Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Globe Murders Read online

  “I’m not proud of the way I behaved, Mr Holmes. I thought I was a sophisticated woman of the world, when all the time I was a silly little provincial girl. Flo Adler and his friend, Addy Trent were the sort of people I’d never met in my life before. They’d been everywhere and seen everything, to hear them tell it. They laughed at everything, they lived it up and, once I’d met them, they insisted on taking me along for the ride. The three of us were inseparable and a lot of local eyebrows were raised but I just ignored them. This was the Theatre. This was life. Both with capital letters.

  “I adored them both but Flo was the one for me. I’d never met a man like him. I still haven’t. Oh, sure, I knew he was married but he said his wife didn’t understand him—how many times have I heard that line since?—And, in any case, we ‘women of the world’ don’t live by other people’s rules. I guess that shows you how green I was. He told me about his romance with Ivy, too, but even that didn’t worry me. We didn’t make any commitments. When the circus left town, that would be that. And, of course, after that terrible business … there was no more circus.”

  By now two large tears were running down her cheeks. Once again I found myself offering my bandana to a Miss Adler and this time the offer was accepted.

  “Perhaps I can ease the burden a little, Mrs Adler.” Holmes leaned forward in his chair and laid a surprisingly gentle hand on her arm. “Soon after Adler left you found you were expecting his child. To prevent the imminent scandal, your parents sent you off to live with an aunt in Seattle until the baby was born and could be given over for adoption. It was a son, I believe?”

  “But how could you …?”

  “I have my methods, Mrs Adler, and some rather effective sources of information, which, I might add, are totally discreet. You need not distress yourself further with that aspect of your story but I fancy this is not the only thing you came to tell us?”

  Carlotta continued as though Holmes had not spoken.

  “I never told Flo at the time and I haven’t told him to this day. It was weak of me, I know, and I’ve suffered for it more rather than less as the years have gone by and I’ve wondered—‘Where is my son now? Who is my son now?’ But then I tell myself all that happened to a different person. You see, when I was—‘convalescing’ in Seattle, I filled in the time by taking more singing lessons. One thing led to another and before long I was singing professionally. The rest you know. I met up with Flo again in New York years later. By that time he was divorced. He started to manage my career and eventually we decided to get married. It wasn’t the mad romance we both remembered but we’ve been together a while now and the good things outweighed the bad. I wouldn’t want to see him hurt.

  “Flo’s never said anything to me about his son, Henry, even though you’ve only to see the two of them together to know the truth. I guess he’ll tell me in his own good time and if he doesn’t, well, what’s past is past. I’d be keeping my own secrets, too—or trying to—were it not for this …” And she fumbled for a moment in her handbag before producing the familiar folded scrap of white paper. “This one was waiting for me in our hotel the day we arrived. Luckily, Flo was too busy checking the arrangements to ask me about it.”

  She handed it to Holmes and I moved my chair nearer to his so that I could read it with him. The same typewritten characters, the same bold outline of a rose—a symbol that seemed to become more mesmeric each time I saw it. The text read …

  —WHOSE SON ART THOU?

  —MY MOTHER’S SON, SIR.

  —THY MOTHER’S SON! LIKE ENOUGH, AND THY FATHER’S SHADOW.

  Henry IV, Pt.2

  “And what did you take it to mean?” Holmes looked at her keenly.

  “What else could it mean? My son had found out who his mother was and was intent on punishing me in some way for my past actions. Why otherwise would he not make himself known to me directly without this strange charade? I didn’t know what to do, Mr Holmes. The one person I would naturally have told was the one person I could not tell. I was horribly torn. On the one hand I wanted to see my son, if this was indeed a message from him and not some cruel hoax. On the other, I feared his motives and the loss of the life I now had, even though it was in a sense at his expense. I was not proud of the emotions that overwhelmed me. And then the other day—the day you and Doctor Watson first came to the Globe—this arrived …”

  She now produced a second note and passed it across. It read …

  COME, SIT DOWN EVERY MOTHER’S SON. REHEARSE YOUR PARTS.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  “The tone grows more threatening,” Holmes mused, as he compared the two notes, “and the patience wears thinner, as the desired response is not forthcoming. Look at the penmanship on the later rose, Watson. The final swirl is an angry flourish that almost tears the paper. The lines are clumsy, which presumably adds to his frustration.”

