Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (36 page)

Carnaby Jenks broke forward—I cannot describe his gesture in any other way. He was still pale and moist, despite the evening chill.

“I had nothing to do with his death, Holmes! You must see that! You must all of you see that! Why should I kill him? Tell them I would not!”

Holmes gave the shrug of a reasonable man.

“I should imagine you loathed and feared Caradoc quite as much as the rest of us used to do—and no doubt with equally good reason. I was his companion on stage but I did not care for him.”

They stared at one another, unblinking, as if neither would be first to turn away. The two policemen watched. A flicker of white gaslight shone on the marble and the red carpeting of the foyer. Holmes broke the silence,

“Did you like Sir Caradoc, Mr Jenks?”

Carnaby Jenks blinked. He echoed his interrogator.

“Like him?”

“That is the question. Many people did not. I should like to hear your answer.”

“He had changed for the worse—”

“Excuse me, that was not the question,” said Holmes patiently.

Quite unaccountably, it seemed to me, Jenks lost his temper.

“You call me your client, Holmes! You have no business to cross-examine me like this in front of—”

“Do you think the Criminal Investigation Division will not cross-examine you presently? If it comes to court, do you not think you will be cross-examined by men who will tear to pieces any answer based on hesitation or equivocation? I prepare my clients for what must come. I do so now in your case.”

“How?”

“You played the part of Hamlet, did you not? I will remind you that the wine, when it was poisoned, was presumably standing in a goblet waiting to be carried on to the stage early in the fifth act. Prior to that, Hamlet—that is to say Carnaby Jenks—does not appear in the play for above half an hour. There is not a single member of the cast who appears to have had longer access or better facility for using poison than you did. That is a serious matter and I beg you will give your attention to it!”

For a moment it seemed as if Jenks could not find the voice to reply. Then he spoke quietly but with a flash of true melodrama.

“Sherlock Holmes, I have trusted you. I always thought of you as my friend. Are you determined to get me hanged?”

Holmes consigned him to the company of Superintendent Bradstreet with the gesture of one dismissing a beggar.

“Contrary to your assertions this evening, Jenks, we have never been close friends nor confidants. However, that is beside the point. The probabilities are equally balanced that you are an innocent fool or a consummate deceiver. My task is to determine which. I have no doubt that I shall do so before the night is over. Meanwhile, you will greatly oblige me by not making your case any more difficult than it is. I suggest that you keep your mouth shut, difficult though you may find it.”

2

A
fter such treatment, Jenks might have been relieved to be led off by Superintendent Bradstreet and the uniformed constable. Stanley Hopkins spoke quietly,

“We've had a chance to question the theatre people, sir. Between ourselves, I think you had better know what Ophelia and Horatio heard your client say a week or two ago.”

“Indeed?”

“They were both present in the green room when Mr Jenks opened a note from Sir Caradoc. Apparently it informed him that after the end of the month—today that is—he would no longer play Hamlet in the matinees. The part was to be taken by a new understudy, who needed the experience. Mr Jenks's wages, prior to his departure from the company, would be reduced accordingly.”

“How unfortunate,” said Holmes indifferently. “Such a fact will tell against him when motives are weighed up.”

“Yes, sir. Other witnesses report Mr Jenks having once used some choice descriptions of his governor. Your client concluded by saying, ‘I would murder him with very great pleasure. He will find what it is to drive a man to a point where he has nothing to lose.' Something of that kind.”

Holmes sighed at the impossibility of defending such a buffoon. Hopkins tried to console him and made matters worse.

“Of course, it's only words, Mr Holmes. It proves nothing. Still, you know what lawyers can do with that sort of thing in court. I thought you'd better know.”

“You did right, my good Hopkins, and I am indebted to you. I suppose the note he read to himself really did contain notice of dismissal and that Jenks was not just having us on?”

“That hadn't crossed my mind, sir. But why have us on?”

