Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘Of course,’ he exclaimed. ‘Murder it must have been. I did not need a book to help me to that conclusion. It is obvious.’

  ‘It is not obvious to me, Oscar.’

  ‘Come now, Arthur. Tuminello tells us his long-kept secret — that he is to be God’s advocate in the cause of the canonisation of little Agnes — and within hours of this revelation, he dies. You and I have not killed him, so who has?’

  ‘Why should anybody kill him?’

  ‘Because his advocacy of Agnes’s cause will lead inevitably to a thorough investigation of her death, and whoever killed Pio Nono’s little lamb of God all those years ago won’t want that …‘

  ‘In your view whoever killed that poor child on 7 February 1878 also killed Monsignor Tuminello yesterday?’

  ‘Indubitably. Tuminello told us that achieving the canonisation of little Agnes had become his “life’s purpose”. Once known, his determination to uncover the truth about her death ensured his own. On Sunday, he was either seen by someone talking to us, or we were overheard, or perhaps, naively, he unburdened himself to one of his colleagues … Whatever it was, on Monday he was killed.’ Oscar raised his glass as if to the late Monsignor’s memory. ‘Who’s next, I wonder?’

  ‘You think the murderer will not stop at Tuminello?’

  ‘Anyone pursuing the truth about the death of little Agnes represents a threat to her murderer. The man — I am assuming it is a man — killed a defenceless child, Arthur. The secret he once thought safe has been disturbed. To safeguard that secret, he will stop at nothing.’

  I looked around the sun-drenched piazza. The hurdy-gurdy music played on, but I noticed that the feral lads from up the hill had disappeared. In their place, a pair of nuns, in black habits with well-starched white cornettes, stood arm in arm watching the dancing dog running round in circles chasing its own tail.

  ‘So even we are not safe?’ I said, surveying the comfortable scene.

  Oscar leant across the table towards me. ‘We’re here, engaged on Tuminello’s business, at his behest. We in particular, Arthur, are not safe. Why else do you think we are drinking French champagne? It’s a deuced expensive drink in Italy, but so long as I can see every bottle as it’s uncorked and keep it within my sights until it’s drained, I can be sure the wine’s not been tampered with. It’s the only way.’ He emptied the last of the champagne into my glass. ‘Peel every peach yourself and make sure you lock your hotel room tonight. We don’t want you murdered in your bed. You never know who may not be rattling at the door.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we inform the police?’ I asked.

  ‘The Swiss Guard or the carabinieri?’

  ‘Either? Both?’

  ‘According to the natives, neither can be trusted and each is as incompetent as the other. And I don’t think they’d be inclined to read Butler’s Lives of the Saints or Twain’s Innocents Abroad, do you, even in translation?’

  ‘Be serious, Oscar.’

  ‘I am serious. We need to wrap this up ourselves, Arthur. And we shall. Within twenty-four hours, as soon as the Capuchin friar is back from Capri. I have a plan. You’ll be back in South Norwood by the end of the week, my friend.’ He delved into his inside jacket pocket and produced a couple of telegrams, one of which he passed to me. ‘I opened it inadvertently. I apologise. Your darling wife is missing you.’

  I took Touie’s telegram and opened it to read her brief and loving message.

  ‘She calls you her “soul’s partner”, I see,’ said Oscar, his head tilted to one side, his eyes appraising me. ‘Another fine sentiment, but quite a responsibility.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pocketing the telegram and turning back to my glass.

  ‘Marriage is quite a responsibility,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘A world of pains and troubles is very necessary to school an intelligence and make it a soul, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘That’s rather deep. Is that you and the champagne speaking, Oscar, or John Keats?’

  ‘I don’t recall — but it’s rather good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is Keats,’ said Axel Munthe, firmly. ‘And it was murder, Mr Wilde. You were right.’

  The Swedish doctor brought over a chair from an adjacent table and sat down facing us, sitting forward so that my shadow fell on him, shading his eyes. He folded his hands together and rested them on Oscar’s pile of books. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said, nodding to each of us in turn.

