Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘Cannot your wife serve as your secretary?’

  ‘My precious Touie does not enjoy the best of health, as I think you know. She has a weak chest and a small daughter and a new house. She is frail. She cannot take on anything more. No, I must clear the correspondence that has accumulated and then stay on top of it. It can be done.’

  ‘It will be done,’ said Oscar emphatically, as the waiter arrived with the fresh bottle of Moselle. ‘And I shall assist you. Do not protest. We shall start work tomorrow — immediately after breakfast. I shall forgo my morning cure to be at your service.’ He raised his hand and shook his head. ‘Do not protest, Arthur,’ he repeated. ‘I insist.’

  I did not protest. I merely smiled. I was accustomed to Oscar’s sudden enthusiasms. I had no doubt that his offer was sincere, but equally I had no doubt that once the novelty of the enterprise had worn off, I would be working my way through Holmes’s correspondence alone.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And thank you for dinner. This wine really is outstanding and, for all that he’s an old soldier down on his luck, I’d say our waiter is looking after us rather well.’

  ‘He is,’ my friend conceded, smiling as he sipped at his wine.

  ‘But just now, Oscar,’ I continued, ‘as he was serving us, I studied his face quite closely. I saw no duelling scar.’

  Oscar raised his glass to me once more and narrowed his eyes. ‘You must allow a fellow writer a little licence, Arthur.’

  The following morning, at ten o’clock, as agreed, we gathered in the hotel lounge to begin our work. When I arrived, Oscar was already in place, seated alone at a card table by the window overlooking the promenade. He was heavily built and massive, with a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in his figure, but above his unwieldy frame perched a head so masterful in its broad brow, so alert in its blue-grey, deep-set eyes, so full in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind — and the outrageous garb. He was dressed in a bottle-green linen suit, sporting a pale-grey shirt and an elaborate daffodil-yellow tie that exactly matched the toecaps on his leather ankle boots. His overlong hair was swept back over his large head. He was freshly shaved; his cheeks were pink and his eyes sparkled.

  ‘You’ve clearly breakfasted well,’ I said, by way of greeting.

  ‘I am breakfasting now,’ he replied, indicating the small hand-rolled cigarette that he held between the middle and the ring finger of his left hand. ‘And never better. And I’ve ordered a bottle of iced champagne to help ease us into our labours: Perrier-Jouët ‘86. I adore simple pleasures, don’t you? They are the last refuge of the complex.’

  ‘Are you going to be saying clever things all morning?’ I asked, opening up my portmanteau and placing four bundles of correspondence on the table.

  ‘I hope so,’ he replied, pulling one of the bundles towards him. ‘Are we opening these at random? May I start?’

  ‘We are,’ I said, ‘and you may.’ I looked about the empty lounge as I took up my place facing Oscar across the card table. ‘Our fellow residents are all over at the bathhouse taking the waters, I presume?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, drawing languorously on his little cigarette. ‘We shall have nothing to disturb us now, except this correspondence and our consciences.’

  ‘Does your conscience trouble you, Oscar?’ I enquired, untying the bundle of letters before me.

  ‘Insufficiently, I fear. Life’s aim, if it has one, is to be always looking for temptations — and there are not nearly enough of them, I find. I sometimes pass the whole day without coming across a single one. It makes one so nervous about the future.’

  I smiled. ‘You’re on form today, my friend.’

  ‘I am hungry for excitement,’ he answered, waving his first opened letter towards me. His eyes scanned the paper and he sighed. ‘However, it seems I am not destined to find it here.’ He drew more impatiently on his cigarette. ‘Listen to this. “Dear Mr Holmes, I am secretary of the Godalming Gardening Society. During the winter months, when gardening is not possible, we run a series of lecture evenings and trust that you may be able to accept our invitation to address us on either 3 November or 1 December next at seven o’clock. We meet on the first Thursday of the month. We expect a talk of sixty minutes in duration, followed by questions from the floor. We are not able to offer a fee, but will cover all reasonable expenses and provide refreshment on the night. Our hope would be to hear something about the cases of yours that have not yet been reported in the Strand Magazine. We look for originality in all our speakers. I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience. Yours most sincerely, Edith Laban (Miss).”’ Oscar let the letter fall from his grasp. ‘Even the woman’s name is banal.’

