Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

9

Not without reason, the waving placards of the newsboys next day proclaimed the Royal Herculaneum “Mystery.” The death of Caradoc Price did not spawn as many theories as the Whitechapel murders of the so-called Jack the Ripper. Yet once or twice a year some penny-a-liner would pen a new solution to the identity of the unknown intruder—and Bradstreet would say a few more words about the unlocked street-door.

Sherlock Holmes was philosophical as our cab took us back to Baker Street in the early hours of the New Year.

“If interest in the case survives, my dear fellow, it will be because people like you persist in quoting curious cases from The Lancet and the British Medical Journal of men and women who have lived for fifteen or twenty minutes after taking prussic acid. As a result, the members of tonight’s audience believe they actually saw him drink it. That will be something to tell their grandchildren. Poor Caradoc is doomed to be one of your rare medical specimens, whether he likes it or not.”

“Then what we saw in the dressing-room is not to be given to the world?”

“Apart from my modest powers of deduction, there was nothing that could not be explained by your medical theories and the poison in the goblet. The tobacco ash was a curious mixture, but it might have come from innocent sources.”

“And what of the riddle in his dressing-gown pocket? What became of the scrap of paper?”

He patted his coat.

“I know I had it then. I do not seem to have it now. In any case, it was hardly conclusive.”

This was too much!

“If you were right, Holmes, as you say you invariably are, young William Gilford has no alibi. True, he did not reach the theatre in time to poison the wine before it was carried on stage. He was certainly there in time to enter the unlocked dressing-room before Caradoc came off during the final scene and exchange the first Real Feytoria for a cigar contaminated by rat poison. The play was in progress. The dressing-room passage would be quiet and empty. Gilford had five minutes for less than one minute’s work. He had ample time to spy through the window and go back to the dead man’s room soon afterwards. Time to change the cigar and the tobacco ash. He could lock himself in while making these arrangements and lock the room after him when he left, tossing the key through the window, to fall as if from Caradoc’s dying hand.”

“He might have poisoned Caradoc,” Holmes said thoughtfully, “but as it happens, I think he did not.”

“Why?”

Holmes pulled a face at the passing scene, almost as if with a pang of indigestion.

“Because of the meeting.”

“The meeting?”

“Several reputable witnesses swear that after his evening lecture he attended a meeting of teachers at Toynbee Hall. It ended about five minutes before nine o’clock.”

“He could still have reached the theatre before Caradoc left the stage.”

“You miss the point, Watson.”

“How?”

“This murder was planned, and he could not have planned it as it happened. He could not have known that he would reach the Herculaneum in time, could he? Among the other statistics a criminal investigator must carry in his head is the speed of traffic in London.”

“Which is?”

“Something over five miles an hour but less at difficult times. Gilford could not be sure that he would be there before Caradoc left the stage. A man who must be two miles away by twenty past nine, in order to plant a poisoned cigar, does not attend a meeting of indefinite length at half-past eight. If he does do so, at least he warns his colleagues that he may have to leave them before the end. That did not happen. Under these circumstances, William Gilford could not plan the murder as it was committed. Nor would he poison a cigar on the spur of the moment. When he joined his colleagues at Toynbee Hall, he had not the remotest idea that Caradoc Price would be dead in an hour or so.”

“So we are left with the phantom of a street woman or her bully who glided in and left a trail of poison?”

He shrugged and looked aside, studying his reflection in the window of the cab as we crossed Oxford Circus into Portland Place. Small groups of revellers and dancers were walking home, Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierette. There was one thing I could not let pass. Almost without considering what I was saying, I broke in upon his thoughts.

“Holmes! Will you give me your word that when you went from the Dome to call Sergeant Witlow and his constable from the green room, you did not first go down the other stairs and put the Yale lock of the street-door on the latch? So that it should later be found unlocked and this story of an unknown intruder put about?”

He had not seemed to be out of the room for long, but I had seen Holmes ascending stairs two or three at a time. Inspector Tobias Gregson was the only man I had ever known to outdistance him.

He smiled at the costumed revellers without turning his head.

“I would willingly have unlocked it, old fellow. Unfortunately for your theory, someone else had already done so.”

There was a moment’s silence before I tried him again.

