Читать книгу The Watches of the Night - Darcy Lindbergh - Страница 5

'I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low, melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.'

A Study in Scarlet

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Preface

Night falls, and London comes alive.

Gas lamps sputter into life, gloomy and ineffective against the fog that descends upon the city. There's something wild about London at night, something swift and ruthless that feeds in the shadows, growing and twining insidiously into the brickwork: intrigue and conspiracy, greed and violence, loneliness and fear and despair.

It was into this darkness that Sherlock Holmes cast his light.

I was not surprised to find that Holmes made his detective's living from deeds so often done by cover of night. The night is a natural hiding place, after all, a refuge where no one sees too clearly nor looks too closely, where everyone sins and so no one's sins are counted. Where people shed their masks and become what they truly are, instead of what they pretend to be.

Men are easier to kill in the dark.

And easier, sometimes, to kiss.

So like a magician revealing an impossible trick, Holmes unveiled the depths the night could hold: the secrecy and the mystery, the terror and the beauty, the peril and the peace. He took me, hand in hand, and led me through the shrouded life that's lived between dusk and dawn, and showed me every wondrous, dangerous thing – except for those things which I showed to him.

Night falls.

The adventure begins.