2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (18 page)

Fraser appeared perturbed by Oscar’s banter. Conan Doyle seemed only amused. “What is your New Year resolution to be, Oscar?” he asked.

“Let old acquaintance be forgot!” said Oscar, without hesitation.

“Surely not?” said Conan Doyle, laughing.

“There will be exceptions, Arthur,” said Oscar, “and you will be among them. We are friends for life, I know that—I believe that—but why should we not joyfully admit, both of us, that there are some people—other people—we do not wish to see again? It is not ingratitude. It is not indifference. They have simply given us all they have to give and we must move on.”

Conan Doyle raised his glass to Oscar and said, “I amaze myself, but I think I agree with you.”

“Oh, no!” cried Oscar. “Please, Arthur, no! Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.”

We laughed.

“And Robert?” asked Fraser, turning to me. “What is your New Year resolution to be?”

I looked at Aidan Fraser and I thought of Veronica Sutherland. I said, with too much emotion in my voice, “To follow my heart, wherever it may lead.”

“And where might that be?”

Deftly, Oscar intervened to save me from myself. “Do not ask, Aidan. Robert does not know the answer, I assure you. But you, Aidan, is this the year in which you and Miss Sutherland will follow your hearts to the altar?”

“I think so. I hope so. I shall be thirty-three this year—”

“On 31 August,” said Oscar.

“Yes,” said the inspector, clearly taken aback. “How did you know?”

“I think you told us on the day we met—on 1 September, the day following your birthday. Either you told us, or I discovered it when I was reading up on you in the Metropolitan Police Directory.”

Fraser laughed. “You never cease to surprise me, Mr Wilde.”

Oscar looked at him reprovingly. “My name is Oscar, Aidan. We are friends…”

“Anyway,” resumed the inspector, “I believe thirty-three is the correct age for a man to marry.”

“There is never a correct age for a man to marry,” said Oscar, teasingly. “Marriage is as demoralising as cigarettes and far more expensive.”

“Do not listen to Oscar,” said Conan Doyle. “He is talking nonsense and he knows it.”

Now it was Oscar’s turn to laugh. “I will not argue with you, Arthur. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

Oscar’s conversation was so brilliant that he could make you forget the toothache. That night, we sat in a dark corner of a London club with a dead boy’s head in a box before us and for forty minutes thought not a thing about it. (No doubt, the champagne and the brandy helped.)

Eventually, as midnight struck and our glasses were drained, it was Oscar who brought us back to reality. “Well, Inspector,” he said, looking steadily at Fraser, “what next? What now? Where do we go from here with this murder inquiry?”

“I hope you go nowhere with it, Oscar. Leave it to me now, please.”

Oscar gave a nod of apparent acquiescence. “What will your first move be?” he asked.

“I will get some of my men to try to trace the cabman who delivered this parcel. And tomorrow I shall go to Broadstairs. I must meet Mrs Wood. You have told me her story, but I must talk to her myself. And I must show her the boy’s head.”

“You cannot!” exclaimed Oscar.

“I must,” said Fraser.

“The shock will kill her.”

“It is a dangerous thing to do, Aidan,” said Conan Doyle.

“Fear not, I will take her to a police morgue. It will be a formal identification. The young man’s head will be placed on a slab with, below it, a bolster beneath a sheet to give the impression of a body. She will not know of the decapitation.”

“Is this really necessary, Aidan?” asked Oscar.

“It is essential. We must know for certain whose head this is.”

“It is the head of Billy Wood.”

“So you tell us, Oscar. So you say. But whose word do we have for this—for any of this—other than yours? You are a writer, Oscar, a raconteur, a teller of tales. I am a policeman. This is a police inquiry now.”

3 January 1890

“I
t’s a humiliating confession,” said Oscar, extinguishing one cigarette beneath his right foot while lighting another, “but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.” We were standing at the north end of Baker Street, outside the railway station, about to cross the road. My friend drew on his fresh cigarette with deep satisfaction. “The more one analyses people,” he continued, “the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later, one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”

“What is your point, Oscar?” I asked. It was eleven o’clock on the morning after the night of Constance’s birthday dinner and my mind was not in a fit state to absorb fundamental truths about the universality of human nature.