  I smiled. ‘A postcard simply saying “Mr Holmes regrets he cannot oblige” will suffice, Oscar.’

  He picked up the letter again. ‘She has underlined the word “originality”, Arthur. The impertinence of the woman, the effrontery…’

  ‘Just scribble a note of regret on a postcard and be done with it, Oscar.’

  ‘I’m not sure we should reply at all — or perhaps I should reply on Holmes’s behalf and explain that he is unavailable but that I am willing to come in his stead. Yes, I think that Oscar Wilde should address the Godalming Gardening Society on 3 November. I am ready to be entirely original. I have things to tell the members of the Godalming Gardening Society that they are certain never to have heard before!’

  I laughed. ‘Give me the letter, Oscar. I shall reply.’

  My friend passed me the letter with a despairing snort and began to sort through the remainder of the pile in front of him.

  ‘Be warned,’ I said, ‘it’ll mostly be requests for autographs, photographs, and the recipe for Mrs Hudson’s apple pie.’

  ‘Ah,’ cried Oscar, holding aloft a small packet, about eight inches long and four inches wide. ‘This looks more promising.’

  ‘Do not get too excited. It is probably a book of sentimental poetry — a gift from the author. Sherlock Holmes has many female admirers.’

  ‘This comes from Italy,’ said Oscar, inspecting the package more closely. He studied the postmark. ‘From Rome. And the address is written out in capital letters. I think it’s more likely to be from a man. It does not feel like a book. It’s more malleable. Unbound proofs, perhaps.’

  He tore open the brown wrapping paper. Inside the package was a large unsealed envelope. Oscar shook the contents onto the table. What fell from the envelope appeared to be a human hand, severed at the wrist.

  2

  The tell-tale hand

  Oscar recoiled in horror and pushed his chair back from the table. ‘This is grotesque,’ he hissed.

  ‘It’s certainly a surprise,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t touch it, Arthur,’ cried Oscar.

  ‘It’s only a hand,’ I reassured him. ‘It won’t bite. And we’ve known worse. As I recall, when we were investigating the case of the candlelight murders, a severed head was delivered to your front door.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said, flinching at the recollection. I took out my pocket handkerchief and, using it, picked up the dismembered limb, holding it towards the window light to examine it. The skin was dark, the hand small; for a moment I thought it might have been the paw of a gorilla or an orang-utan.

  ‘It is a human hand?’ asked Oscar, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, inspecting it more closely.

  ‘It’s not made of wax or India rubber?’

  ‘It’s the real thing, I’m afraid — flesh and bone. It’s a right hand, quite small, quite smooth — almost delicate. I’d say it was a woman’s hand but for the rough cut and shaping of the fingernails. Look.’

  I held the hand out towards Oscar. My friend summoned up his courage and, through gimlet eyes, keeping his distance, he inspected the severed limb. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘It is quite delicate, I see.’<
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  ‘And look at the wrist. Look at the bone, look at the stump. It’s a clean cut, but brutally done. It’s the work of a butcher’s cleaver rather than a surgeon’s knife.’

  ‘And the black marks below the knuckles?’ enquired Oscar, peering closer.

  ‘Mottling, I’d say, nothing more, signs of age. And yet the palm is smooth, almost unlined. The hand looks young…

  ‘It’s not diseased?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Oscar winced as I brought the hand to my nostrils. ‘It’s been pickled, I reckon, or embalmed. That would explain the dark pigmentation of the skin —and the quality of the preservation. It’s a dead hand, but, apart from its colour, it has all the appearance of a living one.’

  I was about to lay the hand back on the table when heavy breathing and the clink of glasses alerted me to the arrival in the lounge of our Bavarian waiter from the night before. Rapidly I wrapped the dismembered limb in my handkerchief and thrust it into my jacket pocket.

  ‘Guten Morgen, mein Herr,’ cried Oscar, a touch over-exuberantly.

