The House of Silk

SIXTEEN The Disappearance

Harriman rose to his feet and almost fell upon Dr Trevelyan. For once his carefully cultivated sang-froid had deserted him. ‘What game is going on here?’ he cried. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘I have no idea…’ the hapless doctor began.

‘I beg of you to show some restraint, Inspector Harriman.’ The chief warder imposed himself between the two men, taking charge. ‘Mr Holmes was in this room?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Trevelyan replied.

‘And it was locked and bolted, as I saw just now, from the outside?’

‘Indeed so, sir. It is a prison regulation.’

‘Who was the last to see him?’

‘That would have been Rivers. He took him a mug of water, upon my request.’

‘I took it but he didn’t drink it,’ the orderly grumbled. ‘He didn’t say nothing, neither. He just lay there.’

‘Asleep?’ Harriman walked up to Dr Trevelyan until the two of them were but inches apart. ‘Are you really telling me he was ill, doctor, or was it perhaps, as I believed from the outset, that he was dissembling — first so that he would be brought here, second so that he could choose his moment to walk out?’

‘As to the first, he was most certainly ill,’ replied Trevelyan. ‘At least, he had a high fever, his pupils were dilated and the sweat was pouring from his brow. I can attest to that, for I examined him myself. As to the second, he could not possibly have walked out of here, as you suggest. Look at the door, for heaven’s sake! It was locked from the outside. There is but one key and it has never left my desk. There are the bolts, which were fastened until Rivers drew them back just now. And even if, by some bizarre and inexplicable means, he had been able to leave the cell, where do you think he would go? To begin with, he would have had to cross this ward and I have been at my desk all afternoon. The door through which you three gentlemen entered was locked. And there must be a dozen more locks and bolts between here and the front gate. Are you to tell me that he somehow spirited himself through all of them too?’

‘It is certainly true that walking out of Holloway would be nothing short of impossible,’ Hawkins agreed.

‘Nobody can leave this place,’ muttered Rivers, and he seemed to smirk as if at some private joke. ‘Unless his name is Wood. Now, he left here only this afternoon. Not on his own two legs though, and I don’t think anyone would have had a mind to ask him where he was going, nor when he was coming back.’

‘Wood? Who is Wood?’ Harriman asked.

‘Jonathan Wood was here in the infirmary,’ Trevelyan replied. ‘And you’re wrong to make light of it, Rivers. He died last night and was carried out in a coffin not an hour ago.’

‘A coffin? Are you telling me that a closed coffin was taken from this room?’ I could see the detective working things out and realised, as did he, that it presented the most obvious, indeed the only method for Holmes’s escape. He turned on the orderly. ‘Was the coffin here when you took in the water?’ he demanded.

‘It might have been.’

‘Did you leave Holmes on his own, even for a few seconds?’

‘No, sir. Not for one second. I never took my eyes off him.’ The orderly shuffled on his feet. ‘Well, maybe I attended to Collins when he had his fit.’

‘What are you saying, Rivers?’ Trevelyan cried.

‘I opened the door. I went in. He was sound asleep on the bed. Then Collins began his coughing. I put the mug down and ran out to him.’

‘And what then? Did you see Holmes again?’

‘No, sir. I settled Collins. Then I went back and locked the door.’

There was a long silence. We all stood there, staring at each other as if waiting to see who would dare to speak first.

It was Harriman. ‘Where is the coffin?’ he exclaimed.

‘It will have been carried outside,’ Trevelyan replied. ‘There will be a wagon waiting to carry it to the undertaker in Muswell Hill.’ He grabbed his coat. ‘It may not be too late. If it’s still there, we can intercept it before it leaves.’

I will never forget the progress that we made through the prison. Hawkins went first with a furious Harriman at his side. Trevelyan and Rivers came next. I followed last, the book and the key still in my hand. How ridiculous they seemed now, for even if I had been able to deliver them to my friend, along with a ladder and a length of rope, he would never have been able to get out of this place on his own. It was only because of Hawkins, signalling at the various guards, that we were able to leave ourselves. The doors were unlocked and swung open, one after another. Nobody stood in our way. We took a different path to that which I had come originally, for this time we passed a laundry with men sweating at giant tubs and another room filled with boilers and convoluted metal tubes that supplied the prison’s heating, finally crossing a smaller, grassy courtyard and arriving at what was evidently a side entrance. It was only here that a guard attempted to block our passage, demanding our letters of authority.

‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ Harriman snapped. ‘Do you not recognise your own chief warder?’

‘Open the gate!’ Hawkins added. ‘There’s not a moment to lose.’

The guard did as he was bidden and the five of us passed through.

