‘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.’
The silence that greeted this revelation was, in a word, profound. The stillness of the winter’s day pressed in on the room and even the flames in the fireplace, which had been flickering cheerfully, seemed to be holding their breath.
‘A girl?’ Carstairs looked at Holmes in wonderment, a sickly smile playing around his lips. ‘Running a gang?’
‘A girl who would have had to conceal her identity if she were to survive in such an environment,’ Holmes returned. ‘And anyway, it was her brother, Rourke, who ran the gang. All the evidence points to this single conclusion. There can be no alternative.’
‘And where is this girl?’
‘That is simple, Mr Carstairs. You are married to her.’
I saw Catherine Carstairs turn pale but she said nothing. Sitting next to her, Carstairs was suddenly rigid. The two of them reminded me of the waxworks I had glimpsed at the fair at Jackdaw Lane.
‘You do not deny it, Mrs Carstairs?’ Holmes asked.
‘Of course I deny it! I have never heard anything quite so preposterous.’ She turned to her husband and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.
‘You’re not going to allow him to speak to me in this way, are you, Edmund? To suggest that I might have some connection with a hateful brood of criminals and evil-doers!’
‘Your words, I think, fall on deaf ears, Mrs Carstairs,’ Holmes remarked.
And it was true. From the moment that Holmes had made his extraordinary declaration, Carstairs had been gazing in front of him with an expression of peculiar horror that suggested to me that some small part of him must have always known the truth, or at least suspected it, but now, at last, he was being forced to stare it straight in the face.
‘Please, Edmund…’ She reached out to him, but Carstairs flinched and turned away.
‘May I continue?’ Holmes asked.
Catherine Carstairs was about to speak but then relaxed. Her shoulders slumped and it was as if a silken veil had been torn from her face. Suddenly she was glaring at us with a hardness and an expression of hatred that would have been unbecoming in any English gentlewoman but which had surely sustained her throughout her life. ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ she snarled. ‘We might as well hear the rest of it.’
‘Thank you.’ Holmes nodded in her direction, when went on. ‘After the death of her brother, and the destruction of the Flat Cap Gang, Catherine O’Donoghue — for that was her given name — found herself in a situation that must have seemed quite desperate. She was alone, in America, wanted by the police. She had also lost the brother who had been closer to her than anyone on this planet, and whom she must have dearly loved. Her first thoughts were of revenge. Cornelius Stillman had been foolish enough to boast of his exploits in the Boston press. Still in disguise, she tracked him down to the garden of his house in Providence and shot him dead. But he was not the only person mentioned in the advertisement. Reverting now to her female persona, Catherine followed his junior partner onto the Cunard liner, the Catalonia. It is clear what was on her mind. She no longer had any future in America. It was time to return to her family in Dublin. Nobody would suspect her, travelling as a single woman, accompanied by a maid. She took with her what profits she had been able to save from her past crimes. And somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic she would come face to face with Edmund Carstairs. It is easy enough to commit murder on the high seas. Carstairs would disappear and her revenge would be complete.’
Holmes now addressed Mrs Carstairs directly. ‘But something changed your mind. What was it, I wonder?’
The woman shrugged. ‘I saw Edmund for what he was.’
‘It is precisely as I thought. Here was a man with no experience of the opposite sex apart from a mother and a sister who had always dominated him. He was ill. He was afraid. How amusing it must have been for you to come to his aid, to befriend him and finally to draw him into your net. Somehow you persuaded him to marry you in defiance of his own family — and how much sweeter this revenge than the one you had originally planned. You were intimately connected to a man you loathed. But you would play the part of the devoted wife, the charade made easier by the fact that you have chosen to sleep in separate rooms and, I fancy, you have never allowed
