Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Er . . .’ Clearly this had come as a surprise to Dew.

  ‘He is not aware, Goron,’ Lestrade cut in. ‘Diminished responsibility – that’s what I’ll do – diminish his responsibility. It’s the water troughs for you, Dew,’ the Inspector shouted, winking surreptitiously at his man. ‘Now, get on with it. Monsieur Goron,’ Lestrade whipped out a cigar, ‘have one of mine.’

  ‘Havana?’ Goron wavered.

  ‘Prince Willem’s,’ he answered.

  Goron shook his head. ‘Too Dutch,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to zese,’ and he sat down and lit up another.

  ‘Well,’ Dew cleared his throat again, vaguely grateful that Goron had left it where it was, ‘this Hitch fingered an old mate of his – Corporal Schiess.’

  ‘And?’ Goron blew smoke into the Constable’s face.

  ‘And we tracked him down.’

  ‘Wiz what success?’

  ‘None,’ Dew admitted. ‘He was dead.’

  Ah,’ Goron nodded, ‘zuicide.’

  ‘Not quite that simple. All right, Walter. I’ll take it from here. Don’t look so glum. It turns out that Friedrich Schiess, known – sorry, Goron – as “Dutchie” to his friends – is actually Ferdinand Christian Schiess and was Swiss.’

  Goron spat into the upturned boater lying beside the Remington.

  ‘Er . . . quite,’ smiled Lestrade.

  ‘I’ll just go and wipe your hat, sir,’ Russell said.

  ‘Thank you, my boy,’ the Inspector said. ‘He was born at Bergedorf on 7 April 1856 and fought for you chaps in the late war against Prussia.’

  ‘Which we lost by a whisker because of treachery and double-dealing,’ Goron explained.

  Lestrade had always believed it was a combination of ruthless Hunnish efficiency, a massive superiority in railway lines, the firepower of the Dreyse needle-gun and the brilliance of Helmuth von Moltke, but he could have been wrong.

  ‘Corporal Schiess served with Lonsdale’s Horse and won the VC against the . . . enemy in the war to which Constable Dew so appallingly referred. He was a shy bloke by all accounts and worked in the telegraph office in Durban, South Africa. By 1884, however, he’d fallen on hard times and, unable to get the prison job on which he’d set his heart, emigrated. He took sick on board the Serapis, however, and died on 14 December of that year off that place . . . where was it, Walter? They make woollens there . . . you remember.’

  ‘Angola, sir.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Zo is zis man a hareng rouge – a red herring?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Lestrade could be cryptic when the moment was right. ‘We contacted the Twenty-fourth Foot as was, the South Wales Borderers as they are now, stationed at Brecon.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ Lestrade drew a telegram from a bundle of papers at his elbow, ‘this is from Captain Penn-Symons of that regiment – “I saw Corporal Schiess in November 1891 in Allahabad, India. He had been working in a jeweller’s shop and was just going to Australia. Being afraid to lose his Victoria Cross, he has sent it on ahead by registered post to his destination.”’

  ‘From which you conclude?’ Goron asked.

  ‘Either,’ Lestrade matched the Frenchman smoke ring for smoke ring, ‘Captain Penn-Symons is an idiot who wouldn’t know Corporal Schiess from his elbow or Corporal Schiess did not die aboard the Serapis, and could therefore be alive and well and living somewhere in London.’

  ‘What would be his motive?’

  Lestrade shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’s as mad as a snake. Perhaps he doesn’t approve of unaccompanied women riding the Underground. Who knows? I’ll tell you that when we’ve found him. I’d be happier if we knew what Corporal Schiess looks like.’

  ‘Well,’ chuckled Goron, ‘don’t ask Toulouse-Lautrec!’

  ‘Because I have a feeling that one of us in this room knows what he looks like.’

  ‘Oh?’ They all looked at each other.

  ‘Apparently,’ Lestrade said, tapping Penn-Symons’s telegram, ‘Schiess spoke perfect English.’

  ‘Zo?’

  ‘So – where was he going from Allahabad?’

  ‘Er . . . Australia.’ Goron had been listening all the time.

  ‘And where do you believe, Walter, did that man come from – the one claiming to be the fictitious Mr Bellamy?’

  ‘Australia!’ Dew clicked his fingers.

