Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Globe Murders

by Barry Day

  Dr Freud has made a special study of the workings of the human mind, particularly in its less ordered conditions, and when I read in today’s paper that the great man was visiting London …”

  “Yes, I am to supervise the translation of my work into English. It is called The Interpretation of Dreams. It is not—as you would say—‘a piece of cake.’

  “Your language is insufficiently precise for my purposes.”

  Holmes chose to ignore this linguistic cavil. “So you see, Watson, I do read something besides the crime reports and the agony column,” he smiled. “I contacted my friend immediately, sent him some background reading and asked him if he would spare us a few moments. As you see, he has been good enough to accept my invitation. Gentlemen, why don’t we make ourselves comfortable in the lounge?”

  Freud gave a precise little nod and we both followed Holmes into a small parlour-like room, where we made ourselves comfortable around a somewhat rickety table.

  The good doctor opened his mouth as if to say something but Holmes raised a hand to prevent him. “Sigmund, I’m afraid you have the temporary advantage of Watson here and I am anxious he should be fully informed before you give us your expert opinion. Events unfolded somewhat briskly these past few hours and it seemed imperative to get the relevant papers into your hands with all dispatch. You have them with you?”

  Freud produced several sheets of folded paper from an inside pocket and I could see at a glance they were more of the cablegrams we had received earlier. Without a word he passed them across to me.

  “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to glance through what Pinkertons have to say, Watson. They have been their usual effective selves and provided us with the missing piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, what they have unearthed—especially in the light of last evening’s events—gives more rather than less cause for concern.”

  The cablegram, which ran to several pages, was headed—“Re: Mrs Joan Lithgow.”

  “Who is ‘Mrs Joan Lithgow?” I looked up from the papers.

  “Read on, Watson. All will become clear.”

  I did as he asked.

  There was a covering note from the man Summers, stating that they had been unable to contact the final name on Holmes’s list in person and it was believed that he had left the US, probably for England, some months ago. there followed details of the adoption of a male child through the Blackett Adoption Agency of Seattle by a Mr and Mrs Christopher Lowe in February 1866. Having remained in the Seattle area for many years, the family had moved to Canada where both the Lowes had been killed in a railway accident almost a year ago—at which point their son, who had lived with them throughout, had disappeared from the family home after settling their affairs. His name was Henry.

  I couldn’t refrain from interrupting my reading once more. “Henry Lowe? We haven’t even met a Henry Lowe! What has all this to do with the Globe and someone trying to assassinate the Queen?”

  “The human mind will often take a tortuous and tortured path to reach what it believes to be the light,” Holmes replied, “and when that mind sees life through a distorted prism …But you will soon see what I mean.”

  I returned to my reading. Their investigations—Summers continued—had revealed the fact that the Lowes had another child, a daughter, also adopted. Her name was Joan, she was three years older than Henry and was now married to an engineer called Lithgow and living in San Francisco. She had been contacted and the letter that followed was her sworn deposition.

  To Whom it May Concern:

  I write this out of concern for my brother, Henry Lowe. My parents adopted him when I was three years old. They had hoped for a child of their own and the doctors had told them that, after adopting a first child, a woman often conceives. In their case this was not to be but Henry—as they called the baby—gave them all the joy they could have wished for from their own child and I could not have wished for a more wonderful brother. From his earliest years he was full of fun and imagination. He would invent little plays in which I was always cast as the maiden in distress and he the hero who would rescue me from the wicked dragon or whatever. We were a very happy family.

  It was my parents who sparked Henry’s interest in the theatre and acting. There was no serious theatre within many miles of where we lived, so they formed their own little amateur group, which they called The Lowe Players and Henry, even as a very young boy, would make himself useful behind the scenes and sometimes in small parts.

  Then, when he was about fifteen, he had an accident on his sledge one winter. It crashed into a tree and he suffered appalling head injuries. He was young, so he got over the physical aspects fairly quickly but he was never quite the same Henry in other ways. He would suffer from terrible headaches and there would be wild mood swings. One minute he would be on top of the world, the next he’d be in a black depression. The doctors said he’d probably grow out of it and all we could do was hope they were right.

  The drama group seemed as though it might be his salvation. He threw himself into it more and more and became a very fair actor. He began to study the history of the theatre and he’d buy up old secondhand books, beg and borrow them from anywhere.

  Then one day he took me aside and said he’d made a great discovery and that he had to tell me but I mustn’t share it with anyone else. He made me swear on the Bible. At first I thought it was a big joke but he was so intense that I began to feel curiously frightened. Then he showed me this old book about Elizabethan theatres. Of course, it meant nothing to me. All I could see on the page he marked was an old drawing of a round wooden building without a proper roof. When I said as much, he got really angry. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “Look at the name in the caption underneath!” So I did. It said ‘Henslowe’s Rose’. I still didn’t understand. He seized me by the shoulders and began to shake me. “The line,” he said, “it wasn’t broken after all. We’re the continuation of the line. Henry … Lowe … Hens-lowe.” At first I thought he was joking, then I realised he was in deadly earnest. A pulse was beating in his forehead and he kept putting his hand up to it. By this time the anger had passed and I got him to sit down quietly, as I tried to explain that it was just a coincidence. Lowe wasn’t even our real name for either of us. We were adopted and we’d never been told what our real names were.

