2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders

by Gyles Brandreth

  Conan Doyle now had both his hands on the back of Constance’s chair. He stood like a preacher in the pulpit reflecting on the lesson of the day. “You knew that O’Donnell could not be Drayton St Leonard…”

  “Yes,” said Oscar, “and I knew that Bellotti would never have suggested that he was. It was an absurd invention on Fraser’s part—unnecessary, ruinous—and even as he spoke the lie he knew how stupid his mistake had been.”

  “But having made Bellotti his false witness, Fraser than had no alternative but to silence him—”

  “Precisely. Exactly so. I should have seen it at once, Arthur—as Holmes would have done! Instead, I allowed myself to be distracted. I neglected Gerard Bellotti in my eagerness to uncover the true identity of Drayton St Leonard. Drayton St Leonard, I sensed, was key to the case.”

  “But, Oscar,” I interrupted, “Drayton St Leonard did not attend the luncheon club on the day of Billy’s murder. He wasn’t in Little College Street that day.”

  “No, Robert, he wasn’t in Little College Street for lunch that day because he was in Cowley Street, around the corner, in an upstairs room, lighting candles, burning incense, preparing a bridal bed for Billy Wood…Drayton St Leonard met Billy Wood through Gerard Bellotti. Drayton St Leonard fell in love with Billy Wood. He worshipped him.”

  Oscar lit a second cigarette, drew on it slowly and then passed it to Aston Upthorpe, who took it gratefully and smiled up at Oscar with red-rimmed eyes.

  “But, Oscar,” I persisted, “Mr Upthorpe told us, Bellotti told us, Canon Courteney told us that Billy Wood, when he left Little College Street, at two o’clock that day, said openly, clearly and without equivocation, that he was on his way to meet his uncle.”

  “Indeed!” Oscar replied, triumphantly. “Absolutely! That’s what he said—and it was true! Drayton St Leonard was his ‘uncle’!”

  “What?” I exclaimed.

  “The euphemism is an old one,” said Oscar, smiling. “We are all familiar with it, are we not, Mrs O’Keefe?” The good woman bobbed up and down with suppressed delight at being thus involved in Oscar’s narrative. “A young lady with a mature admirer will often describe the older man as her ‘uncle’. So it was with young Billy Wood and Mr Drayton St Leonard…And if, as they had planned, they had gone to France—as Billy told his mother they might do—doubtless they would have travelled as ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’. It is more discreet. Even on the Continent, I understand, landladies and hoteliers prefer it that way. Drayton St Leonard was Billy Wood’s ‘uncle’…And Aidan Fraser was Drayton St Leonard. ‘Drayton St Leonard’ was Aidan Fraser’s nom de guerre.”

  Oscar surveyed the room, his eyes glistening. He was revelling in the drama.

  “When did you realise this, Oscar?” asked Conan Doyle.

  “Within moments of his telling me that Bellotti had told him that O’Donnell was St Leonard. It was such a stupid lie—and, even as he uttered it, he knew it. That’s why he pressed me to come with him to Paris. He needed to keep me out of the way. He knew that I knew Bellotti and, given time, that I would speak to Bellotti and discover the truth.”

  “But he got to Bellotti first,” said Conan Doyle.

  “Yes,” said Oscar. “Fraser wanted me in Paris so that he could stall my investigation—and perhaps find out how much I knew. I agreed to go to Paris so that I could keep Fraser under observation. It never occurred to me that, between Thursday night and Friday morning, Fraser would contrive an encounter with Bellotti and murder him. It never occurred to me that Fraser would do something so irrational.”

  “Why irrational?” asked Conan Doyle. “Fraser silenced Bellotti because Bellotti would not corroborate his lie.”

  Oscar laughed. “It was a hopeless lie! And a pointless murder. Fraser killed Bellotti, but Bellotti’s death solved nothing. If ever O’Donnell had come to trial, one or other of the members of Bellotti’s little luncheon club would have come forward to tell the world that Edward O’Donnell was not Drayton St Leonard and never could have been. When that awful truth dawned on Fraser—and I think it came to him during our return journey from Paris—he knew that his only hope was to despatch O’Donnell and make it seem like suicide. He seized the moment the moment that he could.”

