2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (19 page)

“No,” said Oscar, quietly. He seemed suddenly distracted, in a reverie, thinking of something other than what Bellotti was saying, though with a brief nod of his head he indicated to me that I should continue to take notes.

“I believe he may have killed the boy himself,” said Bellotti, now peering at a grubby thumbnail as he used it to push back his cuticles, “though he denied it. And vehemently. With more threats and vile abuse. Of course, he could have murdered the poor boy in a drunken rage and clean forgotten that he had done so.”

“In that case, wouldn’t the body have been discovered by now?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. I imagine it happened in Broadstairs. Having killed the boy, he disposed of the body at sea. Or maybe he drowned him in the first place—pushed him off the cliff at Viking Bay or flung him off the end of the pier. I don’t know. I do know Billy Wood couldn’t swim.”

“How do you know that?” asked Oscar, snapping back from his reverie.

“I took him to the baths in Fulham once, Mr Wilde. With Mr Upthorpe. Billy told me he couldn’t swim. He told me he had a horror of water. He got it from his mother, he said.”

“Why did O’Donnell come to you at all?” I asked.

“He came for money. He came for Billy’s wages.”

“Billy’s wages?” I asked. Gerard Bellotti was slowly pushing ajar a window on a world with which I was entirely unfamiliar.

“The wages go to the guardian. The tips and presents go directly to the boy. Mr Wilde gave Billy a beautiful cigarette case, did you not, Mr Wilde? It carried a charming inscription, I recall. Billy was proud of it, rightly so.”

Oscar said nothing. (I thought nothing of the cigarette case at the time—or later. Oscar was absurdly generous with his gifts. He was particularly partial to presenting his friends with inscribed cigarette cases. Over the years, he gave me three.) “Was O’Donnell the boy’s guardian?” I asked.

“He was his uncle. And his mother’s lover, as I understand it. He was the one who first brought the boy to me, in any event. It was just a year ago. I assume he had the mother’s blessing. I assume they shared the wages. Billy was properly paid—and enjoyed the work. He took to it. He was a natural, wasn’t he, Mr Wilde?”

“I did not realise that you paid him, Mr Bellotti,” said Oscar, coldly.

“Did you not, Mr Wilde?”

“I gave the matter no thought, I am ashamed to say.”

“A labourer is worthy of his hire, is he not, Mr Wilde? And modelling is onerous work, especially when you’re working for an artist as particular as our Mr Aston Upthorpe.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know his work,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” said Oscar, with a hollow laugh. “And I don’t believe Edward O’Donnell murdered Billy Wood. Why should he—if, as you say, Billy earned him a weekly wage? Why slaughter your own milch cow?”

“I’m not saying he did, Mr Wilde. I’m saying he might have done. He has the temperament. He’s a violent man at the best of times, and when he’s in drink…All I’m saying is it’s possible, you’ll grant me that? And assuming the boy was already dead when you and your friend came to see me, Mr Wilde—you remember, at the skating rink?—assuming Billy was dead by then…”

“He was,” said Oscar.

“Well,” said Bellotti, “then O’Donnell was, as far as I know, the last man to see the boy alive.”

“What?” exclaimed Oscar. “What are you saying?”

The monkeys in their cage whooped and screeched as Gerard Bellotti looked up towards us with a devilish smile. He lifted his straw boater, took a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. He was evidently elated by the effect on Oscar of the intelligence he had just let slip.

“You both came to see me on a Thursday, did you not?”

“Yes,” said Oscar, “on 2 September.”

“And you asked me when I had last seen Billy Wood?”

“And you told us first it was on the day before,” I said, “and then corrected yourself and said it was on the Tuesday.”

“It was on Tuesday 31 August, was it not?” asked Oscar. “You told us Billy had been at one of your ‘club lunches’ and you always hold your lunches on the last Tuesday in the month.”

“That’s right, Mr Wilde, you remember. You’ve been to one or two of them yourself, of course—not for a while, I know, and not since we moved to Little College Street.”

“O’Donnell was not at the lunch, surely?”

“Naturally not,” said Bellotti, with a splutter of disgust. “But the point, Mr Wilde, is this. Billy left the lunch early in order to meet up with him. At two o’clock, on the dot, Billy got to his feet and asked to be excused. I can see the boy now—in my mind’s eye. He was wearing a sailor suit. Very fetching. He said he had an important appointment with his uncle. He told us he was looking forward to it. He said he had shaved especially, I remember. We all laughed at that—given he was so young. He stood at the door and took his leave of us with a little naval salute. He was a lovely lad. That was the last I saw of him.”