“I know who murdered Billy Wood,” he said, blowing a small cloud of grey-white cigarette smoke into the cold January air. “Or, at least, I think I do.”

I gazed at him, amazed. “What are you telling me, Oscar?”

“It’s all down to human nature. We’re all made of the same stuff. We’re all motivated by the same impulses: you, me, the murderer—”

“And you know who it is? You know who murdered Billy Wood?”

“I believe I do,” he said, smiling slyly, “thanks, in large part, to something you said last night, Robert…”

“Something I said?”

“But, as yet, I have no proof—and it’s proof we’re after now.”

“Come, man,” I expostulated, “spill the beans, spit it out. Whom do you believe the murderer to be?”

“Not yet, Robert—”

“What do you mean, ‘Not yet, Robert’? You can’t leave me in suspense like this!”

“Oh, but I can, Robert, and I must.” We stepped into the busy roadway, Oscar forging a path between a milk-float and an omnibus. “Suspense is everything!” he cried. “Only the banal—only the bearded and the bald—live for the here and now. You and I, Robert, we live for the future, do we not? We live in anticipation.” We weaved our way through the traffic, Oscar raising his voice in competition with the rumble of wheels and the clatter of hooves. “We live for the promise of delights only dreamt of, of sweets not yet savoured, of books as yet unwritten and unread.” At last, we reached the safety of the pavement on the other side. At the kerb’s edge, leaning against a lamp-post, was a street urchin—a friendly-faced lad of twelve or thirteen—who raised his cap to us. Oscar nodded to the boy and handed him sixpence. “We are grateful for our memories, of course. What’s past sustains us. But it’s what’s to come that drives us on.”

“Is it?” I asked, unnerved by our crossing and bewildered by his flow of words.

“It is. It is the
pursuit
of Miss Sutherland that excites you, Robert. The chase is everything. Once you have achieved her, what then?”

I said nothing. Oscar put his arm through mine and turned us northwards, in the direction of Regent’s Park. “
Mon ami
,” he said, “when I am certain who is the murderer—certain beyond doubt—I shall tell you. I shall tell no one before I tell you, I promise. At present, all I am truly certain of is that I shall unravel this mystery before our friend Fraser does.”

“I thought you said last night that from now on you were going to leave the detective work to him.”

“Did I say that? I don’t think I did. But if I did, that was then and this is now, and now I’m saying something different. Who wants to be consistent? Only the dull and the doctrinaire—the tedious people who carry through their principles to the bitter end of action, to the
reductio ad absurdum
of practice. Not I!”

“You are on song this morning,” I remarked, marvelling at my friend’s energy and resilience. He could have had no more than five hours’ sleep.

“Am I?” he said cheerfully. “If I am, I have you and Conan Doyle to thank for that. Last night was not easy for any of us, but you came up trumps—”

“I did nothing.”

“You did more than you realise. As I said to John Gray at breakfast, “Sherard is a true friend,” and there’s something about Conan Doyle, despite his hideous handshake, that lifts the spirit.”

“He is a decent man,” I said.

“He is a genius,” said Oscar. “He left me a copy of the story that he has just completed,
The Sign of Four
. It is a little masterpiece. Sherlock Holmes is my inspiration!”

I laughed. “Is that why we have come to Baker Street?”

“No, Robert, we are going to the zoo. We are on our way to interview Gerard Bellotti.”

“At the zoo?”

“It is Monday, is it not? Bellotti is always at the zoological garden in Regent’s Park on a Monday morning. He is a creature of habits—few of them good ones.”

“What does he do at the zoo on Mondays?”

“What he does at the skating rink on Thursdays and the Alhambra or the Empire on Saturdays: he scouts for boys.”

As all the world knows, on 25 May 1895, at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey, Oscar Wilde was found guilty of committing acts of gross indecency with other men and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. The trial judge, Mr Justice Wills, described the case as the worst he had ever heard, accusing Oscar of being ‘dead to all sense of shame’ and ‘the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men’.