  Lestrade stubbed out his cigar butt. ‘The rest, Goron, is mystery. Tomorrow, Constables Russell and Bromley here will escort you with full powers of arrest to Earls Court. If we can find the Monster of Montparnasse, you can have him for breakfast.’

  THE COMTE DE LA WARRE, alias Pierre La Touche, Henri Chauvon and the Abbe Fiennes, had done, as the French say, a bunk. Goron was disappointed of course but consoled himself by jabbing Hauptmann Bruno in his vitals during the course of his inquiries. It happened so fast that neither Russell nor Bromley saw it, and when asked (by an examining magistrate) why he had done it, Goron explained that the man was German. Enough that may have been in the boulevards and under the bridges of Paris, but Englishmen with their eminent sense of fair play couldn’t accept it. Goron was quite prepared to settle the matter on Hounslow Heath or Regent’s Park or anywhere. Pistols, swords, medieval maces, he didn’t have a preference. But the magistrate saw things differently and caused an international incident by arresting and imprisoning the Head of the Sûreté which only the Fashoda affair of three years later and the Eurovision Song Contest of another century would eclipse in terms of Anglo-French hostility.

  It had been none of Lestrade’s doing of course, but he, it transpired, had other problems.

  SHE TOOK THE STAIRS for safety, keeping a tight grip on the handrail that spiralled to the right. All the way down, posters told her to use Pear’s Soap and Nestlé’s Milk and Senna’s Laxative. The old advertisements gave her comfort as her heels clicked hollow on the metal treads until she reached the ground.

  There was no one on the platform, but the clock told her it was 11.38. If she stood quite still she could see the huge metal hand move upwards, in uneven jerks, towards the Roman eight. Overhead, the covered walkway along which she had just trudged boasted the fact that a Remington typewriter had a longer life than certain other typewriters, and another display asked her, rather rudely she thought, whether she had tried Allsopp’s Pale Ale.

  The gas lamps flickered green on the white letters of Charing Cross. The last train. Why had she left it this long? Why hadn’t she taken up his gallant offer of a lift home? A cab would have been far more sensible. Still, the newspapers were just scaremongering, weren’t they? It was obviously a ploy by Sabbatarians or somebody to keep women off the Underground. Well, it wouldn’t work. This was 1895. Women could vote in municipal elections. Some of them followed their menfolk all over the Empire, climbed mountains, made their own cream teas. She wasn’t going to be frightened by a lunatic who pounced on women travelling alone. But just in case, as the last locomotive slowed on the curve before the platform and she saw its yellow lights like eyes glowing in the dark, she remembered her mother’s advice and jammed the blunt end of her hatpin between her lips. Let anybody come near her now and they’d be in for a surprise.

  She tried to find a crowded compartment, a carriage with women, children. Perhaps a clergyman? Or even a policeman? But they were empty. The whole train was empty. Still, the carriages had a communication cord. The driver could stop on a sixpence, she’d heard. She’d be all right. She chose the end carriage. She opened the door and hauled up her skirts and climbed inside. Yes, the end carriage was the safest – the one with the guard.

  They found her at four the next morning. As dawn crept over the Moorish façade of Blackfriars and the cleaner shuffled down the platform with his bucket and broom, she half fell out of the end carriage – the safe one with the guard. Her hair was unpinned and her bonnet had gone. Her blouse had been ripped open and her breasts were bare. Still clamped between the blue, bloated lips was a steel
hatpin of fearsome dimensions. Her skirt was hitched up to her waist and her unmentionables had been ripped aside. Her hands were clawed, the nails embedded in the leather of the seats. But it was her eyes the cleaner would never forget. Before they retired him weeks later with the shakes and an inability to sleep, he had seen those eyes watching him every waking hour of his life. Eyes that spoke in silence of the terror they had seen. Of a nameless dread that stalked the Underground. Of a ghost that came in the night.

  ‘MR WELLS?’ THE POLICEMAN stood silhouetted against the sun. ‘Mr Herbert George Wells?’

  ‘Yes.’ The younger man sat up from his dozing alongside the picnic cloth and the relics of a dejeuner sur l’herbe. Lestrade knew that if this had been the redoubtable Goron picnicking, the woman with him would have been naked.

  ‘Would this be Mrs Wells?’ Lestrade asked.

