The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
‘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
‘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
Edmund and Catherine Carstairs sat motionless on the sofa together. Neither of them spoke. But I felt them watching us intently as we left.
Afterword
It is with a heavy heart that I draw to the end of my task. While I have been writing this, it is as if I have been reliving it, and although there are some details I would wish to forget, still it has been good to find myself back at Holmes’s side, following him from Wimbledon to Blackfriars, to Hamworth Hill and Holloway, always one step behind him (in every sense) and yet enjoying the rare privilege of observing, at close quarters, that unique mind. Now that the final page draws near, I am aware once again of the room in which I find myself, the aspidistra on the windowsill, the radiator that is always a little too hot. My hand is aching and all my memories are skewered on the page. Would that there was more to tell, for once I am finished I will find myself alone once again.
I should not complain. I am comfortable here. My daughters visit me occasionally and bring my grandchildren too. One of them was even christened Sherlock. His mother thought she was paying homage to my long friendship, but it is a name he never uses. Ah well, they will come at the end of the week and I will give them this manuscript with directions for its safe lodging and then my work will be done. All that remains is to read it one last time and perhaps take the advice of the nurse who attended upon me this morning.