Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (42 page)

“Indeed, Mr Gwyn?” Hopkins managed to sound concerned and dismayed at the revelation. “I am sorry to hear that.”

“The Dome was his domain, as he called it, sir. My understanding is that he would sometimes give them a key to the street-door, if he knew them well, or leave that door on the latch. I never saw them down here, that I know of. But I could not be sure.”

Holmes turned to his Scotland Yard protégé.

“Tell me, Hopkins, has that street-door been examined this evening? Mr Bradstreet has not mentioned it to me.”

“So far as I know, Mr Holmes, it is locked. The matter has not been raised, but that is what we have assumed.”

“Then had we better not see whether our assumptions are secure?” Holmes inquired innocently.

With Hopkins and Gwyn we climbed the stairs hung with theatrical portraits, went past the sitting-room of the Dome and down the far side. That area seemed little used and the walls were bare. At the foot stood the green-painted street-door. As I looked, it appeared undoubtedly closed and fastened. Only when Hopkins turned the handle and the door swung open was it apparent that the latch and not the lock had been holding it.

“It seems he was expecting a visitor after all,” Holmes said for everybody's benefit.

Caradoc's enemies were legion. However, the unlocked door now opened a Pandora's box of the seven deadly sins, any of whose practitioners in London's underworld might have chosen New Year's Eve as the time to level scores with him. It was not impossible that one of them had been in his dressing-room at any time from the pouring of wine into the goblet to the smoking of the last cigar. A prosecutor of Carnaby Jenks would have a steep hill to climb when this was revealed.

The silence that accompanied our return up the stairs was of a depth that follows the dying reverberations of a trench mortar. We retraced our steps as far as the door of the sitting-room. Superintendent Bradstreet and Carnaby Jenks were staring at each other in silence across the table.

“Mr Bradstreet,” said Holmes pleasantly, “I think the time has come for you and me to share a little information.”

8

T
wenty minutes later we took a courteous farewell of Stanley Hopkins and Isaiah Bradstreet. The latter was now full of the theory that some creature of the streets with a grudge had known of the unlocked door on Maiden Lane. With a little knowledge of the play's performance, she—or he—had only to enter before the last act—even in a costume of some kind. There would be no one in the Dome at such a time. From there, it would be the easiest thing to sidle down the stairway with its signed portraits. While the play was in progress, the chances were that the dressing-room passage, even the dressing-room itself, would be empty. The goblet of wine was out of sight while still in Caradoc's dressing-room. On Mr Gwyn's little table, it was the only one containing wine. In the myth that was now being created, it was vulnerable to a malevolent passing shadow, while all attention was on the efficient performance of
Hamlet
.

Even if challenged, an intruder had only to mention a visit to Sir Caradoc in the Dome and postpone vengeance to a future occasion. How easy to believe that such a phantom had brushed past and emptied a powder, from sleeve or pocket, into the wine before withdrawing by the same route. As the cast crowded towards the stage for the curtain calls, there would have been no one to hear the last dreadful sounds of the great actor's career. No one to see a shadow pass along the wall and up the narrow wooden stairs again.

Such was this fable of the poisoned wine which was woven into the history of the great theatre. It was so much more intriguing than the likely truth. The beauty of it was, as Holmes later remarked, that while such a chain of events could not be proved, it certainly could not be disproved for the benefit of a court. Indeed, so long as the world believed Caradoc had been poisoned on the stage, it must be true. Without conclusive proof against any other defendant, this phantom of the underworld would always haunt the minds of an Old Bailey jury. Caradoc's romances of the street must be the first evidence produced by the defence. Who would send a man to the gallows while the wraiths of such women and their bullies lingered among the backstage stairs and passages?

No one welcomed such an unknown visitant of this kind more readily than Superintendent Isaiah Bradstreet. In the space of two or three hours, before Scotland Yard “got its hands” on the case, this amateur of the uniformed branch solved the mystery, even if he created another in the process. Each time the case became a topic of journalism, he was consulted, quoted, and acquired a fame he can never have expected. His rivals, Lestrade and Gregson—even Sherlock Holmes—were nowhere compared with him.

