The House Of Silk (8 page)

‘I take it you are Mr Finch,’ Holmes began.

‘Yes, sir. That is indeed my name. And you are …?’

‘I am Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Holmes? I don’t believe we are acquainted and yet the name is familiar—’

‘Mr Holmes!’ Carstairs had also come into the room. The contrast between the two men was striking; the one old and wizened, belonging almost to another age, the other younger and more dandified, his features still displaying the anger and frustration that were doubtless the result of the conversation we had overheard. ‘This is Mr Holmes, the detective I was telling you about,’ he explained to his partner.

‘Yes, yes. Of course I know. He has just introduced himself.’

‘I did not expect to see you here,’ Carstairs said.

‘I came because it interested me to see your professional place of work,’ Holmes explained. ‘But I also have a number of questions for you, relating to the Pinkerton’s men whom you employed in Boston.’

‘A dreadful affair!’ Finch interjected. ‘I won’t recover from the loss of those paintings, not until the end of my days. It was the single greatest calamity of my career. If only we had sold him a few of your Whistlers, Edmund. They could have been blown to pieces and no one would give a jot!’ Once the old man had started, there seemed to be no stopping him. ‘Picture-dealing is a respectable business, Mr Holmes. We deal with a great many aristocratic clients. I would not wish it to be known that we have been involved with gunmen and murder!’ The old man’s face fell as he saw that he was involved with more besides, for the door had just opened and a boy had rushed in. I at once recognised Wiggins, who had been in our room only that morning but to Finch it was as if the worst assault were being committed. ‘Go away! Get out of here!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have nothing for you.’

‘You need not concern yourself, Mr Finch,’ Holmes said. ‘I know the boy. What is it, Wiggins?’

‘We’ve found ’im, Mr ’olmes!’ Wiggins cried, excitedly. ‘The cove you was looking for. We saw him with our own eyes, me and Ross. We was about to go in the jerryshop on Bridge Lane – Ross knows the place for ’e’s in and out of there often enough ’imself – when the door opens and there ’e is, clear as daylight, wiv ’is face cut livid by a scar.’ The boy drew a line down his own cheek. ‘It was me what saw him. Not Ross.’

‘Where is he now?’ Holmes asked.

‘We followed ’im to ’is ’otel, sir. Will it be a guinea each if we take you there?’

‘It will be the end of you if you don’t,’ replied Holmes. ‘But I have always played you fair, Wiggins. You know that. Tell me, where is this hotel?’

‘In Bermondsey, sir. Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel. Ross will be there now. I left ’im there to act as crow while I hiked all the way to your rooms and then ’ere to find you. If your man steps out again, ’e’ll watch where ’e goes. Ross is new to the game but ’e’s as canny as they come. Are you going to come back with me, Mr ’olmes? Will you take a four-wheeler? Can I ride with you?’

‘You can sit up with the driver.’ Holmes turned to me and I saw at once the contracted eyebrows and the intensity of expression that told me that all his energies were focused on what lay ahead. ‘We must leave at once,’ he said. ‘By a lucky chance, we have the object of our investigation in our grasp. We must not let him slip between our fingers.’

‘I will come with you,’ Carstairs announced.

‘Mr Carstairs, for your own safety—’

‘I have seen this man. It was I who described him to you, and if anyone can be sure that these boys of yours have correctly identified him, it is I. And I have a personal desire to see this out, Mr Holmes. If this man is whom I believe he is, then I am the cause of his presence here and it is only right I see it to the end.’

‘We have no time for argument,’ Holmes said. ‘Very well. The three of us will leave together. Let us not waste another minute.’

And so we hurried out of the gallery, Holmes, Wiggins, Carstairs and myself, leaving Mr Finch gaping after us. A four-wheeler was located and we climbed in, Wiggins scrambling up beside the driver who glanced at him disdainfully but then relented and allowed him one fold of his blanket. With a crack of the whip we were away, as if something of our urgency had communicated itself to the horses. It was almost dark and with the coming of the night the sense of ease that I had felt had quite dissipated, and the city had once again turned cold and hostile. The shoppers and the entertainers had all gone home and their places had been taken by a different species altogether, shabby men and gaudy women who needed shadows in which to conduct their business and whose business, in truth, carried shadows of its own.

