Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (35 page)

‘It was not easily done,’ said Atitis-Snake. ‘I had to hold a lethal dose of Spanish Fly behind my teeth until I could spew it into the chaplain’s communion wine. I foully burnt my tongue and gums.’

‘But you achieved your end.’

‘Yes,’ said Atitis-Snake, complacently. ‘I did the chaplain a favour, didn’t I? I sent him to meet his maker.’

‘Eliminating a potential witness is relatively easy for the great Atitis-Snake. But how to find your substitute – the man who would hang instead of you?’

‘Any man of about the right height and weight and age would do. The prison was full of them.’

‘Indeed, but you needed one who was about to be released. You had to choose your man – and choose your moment. You had to leave it to the very last. And you did. You left it until the eve of the execution. You left it until the last time you were taken from your cell. As the warders brought you back from the bathhouse you seized your opportunity.
You
created the disturbance – the near-insurrection – that brought about your freedom.’

‘And how did I do that, Mr Sherlock Holmes?’

‘Yes,’ said Melmoth, smiling. ‘Holmes is the clue. As the star prisoners walked towards you along the corridor outside your cell, from beneath your cap
you
called out, “Hang well, Professor Moriarty!” I knew it would not have been one of them – they were star prisoners, new to Reading Gaol. And Warder Stokes was clear it was not Private Luck. It was a man’s voice that called out – not the shrill voice of an Indian eunuch.’

‘Bravo, Holmes. Bravo, Melmoth. Bravo, Wilde. Three cheers.’

‘You threw yourself into the fray – with nothing to lose and everything to gain. You cannot have been certain of the outcome, but you seized the moment – and you seized it well. When the warders flung you and Luck into the condemned cell, you knew at once what you had to do. You had to make your victim instantly unrecognisable. You took the poor eunuch by the head and scraped his face against the wall. You threw him to the ground and kicked in his windpipe. You robbed him of his features. You robbed him of his voice.’

Atitis-Snake laughed. ‘He put up a good fight.’

‘He was Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers. He’d been a soldier – but, poor man, he was a girl at heart and he was not your match. You overwhelmed him and when you had the unhappy wretch upon the ground, you took his number from his uniform and substituted your own. You took his cap from his head and hid your own face beneath it – and the moment the cell door opened you fled through it “like a scalded cat” and sped, “like greased lightning”, along the corridor and up the gantry to his cell.’

Atitis-Snake chuckled. ‘I knew the way.’

‘You must have held your breath that night – wondering whether your plan would work. When they came to take you from Luck’s cell to have you beaten for your part in the “insurrection” you knew that it had.’

‘I was ready for them.’

‘I imagine that you were. In your own cell, I assume that you hid your stash of poison in your bed – in the cracks between the wooden plank and the metal frame. That’s where Luck hid his face paints and his powders. You found them and you put them on.’

‘Yes, in case the cap fell off. But it didn’t. I was lucky there.’

‘You were lucky, too, that Governor Nelson did not postpone the hanging. You were lucky that Dr Maurice was away. He might have recognised Luck’s features, notwithstanding the damage you had done his face and the distortion wrought by the hangman’s rope.’

‘I took Luck’s punishment. And he took mine.’

‘His body is now decomposing in a pit of lime – in an unmarked grave.’

‘My back is still scarred from the beating. I was bent double for a week.’

‘And your face betrays some bruising, I see, now that you have wiped away the powder from your forehead. But you are alive, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. And Achindra Acala Luck is dead. You hobbled out of that accursed prison in Luck’s place – your face masked by Luck’s make-up, your head wrapped in one of Luck’s saris. You escaped Reading Gaol, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. A. A. Luck is forever buried there.’

The man blew his nose and wiped his mouth. ‘Dr Maurice said you were a clever man and so it seems. When did you have your first clue of this?’

‘Did Dr Maurice also tell you that I am a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle?’

‘He did.’

‘Are you familiar with a story called “Silver Blaze”?’

Atitis-Snake shook his head.

‘In the story Sherlock Holmes brings to the attention of the detective in the case “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. “The dog did
nothing
in the night-time,” said the detective. “
That
was the curious incident,” said Holmes.’

Atitis-Snake raised an eyebrow.

‘On the morning of the hanging,’ explained Melmoth, ‘Private Luck did not call out to me. He always spoke to me – every day, without fail, from his cell, at the same time, in the same way. But on the day he left the prison he did not. I thought of the dog that did not bark in the night and realised that the prisoner who did not speak in the morning could not be Private Luck.’

Atitis-Snake nodded appreciatively. He raised his wine glass to Melmoth one final time and drained it. ‘I see,’ he said. He was quite calm. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked, picking up his chequebook.