  The straw-boatered young lady in the frothy summer blouse blushed a softer shade of crimson. ‘Not for a few months yet,’ she said.

  ‘This is Jane Robbins, Mr . . . er?’

  ‘Lestrade,’ said Lestrade.

  ‘My wife is at home,’ Wells explained. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Let’s just say we have a mutual acquaintance.’ Lestrade squatted by the pair, tilting the boater back on his head.

  ‘Oh? Who?’

  Lestrade sucked his teeth. He never enjoyed embarrassing people, although he was excellent at it. ‘Are you the author of a book called The Time Machine, Mr Wells?’ he asked.

  ‘I am.’ Wells was clearly proud of the fact and produced a pen from his waistcoat pocket. ‘You know, old chap, you don’t have to claim a mutual acquaintanceship just to get my signature. I’d be delighted to sign your copy’

  ‘Good,’ said Lestrade, hoicking the man upright by his writing arm. ‘There’s a boat over there. Let’s talk about your book, shall we?’

  ‘But . . . that’s my punt,’ said Wells.

  ‘We shan’t be long, Miss Robbins,’ Lestrade called. ‘Why don’t you rinse the dishes in the river, or something?’

  ‘Look here . . .’ But Wells’ uncomprehending protests were to no avail as Lestrade bundled him into the working end of the punt and lowered himself down as nonchalantly as he dared.

  It had to be said that this was not the ideal position. A suspect in a murder inquiry was looming over the prone policeman and he was armed with a murderous ten-foot pole. Neither was this a stretch of the Thames with which Lestrade was totally familiar. Give him the murky swirling depths of Shadwell Stair, the impenetrable stagnant gloom of Blackwall Reach. Here were fields and trees and bulrushes standing sentinel along the bank. Mallards flapped skywards from the reeds and coots patted on their floating nests, poking their white noses into some other river dweller’s business.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Wells stood defiantly on the platform, ‘until you tell me what this is all about.’

  ‘I didn’t want to compromise you in front of a lady, Mr Wells,’ said Lestrade, ‘but I have reason to believe that you are acquainted with a Miss Henrietta Fordingbridge of Lower Streatham.’

  ‘Henrietta? Yes, I am. Is anything wrong?’

  Miss Robbins was kneeling up now, shielding her eyes from the sun and listening intently to snatches of the men’s conversation.

  ‘Can you use that thing?’ Lestrade pointed to the pole.

  ‘After a fashion,’ said Wells. ‘That is, I got us here.’

  ‘Then row,’ Lestrade advised. ‘I have some grave news for you, Mr Wells. I am a policeman.’

  The author of The Time Machine slid the pole into the river mud and the punt glided effortlessly away from the bank. Ducks were a-dabbling up-tails all, but neither man noticed.

  ‘That’s not very grave. Go on,’ said Wells.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’ Lestrade watched his man for signs of reaction. The pole slipped slightly in the strong zoologist’s hands. The handsome face darkened and the luxuriant mustachios, blonded by the brilliance of the spring sun, visibly drooped.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said.

  ‘Did you now?’ Lestrade sat up, balancing himself in the shallow skiff as best he could. ‘Would you care to elaborate, sir?’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Wells.

  ‘Ah.’ Lestrade sensed his prey slowing, wavering before head-long panic set in to escape the long arm of the law. He’d settle for a confession on Henrietta Fordingbridge. The rest could come later. Then he could clear himself with Frost, cock yet another snook at Abberline and perhaps put in for some long-overdue leave.

  ‘I should never have let her go home alone. How did it happen?’

  ‘You tell me, sir.’ Lestrade had been to the Spanish Inquisition school of police interrogations; not quite vicious enough for Her Majesty’s Tax Inspectors.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘The night before last.’ Wells applied his pole again. ‘She’d been to the theatre with me.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘That little-known piece by Chekhov – Ward Number Six. Do you know it?’

  ‘No,’ said Lestrade. The last time he’d gone to the theatre it was to see a translation of Corneille’s Le Cid. He’d asked for his money back. There wasn’t a single mention of the Criminal Investigation Department, just a load of tosh about some Spanish bloke. Very disappointing. ‘What time did you leave her?’

  ‘Let me see.’ Wells thought. ‘It’d be about ten-thirty, I suppose.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside the Prince’s, Haymarket.’

