by David Marcum
We entered in the deepening dark of evening and found ourselves in a large vestibule designed to accommodate large crowds of patrons before a show. It was, like the outside, functional rather than opulent, but there was an impressive quality to its newness and scrupulous cleanliness.
“You’re back.” A soft, feminine voice spoke to us as we passed through the low-lighted lobby. Holmes, Green, and I were alone, save for the owner of the voice, who quickly joined us. Miss Doris Lake was a small, pale young woman with a shy smile. As we spoke our greetings, I fancied I could understand her association with Green, whose open and confident temperament was so much the opposite of her own. Nevertheless, her voice was low and lovely, and she had striking blue eyes that made her otherwise ordinary face attractive. She took Green’s arm as soon as she could manage it and clung to him as we made our way about the premises, which were much as I had expected, avoiding the appearance of extreme opulence or extreme tawdriness. We were still standing in the front room while Green explained the basic layout of the hall, when a short, round, and extremely fast-moving man entered from somewhere in the deeper environs of the building.
“Charles!” he said breathlessly, as if he’d been exerting himself, “I’m glad to see you. Who are these gentlemen?”
“This is Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes, the detective I was sent to seek.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” the other man replied. “I’ve had nothing but questions from every quarter the entire time you’ve been gone. The Misses Blake are threatening to - to leave us, after all these years!”
Holmes cleared his throat. “Mr. Pike, I believe?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” said the agitated man. “I’m so pleased you’ve come.”
“Then please allow us to proceed on our tour of the premises,” said my friend shortly, though I hardly blamed him. The man seemed harmless enough, but he was not in a helpful frame of mind.
Green, as calm as ever, picked up where he’d ceased and continued to explain the structure’s simple design of main auditorium with wings on either side, the left of which contained practice rooms and the right dressing rooms, with offices in the back, behind the stage. The hall, while primarily concerned with musical entertainments, sometimes also hosted small dramatic productions, so its allotment of dressing rooms was greater than might be supposed necessary for an orchestra or an individual singer.
Once he’d finished his overview, Green led us through the vestibule and into the auditorium, which was illuminated but empty, save for a lone cellist who sat upon the stage and played his instrument without looking up as we entered. I thought that he had not heard us come in, so great was his concentration. It was curious, to my mind, that one of the remaining instruments was one so large and unwieldy. I tried to imagine him carrying it to a restaurant and had some difficulty in doing so.
“All right, Robert?” Once we were close enough to the stage to be heard, Green addressed the cellist in a loud voice. The auditorium held, by my estimation, about four hundred seats, so it did not take long for us to make our way down the center aisle to stand in front of the stage.
The man, who was white-haired and elderly, looked up and blinked, immediately ceasing his playing. “Aye, Charles. Can’t get a moment of quiet in the wings. Everyone rushing this way and that. Came here to be alone.”
“Ah, yes, yes, everyone’s in a terrible roar,” said Pike, who was trailing behind and seemed entirely ignorant of the fact that he was part of the commotion. Robert the cellist did not seem overly fond of his manager, for he did not answer and simply stared down at him from his place atop the stage.
I did, for a moment, wonder if the strange subversion of a flute player having more obvious authority than the manager of the orchestra was the normal way of things for this particular group, or if it had merely arisen out of the present circumstance.
Holmes was, as I would have expected, growing impatient by this time, and he simply strode toward the doorway on stage right, which opened into the left side hallway. Green, Pike, and I followed along, and as we turned, I heard Robert’s cello begin again, eerie in the emptiness.
“The room where it happened is this way,” said Green, leading us to the third door on the right. When we reached it, Holmes studied the lock for a moment. “No sign of any sort of tampering or forcing,” he said.
“None at all,” answered Green, “but both keys to the room were accounted for the whole time - one with Pike and the other with the guard.”
I followed Holmes inside the practice room, which was a large, bare space with nothing but rickety wooden chairs, upon which and against which were balanced all manner of instrument cases. It looked, to all intents, like the players had left them moments before.
“Once the theft was discovered, we asked everyone to leave things exactly as they’d been before, or as nearly as they could remember,” Green offered.
“I take it the police haven’t been here,” said Holmes dismissively. “It looks far too unmolested.”
“That’s correct,” offered Pike. “Mr. Dorrigan, the owner of the hall, doesn’t want to involve them unless it’s absolutely necessary, in order to avoid the terms of contract that force him to pay for the instruments.”
Holmes rounded on him. “I should think you’d have something to say about that.”
The man blanched. “I - didn’t think there was any harm in it. No one’s moved anything, and we sent Green to consult you when we realized there wasn’t a simple explanation, like a joke of some kind.”
“No matter,” said my friend, almost to himself.
As I had many times before, I watched Holmes do his work. First, he walked around the room, as if to gain an understanding of it from every angle. Then, he moved through the rows of chairs without touching anything. Finally, he began a systematic examination of every instrument case in the room.