The carriage took us over Blackfriars Bridge where the wind was at its iciest and cut into us like a knife. Holmes had not spoken since we had left, and I felt that in some way he’d had a presentiment of what was to come. This was not something he had ever admitted and had I ever suggested it I know he would been annoyed. No soothsayer he! For him it was all intellect, all systematised common sense, as he once put it. And yet still I was aware of something that defied explanation and which might even be considered supernatural. Like it or not, Holmes knew that the evening’s events were going to provide a fulcrum, a turning point after which his life – both our lives – would never be quite the same.

Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel advertised a bed and sitting room at thirty shillings a week, and was exactly the sort of establishment you would expect at that price; a mean, dilapidated building with a slop house on one side and a brick kiln on the other. It was close to the river and the air was damp and grimy. Lamps burned behind the windows, but the glass was so dirt-encrusted that barely any light seeped through. Ross, the companion of Wiggins, was waiting for us, shivering with cold despite the thick padding of newspaper with which his jacket was lined. As Holmes and Carstairs climbed out of the carriage, he stepped back and I saw that something had greatly frightened him. His eyes were filled with alarm and his face, in the glow of the street lamp, was ashen white. But then Wiggins leapt down and grabbed hold of him and it was as if the spell was broken.

‘It’s all right, my boy!’ Wiggins cried. ‘We are both of us to have a guinea. Mr ’olmes ’as promised it.’

‘Tell me what has happened in the time that you have been alone,’ Holmes said. ‘Has the man you recognised left the hotel?’

‘Who are these gentlemen?’ Ross pointed first at Carstairs, then at me. ‘Are they jacks? Are they coppers? Why are they here?’

‘It’s all right, Ross,’ I said. ‘You have no need to be concerned. I am John Watson, a doctor. You saw me this morning when you came to Baker Street. And this is Mr Carstairs who has a gallery in Albemarle Street. We mean you no harm.’

‘Albemarle Street – in Mayfair?’ The boy was so cold that his teeth were chattering. Of course all the street Arabs in London were accustomed to the winter, but he had been standing out here for at least two hours on his own.

‘What have you seen?’ Holmes asked.

‘I ain’t seen nothing,’ Ross replied. His voice had changed. There was something about his manner now that might almost have suggested that he had something to hide. Not for the first time it occurred to me that all these children had reached a sort of adulthood long before their tender age should have allowed. ‘I been here, waiting for you. He ain’t come out. No one has gone in. And the cold, it’s gone right through my bones.’

‘Here is the money that I promised you – and you, too, Wiggins.’ Holmes paid both the boys. ‘Now take yourselves home. You have done enough tonight.’ The boys took the coins and ran off together, Ross casting one last look in our direction. ‘I suggest we enter the hotel and confront this man,’ Holmes went on. ‘God knows, I have no wish to linger here any longer than I have to. That boy, Watson. Did it occur to you that he was dissembling?’

‘There was certainly something he was not telling us,’ I concurred.

‘Let us hope that he has not acted in some way so as to betray us. Mr Carstairs, please stand well back. It is unlikely that our target will attempt violence, but we have come here without preparation. Dr Watson’s trusty revolver is doubtless lying wrapped up in cloth in some drawer in Kensington and I, too, am unarmed. We must live on our wits. Come on!’

The three of us entered the hotel. A few steps led up to the front door which opened into a public hallway with no carpets, little light, and a small office to one side. An elderly man was sitting there, propped up in a wooden chair, half-asleep, but he started when he saw us. ‘God bless you, gentlemen,’ he quavered. ‘We can offer you good, single beds at five shillings a night—’

‘We are not here for accommodation,’ Holmes replied. ‘We are in pursuit of a man who has recently arrived from America. He has a livid scar on one cheek. It is a matter of the greatest urgency, and if you do not wish to land yourself in trouble with the law, you will tell us where he can be found.’

The Boots had no desire to be in trouble with anyone. ‘There is but one American here,’ he said. ‘You must be referring to Mr Harrison from New York. He has the room at the end of the corridor on this floor. He came in a while ago and I think he must be asleep as I haven’t heard a sound.’

