‘In real life,’ said Wat Sickert, ‘there’s only one round. Most spontaneous fights last no more than ten seconds. The blow is struck, the blade goes in, a shot is fired—and it’s over.’
‘This is sport,’ said Conan Doyle.
‘No,’ said Sickert, ‘this is pantomime—Punch and Judy for grown—ups.’
The second five rounds were as lacklustre as the first. Diego stayed on the offensive and did not appear to tire. He circled his opponent relentlessly, jabbing away at him, throwing punches high then low then high again in quick succession, forcing McMuirtree to retreat but still not managing to lay a glove on him.
‘I see how Beauty retains her loveliness,’ said Oscar. ‘She keeps out of the sun. She lurks in the shadows, out of harm’s way.’
‘The crowd won’t like it,’ murmured Heron-Allen.
‘Have patience,’ said George Daubeney. ‘Patience will be rewarded. Patience always is.’
In the fifteenth round Heron-Allen’s prediction came true. The rumble of discontent began at the back of the hall with a single, angry cry: ‘For God’s sake, McMuirtree, start fighting!’ The lone voice was joined at once by others close by, and then the cries spread, like rolling thunder, across the auditorium. Within moments, two hundred men were shouting in unison: ‘Fight, fight, fight!’
Curiously, it was Diego—who, for almost an hour, had made all the running—who seemed spurred on by the jeers of the crowd. He moved in close on McMuirtree and instead of pounding his opponent from the front began to throw first a right, then a left hook towards his enemy’s head. McMuirtree was now forced to duck and weave to avoid the blows. He kept his guard up at all times, but began to move about the ring more energetically, darting to left and right, forward and back, taunting an increasingly frenzied Diego to chase after him.
It was in the nineteenth round that the nature of the encounter changed decisively. As the referee called ‘Round Nineteen’ and the starting bell sounded, David McMuirtree, like a man suddenly possessed, sprang upon his opponent. He leapt towards him, jabbing at him with a powerful right fist. Taken off guard, Diego stumbled backwards and fell awkwardly against the ropes, tearing his ear as he fell. Incredibly, instead of going after him, McMuirtree now appeared to retreat, jumping backwards and pounding the empty air with shadow blows while seemingly waiting for his opponent to recover his strength and return to the fray. Diego rose to the bait and lurched towards his assailant with his fists insufficiently raised. As he got within striking distance, for a fraction of a second the scene froze and the hall fell silent as McMuirtree pulled his right arm back and then, with astounding force, landed a single punch in the very centre of Diego’s misshapen face. The man’s head jerked back, his blood sprayed the ring, his knees buckled. He fell slowly to the ground, like a collapsing tower.
He was down. ‘Ten, nine, eight …’ called the referee. ‘Seven, six, five …’ roared the crowd.
‘Wait!’ cried George Daubeney.
‘Good God, he’s getting up,’ gasped Lord Rosebery.
‘A little touch of Lazarus in the night,’ murmured Oscar.
Alfred Diego was down, but he was not out. Far from it. As the referee called, ‘Three, two, one … the man, bloodied but resilient, pushed himself onto his knees and, throwing his head back, rose up quite steadily, seemingly laughing, as if defying McMuirtree to do his worst. In the event, McMuirtree did very little more that round. For the next sixty seconds, until the bell went, the two boxers circled one another warily, throwing and parrying punches without conviction, as if merely sparring to pass the time.
‘Twenty rounds,’ said Heron-Allen when the break came. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘Do you think this one will decide it?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you?’
I looked at Lord Queensberry and Inspector Gilmour going about their business in McMuirtree’s corner. The policeman was wiping the boxer’s torso with a towel and squeezing a wet sponge around his mouth. The Marquess was on his haunches, whispering urgently into his champion’s ear.
‘My father will be impossible tonight,’ muttered Lord Drumlanrig. ‘When he’s triumphed, he’s unbearable.’
‘Seconds out! Round Twenty!‘ called the referee.
