The House of Silk

TWENTY Keelan O’Donaghue

The snowfall of the night before had tranformed Ridgeway Hall in a way that was quite startling, accentuating its symmetry and rendering it somehow timeless. I had thought it handsome on both occasions that I had visited, but as I approached it for the last time, in the company of Sherlock Holmes, I thought it as perfect as the miniature houses one might see behind the window of a toy shop and it almost felt like an act of vandalism to scour the white driveway with our carriage wheels.

It was early in the afternoon of the following day and I must confess that, had I been given a chance, I would have postponed this visit at least for another twenty-four hours, for I was exhausted from the night before and my arm, where I had been struck, was aching to the extent that I could barely close the fingers of my left hand. I had passed a wretched night, desperate to fall asleep in order to put out of my mind everything I had seen at Chorley Grange, yet unable to do so precisely because it was still so fresh in my memory. I had come to the breakfast table and had been irked to see Holmes, quite fresh, restored in every way to his old self, greeting me in that clipped, precise way of his as if nothing untoward had occurred. It was he who had insisted on this visit, having already sent a wire to Edmund Carstairs before I had risen. I remembered our meeting at The Bag of Nails when I had described what had befallen the family, and Eliza Carstairs in particular. He was as concerned now as he had been then and clearly placed great significance on her sudden illness. He insisted on seeing her for himself, although quite how he might be able to help her when I and so many other doctors had failed was beyond my comprehension.

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.’

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 yourself to be seen in a state of undress. There was the inconvenience of that tattoo, was there not. So were you ever to visit a pleasure beach, you would naturally be unable to swim.

‘All would have been well but for the arrival of Bill McParland from Boston. How had he picked up your trail and learned your new identity? We will never know, but he was a detective, a very good one, and doubtless had his methods. It was not your husband he was signalling outside this house and at the Savoy. It was you. By this stage, he was no longer interested in arresting you. He had come here for the money he was owed and his desire for it, his sense of injustice, his recent wound — all this drove him to desperation. He met with you, did he not?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he demanded money from you. If you paid him enough, he would let you keep your secret. When he handed your husband that note, he was effectively warning you. At any time, he could reveal everything he knew.’

‘You have it all, Mr Holmes.’

‘Not all, not quite yet. You needed to give McParland something to keep him quiet but had no resources of your own. It was therefore necessary to create the illusion of a burglary. You came down in the night and guided him to the correct window with a light. You opened that window from inside and allowed him to climb in. You opened the safe, using a key which you had never in fact lost. And even here you could not resist a touch of malice. As well as the money, you gave him a necklace which had belonged to the late Mrs Carstairs and which you knew had great sentimental value to your husband. It seems to me that any chance you had to hurt him was irresistible to you and you always seized it with alacrity.

‘McParland made one mistake. The money that you gave to him — fifty pounds — was only a first payment. He had demanded more and, foolishly, he gave you the name of the hotel where he was staying. It is possible that the sight of you in all the finery of a wealthy English lady deceived him and he forgot the creature you had once been. Your husband was at the gallery in Albemarle Street. You chose your moment, slipped out of the house and climbed into the hotel through a back window. You were waiting in McParland’s room when he returned and struck from behind, stabbing him in the neck. I wonder, incidentally, how you were dressed?’

‘I was dressed in my old style. Petticoats and crinolette would have been a little cumbersome.’

‘You silenced McParland and removed any trace of his identity, missing only the cigarette case. And with him gone, there was nothing to stand in the way of the rest of your scheme.’

‘There is more?’ Carstairs rasped. All the blood had left his face and I thought he might be about to faint.

‘Indeed so, Mr Carstairs.’ Holmes turned back to the wife. ‘The cold-blooded marriage that you had arranged for yourself was only the means to an end. It was your intention to kill Edmund’s family one at a time: his mother, his sister and then he. At the end of it, you would inherit everything that had been his. This house, the money, the art… all of it would be yours. It is hard to imagine the hatred that must have been driving you forward, the relish with which you went about your task.’

