Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (42 page)

Daubeney
shook his head incredulously. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Oscar.’

‘Oh,
but you do, George,’ said Oscar calmly. ‘That afternoon, at our little
charitable fund-raiser, Mrs Wilde told you all about the work of the Rational
Dress Society. She told you how each year, in London alone, scores of women
lose their lives in domestic fires burnt to death in their own homes, on their
own hearth-rugs, their clothes set alight accidentally by spluttering candles
or falling coals or stray sparks from the grate. What my wife told you
inspired
you—to murder your former fiancée by burning her to death … You wanted to
rid the world of the woman who had ruined you once and might ruin you again.
That afternoon, quite innocently, my well-meaning wife suggested to you the
perfect means. Constance gave you the idea, George. With my unhappy game, I
gave you the opportunity.’

A
silence fell as Oscar lit a second cigarette.

‘Mr
Wilde,’ said Inspector Gilmour, ‘you appear to forget that when we found Miss
Scott-Rivers’s body her house was securely locked from the inside. I know. I
checked all the locks myself.’

‘When
you arrived on the scene, Inspector, the house was indeed secured from within.
But when Mr Daubeney arrived at 27 Cheyne Walk, it was not.’

Inspector
Ferris pushed his chair away from the table. ‘Don’t worry, Inspector,’ said
Daubeney turning towards him and raising his glass in his direction. ‘I’m not
planning to run away. I’ve nothing to hide.’

Oscar’s
eyes narrowed as he looked down at the clergyman. ‘You have so much to hide,
George—so much. And your genius, if such it be, is to be so apparently open
that no one would believe you capable of so much evil …’

‘May
God forgive you, Oscar—I thought that we were friends.’ Daubeney shook his head
and drank his wine. He was so calm that it was indeed difficult to believe that
he might be guilty. He looked along the dining table and smiled at his fellow
guests. ‘The house was locked from within, gentlemen. The fire was burning
furiously when I tried to break my way in through the ground-floor window. I
was beaten back by the heat and the flames. If I could have rescued Elizabeth,
I would have done so. That’s the truth of it.’

‘No,
George, that’s not the truth of it.’ Oscar turned towards the Reverend Daubeney
and gazed at him unflinchingly. Until he had finished his narrative he did not
lift his eyes from him once. ‘This is the truth of it, George. At around
midnight on Sunday 1 May last, you left the Cadogan Hotel and walked from here,
down Sloane Street, across the King’s Road, to the Thames embankment. Steadily,
purposefully, you made your way to 27 Cheyne Walk, the home of Miss Elizabeth
Scott-Rivers. You saw a light in your former fiancée’s drawing-room window. You
knocked at the front door. The lady of the house admitted you herself. Her
servants were not at home. She was alone. She told you so—and the moment that
she told you so you seized your opportunity. You killed her there and then—in
an instant, ruthlessly, remorselessly, in cold blood.’

Daubeney
wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘How did I kill her?’

‘I
cannot be certain,’ said Oscar. ‘I imagine that you strangled her. Her eyes
were wide open when her body was found.’

‘This
is grotesque,’ muttered Conan Doyle. Oscar’s gaze remained fixed on George
Daubeney. ‘It gets worse, Arthur, believe me.’ He leant further towards
Daubeney. ‘You killed Miss Scott-Rivers and you dragged her body across her
drawing room towards her own hearth. You laid the body by the grate. You then
returned to the front door and locked and bolted it securely from within. You
went downstairs to the basement and ensured that the door to the front area and
the door to the garden were locked and bolted as well.’ Oscar drew on his
cigarette. ‘The scene was laid … all you now had to do was go back to the
drawing room and light the match—or, with the fire-tongs, lift a piece of
burning coal from the grate and use it to set fire to your victim’s dress …
You set the poor woman’s body alight and waited for the flames to blaze before
making your escape. It was easily done. You watched her burn, and then you
broke your way out of the drawing-room window. And the firemen on the
embankment who saw you standing on the window ledge simply assumed that you
were trying to get into the house, not out of it, because, in the moment that
they saw you, that’s how it appeared to them—’

‘That’s
how it was,’ said Daubeney urgently.