And yet, even as we went, I found myself reflecting on the number of strange circumstances that had come together to effect my friend’s escape. He had feigned illness and managed to fool a trained doctor. Well, that was easy enough. He had done much the same to me. But he had inveigled himself into a room in the infirmary at exactly the same time as a coffin had been delivered and had, moreover, been able to count on an open door, a coughing fit and the clumsiness of a mentally backward orderly. It all seemed too good to be true. Not, of course, that I cared one way or another. If Holmes had truly found a miraculous way out of this place, I would be nothing but overjoyed. But even so I was sure that something was wrong, that we had leapt to a false conclusion and, perhaps, that was exactly what he had intended.

We found ourselves in a broad, rutted avenue that ran along the side of the prison with the high wall on one side and a line of trees on the other. Harriman let out a cry and pointed. A wagon stood waiting while two men loaded a box into the back: from the size and the shape it was evidently a makeshift coffin. I must confess that I felt a moment of relief at the sight of it. I would have given almost anything right then to see Sherlock Holmes and to reassure myself that his illness had indeed been feigned and not the result of deliberate poisoning. But as we hurried forward, my brief euphoria was replaced by utter dismay. If Holmes were found and apprehended, he would be dragged back into the prison and Harriman would make sure that he was never given a second opportunity and that he remained well beyond my reach.

‘Hold there!’ cried he. He strode up to the two men who had manhandled the box into a diagonal position and were holding it, about to lever it into the wagon. ‘Lower the coffin back to the ground! I wish to examine it.’ The men were rough and grimy labourers, a father and son from the look of them, and they glanced at each other quizzically before they obeyed. The coffin lay flat upon the gravel. ‘Open it!’

This time the men hesitated — to carry a dead body was one thing but to look on it quite another.

‘It’s all right,’ Trevelyan assured them, and the strange thing is that it was at that very moment that I realised how I knew him, where we had met before.

His full name was Percy Trevelyan and he had come to our Baker Street lodgings six or seven years before, urgently in need of my friend’s services. I remembered now that there had been a patient, Blessingdon, who had behaved in a mysterious fashion and who had eventually been found hanged in his room… the police had assumed that it was suicide, an opinion with which Holmes had at once disagreed. It was strange that I had not recognised him immediately for I had admired Trevelyan and had studied his work on nervous diseases — he had won the Bruce Pinkerton prize, no less. But circumstances had not been kind to him then, and had clearly become worse since, for he had aged considerably, with a look of exhaustion and frustration that had changed his appearance. As I recalled, he had not worn spectacles when we first met. His health had clearly deteriorated. But it was certainly he, reduced to the role of prison doctor, a position that was well beneath a man of his capabilities, and it occurred to me, with a sense of excitement that I was careful to conceal, that he must have colluded in this attempted escape. He certainly owed Holmes a debt of gratitude and why else would he have pretended not to know me? Now I understood how Holmes had got into the coffin in the first place. Trevelyan had placed his orderly in charge quite deliberately. Why else would he have trusted a man who was evidently unfit for any such responsibility? The coffin would have been placed nearby. Everything would have been planned in advance. The pity of it was that the two labourers had been so slow in their work. They should have been halfway to Muswell Hill, by now. Trevelyan’s assistance had been to no avail.

One of the labourers had produced a crowbar. I watched as it was placed under the lid. He pressed down and the lid of the coffin was torn free, the wood splintering. The two of them stepped forward and lifted it off. As one, Harriman, Hawkins, Trevelyan and I moved closer.

‘That’s him,’ Rivers grunted. ‘That’s Jonathan Wood.’

It was true. The corpse that lay staring up was a grey-faced, worn-out figure who was definitely not Sherlock Holmes and who was definitely dead. Trevelyan was the first to recover his composure. ‘Of course it’s Wood,’ he exclaimed. ‘I told you. He died in the night — a coronary infection.’

He nodded at the undertakers. ‘You may close the coffin and take him up.’

‘But where is Sherlock Holmes?’ Hawkins cried.

‘He cannot have left the prison!’ Harriman replied. ‘Somehow he tricked us, but he must still be inside, waiting his opportunity. We must raise the alarm and search the place from top to bottom.’

‘But that will take all night!’

Harriman’s face was as colourless as his hair. He span on his heel, almost kicking out in his vexation. ‘I don’t care if it takes all week! The man must be found.’

He wasn’t. Two days later, I was alone in Holmes’s lodgings, reading a report of the events that I had myself witnessed.

Mrs Hudson had responded to this strange state of affairs with a remarkable degree of indifference. She had, of course, read the newspaper accounts and had spoken but one brief sentence when she had served my breakfast. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense, Dr Watson.’ She seemed personally offended and it is somehow comforting to me, all these years later, to reflect that she had complete faith in her most famous lodger, but then she perhaps knew him better than anyone and had put up with all manner of peculiarities during the lengthy period that he was with her, including desperate and often undesirable visitors, the violin playing late into the night, the occasional seizures induced by liquid cocaine, the long bouts of melancholy, the bullets fired into the wallpaper and even the pipe smoke. True, Holmes paid her handsomely, but she hardly ever complained and remained loyal to the end. Although she flits in and out of my pages, I actually knew very little about her, not even how she came to occupy the property at 221 Baker Street (I believe she inherited it from her husband, although what became of him I cannot say). After Holmes left, she lived alone. I wish I had conversed with her more and taken her for granted a little less.