Green, Pike, and I stood behind, not saying anything while he did his work. By this time, it was quite late in the evening, and our inactivity led to drooping eyes and flagging energy. I was certainly eager to hear Holmes’s opinion on the matter, but I could little discern of his thoughts from his actions.
Finally, when we had been at loose ends for many minutes, Holmes looked up from somewhere on the right side of the room. “Were any instruments moved to a new position in the room after the discovery, any at all?”
“None, for I watched the entire exercise,” boomed a voice from behind me, and I looked back to see a tall, broad-shouldered man in the doorway. His face wore a sour expression.
“Mr. Dorrigan?” Holmes came over and gazed on the man without revealing any of his thoughts.
“Oh, sir, here is the detective,” said Mr. Pike quickly, like a mouse addressing an intractable elephant.
“So I see,” said the newcomer, fixing his eyes on my friend as if he didn’t much care for what he saw. “I hope you’ll be able to make an end of this ridiculous matter. Surely the theft of an entire orchestra’s instruments is nothing but someone’s idea of an unfortunate joke.”
“Perhaps,” said Holmes noncommittally. “Mr. Green informed us on the way here that the members of the orchestra are all on the premises. Please fetch the players of stringed instruments for me.”
We were taken to another room, a slightly smaller space with a few tattered, cloth-covered chairs. “Would you like them sent in as a group or individually?” asked Green.
“One by one,” answered Holmes. “Mr. Green, your assistance will not be required.”
The first musician to enter the room was a middle-aged woman with long white hair, who slowly sat down opposite Holmes and me and smiled. “Come to find what’s happened, have you?” she asked with a broadly northern accent.
“We hope to attempt it. Now, then, Mrs. Stoker, please tell me where your seat is in the orchestra and what instrument you play.”
“If we go to the next room, I could show you,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of the room we’d just exited.
“That will be unnecessary,” said Holmes. “I am familiar with orchestral seating, and I have the room’s layout stored in my memory.”
“All right,” she answered. “I’m a second violin. We’re opposite the firsts. I’m third from the center.”
Holmes wrote this down in a notebook he pulled from his jacket pocket. “That’s all that will be necessary. Send in the next one.” I looked over at my friend, mystified. Even I, with my limited powers of deduction, had surmised that if none of the instruments had been moved, Holmes really didn’t need the musicians themselves to answer his questions. The evidence was already present, and surely Pike could have told him where they sat.
Nevertheless, I didn’t have time to ask Holmes anything before we were joined by a middle-aged man with a slight limp. He took his seat and stared at the floor, a bit bleary, as if he’d been on the bottle.
Again, as before, Holmes asked incidental questions and was answered without issue. Finally, as the man prepared to leave the room, he turned back. “I hope you find my viola,” he said.
This happened twice more, once with a young man of awkward disposition, and again with an elderly, emaciated male violinist. Each time, my friend asked the same questions and received simple answers. Each time, I was mystified as to his real purpose in asking.
Finally, after the fourth musician exited the room, there was a slight delay before the next entered, and I turned to my flatmate, who stared straight ahead in his uncomfortable chair and said nothing. “Holmes,” I hissed, thinking we might be interrupted again at any second, “what on earth are you doing?”
He bent the full intensity of his gaze upon me and, unexpectedly, smiled, answering rapidly, “You’re a medical man, Watson. I didn’t think it could have escaped your notice.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but just then, Doris Lake entered the room. Compared to her fellow musicians, she was a burst of life, alert where they had been nearly somnambulant.
“Good evening, Miss Lake,” said Holmes, smiling. “I apologize for the ceremony, but I didn’t have a chance to ask you about your seating position in the orchestra. Mr. Green informed us of your instrument.”
“In the chair right behind Mrs. Stoker’s. You’ve already spoken to her, I believe.”
“Yes,” answered Holmes. “That’s all I need from the string section. I would, however, like to speak to Mr. Pike and Mr. Dorrigan again.”
Miss Lake nodded. “If you follow me, I’ll take you to the office.” I noticed as we exited that Green was nowhere to be found.
The girl took us past a few clusters of gathered orchestra members, who stared openly. I wanted to pity them; surely it must be distressing, I thought, for so many to have lost the sources of their livelihood. But their gazes were strange, unnerving, as if they weren’t quite right.
We went through the hallway, past other small, empty rooms and back toward the dark area behind the stage, where Dorrigan’s office was located. The area wasn’t large, but it had enough room to contain an outer and inner sanctum. Miss Lake knocked on the door of the outer office. It was opened by a young, dark-haired man with a moustache and pock-marked skin.
“They weren’t expected yet, Doris,” he said sharply.
“Nevertheless,” she answered meekly, “they’re ready to see Pike and Dorrigan.”
The secretary nodded and knocked on the inner door, which was soon opened by an irate Dorrigan, who frowned even more deeply than before when he saw us. “I had understood you as wanting to question members of the orchestra.”
“So I have,” said Holmes coolly, “and I am now finished.”
“Pike isn’t here,” said the man tersely, “but if you’d like to speak to me, I suppose I can’t prevent you.”
