by M. J. Trow
‘Striking a police officer in the pursuance of his duty,’ Guthrie snarled. ‘Sergeant, take this woman as well. We may as well have the whole family.’
‘And what are you going to do with them?’ Lestrade asked, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Guthrie turned and his eyes bulged under the Homburg. From the woods, two wagons were rolling inexorably, bristling with men. And in the hands of these men, scythes and sickles sparkled in the pale morning sun.
‘And them?’
Guthrie turned again at Lestrade’s voice, to the orchard. A line of men walked abreast, leather-gaitered and woollen-smocked, like harvesters reaping the corn. A white-aproned figure ran from one to the other, weeping and wailing as hysterical housemaids will.
‘And of course, them?’
Tom Wyatt, the Bandicoots’ groom, sauntered around the corner, with a castrating iron carried nonchalantly over his shoulder. Beside him, Nettles, the butler, a man, it had to be admitted, the wrong side of sixty-three, but there was iron in him yet. And flanking him, Maisie’s colleagues, starched and resolute, a monstrous regiment of women.
‘I count forty-eight of ‘em, sir,’ the sergeant confided to his chief inspector.
‘Thank you,’ snapped Guthrie. ‘When I need your powers of mental arithmetic, Poulteney, I shall inform you accordingly. Well, Lestrade?’
‘Better than I was, thank you, Guthrie,’ the inspector beamed.
Guthrie closed to him. So far this morning, he had been slapped, shot at and was now facing the massed agricultural implements of the Bandicoot estate. ‘Dammit, Lestrade, what do we do?’
‘We?’ Lestrade raised an arched brow.
‘Everythin’ all right, Mr Bandicoot?’ one of the labourers called from a halting wagon.
‘Yes, Jack,’ Harry called, astonished to see his tenants-at-arms ringing the Hall.
‘How can we assist, sir?’ a voice called from the direction of the stables.
‘That won’t be necessary, Tom.’ Bandicoot leaned further out. ‘I’d like you men, all of you, to put your tools away and go home. Please.’
The voice of reason had been heard in the land and Guthrie smiled broadly before turning to the trap. But no one else had moved. He turned back to the mob.
‘I’m afraid we can’t do that, squire.’ It was young Jem, a head taller since Harry had last seen him in the harvest.
‘Isn’t this marvellous?’ Miss Balsam clapped her hands gleefully. ‘Just like the fall of the Bastille.’
Guthrie turned on Lestrade. ‘You know they’re all raving mad here, don’t you?’
Lestrade had survived Number Thirteen, Parabola Road. The Bandicoot estate was nothing to him.
‘All right, Lestrade.’ Guthrie was calmer now, and it cost him dear to say it. ‘What do you advise?’
Lestrade looked at him levelly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ll start by going indoors. You, me and Mr and Mrs Bandicoot. Agreed?’
Guthrie looked again at the ring of flashing blades surrounding them all. He nodded. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, as one final word of bravado designed to restore his own ego, ‘if any man tries anything, I want his name. Understand?’
Harry and Letitia went back inside. The table was still full of the breakfast clutter.
‘Letitia,’ Lestrade said, ‘I could manage a cup of your delicious coffee round about now.’
‘Of course, Sholto.’ She smoothed down her housecoat and a degree of normality prevailed.
‘First,’ Lestrade positioned himself in front of the fire in the drawing-room, ‘the cuffs, Mr Guthrie, if you please.’
‘Impossible!’ Guthrie folded his arms adamantly on the chaise-longue. Harry sat opposite on the sofa.
‘Guthrie,’ Lestrade said quietly, ‘you just heard Mr Bandicoot ask his men to disperse. They refused. If I pop my head out of the window now and imply that you are being less than co-operative, I wouldn’t give you or your boys a tinker’s damn in the matter of survival of this morning. Let me see, I counted three constables, plus your sergeant of course and yourself. That’s five. Armed with truncheons against . . . what was it . . . forty-eight scythes? And as for that thing Harry’s groom is carrying . . .’
His sentence was punctuated by a click as Guthrie unlocked Bandicoot’s cuffs and the squire rubbed his already chafed wrists.
‘Now.’ Lestrade felt the warmth of the fire at last counteracting the sodden serge around his nether regions. ‘What is the charge against Harry Bandicoot?’