  Oscar turned to the mantelpiece to find his glass. In the reflection, through the flickering candlelight, he caught my eye. He was my friend, but in that moment he seemed a stranger to me. “Mr Wilde,” said Archy Gilmour from across the room, “it is now seven o’clock.”

  27

  The clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour. “Fear not, Inspector,” said Oscar, smiling. “I will keep my word.” He turned to Mrs O’Keefe who stood attendant at the policeman’s side. “Mrs O, would you be so kind as to go into the street and have a word with Mrs Doyle and Mrs Wood? You will find them in the hansom outside the front door. Assure them they will be kept waiting no more than a quarter of an hour now, twenty minutes at most.”

  “At most,” Gilmour echoed, sternly.

  “Supply them with a cup of tea, would you, Mrs O? And, with the inspector’s permission, furnish his men with refreshment as well.”

  The red-headed police inspector nodded curtly to Mrs O’Keefe, who bobbed up and down, then manoeuvred herself sideways and backwards out of the room. Sergeant Atkins secured the door after her departure.

  “Mr Wilde,” said Gilmour crisply, “you have set out your case against Aidan Fraser, as we agreed—”

  “And I will lead you to him within the hour, as I promised, Inspector. Indulge me a moment more, I pray you. We are nearly done.”

  Both my hands were resting on Veronica’s shoulders.

  Her head was bowed. I felt her body tremble as, silently, she began to sob.

  “You weep, Miss Sutherland,” said Oscar, “and I know the reason why. Once upon a time, you loved Aidan Fraser—but that was long ago, before you learnt his secret, before you discovered that the true love of his life was ‘a slut of a boy’.”

  Veronica looked up at Oscar with unconcealed contempt in her eyes. He gazed at her steadily as he spoke.

  “The violence of your language in Paris yesterday morning rather gave the game away.”

  Aston Upthorpe stirred and said softly, more to John Gray at his side than to Oscar who was standing directly above him: “I loved Billy Wood. I loved that boy.”

  “I know,” said Oscar, kindly, “I know.” He returned his glass to the mantelpiece and looked at the policemen standing on the far side of the room. “Aidan Fraser killed Edward O’Donnell and Gerard Bellotti to keep his secret from the world. He killed them to keep a second secret, too, another’s secret. Aidan Fraser is a murderer: of that there is no doubt. But Aidan Fraser did not kill Billy Wood: of that there is no doubt, either.”

  The silence was heavy in the room.

  “So,” said Conan Doyle eventually, “it was the housekeeper?”

  “Yes,” said Oscar, “it was the housekeeper. Even at the outset I suspected a woman’s involvement. When we went to the scene of the crime, it was so spotless. The floorboards were scrubbed—polished with beeswax, you’ll recall. This was woman’s work—and the work of a woman whom I met within moments of her having carried out the crime. Who was she? Susannah Wood, driven to murder her own child? Unlikely. Mrs O’Keefe? Impossible. She was newly arrived from Ireland—what would her motive have been? And then I thought, perhaps it is not a woman but a man with a woman’s ways…One of Bellotti’s crowd, obsessed with the boy, driven to madness, dressed en travestie?”

  Arthur Conan Doyle shook his head and emitted a country doctor’s grunt of disbelief. Oscar looked at him, with a sly smile.

  “Stranger things have happened, Arthur. Canon Courteney, I understand, conducts ‘marriages’ between men, and even Shakespeare—your beloved Shakespeare!—was not above using a plot device that turned on a boy playing a girl masquerading as a boy…”

  “Mr Wilde!” Inspector Gilmour brought Oscar to order. “We are not in the theatre now
. This is a murder investigation. We have indulged you sufficiently, I think.”

  Oscar turned to Conan Doyle in mock indignation. “Arthur, tell me: did Sherlock Holmes have to endure treatment such as this?”

  “Come, Oscar,” said Constance, “it was you who assured Miss Sutherland that this was not a game. I think it only fair to her—and to the rest of us—that you bring this sorry business to its conclusion.”

  “You are quite right, my dear—as always.” He smiled at his wife, who averted her eyes from his and, in her awkwardness, let slip the brown paper parcel from her lap. Conan Doyle bent down at once to retrieve it for her.

  Oscar turned back to address Inspector Gilmour: “I will do as you would have me, Inspector, and come to the point. You have come to arrest the murderer of Billy Wood.”