  ‘Murder, eh?’ murmured Oscar. ‘I am sorry to hear it, but I am delighted, too. It’s always charming to be found in the right.’ He dropped the end of his cigarette into his empty champagne glass. ‘Monsignor Tuminello was conducting Mass alone?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘With an acolyte or two in attendance, but no other priests?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘In the Sistine Chapel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the high altar, before a small congregation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And at the conclusion of the service, before pronouncing the final blessing, he suffered his “heart attack”? He arched backwards up onto his heels and fell forward clutching at his chest?’

  ‘By all accounts, exactly so. Who told you?’

  ‘No one told me.’

  ‘Then how did you guess?’

  ‘I didn’t “guess”,’ declared Oscar indignantly. ‘Occasionally, I allow myself an imaginative leap, but I never “guess”. As Arthur’s friend Holmes will tell you, it’s a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twists facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’

  ‘Then, how did you know?’ demanded Munthe.

  ‘My father was a doctor. I was brought up in a household filled with medical textbooks. I like to read. I am familiar with the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. I take it that it was strychnine?’

  ‘I fear that it was,’ said Munthe.

  ‘Mixed, I suppose, with the communion wine?’

  ‘Yes. There were still plentiful traces of the poisoned wine at the back of his throat when I examined him.’

  Oscar turned to me with a look of satisfaction on his wide face and revealed his crooked teeth in a complacent smile. ‘An ingenious way to kill a Catholic priest, eh, Arthur? Try the same trick in an Anglican church and you’d kill the whole congregation. In the Church of England, when it comes to taking the Holy Sacrament it’s liberty hall: every communicant is given the wine as well as the bread at communion. At a Catholic Mass, the celebrant alone takes the wine. So long as the murderer knows who will be conducting the Mass, he can place his poison in the sacramental wine decanter at any point before the service starts and then be a mile away, or more, by the time his intended victim raises the chalice to his lips and the grisly death occurs …’

  He looked around for a waiter from whom to order a second bottle of champagne, evidently in celebratory mood. I turned to Axel Munthe. ‘I am going to give my character Sherlock Holmes an older brother and model him on Oscar. I shall sit him in a chair in his club from which he’ll never stir—’

  ‘Like Diogenes in his tub?’ quipped Oscar, as he caught the waiter’s eye.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘And from there, in his club, in his chair, I will let the sedentary sage solve every crime that comes his way.’

  ‘I shall be stirring myself tomorrow,’ said Oscar, turning his attention back to us. ‘You will be, too, Arthur. We are going to host an old-fashioned English tea party — in the Capuchin church of the Immaculate Conception.’

  ‘Why there?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Mark Twain says it’s a “must see” for all who come to Rome, and because Brother Matteo is a Capuchin and a key player in our unfolding drama.’

  ‘Brother Matteo will be there?’

  ‘We need them all there, Arthur: Brother Matteo, the Grand Penitentiary, the Pontifical Master of Ceremonies, the sacristan, the Reverend Engli
sh and his sister, even the egregious Rennell Rodd. We must despatch the invitations as a matter of urgency.’

  ‘Will they come?’

  ‘We shall lure them there with the promise of a reading of your newest Sherlock Holmes mystery …

  ‘I’ve not written it yet,’ I protested.

  ‘This isn’t until tomorrow, Arthur,’ he said playfully, greeting the arrival of the fresh champagne with an elaborate salaam.

  Axel Munthe looked at Oscar sternly. ‘You seem in a remarkably gay mood, given the news I’ve brought. Monsignor Tuminello has been murdered, Mr Wilde.’

  ‘If he was a good man, he is in heaven already,’ said Oscar, now eyeing the waiter as he eased open the bottle of champagne. ‘We are not to mourn for our brother’s soul being in heaven, surely?’

  The waiter offered Oscar the wine to taste: he sipped it gingerly, then took a mouthful and rolled it around his tongue before swallowing it gratefully and nodding his approval to the waiter.

  ‘And if there was the odd venial sin still outstanding, he will be in Purgatory — with his fingers crossed. Either way, he is in a better place than this vale of tears.’

  The waiter made to charge our glasses; I covered mine with an open palm. ‘Did Tuminello die instantly?’ I asked Axel Munthe.

