Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Globe Murders Read online

  QUEEN: The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.

  HAMLET: Good madam

  KING: Gertrude, do not drink

  QUEEN: I will, my lord. I pray you, pardon me.

  She then drank and replaced the cup. There was a pause that seemed to hush the theatre, as mother and son looked at each other for a long moment. Allan was facing in my direction and, once again, I saw that play of emotions cross his lean face. If the good Dr Freud were right, several different people were struggling to find release from within that tortured mind. As the silence stretched on the expression that seemed to prevail was that of a lost and frightened little boy.

  “Has the fool forgotten his lines?” Bryson hissed. “‘I dare not drink yet, madam—by and by.’ Come along, man!”

  In a dull monotone that could hardly be heard Allan said, as if accepting Bryson’s cue—“I dare not drink yet, mother.”

  “Madam—not ‘Mother’—Madam.” Bryson was almost beside himself. On the stage the actors were looking at one another helplessly. Then Carlotta rose unsteadily to her feet and stretched out a hand to Allan … “The drink! Oh, my dear son. The drink!” Then she slid to the floor and lay there motionless.

  “My God, Lestrade!” I cried, “We must do something. That devil’s poisoned her!” The Inspector looked at me with an expression that positively willed me to listen to him. “Our place is right here. Trust me, Doctor.” And to be fair to that honest soul, I had no idea what else I could do.

  The audience was buzzing, very much as its Elizabethan equivalent must have done. Some of them presumably knew the play well enough, though I suspect most knew only the broad outlines of the plot. All of them could sense that something out of the ordinary was going on in front of their eyes but was it part of this unique theatrical experience they had been told so much about?

  I resolved not to take my eyes off Allan. Whatever transpired, I would be the one witness who could attest to his every move. As the rest of the cast stood rooted to the spot, he knelt next to the Queen.

  HAMLET: Oh, villainy! Ho! Let the door be locked Treachery! Seek it out.

  Once again he shielded himself from the other principals, though not from me. I saw him quickly remove the protective ‘button’ from the tip of his foil. The vulnerable child was gone and in its place someone or something whose eyes were dead.

  Then something happened which I swear raised the hair on the back of my head and even silenced Bryson. As the audience were transfixed by the frozen tableau of actors, the double doors at the rear of the stage crashed open. There on a dais and surrounded by mist stood an unearthly giant of a man.

  He stood fully seven feet tall and the wide brimmed hat he wore made him taller still. He was dressed in a black mantle that covered him from head to toe and around his neck was a deep white ruff lace collar. The chalk white face was heavily bearded and the eyes seemed to glow. I was sure the being, whoever he was, could see into my soul and from the way those around me were holding their breath, I was not alone in my reaction.

  The utter silence that fell on the theatre may only have lasted a few seconds. All I know is that it seemed an eternity. While it lasted I began to feel a memory stir at the back of my mind. I had seen this man before—but where? Bryson proved the answer. In a very small voice he said—“Edward Alleyn.”

  That was it. ‘The Gentleman from Dulwich’ in the portrait Holmes had borrowed. The leading actor in Henslowe’s Rose company. Before I could pursue the thought further, ‘Alleyn’ spoke.

  Slowly—oh, so slowly—he raised his right arm and pointed unmistakably at Allan and in a voice that seemed to echo and re-echo around the wooden ‘O’…

  Put up your sword, rash youth, tho’ your intent

  Was noble at its birth, yet does it stale

  And fall from honour. Now ’tis nothing worth.

  Alleyn and Henslowe. Henslowe and Alleyn -

  Two names that shook the heavens in their day

  That day is gone, yet still we walk with gods,

  Our fame is in the firmament writ large

  And needs no champion here to plead its cause.

  You do but vex our shades. Prithee, begone!

  Our wish is that Will’s Globe may live again.

  Allan’s face was a picture. I’ve heard of someone’s jaw dropping but his literally did. He spun around to look at his fellow actors and found they were as stunned as he was by the apparition. Then he turned back to face it once again. Slowly he dropped to his knees, as if in supplication. But as he did so, his body was shaken by a sudden convulsion. He clapped his free hand to his head and let out a feral scream that chilled the blood of everyone in that auditorium.