  “I have,” replied the inspector coldly.

  “Well,” said Oscar, “here she is…”

  Oscar Wilde turned towards Veronica Sutherland and presented her to the room as if she were a prize lot at an auction. Her back stiffened; she threw off my hands from her shoulders; her eyes blazed, but she spoke not a word.

  “To commit a murder,” said Oscar, “is easily done—even when you are a woman. To kill a boy takes only a moment—if the boy is asleep and you have a surgeon’s knife at your disposal. Veronica Sutherland learnt of her fiancé’s infatuation with Billy Wood and determined to put an end to it. She chose her fiancé’s birthday because she knew that was a day on which Aidan and the boy—‘the slut of a boy’—had arranged one of their secret assignations. She had her own key to 23 Cowley Street. Indeed, I learnt from Messrs Chubb & Sons of Farringdon Street that she had the key copied in the last week of June. She had been planning this murder for some time. She acquired the surgeon’s scalpel that she used—the one recommended by Arthur’s old teacher, Dr Bell, in his celebrated Manual of Surgery —from Messrs Goodliffe & Stainer, suppliers to the medical profession, on 1 July. This crime was well planned—and precisely executed.

  “On the morning of Tuesday 31 August last, Veronica Sutherland made her way to number 23 Cowley Street and lay in wait for the two men whose lives, in different ways, she sought to destroy. I do not believe it was her intention to confront Fraser and his catamite together. I think her plan was more malign that that. She wanted to kill the boy—the young seducer—and force Fraser to live on without him. The boy meant nothing to her and everything to him. Kill the boy—and let Fraser live on, with an empty hole where once had lain his heart.

  “Between two and three that afternoon, in the upstairs room at Cowley Street, Aidan Fraser anointed Billy Wood as he might have done his bride. Surrounded by candles, perfumed with incense, they lay together—and when they were done, they parted. Fraser left the house alone. He had business to attend to. He was a newly promoted inspector at Scotland Yard, after all. But Billy stayed behind—and Billy was young and carefree and had taken wine. He fell asleep where he lay, on a rug on the floor at Cowley Street, with a seraph’s smile upon his red-rose lips and guttering candles all about him. That was how Veronica Sutherland found him. That was how he was when she cut his throat from ear to ear.

  “And then the doorbell rang and I appeared, rushing in and rushing out! When I arrived I was in haste. When I departed I was distracted. When she admitted me, I barely glanced at Miss Sutherland. She was half-hidden behind the door in any event. I noticed nothing, beyond a flash of her red hair. She was not expecting me, of course—she was expecting Fraser. And when she saw me and not Fraser, she immediately pulled open the door and hid herself behind it as I hurried across the hall and up the stairs. Later, of course, Fraser did return to Cowley Street, as she expected he would. He returned, I imagine, sometime after six o’clock, at the end of his working day. He returned, with a hansom cab, to collect the boy he loved—and instead he found the woman he had once loved with the butchered body of the boy who had taken her place in his affections.

  “What could poor Fraser do? If he went to the police, his life was over. At best he would be imprisoned as a corrupter of youth. At worst he would be hanged as complicit in the murder. He had no choice in the matter. He did his fiancée’s bidding. He became his fiancée’s prisoner.

  “Together, I imagine, they finished cleaning up the scene of the crime. They did a thorough job, leaving not a trace of evidence behind. You would not expect them to: Fraser had been trained by the Metropolitan Police. Together, I imagine, they loaded poor Billy’s body into the chest in the hallway and conveyed the chest by cab to this house. Together, I imagine, they stowed the chest in the ice house in the garden.”

  Immediately Inspector Gilmour and Sergeant Atkins began to move towards the door. Oscar laughed.

  “The chest will wait upon you, gentlemen. It has been there for five months, undisturbed. Besides, it no longer holds the body of poor Billy Wood.”

  “Do you know then where we will find the body?” asked Gilmour.

  “Yes,” said Oscar, “I believe I do. Aidan Fraser loved Billy Wood and wanted him, even after death. It was Aidan Fraser, alone, who embalmed the body of Billy Wood. He had seen how the job was done in the morgue at Scotland Yard. One night, he visited the morgue, took embalming fluid, borrowed the small hand-held pump that the task requires and brought them home. He embalmed Billy Wood as a sacrament, with reverence and adoration, as the priests of ancient Egypt embalmed the boy kings of the Nile.”

