Holmes had made, Dr Watson. If I am going to fight on his behalf, and it may well be that we have a battle royal on our hands, then the more I know the better. I ask you to leave nothing out.’
It was strange, really, for Holmes had always thought himself in competition with the police and would, in normal circumstances, have told them none of the details of his investigation. On this occasion, though, I had no choice but to acquaint Lestrade with everything that had happened both before and after the child had been killed, starting with our visit to Chorley Grange School for Boys, which had led us to Sally Dixon and The Bag of Nails. I told him of her attack on me, our discovery of the stolen pocket watch, our unhelpful interview with Lord Ravenshaw, and Holmes’s decision to place an advertisement in the evening papers. Finally, I described the visit of the man who called himself Henderson and how he had led us to Creer’s Place.
‘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.’
TWELVE
The Evidence in the Case
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
