The House Of Silk

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