‘You go to bed – and I take my leave of you.’

‘You should be grateful to me, you know, Mr Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. I killed the man who would have destroyed you. Luck was a blackmailer and a determined one. He would have come after you and told your wife all sorts of sordid stories.’

Melmoth shook his head. ‘I cannot be grateful to you, sir. You rid me of an enemy, that’s true, but last night you tried to murder me. You sent me to bed with a prostitute – and a dose of your beloved Spanish Fly.’

‘I don’t deny it, but much good did it do me. I appear to have got the dosage wrong – for here you are.’

‘I am here because I did not touch your devilish aphrodisiac. I kept the powder dry in fact – and, half an hour ago, when I went to “powder my nose”, I poured your twist of powder – all of it, no half-measures – into a glass of champagne. When I returned to our table I rearranged the glasses and set the poisoned yellow wine before you. I see that you have drunk it all.’

As tears filled his eyes, Atitis-Snake began to laugh. ‘I am going to die,’ he cried. He looked around the deserted café. ‘It cannot be.’ He gazed at Melmoth, pleadingly. ‘Is this true?’

‘It is.’

‘Why? Why must I die?’

‘So that the boy, Tom, can live,’ said Melmoth, simply.

‘This is all about the boy, Tom?’ cried Atitis-Snake, the tears now tumbling down his cheeks.

‘Yes, this is all about the boy, Tom,’ said Melmoth. ‘He and I, I realise, are the only ones left who know all your secrets. At Reading Gaol, you made Tom your friend – and your accomplice. Doubtless when he cleaned the cells, he made sure your stocks of poison were not discovered. Once you had murdered me, I think you would have waited for his release and then murdered him.’ Melmoth smiled and ran his forefinger lightly around the rim of his champagne glass. ‘On the day of my release, when I had done my shopping and before I caught the train to Newhaven, I took a cab to his mother’s address in Whitechapel and I promised her that I would do my best for her son. I have broken so many promises in my life, but this one, at least, I have kept.’

Atitis-Snake looked down at the empty glass that stood on the table before him. ‘What time did you give me this champagne?’

Melmoth took out his half-hunter. ‘Half an hour ago, at most.’

‘What time is it now?’

‘Five o’clock.’

‘I will be dead by seven, Oscar Wilde.’ He laughed and cried at the same time. ‘Killed – with a dose of my own poison.’

Melmoth smiled. ‘All men kill the thing they love,’ he said, gently. ‘Go to your room now, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. And if you have prayers to say, say them. You don’t want to die here, at this table. The foot passengers from the paddle steamer will be coming by in a moment. They are already late.’

Afterword

The body of ‘Dr Quilp’ was discovered in an upstairs bedroom at the Café Suisse on the morning of Saturday, 26 June 1897. According to the brief report that appeared ten days later in the
Gazette des Bains
, the man was ‘
un inconnu
’ – an unknown – who carried in his coat pocket a small packet of recently printed visiting cards bearing the name of ‘Dr Quilp’, but no other form of identification. His age, nationality and occupation could only be guessed at, said Dr Pierre Pollet, the police doctor, giving evidence at the inquest, but what was not in doubt was the cause of death. ‘This man had poisoned himself with an overdose of cantharides powder. His face was severely bloated, his skin a mass of blisters.’ According to the coroner, Monsieur Varangeville, it was a regrettable fact of life that strangers would come to Dieppe to avail themselves of prostitutes and take risks with so-called ‘aphrodisiacs’. Because, understandably, what little money the man had on him at the time of his death had been taken by the management of the Café Suisse as a contribution towards his unpaid bill, the coroner had no choice but to order the burial of the deceased in the municipal graveyard at public expense.

Within weeks of Quilp’s death, Oscar had finished writing
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
. When the poem was published in book form, in February 1898, he arranged for one copy to be sent to R. B. Haldane, the Member of Parliament (and, later, Lord Chancellor) who had visited him at Pentonville prison at the beginning of his sentence, and another to Major Nelson, the governor of Reading Gaol. The copy that he sent to me was inscribed on the title page:

R
OBERT
H
ARBOROUGH
S
HERARD
:

IN MEMORY OF AN OLD AND NOBLE FRIENDSHIP
:

FROM THE AUTHOR
O
SCAR
W
ILDE
.

These words were written in ink, but below them Oscar had added, in pencil:

In my end is my beginning – from first to last.

And on the final page of the book, again in pencil, he had lightly underlined the first and last letter of each line of the last three verses of the poem:

I
n Reading gaol by Reading tow
n

     
T
here is a pit of sham
e
,

A
nd in it lies a wretched ma
n