“Just so,” Holmes replied. “If I may, I would like to speak to you, Green, and Miss Lake together.” Dorrigan’s brows knitted together even more forcefully, but he nodded once and shouted for his secretary.
Miss Lake returned first, and it was another ten minutes before Green joined our awkwardly silent group. Upon entering the room, he immediately took the girl’s hand. Dorrigan presided over his enormous wooden desk, and Holmes and I sat on its other side, with our chairs facing outward, toward the young people who stood before us.
“How long have you been obtaining opium for the members of Pike’s orchestra, Miss Lake?” The girl’s face went even paler than it usually was as the words of Holmes’s question poured over her.
“I - we - Mr. Green is my fiancé. That is my only position of importance.”
“No,” said Holmes decidedly, though not cruelly, “he isn’t. Or, if he is, that certainly isn’t all he is, but you know the truth. I would like you to tell it to me now.”
“How did you know?”
Holmes answered after contemplating her for a moment. “Your empty viola case was in the wrong section of the practice room. Every other instrument case in the orchestra was in its proper location; only yours was incorrect, obviously a signal of some kind. I could have attributed this to the confusion after the theft was discovered, but it wasn’t a seat or two away from its place. It was in the middle of the woodwinds. Of course, when I first discovered the case, I had no idea whose it was, but that was easy enough to ascertain by questioning members of your section.”
She shook her head and gave Dorrigan a desperate look. “He said - he said that you wouldn’t know about that. He was afraid the police would bring in a musical expert of some kind, but he said one detective wouldn’t know difference, so I mustn’t risk anyone seeing me move it back.”
“My musical talents are less renowned than my others,” Holmes replied, “but I certainly know how an orchestra is arranged.” The irony was not lost on me, for I was well aware, as was Holmes, that if they had called in the official force, the likelihood of anyone noticing a detail of that nature would have been nearly nonexistent. They had bet on one man, but he was entirely the wrong man.
Holmes added, “Every member of the orchestra whom I’ve met up to this moment shows the effects of opium - not the most acute effects; Pike wouldn’t have allowed that, but I recognized its lingering presence in their lethargy. It was too coincidental to assume that your instrument signal was uninvolved in something so unusual. Now,” he continued firmly, “the truth.”
She nodded, resigned. “I met James Dorrigan two years ago, when our orchestra was first engaged here. It was a good time for us. Pike was delighted, because this hall represented a step up in the world, a foothold in London. Green hadn’t joined us yet - of course.” I did not know what she meant by this, but Holmes obviously did.
“The night of our first concert here, Dorrigan caught me bringing the opium to our members, something Pike had paid me to do for three years previously, using the placement of my viola case to signal the members that the drug was available. He recruits members from opium dens, supplies them with the drug, and then pays them nearly nothing, supposedly because they owe their wages to him as payment. He makes a profit, and they don’t know they’re being cheated.” Her contempt was palpable. “The only reason I did his work of giving out the drug once he obtained it was that he threatened to put me out on the street if I didn’t, and I had nowhere else to go - I’m not accomplished enough to join a more important orchestra, if one would even take a woman, which is extremely rare, and I had joined this one without realizing its true nature.”
“The night Dorrigan found out, he threatened to terminate the contract and cancel our remaining three performances on account of the disgrace of it. This would have been disastrous. Pike had already put up what little collateral he had to transport us to London, under the promise of a large profit. I knew that he would blame me for being indiscreet, so I offered Dorri
gan a deal - part of the profits from the opium in exchange for being quiet and letting things go on as they had been. The potential of making money far eclipsed any scruples he might have had.”
“I had to tell Pike, but I waited until I had things arranged with Dorrigan. Pike is - he’s not an utterly unkind man, and he took a more charitable view than I’d expected. He offered to divide the loss of Dorrigan’s share with me, so the three of us were, effectively, in business together.”
She stared daggers at the owner of the hall. “Of course, we’d have liked to get rid of Dorrigan as part of the equation, but he had the upper hand. He threatened to spread the news publicly of our orchestra’s particular - interest and destroy our careers just as they were beginning to improve. That was the reason for the theft. Pike stole the instruments in order to force Dorrigan to either pay for them or agree to relinquish his share in the opium. If Dorrigan refused, Pike intended to go to the police and force him to honor his contract. By then, the instruments would have been long destroyed. It was Green’s idea to go and see you and ascertain your likelihood of solving the case. He was only to bring you if he thought you would be easily deceived.” Holmes smiled at this, and I realized that not only had Green been trying to fool us, but Holmes had also been fooling him all along, using flattery and simple deduction to look as if he esteemed his own abilities as much greater than they were.
At that moment, someone yelled. I realized, after my initial surprise, that it had sounded like a male rather than a female voice. Miss Lake and I stared at each other for a few seconds, but Holmes wasn’t paralyzed by surprise. He was at the door in an instant and nearly collided with a white-faced Robert the cellist. “It’s Pike. He’s - dead.”