“William Gilford had ample opportunity to replace the half-smoked cigar and the ash in the dead man’s dressing-room, even if he had not planned the murder.”

He turned to me with a smile.

“A palpable hit, if we could prove it! I should bet that Gilford never smokes and would not know one leaf of tobacco ash from another!”

“There is very little you could not prove if you chose. Gilford is your man.”

“More to the point,” he said, gazing at the dancers again, “who is my woman? This is not Gilford’s revenge.”

“Madge Gilford?” It fitted so neatly—and yet how I wished it did not. Poison is proverbially a woman’s weapon against the physical strength of a man. If Caradoc had sworn to her that he would punish her resistance, where more likely than before the elite of the theatre and the gossips of the sporting press during the green room supper? How was she to silence him?

Sherlock Holmes yawned.

“If I am correct, Gilford intervened to shield a murderer. So, I believe, did Carnaby Jenks. I do not much care for him but tonight that broken old player gave the performance of his life.”

“Madge Gilford?” I repeated.

“Who else would Gilford intervene to save—in the certainty of the gallows if he was caught in that room? As gallant a gentleman as Henry Hawley Crippen—but more fortunate.”

He counted on his fingers.

“That young woman was mocked, threatened, abused by her seducer when she knew her error and turned away from him. Her life, her marriage, all hope of happiness, were at his mercy. You doubt it? Recall his treatment of the lost and unfortunate Oscar Wilde. That serpent tongue had the power to ridicule Madge Gilford so publicly that her husband, her father, the friends of her youth must weep for her but could not save her. She had good reason to dread his harangue at the green room supper. By tomorrow, his pleasantries would be all over London.”

He pulled on his gloves.

“Therefore, if I am correct, Watson, Madge Gilford prepared a weapon to silence that man for ever.”

“She? And if it was she, you will keep silent?”

“Even you, old fellow, came with me to exterminate Charles Augustus Milverton and silence his threats of blackmail to young women a year or two ago. Had you forgotten? Happily, a young woman whose reputation he destroyed did the job a few minutes before us! We witnessed it but did not betray her, did we? Nor did you ever suggest that we should.”*

The porticoes of Langham Place stretched away to the Euston Road.

“I cannot believe Madge Gilford was a Lady Macbeth.”

“Precisely my point, Watson. If I am correct, William, on his return, found her stricken by what she had done—the simple substitution of one cigar for another. What followed was quite beyond her, as we saw for ourselves when we passed her in her distress. As the terrible minutes ticked by, if my conclusion is correct, William laid a false trail before Caradoc was found. His one touch of criminal genius was to add what remained of the poison to one of the goblets on the stage, just as Caradoc was discovered and the dressing-room door was opened.”

The cab rumbled over hardened snow.

“And that is where the case must rest?”

“Watson, I should despise myself if I did not do as much to save the woman I loved and who had suffered so bitterly. On the evidence, I cannot convict William Gilford rather than an intruder who may have entered by the street door. I would not even if I could. Will that do?”

We turned the corner at Baker Street Metropolitan station. He wrapped his plaid coat round himself and prepared to descend from the cab.

“You set yourself above the law.”

“But not above justice. In any case, I have been my own judge and jury so often that it comes a little late in life to alter the practice now. I believe that they are young enough to salvage their marriage from the wreck of their romance.”

That last prediction proved correct. We later heard that the couple clung together and ultimately took ship for Queensland. Holmes seemed prepared to bury deep in his mind the evidence of the dressing-room. As for Carnaby Jenks and Roland Gwyn, neither would name a suspect, even to us.

The cab slowed down in the snowy length of Baker Street.

“In the circumstances,” I said, “I think this must be one of our adventures that does not see the light of day.”

We had pulled up outside our rooms. Sherlock Holmes looked up at them through the window of the cab with something like affection but also as if he were seeing them for the first time in the frosty lamplight. Then he turned and favoured me with the same resigned and rather weary smile.

“Let us say, Watson, that I should not dream of preventing you putting pen to paper in one of your little mysteries. However, I should be obliged if you would withhold this one from the world—as you have withheld certain others—until the day when it can no longer matter to me.”

In that, at least, I have respected the wishes of my wayward but greatest friend.

*“Charles Augustus Milverton” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes.