The House of Silk_ The New Sherlock Holmes Novel - Anthony Horowitz [108]
We slipped outside. The house steward had disappeared, but the music was still playing, a waltz now, and it struck me that the keys were a little out of tune. We made our way down the corridor, moving further into the building, away from the front door. Somewhere, far above us, I heard someone cry out very briefly and my blood froze, for I was sure it was the sound of a child. A clock, suspended on the wall and ticking heavily, showed ten to nine but so enclosed were we, so cut off from the outside world, that it could have been any time of the night or day. We reached a staircase and began to make our way up. Even as we took the first steps, I heard a door open somewhere along the corridor and a man’s voice which I thought I recognised. It was the master of the house. He was on his way to see us.
We hurried forward, turning the corner just as two figures – the house steward who had greeted us and another – passed below.
‘Onwards, Watson,’ Holmes whispered.
We came to a second corridor, this one with the gas lamps turned down. It was carpeted, with floral wallpaper and there were many more doors with, on either side, oil paintings in heavy frames which proved to be tawdry imitations of classical works. There was an odour in the air that was sweet and unpleasant. Even though the truth had still not fully dawned on me, my every instinct was to leave this place, to wish that I had never come.
‘We must choose a door,’ Holmes muttered. ‘But which one?’
The doors were unmarked, identical, polished oak with white porcelain handles. He chose the one closest to him and opened it. Together, we looked in. At the wooden floor, the rug, the candles, the mirror, the jug and the basin, the bearded man we had never seen before, sitting, dressed only in a white shirt open at the collar, at the boy on the bed behind him.
It could not be true. I did not want to believe it. But nor could I disavow the evidence of my own eyes. For that was the secret of the House of Silk. It was a house of ill-repute, nothing more, nothing less; but one designed for men with a gross perversion and the wealth to indulge it. These men had a predilection for young boys and their wretched victims had been drawn from those same schoolchildren I had seen at Chorley Grange, plucked off the London streets with no families or friends to care for them, no money and no food, for the most part ignored by a society to which they were little more than an inconvenience. They had been forced or bribed into a life of squalor, threatened with torture or death if they did not comply. Ross had briefly been one of them. No wonder he had run away. And no wonder his sister had tried to stab me, believing I had come to take him back. What sort of country did I live in, at the end of the last century, I wonder, that could so utterly abandon its young? They could fall ill. They could starve. And worse. Nobody cared.
All these thoughts raced through my consciousness in the few seconds that we stood there. Then the man noticed us. ‘What the devil you do you think you’re doing?’ he thundered.
Holmes closed the door. At that very moment, there was a cry from downstairs as the master of the house entered the drawing room and found that we had gone. The piano music stopped. I wondered what we should do next, but a second later the decision was taken from us. A door opened further down the corridor and a man stepped out, fully dressed but with his clothes in disarray, his shirt hanging out at the back. This time I knew him at once. It was Inspector Harriman.
He saw us. ‘You!’ he exclaimed.
He stood, facing us. Without a second thought, I took out my revolver and fired the single shot that would bring Lestrade and his men rushing to our aid. But I did not fire into the air as I could have done. I aimed at