Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders Read Free Page B

Oscar.
    ‘It’s
only a hand,’ I reassured him. ‘It won’t bite. And we’ve known worse. As I
recall, when we were investigating the case of the candlelight murders, a
severed head was delivered to your front door.’
    ‘I
remember,’ he said, flinching at the recollection. I took out my pocket
handkerchief and, using it, picked up the dismembered limb, holding it towards
the window light to examine it. The skin was dark, the hand small; for a moment
I thought it might have been the paw of a gorilla or an orang-utan.
    ‘It is
a human hand?’ asked Oscar, as if reading my thoughts.
    ‘Yes,’
I said, inspecting it more closely.
    ‘It’s
not made of wax or India rubber?’
    ‘It’s
the real thing, I’m afraid — flesh and bone. It’s a right hand, quite small,
quite smooth — almost delicate. I’d say it was a woman’s hand but for the rough
cut and shaping of the fingernails. Look.’
    I held
the hand out towards Oscar. My friend summoned up his courage and, through
gimlet eyes, keeping his distance, he inspected the severed limb. ‘Yes,’ he
whispered. ‘It is quite delicate, I see.’
    ‘And
look at the wrist. Look at the bone, look at the stump. It’s a clean cut, but
brutally done. It’s the work of a butcher’s cleaver rather than a surgeon’s
knife.’
    ‘And
the black marks below the knuckles?’ enquired Oscar, peering closer.
    ‘Mottling,
I’d say, nothing more, signs of age. And yet the palm is smooth, almost
unlined. The hand looks young…
    ‘It’s
not diseased?’
    ‘I
don’t think so.’ Oscar winced as I brought the hand to my nostrils. ‘It’s been
pickled, I reckon, or embalmed. That would explain the dark pigmentation of the
skin —and the quality of the preservation. It’s a dead hand, but, apart from
its colour, it has all the appearance of a living one.’
    I was
about to lay the hand back on the table when heavy breathing and the clink of
glasses alerted me to the arrival in the lounge of our Bavarian waiter from the
night before. Rapidly I wrapped the dismembered limb in my handkerchief and
thrust it into my jacket pocket.
    ‘Guten
Morgen, mein Herr,’ cried Oscar, a touch
over-exuberantly.
    Ponderously,
in silence, the waiter opened the Perrier-Jouët and poured us each a glass.
With an utterly irrelevant quotation from Goethe (something about the land
where the lemon trees grow!), Oscar pressed an English florin into the man’s
hand, explaining that it was the only coin he had about him but, as it bore a
portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, he trusted it would
be acceptable as a modest token of our appreciation. The waiter said nothing.
When he had gone, Oscar raised his glass and drank down his champagne in a
single gulp. He poured himself a second glass and said quietly: ‘Arthur, you
sit there with a dead man’s hand in your pocket. What does it mean? Why has it
been sent to you?’
    ‘It’s
not been sent to me. It’s been sent to Sherlock Holmes.’
    ‘Care
of your publishers.’
    ‘No.
Look at the label on the wrapping. It was sent to Holmes at 221B Baker Street,
London. There’s no such address, of course. Baker Street runs up only to number
100. The post office covering the Marylebone district kindly collects the
letters and forwards them to my publisher.’
    Oscar
examined the brown wrapping paper. I looked at the envelope that had contained
the hand itself. ‘It’s a sturdy envelope,’ I observed, ‘and made of quality
paper.’
    ‘Is
there a watermark?’
    I held
the envelope up to the window. ‘No, not that I can see. It’s thick paper — card
almost. It’s the sort of envelope that a lawyer might use to store deeds in, or
a will.’
    ‘The envelope
is unmarked?’
    ‘Quite.’
    ‘There’s
no note inside? No message of any kind?’
    I
looked inside the envelope. ‘No, there’s nothing.’ I put down the envelope and
took a sip of the iced champagne. It was strange to taste champagne so early in
the day.