At any event, my sojourn was interrupted by the arrival of that lady, and with her, another visitor. I had indeed heard the doorbell ring and a footfall on the stair but preoccupied as I was, these sounds had barely registered so I was unprepared for the arrival of the Reverend Charles Fitzsimmons, the principal of Chorley Grange School, and greeted him, I am afraid, with a look of blank puzzlement, as if we had never met before.

The fact that he was wrapped in a thick black coat with a hat and scarf across his chin did help to make a stranger of him. His clothes made him look even more rotund than he had before.

‘You will forgive me interrupting you, Dr Watson,’ he said, divesting himself of these outer garments and revealing the clerical collar which would have at once jogged my memory. ‘I was unsure whether to come but felt I must… I must! But first I must ask you, sir. This extraordinary business with Mr Sherlock Holmes, is it true?’

‘It is true that Holmes is suspected of a crime of which he is completely innocent,’ I replied.

‘But I read now that he has escaped, that he has managed to spring himself from the confinement of the law.’

‘Yes, Mr Fitzsimmons. He has also managed to evade his accusers in a manner which is a source of mystery, even to me.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘And the child, Ross, do you have any news of him?’

‘In what sense?’

‘Have you found him yet?’

Evidently, Fitzsimmons had somehow missed the reports of the boy’s terrible death — although, it occurred to me, sensational though they had been, Ross had not actually been named. It therefore fell to me to tell him the truth. ‘I am afraid we were too late. We did find Ross, but he was dead.’

‘Dead? How did it happen?’

‘Somebody had beaten him very badly. He was left to die by the river, close to Southwark Bridge.’

The headmaster’s eyes fluttered and he fell heavily into a chair. ‘Dear God in Heaven!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who would do such a thing to a child? What wickedness is there in this world? Then my visit to you is redundant, Dr Watson. I thought I might be able to help you find him. I had come upon a clue — or rather, my dear wife, Joanna, had discovered it. I brought it to you in the hope that you might know the whereabouts of Mr Holmes and pass it to him and that even given his own exigencies, he might…’ His voice trailed off. ‘But it is too late. The child should never have left Chorley Grange. I knew no good would come of it.’

‘What is this clue?’ I asked.

‘I have it with me. It was, as I say, my wife who found it in the dormitory. She was turning the mattresses — we do it once a month to air and to fumigate them. Some of the boys have lice… we wage a constant war against them. At any event, the bed occupied by Ross is now taken by another child, but there was a copybook concealed there.’ Fitzsimmons took out a thin book with a rough cover, faded and crumpled. There was a name written in a childish hand, in pencil on the front.

‘Ross could not read or write when he came to us, but we had endeavoured to teach him the rudiments. Each child in the school is given a copybook and a pencil. You will see inside his that he has forsaken his exercises. It is all very messy. He seems to have passed much of his time scribbling. But on examining it, we discovered this and it seemed to us to have significance.’

He had opened the book in the middle to show a sheet of paper, neatly folded and slipped inside as if the intention had been deliberately to conceal it. Taking it out, he unfolded it and spread it on the table for me to see. It was an advertisement, a cheap flyer for an attraction of the sort that I knew had once sprung up around such areas as Islington and Cheapside but which had since become rarer. The text was decorated by images of a snake, a monkey and an armadillo. It read:

‘I would, of course, discourage my boys from ever entering such a place,’ the Reverend Fitzsimmons said. ‘Freak shows, music halls, one penny gaffs… it astonishes me that a great city such as London will tolerate such entertainments, where everything that is vulgar and unnatural is celebrated. The lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah spring to mind. I say this to you, Dr Watson, as it may be that Ross concealed this advertisement for no other reason than that he knew it was against the very spirit of Chorley Grange. It may have been an act of defiance. He was, as my wife told you, a very wilful boy—’

‘But it may also have a connection for him,’ I broke in. ‘After he left you, he sought refuge with a family in King’s Cross and also with his sister.

But we have no idea where he was before. It could be that he fell in with this crowd.’

‘Exactly. I feel sure it is worthy of investigation which is why I brought it to you.’ Fitzwilliams collected his things and got to his feet. ‘Is there any possibility that you will be in communication with Mr Holmes?’

‘I am still hoping that he will contact me in some way.’

‘Then perhaps you will see what he makes of it. Thank you for your time, Dr Watson. I am very, very shocked about young Ross. We will pray for him in the school chapel this Sunday. No. There is no need to show me out. I will find my way.’

He took up his coat and scarf and left the room. I stared at the page, allowing my eyes to travel across the gaudy lettering and the crude illustrations. I think I must have read it two or three times before I saw what should have been obvious to me from the start. But there was no mistaking it. Dr Silkin’s House of Wonders. Jackdaw Lane. Whitechapel.

I had just found the House of Silk.