‘No,
George. There was so much broken glass in the area below the window—the window
had to have been broken from the inside out, not from the outside in.’

‘It was
an accident,’ Daubeney protested. ‘Her dress caught fire!’

‘If her
dress had caught fire by accident, George, her body would not have been found
by the fireplace. When a woman sees that her dress is alight, she does not
remain right by the source of the fire. She runs from it—she tries to escape.
Elizabeth Scott-Rivers’s body was found by the hearth because that is where you
placed it.’

Archy
Gilmour got to his feet and nodded across the table to his fellow officer.
‘Charge him with murder!‘ he commanded.

Oscar
laughed. ‘And so much more besides!’ He held up his right hand. ‘We’re not done
yet.’

George
Daubeney made no attempt to move. He closed his eyes. ‘I do not feel very
well,’ he whispered.

‘Take
him away!’ barked Gilmour.

Oscar
turned towards the policeman. ‘There’s more to be told, Inspector—if you’re
inclined to hear it.’

‘Haven’t
we heard enough?’ asked Conan Doyle.

‘We’ve
heard enough to hang a man, for sure, ‘said Oscar. ‘We’ve heard the “what”,
Arthur; we’ve heard the “how”. We’ve not yet heard the “wherefore”; we’ve not
yet heard the “why”.’

I
looked up at Oscar. ‘Surely he murdered the poor woman to retrieve his
fortune—to inherit hers … ‘I said.

‘No,
Robert. At the time that Daubeney killed Elizabeth Scott-Rivers, he assumed
that she had changed her will. He did not kill her for her money— that came as
an incidental bonus. He killed her to exact his revenge—and to silence her. She
knew his secret.’

‘We all
have secrets, don’t we, Oscar?’ giggled Lord Alfred Douglas, reaching across
his brother to Wat Sickert and stealing a cigar from Wat’s coat pocket.

‘We
do,’ said Oscar quietly. ‘Elizabeth Scott-Rivers discovered her fiancé’s secret
a week before the day intended for their wedding. At once, privately, she broke
off their engagement. Shortly afterwards, publicly, she sued him for breach of
promise and, in the process, ruined him. He said nothing in his own defence.
Why? Why did George Daubeney—a supposed gentleman, an apparently eligible
bachelor, the son of an earl, a man of the cloth, an assistant chaplain at the
House of Commons—why did he accept the humiliation and ruin that this breach of
promise action brought upon him? Because he had no choice—because he had a
secret.’

‘There’ll
be a lady in the case,’ murmured Bram Stoker. ‘There always is.’

‘Or
perhaps a young man,’ suggested Charles Brookfield. ‘Oscar has some funny
friends.’

‘What
is this secret, Oscar?’ demanded Conan Doyle impatiently. ‘Come on, man. Don’t
play with us. Spit it out.’

Oscar
held his head back. Two thin blue-grey plumes of smoke rose from his nostrils.
‘George Daubeney is a trafficker in child prostitutes,’ he said. ‘He has a
speciality: young girls. He sells virgins—at five pounds a piece.’

Daubeney
said nothing. He sat in his place, his head now in his hands. Inspector Ferris
stood immediately behind him.

‘How do
you know all this?’ asked Arthur Conan Doyle.

‘Because
of the cuff-links,’ said Oscar, simply.

‘The
cuff-links?’ repeated Willie Hornung.

‘The
cuff-links.’ said Wat Sickert, quietly.

‘Yes,
Wat,’ said Oscar, looking at the artist. ‘The cuff-links.’ Oscar’s eyes ranged
around the table. All but George Daubeney had their gaze fixed on him. ‘At the
Socrates Club dinner I happened to notice that the Honourable the Reverend
George Daubeney was wearing unusual cuff-links—cufflinks that did not match.
One was a simple silver cuff-link, undecorated, unremarkable, but the other was
exquisite. It was a cuff-link with an enamel facing that featured a
reproduction of a favourite painting of mine: a Madonna by Bellini. When I next
saw Daubeney—a few hours later, when he found his way to my house in Tite
Street in the aftermath of the fire the cuff-links were missing. He had removed
them. I wondered why.’

