Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (41 page)

“I threw them in the fire. It seemed the best place for them, at the time.”

“What a pity. Conveniently, Caradoc is no longer here to prove you wrong. Many people had cause to dislike him. You, it seems, were the only one with cause to wish him dead.”

“What of that?”

Holmes shrugged.

“Unlike Dr Crippen, your alibi may save you as soon as you summon Mr Roscoe of the Garrick's Head to the witness-box. If the case goes that far. What you will have done meantime is to make nonsense of the police investigation. In the end, of course, you may prove to be the one person who certainly cannot have poisoned Caradoc's wine. The critical time would be between a few minutes to nine o'clock and five minutes past or so, when Roland Gwyn took possession of the properties for the last act. Until ten past nine or even later you were not near the stage. From then until the final curtain, by which time Sir Caradoc was certainly poisoned and very probably dead, you were on public view in the final scene.”

Holmes gave him a moment to come to his senses and then concluded.

“In the light of all this, I think you may dispense with my services, except in so far as you may be charged with obstructing the police investigation.”

Carnaby Jenks struggled to his feet.

“Sit down, if you please, Mr Jenks!”

Jenks sat down. Holmes became reminiscent.

“In my experience, when a man or woman takes on the guilt of another in this fashion, it is to protect a close member of the family or a lover. Madge Gilford appears hysterically distressed over the death of Caradoc. William Gilford seems anxious but remarkably composed.”

“There is no reason that he should not.”

“One moment,” said Holmes courteously. “William Gilford also has an alibi. It is supported by very respectable teachers at Toynbee Hall and by the stage-door keeper here. The goblet of wine was already on the stage when he arrived at the theatre. It is evident that he could not possibly have tampered with it before it was taken on.”

“Then I do not understand what all this is about.”

“It is about perfection, Mr Jenks. Gilford's alibi is almost too perfect. And you have added to its perfection, if such a thing were possible. Why would you do that? Why these scribbled notes? Why the silence over an alibi of your own that you could have produced so easily? Why the boast in your note to me that you had killed Caradoc before a thousand witnesses? You see?”

I offered up a prayer that Holmes was not about to reveal what we had discovered in the dressing-room. I need not have worried.

“You are surely drawing suspicion upon yourself in order to protect someone else. I conclude that you took action at once, on hearing of Caradoc's death and before knowing of Gilford's alibi. The notes must be written and in place before the arrival of Bradstreet and Hopkins. Who were you protecting? Are you quite sure you cannot tell me the relation in which William Gilford or his wife stands to you?”

There was a terrible silence and the poor fellow seemed to wrestle with his soul. The pulse in his throat told me that we were near the truth.

“What will happen?” he whispered at length. “What will you do?”

“I am not a policeman, Mr Jenks. You have summoned me here to help you. Unfortunately, you have made my task extremely difficult. I have believed almost from the first that you have brought me here to shield someone else. Young William Gilford, I daresay, and possibly Madge. Now, will you tell me what he is to you? You are walking the plank and you are almost at the end of it. The parish records or the register of Trinity College should yield the answer I seek. I would rather have it from you. Now!”

There was a long pause. At last the answer came, the first calm words the haggard player had spoken.

“Very well, Mr Holmes. I know nothing of Caradoc's death. The truth is that I was born out of wedlock. William Gilford is more then thirty years my junior but his grandfather adopted me for reasons I will not specify. When the young people came to London a year or so ago, Madge Gilford was very much taken with the theatre, which I had shown her. It was a new thing to her, a child's fairyland. She was too genteel for it, but at the request of the couple, I found her a place here as wardrobe mistress. William was the breadwinner but Madge was quick with a needle and something like this would occupy her. It seemed innocent enough. I thought it would be safe. That is all I have done.”

Then, to my dismay, Carnaby Jenks began to weep.

“And your sister, to whom you refer in your letters?” Holmes inquired gently.

Jenks shook his head without looking up.