  That seemed to make him sad for a while, then he said—“But that’s just it. It’s a reincarnation. It was all meant.” Then a puzzled look came over his face. “Perhaps I’m the one and Mom and Dad aren’t supposed to know. We mustn’t tell them—it may affect the line of Destiny.”

  To cut a long story short, he made me promise to keep the secret which wasn’t difficult—for what could I have told them that wouldn’t have worried them sick? But I must say the secret seemed to please him and to an extent, calm him. Every now and then he’d come and tell me of another discovery from his ‘research.’ “You know Dad’s name is Christopher?” he said one day. “Well, who do you think was Henslowe’s’s main playwright? Christopher Mar-lowe. And he was mysteriously killed in a fight in a tavern. They were out to get us even then.”

  He would go on like this and one day I asked him who ‘they’ were. Then he told me how Henslowe and his Rose theatre were finally put out of business by the people who built another theatre nearby. The Globe, I think it was, and they had Shakespeare writing all these great plays for it. When he got to this part, Henry would get very excited and start saying that he—Shakespeare—had been ‘theirs’, the Rose’s, until the plot began. He seemed to have learned every word the man ever wrote off by heart—at least, that’s the way it seemed to me.

  I’m making him sound as if he was really weird all the time but that’s wrong. Mostly, he was the same sweet boy I’d grown up with. It was just this one subject and it seemed to be like a lightning conductor for all the bad feelings, so I was glad in a way and even got used to it. And, as I say, our parents never knew anything.

  Then the time came when I got married and moved
away. I wasn’t too worried about Henry by then. He seemed so much better. Clay, my husband, and I started a family of our own and time went by. Henry got an office job but most of his spare time went into the acting group and we kept in touch. I’d almost forgotten about what I used to think of as ‘Henry’s Dream’ and I supposed he had, too. Perhaps he had.

  One day about a year ago I got the dreadful message that our folks were dead—both of them, just like that. I came back for the funeral, of course, but Henry had arranged everything. There was so much to do that there wasn’t time for much private conversation and, in any case, I had Clay and my two little ones with me. But as we left the graveside, Henry said a strange thing to me. He said—“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. The Rose will be avenged.” I didn’t have the occasion to question him on what he meant by that and the next day we had to leave.

  And that’s the last I’ve seen of him. I had a note from the solicitors a few weeks later telling me what I’d been left in the will. Apparently, Henry had instructed them to put the family house on the market and I was to have the proceeds. He wanted nothing. He told them he had some very old unfinished family business to attend to and he left the town the very next day.

  He’s in my mind often and I wonder how he is. Henry is a good man but he needs help. I just hope he finds a friend who will lead him to peace of mind.”

  And there Joan Lithgow’s letter ended. There was a postscript from Summers informing Holmes that a few days after Henry Lowe’s departure, there had been a report of a break in at the offices of the Blackett Adoption Agency. Only the historical files had been disturbed and it was not yet known if any were missing.

  I handed the papers back to Holmes. “I’d be prepared to bet a pound to a penny that the only one they won’t find will be marked ‘Charlotte Mencken.’”

  “For once, Watson, that’s not a bet I’d take. I think we can safely assume that Henry Lowe, in his determination to trace his antecedents, found enough evidence in that simple folder to set him on a trail which led him from Charlotte Mencken to Carlotta Adler to the man who married her, Florenz Adler, who just happens to be rebuilding the playhouse that destroyed the Rose. A skein of happenstance that will have all the inevitability of Greek—or, more aptly, Shakespearean—tragedy to his soured mind …”

  “Hamlet.” This from Freud, more of a statement than a question.

  “Hamlet, indeed,” Holmes replied, “which is why our friend Mr Allan was so anxious to play the part that he laid siege to Adler the moment he got off the boat. In doing so, he immediately began to create a situation in which confusion would become more confounded.”

  “Ah, so …” Freud picked up the thread. “I doubt very much that he realises Adler is his natural father. Indeed, if he even suspects it, his ego will be fighting it. He is fixated on Carlotta Adler, the woman he knows to be his mother. But in his fantasy he has also equated her with Gertrude, who, he believes, is betraying his unknown but presumably dead and certainly heroic father with Adler, the Claudius figure. In one way or another both must be punished for the sins of omission and commission. Yet to punish his mother recreates the Oedipus myth and leads to unbearable sin. The man is being torn apart by the Furies. He needs to invent nothing more. Shakespeare has already written the text for him.”

  “The man is hopelessly torn. Like many children, he probably fantasised about being a foundling. His parents weren’t his real parents—something which, in due course, he found to be true, thus giving greater credibility to the rest of his imaginings. By that time, however, he was locked into another parallel fantasy. He was the reincarnation of Rose and its protagonists. With no one qualified to advise him …” He coughed modestly—“something like this was almost certain to happen. The real Allan—if I may call him so—wishes no one any real harm. He merely wishes to upset Adler’s plans and so rebuke his mother. But the dark side of him cries out for Revenge!” Here he almost leapt to his feet, so convinced was he by his own rhetoric. “It is a question of which side will prevail. I find it a most interesting case.”