  ‘From what I gather, within moments of suffering the spasm. It seems that the poor man breathed his last even as he was being carried from the altar to the sacristy.’

  ‘Who carried him?’ Oscar enquired.

  ‘Cesare Verdi and one of the acolytes.’

  ‘It was definitely a lethal dose then?’ I said.

  ‘It was no accident, Dr Conan Doyle.’

  ‘But all present took it to be a heart attack?’ asked Oscar, placing a glass of champagne in front of Munthe.

  ‘Yes, that’s how it appeared.’

  ‘And you did not disabuse them?’

  ‘I followed your instructions.’

  ‘And you examined him discreetly?’

  ‘Cesare Verdi had laid him Out on the seat of tears, but I was on my own when I examined him and I have spoken to no one since.’

  ‘Good,’ said Oscar. ‘Thank you. That should provide us with the time we need to gather in the final pieces of the puzzle.’ He sipped at his champagne and, over the rim of his glass, looked beadily into Axel Munthe’s blinking eyes. ‘Do not misunderstand me, Doctor. I do not take Luigi Tuminello’s death lightly. I am exhilarated just now because the play is reaching its climax, the curtain is in sight and I look forward to the audience’s applause. But I am stricken, too. My conscience pricks — and so should yours. I’ve played my part in Tuminello’s death. And so have you.’

  ‘In any event, he was not long for this world,’ said Munthe, transferring his gaze from Oscar to the champagne glass before him. ‘He was not a well man.’

  ‘It was you who prescribed him strychnine, Doctor—’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Munthe, looking up sharply, ‘But not a lethal dose or anything like one. Very occasionally I gave him a thousandth of a grain, as a stimulant, and I administered it personally.’

  ‘Were you in Rome on the day that little Agnes died —on 7 February 1878?’

  Munthe looked perplexed. ‘On the day that Pope Pius IX died? Yes, as it happens, I was. I was a student, aged twenty, on my first trip to Italy.’

  ‘And you went to the Vatican that day?’

  ‘I did, out of curiosity. I was not alone. The pope was dying — all Rome knew that.’

  ‘So you were there, locus in quo, on the day that little Agnes died.’

  Munthe laughed. ‘I was, but I did not kill her. I do assure you of that. And I did not kill Tuminello.’

  ‘Do not protest too much, Doctor. Are you not, like Keats, by your own admission, “half in love with easeful death”?’

  ‘I did not kill the child, Agnes. I did not kill Monsignor Tuminello.’

  ‘If you didn’t, then who did, I wonder?’ Oscar raised his champagne glass to his lips and looked out across the grand piazza.

  I smiled. ‘You believe you know, don’t you, Oscar?’

  ‘I believe I do, Arthur. And, God willing, tomorrow afternoon, over tea at the Capuchin church, all will be revealed. And Arthur, while I explain the mystery, you can serve the cucumber sandwiches.’

  22

  Old bones

  The austere and elegant church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII in the year 1626 at the instigation of his younger brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who was both powerful and of the Capuchin order. In 1631, on the church’s completion, Barberini commanded that the mortal remains of thousands of Capuchin friars be exhumed and transferred from the old Capuchin friary of the Holy Cross near by to the crypt of the new church of the Immaculate Conception. There, over time, in five interconnecting subterranean chapels, the bones of more than four thousand Capuchins were laid to rest. They were neither buried nor entombed but displayed: as a celebration of the dead and a reminder to the living. Bones — thousands of bones — laid out in extraordinary, elaborate, ornamental patterns, adorn the walls and ceilings of the church crypt. Complete skeletons, some dressed in Franciscan habits, lie or sit or crouch in dark corners and individual niches. A plaque in one of the chapels reads: ‘What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.’

  It was at this bizarre ossuary that Oscar chose to host his English tea party and bring what he termed ‘the drama of the Vatican murders’ to its climax. It was in this dimly lit gallery of bones and skeletons that he insisted that I hand round cups of Indian tea and plates of cucumber sandwiches (thinly sliced and lightly salted). To my astonishment, the Capuchin church was happy to allow my friend to commandeer the crypt for his divertissement. Indeed, it turned out that the priest in charge had a ‘set fee’ for an afternoon’s hire of the crypt and since Brother Matteo, a good Capuchin and friend to the church, was to be of the party, and Oscar was ready to pay four times the going rate, there were no awkward questions asked.