“And you say it was two o’clock?”

“On the dot. We heard Big Ben strike.”

“And within two hours the poor boy was dead,” said Oscar, “murdered in cold blood—not in Broadstairs, but in a perfumed room not two streets away.”

“Now you are telling me what I did not know,” said Bellotti, mopping his face with his yellow handkerchief. The monkey house was hot and airless.

“Who else was at the lunch?” asked Oscar.

“All the regulars—Mr Upthorpe, Mr Tirrold, Mr Prior, Mr Talmage—Canon Courteney, of course—and a couple of other boys.”

“No strangers?”

“No strangers.”

“I must meet them,” said Oscar. He looked at me, indicating that it was time for us to take our leave. “We must piece together all the details of Billy Wood’s final hours. We must talk to those who saw him last.”

“Come to our next lunch,” said Bellotti, holding out his hands, palms upwards, by way of invitation. “They’ll all be there. I’ll make sure of that. Bring your friend, Mr Wilde. He’ll be most welcome.”

“Thank you,” said Oscar.

“Little College Street, number 22. Any time from twelve. I take it you’ve still got your key?”

“But you’ve moved, haven’t you?” said Oscar.

“Different address. Same lock. Canon Courteney’s idea.” Bellotti raised his boater in my direction. “It’s always the last Tuesday in the month. Be sure to breakfast lightly. We lay on a good spread, don’t we, Mr Wilde?”

“Indeed,” said Oscar, without emotion. “Thank you, Mr Bellotti.”

We made to leave. Bellotti returned his attention to the monkeys, feeling in his coat pocket for his bag of nuts. “You say they’re all females, Mr Wilde?”

“Without question, Mr Bellotti.”

The fat man shifted his bulk uneasily and shook his head ruminatively from side to side. “Appearances can be very deceptive,” he said, with a small laugh.

“Indeed,” said Oscar. “Good day.”

As we reached the door of the monkey house, it swung slowly open as if by magic. As we stepped through it, we saw that it was being held open by Bellotti’s dwarf. The ugly creature gazed up at us with ill-concealed contempt. Oscar threw a sixpenny piece at his feet.

When we reached the gates of the zoo itself, we found a hansom cab awaiting us, with, standing by it and holding open the cab door, the street urchin with the friendly face who had touched his cap to us in Baker Street an hour before. As we clambered into the vehicle, Oscar turned to the lad and said, “Continue to keep an eye on them, Jimmy. They’re not to be trusted.”

As the hansom set off towards town, the boy stood on the roadside watching us, waving us on our way.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“One of my ‘spies’,” said Oscar. “One of the best.”

“Look at the Postscript”

“W
ho are these ‘spies’?” I asked, as our cab rumbled through Clarence Gate, out of Regent’s Park and, into Baker Street.

“Good-hearted boys like Jimmy there,” he said. “Street boys—ragamuffins, urchins, call them what you will. Their lives may be rackety and irregular by the standards of the sons of stockbrokers and civil servants, but they are good lads, my ‘spies’, hard-working and as honest as the day is long.”

“They work for you? You pay them?”

“I give them the odd sixpence and keep them out of mischief. They run errands for me: carry messages about town, deliver flowers, get me cabs…”

“And ‘spy’ on your behalf?”

He smiled. “When necessary. They are my roving eyes and ears, Robert, and—more to the point—my roving legs. As you’ve observed, I’m not much given to exercise. I wasn’t built for it. These lads are nimble and fleet of foot. They can throw a girdle round the capital in forty minutes. Each one’s my Ariel.”

“How many of them do you have, then?”

“Across London? Two dozen perhaps, thirty at the most. I count them among my truest friends. Conan Doyle has given Holmes a similar band of youthful assistants, but I came up with the idea first. Posterity will give me no credit for it, of course—unless you put the record straight. You are my Recording Angel, Robert. My reputation rests with you.”

Oscar did not keep a diary, but he knew that I did and he encouraged me to continue. He was fond of remarking that he had put his genius into his life but only his talent into his work and he told me, regularly, that he was relying on me and my journal to show posterity where his genius lay.

