Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (12 page)

BREAKFAST AT THE LANGHAM

That evening, I dined
alone in my room in Gower Street. In those days, I would often dine alone: usually
in my room, on bread and cheese or a cold sausage and half a beef tomato;
occasionally, across the way, at the Mermaid tavern in Chenies Street, on a
mutton chop with onion gravy, the Mermaid’s’ speciality ‘.

Oscar,
of course, rarely ate alone. That Tuesday evening, he and Lord Alfred Douglas
had abandoned their theatre plans and settled, instead, on a five-shilling
bottle of champagne at the Café Royal followed by a two-shilling supper at the
Florence Restaurant in Rupert Street.

‘There
were no nightcaps taken, Robert!’ Oscar called out the moment he saw me the
following morning. I arrived at the Langham Hotel promptly at nine o’clock and
found my friend seated alone at a round table set for three in one of the
darker corners of the hotel’s absurdly bosky Palm Court. He gestured to me to join
him and, without pausing to give or receive a greeting, continued: ‘I did as
you would have wished, Robert. I was a martyr to self-discipline and uxorial
responsibility. I resisted all of Bosie’s blandishments. He proposed whisky-and-soda
at the Albemarle. He suggested schnapps and ice cream at the Savoy. He even
tried to entice me with the promise of a pint of porter at the Empire,
Leicester Square. Still, I held firm. “Get thee behind me, Douglas!” I cried,
“I am going home.” And by half past ten, Robert, I was back in Tite Street.’

‘I am
glad to hear it.’

‘You
will be less glad when I tell you what I found there …’

‘My
God!’ I exclaimed, suddenly alarmed. ‘What? Tell me.’

‘I
found Edward Heron-Allen there.’

‘With
Constance?’ I shook my head. ‘The man knows no shame.’

Oscar
nodded solemnly. ‘You are right, Robert. He was still speaking of asparagus.’
Oscar sat back and burst out laughing. He unfurled his linen napkin with a
flourish. ‘I have ordered kidneys and poached eggs for us both. The beverages are
already present and correct.’

‘What
did you do with Heron-Allen?’ I asked, while my friend solicitously poured me a
cup of tea.

‘I sent
him packing—when I had thanked him for keeping my wife company. Edward
Heron-Allen adores Constance.’

‘I
know,’ I grumbled, ‘that’s why I don’t trust him.’

‘You
should, Robert. I do. We both care for Constance, don’t we? She is never safer
than when Edward Heron-Allen is there. He loves her. He would lay down his own
life to safeguard hers.’

‘I had
not thought of that,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless,’ I added, lowering my voice, ‘I
remain mistrustful.’ I leant towards Oscar and muttered,
sotto voce:
‘The
man’s a self-confessed pornographer, is he not?’

Oscar
smiled and stirred his tea. ‘Given the word’s Greek roots,’ he answered,
lowering his voice to match mine, ‘a pornographer, strictly speaking, is
concerned with writing of harlots.

Heron-Allen’s
interests are far broader than that. The gross bodily appetites of men and
beasts, in all their rich variety, are Heron-Allen’s peculiar obsession. The
more unusual the practice the more intrigued is our Edward. I am certain he
does not speak of these matters to Constance, but the other night he introduced
me to a new word whose meaning you may guess at … “necrophilia”.’

‘Good
grief!’

Oscar
smiled. ‘That was Conan Doyle’s reaction exactly,’ he said out loud, looking up
and welcoming the arrival of a rack of toast at our table.

‘Where
is Conan Doyle?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure that he’s coming?’

‘That’s
what Nat told us.’

‘Nat?’

‘The
page-boy from the Cadogan you recall? He brought us word from Arthur yesterday
afternoon. That’s why we’re here.’

‘Oh,’ I
said, lamely. I was confused.

Oscar
looked at me with a gently supercilious raised eyebrow. ‘Yesterday afternoon,
Robert, when I realised that poor Captain Flint was the third of our “victims”
to be found dead since Sunday night and that Sherlock Holmes was the next name
on the list, I thought we should take the precaution of meeting up with Arthur
to discuss the situation. Just before we left the Cadogan, I found Nat and
asked him to convey my message to Arthur. Just after we left the Cadogan, Nat
found us in the street and brought us the good doctor’s reply.’