Bellotti’s ‘boys’ were the type of young men of whom Mr Justice Wills was speaking: that I must accept. What I do not accept, however, is that Oscar was ever the centre of any circle of corruption. He cultivated the company of young men—he revelled in their youth—but he did not corrupt them. He reverenced them. Whether they were always worthy of his adoration is another matter. Several of those who gave evidence against him at his trial were young men whom he had treated as friends—and who repaid that friendship with false testimony bought at a price. (From the spring to the summer of 1895, every one of the prosecution witnesses in the case of
Regina v. Wilde
was paid a retainer of five pounds a week.)

In a conversation with me some time after Oscar’s death, Arthur Conan Doyle likened what he called ‘our friend’s pathological obsession with masculine youth and beauty’ to his creation Sherlock Holmes’s addiction to morphine and cocaine. “In my experience,” said Conan Doyle, “great men are frequently shot through with an obsessive or addictive strain that may seem aberrant—even abhorrent—to the rest of us. It does not diminish their greatness. It may make us more aware of their humanity.”

If, on occasion, in moments of weakness, in the privacy of a darkened room, Oscar succumbed to the sins of the flesh, so be it. It happened. It was his way. It does not make him a corrupter of youth. I knew Oscar from the time he was twenty-eight until the time of his death; you must believe me when I tell you he was a gentleman in the fullest, best and truest sense of the word. As Conan Doyle has written in his own memoir,* “Never in Wilde’s conversation did I observe one trace of coarseness of thought.” Neither did I.

*
Memories and Adventures
, 1924.

The same could not be said of Gerard Bellotti.

We found Bellotti in the monkey house, eating peanuts. He was cracking open the shells between his teeth and spitting the nuts through the bars into the monkeys’ enclosure.

“Bread and bread, these two,” he said, as we approached. He did not turn to greet us. “I thought they might take a fancy to one another, but they haven’t. Fighting like cats. That’s monkeys for you.” He uttered a small high-pitched laugh and held out his paper bag of peanuts in our direction. “Care for one?”

“No, thank you,” I said, “I’ve breakfasted.”

“Oho, Mr Wilde, your friend has a lively sense of humour. We like that in a man, don’t we?” Oscar said nothing. “Mr Wilde has a lovely sense of humour,” Bellotti added, shifting his huge bulk slightly, but still keeping his gaze fixed firmly ahead of him. The monkeys—long, lanky, ugly creatures, with low-slung pot-bellies, their shaggy coats grey-haired and moth-eaten—swung wildly around their cage, squealing and screeching as they went. Bellotti’s head did not follow their movements, but he seemed to know what they were doing nonetheless. One of the animals came to rest immediately in front of him, lying on its back, scratching itself against the ground. “Nice pencils they have,” murmured Bellotti. “I like a well-endowed monkey, don’t you?”

“These are spider monkeys,” said Oscar, “and these are females of the species.”

“Surely not?” said Bellotti, turning in our direction for the first time. There was a milky-white translucent film across his eyes and his blackened teeth were decorated with shards of peanut shell. His sallow skin was faintly pock-marked and, beneath his boater, tight curls of his henna-coloured hair glistened with oil and perspiration. He was not a pretty sight.

“The elongated sexual organ of the female spider monkey is often confused with that of the male. Do not trouble yourself, Mr Bellotti. It is a common mistake.”

I laughed. “How on earth do you know this, Oscar?”

Oscar smiled. “I have read
Mycroft on Monkeys
. It is the standard text. My reading extends beyond Sophocles and Baudelaire, you know.”

Bellotti sniffed and stuffed his paper bag of nuts into his pocket. He pinched his nose and closely studied his thumb and forefinger as he rubbed them together lightly. “I take it you’ve come about Billy Wood,” he said. “I’ve heard the news. It is very sad. He was a bright boy, one of the best. You were especially fond of him, Mr Wilde, I know. My condolences.”

“Who told you?” asked Oscar, moving a half-step closer to Bellotti and at the same time indicating to me that I should take a written note of what was to follow.

“O’Donnell,” said Bellotti, “the uncle.”

Oscar raised an eyebrow. “When was this?”

“Just before Christmas. He was drunk—and abusive. Made all sorts of threatening noises. Demanded money, the usual thing. I sent him on his way.”

“Did you give him anything?”

“Advice, that’s all. But good advice. I told him to leave the country—return to Canada or go to France. He speaks French of a sort, when he’s sober enough to speak at all. I’ve not heard from him since. Have you, Mr Wilde?”