The round did not last long. This time, Diego anticipated McMuirtree’s pounce and avoided it neatly, feinting to the left before jumping to the right, bringing McMuirtree on after him. Diego, however, held the advantage for only a moment. It was clear that he had given his all; he had nothing more to give: his legs could carry him no longer. The crowd sensed that the climax was upon us. ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ they thundered, stamping their feet and waving their fists, as McMuirtree moved lightly forward and, with alternate fists, began, almost methodically, to pound his opponent about the head.
‘He’s beating him senseless,’ cried Oscar. ‘This must be stopped.’
‘It will be,’ called Heron-Allen. ‘Look at the blood.’
In the ring, suddenly, blood was everywhere. Both boxers were awash with blood. Blood was pouring from them onto the canvas. Still the crowd bayed for more: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! ‘, As the referee ran towards the combatants shouting ‘Break! Break!’, David McMuirtree delivered his final blows: a left jab, a straight right, a formidable left hook. Alfred Diego crumpled to the ground.
‘It’s over!’ cried Oscar.
‘Thank God,’ muttered Conan Doyle.
George Daubeney broke away from us and ran down the gangway towards the ring.
In his corner at the ringside, I saw the Marquess of Queensberry, with his hands raised about his ears, dancing a victory jig.
Inside the ring, David McMuirtree stumbled away from Diego‘s body and turned triumphantly to face the crowd. His face was white, but his eyes blazed. He held up his arms in salute and as he did so we saw the horror of it. There was blood flowing freely from each of his wrists. It was streaming down his naked arms. As George Daubeney and the referee reached him, his eyes closed and he fell dead into their arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A CHARM BRACELET
‘I am certain that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’
The Hon. the Reverend George Daubeney, kneeling over the body of David McMuirtree, crossed himself with trembling, bloodied fingers and turned to look up at us. There were tears in his eyes. Daubeney and the referee had dragged McMuirtree’s body from the auditorium to the dressing room. They had laid him on an overcoat on the floor.
‘Is he dead?’ asked Oscar.
‘There was no time for the last rites,’ said Daubeney.
‘Is he dead?’ repeated Oscar.
Arthur Conan Doyle was crouching by McMuirtree’s head, feeling for the pulse in his neck. ‘He’s dead, I’m afraid, old man. There’s no doubt about that.’
‘I thought so,’ said Oscar, quietly. ‘One can always tell. When a man dies, his spirit vanishes. It never lingers. It is gone at once.’
‘What in God’s name has happened?’ The Marquess of Queensberry, like a rampaging bull, burst into the dressing room. He had a whip in his hand. He cracked it again and again against the three-legged wooden stool that Antipholus had used when oiling the boxer two hours before and roared:
‘In God’s name, will someone tell me what has happened?’
‘Something outwith the Queensberry Rules,’ murmured Oscar. ‘Your champion is dead, my lord.’
‘He can’t be!’ cried Queensberry, swinging round in a circle like a dervish, holding out his whip as if to keep us all at bay.
‘It seems he is, Lord Queensberry,’ said Inspector Gilmour. He drew himself to attention as he spoke. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Sorry?’ roared Queensberry. ‘Sorry? I’ve never heard of such incompetence.’
‘A man lies dead before us, my lor
d,’ said Oscar quietly, ‘and you talk of “incompetence”?’
‘What else is it?’ raged the Marquess. ‘Gilmour said he had the building crawling with police officers in plain clothes. How has this happened?’
‘I do not know,’ said Inspector Gilmour, gravely. ‘I do not know, but I intend to find out. McMuirtree was one of ours.’
‘Yes,’ growled Queensberry. ‘So you told me. He pointed his whip towards McMuirtree’s body laid out upon the floor. ‘We can all see how you take care of your own.’ He looked about the room angrily. ‘Where’s the referee gone?’
‘He’s gone to see Diego and his supporters,~ explained Daubeney, getting to his feet and backing away from the body on the floor. ‘He felt he should.’
‘Two of my men are with Diego,’ said Inspector Gilmour. ‘I will interview him as soon as he’s recovered.’
Oscar shook his head. ‘Alfred Diego has nothing to do with this sorry business.’
Conan Doyle had moved to the side of McMuirtree’s body and was now kneeling on the edge of the overcoat inspecting the dead man’s wrists and arms. ‘This is the devil’s work,’ he muttered.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Oscar, forcing himself to step closer.
