Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (39 page)

“Which is?”

Holmes got up from the desk.

“Caradoc drank his wine a few minutes before he left the stage. Suppose, after all, it contained prussic acid. How long would he live?”

As the reader may imagine, the answer to this question is that one cannot tell until the victim has been anatomised. Perhaps it may be impossible even then. In the course of our detective partnership, I had pursued a little research into the art of poisoning, including cyanide, rare though it is. Dixon Mann in his
Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
and Garstang in
The Lancet
of 1888 talk of those who have taken a fatal fifth of an ounce of hydrocyanic acid and survived for an hour and three-quarters. I noted that, in 1890, the
British Medical Journal
described a woman who accidentally swallowed an ounce of cyanide in the form of powder but was able to “rush” upstairs, report the fact, obtain treatment and survive.

In the light of all this, I could offer only my doubts.

“Holmes, we must judge from the facts. If the wine was poisoned, Caradoc was obviously not one of those who succumbed in a couple of minutes, or else a thousand people would have seen him die on the stage! Perhaps that was the public revenge that Carnaby Jenks hoped for. Failing that, any dose swallowed in his wine could not have been sufficient to be immediately overwhelming. He was able to get back here at least five minutes later.”

“Would he still have been alive half an hour after drinking the wine—even if the poison was present only in a small dose? Alive just before ten o'clock?”

“I think not. It is most unlikely, though not impossible. My friend Mr Knott of Lincoln's Inn is editing the trial of England's most famous poisoner, Dr William Palmer of Rugeley. In that case the defence rested on the survival of his victim for an hour and a half. That man had taken poison which should have killed him in no time. As for Caradoc, it was not impossible that he was alive until ten o'clock—but without treatment, most, most unlikely.”

“We may allow that he might have begun to feel unwell a few minutes before his sudden death?”

“If he survived for even ten minutes or so after taking the poison, his collapse might not have been as sudden. He would perhaps have felt the effects more gradually.”

“Time enough to call for help? Or to write a few lines with failing legibility?”

“Very likely.”

He stared at me and said in that coldly rational voice, “Then he was poisoned in this room, not on the stage. That is the only solution which fits the facts. Forget the miracles recounted in
The Lancet
and the
British Medical Journal
. Sitting in this chair, he breathed in the fumigation vapours of rat poison from his cigar before he knew what he was doing. He lived just long enough to tear a strip from the newspaper and scrawl a dozen words or so upon it. He did not have time to get up and struggle to the door. Someone else placed the key and the cord where they were found.”

“The murderer?”

“He or she had ample time to return after Caradoc's death, perhaps verifying through the window from the street that he was dead. Time to change the evidence and leave—dropping the dressing-gown cord by the door to muddy the waters. There was probably time for all this before the play ended and the actors reappeared. It was the murderer who locked the door upon leaving. It need not have been locked before. Caradoc's own key was used to close it. Then the man or woman went out into the street, raised the sash window and tossed the key over by the door. If I were the criminal I should also have left one of the sash windows open a little to clear the air.”

He paused and then added emphatically,

“Neither Bradstreet nor Hopkins is to hear anything of this.”

“But surely Dr Hammond found poison in the wine?”

“How easy for anyone to slip it in when the play was over and the goblets standing unnoticed! There was no poison when Caradoc drank it. That is the key to this case. That is the fog that Bradstreet and Hopkins have got themselves into.”

“And Dr Worplesdon and Hammond?”

His face softened.

“My dear old fellow, we have indulged in a pleasant little fantasy in which Caradoc was one of those rare souls who survive cyanide poisoning for half an hour or more because the dose was a low one. A thousand people will believe it because they think they saw it happen on stage. Bradstreet and Hopkins believe it because the wine was certainly poisoned by the time they arrived. They could find no poison anywhere else. Worplesdon and Hammond also believe it—save the mark!—because he was dead of cyanide poisoning when they got here and it must have come from somewhere!”

“Then where is the remainder of the poison now?”

“You may depend upon it that all which remains is safely inside Caradoc. You will look in vain elsewhere. Whoever had it last put a little of it in the wine on-stage after the curtain came down but before Caradoc was examined. That would have been simple. While Bradstreet and Hopkins have been plodding through their so-called investigation, an unknown hand has had an hour and a half in which to tip the remainder of the powder or the liquid down a sink or even into the sewer in Maiden Lane. I think you may be certain that not a grain nor a drop is left in this building.”

“And what of our client?”

Holmes did not often scowl but he did so now.

“I do not know whether Mr Carnaby Jenks is playing a game with us, or with the police, or with someone else. I propose to find out—in very short order.”

“You think he is a poisoner?”

“He is certainly an unscrupulous liar and a less accomplished actor than he thinks he is. That is what will hang him, if he persists in it.”

5

W
e found our way through a door in the dressing-room corridor to a narrow flight of wooden stairs. The walls of this stairway were hung with sketches, prints and signed photographs of those who had trodden the boards of the Royal Herculaneum during its years of fame. I noticed Johnstone Forbes-Robertson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Madame Modjeska, Squire Bancroft and Madame Bernhardt. After a right-angle turn the stairs led to the door of the famous Dome. To one side, a passageway and a further flight led downwards to the street-door of these domestic quarters.

Holmes paused and nodded towards them.

“How are the mighty fallen, Watson. This route was designed when the Herculaneum was last rebuilt, half a century ago. In those days theatre-going was not quite respectable. This was a private entrance to the box used by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. They came repeatedly to see the great William Macready in
Macbeth
and
King Lear
.”

If Holmes was remarkable for nothing else, his knowledge of buildings in London, even of their private rooms and passages, would have secured him a modest fame.

He did not knock at the door. When we entered, Jenks was sitting in a chair and Sergeant Witlow in another. A uniformed constable stood behind the prisoner. Their attitudes suggested that there had been no conversation for some time.

