The House Of Silk

in the gaslight, flitting down a passageway and disappearing from sight, perhaps he hears a cry as the blow is struck. Moments later, the killer appears a second time, hurrying away into the night. Ross remains where he is and a short while later the three of us arrive.’
    ‘He was afraid,’ he said. ‘He mistook Carstairs for a police officer.’
    ‘It was more than fear. I would have said the boy was in the grip of something close to terror, but I assumed …’ He struck a hand against his brow. ‘We must find him again and speak with him. I hope I have not been guilty of a grave miscalculation.’
    We stopped at a post office on the way back to Baker Street and Holmes sent another wire to Wiggins, the chief lieutenant of his little army of irregulars. But twenty-four hours later, Wiggins had still not reported back to us. And it was a short while after that that we heard the worst possible news.
    Ross had disappeared.

SIX
Chorley Grange School for Boys

    In 1890, the year of which I write, there were some five and a half million people in the six hundred square miles of the area known as the Metropolitan Police District of London and then, as always, those two constant neighbours, wealth and poverty were living uneasily side by side. It sometimes occurs to me now, having witnessed so many momentous changes across the years, that I should have described at greater length the sprawling chaos of the city in which I lived, perhaps in the manner of Gissing – or Dickens fifty years before. I can only say in my own defence that I was a biographer, not a historian or a journalist, and that my adventures invariably led me to more rarefied walks of life – fine houses, hotels, private clubs, schools and offices of government. It is true that Holmes’s clients came from all classes, but (and perhaps someone might one day have pause to consider the significance of this) the more interesting crimes, the ones I chose to relate, were nearly always committed by the well-to-do.
    However, it is necessary now to reflect upon the lower depths of the great cauldron of London, what Gissing called ‘the nether world’, to understand the impossibility of the task that faced us. We had to find one child, one helpless tatterdemalion among so many others, and if Holmes was right, if there was danger abroad, we had no time to spare. Where to begin? Our enquiries would be made no easier by the restlessness of the city, the way its inhabitants moved from house to house and street to street in seemingly perpetual motion so that few knew so much as the names of those who lived next door. The slum clearances and the spread of the railways were largely culpable, although many Londoners seemed to have arrived with a restlessness of spirit that simply would not allow them to settle long. They moved like gypsies, following whatever work they could find; fruit-picking and bricklaying in the summer, bunkering down and scurrying for coal and scraps once the cold weather arrived. They might stay a while in one place, but then, once their money had run out, they would bolt the moon and be off again.
    And then there was the greatest curse of our age, the carelessness that had put tens of thousands of children out on to the street; begging, pickpocketing, pilfering or, if they were not up to the mark, quietly dying unknown and unloved, their parents indifferent if indeed those parents were themselves alive. There were children who shared threepenny lodging houses, provided they could find their share of the night’s rent, crammed together in conditions barely fit for animals. Children slept on rooftops, in pens at Smithfield market, down in the sewers and even, I heard, in holes scooped out of the dust-heaps on Hackney Marshes. There were, as I shall soon describe, charities that set out to help them, to clothe and to educate them. But the charities were too few, the children too many and even as the century drew to a close, London has every reason to be ashamed.
    Come, Watson, that’s quite enough of this. Get back to the story. Holmes would never have stood for it had he been alive!

    Holmes had been a mood of constant disquiet from the moment we had left Mrs Oldmore’s Private Hotel. During the day, he had paced up and down the room like a bear. Although he had smoked incessantly, he had barely touched his lunch or dinner and I was concerned to see him glance once or twice at the smart morocco case that he kept on his mantelpiece. It