“A dear friend, that is all. One who helped me and who has suffered by that evil man. I will not say more. Roland Gwyn, the stage manager, is the person who can tell you, if he thinks it right.”

This time, I knew that Jenks would keep his vow of silence. He was shaken but resolute. Sherlock Holmes was always of the opinion that Jenks intervened that night, when Caradoc was found dead, in fear of what he thought young William Gilford might have done, rather than from knowledge of it.

So it was that we made the acquaintance of Roland Gwyn. He was a man of short but wiry build and greater strength than might appear. I think he was no more than forty, but like Caradoc, he had made his way to London from the Welsh valleys of collieries and blast furnaces. The two men had met, and Gwyn's practical turn of mind as a stage-hand soon commended him as a manager.

We stood with him on the deserted set of Elsinore which had still to be dismantled.

“Tell me, Mr Gwyn,” said Holmes quietly, “you probably know best of all where everyone is at every moment and what they are doing. Is that not so? You can help me—if you will.”

“And why should I not, sir?”

“Perhaps, first of all, you could clear up two points for me. How long had Sir Caradoc been the lover of young Madge Gilford? And how long had her husband known of this?”

I thought it must be a shot in the dark, but looking at Gwyn, I knew it had found its mark. The poor fellow went pale but he came back fighting.

“William Gilford knew nothing of it, sir. Because there was nothing to know.”

He had never expected such questions, I am sure, and there was a fatal hesitation between his two replies. Holmes let him know it but he spoke reassuringly.

“Mr Gwyn, by answering my second question first I fear you have given the game away. Your first instinct was to say that William Gilford did not know, not that the thing had never happened. You would not last long against Inspector Hopkins. Even Mr Bradstreet would catch you with some such trick.”

Gwyn stared down at the boards of the stage.

“I know nothing of that, sir. I could not tell you.”

Holmes went on in the same even-tempered voice.

“I think you could, Mr Gwyn, but I will not force you. Do you know of me? Do you believe I am an honest man?”

“Everything I have heard of you, Mr Holmes, makes me believe that. When we shook hands a moment ago, your grip was the grip of an honest man.”

“Will you believe me when I tell you that those two young people shall be safe with me? That they shall come to no harm through me? That I may yet save them for one another?”

Unlike Carnaby Jenks, Roland Gwyn was a straightforward man by nature. It was easy to see the passions of doubt and hope contending in his strong features.

“Come,” said Holmes, “If you tell me, I can help them. But I cannot help if there are facts and evidence of which I am unaware.”

What on earth was this? For all the world it sounded as if he was offering to compromise a police investigation.

Roland Gwyn sat down on a gothic chair that had been placed for King Claudius or Queen Gertrude. He stared up at us.

“I will tell you something,” he said, “and then you must decide. William Gilford is the son of an attorney in the town of Carmarthen. I knew the family, though not well. William was a scholar at Cambridge for a year. Then his father died and he had to leave, for money reasons. But he grew acquainted with Mr Munby, a fellow of the college, and found an interest in the education of working men. He met Madge in the cathedral city of Ely not ten miles or so from the college.”

Young Gilford hardly sounded like the stuff of which murderers are made. Yet the story took Roland Gwyn some time to tell and he did not find it easy. Emotion sometimes came close to overwhelming him, but he mastered it bravely and kept his course. To me, both as a medical man and a partner of Sherlock Holmes in our detective practice, it was a familiar tale of its type.

The girl's father had been a verger of Ely cathedral, who blessed the love match and the union. Madge Gilford had been a kind and generous girl but a simpleton in the ways of the world. The young married couple had come to London, where William Gilford found his post as an almoner at Marylebone Hospital. They took lodgings in Maida Vale. Madge was already deft with a needle. When the chance came to care for theatrical costumes, neither father nor husband raised any objection.

