The House of Silk_ The New Sherlock Holmes Novel - Anthony Horowitz [112]
We had reached the school. Holmes handed the dog cart back to its driver with an apology. Lestrade was waiting for us at the door. ‘Harriman?’ he asked.
‘He is dead. His cart overturned.’
‘I can’t say I’m sorry.’
‘How is your officer, the man who was shot?’
‘Badly hurt, Mr Holmes. But he’ll live.’
Unwilling though I was to enter the building a second time, we followed Lestrade back inside. Some blankets had been brought down and used to cover the police officer who had been shot by Harriman and the piano, of course, was silent. But apart from that the House of Silk was much as it had been when we had first entered it. It made me shudder to return, but I was aware that we still had unfinished business.
‘I have sent for more men,’ Lestrade told us. ‘It’s a nasty business we have here, Mr Holmes, and it’s going to take someone a lot more senior than me to sort it out. Let me tell you that the children have been sent back to the school on the other side of the lane and I have two officers keeping an eye on them, for all the teachers in this horrible place are implicated in what’s been going on and I have them all under arrest. Two of them – Weeks and Vosper – I think you met.’
‘What of Fitzsimmons and his wife?’ I asked.
‘They’re in the drawing room and we’ll see them shortly, although there’s something I want to show you first, if you can stomach it.’ I could hardly believe that the House of Silk could hold any further secrets but we followed Lestrade back upstairs, he talking all the while. ‘There were another nine men here. What am I to call them? Clients? Customers? They include Lord Ravenshaw and another man who will be well known to you, a certain doctor by the name of Ackland. Now I can see why he was so keen to perjure himself against you.’
‘And what of Lord Horace Blackwater?’ asked Holmes.
‘He was not present here tonight, Mr Holmes, although I’m sure we’ll find that he was a frequent visitor. But come this way. I’ll show you what we’ve found and see if you can make sense of it.’
We walked along the corridor where we had encountered Harriman. The doors were now open, revealing bedrooms, all of which were luxuriously appointed. I had no wish to enter any of them – my very skin recoiled – but I went in after Holmes and Lestrade and found myself in a room draped in blue silk with a cast-iron bed, a low sofa and a door leading into a bathroom with piped water. The opposite wall was taken up by a low cabinet on which stood a glass tank containing a number of rocks and dried flowers arranged in what amounted to a miniature landscape, the possession of a naturalist, perhaps, or a collector.
‘This room was not in use when we entered it,’ Lestrade explained. ‘My men continued along the corridor to the next room, which is nothing more than a storage cupboard, and they only opened it quite by chance. Now, look over here. This is what we found.’
He drew our attention to the tank and at first I could not see why we were examining it. But then I realised that there was a small aperture cut into the wall behind it, perfectly concealed by the glass so that it was virtually invisible.
‘A window!’ I exclaimed. And then I grasped its significance. ‘Anything that happened in this room could be observed.’
‘Not just observed,’ Lestrade muttered, grimly.
He took us back out into the corridor, then threw open the door of the cupboard. It was empty inside but for a table on which stood a mahogany box. At first, I was not sure what I was seeing but then Lestrade unfastened the box which opened like a concertina and I realised that it was in fact a camera and that its lens, at the end of a sliding tube, was pressed against the other side of the window that we had just seen.
‘A quarter plate Le Merveilleux, manufactured by J. Lancaster and Son of Birmingham, if I am not mistaken,