‘It has been a pleasure, Mr Holmes. I have enjoyed every minute of it.’

‘My mother?’ Carstairs gasped the two words.

‘The most likely explanation was the one you first suggested to me, that the gas fire in her bedroom blew out. But it was not one that stood up to scrutiny. For your manservant, Kirby, told us that he blamed himself for the death as he had stopped up every crack and crevice in the room. Your mother disliked draughts so it was impossible that a draught could have blown out the fire. Your sister, however, had come to another conclusion. She believed that the late Mrs Carstairs had taken her own life, so distraught was she at your marriage. But as much as Eliza loathed your new wife and instinctively knew her to be dissembling, even she was unable to arrive at the truth, which is that Catherine Carstairs entered the room and deliberately blew out the flame, leaving the old lady to perish. There could be no survivors, you see. For the property to be hers, everyone had to die.’

‘And Eliza?’

‘Your sister is being slowly poisoned.’

‘But that’s impossible, Mr Holmes. I told you—’

‘You told me that you have carefully examined everything she has eaten, which only suggests to me that she is being poisoned in another way. The answer, Mr Carstairs, is the bath. Your sister insists on bathing regularly and uses strong, lavender bath salts. I must confess that this is a most novel way of administering poison, and I am frankly surprised that it has been so effective, but I would say that a small measure of aconitine has been added, regularly, to the bath salts. It has entered Miss Carstairs’s system through her skin and also, I would imagine, through the moisture and the fumes which she has, of necessity, absorbed. Aconitine is a highly toxic alkaloid which is soluable in water and which would have killed your sister instantly if a large dose had been used. Instead, you have noted this slow but remorseless decline. It is a striking and innovative method of murder, Mrs Carstairs, and one which I am sure will be added to the annals of crime. It was also quite daring of you, incidentally, to visit my colleague while I was incarcerated, although you naturally pretended you knew nothing of that. It doubtless persuaded your husband of your devotion to your sister-in-law while, in fact, you were actually laughing at them both.’

‘You devil!’ Carstairs twisted away from her in horror. ‘How could you? How could anyone?’

‘Mr Holmes is right, Edmund,’ his wife returned and I noticed that her voice had changed. It was harder, the Irish accent now prominent. ‘I would have put all of you in your graves. First your mother. Then Eliza. And you have no idea what I was planning for you!’ She turned to Holmes. ‘And what now, clever Mr Holmes? Do you have a policeman waiting outside? Should I go upstairs and pack a few things?’

‘There is indeed a policeman waiting, Mrs Carstairs. But I have not finished yet.’ Holmes drew himself up and I saw a coldness and a vengefulness in his eyes that went beyond anything I had ever seen before. He was a judge about to deliver sentence, an executioner opening the trapdoor. A certain chill had entered the room. A month from now, Ridgeway Hall would be empty, unoccupied — and am I too fanciful to suggest that something of its fate was already being whispered, that somehow the house already knew? ‘There is still the death of the child, Ross, to be accounted for.’

Mrs Carstairs burst out laughing. ‘I know nothing about Ross,’ she said. ‘You have been very bright, Mr Holmes. But now you go beyond yourself.’

‘It is no longer you I am addressing, Mrs Carstairs,’ Holmes replied and turned instead to her husband. ‘My investigation into your affairs took an unexpected turn on the night that Ross was murdered, Mr Carstairs, and that is not a word I use often, for it is my habit to expect everything. Every crime that I have ever investigated has had what you might call a narrative flow — it is this invisible thread that my friend, Dr Watson, has always unerringly identified. It is what has made him such an excellent chronicler of my work. But I have been aware that this time I have been diverted. I was following one line of investigation and it took me, suddenly and quite accidentally, onto another. From the moment I arrived at Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel, I had left Boston and the Flat Cap Gang behind me. Instead, I was moving in a new direction and one that would eventually take me to the unveiling of a crime more unpleasant than any I had ever encountered.’

