The House Of Silk

A working man, I would have said. And he pressed this into my hand.’
    She produced a small cloth bag which she had been clutching all the time but which she had almost forgotten in the pleasure of our reunion and our necessary haste leaving the station. Now she handed it to me. There was something heavy inside the bag, and I thought at first that it might be coins for I heard the clink of metal, but on opening it and pouring the contents into the palm of my hand, I found myself holding three solid nails.
    ‘What is the meaning of this?’ I asked. ‘Did the man say nothing more? Can you describe him?’
    ‘Not really, my dear. I barely glanced at him as I was looking at you. He had chestnut hair, I think. And a dirty, unshaven face. Does it matter?’
    ‘He said nothing else? Did he demand money?’
    ‘I told you. He greeted me by name; nothing more.’
    ‘But why on earth would anyone give you a bag of nails?’ The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I understood and let out a cry of exultation. ‘The Bag of Nails! Of course!’
    ‘What is it, my dear?’
    ‘I believe, Mary, that you may have just met Holmes himself.’
    ‘It looked nothing like him.’
    ‘That is exactly the idea!’
    ‘This bag of nails means something you?’
    It meant a great deal. Holmes wanted me to return to one of the two public houses that we had visited when we were searching for Ross. Both had been called The Bag of Nails, but which one did he have in mind? It would surely not be the second one, in Lambeth, for that was where Sally Dixon had worked and it was known to the police. All in all, the first one, in Edge Lane, was more likely. For he was certainly afraid of being seen; that much was implicit in the manner he had chosen to communicate with me. He had been in disguise and if anyone had seen the approach and tried to apprehend Mary or myself on the station platform, they would have found nothing but a cloth bag with three carpenter’s nails and no indication at all that a message had been passed.
    ‘My dear, I’m afraid I am going to have to abandon you the moment we are home,’ I said.
    ‘You are not in any danger are you, John?’
    ‘I hope not.’
    She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you are fonder of Mr Holmes than you are of me.’ She saw the look on my face and patted my hand gently. ‘I’m only being pleasant with you. And you don’t need to come all the way to Kensington. We can stop at the next corner. The driver can bring in my bags and I can see myself home.’ I hesitated and she looked at me more seriously. ‘Go to him, John. If he resorted to such lengths to send a message, then he must be in trouble and needs you as he has always needed you. You cannot refuse.’
    And so I parted company from her, not just taking my life in my hands but almost losing it as I slipped out in the traffic, coming close to being run over by an omnibus in the Strand. For it had occurred to me that, if Holmes was afraid of being followed, I should be too, and it was therefore vital that I should not be seen. I dodged between various carriages and finally reached the safety of the pavement where I looked carefully about me before turning back the way I had come, arriving in that forlorn and sorry part of Shoreditch about thirty minutes later. I remembered the public house well. A rundown place that looked little better in the sunlight than it had in the fog. I crossed the street and went in.
    There was one man sitting in the saloon bar and it was not Sherlock Holmes. To my great surprise and somewhat to my mortification, I recognised the man called Rivers who had assisted Dr Trevelyan at Holloway Prison. He was no longer wearing his uniform, but his vacant expression, sunken eyes and unruly ginger hair were unmistakable. He was slouching at a table with a glass of stout.
    ‘Mr Rivers!’ I exclaimed.
    ‘Sit down with me, Watson. It’s very good to see you again.’
    It was Holmes who had spoken – and in that second I understood how I had been deceived and how he had effected his escape from prison in front of my very eyes. I confess that I almost fell into the seat that he had proffered, seeing, with a sense of haplessness, the smile that I knew so well, beaming at me from beneath the wig and the make-up. For that was the wonderment of Holmes’s disguises. It wasn’t that he used a great deal of theatrical trickery or camouflage. It was more that he had a knack of metamorphosing into whatever character he