I took this responsibility seriously. For example, when we parted after our encounter with Gerard Bellotti, the first thing I did on getting back to my room was to write up the record of the morning’s adventure. Indeed, it would be true to say that, during the years when Oscar and I were closest, my journal is as much an account of his life as it is of my own. Perhaps that is not so surprising. His life was infinitely more remarkable than mine.

Re-reading my diary of January 1890, what do I appear to have achieved that month? Very little. My days, it seems, were spent in pursuit of Veronica Sutherland. My evenings, until I met up with Oscar at around 11 a.m. for our customary nightcap at the Albemarle Club, were mostly empty. Usually, I dined in my room alone and then wandered the streets of Bloomsbury and Soho for an hour or so. Occasionally, I treated myself to a solitary glass of beer at a public house in Chenies Street. I went to the theatre twice (to the Drury Lane pantomime and, with Oscar, to the revival of an H.J. Byron farce at the Criterion) and one evening, so the record shows, I took a young lady named Lucy (of whom I have no recollection whatsoever) to the Agricultural Hall to witness an American cowboy on horseback racing a French bicyclist on a penny-farthing! (I reckoned the outing ‘a costly failure’; the novelty of the entertainment quickly wore thin and Lucy, apparently, spent the entire evening explaining to me that her brother would be most anxious if she were not home by half past ten.)

In the exact same period, by contrast, Oscar, according to my journal, dined out on twenty-six nights out of thirty-one. He spent his evenings in the company of the outstanding personalities of the age—poets, playwrights, politicians, artists and actresses, men and women whose names still resonate half a century later—and his days seated at Thomas Carlyle’s writing desk, writing, reading, reflecting. That month, while I wrote not one worthwhile word (and appear to have read nothing of note except, appropriately enough, Jerome K. Jerome’s
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
), Oscar’s reading encompassed (to my certain knowledge) Goethe, Balzac, Baudelaire, Plato, Petrarch and Edgar Allan Poe, and his writing included two articles, one lecture, three poems, the outline of a play (for George Alexander) and ten thousand words of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

He made light of his industry. (His account of spending a morning deciding to place a comma in a paragraph, and then spending the afternoon deciding to take it out again, was one of his favourite
jeux d’esprit
.) And he made a point when we met of enquiring about my endeavours before giving news of his own. As soon as we had each been served with our eleven o’clock glass of champagne, he would ask, “How is Miss Sutherland today? Is she still pretty? Is she still pleasing? Is she more pliant?” He gave the impression of being truly interested. Oscar had the charmer’s gift of looking you in the eye and making you feel that, in that particular moment, he cared more about you than about anybody else in the world.

Usually, once we had spent five minutes discussing Veronica (and her infuriating ability to both encourage and resist me at the same time), Oscar would throw in a casual reference to Aidan Fraser. Did Miss Sutherland have news of her fiancé?

“No, we never speak of him. He is her fiancé, you understand?”

Of course, of course, but had I chanced to see him?

“In the hallway, in passing.”

Yes-and?

“And nothing, Oscar. He said good day. That was all. He did not ask after you. He did not mention our case.”

“‘Our case’!” Oscar would explode. “It’s
his
case now! And he appears determined to keep it to himself.”

One evening towards the middle of January (it was the evening of our outing to the Byron farce at the Criterion) Oscar said to me, “Do you not think it more than curious, Robert, more than strange, perverse, in fact, that friend Fraser—whom you encounter sometimes twice, sometimes three times a week—makes no reference, no reference of any kind, to his ongoing investigations in the matter of poor Billy Wood? Has he made a forensic examination of the poor boy’s severed head? Has he traced O’Donnell? Has he interviewed Bellotti? He knows of your interest in the matter. He sees you, yet he says nothing.”

“I do not think his behaviour either strange or perverse, Oscar,” I said. “I think it is a matter of professional pride. He wants to solve the mystery in his own way, on his own terms. Veronica has told me as much.”

He pounced. “Has she now? I thought you said that you and she never discuss Fraser—”

“It is Fraser-the-fiance we don’t discuss. Occasional references to Fraser-of-the-Yard are permitted.”

Oscar raised a cynical eyebrow. “Do you not also wonder, Robert, why Fraser tolerates you as a rival for his fiancée’s affections?”

Of course, I had wondered about this, but I did not want to admit as much to Oscar. “I do not think Fraser sees me a rival,” I said quickly. “He works long hours. He appears grateful to me for keeping Veronica occupied and entertained in his absence.”