Oscar
paused and held the moment. He looked at Wat Sickert expectantly. Wat ran his
fingers along his moustache and said nothing. Oscar went on: ‘On the night of
the Socrates Club dinner I had been especially struck by George Daubeney’s Bellini
cuff-link because I knew someone else who had a pair of cuff-links not unlike
it … a friend, my friend our friend—the artist, Walter Sickert.’

Oscar
stretched out his left arm in Wat’s direction. Sickert leant urgently across
the table.

‘I
bought the cuff-links from Daubeney, Oscar—I told you that when I gave them to
you.’ He looked around at the rest of us. There was a sudden desperation in his
eyes. For a moment, he seemed quite frantic. ‘The cuff-links featured
Leonardo’s painting,
The Virgin of the Rocks.
Oscar admired them, so I
gave them to him. No, that’s not true. I
sold
them to him.’

‘For
five pounds,’ said Oscar.

‘Yes,’
answered Sickert, ‘for five pounds. That’s what I had paid Daubeney. That’s
what I told you.’

‘You
told me that the cuff-links had cost you five pounds …’

‘They
did,’ cried Sickert. ‘They had!’

‘But
you did not tell me, Wat, that when you bought the cuff-links from Daubeney for
five pounds Daubeney promised that the cuff-links would be delivered to you
personally by a special messenger—a child of thirteen, a young girl, guaranteed
a virgin …’

Sickert
pushed his chair back from the table. ‘I did not touch her, Oscar. I swear to
it. I wanted her as a model nothing more. I wanted to paint a girl on the brink
of womanhood. I wanted to paint a virgin—a true virgin. That is all.’

‘You
undressed her?’

‘She
undressed herself. I did not touch her. Believe me, Oscar.’

Oscar
smiled and lit yet another cigarette. ‘I believe you, Wat. You are my friend
and I know you to be a gentleman. And, strange as it may seem, in this matter
I’m indebted to you. You sold me those cuff-links because I took a fancy to
them and I’m glad that you did because, by chance, I wore them on the day that
Robert Sherard and I visited the French Bookshop in Beak Street. George
Daubeney was there. He saw me wearing the cuff-links. And he assumed that I,
too, was a man in want of a five-pound virgin …’

‘Well,
well …’ murmured Charles Brookfield.

‘Last
night, Daubeney invited me to Beak Street and took me to an upstairs room and
introduced me to a little Spanish-speaking girl called Rosa. She was the
prettiest child. She had round black eyes and long eyelashes like a baby
giraffe’s. She can have been no more than eleven or twelve years of age.
Daubeney said she was newly arrived from Mexico. He called her
“Nuestra
Señora de Guadalupe”.
He said that he had “examined” her and that her young
breasts were “newly formed and quite, quite perfect”. She was “hairless”, he
assured me, and “blemish-free”. He had a certificate from a reliable midwife
guaranteeing her virginity. He told me that the child’s maidenhood was mine for
five pounds— and that I would receive the most charming cufflinks as a
souvenir of our encounter.’

‘My
throat!’ cried George Daubeney, lifting his head from his hands, ‘My throat is
burning. My neck is swollen.’

‘Your
neck will be broken soon enough, sir,’ said Inspector Gilmour of Scotland Yard.
‘Get him to his feet, Ferris. Take him to the growler. Get the men to keep him
in the wagon till we’re done here. Tell them he’s to be charged with murder.
Don’t mention this other business. We need him to survive the night.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ANSWERS, ANSWERS

Alphonse Byrd returned to
Oscar’s side with a fresh glass and the small decanter of yellow wine. ‘You’ve
not touched your wine, Mr Wilde,’ he said.

Oscar
smiled and rested his hand on the club secretary’s arm. ‘Forgive me, Byrd. I
gave it to Daubeney. I felt his need was greater—under the circumstances.’

‘Will
you take some now, sir?’

‘Thank
you just half a glass.’ He turned to the waiter who was standing by the
sideboard. ‘Make sure everyone has all that they require—if you would be so
kind. And then join us at the table.’

‘The
waiter is to join us at table?’ asked Heron-Allen, with an amused look on his
pale face. ‘I admire your democratic impulse, Oscar.’

‘It’s
all happening tonight!’ cried Bosie Douglas, raising his glass towards our
host.