Witlow stood up as we came in, and Holmes said brusquely, “Sergeant, Mr Hopkins assures me that a cup of tea is waiting for you and your colleague in the green room. Perhaps you would be good enough to leave us with Mr Jenks. I shall not keep you long. I promise you he will not evade us.”

“Very good, Mr Holmes.”

Holmes and I stood in silence as they left. Then my friend turned to Carnaby Jenks, shrunken, as it seemed, in his chair.

“Mr Jenks, this case is not yet three hours old. I may say already that you are the most difficult client I have ever had to deal with. If you are quite determined to put the rope round your own neck, then tell me so and I will go back to my bed in Baker Street.”

Jenks raised his eyebrows in an actor's expression of surprise.

“I don't follow you at all, Mr Holmes.”

“Do you not? Are you a lunatic?”

“You know I am not!”

“Then why have you concocted at least four demented notes and addressed them to Sir Caradoc Price?”

“Can the police put me in prison for sending notes to him?”

“Listen to me, Jenks! I was most careful in my choice of language. I suggested that you addressed them to him—not that you sent them or that he received them.”

I was surprised to see that the distinction between “addressing” and “sending” rattled Carnaby Jenks far more than the threat of the gallows had done. If he had launched a plot, he now seemed fearful that it was out of his control.

“I sent them,” he said peevishly, “Every word was justified. It has been getting worse by the day. I saw long ago that he kept me on here only for the use he could make of me. He knew that at my age I would never be employed elsewhere.”

“In what way does he use you, except to employ you?”

Unless he was a more accomplished deceiver than I supposed, Jenks was truly angered now.

“By promises betrayed, sir! That I should have leading roles in my own right. Even that I should be his successor. But I was a leading man only when it suited him to have a quiet evening or to escape a matinee performance. Never when a play was reviewed or the theatre was full and I might get a benefit. I wrote to him. What would you have me do?”

There was no pity in my friend's response. The dark gaze of Sherlock Holmes as he leant towards the chair seemed to fix Jenks like a butterfly upon a specimen board.

“What would I have you do? The very thing you have avoided doing since I arrived this evening. Tell me the truth. I am not here to be made a fool of.”

“What truth?”

Holmes straightened up and shook his coat into shape.

“In the first place, that you are not responsible for the death of Sir Henry Caradoc Price but that you have gone to every length imaginable to convince the police that you must be.”

The thin nervous frame quivered once and Jenks blinked at him, like a schoolboy under reprimand. Then the pale nervous temperament in him flared up again, his face reddening and his voice almost a gabble.

“I am an innocent man, sir. I will not have my words twisted. I know the law. I have my right to silence against the police. If they believe I am guilty of some crime, let them prove the fact. It is no duty of mine to help them.”

“My further suggestion,” said Holmes quietly, “is that this intrigue does not touch you alone.”

That also shook him. He could not see how Holmes might think it on such evidence—let alone know it.

“We will leave that for a moment,” my friend went on, “but let me first assure you that stupidity hangs more men than wickedness alone.”

Sherlock Holmes sat down in the elbow chair with his chin in his hand and a finger across his mouth, as though performing a calculation of some kind. At length he looked up.

“These notes to Sir Caradoc, they speak of other things. When did you send them?”

“On various dates. Not in the last few days.”

“He does not seem to have mentioned them to anyone. They also have a remarkable uniformity in their calligraphic style. What have you to say about that?”

“Nothing. Neither to you nor to anyone else.”

“A Home Office examiner will almost certainly tell the court that they were probably written on a single occasion. Presumably to be planted among the dead man's papers.”

Carnaby Jenks said nothing—but he listened more intently than almost any man I had seen questioned by Holmes.

“From the time the house surgeon and the Bow Street police were alerted until they got here must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. You are a literate man, Mr Jenks, and I have a certain knowledge of handwriting. Whenever these notes were written, they were written very quickly, as the tailing script confirms. They are fluent in thought as well as script. In total, I should say they could all be written in about seven minutes.”

A sudden look of dread at what was coming glimmered in Jenks's eyes. He repressed it with an effort. Holmes continued.

“You had time enough tonight to write those fragments before Dr Worplesdon and Mr Bradstreet arrived. Sir Caradoc Price had just been found dead in his dressing-room! Everyone was down there. Your way to his desk in the Dome was clear.”

“You may believe me or not as you please.”

It was the last gasp of a runner crossing the finishing-line.

Holmes attempted to refresh the conversation.

“What of the blackmail, Mr Jenks? You say in the notes that you were blackmailed by Sir Caradoc. How and when?”

Once again, Jenks blinked as if someone had slapped his face.

“I cannot discuss it.”

Sherlock Holmes sighed.

“In any court of law, Mr Jenks, a judge will direct you to discuss it. And, believe me, the nature of the blackmail you allege is one of the first facts a cross-examiner will require.”

To see the perspiration on his forehead was to know that something had indeed gone terribly wrong with his plan. But then suddenly it seemed as if all was well again.

“I did not say that I was the direct victim of the blackmail.”

“Did you not?”

“I said it was an actor whom he blackmailed. Indeed, it was the sister of whom I had spoken and through whom we were both blackmailed.”

“Your sister? Your sister whom you say he ruined?”

Jenks's words came in a rush but he spoke like a man now standing on firm ground.

“She worked to be an actress at first, Mr Holmes. After he corrupted her, he threatened to make her name notorious throughout the streets and theatres of London unless she submitted to his further demands. He included me in these threats, if I made trouble for him. He would make the details of her downfall a joke and a smoking-room story in every club. To use his own words, she would crawl back to her burrow and dread the light of day. That was what I meant by blackmailing a fellow actor.”