“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 glass at the remaining length of the cigar and then at the match which had been used to light it. There was also a crumpled paper band which had been stripped from the cigar before lighting it. He gave a quiet sigh of satisfaction, like one whose expectations have been justified. Without another word of explanation, he eased a fresh match from the box and, for what seemed like an age, gently sifted the cold ash.
If there was no poison in the room, I could not see how we should find anything of interest here. The flakes of pale grey ash at the tip of the dead cigar looked a perfect replica of those in the ornamental porcelain bowl. Holmes continued to poke cautiously with the unused match, stirring so lightly that hardly a fragment of ash fell out of place. Presently he uttered another long and relaxed sigh, as if he had been holding his breath in a trance throughout this process.
“As I supposed,” he said to himself.
“Prussic acid?” I asked uncertainly. “Cyanide?”
He looked up at me in despair.
“Of course not, Watson! That is the last thing we shall find here! You underestimate our adversary, whoever he or she may be.”
“Do you mean that Caradoc was not poisoned here?”
“I did not say that.”
“But if there is no cyanide here, how can he have been poisoned by it in this room? The door was locked and he did not go out. And if there was no cyanide in the wine, how was he poisoned at all?”
“I deduce that there was no cyanide in the wine during the final scene of the play,” he said softly, “But there is now. Be patient and watch.”
I looked on but I could not see that he was doing anything other than before. The ash below the surface was not even much different in colour. A little darker, perhaps, but the colour of different burnt leaves from a single cigar will almost always vary a little.
“Look,” he said, easing up a flake of ash which seemed to have a mere thread of spider’s web hanging from it.
“What is it?”
“A burnt stalk. This cigar is of premier extraction.” He paused to flatten out the red and gold band. “‘Real Feytoria Reserva,’ a Portuguese importer and a Brazilian leaf of the highest quality. Believe me, such a superior weed does not contain the stalk of the tobacco leaf. That is the mark of an inferior brand, what is called in the trade ‘bird’s eye.’ You will see tiny white flecks here and there. You understand me?”
“The ash in the bowl has come from elsewhere?”
“Much of it has. On its own, that is conclusive of nothing, but it is indicative of a good deal.”
I could not see the logic of this.
“Surely the bird’s eye may have been deposited either by Sir Caradoc at some other time or by some other person?”
He folded his glass and slipped it into his watch-pocket again.
“Cranleigh would have left a clean ash-tray. I am sure that Caradoc smoked his usual cigar this evening after settling down in his chair with the newspaper. He came in, changed from his doublet and hose, putting on his green silk dressing-gown. However, I do not think he bothered to lock the door after him. People were not in the habit of disturbing him, and, in any case, he was on his own. As I say, he smoked a cigar. What he did not do was to smoke this cigar.”
I saw at once what was coming but I was not quick enough to say so.
Holmes continued.
“A Real Feytoria is a long and expensive cigar, such as Caradoc affected. It is not a sixpenny, twenty-minute cheroot. He would never touch those. I should not wish to pose as an expert merely because I have written my little treatise upon the subject. However, I may tell you that a Real Feytoria would probably last a smoker for at least fifty minutes or an hour. There is not enough ash in the bowl to account for that. Someone who knows little about the joys of smoking has bulked it out with the ash of bird’s eye, but it is still too little.”
Now I took my chance.
“Caradoc probably did not live for anything like thirty or forty minutes after leaving the stage. He was found then but he had not answered any knocks for most of that time. In any case, he could not have smoked so much of the cigar before that.”
“Well done, Watson. As so often, you are there before me. After Caradoc’s death, his adversary returned. The contaminated cigar was taken and this remainder was substituted. Someone has cut off a large portion of it and lit what remained. It was left here for us to find.”
I tried to pin down a flaw in this.
“Suppose Caradoc had started his cigar earlier, let it go out and lit it again after he left the stage at the end of the play.”
“It would seem, Watson, that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet with the primary purpose of thwarting you as a detective. If you will look at the last hour of the play, there is hardly a point where the King is off-stage for long enough to tempt a sensible man into ruining a good cigar. In any case, why would the dresser Cranleigh bring his master a bowl half filled with the ash of bird’s eye? No, my dear chap, let us settle the one remaining point.”
“Which is?”
Holmes got up from the desk.
“Caradoc drank his wine a few minutes before he left the stage. Suppose, after all, it contained prussic acid. How long would he live?”
As the reader may imagine, the answer to this question is that one cannot tell until the victim has been anatomised. Perhaps it may be impossible even then. In the course of our detective partnership, I had pursued a little research into the art of poisoning, including cyanide, rare though it is. Dixon Mann in his Forensic Medicine and Toxicology and Garstang in The Lancet of 1888 talk of those who have taken a fatal fifth of an ounce of hydrocyanic acid and survived for an hour and three-quarters. I noted that, in 1890, the British Medical Journal described a woman who accidentally swallowed an ounce of cyanide in the form of powder but was able to “rush” upstairs, report the fact, obtain treatment and survive.
In the light of all this, I could offer only my doubts.
“Holmes, we must judge from the facts. If the wine was poisoned, Caradoc was obviously not one of those who succumbed in a couple of minutes, or else a thousand people would have seen him die on the stage! Perhaps that was the public revenge that Carnaby Jenks hoped for. Failing that, any dose swallowed in his wine could not have been sufficient to be immediately overwhelming. He was able to get back here at least five minutes later.”
“Would he still have been alive half an hour after drinking the wine—even if the poison was present only in a small dose? Alive just before ten o’clock?”
“I think not. It is most unlikely, though not impossible. My friend Mr Knott of Lincoln’s Inn is editing the trial of England’s most famous poisoner, Dr William Palmer of Rugeley. In that case the defence rested on the survival of his victim for an hour and a half. That man had taken poison which should have killed him in no time. As for Caradoc, it was not impossible that he was alive until ten o’clock—but without treatment, most, most unlikely.”