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.”
“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
Twenty 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
Not 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?”
Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly Page 32