It will be known to just the two of them and they can discuss their business later. Unfortunately, however, Mr Carstairs returns unexpectedly early to the house, moments before our man has had the chance to achieve his aim. So what does he do? He raises the note high above him and hands it to Mr Carstairs. He knows he is being watched from the breakfast room and his meaning now is rather different. “Find me,” he is saying. “Or I will tell Mr Carstairs everything I know. I will meet him in the church. I will meet him anywhere I please. You cannot prevent me.” Of course, he does not turn up at the assignation. He has no need to. The warning is enough.’

‘But with whom did he wish to speak if not with me?’ Carstairs demanded.

‘Who was in the breakfast room at the time?’

‘My wife.’ He frowned as if anxious to change the subject. ‘Who was this man, if he was not Keelan O’Donaghue?’ he asked.

‘The answer to that is perfectly simple, Mr Carstairs. He was Bill McParland, the Pinkerton’s detective. Consider for a moment. We know that Mr McParland was injured during the shootout in Boston and the man we discovered in the hotel room had a recent scar on his right cheek. We also know that McParland had fallen out with his employer, Cornelius Stillman, who had refused to pay him the amount of money he felt he was owed. He therefore had a grievance. And then there is his name. Bill, I would imagine, is short for William and the initials we found on the cigarette case were—’

‘WM,’ I interjected.

‘Precisely, Watson. And now things begin to fall into place. Let us begin by considering the fate of Keelan O’Donaghue himself. First, what do we know about this young man? Your narrative was surprisingly comprehensive, Mr Carstairs, and for that I am grateful to you. You told us that Rourke and Keelan O’Donaghue were twins but that Keelan was the smaller of the two. They carried each other’s initials, tattooed on their arms, proof, if any were needed, of the extraordinary closeness of their relationship. Keelan was clean-shaven and taciturn. He wore a flat cap which, one would imagine, would have made it difficult to see very much of his face. We know that he was of slender build. He alone was able to squeeze through the gulley that led to the river and so effect his escape. But I was particularly struck by one detail that you mentioned. The gang all lived together in the squalor of the tenement in South End – all, that is, apart from Keelan who had the luxury of his own room. I wondered from the very start why that might be.

‘The answer, of course, is quite obvious, given all the evidence I have just laid out and I am happy to say that I have had it confirmed by no less than Mrs Caitlin O’Donaghue who still lives in Sackville Street in Dublin where she has a laundry. It is this. In the spring of 1865 she gave birth, not to twin brothers but to a brother and a sister. Keelan O’Donaghue was a girl.’