  His analysis was a subtlety that was largely lost on Carlotta Adler, preoccupied as she was with her own problems. “Now you see why I’m so anxious for Flo to pull back even at this late hour and even though I know he thinks I’m being disloyal. Call it my woman’s instinct, gentlemen, but I feel this man—whether he is my son or not—means us genuine harm and I fear that recent events have proved me right. You must find him, Mr Holmes, find him before it’s too late. If it’s money he wants, well, I have a little …”

  “I very much doubt that we shall find money plays any part in his calculations. And, if it’s any slight assurance to you, Mrs Adler, I suspect that should the biological connection that you suspect exist, that is a contributory but not a principal factor in this affair. If a particular man had not decided to build a particular playhouse, skeletons—if you’ll pardon the expression—could have stayed firmly locked in their cupboards. Rest assured, my dear lady, that Watson and I will spare no effort to bring this distressing business to a speedy resolution.”

  “What can I do to help, Mr Holmes?”

  “Watch and listen for the smallest details of behaviour that diverge from the normal pattern. Omit nothing. Watson here has lost count of the times that I have counselled him on the subject. The truth is invariably to be found in the details, in the smallest of brush strokes. Other than that, go about your normal business and give that husband of yours the moral support that he needs. You indicate that he has his faults but then, which of us does not? If I were to ask Watson to list mine, the great Globe would be open long before he had finished!”

  “Mr Holmes, Doctor Watson, I can’t thank you enough.”

  Carlotta Adler was now dabbing at her face with those instruments that women invariably carry and never forget to use, no matter how severe the crisis. “And here am I inundating you with my troubles without even telling you the good news. Ted Allan is going to be fine. As you diagnosed, Doctor, it was little more than a nick. Being in a fleshy part of the hip, it bled a lot and that made it look worse. He’s a lucky young man. He might have been …”

  She stopped abruptly in the realisation of what she’d been about to say. The effect was theatrical, even operatic. The diva open mouthed with powder puff poised, an aria imminent. Instead, she said very quietly—“One of those young men is a murderer. He is also my son. And that is a terrible thought to live with. Goodnight, gentlemen.”

  A few moments later we heard the street door close behind her. For a minute or two Holmes and I sat there looking into the fire, each of us nursing our own thoughts. Finally, I said—“Well, in the light of that little revelation, Phipps is our man after all, surely? Right age. Appears from nowhere. American background as well as English. Used to playing parts. In the blood, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “True. But then, so is Allan. And there we have the advantage of the lady. She rules him out of her calculations because she classifies him as a victim but, if that should happen to be a role—however painful …

  “And there is one other small fact which I omitted to mention, old fellow. Harrison Trent was adopted. I’ve asked Pinkert
ons to check into the adoption agency.”

  “You mean Trent was so in love with Carlotta that he found out about the child and took it for his own?”

  “Watson, how often do I have to remind you that to infer from insufficient data is the capital crime of the investigative mind? All we know is that at this moment there are three viable candidates.

  “And there is one other thing that, fortunately, has so far not occurred to Carlotta Adler—another irony of Shakespearean proportions.”

  “And that is?”

  “You remember the last quotation Adler received? The line about the ‘almost blunted purpose’? In this case Claudius and Hamlet’s father are one and the same man. A fact that only we and Mrs Adler know. And now, if you would be kind enough to pick up the book from the third shelf above your elbow, I should like to consult the deathless prose of that publication that contains inspiration second only to the Good Book itself.”