‘This is utterly grotesque,’ continued Doyle, slowly unravelling the blood-soaked laces that had bound the boxing gloves to McMuirtree’s wrists.
‘Fiendishly ingenious by the look of it,’ said Oscar grimly. He bent over the cadaver and through half-closed eyes peered closely at McMuirtree’s lifeless arms. ‘Like a martyr’s wounds … May God forgive whoever has done this terrible thing.’
‘It is truly terrible,’ said Conan Doyle, shaking his head. ‘In all my experience, I’ve seen nothing like it.’
Queensberry had calmed himself and was standing, whip in hand, arms akimbo, gazing down at the blood-drenched body on the floor. ‘I admired this man. He was almost like a son to me. He was better than the sons I’ve got. He was blessed with a natural nobility. He was proper fighting man, fit and strong. And he had intelligence and guile. He could pace himself—that’s rare. He was a decent man, too—clean-living. That’s rarer still.’
Archy Gilmour crouched down beside Arthur Doyle. The policeman was by several years the older of the two, but he did not seem it. With his light red hair and fair, freckled, anxious face, he looked like a young actor playing the part of a detective inspector for the very first time. He tried to speak with authority, but sounded merely bewildered. ‘Well, Doctor?’ he enquired.
‘It is as horrific as it appears to be, Inspector,’ Doyle replied, carefully turning back the leather wrist-band of one of McMuirtree’s boxing gloves to reveal a two-inch-long jagged blade. He tugged at the wrist band with his fingers and tore apart the sodden leather, exposing a second blade—smaller than the first—and then a third, and then a fourth. ‘Do you see?’
‘I don’t see,’ growled Queensberry. ‘What is the meaning of this?’
‘It’s very simple,’ said Oscar. ‘Someone has sewn a series of tiny blades—jagged, sharp and lethal into the leather lining of the wrist-bands of McMuirtree’s gloves. During the fight, over time, as McMuirtree began to sweat and the laces loosened, with the movement of his wrists the blades cut through the lining … The more he punched, the harder he punched, eventually the blades cut through the veins in his wrists as well.’
‘Not just the veins,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘He might have survived that. The arteries were cut, too— sliced through.’ With his forefinger the doctor indicated each side of McMuirtree‘s bloodied wrist. ‘On both hands, both the radial and the ulnar arteries have been severed.’
‘Is that why there is so much blood?’ asked the red-haired policeman, contemplating McMuirtree’s arms and chest and legs all covered in gore.
‘Yes,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘It’s the quantity of blood that he lost—and the speed at which he lost it—that killed him.’
‘The wretched man was streaming blood,’ said Oscar. ‘Look at Daubeney. He’s covered in it now.’
We all turned to look at the Reverend George. He had carried McMuirtree from the ring and brought him to the dressing room. He stood before us now, like Banquo’s murderer, his hands and shirt-front glistening with the dead man’s blood.
Edward Heron-Allen was standing just behind Daubeney, by the gas lamp in the corner of the room. ‘Forgive me for speaking,’ he said, a little too loudly, ‘but my uncle was a surgeon and I always understood that a single cut across a healthy artery is not dangerous because an artery—unlike a vein— has an in-built muscle that contracts to staunch the blood.’
‘Indeed,’ said Conan Doyle, studying Heron-Allen with interest. ‘That is correct. On its own a single, clean cut across the wrist might not prove fatal—as many a half-hearted suicide has learnt.’
‘And whoever did this knew that much also,’ said Oscar, lowering himself with difficulty onto his knees and squinting at the wrist-bands of McMuirtree’s boxing gloves. ‘Hence the multiplicity of blades and the variety of angles.’
‘Yes,’ said Conan Doyle in a business-like way, sitting back and scratching his moustache. ‘The blood vessels in this case have been sliced repeatedly, and—more to the point—sliced vertically as well as diagonally.’
‘Would he not have felt the pain?’ I asked.
‘No,’ answered the doctor, shaking his head, ‘not in the heat of battle.’
‘A man can lose a leg in the heat of battle and not notice it,’ said Lord Queensberry, curtly.