Guthrie unfolded a piece of paper from his breast pocket, cleared his throat and read aloud: ‘That the said Mr Bandicoot, of Bandicoot Hall, Huish Episcopi in the County of Somerset, did wilfully and maliciously cause the death of the late Mr Richard Tetley of the same County.’
‘I see,’ said Lestrade gravely. ‘All right, Harry. How did you do it?’
‘I poisoned him, Sholto,’ Bandicoot said.
Lestrade began to circle the immense room slowly.
‘How?’
‘I used phosphorus.’
‘You see, Lestrade,’ Guthrie said, ‘he admits it. Just as he admitted to me not ten minutes before you and your rabble turned up.’
‘The rabble are not mine,’ Lestrade told him. ‘I suspect they were summoned by Maisie, the maid. And I am here on another matter. Where’s your proof, Guthrie?’
‘Proof? When a man confesses, Lestrade, you don’t need proof. Don’t they do it that way at the Yard?’
‘All right,’ Lestrade nodded. ‘But Harry here had not confessed, I take it, until you arrived with your heavies. I repeat, where is your proof?’
‘Very well,’ Guthrie sighed. ‘The coroner’s report . . .’
‘The one I never got to see,’ said Lestrade, looking pointedly at Bandicoot.
‘Quite rightly,’ snorted Guthrie. ‘It said that Tetley died of phosphorus poisoning.’
‘I know,’ Lestrade told him.
Guthrie dismissed it as bravado.
‘Tell me, Harry, what did you use? Water?’
‘That’s right, Sholto.’ Bandicoot hung his head. ‘Please. I know you mean well, but I’d rather get this over.’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but why did you use phosphorus? Was it its tasteless, colourless properties?’
‘Yes,’ said Bandicoot, ‘it mixed so well with the water.’
Lestrade took the squire’s hands in his. ‘Harry, why? Why did you do it?’
The old Etonian looked him straight in the eye. ‘I had my reasons,’ he said.
Lestrade looked down sadly, then turned to Guthrie.
‘You’ve got to let this man go, Chief Inspector,’ he said.
‘The devil I will!’ bellowed Guthrie. ‘He’s a murderer.’
‘No, he’s not,’ Lestrade said. ‘Where’s your motive? Bandicoot here hasn’t given us one.’
‘I’ll get that from him,’ said Guthrie, cracking his knuckles with certainty. ‘It’s the least important.’
‘Opportunity?’ Lestrade asked.
‘The Dower House is on the Bandicoot estate, not a mile away. Wookey Hole is only an hour’s ride. Someone of Mr Bandicoot’s equestrian inclinations would think nothing of that. He is a free agent to come and go as he pleases.’
‘Method?’ Lestrade asked. It was the Holy Trinity of the detective.
‘He’s just told you, Lestrade,’ Guthrie yawned. ‘Do concentrate. Phosphorus poisoning.’
Lestrade nodded. ‘Is the death of Richard Tetley the first death by phosphorus poisoning you’ve met, Mr Guthrie?’
‘Well, yes . . . as a matter of fact, it is.’
‘I thought so. If you’d seen more, you’d know that what Bandicoot just told us is tosh.’
‘Sholto!’ The squire stood up.
‘Sit down, Harry,’ Lestrade told him. ‘The grown-ups are talking now.’ He resisted the temptation of lesser policemen the country over to use his fingers as aids. ‘First, the squire tells us he put the phosphorus in water. Unless Tetley was blind, he woul
d never have drunk it. It would leave a lump of nasty stuff at the bottom which would have coloured the whole glass. Second, he said he used phosphorus because of its tasteless property. It tastes revolting, Harry, and can only be ingested in something highly flavoured – like chocolates, for instance. Third, he said he chose phosphorus because of its colourless properties. It’s yellower than the Primrose League. Fourth,’ Lestrade was in full flight, wearing a furrow in the rich pile of Bandicoot’s Wilton, ‘Mr Bandicoot’s hands bear the marks of a man who has played the Wall Game, boxed and sculled for his school and harvested in due season. What they do not bear is any trace of phosphorus – and even with indiarubber gloves, that is difficult to avoid. No, Harry.’ Lestrade turned to him. ‘I’m afraid my trap caught you more surely than Guthrie’s did outside. The poison I was describing was antimony. I deliberately misled you. Anyone who had really used phosphorus would know the difference. Guthrie here didn’t because he hasn’t seen it used before.’
