5

We found our way through a door in the dressing-room corridor to a narrow flight of wooden stairs. The walls of this stairway were hung with sketches, prints and signed photographs of those who had trodden the boards of the Royal Herculaneum during its years of fame. I noticed Johnstone Forbes-Robertson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Madame Modjeska, Squire Bancroft and Madame Bernhardt. After a right-angle turn the stairs led to the door of the famous Dome. To one side, a passageway and a further flight led downwards to the street-door of these domestic quarters.

Holmes paused and nodded towards them.

“How are the mighty fallen, Watson. This route was designed when the Herculaneum was last rebuilt, half a century ago. In those days theatre-going was not quite respectable. This was a private entrance to the box used by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. They came repeatedly to see the great William Macready in Macbeth and King Lear.”

If Holmes was remarkable for nothing else, his knowledge of buildings in London, even of their private rooms and passages, would have secured him a modest fame.

He did not knock at the door. When we entered, Jenks was sitting in a chair and Sergeant Witlow in another. A uniformed constable stood behind the prisoner. Their attitudes suggested that there had been no conversation for some time.

Witlow stood up as we came in, and Holmes said brusquely, “Sergeant, Mr Hopkins assures me that a cup of tea is waiting for you and your colleague in the green room. Perhaps you would be good enough to leave us with Mr Jenks. I shall not keep you long. I promise you he will not evade us.”

“Very good, Mr Holmes.”

Holmes and I stood in silence as they left. Then my friend turned to Carnaby Jenks, shrunken, as it seemed, in his chair.

“Mr Jenks, this case is not yet three hours old. I may say already that you are the most difficult client I have ever had to deal with. If you are quite determined to put the rope round your own neck, then tell me so and I will go back to my bed in Baker Street.”

Jenks raised his eyebrows in an actor’s expression of surprise.

“I don’t follow you at all, Mr Holmes.”

“Do you not? Are you a lunatic?”

“You know I am not!”

“Then why have you concocted at least four demented notes and addressed them to Sir Caradoc Price?”

“Can the police put me in prison for sending notes to him?”

“Listen to me, Jenks! I was most careful in my choice of language. I suggested that you addressed them to him—not that you sent them or that he received them.”

I was surprised to see that the distinction between “addressing” and “sending” rattled Carnaby Jenks far more than the threat of the gallows had done. If he had launched a plot, he now seemed fearful that it was out of his control.

“I sent them,” he said peevishly, “Every word was justified. It has been getting worse by the day. I saw long ago that he kept me on here only for the use he could make of me. He knew that at my age I would never be employed elsewhere.”

“In what way does he use you, except to employ you?”

Unless he was a more accomplished deceiver than I supposed, Jenks was truly angered now.

“By promises betrayed, sir! That I should have leading roles in my own right. Even that I should be his successor. But I was a leading man only when it suited him to have a quiet evening or to escape a matinee performance. Never when a play was reviewed or the theatre was full and I might get a benefit. I wrote to him. What would you have me do?”

There was no pity in my friend’s response. The dark gaze of Sherlock Holmes as he leant towards the chair seemed to fix Jenks like a butterfly upon a specimen board.

“What would I have you do? The very thing you have avoided doing since I arrived this evening. Tell me the truth. I am not here to be made a fool of.”

“What truth?”

Holmes straightened up and shook his coat into shape.

“In the first place, that you are not responsible for the death of Sir Henry Caradoc Price but that you have gone to every length imaginable to convince the police that you must be.”

The thin nervous frame quivered once and Jenks blinked at him, like a schoolboy under reprimand. Then the pale nervous temperament in him flared up again, his face reddening and his voice almost a gabble.

“I am an innocent man, sir. I will not have my words twisted. I know the law. I have my right to silence against the police. If they believe I am guilty of some crime, let them prove the fact. It is no duty of mine to help them.”

“My further suggestion,” said Holmes quietly, “is that this intrigue does not touch you alone.”

That also shook him. He could not see how Holmes might think it on such evidence—let alone know it.

“We will leave that for a moment,” my friend went on, “but let me first assure you that stupidity hangs more men than wickedness alone.”

Sherlock Holmes sat down in the elbow chair with his chin in his hand and a finger across his mouth, as though performing a calculation of some kind. At length he looked up.

“These notes to Sir Caradoc, they speak of other things. When did you send them?”

“On various dates. Not in the last few days.”

“He does not seem to have mentioned them to anyone. They also have a remarkable uniformity in their calligraphic style. What have you to say about that?”

“Nothing. Neither to you nor to anyone else.”

“A Home Office examiner will almost certainly tell the court that they were probably written on a single occasion. Presumably to be planted among the dead man’s papers.”

Carnaby Jenks said nothing—but he listened more intently than almost any man I had seen questioned by Holmes.

“From the time the house surgeon and the Bow Street police were alerted until they got here must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. You are a literate man, Mr Jenks, and I have a certain knowledge of handwriting. Whenever these notes were written, they were written very quickly, as the tailing script confirms. They are fluent in thought as well as script. In total, I should say they could all be written in about seven minutes.”