  Ponderously, in silence, the waiter opened the Perrier-Jouët and poured us each a glass. With an utterly irrelevant quotation from Goethe (something about the land where the lemon trees grow!), Oscar pressed an English florin into the man’s hand, explaining that it was the only coin he had about him but, as it bore a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, he trusted it would be acceptable as a modest token of our appreciation. The waiter said nothing. When he had gone, Oscar raised his glass and drank down his champagne in a single gulp. He poured himself a second glass and said quietly: ‘Arthur, you sit there with a dead man’s hand in your pocket. What does it mean? Why has it been sent to you?’

  ‘It’s not been sent to me. It’s been sent to Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Care of your publishers.’

  ‘No. Look at the label on the wrapping. It was sent to Holmes at 221B Baker Street, London. There’s no such address, of course. Baker Street runs up only to number 100. The post office covering the Marylebone district kindly collects the letters and forwards them to my publisher.’

  Oscar examined the brown wrapping paper. I looked at the envelope that had contained the hand itself. ‘It’s a sturdy envelope,’ I observed, ‘and made of quality paper.’

  ‘Is there a watermark?’

  I held the envelope up to the window. ‘No, not that I can see. It’s thick paper — card almost. It’s the sort of envelope that a lawyer might use to store deeds in, or a will.’

  ‘The envelope is unmarked?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘There’s no note inside? No message of any kind?’

  I looked inside the envelope. ‘No, there’s nothing.’ I put down the envelope and took a sip of the iced champagne. It was strange to taste champagne so early in the day. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘The hand is the message,’ mused Oscar, still studying the brown wrapping. ‘But what does it signify? Is it a cry for help?’

  ‘Or a warning?’

  ‘Or a threat?’

  ‘Or an act of madness?’ I put down my glass and smiled. ‘Is it simply a practical joke? An English admirer of Edgar Allan Poe once sent Holmes a dead raven.’

  Oscar looked up at me and pursed his lips. ‘Yes, well, we know an Englishman’s idea of ready wit is a bucket of water perched on top of a half-opened door — but this isn’t an Englishman’s work. This hand was sent to Holmes from Italy.’

  ‘Is the handwriting on the label Italian?’

  ‘Impossible to tell.’ Oscar scrutinised the wrapping once more. ‘The stamps are. The postmark is. “Roma, 8 marzo 1892”‘

  ‘Marzo? That’s March, Oscar. It’s now July. The package was sent four months ago.’

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘It may be. If this was a cry for help and it has gone unheeded, there may be others, yet more desperate.’ I turned to my portmanteau on the floor beside my chair and pulled out four more bundles of correspondence. ‘We must go through all this, I’m afraid, every item.’

  ‘How far back do these letters and packages go?’ asked Oscar, pushing his glass and ashtray to one side and taking a bundle from me.

  ‘To the beginning of the year. I have let it all accumulate since Christmas. I’ve been ignoring it because I find it so oppressive. I’m a doctor, Oscar. I’m a writer. I have no wish to be correspondence secretary to an imaginary detective. I’m not interested. I haven’t the time.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Arthur,’ my friend said, soothingly. ‘These letters are the fruits of your success. Take pride in the fact that you have created a character so vivid, so real, so tangible that strangers turn to him in their hour of need.’ Oscar was now rifling through a substantial handful of the correspondence, noting the postmark on every letter. ‘London, London, London, Chester, Plymouth, London, Glasgow, New York, Babbacombe, Leeds, London, Milwaukee, Moscow, the Isle of Wight …‘ He paused and looked up at me. ‘Holmes has conquered the world, Arthur. Be happy.’

  ‘I have a dead man’s hand in my pocket, Oscar,’ I said.

  ‘And between my thumb and forefinger,’ cried my friend exultantly, holding up a small cream-coloured envelope and waving it towards me, ‘I have another letter from Rome — look! “Roma, 22 gennaio 1892”.’

  ‘That’s January — open it, open it!’

  Oscar tore open the envelope and peered inside.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A note this time?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is a lock of hair.’ Oscar tipped the contents of the envelope onto his open palm. It was indeed a lock of hair, a thick loop about an inch in diameter and two inches in length. ‘It is hair the colour of honey,’ he said, gazing down at it.

