Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery by Gyles Brandreth

in the army, then?’
    ‘I was – once upon a time. My correct name, Mr Wilde, is Private Luck.’
    I held my breath. I did not know what to say. A moment later, a peal of laughter came cascading through the narrow cracks of light in the hatch in my cell door. ‘It is funny, is it not?’ cried my friend.
    ‘It is very charming,’ I said. ‘I am so pleased to have made your acquaintance, Private Luck.’
    ‘Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers. But you can call me “AA”, Mr Wilde. That’s what my master called me. My other names are Achindra Acala.’
    ‘Sanskrit names,’ I said.
    ‘Achindra means “perfect, without fault” and Acala—’
    ‘Means “the invisible one”. I know,’ I said.
    ‘You know!’ chorused my neighbour gleefully.
    ‘I am very well read,’ I said, smiling in the gloom of my cell, ‘and I have a wonderful memory. I am noted for it.’
    ‘You are so like my master!’ exclaimed AA.
    ‘But I am not a soldier.’
    ‘But you are a great man. And a man of letters. Like my master. He admired you very much, Mr Wilde. He had all your books in his library.’
    ‘And did I have all of his in mine?’
    ‘Most likely. Every man of culture and imagination has a copy of One Thousand and One Nights .’
    ‘Your master was Sir Richard Burton?’ I asked, amazed.
    ‘Sir Richard Burton, KCMG, FRGS. Yes,’ said AA happily, as the chapel bell began to toll, ‘I was Sir Richard Burton’s batman for almost twenty years.’
    Was what my neighbour told me true? Or was it, as I suspected, part fact, part fancy? To me it did not matter. That he had a tale to tell and that he chose to tell it to me was all that I cared about. My morning ‘chinwag’ with Private Luck became the moment in the day I lived for. It was my delight – and consolation. The rest was silence.
    Speech is what defines a man. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: ‘The first duty of man is to speak: that is his chief business in the world.’ In prison, we may not speak. And conversation – in my experience of life, the only proper intoxication – is not only denied us: in prison, it is a punishable offence. At Reading Gaol, for twenty-two hours of every day we convicts are locked in our cells. We live alone, in silence. Each morning, we are let out twice: once to file, in silence, to the latrines to empty our slops, and then, a little later, with only slightly less solemnity, to make our way to our daily act of worship. As we walk in line, five paces (no more, no fewer) must separate us from the man in front and the man behind. Each afternoon we are released once more: to take exercise in the prison garden, in a stone-flagged yard set out like a gigantic carriage wheel, with twenty spokes radiating from a central hub. Each sector of the wheel is forty feet in length and, at the rim, the widest point, seven feet across. Hooded and silent, and walking five steps apart, we pace the perimeter, like caged elephants at the zoo. At the centre of the hub, on a dais, stands a warder watching our perambulation.
    About six weeks after I arrived at Reading, a second prisoner spoke to me. It was during the exercise hour. As we shuffled around the ring, I heard a voice speak my name. What direction it came from I could not tell. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ said the voice, ‘I pity you because you must be suffering more than we are.’ I looked up – foolishly. I looked about me – stupidly. I said, out loud, without thinking, ‘No, my friend, we are all suffering equally.’
    Even as I spoke, the warder on his dais was shouting: ‘C.3.3., C.4.8., step out of line!’
    We were arraigned before the prison governor. In the great man’s presence caps had to be removed, so we were escorted into his office separately, one after the other, in order that we might not catch sight of the other’s unmasked face.
    Who had initiated our illicit conversation? That was what Colonel Isaacson required to know. Whichever one of us had spoken first