‘With your permission, Inspector …’ Oscar, still on his knees, leant forward over McMuirtree’s body and, with his right thumb and forefinger, picked out one of the tiny blades and held it up. It was no more than three-quarters of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. As he lifted it off the fringe of the glove, we saw that it was attached to a second blade by a slender piece of thread. The second blade was tied to a third, the third to a fourth, and so on. Oscar held the chain of little blades aloft. There were seven of them in all.
‘It looks like a charm bracelet,’ said Heron-Allen.
Oscar looked at his wife’s friend without his customary, indulgent smile. ‘Of a sort, Edward,’ he said coldly.
‘He’s been … murdered?’ asked the Marquess of Queensberry falteringly, as though the truth were only just dawning upon him.
‘Or he’s taken his own life,’ suggested Oscar.
The police inspector looked up at Oscar, incredulous. He held his hand out over the boxer’s bloody corpse. ‘Like this?’ he demanded.
‘You were in the room, Inspector, when he put on the gloves. One of your men helped lace them up for him, as I recall—assisted by Wat Sickert. I distinctly recollect McMuirtree asking you to pull the laces tighter. He made a point of it. Perhaps Mr Heron-Allen is right: perhaps to David McMuirtree these were charm bracelets of a kind. Perhaps he sought a public death …’
‘As a form of absolution?’ asked the Reverend George.
‘Exactly,’ answered Oscar. ‘A public suicide—on a stage, in an arena, within “the Ring of Death” …’
‘This is absurd, Oscar,’ said Conan Doyle.
‘McMuirtree was not a man for suicide,’ barked Lord Queensberry.
‘In certain circumstances, is not suicide allowable, my lord? Laudable, even … Nay, in certain circumstances, heroic?’ He paused and looked about the room. ‘There is something heroic in this bloody scene, is there not?’
‘No,’ answered Conan Doyle abruptly. ‘Sometimes, Oscar, you go too far.’
Oscar began to struggle to his feet. He seemed almost to be laughing to himself. As I helped him up, he squeezed my arm.
‘I agree with Dr Doyle,’ said Inspector Gilmour. ‘Suicide is out of the question. We were all with McMuirtree before the fight. He was evidently in the best of spirits. He did not appear in the least to be a man who was about to take his own life.’
‘The same could be said of Bradford Pearse,’ said Oscar.
�
�Why should McMuirtree take his own life, Mr Wilde?’
‘Why should Bradford Pearse, Inspector?’
‘Who is Bradford Pearse?’ demanded Lord Queensberry. ‘What’s he to do with it? What’s his involvement?’
‘None, my lord,’ said the police inspector quickly. ‘He is a friend of Mr Wilde’s. He has nothing to do with this matter.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked Oscar, raising an eyebrow.
‘I am certain, Mr Wilde. I am certain that David McMuirtree has been murdered—and that his tragic and untimely death has nothing to do with you or any of your friends, nothing to do with your dinner or your foolish game.’
‘What’s this all about?’ grumbled Lord Queensberry impatiently, beating the side of his own thigh with his whip.
‘Nothing, your lordship,’ said the police inspector. ‘I simply want Mr Wilde to understand that David McMuirtree has been murdered because he was one of us—because he was on the side of law and order. David McMuirtree was a police informer. Such men are necessary. Such men are brave. They put their lives at risk and sometimes they pay the price. McMuirtree had enemies—hardened criminals, evil men who sought to kill him for what he was, for what he knew.’
‘These hardened criminals of yours are blessed with wonderfully theatrical imaginations, Inspector,’ said Oscar mockingly. ‘You might expect a police informer to be beaten to death with a cudgel, or knifed in a dark alley, or even shot as he was alighting from a carriage—but to be killed, as McMuirtree has been killed, by a pair of deadly bracelets sewn inside his boxing gloves suggests a band of desperadoes that is—to say the least of it—a little out of the ordinary.’
‘If you will forgive me, Mr Wilde,’ said the police inspector, ‘we have work to do.’ He looked around the room, widening his eyes and clearing his throat. He held his hands out, palms open, as if to sweep us from the room. ‘I’d be grateful if Dr Doyle could remain until the police surgeon arrives, but, otherwise, gentlemen, you are free to depart. Thank you for your assistance.’
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death Page 23