  ‘How was she to get home?’

  ‘Well, I offered to call her a cab, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was an independent spirit, Mr Lestrade. Insisted on paying for her own theatre seat and so on. I should have insisted!’ He jabbed the butt of the pole down on to the boat’s end and it wobbled violently.

  ‘So,’ Lestrade’s mind was racing over the map of London he knew so well, ‘from the Haymarket, her nearest Underground station was Charing Cross?’

  ‘Er . . . yes, I suppose so.’ Wells was less familiar.

  ‘So where was she between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty?’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Wells, scanning the river ahead for other craft. ‘Hello, Jerome!’ he called to the three men in the passing boat.

  ‘Afternoon, H.G.!’ the clean-shaven member of the trio shouted back. ‘Loved The Time Machine, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks. What do you mean?’ He’d returned mentally to Lestrade.

  ‘We know from a platform guard that she caught the eleven thirty-eight at Charing Cross Station. At that time of night it takes . . . what, five minutes to reach Charing Cross – and that’s with a headwind. So where was she for the other fifty-five minutes or so?’

  Wells shrugged.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Home,’ he said, ‘by cab. Oh God, Lestrade, this is terrible.’

  ‘Can you tell me, sir,’ the Inspector leaned forward, ‘what was Miss Fordingbridge to you?’

  ‘A dalliance, that’s all.’

  ‘Whereas Miss Robbins . . . ?’

  ‘Is my fiancée, Mr Lestrade. I appreciate your circumspection, by the way, but it wasn’t strictly necessary.’

  Lestrade closed his legs. He didn’t know it showed. ‘And Mrs Wells?’

  ‘Isabel and I are divorced,’ the writer told him. ‘I may as well come clean, Lestrade. I am a believer in free love.’

  ‘You mean you don’t approve of prostitution?’

  ‘No. I mean that I don’t believe that a man and a woman should be shackled by the conventions of a Christian marriage where sex is concerned.’

  Lestrade raised an eyebrow. No wonder the nineties were naughty. And thank God Walter Dew wasn’t there. ‘You mean you expect any woman to have sex with you?’

  ‘Only if she wants to,’ Wells explained. ‘Never without her consent – and never on the Underground. Was Henrietta raped, Mr Lestrade?’

 
‘The police surgeon thinks not,’ Lestrade said. ‘Tell me, Mr Wells,’ he peered closely at his man, ‘how did you come to scratch your cheek?’

  ‘My . . . ?’ Wells felt the red claw marks as though for the first time. ‘Oh, my cat, Mr Polly. A vicious old Tom with homicidal tendencies. I was moving him off some notes I’d written for the Graphic yesterday and he didn’t appreciate the gesture. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Did anyone witness this murderous attack on you by your pet?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. What is its significance?’

  ‘The police surgeon is a good man. Chap called Quincey; he’ll go far. He noticed, under Miss Fordingbridge’s finger-nails, a quantity of human skin.’

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘I mean, Mr Wells, that as she was being strangled to death by a powerful pair of hands,’ and he glared meaningfully at those handling the pole with such expertise, ‘she clawed the face of her attacker.’

  ‘I see,’ said Wells, ‘and you think . . . ?’

  ‘I’m not paid to think,’ Lestrade confessed. ‘Merely to ask questions and to act upon information received.’

  ‘It’s a tragic world, Mr Lestrade,’ Wells said. ‘You clearly haven’t read my Time Machine and that’s a pity. You see, I’m something of a prophet. Oh, I’m not Elijah or Elisha and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I know there are terrible things coming. One day – and not too long in the future – there’ll be war from the air; great bombs that will destroy whole civilizations; men and women created like some ghastly Frankenstein experiment; and worst of all, people will pay good money to eat pieces of minced beef thrust with onions between two pieces of bread. I tell you, that’s not a future I want to see.’

  It was Lestrade’s turn not to follow.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Wells took in the puzzled face, the hangdog moustache. It spoke of incomprehension beyond comprehension. ‘It’s started already. The End Of Civilization As We Know It. Some lunatic is going round slaughtering women haphazardly on the Underground. This isn’t an England I want; an England I can believe in; an England in which my children will grow up. There’s only one solution, Lestrade.’