The House of Silk_ The New Sherlock Holmes Novel - Anthony Horowitz [59]
I crossed to the bar where an old, grizzled man with cataracts on his eyes poured me a glass of ale for a couple of pence and I stood there, not drinking, ignoring my own worst imaginings, trying not to think about Holmes. The majority of the men around me were sailors and dockworkers and many of them were foreign – Spanish and Maltese. None of them took any notice of me, and for that I was glad. In fact, they barely spoke to each other, and the only real sound in the room was that made by the card players. A clock on the wall showed the passing hour and it seemed to me that the minute hand was deliberately dragging itself, ignoring the laws of time. I had often waited, with and without Holmes, for a villain to show himself, whether it was on the moors near Baskerville Hall, on the banks of the Thames or in the gardens of many a suburban home. But I will never forget the fifty-minute vigil that I spent in that little room with the slap, slap, slap of the cards against the table, the out-of-tune notes picked out on the piano, the dark faces gazing into their glasses as if all the answers to the mystery of life might there be found.
Fifty minutes exactly, for it was at ten to midnight that the still of the night was suddenly shattered by two gunshots and, almost immediately, by the shrill cry of a police whistle and the sound of voices shouting out in alarm. I was instantly out in the street, bursting through the doors, sick with myself and angry that I had ever let Holmes talk me into this dangerous scheme. That he had fired the shots himself I never doubted. But had he fired them as a warning, for me, or was he in some sort of peril, forced to defend himself? The fog had lifted slightly and I hurled myself across the street and up to the entrance of Creer’s Place. I turned the handle. The door was unlocked. Drawing my own weapon from my pocket, I rushed in.
The dry, burning smell of opium greeted my nostrils and at once brought irritation to my eyes and a sharp, stabbing pain to my head, to the extent that I was unwilling to breathe for fear of falling under the spell of the drug myself. I was standing in a dank, gloomy room that had been decorated in the Chinese style with patterned rugs, red paper lampshades and silk hangings on the walls, just as Henderson had described. Of the man himself there was no sign. Four men lay stretched out on mattresses with their japan trays and opium lamps on low tables nearby. Three of them were unconscious and could indeed have been corpses. The last was resting his chin on one hand, gazing at me with unfocused eyes. One mattress was empty.
A man came rushing towards me and I knew that this must be Creer himself. He was completely bald, his skin paper-white and stretched so tightly over his bones that, with his black, deep-set eyes he seemed to have a dead man’s skull instead of a living head. I could see that he was about to speak, to challenge me, but then he saw my revolver and fell back.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded.
‘Who?’
‘You know who I mean!’
My eyes travelled past him to an open doorway at the far end of the room and a corridor, lit by a gas lamp, beyond. Ignoring Creer, anxious to be out of this dreadful place before the fumes overcame me, I pushed my way forward. One of the wretches lying on the mattresses called out to me and reached out with a begging hand, but I ignored him. There was another door at the far end of the corridor and, as Holmes could not have possibly left by the front, he must surely have come this way. I forced it open and felt the rush of cold air. I was at the back of the house. I heard more shouting, the clatter of a horse and carriage, the blast of a police whistle. I knew already that we had been tricked, that everything had gone wrong. But still I had no idea what to expect. Where was Holmes? Had he been hurt?
I ran down a narrow street, through an archway, around a corner and into a courtyard. A small crowd had gathered here. Where could they all have come from at