  “Ted Allan, eh?” I mused aloud. “Had my eye on him from the beginning.” Holmes’s quizzical expression caused me to change the subject hurriedly into a question—“But why did he choose that particular name? No one would have recognised him if he’d kept his own name …”

  Freud was now clearly into one of his favourite subjects. Putting his fingers together—perhaps in unconscious emulation of the way Holmes himself was now sitting—his voice took on the tone of the lecture room.

  “Quite simple, given what we know. His dementia is undergoing a classic metamorphosis. As I say, he now identifies totally with the story of the Rose, as he knows it, and with its ‘characters’. But, if I am not mistaken, there are two characters who were equally key to that story. Henry Lowe has already turned himself into Henslowe. So what does the name ‘Ted Allan’ suggest to us?”

  He scanned our faces as if we were one of his seminars… Suddenly I found myself saying—“Ed …Edward … Allan … good God—Edward Alleyn the Rose’s great actor!”

  “Correct. Henslowe is also becoming Alleyn. You must understand that, as the mood takes him, both men also inhabit his mind. And not even he is to know which one will be in the ascendant or when.”

  “So the man is effectively a split personality?” said Holmes, sucking the stem of his pipe thoughtfully.

  “Exactly so. Dementia Praecox… Schizophrenia… call it what you will. There was a most interesting case brought to my attention recently in Prague of a station master who …”

  We were not to hear of the station master’s problems for Holmes had jumped to his feet and was pacing the room.

  “The good doctor, I’m afraid, confirms my own reading of the signs. Much as we might like to share Mrs lithgow’s optimism about her brother’s prognosis, recent events dictate a more sinister interpretation—and since we have two Queens to protect, we must distract him from whatever bizarre scheme he has devised. So far he has largely had things his own way but tonight he will learn that, despite all he has done, he has still failed to dissuade Adler from opening his theatre.”

  “Why,” I said, “surely that will shock him back to some form of reality? And in any case, last night’s business …” I didn’t want to say too much in front of Freud but I need hardly have worried. He was lost in his own world of theories and speculations.

  “In the ordinary way I’d agree with you, Watson,” Holmes replied. “Lestrade and his men are pursuing their enquiries, as they quaintly put it. He was round to see me this morning before you made your appearance. It appears the hotel has a large transient population and the redoubtable Mrs Harris makes a point, she assures him, of treating her guests as members of the family letting them come and go as and when they please. In short, the door is always on the latch and anyone can take the chance of entering. Our friend Allan clearly took that chance and got away with it. Oh, I don’t doubt Lestrade will turn up something in time—but time is the one thing we do not have between now and Tuesday’s royal opening. We must seize events before we become their victim.”

  Freud had apparently come to some further conclusion he wished to impart.

  “May I add something?” said the doctor. “You taught me much during our ‘sabbatical’, Mr Holmes. I have learned to pay such attention to coat sleeves and collars that many of my patients become nervous. Perhaps I am even causing trauma they did not have in the first place—I jest, of course. But if I may offer you a piece of advice … However unbalanced his version of things appears to you—and I admit to you that I found it hard to read his sister’s account unmoved—to him what he is doing is perfectly logical. He is pursuing a holy cause every bit as much as one of your …”

  “Crusaders?” I offered.

  “Crusaders, exactly. Dr Watson’s hope may be realised, though my experience of such cases causes me to doubt it. I fear he is too far over the edge and must go forward or betray the cause. As for his three
faces … In my country we have a kind of clock where little human figures come in and out of a house to indicate the weather. Allan … Lowe … Allan … Lowe … in and out … in and out. And then, of course, we must not forget the young man who was there to begin with. Though he, I fear, we shall see less and less. None of them responsible for the thoughts or actions of the others. None of them necessarily aware that the others exist.”

  Ever the practical man, I asked the obvious question—“So what do you suggest, Doctor?”

  “Ah!” Freud was not to be caught so easily. “Solutions are not my business. I merely seek to understand and clarify the problems for my patients. But I tell you this, Mr Holmes, you will not reach this poor young man by your usual stratagems. You must seek him in the theatre of the mind.”

  And he sat back and folded his hands in front of him, as though the case were already solved. Then a thought struck him and he pulled out of a waistcoat pocket a large watch of the kind my father called a turnip and consulted it earnestly.

  “I have another appointment, gentlemen. You will excuse me?”

  “Of course, Doctor,” said Holmes. “In any case, Watson and I must be on our way. There is much to be done.”

  As Freud rose, he pulled another document from his pocket and began to study it. “Now that you have had the benefit of my advice—to which you are more than welcome,” he added quickly, realising that he had perhaps sounded churlish—“perhaps I may ask your advice on a somewhat intractable matter?”

  “Certainly,” Holmes and I spoke almost in unison.

  “Last night, my friend, I took your suggestion to visit the Oxford …”

  “Oxford?” I said. “Why Holmes and I were there only the other …”