  Oscar turned sharply towards Veronica.

  “Where did you find the body, Miss Sutherland?” She made no reply, but gazed steadily at Oscar with cold contempt in her eyes. “You will not tell me? Well, then, let me hazard a guess. Was it in his bed? Was it in the bridal bed that was once your due? Was it? Was it?” She turned from him slowly and looked at Constance Wilde. “I thought it was, Miss Sutherland,” Oscar continued. “Even after death, Aidan Fraser took Billy Wood to his bed. Even after death, the boy was beautiful.”

  Aston Upthorpe hunched forward and hid his face in his hands. John Gray put an arm of consolation about his shoulders. Veronica turned her gaze from Constance and bent it on the two men seated on the French settee. Suddenly, violently, she spat at them.

  “Is it contempt? Is it scorn? Is it fear?” cried Oscar. “Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrender.”

  Veronica turned back to Oscar and sneered, “What do you know of women, Mr Wilde?”

  “I know what Congreve knew:”

  Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,

  Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

  “I know that Aidan Fraser so loved Billy Wood that he took him to his bed even after death—and that drove you mad. Having murdered Billy once, you killed the boy again. You cut off his head, his beautiful head…You bought a surgical saw for the purpose from Messrs Goodliffe & Stainer on 23 December at three o’clock in the afternoon—I have inspected their sales ledger—and to hurt and humiliate Fraser further, you had the head delivered on such a day, at such a time, in such a way that you knew it would arrive at my house in Tite Street when Fraser was seated, apparently at his ease, surrounded by his friends.

  “But ‘Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid,”’ Miss Sutherland. And that night, the night of Constance’s birthday, you did something stupid. You stole a swordstick from my house. It was there at the beginning of the evening. It was gone when you left. And I noticed. You took it, hidden beneath your coat. Robert, poor boy, did not realise it when he came upon you in the hallway a moment after you had removed it from the coatstand.

  “You thought—wrongly as it happens—that it was my swordstick. It was, in fact, Robert’s, a present he gave to Constance some years ago. But you took it, thinking it was mine. Somehow you had decided that you wanted to implicate me in this affair. My talk of Billy’s youth and beauty sickened you. You thought—wrongly as it happens; appearances can be deceptive—but nonetheless you thought, possibly because of what Fraser had told you abo
ut the sorry, sordid ‘Cleveland Street Affair’, that I was—as others are—as Fraser was: a lover of men, a frequenter of male brothels, a sodomite…”

  Conan Doyle cleared his throat. John Gray shook his head. Gilmour called across the room, “It is gone seven-fifteen, Mr Wilde. You promised to deliver the two murderers into my hand within the hour. That was our understanding.”

  “And I will keep my word, Inspector. Here is Miss Sutherland. Take her—she is yours.”

  “And Fraser? Where is Fraser?”

  “He is upstairs, in the room above us, lying on his bed, with the head and body of Billy Wood at his side.”

  “Atkins!” barked the inspector, pulling open the drawing-room door. “Go—go now.”

  Oscar called after him, “He will wait until you come, Sergeant. He is dead. Aidan Fraser took his own life at some point between four and five o’clock this afternoon. I think you will find that he killed himself with the swordstick that Miss Sutherland presented to him for the purpose.”

  Suddenly everyone in the room began to move. Gilmour came straight towards Veronica. She stood and faced him with her head held high and her hands outstretched towards him. She turned to me as he closed a pair of handcuffs about her wrists.

  “Goodbye, Mr Sherard,” she said.

  “I love you,” I whispered. “I love you still.”

  “You are a fool,” she answered, “as all men are. So vain and so stupid.”

  Oscar was standing with his arm about Constance’s shoulders. “It has been a trying afternoon for you, my dear, but I thought it best that you should see and hear the worst of it at first hand.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I had guessed some of it, not all. This business has filled your mind for many months. I am relieved it is all over now. The children will be, too. They need to see more of their papa.”

  “You can blame Arthur for getting me involved in the first place,” said Oscar, smiling benevolently at the country doctor who had now taken out his pipe and was sucking upon it thoughtfully.