“Why does Jenks do anything? The quirks of an old character actor who makes his whole life a drama. For the moment let us put aside questions of motives for killing Sir Caradoc and concentrate on who had the opportunity. From what I am told, he must have faced a battalion of enemies. I do not even think we could exclude Lady Myfanwy. If all I hear is true, ladies have killed for much less.”

“Opportunity, Mr Holmes?” Hopkins reminded him hopefully

“Quite. I will confine myself within Mr Bradstreet's limits but I should be greatly obliged for a tour of the evidence. Perhaps, standing where we are, it would be best to start with the auditorium.”

Holmes and I followed Stanley Hopkins up the red-carpeted marble steps which led to the varnished doors of the dress circle.

The interior of the Herculaneum was little different, except in size, to a dozen horseshoes of red plush in the West End of London. The same curving seat-rows and pillars, cream and gold paintwork rising from stalls to gallery. As we stood at the back of the dress circle, the stage curtain was open. We were looking down at the set which Caradoc had commissioned for the final act of Shakespeare's most famous play.

I understand that William Shakespeare gave no stage directions for the setting of this scene. Caradoc had copied a famous design by William Telbin at the Lyceum production in 1864. Instead of a hall with thrones and galleries, he had staged the denouement on the battlements. Perhaps I should call it a broad terrace edged by the battlements. We looked out across what seemed to be a considerable drop towards a cyclorama of distant sea. There were two throne-like chairs and two long baronial tables. One table was strewn with the remains of a banquet. From where we stood, I could see a pair of pewter goblets of Elizabethan design.

Centre stage, a uniformed London constable stood at ease. Two more men had been posted in the wings and another in the gangway of the stalls. The Herculaneum was as securely in the hands of Bradstreet's officers as a conquered city might be. Hopkins spoke quietly to Holmes, though not so quietly that I missed anything of the exchanges.

“I've had half an hour to look round, Mr Holmes. There's one or two things that you won't find in the evidence. Mr Squire, the stage-door keeper, liked Sir Caradoc. That puts him in a minority. He says that if you want to understand the great man, remember one thing. Our hero discovered at fifty that, contrary to what he had always told himself, he did not love his fellow men. By fifty-one, he saw no reason why he should.”

“The ruin of youth,” Holmes said philosophically. “Even when he was thirty, I predicted as much.”

“Indeed? He lived a solitary life in the Dome. Lady Myfanwy went up there only when necessary. I had a look just before you came. It had a sad feel, Mr Holmes. Panelled walls with scenes from his productions, others embellished with fancy mottoes. ‘He who takes in too much wine gets drunk. He who takes in too much water drowns himself.' That sort of thing. ‘It is better to drink a little too much than much too little.' He certainly drank more than was good for him, which perhaps he didn't do when he was younger.”

“On the contrary he did, Hopkins. Its effects were less apparent then. What of his ladies?”

“Lady Myfanwy was never sure where he was at night. I'm not convinced she any longer cared. He was a matinee idol, after all. When he was younger, there were so many women writing for a lock of his hair that they say he kept a young man just to grow hair for him. I can't find that there was anyone in particular at present. In the past few years, a young country virgin or a woman of the city streets seems to have been all the same to him.”

“What a falling off was there,” said Holmes, looking about him. “He was no angel at thirty, but the melancholy seediness which you describe had not quite engulfed him. Who will lament his passing?”

Hopkins shrugged.

“Not many, sir. Some will lament the death of his spirit several years ago. Few will regret the passing of the man himself now.”

“My dear Hopkins! There is a tone of poetry in your diagnosis!”

The young inspector shook his head.

“The wrong diagnosis, Mr Holmes. Thanks to your client, a thousand people will read the papers and believe they saw Sir Caradoc drink poisoned wine in his struggle with Carnaby Jenks.”

Holmes gripped the red plush of the circle barrier and stared at the blue cyclorama of the stage.

“All theatre is illusion, inspector. Jenks is no more than what he makes himself for the passing moment. Was real wine always drunk?”

