'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. n.o.body stood in our way. We took a different path to that which I had come originally, for this time we pa.s.sed 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, gra.s.sy courtyard and arriving at what was evidently a side entrance. It was only here that a guard attempted to block our pa.s.sage, demanding our letters of authority.

'Don't be a d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed through.

And yet, even as we went, I found myself reflecting on the number of strange circ.u.mstances 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 rea.s.sure 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sumed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 grat.i.tude 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 a.s.sistance 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.

Police are still unable to explain the mysterious disappearance of the well-known consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, who was being held at Holloway Prison in connection with the murder of a young woman in Coppergate Square. Inspector J. Harriman who is in charge of the inquiry has accused the prison authorities of a dereliction of duty, a charge that has been strenuously denied. The fact remains that Mr Holmes somehow managed to spirit himself out of a locked cell and through a dozen locked doors in a manner that would appear to deny the laws of nature and the police are offering a reward of 50 to anyone who can supply information leading to his discovery and apprehension.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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.

SEVENTEEN.

A Message My wife returned to London the following day. She had sent me a telegram from Camberwell to inform me of her arrival and I was waiting for her at Holborn Viaduct when her train drew in. I have to say that I would not have left Baker Street for any other reason. I was still certain that Holmes would attempt to reach me and dreaded the idea of his making his way to his lodgings, with all the dangers that would entail, only to find me not in. But nor could I consider allowing Mary to cross the city unattended. One of her greatest virtues was her tolerance, the way she put up with my long absences in the company of Sherlock Holmes. Never once did she complain, although I know she worried that I was putting myself in danger, and I owed it to her now to explain what had happened while she had been away and to inform her that, regretfully, it might be a while yet before we could be permanently reunited. And I had missed her. I looked forward to seeing her again.

It was now the second week in December and, after the bad weather that had begun the month, the sun was out and although it was very cold, everything was ablaze with a sense of prosperity and good cheer. The pavements were almost invisible beneath the bustle of families arriving from the countryside and bringing with them wide-eyed children in numbers that might have populated a small city themselves. The ice-rakers and the crossing-sweepers were out. The sweetmeat and grocer shops were gloriously festooned. Every window carried advertis.e.m.e.nts for goose clubs, roast beef clubs and pudding clubs and the very air was filled with the aroma of burned sugar and mincemeat. As I climbed down from my brougham and made my way into the station, pushing against the crowd, I reflected on the circ.u.mstances that had alienated me from all this activity, from the day-to-day pleasures of London in the festive season. That was perhaps the disadvantage of my a.s.sociation with Sherlock Holmes. It drew me into dark places where, in truth, n.o.body would choose to go.

The station was no less crowded. The trains were on time, the platforms filled with young men carrying parcels, packages and hampers, scurrying around as excitably as Alice's white rabbit. Mary's train had already arrived and I was briefly unable to locate her as the doors opened, pouring yet more souls into the metropolis. But then I saw her and, as she climbed down from her carriage, an event occurred that caused me a moment of disquiet. A man appeared, shuffling across the platform as if about to accost her. I could only see him from the back and, apart from an ill-fitting jacket and red hair, would have been unable to identify him again. He seemed to speak briefly to her, then boarded the train, disappearing from sight. But perhaps I was mistaken. As I approached her she saw me and smiled and then I had taken her in my arms and together we were walking towards the entrance where I had told my driver to wait.

There was much that Mary wanted to tell me of her visit. Mrs Forrester had been delighted to see her and the two of them had become the closest of companions, their relationship of governess and employer being long behind them. The boy, Richard, was polite and well behaved and, once he had begun to recover from his sickness, charming company. He was also an avid reader of my stories! The household was just as she remembered it, comfortable and welcoming. The whole visit had been a success, apart from a slight headache and sore throat that she had herself picked up in the last few days and which had been exacerbated by the journey. She looked tired and, when I pressed her, she complained of a sense of heaviness in the muscles of her arms and legs. 'But don't fuss over me, John. I'll be quite my old self after a rest and a cup of tea. I want to hear all your news. What is this extraordinary business I've been reading about with Sherlock Holmes?'

I wonder to what extent I should blame myself for not examining Mary more closely. But I was preoccupied and she herself made light of her illness. And I was thinking also of the strange man who had approached her. It is quite likely that, even had I known, there would have been nothing that I could do. But even so, I have always had to live with the knowledge that I took her complaints too lightly and failed to recognise the early signs of the typhoid fever which would take her from me all too soon.

It was she who brought up the message, just after we set off. 'Did you see that man just now?' she asked.

'At the train? Yes, I did see him. Did he speak to you?'

'He addressed me by name.'

I was startled. 'What did he say?'

'Just "Good morning, Mrs Watson." He was very uncouth. A working man, I would have said. And he pressed this into my hand.'

She produced a small cloth bag which she had been clutching all the time but which she had almost forgotten in the pleasure of our reunion and our necessary haste leaving the station. Now she handed it to me. There was something heavy inside the bag, and I thought at first that it might be coins for I heard the clink of metal, but on opening it and pouring the contents into the palm of my hand, I found myself holding three solid nails.

'What is the meaning of this?' I asked. 'Did the man say nothing more? Can you describe him?'

'Not really, my dear. I barely glanced at him as I was looking at you. He had chestnut hair, I think. And a dirty, unshaven face. Does it matter?'

'He said nothing else? Did he demand money?'