  As its echoes died away, I realised there was complete silence in the theatre. All attention was on that lonely figure. It was the only thing moving on that vast stage as slowly Allan rose to his feet, turned and faced actors and audience. Then you could hear a collective gasp. Clearly the man had had some form of seizure. One side of his face had lost control and drooped as if made of some soft substance. His right arm also hung loosely by his side. But it was his eyes—my God, his eyes! They were the eyes of the wild creature that lurks deep in the forest of one’s worst nightmare.

  More pieces of the puzzle fell into place. He was holding the sword in his left hand. The left hand emphasis in the typed notes … the left handed ‘stabbing’ of Caesar. But we were past the point where such clues could serve any useful purpose. The man was still lethal.

  And then he moved. Despite his affliction, he lurched forward with remarkable speed towards the front of the stage. At which point I realised—two Queens! He’d killed one and now he meant to have the other. Lestrade had obviously come to precisely the same conclusion. “Come on, Doctor. It’s our turn now.” And he began to force his way through the crowd. As I followed through the path he cleared, I took out my service revolver but, even as I did so, I asked myself how I could possibly use it without risking innocent lives.

  In situations such as this, people invariably behave like sheep, moving the wrong way even when they’re trying to help. Quick as we were, Allan was quicker. Just as he reached the edge of the stage, Phipps realised something of his intention and threw himself in front of the man. Without stopping, Allan slashed at him with his foil. Had it been a true sword, who knows what might have happened. As it was, the uncapped point cut through Phipps’s forearm and I saw the shirt sleeve redden dramatically.

  The next moment Allan’s misshapen figure was on the ground and limping across the yard, slashing with his foil at anyone near him. The crowd melted before him, as if fearful of contagion. Lestrade and I were still several feet from the royal party and I could see the equerries moving towards the VIPs in what seemed like slow motion, though I suppose that was merely how it seemed to my shocked mind. Frozen as in a photograph, I saw a lady-in-waiting, her hand to her mouth to suppress a scream. I saw Mycroft, his hand poised over the Queen’s shoulder. But the image that burned into my brain was of the Queen herself. In the midst of the noise and panic she sat perfectly still in her seat, her gaze fixed unwaveringly on the approaching Allan.

  They say a wild dog can be deterred from attacking, if one stares it down and the irrelevant thought crossed my mind that this was precisely what she was trying to do. Certainly it had the effect of stopping him some ten feet from the gallery rail that separated them.

  Why did no one move? It was as though the whole crowd were under a spell and could not believe what they were seeing. People were rooted to the spot and Lestrade and I were effectively blocked from getting closer. Past the man unconsciously impeding my progress I could see Allan’s piteous face. If he could have reproduced the expressions that flitted across it to order, the man would have been the finest actor who ever lived. Sadness, pain, fear came and went as he looked at the face of the woman he’d come so far to kill. Then, in a flash, they were hustled off stage to make way for the dark side of his complex mind.

  With a gut
tural roar he somehow leapt on to the railing, looked down on the Queen and with a cry of “How now, sweet queen! One woe doth tread upon another’s heel!” he struck downward.

  My next image is of the foil flying upwards, twisting and turning, catching the light like some latter-day Excalibur, until it struck one of the wooden beams, where it hung, quivering gently.

  I looked back to the lower gallery and couldn’t believe my eyes. Allan had fallen back on to the yard floor and stood there, nursing a wrist that was obviously broken. But that was not what rivetted every eye. It was the Queen rising from her seat—and then continuing to rise until she stood at a height that far exceeded that of a diminutive little woman. In her hand was the silver topped stick she had leaned on when she entered—now revealed as a fearsome sword stick. It was this weapon that had so effectively disarmed Allan a moment earlier.

