confirm his suspicions. A fatal dose of prussic acid is the least that we can expect. However, I would appreciate a few minutes to survey this dressing-room.”
“There is a plain mortuary van outside, sir,” said Hopkins quietly. “It was waiting only for Mr Holmes to see the body. Sir Caradoc could be moved now.”
“Thank you,” said Holmes courteously. “Sir Caradoc will not inconvenience us. Let him remain, if you please.”
Bradstreet was visibly concerned that my friend’s requests should be so modest and apparently irrelevant.
“There really is not much in here, Mr Holmes. His key to the door was lying on the carpet, close to the tasselled cord of the dressing-gown. The evening paper is on the desk. It seems that he usually read it after the performance, while he smoked his cigar. I believe he liked to do the puzzles which they print at the back. It relaxed him.”
Holmes brightened up at this. Bradstreet continued.
“We have not touched nor moved the ash-tray, nor the half-smoked cigar lying in it. Still, it may save you time if I tell you that there is no trace of poison that Dr Worplesdon or Dr Hammond from Scotland Yard could detect in the cigar or its ash.”
“Nor I,” said Stanley Hopkins apologetically.
“Capital!” said Holmes enthusiastically, “I wonder if these two medical gentlemen have chanced to read a slight monograph of mine, printed in 1879, ‘Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos.’ It would be of the greatest assistance to them. Unfortunately, at the time, I was insistent that it must be illustrated with colour plates. I was therefore obliged to defray the cost of having it privately printed. In consequence it now changes hands at a premium and has become something of a rarity.”
The two policemen shook their heads sympathetically.
“No matter,” said Holmes amiably. “If you would be so good as to leave us, we shall not keep you very long.”
Bradstreet hesitated, but Hopkins forced the issue by walking into the passage at once. The superintendent followed reluctantly and Holmes closed the door behind them.
4
Sherlock Holmes stood over the desk. A gold-inlaid green leather blotter was filled with pink paper that showed not a mark. Roughly folded across it lay that evening’s
Holmes picked up the
“Be good enough to see what you can find in his dressing-gown pockets.”
“His pockets?”
“Certainly. In his predicament, assuming he tore it off, that is where I should put a slip of paper. It is missing and it is not on the desk or on the floor. His pockets are the only other place that would probably have been within reach during his last moments. We are meant to believe that he had already staggered towards the door to open it and found he could not do so. He lost the cord of his dressing-gown and dropped the key as he struggled back to the chair. He was not a fool. He knew he was in mortal torment. It seems he tore a strip from the back page of the paper. Why? Surely to write a message. He would not spend the last seconds of his life playing newspaper games.”
“To leave his last testament?”
“Look in those pockets. The right-hand one. I do not recall he was left-handed.”
Averting my eyes from the dead man’s contorted features and crimson-blotched cheeks, I slid my hand into the right pocket. Holmes was correct, of course. There was the stub of a pencil and a crumpled scrap of paper that anyone else might have thrown away. Why was it not on the desk? I handed it to my companion. The writing of the dying man spidered into illegibility but Holmes seemed to make sense of it easily enough. He had recognised that the subject was a nonsense poem of a kind well-suited to newspaper competitions. When we first met I had noted that his knowledge of literature was esoteric but extensive.
“Holmes! What the devil is this trumpery?”
“A riddle well enough known to those like Caradoc who particularly enjoy such mysteries. It dates, I believe, from the reign of Queen Anne. I imagine that the
“But what use?”
He held it in front of him and completed those lines that I had not been able to decipher. I stared at the finished text.
He spread it on the desk.
“Very well. Let us see what we have. ‘To three-fourths of a cross add a circle complete.’ Now that indicates the letters T and O, does it not? Then we have, ‘Two semi-circles a perpendicular meet.’ What can that be but the letter B? There follows an instruction. ‘Next add a triangle that stands on two feet.’ What a picturesque description of the letter A! And last of all. ‘Two semi-circles, and a circle complete.’ That can only be the letters C plus C plus O. Put it all together and you have TOBACCO.”
“What has tobacco to do with it?”
“What, indeed? And why should he thrust it into his pocket?”
“So that it should not be found,” I said.
“No, Watson. So that it should be found later on, when his pockets were turned out. It must be hidden for the moment. In his last moments, he seems to have guessed that his enemy would return to this room to make certain changes in the evidence. He could not leave his scrap of paper where that man—or woman—would find it. Such a person would be alert for it on the desk or even on the floor. But with only seconds to spare, the killer would not dare to waste time in struggling with the dead weight of a corpse, searching the clothes for something which was probably not there anyway.”
“And yet to search him might make all the difference.”
“Balance that against the difference between slipping out into the passage unseen or walking into the path of a witness. In other words, the murderer’s second visit was almost certainly during the curtain calls and speeches when the dressing-room passage was empty and the keeper of the stage-door had his eyes on the little crowd of worshippers who gather there each night for a kind word or an autograph.”
“But neither Worplesdon nor Hammond found any contamination of the cigar.”
“Of course not. That is the whole point.”
He had drawn his folding lens from his watch-pocket. He opened it and sat at the desk, peering through the
