Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

as Salome.”

This would have been bad enough. Caradoc in his present mood apparently thought it fell short. He remarked to a wide circle of his own admirers at a green room supper after a performance of The Second Mrs Tanqueray that “Mr Wilde’s tragedy is to become the creator of laughter on the public stage and of sniggering in private conversations.” He was too close to the mark, and the endangered playwright dared not retort on such a subject. Within a few days, Caradoc’s epigram was quoted in the gossip column of The Winning Post. A fortnight later his portly antagonist was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel on charges of indecency.

Wilde’s plays closed and his books were withdrawn but Caradoc would not leave the wretched man alone to his destruction. He harped on Wilde’s physical appearance, assuring his Herculaneum audience, after a curtain call, “The London theatre has suffered a heavy loss in Mr Wilde. He has left a gap which it will be hard to fill.” There was little laughter and a long silence of embarrassment. Even death was no reason for mercy, at least in private conversation. “Mr Wilde has been such a bore all his life that it is no wonder the grave should yawn for him.”

In his later years Caradoc lost friends and made enemies. It was hard to say how many friends he lost or how violent were the enemies he made. People in the theatrical profession were simply frightened of him. Among his admirers, the laughter at his jibes grew hesitant and the silences became longer. Holmes knew more than I did, but to me it almost seemed that the poor fellow had become an obsessive, if not demented.

He always drank more than was good for him. Backstage, at the green room banquets which followed his performances, he presided as tyrant and buffoon before his own actors and a host of theatrical celebrities. Here he was in his element. The characters of men and, worse still, the reputations of women who had resisted his charms were publicly flayed in his harangues for the benefit of gossip columns of The Winning Post or Town and Turf. Private lives were turned to public laughter all over London. Once, notoriously, the soul of his partner in romance had been so brutalised in his onslaught that she could no longer face her family or friends. Mockery followed her everywhere. She was found several days later, having opened her veins in the bath like a dishonoured matron of the Roman world. It was a brave man who stood his ground against Caradoc and a still braver woman who defied him to do his worst. Yet he remained the great tragedian of his day

I thought of all this as I gathered and checked the details for the present narrative. I returned the Sassanoff programmes to their envelope. I took out one or two other documents and letters. Then I closed and locked the tin trunk again. As I went back cautiously down the attic steps, I recalled the comfortable New Year’s Eve when the whole thing began. How close and vivid it seemed as I held the papers in my hand—and yet what a different world it had been to the one I was living in now, so many years later!

4

The Case of the

Matinee Idol

1

Now I must lead my reader back to Baker Street and the beginning of our adventure. New Year’s Eve is a time I shall always associate with the headline “Royal Herculaneum Mystery” on the newspaper placards. Snow had fallen every day since Christmas, and by nine o’clock on that last evening of the year the view from our sitting-room had all the impressionist charm of Camille Pissarro’s Paris streets.

Lamp-lit shops were open late and warmly lit. Each window was illuminated like the stage of a little theatre. The smiling doll-faces and tinsel of Mr Pollock’s Toys, the warm patterns of Indian cloth in the Marylebone Linen Company, the solid rounds of Stilton and Cheshire cheese on Mr McIver’s marble slab, gave a cosiness to the chill of the year’s last night.

Holmes and I were in evening dress. We had accepted our annual invitation to an early-evening reception at the Bohemian Legation, from which we had just returned. Years before, Holmes had rendered a considerable service to the “Count Von Kramm,” otherwise known as Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismund von Ormstein, King of Bohemia. It was a matter of extortion concerning a certain photograph in the possession of Irene Adler of New Jersey. No woman ever affected Holmes so acutely. He abominated official receptions of all kinds, but I believe there lingered a dying hope that she would one day make her appearance at the legation in search of him.

I stood at the window and smiled at the thought. Two muddy gashes of carriage tracks, carved by cabs and twopenny buses, brewers’ drays and bakers’ vans, disfigured the white sheet of snow. The clear chimes of nine o’clock carried through the crisp air from the steeple of Marylebone Church. The northern sky towards Hampstead and Highgate was gently luminous with reflected snow-light. A few years later, we recalled the events of this New Year’s Eve and the beauty of that winter scene with its tranquil light from the sky. Holmes then became reminiscent and murmured slowly to himself,

Serene and bright,

And lovely as a Lapland night.

The lines struck me as an ideal opening to the tale of the Herculaneum mystery. For reasons which the reader will discover, its publication was to be delayed, but I was anxious to have it “on paper.”

“I say, Holmes! That would do very well at the beginning. Are they your own lines? Or some modern poet whom we might acknowledge?”

“I do not think, Watson, you would care to acknowledge them. They belong to George Joseph Smith, the so- called ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer. They describe his only surviving wife, in his final letter to her. It was written a few hours before they stretched his neck on the gallows at Pentonville. You may recall that that particular tragedy owed something to my own modest abilities. Of all psychopathic personalities, Smith remains for me the most intriguing. I suggest a more suitable epigraph.”

For the present, removing his coat and slipping into his mauve silk dressing-gown over waistcoat and trousers, he draped himself along the sofa. With a bottle of Bollinger sparkling between us, we toasted the year to come.

It was some time later when the bell of the street-door rang. At that hour, it would hardly be a call for our landlady, Mrs Hudson. Holmes stood up at once. Hanging his dressing-gown on the back of the door, he resumed his dress coat. From the hallway I caught a murmur of voices, one of which was Mrs Hudson’s. There was a quiet footfall on the stairs and a tap at the door. With some sense of despair, I guessed that our plans for ringing out the old year and ringing in the new were at an end.

Our good lady appeared.

“A young gentleman, Mr Holmes. He brings you a message concerning Sir Henry Caradoc Price.”

She spoke with all the importance the name demanded. Holmes frowned.

“Caradoc? What can he want? It is a year or two since I heard from him!”

He took the envelope and I glanced over his shoulder at the messenger. This was no urchin of the Baker Street Irregulars. Perhaps fourteen years old, he wore a dark, velvet suit, as if he had come from his first evening party in Portman Square. Holmes scanned the single sheet of paper. His long aquiline features were without expression.

“Dear me! Dear me!” he said with a sigh. “Who would have thought it?”

He handed me the sheet of notepaper with its printed heading: “Sir Henry Caradoc Price KBE, Royal Herculaneum Theatre.” I read what followed.

My dear Holmes.

We have not communicated for some years. I beg you to come at once to the street entrance of the Royal Herculaneum. Bring whatever “investigating equipment” you usually carry. I am in the most dreadful fix of my life.

As the newspapers will tell the world tomorrow, Caradoc Price was killed this evening in front of