  I could stand it no longer. Brandishing my revolver, I caused the man in front of me to move hastily aside. A moment later I had Allan pinioned with his hands behind him, while Lestrade slipped on the handcuffs. “You’re safe now, Ma’am,” I heard myself say and even to my ears the words sounded foolish.

  “I’m most relieved to hear it, Watson,” Her Majesty replied. And with that she put her hand to her head and pulled off the wig and mantilla. “It is no joke when a tall man has to take a foot off his height for an extended period of time. Try to dissuade me from doing so in the future, except under the direst of circumstances, there’s a good fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  So many questions were bubbling in my mind that I hardly knew which to ask first. “What do you suppose will happen to that poor fellow, Allan … Lowe … whatever his name was? I shall never forget the empty look on his face as Lestrade’s men took him off.”

  “I sincerely hope he will get the best attention our primitive medical resources can provide,” my friend replied, “but I have to admit to not being wildly optimistic. As Sigmund points out, the human mind is the last great frontier to be explored and our maps are rudimentary at best. Even he—as I’m sure he would be the first to admit—is but charting the foothills. If we knew but a fraction of its mysteries, I venture to suggest we could solve most of our cases without leaving the portals of Baker Street.”

  We were strolling along the river walk just beyond the Globe with the evening sun warming our faces. Behind us we could hear the sound of an appreciative new Elizabethan audience. How different a sound might there have been throughout the Empire and indeed the rest of the civilised world tonight but for the man walking at my side, dressed now in his familiar ulster and deerstalker, worn as if to assert his own identity. I had a sense that even he wished to put recent events firmly behind him and inhabit once more the comfortable world of Victoria’s England. The events of the past few days had been incredible, even by his standards—incredible and unsettling to be in the presence of so deranged a mind. Evil we had encountered often enough but here we had faced pity as well as terror.

  “I presume that, when the time comes, you will call our little adventure something like ‘The Shakespeare Globe Murders’?” Holmes looked at me quizzically. “Despite the fact that by far the most interesting part of the whole affair were a number of what will one day, I don’t doubt, be referred to as Freudian complications.”

  “Your may well be right, Holmes,” I said, entering into the spirit of things, “but you must admit there were times when the bodies seemed to be piling up with the regularity of—of …”

  “Of an Elizabethan tragedy? Quite so. But I think you’ll agree, Watson, that it was necessary to—as you might say—fight fire with fire. The genesis of the case was in the theatre—or, should I say, in a theatre. Faced with an opponent who only saw things clearly and whose actions were motivated by the world of artifice, it seemed apparent to me from the first that the play was the thing wherein we’d catch the conscience—or at least the attention—of the killer. And so it proved, though I must admit only to you and not for your confounded story—that there were moments I doubted my plot would hold …”

  I thought back to the scene in the yard of the Globe not more than an hour or so ago …

  As Lestrade’s men took an unresisting Allan from my custody, I spun the Inspector around, I’m afraid a trifle roughly. “Come along, Lestrade, how much of this did you know? And why couldn’t you have confided in me?”

  “Don’t be too hard on poor Lestrade, Watson,” Holmes interceded, as with Mycroft’s help he shed his royal disguise and straightened his normal attire.

  “Like the good public servant he has always been, he did precisely what I asked him, which was to be where he was and do what he did. Oh, and to accept that, whatever strange events may take place on the stage, that they were part of my plan.” Then, seeing that the Inspector was safely out of ear shot, he added—“If there is one thing our friends in the constabulary are particularly good at it is following orders!”

  It was then I realised that in the excitement of the events in the gallery, I had totally forgotten the drama I had witnessed on the stage. I turned but Holmes had read my mind. “A play within a play within a play, I’m afraid. We had to provoke Allan or live in the certain knowledge that some time, somewhere he would erupt into violence. Where better than on a platform specifically devised for such actions?”

  “But Carlotta … and Phipps?” By this time I had the answer to both questions. Phipps was being bandaged for what, even from a distance, I could see was no more than a flesh wound, while Carlotta was sitting in Gertrude’s chair on the stage, receiving the attentive care of—Edward Alleyn!