We did not see Carnaby Jenks again. His own alibi seemed proof against all suspicion, as indeed it was, for he was on the public stage while Caradoc was supposed to be dying. As Holmes and I parted company with Roland Gwyn, my friend said softly once again, “They shall he safe with me.”

9

N
ot without reason, the waving placards of the newsboys next day proclaimed the Royal Herculaneum “Mystery.” The death of Caradoc Price did not spawn as many theories as the Whitechapel murders of the so-called Jack the Ripper. Yet once or twice a year some penny-a-liner would pen a new solution to the identity of the unknown intruder—and Bradstreet would say a few more words about the unlocked street-door.

Sherlock Holmes was philosophical as our cab took us back to Baker Street in the early hours of the New Year.

“If interest in the case survives, my dear fellow, it will be because people like you persist in quoting curious cases from
The Lancet
and the
British Medical Journal
of men and women who have lived for fifteen or twenty minutes after taking prussic acid. As a result, the members of tonight's audience believe they actually saw him drink it. That will be something to tell their grandchildren. Poor Caradoc is doomed to be one of your rare medical specimens, whether he likes it or not.”

“Then what we saw in the dressing-room is not to be given to the world?”

“Apart from my modest powers of deduction, there was nothing that could not be explained by your medical theories and the poison in the goblet. The tobacco ash was a curious mixture, but it might have come from innocent sources.”

“And what of the riddle in his dressing-gown pocket? What became of the scrap of paper?”

He patted his coat.

“I know I had it then. I do not seem to have it now. In any case, it was hardly conclusive.”

This was too much!

“If you were right, Holmes, as you say you invariably are, young William Gilford has no alibi. True, he did not reach the theatre in time to poison the wine before it was carried on stage. He was certainly there in time to enter the unlocked dressing-room before Caradoc came off during the final scene and exchange the first Real Feytoria for a cigar contaminated by rat poison. The play was in progress. The dressing-room passage would be quiet and empty. Gilford had five minutes for less than one minute's work. He had ample time to spy through the window and go back to the dead man's room soon afterwards. Time to change the cigar and the tobacco ash. He could lock himself in while making these arrangements and lock the room after him when he left, tossing the key through the window, to fall as if from Caradoc's dying hand.”

“He might have poisoned Caradoc,” Holmes said thoughtfully, “but as it happens, I think he did not.”

“Why?”

Holmes pulled a face at the passing scene, almost as if with a pang of indigestion.

“Because of the meeting.”

“The meeting?”

“Several reputable witnesses swear that after his evening lecture he attended a meeting of teachers at Toynbee Hall. It ended about five minutes before nine o'clock.”

“He could still have reached the theatre before Caradoc left the stage.”

“You miss the point, Watson.”

“How?”

“This murder was planned, and he could not have planned it as it happened. He could not have known that he would reach the Herculaneum in time, could he? Among the other statistics a criminal investigator must carry in his head is the speed of traffic in London.”

“Which is?”

“Something over five miles an hour but less at difficult times. Gilford could not be sure that he would be there before Caradoc left the stage. A man who must be two miles away by twenty past nine, in order to plant a poisoned cigar, does not attend a meeting of indefinite length at half-past eight. If he does do so, at least he warns his colleagues that he may have to leave them before the end. That did not happen. Under these circumstances, William Gilford could not plan the murder as it was committed. Nor would he poison a cigar on the spur of the moment. When he joined his colleagues at Toynbee Hall, he had not the remotest idea that Caradoc Price would be dead in an hour or so.”

“So we are left with the phantom of a street woman or her bully who glided in and left a trail of poison?”

He shrugged and looked aside, studying his reflection in the window of the cab as we crossed Oxford Circus into Portland Place. Small groups of revellers and dancers were walking home, Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierette. There was one thing I could not let pass. Almost without considering what I was saying, I broke in upon his thoughts.

