Sherlock Holmes and the Murders at Drury Lane
TWO MEN. FORTY MINUTES. NOT A MARK ON EITHER OF THEM.
London, October 1895. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane has been wired for the electric light, and on the evening of the eighteenth the new system is tried at its full power for the first time. During the technical rehearsal, Sir Reginald Hartwell - seventy-six years old, principal investor in the autumn drama - dies in the stage box on the prompt side. Forty minutes later the stage manager is found dead at the switchboard beneath the stage.
A police surgeon writes heart failure in the one case and misadventure in the other. Augustus Harris, the greatest theatrical manager of his generation, does not believe a word of it, and sends for Sherlock Holmes at half past nine at night.
Holmes disbelieves the certificates inside a minute, and for a reason that is not evidence at all but arithmetic. Not four minutes, which would be a common cause, visible and instantaneous. Not four days, which nobody would remark upon. Forty minutes is neither - and forty minutes is therefore a decision.
What the theatre yields up over the following week is a fraud: cable of a third the specified weight, switch-gear with no maker's plate, eighteen hundred yards of casing invoiced as three thousand, and two thousand two hundred pounds divided between a contractor and the one man in the building qualified to inspect his work. Scotland Yard has a motive, a method and an arrest inside a fortnight, and Inspector Lestrade's case is the strongest he has ever laid before a magistrate.
Holmes tells him it will hang the wrong man.
For the fraud explains a theft and it does not explain a stage box. It does not explain why the murderer waited until an old gentleman had established a ten-day habit of sitting in one particular chair, with his arm along one particular rail, on the cue of the largest effect in the piece. That is not the arithmetic of concealment. It is the arithmetic of a debt.
The debt is seven years old. It was buried by a coroner's jury south of the river in the summer of 1888, in a small theatre nobody now remembers, where a fire that the brigade extinguished in forty minutes killed nineteen people - eleven of them children - none of whom were burnt, and all of whom died on a gallery staircase behind a door that had been chained. Three men swore at that inquest that there was no chain. No person was ever charged. No rule was ever altered.
And somewhere in the Theatre Royal there is a man who believed that verdict for seven years, and cut the grass on a gravestone every week of them, and has recently been told the truth.
Holmes has until the ninth of November, when Drury Lane reopens for a benefit performance and six hundred and eleven working men of the London theatre will be admitted free to the gallery, above a stage, behind two doors that open inward.
Recovered from a sea-chest taken out of a solicitor's vaults in the City of London, Sherlock Holmes and the Murders at Drury Lane is a full-length Victorian mystery of some 45,000 words, narrated by Dr. John H. Watson in his own voice, and complete in itself. It is a novel of gaslight and limelight and new copper wire; of the trades that keep a great playhouse standing and are never named on the playbill; and of what a decent man may be driven to when the law has told him, correctly and courteously, that there is nothing whatever to be done.
Perfect for readers of Conan Doyle, Anne Perry, and Charles Finch, and for anyone who has ever glanced up at an exit door and wondered whether it opens.
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