  ‘It’s a brackish yellow, Oscar.’

  ‘It is golden,’ he persisted. ‘It’s the colour of a leaf in early autumn. It’s beautiful. Look at the shape. It might be a kiss-curl from a young boy’s forehead.’

  I lifted the lock of hair from his palm. It was surprisingly rough to the touch. ‘Or it might be a ringlet cut from an old lady’s wig,’ I suggested. ‘The hair feels very coarse.’ I held it to my nostrils. ‘It smells musty. It smells of overripe apples.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Oscar, raising his glass to me. ‘The very smell of it evokes Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘Three glasses of champagne in lieu of breakfast, Oscar, and you’ll say anything.’

  ‘But isn’t it possible?’ he asked, earnestly, putting down his glass and leaning across the table towards me. ‘This lock of hair, the severed hand in your pocket: they could have been cut from the butchered body of some poor Italian youth…’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Or the hair could have come from a wig — that’s what it feels like. And the hand could have been cut from a legitimate cadaver, in the dissecting room of a hospital or in a respectable mortuary.’

  ‘Then why send them to Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘As a hoax? As an unpleasant joke?’

  ‘Or as evidence of a terrible crime. You must concede that is at least a possibility, Arthur?’ Quickly, he lit another of his home-rolled cigarettes and, sucking on it urgently to draw the smoke, he continued to rifle through the piles of correspondence on the table. I joined him in the task. ‘We must look at every envelope,’ he said. ‘There may be more from Rome.’

  There was. Among the last batch of letters we inspected — it was, in fact, the batch that had contained the original package with the severed hand — I came across a third, and final, envelope bearing Italian stamps. The postmark read: ‘Roma, 15 maggio 1892’.

  Oscar raised his glass to me, as if in triumph. ‘Is the handwriting the same as before?’ he asked.

  ‘It appears to be. With capital letters it’s difficult to tell. But the address is written in black ink, as before, and in a steady hand. It’s a different envelope, smaller than the first, larger than the second. But it’s evidently from
the same source.’

  ‘Open it up,’ commanded Oscar. ‘What will it be this time?’

  ‘A photograph of the sender, I hope, with a detailed letter of explanation — preferably in English.’ I opened the envelope. There was no letter. I saw at once what was inside and tipped the contents onto the littered table.

  ‘Ah,’ cried Oscar, narrowing his eyes, ‘just what I’ve been wanting: a small cigar.’

  ‘I think not, Oscar,’ I said. ‘You really have drunk too much. Look at it, man. It’s a finger — a human finger — an index finger, I’d say, severed at the knuckle.’

  Oscar peered down at the table suspiciously. ‘It looks like a small Havana to me. Look, there’s the cigar band.’

  ‘That’s a ring, Oscar.’ I shook my head and sighed, unable to decide whether my friend was being playful or perverse. ‘May I borrow your handkerchief?’ I asked.

  ‘If you must,’ he said, fishing into his top left-hand coat pocket and handing me an apricot-coloured square of silk.

  Carefully, I laid out the finger on Oscar’s handkerchief and, from my own pocket, produced the severed hand, laying it, palm down, alongside the severed digit. ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘I think the members of the Godalming Gardening Society would be in for a treat if one took these along as exhibits.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Oscar?’ I said, somewhat impatiently. ‘Concentrate, would you? Focus.’

  ‘What don’t I see?’ he asked, pouring himself yet more champagne. ‘It’s plain enough, alas. I see a dead man’s hand and a dead man’s finger.’

  ‘But you don’t,’ I said. ‘Or, at least, not necessarily so. Who is to say these limbs belong to a man?’

  ‘Do they belong to a beast?’ he cried, melodramatically.

  ‘No, but the hand might be a woman’s. It is small and smooth. We must not make assumptions, Oscar. We must consider the evidence.’ My friend sipped his wine, gazing steadily at the hand and finger that lay on the table before him. When I sensed that I had his full attention once more, I went on: ‘These limbs do not come from the same person, Oscar.’