  To my delight, Catherine English agreed to help me with the refreshments. The sandwiches were not a problem. It turned out that in the larder of her apartment at All Saints she had a ready supply of bread she had baked in the English manner; I bought fresh cucumbers from the vegetable market on Piazza Barberini, and Darjeeling tea from the English tea-rooms by the Spanish Steps. And at the church of the Immaculate Conception we found a stove, a kettle and sufficient crockery for our purpose in the pantry adjacent to the crypt.

  The guests were invited for four o’clock and all came, in good order and in good humour — in remarkably good humour, I thought, under the circumstances.

  ‘They are excited by the prospect of hearing your story,’ Oscar whispered to me teasingly.

  ‘They will be disappointed, then,’ I said.

  ‘A little disconcerted, perhaps, but when they hear what I have to offer in its place I believe their attention will be held.’

  The trio of chaplains-in-residence from the Vatican were the first to arrive. Monsignor Felici, the Pontifical Master of Ceremonies, vast and wheezing, but with a twinkle in his eye, descended the crypt’s stone steps, gripping Brother Matteo by the arm. The friar, stalwart, upright, equable as ever, though returned from Capri only that lunchtime, betrayed no sign of weariness. When I asked after Father Bechetti’s funeral, he nodded gently and said simply, ‘E andato bene, grazie.’ Monsignor Breakspear brought up the rear, bubbling with bonhomie.

  ‘I love this church,’ he declared to no one in particular. ‘Urban VIII was brought up by Jesuits, of course. He was urbane, arguably the most civilised of all the popes. As we can tell from Caravaggio’s portrait, he was wonderfully handsome. He had a brilliant mind and exquisite taste. He got the better of Galileo in debate. He wrote fine poetry and beautiful prose.’ Breakspear caught my eye and beamed at me. ‘He would have enjoyed your work, Conan Doyle. If only poor Tuminello was still with us, he might have been able to summon
up Urban’s ghost to listen to your story this afternoon.’

  I smiled wanly at the Grand Penitentiary and offered him a cucumber sandwich.

  ‘The Lord be praised,’ he breathed. ‘These do look like the real thing.’ He took a bite of a sandwich and gazed about him. We were standing in the ‘crypt of skulls’, the empty eye-sockets of a legion of dead Capuchins staring down at us. ‘Perhaps Tuminello can hear us,’ he said, ‘and Father Bechetti too. And Pope Urban …’

  ‘And Pio Nono?’ suggested Oscar, joining the group.

  ‘Pio Nono was very hard of hearing towards the end,’ said Monsignor Breakspear, beaming at me once more. ‘Be sure to speak up during your reading, Conan Doyle.’

  Hurriedly I moved away, mumbling that I had to be about my butler’s duties. I took my dish of sandwiches through to the ‘crypt of the pelvises’, where I found the Reverend Martin English, Axel Munthe and James Rennell Rodd, teacups in hand, standing in a semicircle and peering up at a ceiling rosette formed by seven shoulder blades set in a frame of sacral bones, vertebrae and feet.

  ‘We don’t do this sort of thing in England, do we?’ murmured Rennell Rodd. ‘I’m glad.’ He looked at my plate of sandwiches. ‘This is more like it,’ he said.

  Truth to tell, everyone at the gathering seemed more taken with the tea and sandwiches than the extraordinary memento mori all around them. Indeed, everyone, it appeared, apart from Oscar and myself, knew the crypt already.

  ‘It has been a tourist attraction since the eighteenth century,’ Axel Munthe explained. ‘The Marquis de Sade, Hans Andersen, Mark Twain: they’ve all written it up. When you’ve been to St Peter’s and seen the Pietà, this is where you come next.’

  ‘The English do come,’ said Rennell Rodd, ‘but rarely more than once. It’s not terribly jolly, is it?’

  ‘We Swedes come time and time again,’ replied Axel Munthe, pleasantly. ‘We find it very soothing.’