‘The number of the room?’ Holmes demanded.

‘It’s number six.’

We set off at once, down a bare corridor with doors so close together that the rooms behind them must be little more than cupboards and gas-jets turned so low that we had almost to feel our way through the darkness. Number six was indeed at the end. Holmes raised his fist, meaning to knock, then stepped back, a single gasp escaping from his lips. I looked down and saw a streak of liquid, almost black in the half-light, curling out from beneath the door and forming a small pool against the skirting. I heard Carstairs give a cry and saw him recoiling, his hands covering his eyes. The Boots was watching us from the end of the corridor. It was as if he was expecting the horror that was about to unveil itself.

Holmes tried the door. It wouldn’t open. Without saying a word, he brought his shoulder up against it and the flimsy lock shattered. Leaving Carstairs in the corridor, the two of us went in and saw at once that the crime, which I had once considered trivial, had taken a turn for the worse. The window was open. The room was ransacked. And the man we had been pursuing was curled up with a knife in the side of his neck.

Quite recently I saw George Lestrade again for what was to be the last time.

He had never fully recovered from the bullet wound he had sustained whilst investigating the bizarre murders that had become known in the popular press as the Clerkenwell Killings, although one of them had taken place in neighbouring Hoxton, and another turned out to be a suicide. By then, he had, of course, long retired from the police force, but he had the kindness to come and seek me out in the home into which I had just moved and we spent the afternoon together, reminiscing. My readers will hardly be surprised to learn that it was the subject of Sherlock Holmes that occupied much of our discourse, and I felt a need to apologise to Lestrade on two counts. First, I had never described him in perhaps the most glowing terms. The words ‘rat-faced’ and ‘ferret-like’ spring to mind. Well, as unkind as it was, it was at least accurate, for Lestrade himself had once joked that a capricious Mother Nature had given him the looks of a criminal rather than a police officer and that, all in all, he might have made himself a richer man had he chosen that profession. Holmes, too, often remarked that his own skills, particularly in matters of lock-picking and forgery, might have made him as equally successful a criminal as he was a detective, and it is amusing to think that, in another world, the two men might have worked together on the wrong side of the law.

But where I perhaps did Lestrade an injustice was in suggesting that he had no intelligence or investigative skill whatsoever. It’s fair to say that Sherlock Holmes occasionally spoke ill of him, but then Holmes was so unique, so intellectually gifted that there was nobody in London who could compete with him and he was equally disparaging about almost every police officer he encountered, apart perhaps from Stanley Hopkins, and his faith, even in that young detective, was often sorely tested. Put simply, next to Holmes, any detective would have found it nigh on impossible to make his mark and even I, who was at his side more often than anyone, sometimes had to remind myself that I was not a complete idiot. But Lestrade was in many ways a capable man. Were you to look in the public records you would find many successful cases that he investigated quite independently and the newspapers always spoke well of him. Even Holmes admired his tenacity. And, when all is said and done, he did finish his career as Assistant Commissioner in charge of the
CID
at Scotland Yard, even if a large part of his reputation rested on the cases that Holmes had, in fact, solved, but for which he took the credit. Lestrade suggested to me, during our long and pleasant conversation, that he may well have been intimidated when he was in the presence of Sherlock Holmes, and that this might have caused him to function less than effectively. Well, he is gone now and won’t mind, I am sure, if I break his confidence and give him credit where it’s due. He was not a bad man. And at the end of the day, I knew exactly how he felt.

At any event, it was Lestrade who arrived at Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel the next morning. And yes, he was as always pale-skinned with bright, sunken eyes and the general demeanour of a rat who has been obliged to dress up for lunch at the Savoy. After Holmes had alerted the constables in the street, the room had been closed off and kept under police guard until the cold touch of light could dispel the shadows and lend itself to a proper investigation, along with the general surroundings of the hotel.

‘Well, well, Mr Holmes,’ he remarked with a hint of irritation. ‘They told me you were expected when I was at Wimbledon and here you are again now.’

‘We have both been following in the footsteps of the unfortunate wretch who has ended his days here,’ retorted Holmes.