If the young wife had a vice, it was no more than the credulity of a country girl in the city, rather than a betrayal of marriage vows taken so short a time ago. To Caradoc she was easy prey. By being polite, then helpful and understanding, to a man who seemed so famous and so far above the world she had lived in, she stepped into the quicksands of flattery and insinuation. After she had given way to him and then regretted it, he had only to suggest that any resistance would compel him to reveal to the world what she had already done. I thought at once of Jenks's “blackmail.” Did he know something of all this or only of Caradoc's ways with others? At first Madge Gilford, poor fool, was enchanted by this important man who was the age of her own father. At length, love had turned to distaste, tempered by fear of how the spiteful public tongue of Caradoc might curb her disobedience. Perhaps I was over-dramatising the threat, but I wondered if Madge Gilford knew that a public flaying of her quiet character awaited her at the green room supper, after which—as Jenks described Caradoc's threat—she would crawl back to her burrow and dread the light of day.

Because she was honest, she had at first told William Gilford everything and protested that she had fallen in love with the great actor. She could not help herself. The young man was distraught. There had followed a miserable six months of estrangement under one roof, hopeless arguments, threats of self-destruction, wretchedness of every sort. All this was for the delight of a man—once his friend—whom Roland Gwyn described as having lowered himself in recent years to become one of “the scum of the earth.”

“Mr Holmes,” he said quietly, “I have never forgotten the religion of my childhood. After a few years Caradoc was so changed, without heart or feeling. He seemed like a man without a soul.”

I have seen a good deal in my time, but I confess I was shocked by the account that followed. To destroy the lives of two young people in this manner—even as they set out in hope upon their life together. In the course of my practice I had once come across it in the case of a man from the dregs of a European city. He had amused himself by enticing such simple victims into a society where they marvelled at the rich clothes of his companions and the assurances of his passion. Disease happily rid the world of him in his middle years. Forgive me, I rejoiced to hear of it.

We listened to this tale of a kind familiar in the divorce courts and in the small tragedies of everyday life. William Gilford would return from his evening classes. Sometimes Madge Gilford was not at home. Far worse, sometimes he would see her hurrying ahead of him from an assignation with Caradoc, hoping to be in the house first and make it seem that she had been at home all the time. If Roland Gwyn was truthful, which no one who heard him would doubt, William remained loyal. He lived with his embittered thoughts but hoped for better times.

During this account, Gwyn had become increasingly distressed. He was almost in tears before the end. It was clear to me that he had grown fond of these two young people, almost as a father might. Holmes held the gaze of those brown eyes steadily and said again,

“You need have no fear, Mr Gwyn. They are both safe with me.”

What did he mean? What else had he kept to himself?

“Mr Gwyn,” he said, “You will have heard by now of the letters from Carnaby Jenks to Caradoc?”

“Something of them, sir.”

“The story of his sister?”

He shook his head.

“He had no sister, Mr Holmes.”

“I thought not.”

“She was his friend, sir. I daresay he would not write her name in the letters for the world to see.”

“She became, perhaps, one of the ladies of the night who visited Caradoc in the Dome?”

“Perhaps she was, Mr Holmes. I know nothing of that.”

“How was it done?”

Mr Gwyn took a deep breath.

“I was occupied with the performance. I never saw them, that I know of. The story was that they came through the private entrance, the street-door, not directly into the theatre. The Dome was his domain, as he said. Now and again I believe they were in his dressing-room with him. He might easily lend them a key to the private door on Maiden Lane, if he chose. More likely, he would leave the Yale on the latch for them. I do not know. Only he could have told you.”

Holmes swung round and strode out through the wings. I could hear his voice in the passageway.

“Mr Hopkins! Mr Bradstreet! If you please!”

There was a pause, and then he returned with the trim, upright figure of young Hopkins in attendance.

“Now then,” said Holmes to Gwyn, “be so kind as to repeat to Inspector Hopkins what you have just said to me. I promise that neither you nor anyone else has anything to fear.”

Gwyn hesitated, looking at the young inspector as though at a man who might be trusted.

“Sir Caradoc was visited by ladies of a bad reputation, sir, in the sitting-room of the Dome. At night, usually after the play. Even in his dressing-room, sometimes.”