The House Of Silk

the front door. ‘Thank you for your visit, Dr Watson,’ he said. ‘I understand the forces that drove my dear Catherine to your door and I very much hope that Mr Holmes will be able to extricate himself from the difficulties which he is in.’
    We shook hands. I was about to leave and then I remembered. ‘There is just one other thing, Mr Carstairs. Is your wife able to swim?’
    ‘I’m sorry? What an extraordinary question! Why do you wish to know?’
    ‘I have my methods …’
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact, Catherine cannot swim at all. Indeed, she has a fear of the sea and has told me she will not enter the water under any circumstances.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Carstairs.’
    ‘Good day, Dr Watson.’
    The door closed. I had received an answer to the question that Holmes had put to me. Now all I needed to know was why I had asked it.

FOURTEEN
Into the Dark

    A note from Mycroft awaited me on my return. He would be at the Diogenes Club early that evening and would be pleased to see me if I would like to call upon him at around that time. I was almost worn out by my journey to and from Wimbledon on top of the activity of recent days … it was never possible for me to exert myself to any great extent without being reminded of the injuries I had sustained in Afghanistan. Even so, I decided to go out once again after a short rest for I was acutely aware of the ordeal that Sherlock Holmes must be enduring while I was at liberty, and this outweighed any consideration of my own well-being. Mycroft might not give me a second opportunity to visit him, for he was as capricious as he was corpulent, flitting like some oversized shadow through the corridors of power. Mrs Hudson had laid out a late lunch which I ate before falling asleep in my chair and the sky was already darkening when I set out and caught a cab back to Pall Mall.
    He met me once again in the Stranger’s Room but this time his manner was more clipped and formal than it had been when I was there with Holmes. He began without any pleasantries. ‘This is a bad business. A very bad business. Why did my brother seek my advice if he was not prepared to take it?’
    ‘I think it was information he required from you, not advice,’ I countered.
    ‘A fair point. But given that I was able to provide only the one and not the other, he might have done well to listen to what I had to say. I told him that no good would come of it – but that was his character, even when he was very young. He was impetuous. Our mother used to say the same and always feared that he would find himself in trouble. Would that she had lived to see him established as a detective. She would have smiled at that!’
    ‘Can you help him?’
    ‘You already know the answer to that, Dr Watson, for I told you the last time we met. There is nothing I can do.’
    ‘Would you see him hanged for murder?’
    ‘It will not come to that. It cannot come to that. Already I am working behind the scenes, and although I am finding a surprising amount of interference and obfuscation, he is too well known to too many people of importance for that possibility to arise.’
    ‘He is being held at Holloway.’
    ‘So I understand, and being well cared for – or at least as well as that grim place will allow.’
    ‘What can you tell me of Inspector Harriman?’
    ‘A good police officer, a man of integrity, with not a spot on his record.’
    ‘And what of the other witnesses?’
    Mycroft closed his eyes and lifted his head as if tasting a good wine. In this way did he give himself pause for thought. ‘I know what you are inferring, Dr Watson,’ he said at length. ‘And you must believe me when I say that, despite his reckless behaviour, I still have Sherlock’s best interests at heart and am working to make sense of what has happened. I have already, at considerable personal expense, investigated the backgrounds of both Dr Thomas Ackland and Lord Horace Blackwater, and regret to tell you that as far as I can see they are beyond reproach, both of good families, both single, both wealthy men. The two of them do not club together. They did not go to the same school. For most of their lives, they have lived hundreds of miles apart. Beyond the coincidence of their both being in Limehouse at the same time of night, there is nothing that connects them.’
    ‘Unless it is the House of Silk.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘And you will not tell me what it is.’
    ‘I will not tell you because I do not know. This