“Holmes! Will you give me your word that when you went from the Dome to call Sergeant Witlow and his constable from the green room, you did not first go down the other stairs and put the Yale lock of the street-door on the latch? So that it should later be found unlocked and this story of an unknown intruder put about?”

He had not seemed to be out of the room for long, but I had seen Holmes ascending stairs two or three at a time. Inspector Tobias Gregson was the only man I had ever known to outdistance him.

He smiled at the costumed revellers without turning his head.

“I would willingly have unlocked it, old fellow. Unfortunately for your theory, someone else had already done so.”

There was a moment's silence before I tried him again.

“William Gilford had ample opportunity to replace the half-smoked cigar and the ash in the dead man's dressing-room, even if he had not planned the murder.”

He turned to me with a smile.

“A palpable hit, if we could prove it! I should bet that Gilford never smokes and would not know one leaf of tobacco ash from another!”

“There is very little you could not prove if you chose. Gilford is your man.”

“More to the point,” he said, gazing at the dancers again, “who is my woman? This is not Gilford's revenge.”

“Madge Gilford?” It fitted so neatly—and yet how I wished it did not. Poison is proverbially a woman's weapon against the physical strength of a man. If Caradoc had sworn to her that he would punish her resistance, where more likely than before the elite of the theatre and the gossips of the sporting press during the green room supper? How was she to silence him?

Sherlock Holmes yawned.

“If I am correct, Gilford intervened to shield a murderer. So, I believe, did Carnaby Jenks. I do not much care for him but tonight that broken old player gave the performance of his life.”

“Madge Gilford?” I repeated.

“Who else would Gilford intervene to save—in the certainty of the gallows if he was caught in that room? As gallant a gentleman as Henry Hawley Crippen—but more fortunate.”

He counted on his fingers.

“That young woman was mocked, threatened, abused by her seducer when she knew her error and turned away from him. Her life, her marriage, all hope of happiness, were at his mercy. You doubt it? Recall his treatment of the lost and unfortunate Oscar Wilde. That serpent tongue had the power to ridicule Madge Gilford so publicly that her husband, her father, the friends of her youth must weep for her but could not save her. She had good reason to dread his harangue at the green room supper. By tomorrow, his pleasantries would be all over London.”

He pulled on his gloves.

“Therefore, if I am correct, Watson, Madge Gilford prepared a weapon to silence that man for ever.”

“She? And if it was she, you will keep silent?”

“Even you, old fellow, came with me to exterminate Charles Augustus Milverton and silence his threats of blackmail to young women a year or two ago. Had you forgotten? Happily, a young woman whose reputation he destroyed did the job a few minutes before us! We witnessed it but did not betray her, did we? Nor did you ever suggest that we should.”
*

The porticoes of Langham Place stretched away to the Euston Road.

“I cannot believe Madge Gilford was a Lady Macbeth.”

“Precisely my point, Watson. If I am correct, William, on his return, found her stricken by what she had done—the simple substitution of one cigar for another. What followed was quite beyond her, as we saw for ourselves when we passed her in her distress. As the terrible minutes ticked by, if my conclusion is correct, William laid a false trail before Caradoc was found. His one touch of criminal genius was to add what remained of the poison to one of the goblets on the stage, just as Caradoc was discovered and the dressing-room door was opened.”

The cab rumbled over hardened snow.

“And that is where the case must rest?”

“Watson, I should despise myself if I did not do as much to save the woman I loved and who had suffered so bitterly. On the evidence, I cannot convict William Gilford rather than an intruder who may have entered by the street door. I would not even if I could. Will that do?”

We turned the corner at Baker Street Metropolitan station. He wrapped his plaid coat round himself and prepared to descend from the cab.

“You set yourself above the law.”

“But not above justice. In any case, I have been my own judge and jury so often that it comes a little late in life to alter the practice now. I believe that they are young enough to salvage their marriage from the wreck of their romance.”