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We all stood staring at the room’s closed door. ‘Why was she in the telephone room?’
    ‘She must have come down during the night – to make a call. Or to receive one.’
    ‘Where is her body now?’ asked Conan Doyle.
    ‘It has not been moved,’ answered the duke. ‘Lord Yarborough is returning with the undertakers. They are due at any moment.’
    Conan Doyle took a small step towards the duke. ‘Might I see her, Your Grace?’
    ‘She is unclothed,’ replied the duke, covering his face with his hands. ‘She is dead.’
    Conan Doyle pressed his hand on the duke’s shoulder. ‘It is quite in order. I am a medical man.’

16
From the journal of Arthur Conan Doyle

    The duke remained outside the room, in the hallway with Oscar and Sherard. He unlocked the door, barely opened it to allow me to slip inside and shut it immediately after me. ‘I must keep the door closed,’ he said. ‘Apart from Parker [the butler], the staff know nothing of this.’
    The room itself was no more than a large cubicle, lit by a dim and flickering electric light. On the left of the door was a narrow wooden shelf on which stood the telephone apparatus. On the right was a tall wooden stool fixed to the wall. Perched upon the stool, leaning backwards into the corner, sat the half-naked body of the late Duchess of Albemarle.
    It was a grotesque and pitiable sight. Beneath her velvet evening gown, the poor woman’s legs dangled down from the stool. I brushed against them as I leant forward to study her face. Her eyes were open wide, staring, petrified. Her skin was pale grey, the colour of paving stones. Mucus had dried around her nostrils. Her white lips were twisted – contorted in pain, as I have sometimes seen on the victims of sudden, violent heartseizure. Her bodice and chemise had been ripped from her, exposing her full breasts, horribly disfigured with scratch marks. I touched her left arm and her naked belly. Her body was cold as stone but no longer rock hard. Rigor mortis was beginning to ease. She had not died within the past twelve hours.
    I did not linger in the airless room. The horror was very great and the smell from the body already noticeable. Before I left, I made to close the dead woman’s bulging, startled eyes. As I pressed my fingers against her eyelids to close them, her head lolled suddenly to the side and I saw some bloody marks upon her neck. They were of two sharp incisions, positioned below her earlobe, beneath her jaw, side by side, no more than an inch apart. The tears in the flesh were not wide – each was no more than an eighth of an inch in diameter – but they were deep. I took a matchstick from my pocket and carefully inserted it into each incision. The rupture was certainly deep enough to reach the jugular vein.

17
Notes written by Oscar Wilde on the back of the supper menu at Solferino’s restaurant in Rupert Street

    When did the duchess die? Was she alive when Robert caught sight of her at midnight? Or was she already dead? Did Robert mistake the bloody marks on her neck for ruby earrings?
    Why was she in the telephone room? What drew her there – in the course of her own reception, at its very height, with royalty present? If she was there to make use of the telephone, why was the telephone itself apparently untouched?
    When did the duke discover her body? He says it was in the morning, at seven o’clock, when he went to use the telephone himself – but Robert saw the duke at the door of the telephone room at midnight. If his wife was missing at midnight – and the duke knew that she was: she failed to say goodbye to her guests – why did he not instigate a search for her then?
    And once the body had been discovered, why was it left hidden in the telephone room? Lord Yarborough – a mind doctor, not a physician – examined her in the half-light and concluded at once that she had died of heart failure. Why? Why did he not order her body to be removed to the morgue and examined