Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

4

“Bradstreet is the giddy limit, Watson! He may only be a uniformed man but that does not preclude the exercise of a little common sense or logic. Hopkins, however, may go far.”

Sherlock Holmes stood over the desk. A gold-inlaid green leather blotter was filled with pink paper that showed not a mark. Roughly folded across it lay that evening’s Globe newspaper. A silver cigar-cutter had evidently been used and then put to one side. The white china bowl of the ash-tray was about half full of grey dust. A quarter or so of a partly-smoked cigar lay balanced upon its rim. A box of yellow Vesta matches was beside it, one of them used and discarded with the ash. The paper band of the cigar lay among the dust. This ash-tray itself was a distinctive but not uncommon souvenir, embossed with “Royal Herculaneum Theatre” in crimson round its edge, and with a gold Prince of Wales crown where the two ends of the legend met.

Holmes picked up the Globe and turned its pages. Nothing took his fancy until he reached the end. A blank strip had been torn from the margin of the final page. There was no indication of its use. He looked about him, scrutinised the top of the desk and then turned to me.

“Be good enough to see what you can find in his dressing-gown pockets.”

“His pockets?”

“Certainly. In his predicament, assuming he tore it off, that is where I should put a slip of paper. It is missing and it is not on the desk or on the floor. His pockets are the only other place that would probably have been within reach during his last moments. We are meant to believe that he had already staggered towards the door to open it and found he could not do so. He lost the cord of his dressing-gown and dropped the key as he struggled back to the chair. He was not a fool. He knew he was in mortal torment. It seems he tore a strip from the back page of the paper. Why? Surely to write a message. He would not spend the last seconds of his life playing newspaper games.”

“To leave his last testament?”

“Look in those pockets. The right-hand one. I do not recall he was left-handed.”

Averting my eyes from the dead man’s contorted features and crimson-blotched cheeks, I slid my hand into the right pocket. Holmes was correct, of course. There was the stub of a pencil and a crumpled scrap of paper that anyone else might have thrown away. Why was it not on the desk? I handed it to my companion. The writing of the dying man spidered into illegibility but Holmes seemed to make sense of it easily enough. He had recognised that the subject was a nonsense poem of a kind well-suited to newspaper competitions. When we first met I had noted that his knowledge of literature was esoteric but extensive.

“Holmes! What the devil is this trumpery?”

“A riddle well enough known to those like Caradoc who particularly enjoy such mysteries. It dates, I believe, from the reign of Queen Anne. I imagine that the Globe newspaper has made use of it in the recent past on its puzzle page.”

“But what use?”

To three-fourths of a cross.…

Two semi-circles.…

Next add a triangle.…

Then two semi-circles.…

He held it in front of him and completed those lines that I had not been able to decipher. I stared at the finished text.

To three-fourths of a cross add a circle complete;

Two semi-circles a perpendicular meet,

Next add a triangle that stands on two feet,

Then two semi-circles and a circle complete.

He spread it on the desk.

“Very well. Let us see what we have. ‘To three-fourths of a cross add a circle complete.’ Now that indicates the letters T and O, does it not? Then we have, ‘Two semi-circles a perpendicular meet.’ What can that be but the letter B? There follows an instruction. ‘Next add a triangle that stands on two feet.’ What a picturesque description of the letter A! And last of all. ‘Two semi-circles, and a circle complete.’ That can only be the letters C plus C plus O. Put it all together and you have TOBACCO.”

“What has tobacco to do with it?”

“What, indeed? And why should he thrust it into his pocket?”

“So that it should not be found,” I said.

“No, Watson. So that it should be found later on, when his pockets were turned out. It must be hidden for the moment. In his last moments, he seems to have guessed that his enemy would return to this room to make certain changes in the evidence. He could not leave his scrap of paper where that man—or woman—would find it. Such a person would be alert for it on the desk or even on the floor. But with only seconds to spare, the killer would not dare to waste time in struggling with the dead weight of a corpse, searching the clothes for something which was probably not there anyway.”

“And yet to search him might make all the difference.”

“Balance that against the difference between slipping out into the passage unseen or walking into the path of a witness. In other words, the murderer’s second visit was almost certainly during the curtain calls and speeches when the dressing-room passage was empty and the keeper of the stage-door had his eyes on the little crowd of worshippers who gather there each night for a kind word or an autograph.”

“But neither Worplesdon nor Hammond found any contamination of the cigar.”

“Of course not. That is the whole point.”