'I told you. He greeted me by name; nothing more.'

'But why on earth would anyone give you a bag of nails?' The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I understood and let out a cry of exultation. 'The Bag of Nails! Of course!'

'What is it, my dear?'

'I believe, Mary, that you may have just met Holmes himself.'

'It looked nothing like him.'

'That is exactly the idea!'

'This bag of nails means something you?'

It meant a great deal. Holmes wanted me to return to one of the two public houses that we had visited when we were searching for Ross. Both had been called The Bag of Nails, but which one did he have in mind? It would surely not be the second one, in Lambeth, for that was where Sally Dixon had worked and it was known to the police. All in all, the first one, in Edge Lane, was more likely. For he was certainly afraid of being seen; that much was implicit in the manner he had chosen to communicate with me. He had been in disguise and if anyone had seen the approach and tried to apprehend Mary or myself on the station platform, they would have found nothing but a cloth bag with three carpenter's nails and no indication at all that a message had been pa.s.sed.

'My dear, I'm afraid I am going to have to abandon you the moment we are home,' I said.

'You are not in any danger are you, John?'

'I hope not.'

She sighed. 'Sometimes I think you are fonder of Mr Holmes than you are of me.' She saw the look on my face and patted my hand gently. 'I'm only being pleasant with you. And you don't need to come all the way to Kensington. We can stop at the next corner. The driver can bring in my bags and I can see myself home.' I hesitated and she looked at me more seriously. 'Go to him, John. If he resorted to such lengths to send a message, then he must be in trouble and needs you as he has always needed you. You cannot refuse.'

And so I parted company from her, not just taking my life in my hands but almost losing it as I slipped out in the traffic, coming close to being run over by an omnibus in the Strand. For it had occurred to me that, if Holmes was afraid of being followed, I should be too, and it was therefore vital that I should not be seen. I dodged between various carriages and finally reached the safety of the pavement where I looked carefully about me before turning back the way I had come, arriving in that forlorn and sorry part of Sh.o.r.editch about thirty minutes later. I remembered the public house well. A rundown place that looked little better in the sunlight than it had in the fog. I crossed the street and went in.

There was one man sitting in the saloon bar and it was not Sherlock Holmes. To my great surprise and somewhat to my mortification, I recognised the man called Rivers who had a.s.sisted Dr Trevelyan at Holloway Prison. He was no longer wearing his uniform, but his vacant expression, sunken eyes and unruly ginger hair were unmistakable. He was slouching at a table with a gla.s.s of stout.

'Mr Rivers!' I exclaimed.

'Sit down with me, Watson. It's very good to see you again.'

It was Holmes who had spoken and in that second I understood how I had been deceived and how he had effected his escape from prison in front of my very eyes. I confess that I almost fell into the seat that he had proffered, seeing, with a sense of haplessness, the smile that I knew so well, beaming at me from beneath the wig and the make-up. For that was the wonderment of Holmes's disguises. It wasn't that he used a great deal of theatrical trickery or camouflage. It was more that he had a knack of metamorphosing into whatever character he wished to play and that if he believed it, you would believe it too, right up to the moment of revelation. It was like gazing at an obscure point on a distant landscape, at a rock or a tree which had taken on the shape, perhaps, of an animal. And yet once you had drawn closer and seen it for what it was, it would never deceive you again. I had sat down with Rivers. But now it was obvious to me that I was with Holmes.

'Tell me-' I began.

'All in good time, my dear fellow,' he interrupted. 'First, a.s.sure me that you were not followed here.'

'I am certain I am alone.'

'And yet there were two men behind you at Holborn Viaduct. Policemen, from the look of them, and doubtless in the employ of our friend, Inspector Harriman.'

'I didn't see them. But I took great care leaving my wife's carriage when it was halfway down the Strand. I didn't allow it to come to a complete stop and slipped behind a barouche. I can a.s.sure you that if there were two men with me at the station, they are now in Kensington and wondering what became of me.'

'My trusty Watson!'

'But how did you know that my wife was arriving today? How did you even come to be at Holborn Viaduct at all?'

'That is simplicity itself. I followed you from Baker Street, realised which train you must be meeting and managed to get ahead of you in the crowd.'

'That is only the first of my questions, Holmes, and I must insist that you satisfy me on all counts, for it makes my head spin, simply to see you sitting here. Let us start with Dr Trevelyan. I a.s.sume you recognised him and persuaded him to help you escape.'

'That is exactly the case. It was a happy coincidence that our former client should have found employment at the prison although I would like to think that any medical man would have been persuaded to my cause, particularly when it became clear that there was a plan to murder me.'

'You knew of that?'

Holmes glanced at me keenly, and I realised that if I were not to break the pledge I had given to my sinister host, two nights before, then I must pretend to know nothing at all. 'I expected it from the moment I was arrested. It was clear to me that the evidence against me would begin to fall apart as soon as I was allowed to speak and so, of course, my enemies would not permit it. I was waiting for an attack of any description and took particular care to examine my food. Contrary to popular belief, there are very few poisons that are completely tasteless and certainly not the a.r.s.enic which they hoped would finish me. I detected it in a bowl of meat broth which was brought to me on my second evening ... a particularly foolish attempt, Watson, and one that I was grateful for, as it gave me exactly the weapon that I needed.'

'Was Harriman part of this plot?' I asked, unable to keep the fury out of my voice.