  “I doubt that Florenz Adler will ever give a finer performance,” Holmes murmured at my shoulder. “I really think we should go over and congratulate him.” As we climbed on to the stage and approached them, I saw that Tallis was also close by the two of them. They might not be a family in the true sense but I had a distinct feeling that recent events had created a bond that many true families never manage to forge and I was happy for them.

  “Well, Mr Holmes, we pulled it off,” said Adler, pale behind his make up. “I must admit, I had a nasty moment or two back there, stuck on that platform. “I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing any more. I knew I was following your direction but it felt pretty creepy being directed from the grave—or so I thought. Next time I have a director, I want him where I can see him. And what about this little lady?”—and he put an arm around his wife’s shoulders—“she clinched it. When she fell to the ground, I could almost believe she had been poisoned.”

  “Make that two of us,” said Carlotta. “I knew something strange was going on but I was brought up to believe that, when you’re on stage, you say your lines and try not to bump into things.”

  “But,” I interrupted, “I saw Allan put something in the wine.”

  “Quite right, Watson,” said Holmes, “so you did. An exotic foreign substance called—cocoa powder. It could not do the lady the slightest harm—unless, of course, she happens to be allergic to cocoa.”

  Seeing that the explanation did not fully convince me, he continued—“Between us Lestrade’s men and I shadowed Allan from the moment it was clear that he and only he could be the perpetrator of these literary happenings. When he made his decisive move to obtain poison—with, I might add, a very cleverly forged prescription—I was on hand. A very anxious cleric had very little trouble in persuading the chemist that he may have given to his young curate in error a prescription intended to remove mice from the vestry and then rushing off to correct his addle-pated error. It really is amazing how unquestioningly we trust the Church.” And for a moment he took on the look of the befuddled vicar.

  “Once we knew his intent—and knowing the scene that was to be enacted, that was simple enough to deduce. It was, in his mind, of course, the only scene he intended to be played. After that, well, I rather think that this is your part of the story …” He turned to Phipps, who had now joined us, his wounded arm in
a sling and the other around Pauline French, who had hurried from backstage, looking beautifully incongruous—and incongruously beautiful as Katharine of France for the Henry V that was to follow.

  “Nothing much to tell, really,” Phipps replied, his attention more on Miss French than on the rest of us—and who could blame him? “I just followed Inspector Lestrade’s suggestion. I shared a dressing cubicle with Allan,” he added by way of clarification. “It was easy enough to go through his things and there was this folder of paper with some brown powder in it. So …” He shrugged his shoulders, “I substituted one lot of brown powder for another. Then I threw that first lot down the sink pretty darn quickly, I can assure you!”

  “Which was just as well for me,” said Carlotta from her seat. “Of course, Flo brought me in on the game just before he ‘disappeared’ but, as the moment in the scene came nearer, I had no way of knowing whether Simon had managed to do his substitution trick. I have to say I don’t think I’ve acted better, not even when we did The Ring at the Met.”

  “Your second finest hour, my dear,” said Edward Alleyn, as I was now coming to think of Adler. “And I do believe, modestly, that I myself have never done better since—oh, since …”

  “Our American Cousin?” his wife asked teasingly. “At least this performance ended with the audience intact, even if the players were a little the worse for wear. If you go on like this, Flo, people will soon ask to be insured before they come to an Adler show!”

  She smiled when she realised that he hadn’t heard a word. Friend Adler hadn’t got where he was by listening to things he didn’t want to hear. Right now he was reliving his own part. “Yes, I have to admit I felt the old thrill standing there. You know, I might try Lear one of these days, what do you think, Lotta?” Then, taking in the audience for the first time, he exclaimed—“My God, we’ve got a show to do! What must all these people think?”

  “Mr Adler,” Holmes said reassuringly, “I suggest they will think whatever you tell them to think. They came to see an unexpected spectacle and even the most mean-spirited can hardly dispute that they have already had their money’s worth. I would be inclined to tell them that you were staging an experimental drama and wished to see whether a modern audience would react with the true spontaneity of its Elizabethan forebears.”