Carstairs flinched when he heard this. His wife was regarding him curiously.

‘Let us go back to that night, for you, of course, were with me. I knew very little about Ross, except that he was one of the band of street urchins that I have affectionately named the Baker Street Irregulars and who have helped me from time to time. They have been of use to me and I have recompensed them. It seemed a harmless arrangement, at least until now. Ross was left to watch the hotel while his companion, Wiggins, came for me. We drove, the four of us — you, me, Watson and Wiggins — over to Blackfriars. Ross saw us. And at once I perceived that the boy was terrified. He asked who we were, who you were. Watson attempted to reassure him and, in doing so, both named you and gave the boy your address. That, I rather fear, was to be the death of him — though do not blame yourself, Watson, for the mistake was equally mine.

‘I had assumed that Ross was frightened because of what he had seen at the hotel. It was a natural assumption to make for, as things turned out, a murder had taken place. I was convinced that he must have seen the killer and, for reasons of his own, had decided to keep silent. But I was wrong. What had frightened and amazed the boy was nothing to do with it at all. It was the sight of you, Mr Carstairs. Ross was determined to know who you were and where he could find you because he recognised you. God knows what you had done to that child, and even now I refuse even to consider it. But the two of you had met at the House of Silk.’

Another dreadful silence.

‘What is the House of Silk?’ Catherine Carstairs asked.

‘I will not answer your question, Mrs Carstairs. Nor do I need to address myself to you again except to say this: your entire scheme, this marriage of yours, would only have worked with a certain sort of man — one who wanted a wife to spite his family, to give him a certain standing in society, not for reasons of love or affection. As you put it so delicately yourself, you knew him for what he was. I myself wondered exactly what sort of creature I was dealing with on the very first day that we met for it always fascinates me to meet a man who tells me he is late for a Wagner opera on an evening when no Wagner is being played in town.

‘Ross recognised you, Mr Carstairs. It was the very worst thing that could have happened, for I can imagine that anonymity was the watchword at the House of Silk. You came in the night, you did what you had to do, and you left. Ross was, in all this, the victim. But he was also old beyond his years and poverty and desperation had driven him inexorably to crime. He had already stolen a gold pocket watch from one of the men who had preyed on him. As soon as he got over the shock of encountering you, he must have seen the possibilities of considerably more. Certainly, that is what he told his friend, Wiggins. Did he visit you the next day? Did he threaten to expose you if you did not pay him a fortune? Or had you already scuttled off to Charles Fitzsimmons and his gang of thugs and demanded that they take care of the situation?’

‘I never asked them to do anything,’ Carstairs muttered in a voice that seemed to be straining to bring the words to his lips.

‘You went to Fitzsimmons and told him that you were being threatened. Acting on his instructions, you sent Ross to a meeting where he believed he would be paid for his silence. He had left for that meeting moments before Watson and I arrived at The Bag of Nails and by then we were too late. It was not Fitzsimmons or yourself that Ross met. It was the two thugs who called themselves Henderson and Bratby. And they made sure he would not trouble you again.’ Holmes paused. ‘Ross was tortured to death for his audacity, a white ribbon placed around his wrist as a warning to any other of these wretched children who might have the same ideas. You may not have commanded it, Mr Carstairs, but I want you to know that I hold you personally responsible. You exploited him. You killed him. You are a man as debased and as vile as any I have ever met.’

He rose to his feet.

‘And now I will leave this house, for I do not wish to tarry here any longer. It occurs to me that, in some ways, your marriage was not perhaps as ill-judged as might be thought. The two of you are made for each other. Well, you will find police carriages waiting outside for both of you, although they will be taking you their separate ways. You are ready, Watson? We will show ourselves out.’

Edmund and Catherine Carstairs sat motionless on the sofa together. Neither of them spoke. But I felt them watching us intently as we left.