Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand

by M. J. Trow

  It was the day after that, a Thursday, that two rather familiar men turned up at Sergeant Dixon’s desk, main vestibule, Scotland Yard. One had the unmistakable stoop of a man who had, at one time or another, seen service on the North-West Frontier and showed all the signs of having let the Khybers past. The other bore curious pale marks across his forehead that seemed to have been caused by dangling corks blotting out the fierce Antipodean sun. They had come, they said, in search of their brother, who had sent them a telegram the previous day. They wanted him charged or they wanted him released.

  Sergeant Dixon was a copper of the old school. He knew which side his bread was buttered. ‘Anything happens on the Appleyard front,’ Abberline had said to him, ‘you send for me straight away.’ And an in situ Chief Inspector carried immeasurably more clout than a suspended Inspector. But somewhere Sergeant Dixon had a mind of his own. And he sent old Bromley round with a message to Mr Lestrade’s.

  ‘Forgive me,’ the Inspector said, at a corner table in Gannet’s Tea Rooms, ‘for meeting you both here rather than at the Yard, but I have my reasons.’

  ‘We’ve come for our brother,’ said the Frontier man. ‘You’re holding him illegally.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Lestrade said. ‘We are holding him on suspicion of murder. The magistrate was kind enough to extend the writ. Tea?’

  The waitress hovered, chewing her pencil stub.

  ‘Thank you, no,’ the Australian said. ‘I lost the taste for it down under.’

  Lestrade couldn’t see what the man’s sexual inclinations had to do with tea, but perhaps it wasn’t his place to pry. ‘One tea, please,’ he said, ‘and a Sally Lunn. Go easy on the sugar.’

  The waitress bobbed.

  ‘Scotland Yard’s tab,’ Lestrade called after her. ‘Name of Abberline. You see, gentlemen,’ the Inspector closed to the pair, moving the table napkin into position down his collar-front, ‘my first problem is that your brother refuses to give us his name. He calls himself Arthur Appleyard. And that just won’t do.’

  ‘He has his reasons,’ said the Frontier man, ‘as do we all.’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ Lestrade said, ‘and they probably involve the deaths of six women and one . . . er . . . man on the Underground since February last. Am I right?’

  ‘We cannot comment on that,’ the Australian said. ‘We give you our word, however, that none of us is responsible.’

  Lestrade sighed. He fished in his pocket and produced two crumpled sketches. He showed them to the pair. ‘Look familiar?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should we?’ the two chorused.

  ‘No, I mean, do these drawings look familiar? They should. Constable Hockney is our police artist. He’s coming on, isn’t he? I remember when he used to draw horses with five legs. But that’s quite a good likeness of you, isn’t it, Mr Bellamy? And of you, Mr Fordingbridge?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ snapped Bellamy.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Lestrade’s tea and cake arrived. ‘Thank you, my dear. You’re thinking that sketches like this are not admissible as evidence in court. Well, of course, you’re quite right. There’s a French bloke called Bertillon who’s putting together hundreds of sorts of ears, noses, eyes and so on, like a jigsaw puzzle – a sort of kit to establish identity. All nonsense of course. It’ll never work. But there’s nothing like the real thing, is there?’ Lestrade clicked his fingers and the waitress came loping over. ‘No, dear, not you. Walter!’

  The Detective Constable of that name appeared at his elbow from behind a frosted glass partition whose lettering read CREAM TEAS.

  ‘Oh, yessir,’ Dew beamed, ‘this one’s William Bellamy all right.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Lestrade clicked again. ‘No, dear, I told you; not now. Bromley!’

  The Detective Constable of that name followed Dew. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘This man was calling himself John Fordingbridge not three weeks ago.’

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Lestrade sank his incisors into the gooey pastry. ‘Your collar, I think, Walter. Read them their rights as you go. It’s only a short walk to the Yard, Messrs Bellamy and Fordingbridge, and I believe you know the way. These officers will accompany you.’

