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 a thousand witnesses. I fear the papers must also tell the world that I did it. The Bow Street police and the house surgeon from Charing Cross Hospital have been summoned. They are close by and will be here soon. It is imperative that I should speak to you before the arrival of the detective officers from Scotland Yard. If this is delivered to you at once by the theatre call-boy, you may just be in time.
I implore your assistance, for old acquaintance sake.
Carnaby Jenks.
“For old acquaintance sake!” Holmes said with a groan “Appropriate for a New Year’s Eve joke, is it not? I do not, however, treat this as a joke, despite the thousand witnesses. I recall Jenks as a histrionic egotist. Wherever he is, trouble attends him—and spreads to those around him.”
I glanced at the paper again.
“Caradoc Price was a Knight Commander of the British Empire!”
My friend adjusted his cravat and wrapped himself in his plaid overcoat.
“Brother Mycroft assures me that Mr Gladstone was determined upon the award before he resigned his premiership,” he said as he fastened the buttons. “Indeed, the Grand Old Man shed tears during Caradoc’s last performance as King Lear. Everything was forgiven the old scoundrel when WG made his recommendation to Her Majesty. Public hostilities and scurrilous innuendoes, not to mention irregular romances, were overlooked. So were two famous backstage fist-fights with other actors.”
“Fist-fights?” I pulled on my pumps with a shoe-horn.
Holmes reached for a silver-topped stick.
“Do you not recall his Arthurian drama, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? He and Rosemount Phipps in suits of woollen stage-armour were to argue on either side of the famous round table. Phipps was to smash his fist down with such strength that his half of the table broke off and fell to earth. The property manager had prepared and positioned it for Phipps’s half to fall at a mere tap, the other half being reinforced. Before the curtain rose Caradoc contrived to turn the table round.”
I remembered the story now, but Holmes continued with a chortle.
“Phipps brought his mailed fist crashing down—and nothing happened. He struck four times with increasing force and desperation—at which point the wrong half of the table fell off. There was giggling in the stalls and a fist-fight with Caradoc behind the scenes. Rosemount Phipps was a young man of promise and he left the company next day.”
He turned to the velvet-suited messenger, who waited with insolent impatience.
“And now, sonny, we will proceed to the cab, which I assume you have ordered to wait.”