‘Sholto, I . . .’ Bandicoot began, but Lestrade’s look silenced him.
‘Well.’ Guthrie got to his feet, fuming quietly. ‘I suppose that’s it.’
‘Not quite,’ said Lestrade, lighting up a well-earned cigar. ‘You see, Mr Bandicoot is guilty.’
‘What?’ the squire and the chief inspector chorused.
‘Guilty,’ said Lestrade, ‘of covering up for someone else.’
There was a silence and then a knock at the door. Letitia entered with a tray of coffee for Harry and Lestrade. She had thoughtfully omitted one for Guthrie.
‘Letitia,’ said Lestrade, ‘I’d like you to listen to this.’
‘This does not concern Letitia, Sholto.’ Harry was adamant.
Lestrade looked at his man. ‘I’m afraid it does,’ he said. And she sat down. ‘As everybody but Chief Inspector Guthrie is willing to admit, the death of Richard Tetley was one of a series.’
‘Exactly,’ Bandicoot broke in, ‘and I did them all.’
‘Harry!’ Letitia nearly dropped her sugar tongs. She did in fact drop the sugar and it plopped resoundingly into Lestrade’s cup, spraying his face as he stood behind the sofa. He put the cup down.
‘All right, Harry,’ Lestrade sighed. He was prepared to humour him a little further. ‘Why did you kill The Sheep? The man on the omnibus? Why him?’
‘Er . . . for the wrong he had done Roger Lytton, Sholto. I was at school with him, you know. Floreat Etona and all that. There are just some things a chum has to do for a chum.’
‘You left it a long time, didn’t you, chum?’ Lestrade asked. ‘Roger Lytton was killed over a year ago. Why the delay?’
‘I had to find him first, Sholto. An East End rough in a whole East End full of roughs . . .’
Lestrade nodded. He could see the problem.
‘Lestrade,’ Guthrie interrupted, ‘I don’t understand any of this.’
‘Of course not,’ the inspector smiled, ‘you’re with the Somerset Constabulary. Tell me, Harry, what did you use?’
‘A stiletto,’ Bandicoot answered.
‘The same one you used on the Mander brothers?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Why did you put the aluminium in the mouth of Cuthbert Mander, known as Sally?’
Bandicoot looked a little vacant at that. No one noticed the difference. ‘A private joke,’ he said.
Lestrade shook his head. ‘Now,’ he said quietly, risking his coffee again, ‘we come to Howard Luneberg de Lacy. Just what was your relationship with his wife?’
Bandicoot looked at Letitia, whose earnest eyes had not left her husband the whole time. ‘I was having . . . an affair with her,’ he said.
Lestrade heard Letitia breathe in sharply.
‘So when de Lacy killed his wife, you naturally wanted revenge.’
‘Yes.’ Bandicoot was staring at Letitia, as though no one else were in the room.
‘So you gave him phosphorus poisoning?’
‘Yes. I . . . that is . . .’
‘But you’ve just said he doesn’t know phosphorus from my left testicle – saving your presence, Mrs Bandicoot,’ said Guthrie, bewildered and exasperated.
‘Poetically put,’ said Lestrade, ‘but there are one or two other things Mr Bandicoot doesn’t know. For instance, that only one Mander brother was killed by stabbing, not both. And the piece of aluminium was found in the mouth of Gerald Mander, not Cuthbert. And, of course, Howard de Lacy was stabbed, not poisoned.’
Everybody looked at everybody else.
‘Oh, for a while there,’ sighed Lestrade, ‘I must confess I had my doubts. Things looked a little black for you, Harry. First of all, you asked Letitia to engage my help in the death of Richard Tetley.’
Guthrie snorted his disapproval.
‘For an unworthy moment, it crossed my mind that you did that in the hope that I’d be more lenient with you than the local constabulary, for want of a better phrase.’
‘Right.’ Guthrie was now following Lestrade’s drift.
‘And, of course, you also failed to get me the coroner’s report on Tetley, which might have established your guilt. And you were in Yorkshire on business at the time that Captain Hellerslyke was killed. You were in London, similarly, at the time when Howard de Lacy met his end. It goes without saying you were there again when The Sheep died. You also knew “Armpits” Parmenter, whose death was almost certainly deliberately caused by the Mander brothers. That gave you a motive for at least two of the murders and the opportunity for three.’
‘Then why don’t you let Guthrie take me in?’ Bandicoot shouted.