A sudden look of dread at what was coming glimmered in Jenks’s eyes. He repressed it with an effort. Holmes continued.

“You had time enough tonight to write those fragments before Dr Worplesdon and Mr Bradstreet arrived. Sir Caradoc Price had just been found dead in his dressing-room! Everyone was down there. Your way to his desk in the Dome was clear.”

“You may believe me or not as you please.”

It was the last gasp of a runner crossing the finishing-line.

Holmes attempted to refresh the conversation.

“What of the blackmail, Mr Jenks? You say in the notes that you were blackmailed by Sir Caradoc. How and when?”

Once again, Jenks blinked as if someone had slapped his face.

“I cannot discuss it.”

Sherlock Holmes sighed.

“In any court of law, Mr Jenks, a judge will direct you to discuss it. And, believe me, the nature of the blackmail you allege is one of the first facts a cross-examiner will require.”

To see the perspiration on his forehead was to know that something had indeed gone terribly wrong with his plan. But then suddenly it seemed as if all was well again.

“I did not say that I was the direct victim of the blackmail.”

“Did you not?”

“I said it was an actor whom he blackmailed. Indeed, it was the sister of whom I had spoken and through whom we were both blackmailed.”

“Your sister? Your sister whom you say he ruined?”

Jenks’s words came in a rush but he spoke like a man now standing on firm ground.

“She worked to be an actress at first, Mr Holmes. After he corrupted her, he threatened to make her name notorious throughout the streets and theatres of London unless she submitted to his further demands. He included me in these threats, if I made trouble for him. He would make the details of her downfall a joke and a smoking-room story in every club. To use his own words, she would crawl back to her burrow and dread the light of day. That was what I meant by blackmailing a fellow actor.”

“Was it?” said Holmes, looking past Jenks with a distant scepticism. “It did not sound like that in the note but pray continue.”

“She and I were his victims.”

Holmes continued to stare at the curtained window.

“It seems,” he said thoughtfully, “that we are back to where we were five minutes ago. I repeat, Mr Jenks, you will be meticulously examined—and cross-examined—about this sister. You say in your note that Caradoc ruined her. Doubtless she now walks the promenade bar of the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square—or something of the kind. Does she exist? Think carefully before you answer.”

“Yes.”

“As your sister?”

“What does the title matter?”

“For the purposes of this case, Mr Jenks, you may take it from me that it matters.”

“Molly has always been kind to me when I have met her with one of the men she calls a ‘husband’ on her arm. Five shillings or ten, a guinea even, when the scoundrel here would not sub me for a day or two. He laughed and said he had no money in his pocket but he never went short.”

“And do you propose to inform the police of all this? I shall not tell them, of course. I imagine they will find out anyway.”

But he had done too good a job. The brain of Carnaby Jenks, rather than his voice, seemed paralysed. He bowed his greying head in his hands. Then he looked up.

“I must think,” he said feebly. “You must let me think.”

“Very well. Wait here with Dr Watson. I will fetch Sergeant Witlow. In your present frame of mind, it would be best that you should continue to refuse all questions. I suggest you also retain a solicitor to advise you.”

Holmes stood up.

“You will not abandon my case?” Jenks pleaded.

Sherlock Holmes turned round again, ignoring the question.

“One more thing, Mr Jenks. Do not think of escape while I am out of the room. It is all that is required to put a noose round your neck. In any case, my colleague Dr Watson carries his Army revolver on these occasions. He knows how to use it and will not hesitate to shoot you through the leg at your first attempt. You will not be the first fugitive he has brought low.”

“I have nothing to run from,” Jenks muttered morosely. “I am innocent, damn you all.”

Holmes went out and there was silence again. I thought of my revolver, oiled and wrapped in lint, lying in its Baker Street drawer. Our client turned away from me, sitting in profile. The silence continued. After what seemed far too long there were voices on the stairs. We left the sullen figure of the suspect in the custody of Witlow and his constable.

As soon as we were out of earshot, I turned to Holmes.

“This comes of having a client who can act one part after another!”

He ignored the remark and took my arm.

“Interesting, Watson. Most, most interesting. Did it not strike you?”

“Did what not strike me? That the man is a pernicious fool?”

“I left a trap open and Jenks fell into it slap-bang. The world believes Caradoc was poisoned on the stage at about quarter past nine and that the poison was added to the wine shortly before. Previous to that, Hamlet alias Jenks was off-stage for half an hour with a better opportunity than most people of contaminating the goblet during that time. He knows it. Very well. What is the first thing a criminal would say?”

“I suppose he might say, ‘I cannot have done it. I was elsewhere at the time.’ That would be a complete answer.”

“Exactly! Jenks has not once offered an account of his movements at any time during that half-hour. I have been very careful not to press him. He has not even said, for example, that he was in his dressing-room. Yet he is on the verge of a murder charge. Surely a man in that situation would offer an alibi, if he had one. It is the first refuge of the criminal and the innocent man alike. Jenks says nothing of his activities in that half-hour between about twenty to nine and ten minutes past.”

“As if he wanted to be the suspect.”

He stopped and nodded at me, relieved that I had understood at last.

“That hits the target.”

“Then where was he?”

“Precisely!”

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