“She became, perhaps, one of the ladies of the night who visited Caradoc in the Dome?”
“Perhaps she was, Mr Holmes. I know nothing of that.”
“How was it done?”
Mr Gwyn took a deep breath.
“I was occupied with the performance. I never saw them, that I know of. The story was that they came through the private entrance, the street-door, not directly into the theatre. The Dome was his domain, as he said. Now and again I believe they were in his dressing-room with him. He might easily lend them a key to the private door on Maiden Lane, if he chose. More likely, he would leave the Yale on the latch for them. I do not know. Only he could have told you.”
Holmes swung round and strode out through the wings. I could hear his voice in the passageway.
“Mr Hopkins! Mr Bradstreet! If you please!”
There was a pause, and then he returned with the trim, upright figure of young Hopkins in attendance.
“Now then,” said Holmes to Gwyn, “be so kind as to repeat to Inspector Hopkins what you have just said to me. I promise that neither you nor anyone else has anything to fear.”
Gwyn hesitated, looking at the young inspector as though at a man who might be trusted.
“Sir Caradoc was visited by ladies of a bad reputation, sir, in the sitting-room of the Dome. At night, usually after the play. Even in his dressing-room, sometimes.”
“Indeed, Mr Gwyn?” Hopkins managed to sound concerned and dismayed at the revelation. “I am sorry to hear that.”
“The Dome was his domain, as he called it, sir. My understanding is that he would sometimes give them a key to the street-door, if he knew them well, or leave that door on the latch. I never saw them down here, that I know of. But I could not be sure.”
Holmes turned to his Scotland Yard protégé.
“Tell me, Hopkins, has that street-door been examined this evening? Mr Bradstreet has not mentioned it to me.”
“So far as I know, Mr Holmes, it is locked. The matter has not been raised, but that is what we have assumed.”
“Then had we better not see whether our assumptions are secure?” Holmes inquired innocently.
With Hopkins and Gwyn we climbed the stairs hung with theatrical portraits, went past the sitting-room of the Dome and down the far side. That area seemed little used and the walls were bare. At the foot stood the green-painted street-door. As I looked, it appeared undoubtedly closed and fastened. Only when Hopkins turned the handle and the door swung open was it apparent that the latch and not the lock had been holding it.
“It seems he was expecting a visitor after all,” Holmes said for everybody’s benefit.
Caradoc’s enemies were legion. However, the unlocked door now opened a Pandora’s box of the seven deadly sins, any of whose practitioners in London’s underworld might have chosen New Year’s Eve as the time to level scores with him. It was not impossible that one of them had been in his dressing-room at any time from the pouring of wine into the goblet to the smoking of the last cigar. A prosecutor of Carnaby Jenks would have a steep hill to climb when this was revealed.
The silence that accompanied our return up the stairs was of a depth that follows the dying reverberations of a trench mortar. We retraced our steps as far as the door of the sitting-room. Superintendent Bradstreet and Carnaby Jenks were staring at each other in silence across the table.
“Mr Bradstreet,” said Holmes pleasantly, “I think the time has come for you and me to share a little information.”
8
Twenty minutes later we took a courteous farewell of Stanley Hopkins and Isaiah Bradstreet. The latter was now full of the theory that some creature of the streets with a grudge had known of the unlocked door on Maiden Lane. With a little knowledge of the play’s performance, she—or he—had only to enter before the last act—even in a costume of some kind. There would be no one in the Dome at such a time. From there, it would be the easiest thing to sidle down the stairway with its signed portraits. While the play was in progress, the chances were that the dressing-room passage, even the dressing-room itself, would be empty. The goblet of wine was out of sight while still in Caradoc’s dressing-room. On Mr Gwyn’s little table, it was the only one containing wine. In the myth that was now being created, it was vulnerable to a malevolent passing shadow, while all attention was on the efficient performance of Hamlet.
Even if challenged, an intruder had only to mention a visit to Sir Caradoc in the Dome and postpone vengeance to a future occasion. How easy to believe that such a phantom had brushed past and emptied a powder, from sleeve or pocket, into the wine before withdrawing by the same route. As the cast crowded towards the stage for the curtain calls, there would have been no one to hear the last dreadful sounds of the great actor’s career. No one to see a shadow pass along the wall and up the narrow wooden stairs again.
Such was this fable of the poisoned wine which was woven into the history of the great theatre. It was so much more intriguing than the likely truth. The beauty of it was, as Holmes later remarked, that while such a chain of events could not be proved, it certainly could not be disproved for the benefit of a court. Indeed, so long as the world believed Caradoc had been poisoned on the stage, it must be true. Without conclusive proof against any other defendant, this phantom of the underworld would always haunt the minds of an Old Bailey jury. Caradoc’s romances of the street must be the first evidence produced by the defence. Who would send a man to the gallows while the wraiths of such women and their bullies lingered among the backstage stairs and passages?
No one welcomed such an unknown visitant of this kind more readily than Superintendent Isaiah Bradstreet. In the space of two or three hours, before Scotland Yard “got its hands” on the case, this amateur of the uniformed branch solved the mystery, even if he created another in the process. Each time the case became a topic of journalism, he was consulted, quoted, and acquired a fame he can never have expected. His rivals, Lestrade and Gregson—even Sherlock Holmes—were nowhere compared with him.
We did not see Carnaby Jenks again. His own alibi seemed proof against all suspicion, as indeed it was, for he was on the public stage while Caradoc was supposed to be dying. As Holmes and I parted company with Roland Gwyn, my friend said softly once again, “They shall he safe with me.”
9
Not without reason, the waving placards of the newsboys next day proclaimed the Royal Herculaneum “Mystery.” The death of Caradoc Price did not spawn as many theories as the Whitechapel murders of the so-called Jack the Ripper. Yet once or twice a year some penny-a-liner would pen a new solution to the identity of the unknown intruder—and Bradstreet would say a few more words about the unlocked street-door.
Sherlock Holmes was philosophical as our cab took us back to Baker Street in the early hours of the New Year.
“If interest in the case survives, my dear fellow, it will be because people like you persist in quoting curious cases from The Lancet and the British Medical Journal of men and women who have lived for fifteen or twenty minutes after taking prussic acid. As a result, the members of tonight’s audience believe they actually saw him drink it. That will be something to tell their grandchildren. Poor Caradoc is doomed to be one of your rare medical specimens, whether he likes it or not.”
“Then what we saw in the dressing-room is not to be given to the world?”
“Apart from my modest powers of deduction, there was nothing that could not be explained by your medical theories and the poison in the goblet. The tobacco ash was a curious mixture, but it might have come from innocent sources.”