‘Was
Arthur in the hotel at the time then?’ I asked.

‘No,’
said Oscar. ‘Arthur was in South Norwood.’

I fell
silent for a moment. ‘I can’t fathom it, Oscar. If Arthur was in South Norwood
and the boy was at the Cadogan Hotel—how on earth did they communicate?’

‘By
telephone!’ said my friend, triumphantly.

I was
amazed. ‘Does Conan Doyle have a telephone—in South Norwood?’

‘Nowhere
is a telephone more necessary than in South Norwood, Robert.’ Oscar smiled his
sly smile. He scraped his butter knife noisily across his toast. ‘Arthur has
had a telephone installed because he is a medical man. Doctors get priority,
apparently. But soon, I’m told, we shall all be linked by telephone— the length
and breadth of the land. The telephone is about to revolutionise both the art
of conversation and the science of detection. I am thinking of having one installed
in Tite Street.’

‘Do you
know how to use a telephone, Oscar?’

‘Not
yet, but I have children, Robert. They will teach me.’

I
laughed and, as I did so, glanced up to see coming towards our table,
simultaneously, side by side, our waiter, bearing our kidneys and poached eggs,
and Arthur Conan Doyle, looking distinctly flustered and bedraggled.

‘I got
caught in a sudden downpour,’ he grumbled.

‘But
worse than that,’ said Oscar, ‘you have just realised that you left your
umbrella in the hackney carriage that brought you here …’

Conan
Doyle stopped in his tracks and gazed at Oscar in astonishment. ‘How on earth
did you know that?’ he asked.

Oscar
smiled. ‘I saw you come in at the door just now, looking damp but relatively
serene. Suddenly, your face clouded over as, frantically, you looked about you.
What had you forgotten? It might have been your hat, but your hair is dry while
your shoulders are sodden. It must be an umbrella—most likely your favourite
umbrella, the special one with the fine ebony handle.’

‘It’s
too early in the day for this, Oscar. Come, man, explain yourself. Have you
seen me with the umbrella before?’

‘No,’
said Oscar, complacently, ‘but if you turn around, Arthur, and look behind
you—standing at the desk, talking to the
maître d’hôtel,
is a London
cabby holding a furled gentleman’s umbrella that bears a remarkable resemblance
to the one I’ve just described.’

Instantly,
Conan Doyle’s troubled face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Just tea and toast for
me,’ he called as he strode off to reclaim his lost umbrella. We watched as he
tipped the cabman and shook him warmly by the hand.

‘He’ll
be telling him he’s the salt of the earth and the backbone of the Empire,’ said
Oscar. ‘There’s no more decent fellow in England than Arthur Conan Doyle.’

When he
returned to the table, the doctor was a man transformed. He was bubbling with
delight. ‘Salt of the earth, that cabby,’ he said.

‘Where’s
the umbrella now?’ I asked.

‘In the
cloakroom, I hope, with my hat. The
maître d’hôtel
offered to look after
it. We can trust him, can’t we?’

‘We
can,’ said Oscar. ‘Franco comes from Lake Como.’

‘Excellent,’
said Doyle, surveying the breakfast table and reaching for the marmalade.

Oscar
leant towards me to explain. ‘Arthur and his wife enjoyed a particularly happy
holiday on the banks of Lake Como two summers ago.’

Doyle
bit into his toast and, crumbs flying, exclaimed, ‘Oscar, you amaze me! Nothing
passes you by.’

‘I
don’t know about that,’ said Oscar, tapping his next cigarette against the back
of his silver cigarette case, ‘but I did at least register the fact that the
poor parrot’s body was cold—quite cold.’

‘Ah,
yes,’ said Doyle, mopping marmalade from his moustache, ‘to business. I was
sorry to hear about the parrot. It was found at what time?’

‘At
three o’clock,’ I said.

‘But it
must have been dead for some while,’ said Oscar, ‘an hour and more, at least.
And the feathers we found in the hallway were not shed by the unfortunate bird
in flight. They were stripped from its body and wings and tail after death and
deliberately flung about, hither and yon, like confetti.’

‘Bizarre,’
said Conan Doyle.

‘Brutish,’
said Oscar. ‘The poor creature’s blood had been smeared across the floor.’

‘In any
particular pattern?’ asked Doyle.

