The House Of Silk

adamant that he would be powerless if it was ignored. Even so, I made the decision to present myself once more at the Diogenes Club as soon as the opportunity arose. But that would have to wait until after the police court. Lestrade rose to his feet. ‘I will call for you at two o’clock,’ he said.
    ‘Thank you, Lestrade.’
    ‘Don’t thank me yet, Dr Watson. There may be nothing that I can do. If ever a case looked cut and dried, this is it.’ I remembered that Inspector Harriman had said much the same to me the night before. ‘Harriman wants to try Mr Holmes for murder and I think you should prepare yourself for the worst.’

TWELVE
The Evidence in the Case

    Never before had I attended a police court and yet, as I approached that solid and austere building on Bow Street in the company of Lestrade, I felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if it was right that I had been summoned and that my coming here was somehow inevitable. Lestrade must have seen the look on my face for he smiled mournfully. ‘I don’t suppose you expected to find yourself in a place like this, eh, Dr Watson?’ I told him that he had taken the very thought from my head. ‘Well, you have to wonder how many other men have passed this way thanks to you – by which, of course, I mean you and Mr Holmes.’
    He was quite right. This was the end of the process which we had so frequently begun, the first step on the way to the Old Bailey and then perhaps the gallows. It is curious to reflect now, at the very end of my writing career, that each and every one of my chronicles ended with the unmasking or the arrest of a miscreant, and that after that point, almost without exception, I simply assumed that their fate would be of no further interest to my readers and gave up on them, as if it was their wrongdoing alone that justified their existence and that once the crimes had been solved they were no longer human beings with beating hearts and broken spirits. Never once did I consider the fear and anguish they must have endured as they passed through these swing doors and walked these gloomy corridors. Did any of them ever weep tears of repentance or offer prayers for their salvation? Did some of them fight on to the end? I did not care. It was not part of my narrative.
    But as I look back on that iron-cold December day when Holmes himself faced the forces that he had so often unleashed, I think that perhaps I did them an injustice; even villains as cruel as Culverton Smith or as conniving as Jonas Oldacre. I wrote what are now called detective stories. By chance, my detective was the greatest of them all. But in a sense he was defined by the men and, indeed, the women he came up against, and I cast them aside all too easily. Entering the police court they all returned very forcibly to mind and it was almost as if I could hear them calling to me: ‘Welcome. You are one of us now.’
    The courtroom was square and windowless, with wooden benches and barriers and the royal arms emblazoned on the far wall. This is where the magistrate sat, a stiff, elderly man whose demeanour had something wooden about it too. There was a railed-off platform in front of him and it was here that the prisoners were brought one after the other, for the process was rapid and repetitive so that, to the onlooker at least, it became almost monotonous. Lestrade and I had arrived early, taking our places in the public gallery with a few other onlookers, and we watched as a forger, a burglar and a magsman were all remanded in custody to await trial. And yet the magistrate could also be compassionate. An apprentice accused of drunken and violent behaviour – it had been his eighteenth birthday – was sent away with the details of his crime placed in the Refused Charge Book. And two children, no more than eight or nine years old, brought in for begging, were handed over to the Police Courts Mission with the recommendation that they should be looked after either by the the Waifs and Strays Society, by Dr Barnardo’s orphanage or by the Society for the Improvement of London’s Children. It was odd to hear the last of these three named for this was the organisation responsible for Chorley Grange, which Holmes and I had visited.
    Everything had proceeded at a pace, but now Lestrade nudged me and I became aware of a new sense of gravity in the courtroom. More uniformed policemen and clerks entered and took their places. The usher of the court, a plump, owl-like man in his