Had it not been so gloomy, Conan Doyle’s companions would have seen him blush.
“Your dress reveals much, Arthur. You are wearing a very fine bespoke suit — beautifully tailored might I add — rather than your work-a-day tweeds. You sport a beaver top hat, a fresh boutonniere, and have obviously spent a great deal of effort on your toilet, including taking the time to wax your extravagant moustaches, which I must confess positively coruscate in the light. Were we actually heading to jail you would be the talk of the prison yard. A man as practical as Arthur Conan Doyle does not take such pains with his attire to dine with an old school chum or a chalk-dusted academic. You have clearly dressed for a lady friend. A young and fetching lady, I would wager. Another good reason to dodge your usual haunts to avoid wagging tongues—”
“Yes, thank you, Oscar,” Conan Doyle interrupted. “And I think that’s quite enough. I assume you were carousing at The Savoy, as usual?”
The Irishman trilled with laughter. “Au contraire. It is scarcely ten o’clock. Oscar Wilde does not begin to carouse until midnight at the very earliest. No, I was visiting the Haymarket Theatre. My new play is in its third week. I look in on the production from time to time. To boost company morale. To thrill my audiences with a personal appearance… and to count the box office receipts. Plus I am a great aficionado of my own work. I love the sound of my own voice. And I love to hear the sound of my own voice coming out of someone else’s mouth. It is the primary reason for my connexion with the theater; it ensures I am never far from the thing I love most.”
“Well now you’ve found me,” Conan Doyle said, and turned his attention to the policeman sitting opposite. “Can you reveal, Detective Blenkinsop, what has prompted Scotland Yard to search for me so diligently?”
Blenkinsop drew the homburg from his head and held it slackly in his hands, turning it slowly by the brim. “There’s been a murder — no, not a murder. That ain’t right. I guess you’d properly call it… an assassination.”
Conan Doyle and Wilde exchanged stunned glances.
“Are we permitted to know whom?” Wilde asked.
The young detective’s expression grew tragic. “The whole world will know soon enough: Lord Howell.”
Both Wilde and Conan Doyle grunted as if gut-punched.
“The prime minister’s secretary for war,” Conan Doyle muttered in shocked tones.
Wilde leaned forward, his expression tense. “An assassination, you say? Do you suspect the party or parties responsible for such an act?”
Blenkinsop shook his head. “Not a clue. Right now all we got is the body. But it’s not just the murder. It’s how he was murdered. The murder scene…” A gasp tore loose from Blenkinsop, whose eyes lost focus as he stared blankly into space. “I can’t tell ya no more. I can’t describe it. I seen some dark doings in me days as a copper. But I ain’t never seen nothing like this. When I shut me eyes, I can still see it.”
With Blenkinsop unwilling to reveal more, the men fell into a tense silence for the rest of the journey. Held to a slow walk by the fog, the horses clop-clopped through deserted streets, at times narrowly avoiding horseless, abandoned carriages that loomed like shipwrecks in the fog. And so the Black Mariah took thirty minutes to travel less than a mile to reach its destination. When Conan Doyle and Wilde finally climbed out, the fog had grown thicker still, caging the streetlamps in tremulous globes of light.
Conan Doyle, who knew London intimately, looked about, utterly lost, and asked in a baffled voice, “Where the devil are we?”
“Belgravia, sir,” Detective Blenkinsop answered. He nodded toward the limestone façade of a handsome residence where two constables stood guard on either side of the front gate. “That there is Lord Howell’s residence.”
As he spoke, a third constable came staggering out of the house. He wobbled a rubber-legged path to the pavement where he doubled over and vomited explosively into the gutter. Conan Doyle and Wilde jumped back to avoid having their shoes splashed as a second wave hit and the officer gargled up the remainder of his dinner. As he sagged to his knees, clutching the railings for support, the young constable looked up at them, his face wretched with horror, and moaned, “Don’t go in there!”
Conan Doyle shared a look with Wilde, whose eyes were saucered, his complexion waxen and ghastly in the otherworldly throb of gaslight.
“Oscar, perhaps it would be better if you remained outside. As a medical doctor, I am used to such sights—”
“No,” Wilde shook his head. “If I do not see for myself then you shall be forced to describe it to me, and I fear my imagination excels when it comes to fathoming horrible things from nothing.”
“Right then,” Conan Doyle said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Boyle! Jennings!” Blenkinsop called to the two officers posted on either side of the gate. Lend the gentlemen your rain capes,” he fixed the two friends with a dire look. “You’ll be needin’ them, I reckon.”
With their fine clothes protected beneath long police rain capes, Conan Doyle and Wilde cautiously stepped up to the front door — or rather, what remained of it. A solid chunk of milled and planed English oak, the door had been smashed violently inward, tearing the mortise lock completely through the doorframe and wrenching two of the three hinges loose. Once painted ivory, the door gleamed crimson with spattered gore. The two friends stood goggling at the site, which bore mute testament to an act of extreme violence. Although the door had been solidly locked — they could see the exposed brass tenon — something with the force of a steam locomotive had smashed straight through it. They entered the house and found the marble tiles of the entrance hall slippery with blood. The footprints of every police officer that had entered the space tracked in all directions, like macabre steps in a dance studio from hell. Conan Doyle cast a doubting look at his tall Irish friend. “Really, Oscar, I don’t think there’s a need for you to see this.”
Wilde, who had yanked a scented handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it over his nose and mouth, shook his head. “No,” he said in a muffled voice. “Proceed. I have witnessed the dreadful prologue. I must see how the act ends.”
Their feet slithered across blood-slick tiles to a front parlor where the same maniacal force had also ripped the lighter parlor door to splinters. Inside the room, toppled chairs and broken furniture testified to a dreadful struggle. The tepid air of the parlor roiled with the ferric tang of blood. Beside an overturned divan, a body lay on the floor. Conan Doyle stepped around a broken end table to inspect it.
The corpse had a face both men recognized from the newspapers: Lord Montague Howell, hero of the battle of Alma and the siege of Sevastopol — amongst a score of Crimean campaigns. Miraculously, the handsome features had escaped unscathed; the blue eyes retained a calm gaze, the lids drooped slightly, a rictus-smile drawing back the lips, showing strong white teeth beneath a scrupulously groomed brown moustache. However, Lord Howell’s head was unnaturally kinked upon his neck.
With his years of medical experience, Conan Doyle was used to blood and death, but as he stepped closer, his gorge rose and invisible needles tattooed his face as he saw, to his horror, that the body was lying chest down.
The head had been twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, so that it pointed in the wrong direction.
“Dear God!” he gasped. “His neck has been wrung like a pigeon’s.” He crouched down to examine ten finger-sized bruises, five tattooed on either side of the neck. “And by someone with a demon’s grip.”
Wilde made a dry heaving sound and gripped a drinks cabinet to steady himself. “I think I shall look for clues outside,” he said in a squeezed-tight voice.