‘No,’
said Oscar. ‘I looked. It appeared to have been done in haste, at random. Who
would do such a thing?’

‘Whoever
is working their way through our list of murder victims one by one?’ I
suggested.

‘Possibly
…’ said Oscar, drawing deeply on his cigarette and looking up into the leaves
of the palm tree above him.

Conan
Doyle shook his head and attacked another slice of toast. ‘Gilmour of the Yard
is adamant that the death of Elizabeth Scott-Rivers was an unfortunate
accident, is he not?’

‘He
is,’ said Oscar, returning from his reverie. ‘And Lord Abergordon, our second
“victim”, was an elderly gentleman who did not treat his body as a temple and
appears to have died in his sleep to no one’s very great surprise.’

‘So,’
said Conan Doyle, wiping his moustache once more before laying down his napkin
with a show of satisfaction and finality, ‘We have two chance deaths, easily
explained, followed by one inexplicable and brutal murder … What next?’

‘Next
on the list,’ said Oscar, producing it from his breast pocket, is a “Mr
Sherlock Holmes”.’

‘Who on
earth would want to murder “Sherlock Holmes”?’ I asked.

‘I do,
for one,’ said Conan Doyle, sitting back and folding his arms across his chest,
‘And the sooner the better.’

Oscar
pounced. ‘What, Arthur? What are you saying?’

‘I plan
to do away with Sherlock Holmes myself.’

‘So it
was you who put Holmes’s name into the bag on Sunday night?’

Doyle
laughed. ‘No, certainly not. I did not wish to be party to your game, Oscar, as
you know, but I freely admit it: as far as I’m concerned, Holmes’s days are
numbered …’

‘But
Holmes has been the making of you, Arthur,’ Oscar protested.

‘And he
could be the undoing of me, too. I have so much else I want to write—romances,
adventures, stories that delve into the future and the past. I have poetry to
pen, dramas to create. I want to write my play for Henry Irving. One hundred
years from now, do I want to be known simply as the man who invented Sherlock
Holmes? I think not, Oscar. I plan to kill him in his prime. Indeed, it was on
Sunday night that I decided how it might be done.‘

Oscar
and I were now sitting forward, giving Conan Doyle our rapt attention. I had
never known our Scottish friend be quite so passionate. ‘On Sunday, before
dinner,’ he went on, ‘inspired no doubt by the prospect of your game, one of
our guests asked me for my views on “the perfect murder” where to commit it and
how? It’s a question that I have been asked before, so I had my answer ready.
“On the White Cliffs of Dover,” I said. “Or at Beachy Head. Leastways, on a
cliff-top somewhere, where, together, unobserved, the murderer and his intended
victim can be taking a stroll. All the murderer has to do to achieve his end is
seize the moment. When he is certain the coast is clear, with one sharp lunge,
our murderer propels his unsuspecting victim over the cliff’s edge to meet his
doom. It’s simple, it’s quick, it’s clean and it has several advantages—there
are no witnesses, there is no murder weapon and it has all the appearance of an
unfortunate accident.”‘

Conan
Doyle was not a vain man, but it was evident that he was enjoying his moment
‘holding the floor’. Oscar was an appreciative audience. He picked a fleck of
tobacco from his lower lip.

‘You
spin a fine yarn, Dr Doyle,’ he said. ‘Pray continue.’

Conan
Doyle smiled. ‘On Sunday night,’ he went on, ‘it was the word “accident”, I
believe, that aroused the interest of your friend Bosie’s brother, Lord
Drumlanrig. “A body going over the cliffs at Dover or Beachy Head doesn’t
suggest an ‘accident’ to me,” he said. “Suicide perhaps, but not an accident.
If you want to contrive an accident, you need to go to Switzerland.”‘

‘Ah,’ said
Oscar, ‘Drumlanrig told you of his uncle.’

‘His
namesake, Francis yes—killed in the Swiss Alps. He was with a party of friends,
according to Drumlanrig, seasoned mountaineers mostly. They had successfully
scaled a peak, somewhere between Zermatt and the Reichenbach Falls, and they
were on their way down when the accident occurred. It was a fine day, clear and
cloudless; the snow was settled; the conditions perfect for mountaineering. No
one knows quite what happened. One moment, Francis Douglas was alive and well;
the next, he was gone. He fell headlong into a deep ravine and was never seen
again.’