“They say Sir Caradoc was never in liquor when he played Prince Hamlet. He liked a decent bottle to fill his goblet if he was only King Claudius. After all, it was the last scene and the play almost at an end. If you ask me, the only thing he liked better than drinking was the reputation of drinking. To hear them talk, you'd think most people came in the hope of seeing him fall down drunk on the stage.”

“Where did this bottle of wine come from?”

Hopkins took out his notebook and flipped over a page.

“The bottle was brought in as usual, at about ten to nine by a waiter from the Cafe Boucherat in Maiden Lane, just round the back. It was a Nuits St Georges 1885. Because it was a numbered bottle, the time when it was drawn was noted in the stock book. Restaurants do that to prevent pilfering by their staff. It was uncorked and sniffed by Monsieur Boucherat, the proprietor. It certainly wasn't poisoned then.”

“And the waiter?”

“Never out of sight of the cafe until the bottle was passed to Mr Squire the stage-door keeper. Sir Caradoc took it from him and filled one of the pewter goblets in his dressing-room. The other one had something like ginger cordial for Hamlet and the Queen. Very often they had nothing at all and just pretended to drink. Caradoc put the goblets on the stage manager's table in the wings at about nine o'clock or just after. Roland Gwyn, the stage manager, had all the properties for the last scene in place by five minutes past nine. They were under his eye after that and he doesn't strike me as a murderer. The goblets were carried on-stage by two footmen during the last scene at about ten past nine or very soon after.”

“Then we are invited to believe that the poison must have been added to the goblet of wine by sleight of hand? In a split second between about nine and ten past?”

“So it seems, Mr Holmes. If you take that time, I expect there must have been moments when no one was looking. Even after Mr Gwyn took charge. Presently, King Claudius on the stage calls out, “Set me the stoups of wine upon the table,” and that's when the servants carry them in. The King stands at one end of the long table and the Queen with Hamlet at the other. The goblet put down for Sir Caradoc was the only one with real wine in it and within his reach.”

“Hopkins,” said my friend delightedly, “you have made the play your own!”

Again, the young man blushed slightly with pleasure.

“I'd rather make the case my own, Mr Holmes. But there's no other way that I can see how it happened.”

“And very probably you are right. We have only to find who could have put poison into the goblet in the wings. We may still exclude the stage manager, I suppose?”

“Unless I've lost all sense of innocence and guilt, sir. For all his theatrical connections, Mr Gwyn's pride is being a deacon of the Welsh chapel in the Tottenham Court Road.”

“How very singular. I believe we may also exclude Sir Caradoc, unless this was a suicide of truly melodramatic originality. That is a theory to which I do not incline.”

“And what if he noticed an odour of almonds in the goblet as he drank, Mr Holmes?”

“He might take it for just that, an almond odour in the goblet. All wines smell of something or other. Certain red wines pride themselves upon a nutty flavour, do they not? In any case, he would be swallowing already, as his part requires, and it would be too late. He may have thought the wine had been spiced or was sour. He would complain to the Cafe Boucherat afterwards but he must drink. For all his vices, Caradoc would not halt a performance of
Hamlet
in the middle of the last act. Whoever killed him no doubt knew him well enough to be sure of that.”

“As I understand it, sir, the performance would require him to drink two or three draughts during the duel, as well as two before it, which was the way he usually played the part. We reckon, at least a third of a bottle of wine in all.”

Holmes nodded and the inspector added,

“Then there was the make-believe of Mr Jenks forcing him to drink from the other goblet and rolling him over the battlements. It seems Sir Caradoc played his part to the end. As for what came next, Mr Holmes, we calculate he could be in his dressing-room—with or without the door locked behind him—a minute or so after coming off the stage.”

“What was his routine?”

“As a rule he never called his dresser, Alfred Cranleigh—a loyal old fellow—until he had relaxed for fifteen or twenty minutes. He needed to ‘calm down,' as he called it. That was when he had his regular cigar. He'd read the evening paper while he smoked. After that, he would call for Cranleigh. Tonight Cranleigh received no call and would never have gone into the dressing-room without one. Sir Caradoc might have had company on his sofa, if you believe what you hear.”

“How was the alarm raised?”