He had drawn his folding lens from his watch-pocket. He opened it and sat at the desk, peering through the glass at the remaining length of the cigar and then at the match which had been used to light it. There was also a crumpled paper band which had been stripped from the cigar before lighting it. He gave a quiet sigh of satisfaction, like one whose expectations have been justified. Without another word of explanation, he eased a fresh match from the box and, for what seemed like an age, gently sifted the cold ash.

If there was no poison in the room, I could not see how we should find anything of interest here. The flakes of pale grey ash at the tip of the dead cigar looked a perfect replica of those in the ornamental porcelain bowl. Holmes continued to poke cautiously with the unused match, stirring so lightly that hardly a fragment of ash fell out of place. Presently he uttered another long and relaxed sigh, as if he had been holding his breath in a trance throughout this process.

“As I supposed,” he said to himself.

“Prussic acid?” I asked uncertainly. “Cyanide?”

He looked up at me in despair.

“Of course not, Watson! That is the last thing we shall find here! You underestimate our adversary, whoever he or she may be.”

“Do you mean that Caradoc was not poisoned here?”

“I did not say that.”

“But if there is no cyanide here, how can he have been poisoned by it in this room? The door was locked and he did not go out. And if there was no cyanide in the wine, how was he poisoned at all?”

“I deduce that there was no cyanide in the wine during the final scene of the play,” he said softly, “But there is now. Be patient and watch.”

I looked on but I could not see that he was doing anything other than before. The ash below the surface was not even much different in colour. A little darker, perhaps, but the colour of different burnt leaves from a single cigar will almost always vary a little.

“Look,” he said, easing up a flake of ash which seemed to have a mere thread of spider’s web hanging from it.

“What is it?”

“A burnt stalk. This cigar is of premier extraction.” He paused to flatten out the red and gold band. “‘Real Feytoria Reserva,’ a Portuguese importer and a Brazilian leaf of the highest quality. Believe me, such a superior weed does not contain the stalk of the tobacco leaf. That is the mark of an inferior brand, what is called in the trade ‘bird’s eye.’ You will see tiny white flecks here and there. You understand me?”

“The ash in the bowl has come from elsewhere?”

“Much of it has. On its own, that is conclusive of nothing, but it is indicative of a good deal.”

I could not see the logic of this.

“Surely the bird’s eye may have been deposited either by Sir Caradoc at some other time or by some other person?”

He folded his glass and slipped it into his watch-pocket again.

“Cranleigh would have left a clean ash-tray. I am sure that Caradoc smoked his usual cigar this evening after settling down in his chair with the newspaper. He came in, changed from his doublet and hose, putting on his green silk dressing-gown. However, I do not think he bothered to lock the door after him. People were not in the habit of disturbing him, and, in any case, he was on his own. As I say, he smoked a cigar. What he did not do was to smoke this cigar.”

I saw at once what was coming but I was not quick enough to say so.

Holmes continued.

“A Real Feytoria is a long and expensive cigar, such as Caradoc affected. It is not a sixpenny, twenty-minute cheroot. He would never touch those. I should not wish to pose as an expert merely because I have written my little treatise upon the subject. However, I may tell you that a Real Feytoria would probably last a smoker for at least fifty minutes or an hour. There is not enough ash in the bowl to account for that. Someone who knows little about the joys of smoking has bulked it out with the ash of bird’s eye, but it is still too little.”

Now I took my chance.

“Caradoc probably did not live for anything like thirty or forty minutes after leaving the stage. He was found then but he had not answered any knocks for most of that time. In any case, he could not have smoked so much of the cigar before that.”

“Well done, Watson. As so often, you are there before me. After Caradoc’s death, his adversary returned. The contaminated cigar was taken and this remainder was substituted. Someone has cut off a large portion of it and lit what remained. It was left here for us to find.”

I tried to pin down a flaw in this.

“Suppose Caradoc had started his cigar earlier, let it go out and lit it again after he left the stage at the end of the play.”

“It would seem, Watson, that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet with the primary purpose of thwarting you as a detective. If you will look at the last hour of the play, there is hardly a point where the King is off-stage for long enough to tempt a sensible man into ruining a good cigar. In any case, why would the dresser Cranleigh bring his master a bowl half filled with the ash of bird’s eye? No, my dear chap, let us settle the one remaining point.”

“Which is?”

Holmes got up from the desk.

“Caradoc drank his wine a few minutes before he left the stage. Suppose, after all, it contained prussic acid. How long would he live?”

