The House Of Silk

Scotland Yard and the son of the Earl of Blackwater, a member of the English aristocracy, should all come together for no obvious reason to fabricate a story and incriminate a man that none of them had ever met. That was the choice before me. Either all four of them were lying. Or Holmes, under the influence of opium, had indeed committed a terrible crime.
    The magistrate needed no such deliberation. Having heard the evidence, he called for the Charge Book and entered Holmes’s name and address, his age and the charge that had been preferred against him. To these were added the names and addresses of the prosecutor and his witnesses and an inventory of all the articles found in the prisoner’s possession. (They included a pair of pince-nez, a length of string, a signet ring bearing the crest of the Duke of Cassel-Felstein, two cigarette ends wrapped in a page torn from the
London Corn Circular
, a chemical pipette, several Greek coins and a small beryl. To this day, I wonder what the authorities must have made of it all.) Holmes, who had not uttered a word throughout the entire procedure, was then informed that he would have to remain in custody until the coroner’s court, which would be convened after the weekend. After that, he would proceed to trial. And that was the end of the business. The magistrate was in a hurry to get on. There were several more cases to try and the light was already fading. I watched as Holmes was led away.
    ‘Come with me, Watson!’ Lestrade said. ‘Move sharp, now. We don’t have a lot of time.’
    I followed him out of the main courtroom, down a flight of stairs and into a basement area that was utterly without comfort, where even the paintwork was mean and shabby, and which might have been expressly designed for prisoners, for men and women who had parted company with the ordinary world above. Lestrade had been here before, of course. He swiftly led me along a corridor and into a lofty, white-tiled room with a single window and a bench that ran all the way round. The bench was divided by a series of wooden partitions so that whoever sat there would be isolated and unable to communicate with those on either side. I knew at once that this was the Prisoners’ Waiting Room. Perhaps Holmes had been held here before the trial.
    We were no sooner in than there was a movement at the door and Holmes appeared, escorted by a uniformed officer. I rushed towards him and might even have embraced him had I not realised that, in his view, this would have been just one more indignity piled up on so many. Even so, my voice broke as I addressed him. ‘Holmes! I do not know what to say. The injustice of your arrest, the way you have been treated … it is beyond any imagining.’
    ‘It is certainly most interesting,’ returned he. ‘How are you, Lestrade? A strange turn of events, do you not think? What do you make of it?’
    ‘I really don’t know what to think, Mr Holmes,’ Lestrade muttered.
    ‘Well, that’s nothing new. It seems that our friend, Henderson, led us a pretty song and dance, hey, Watson? Well, let’s not forget that I half-expected it and he has still proved useful to us. Before, I suspected that we had stumbled on to a conspiracy that went far beyond a murder in a hotel room. Now I am certain of it.’
    ‘But what good is it to know these things if you are to be imprisoned and your reputation destroyed?’ I replied.
    ‘I think my reputation will look after itself,’ Holmes said. ‘If they hang me, Watson, I shall leave it to you to persuade your readers that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.’
    ‘You may make light of all this, Mr Holmes,’ growled Lestrade. ‘But I should warn you that we have very little time. And the evidence against you seems, in a word, unarguable.’
    ‘What did you make of the evidence, Watson?’
    ‘I don’t know what to say, Holmes. These men don’t appear to know each other. They have come from different parts of the country. And yet they are in complete agreement about what occurred.’
    ‘And yet, surely you would take my word above that of our friend, Isaiah Creer?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Then let me tell you at once that what I have told Inspector Harriman is the true version of events. After I entered the opium den, I was approached by Creer and greeted as a new customer – which is to say, with a mixture of warmth and wariness. There were four men lying semiconscious, or pretending to be, on the mattresses and one of