‘Because you didn’t do them, Harry,’ Lestrade said. ‘Not any of them. What do you know of Mortimer Lytton?’
‘Roger’s brother?’ Bandicoot checked. ‘Not much. I didn’t care for him.’
‘No,’ laughed Lestrade, ‘not your type, I wouldn’t think. Though you were clearly his.’
‘What?’ Guthrie, baulked of one crime, sensed another.
‘Mortimer Lytton is not as other men, Chief Inspector,’ Lestrade told him. ‘What happened, Harry? Did he make you an offer you could refuse?’
‘He certainly did.’ Bandicoot raised his head disdainfully.
‘What did you do?’ Lestrade asked.
‘I knocked him out,’ Bandicoot and Lestrade chorused.
‘I suspected something like that,’ Lestrade went on. ‘Your rejection of the man must have hit him harder than your fist. Didn’t he warn you, Letitia, that Harry wasn’t right for you?’
‘He did, Sholto. He said the most frightful things about you, Harry. I knew they weren’t true. I hit him too.’
They laughed and fell into each other’s arms.
‘That’s enough of that,’ Guthrie growled. ‘This is a murder enquiry. Isn’t it, Lestrade?’
‘Letitia, you’re a scholar,’ said Lestrade. ‘What does the Spanish cherchez l’homme mean?’
‘It’s French, Sholto,’ she giggled, vaguely recognizing the phrase despite Lestrade’s pronunciation. ‘It means “look for the man”.’
Lestrade nodded. ‘Whereas, of course, I should have been looking for a woman.’
Letitia was the first to break the silence. ‘Sholto? Do you mean Harry really didn’t do it?’
Lestrade shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Oh, thank God!’ She held him close. ‘Harry, forgive me; for a moment I thought . . . I was about to send Sholto a telegram, to give myself up. I thought it was you.’
‘And I thought it was you, dearest heart . . .’ Bandicoot laughed. Then he caught the grim faces of Lestrade and Guthrie. It was the chief inspector who crossed the room first.
‘I suggest you get dressed, Mrs Bandicoot,’ he said.
‘Guthrie . . .’ Lestrade began.
The chief inspector ignored him. ‘Letitia Bandicoot, I am arresting you for the murder of Richard Tetley. You are not obliged to say anything . . .’
Indeed, Guthrie wasn’t obliged to say much mor
e. Lestrade expected it. He had seen it before. The flash in the clear blue eyes, the bracing of the back, the swing of the head. And a powerful right hook connected with the chief inspector’s jaw as Harry went for him. Guthrie catapulted backwards, carrying the chaise-longue with him, and lay with his feet twitching slightly.
Lest the crash of furniture brought inquisitive policemen to the window, Lestrade opened the casement and waved to the sergeant. ‘Oops,’ he said cheerily, ‘there goes Mrs Bandicoot’s jardiniere. Clumsy me.’
But the sergeant was standing head to head and toe to toe with Tom Wyatt. He couldn’t have coped with anything else. Lestrade spun to the couple. ‘Harry,’ he said and stooped to check the prostrate policeman. ‘I’m trying to keep you out of prison, but you’re making it damned difficult for me.’
‘I’m sorry, Sholto,’ Bandicoot said. ‘But that oaf is not going to arrest my wife.’
‘No, no, of course not,’ Lestrade soothed him and then his eyes fell on something dangling from Guthrie’s pocket. He picked them up and laughed. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘come and look at this. You’ll never believe it.’
‘What?’ Bandicoot grinned and bent beside him. Lestrade brought both fists down as hard as he could on the back of the squire’s neck and as he crouched, stunned, he flicked out Guthrie’s cuffs and clicked one around Bandicoot’s wrist and one around the iron ring jutting from the wall below the mullion.
‘That’s handy,’ he said to Letitia. ‘Do you suppose that’s why it was put there in the first place?’
‘Harry!’ Letitia had only now realized what was happening and ran to tend her husband.
‘He’s all right,’ Lestrade reassured her. ‘At least he’ll have less of a headache than old Guthrie. Now,’ he lifted her up, ‘Harry lied to save you. You were going to lie to save him.’ He sat her down on the settee and sat beside her. ‘Your confession would have gone something like this. You called me in to sort out the Richard Tetley murder for the same reason Harry might have or because some killers have a compulsion to report their own crimes – a sort of vanity, I suppose.’