As the reader may imagine, the answer to this question is that one cannot tell until the victim has been anatomised. Perhaps it may be impossible even then. In the course of our detective partnership, I had pursued a little research into the art of poisoning, including cyanide, rare though it is. Dixon Mann in his Forensic Medicine and Toxicology and Garstang in The Lancet of 1888 talk of those who have taken a fatal fifth of an ounce of hydrocyanic acid and survived for an hour and three-quarters. I noted that, in 1890, the British Medical Journal described a woman who accidentally swallowed an ounce of cyanide in the form of powder but was able to “rush” upstairs, report the fact, obtain treatment and survive.

In the light of all this, I could offer only my doubts.

“Holmes, we must judge from the facts. If the wine was poisoned, Caradoc was obviously not one of those who succumbed in a couple of minutes, or else a thousand people would have seen him die on the stage! Perhaps that was the public revenge that Carnaby Jenks hoped for. Failing that, any dose swallowed in his wine could not have been sufficient to be immediately overwhelming. He was able to get back here at least five minutes later.”

“Would he still have been alive half an hour after drinking the wine—even if the poison was present only in a small dose? Alive just before ten o’clock?”

“I think not. It is most unlikely, though not impossible. My friend Mr Knott of Lincoln’s Inn is editing the trial of England’s most famous poisoner, Dr William Palmer of Rugeley. In that case the defence rested on the survival of his victim for an hour and a half. That man had taken poison which should have killed him in no time. As for Caradoc, it was not impossible that he was alive until ten o’clock—but without treatment, most, most unlikely.”

“We may allow that he might have begun to feel unwell a few minutes before his sudden death?”

“If he survived for even ten minutes or so after taking the poison, his collapse might not have been as sudden. He would perhaps have felt the effects more gradually.”

“Time enough to call for help? Or to write a few lines with failing legibility?”

“Very likely.”

He stared at me and said in that coldly rational voice, “Then he was poisoned in this room, not on the stage. That is the only solution which fits the facts. Forget the miracles recounted in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal. Sitting in this chair, he breathed in the fumigation vapours of rat poison from his cigar before he knew what he was doing. He lived just long enough to tear a strip from the newspaper and scrawl a dozen words or so upon it. He did not have time to get up and struggle to the door. Someone else placed the key and the cord where they were found.”

“The murderer?”

“He or she had ample time to return after Caradoc’s death, perhaps verifying through the window from the street that he was dead. Time to change the evidence and leave—dropping the dressing-gown cord by the door to muddy the waters. There was probably time for all this before the play ended and the actors reappeared. It was the murderer who locked the door upon leaving. It need not have been locked before. Caradoc’s own key was used to close it. Then the man or woman went out into the street, raised the sash window and tossed the key over by the door. If I were the criminal I should also have left one of the sash windows open a little to clear the air.”

He paused and then added emphatically,

“Neither Bradstreet nor Hopkins is to hear anything of this.”

“But surely Dr Hammond found poison in the wine?”

“How easy for anyone to slip it in when the play was over and the goblets standing unnoticed! There was no poison when Caradoc drank it. That is the key to this case. That is the fog that Bradstreet and Hopkins have got themselves into.”

“And Dr Worplesdon and Hammond?”

His face softened.

“My dear old fellow, we have indulged in a pleasant little fantasy in which Caradoc was one of those rare souls who survive cyanide poisoning for half an hour or more because the dose was a low one. A thousand people will believe it because they think they saw it happen on stage. Bradstreet and Hopkins believe it because the wine was certainly poisoned by the time they arrived. They could find no poison anywhere else. Worplesdon and Hammond also believe it—save the mark!—because he was dead of cyanide poisoning when they got here and it must have come from somewhere!”

“Then where is the remainder of the poison now?”

“You may depend upon it that all which remains is safely inside Caradoc. You will look in vain elsewhere. Whoever had it last put a little of it in the wine on-stage after the curtain came down but before Caradoc was examined. That would have been simple. While Bradstreet and Hopkins have been plodding through their so-called investigation, an unknown hand has had an hour and a half in which to tip the remainder of the powder or the liquid down a sink or even into the sewer in Maiden Lane. I think you may be certain that not a grain nor a drop is left in this building.”

“And what of our client?”

Holmes did not often scowl but he did so now.

“I do not know whether Mr Carnaby Jenks is playing a game with us, or with the police, or with someone else. I propose to find out—in very short order.”

“You think he is a poisoner?”

“He is certainly an unscrupulous liar and a less accomplished actor than he thinks he is. That is what will hang him, if he persists in it.”