  “If you mean Bradshaw, why don’t you say so?” I replied crossly, tossing him the red covered tome that had occupied so many of his waking hours since I had known him. “What is this evening’s text?”

  “The morning trains to Oxford.”

  “And who is going to Oxford, pray?”

  “We are—at the crack of tomorrow’s dawn. It is time we learned all there is to know about roses …”

  Chapter Eight

  By the time the dreaming spires had tolled the hour of ten, I found myself in the middle of an Oxford tutorial.

  “Mr Holmes, my work constantly requires me to study the image, then seek the meaning behind it. In that I suspect we are not dissimilar. I know much of you—admittedly, at second hand. What does your limited acquaintance tell you about me?”

  “Relatively little, I’m afraid. Other than the fact that you have two Siamese cats, are a keen but not particularly successful fly fisherman, prefer the works of Trollope to those of Dickens and have recently taken a long walk along the Isis towpath, I know only what I have been told by others—that you are the leading expert in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre practice.”

  There was a silence as the interrogator looked at Holmes over his half glasses. Professor Campbell Bryson of Balliol College, Oxford was a thin man of medium height whose habit of sitting hunched up in his winged leather chair made him look smaller. Despite that, he dominated his environment, as I have no doubt he fully intended to do. I could well imagine generations of undergraduates sitting opposite his book and paper-encrusted desk transfixed by that beady eye. The rest of his study was littered with similar piles, to the point where one had to negotiate the stacks with care to avoid the possibility of starting an avalanche. Dust covered most of the surfaces yet one had the sense that Bryson could lay his hand on anything he wanted without a moment’s hesitation. The room was designed to create a particular effect as, indeed, was the professor’s tactic of opening the conversation to take the other person off guard. It was a typical don’s gambit but he had picked he wrong opponent in Holmes.

  At last he was forced to indulge his curiosity. When he did so, a boyish smile lit up his face. The academic disappeared and the real man appeared as he unclasped his hands from behind his head and sat forward in his chair. “I see your reputation combines image and content. Now please put me out of my misery.”

  “My profession is based on the observation of detail, Professor and the details in your case are obvious enough. You wear a coarse tweed jacket which, by the way the cuffs and elbows are patched, is obviously a favourite that you wear constantly. There are two distinct types of cat’s hairs adhering to it—a silvery grey and a marmalade gold—that suggest the presence of pedigree and almost certainly Siamese cats rubbing themselves against you—a practice which, if you were not a cat lover, you would never allow …”

  “Touché! My wife is always chastising me for not brushing this jacket but life is too short for such niceties. But what about the fishing? You spotted the hat on the coatrack as you came in, no doubt?”

  “Yes, the number and variety of flies in the hatband tell of the keenness to participate in the sport but the mounted fish on the bookcase tells the real story. Don’t think me rude, Professor, but to mount a fish which most anglers would have thrown back suggests enthusiasm verging on desperation.”

  At this, Bryson threw his head back and laughed until the tears came, at the same time banging his hand on the desk enthusiastically, sending up a cloud of dust that hung around his head, catching the sunlight. It was a strange and spectral sight.

  “As for the rest of my little parlour trick,” Holmes continued, “I am almost ashamed to own up to it. The collected works of Messrs. Dickens and Trollope are sitting next to each other on that shelf and wheras the Trollopes show signs of being well used, those of Mr Dickens look almost pristine in their bindings. I agree with your literary verdict, by the way. The walk down the towpath? Something of a guess on my part, I must confess. The burrs that have fastened themselves to your trousers and jacket cuffs are to be found in profusion among the vegetation that lines the river bank at this time of the year and knowing you to be a fisherman …”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr Holmes,” said the professor, wiping his eyes on a none too clean kerchief. “You have made my day, I do declare. Now, what can I do to assist yours and Dr Watson’s? Your telegram was elliptical, to say the least.”

  “Before I get to that, Professor, may I thank you for interrupting your weekend and …” nodding towards the trophy case, “particularly your fishing, in order to see Dr Watson and myself. We will try to take up as little of your time as possible, since I have every reason to believe that the information we seek is at your mental fingertips. A matter which my friend and I are currently investigating has certain connections with the newly rebuilt Globe playhouse …”

  Bryson nodded, his interest now fully engaged. “Yes, I’ve been following it with great interest, as you may imagine. Adler even consulted me when the project was in its elephantine gestation period—as I believe he consulted everyone with any pretension to academic status. When my opinion differed from his, I’m afraid I was banished like Prospero. A single-minded man, Mr Adler.

  Having said that, I admire much, indeed most, of what he has finally realised on Bankside. The great Globe once more rises to be—in Benjonson’s deathless description—‘the glorie of the Banke’. So, yes—to respond in my tortuous scholar’s way—I know about the Globe. In all three of its incarnations …”

  “Three?” I felt obliged to ask, having made myself a mental promise to be a passive observer to what promised to be an exchange far above my intellectual level. Curiosity, however, got the better of discretion. “There were three Globes?”

  “Indeed, there were, Doctor,” said Bryson, turning his head in my direction for the first time since we had been introduced. “Or should I be pedantically academic and say ‘will be’, since the third is shortly to be with us? The first Globe was built on a site a few yards from the present structure under somewhat ‘romantic’ circumstances, if that isn’t too imprecise a word. James Burbage, an Elizabethan theatrical impresario, not unlike our mutual acquaintance, Florenz Adler, built a playhouse north of the river in Shoreditch. It was a wooden building circular in shape and he called it simply the Theatre—from the Greek teatron or ‘viewing place’. In it he staged plays for his troupe of actors, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a troupe which included his son, Richard and later, a young actor who also wrote plays …”

  “Will Shakespeare?”

  “Will Shakespeare. The very same. Well, James Burbage died, the lease of the Theatre expired and the landlord refused to renew it, so Richard, his brother, Cuthbert, Shakespeare and the rest of the troupe—with the help of a master builder, Peter Streete, simply dismantled the timbers one December night in 1599 and transported them across the river to a site they had already leased in Southwark. It was the origin of the ‘moonlight flit’. At least, one hopes it was by moonlight …” He smiled at the tel
ling of a tale that was clearly more real to him than most of the things that happened in his daily life. “Forgive me, gentlemen, didactic discourse is second nature in the groves of academe…”

  “Please continue,” Holmes encouraged him, “the story is fascinating and you tell it as though it were happening yesterday.”

  Thus encouraged, the Professor went on. “They called their new playhouse built with the old timbers—The Globe. You remember Shakespeare’s line ‘All the world’s a stage’? …”

  “Shakespeare’s lines are much on our minds lately, are they not, Watson?” Holmes murmured, anxious not to stop Bryson’s flow.

  “The Burbages, Shakespeare and a handful of others were ‘sharers’ in the new company. In other words, they had a financial interest in its affairs and decided its policy. Shakespeare himself, of course, became their principal playwright and most of his great plays—Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear—were written specifically for ‘this wooden ‘O’, as he called it, most of them with Richard Burbage in the leading role. It must have been a magnificent time …”

  His eyes were far away, three hundred years away as he spoke. Suddenly, realising he had not even begun to answer my original question, he pulled himself back to the present. When he continued, his tone was crisper.

  “The first Globe was burned down in 1613. During a production of Henry VIII a prop cannon on stage malfunctioned. The wadding combusted as it was set off, landed on the thatched roof, which promptly caught fire. Within two hours the entire structure burned to the ground.”

  “Good heavens,” I exclaimed, remembering the theatre I had seen so recently, “the poor devils inside!”

  “The ‘poor devils’ escaped, down to the last man, woman and child,” Bryson reassured me, amused that I had become so involved in events that had taken place so long ago. “The only man even mildly discomfited was a nobleman whose britches caught fire and someone soon put that conflagration out with a bottle of ale. Whether his saviour was ever paid for the ale, history does not record.”