  ‘Are we under arrest?’ Bellamy asked.

  ‘I think you can assume that,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘On what charge?’ Fordingbridge demanded.

  ‘Lying to a police officer. Giving fictional names. Hampering the police in the course of their inquiries. That’ll keep you for twenty-four hours anyway. I’ll have thought of something else by then.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Fordingbridge snarled. ‘This is outrageous. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Lestrade clicked his fingers for a spoon. The waitress, tired of the policeman who cried wolf, ignored him.

  ‘I’ve heard many a criminal say that,’ Lestrade said, ‘in a rather muffled way with a bag over his head and a rope round his neck. With my vast experience of the felonious classes, I believe that William and John are your real names. And your brother probably is Arthur. And there’s no doubt about your familial relationship. All I need now is a surname. Do I have it? It makes the paperwork so much easier.’

  NO SURNAME FOR THE brothers grim was forthcoming. Dew and Bromley took them across the road to the Yard, under the shadow of Big Ben, and placed them in separate cells from their brother and each other with Corkindale minding all three.

  And it was late that night that Lestrade found himself alone, padding slowly down the platform of Blackfriars Station, his hands locked behind his back, his bowler atilt on his head. The last train had gone. And the iron gears of the station clock chimed midnight. A passing pigeon, flapping homeward to its roost in the wrought-iron eaves, left its calling card on Lestrade’s shoulder. He was about to deal with it as deftly as he could when a shadow flitted across the platform ahead. He broke his stride, half turned and flattened himself against the wall of the little covered waiting room.

  There was no sound now, only the distant barges on the river wailing under the moon. The hiss of steam had gone; so had the clang of girders as they expanded and contracted in the summer’s heat. He poked his head round the corner. Nothing. He edged one shoulder out, sticky with pigeon droppings, and he sidled into the moonlight. The waiting room, for all its glass sides, had dark corners, deep shadows. The Inspector felt the warm brass of the knuckles in his pocket and placed a foot gingerly on the brass step at the door. A faded poster urged him to take the Great Northern Railway to Doncaster, an invitation he found curiously easy to decline. Another, ripped and peeling, offered an exhilarating evening in the company of Martha Arthur And Her Amazing Chameleons. Sadly, Lestrade had missed it by nearly three years.

  ‘Now, Ivan,’ Lestrade said softly, ‘we aren’t going to have any tricks, are we? We’re both too old for tricks.’

  There was a chuckle in the darkest corner of the room. ‘You always were a flatfoot, Sholto Lestrade. If I was a trasseno, you’d be dead by now.’

  Lestrade swept off his hat and sat in the opposite corner. ‘If you were a trasseno, Ivan, I wouldn’t have come. How long has it been?’

  A figure emerged into the light. A tall man with a curiously wrought walking stick and a stiff left leg. He extended a hand. Lestrade caught it.

  ‘Too long,’ the man said. ‘How have you been, Sholto?’

  ‘Better,’ Lestrade confessed. ‘But I’m a busy man, Ivan. And I’d dearly like to know why you asked me to meet you at midnight at Blackfriars Station.’

  ‘“Under the moon at midnight”,’ Ivan corrected him.

  Lestrade looked at his man. Older, certainly. Thinner of hair under the Homburg, he suspected. Gammier of leg than he remembered. But the same old Ivan. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to grow hair and start baying at it,’ the Inspector said.

  Ivan smiled. ‘What do you know about me, Sholto?’ he asked.

  Lestrade looked at him in the moonlight. ‘Ex-Inspector Ivan Corner, known to coppers
and the Underworld alike as Ivan the Terrible and to the newspapers as Corner of the Yard. Joined the Metropolitan Police, M Division, in the Year of Our Lord 1840.’

  ‘1839,’ Corner corrected him. ‘Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister and our great founder, bless his cotton underwear, had not yet taken the fall from his horse which was to prove his undoing.’

  ‘Served two years as beat constable and became a member of that gallant band known as the Detective Branch.’

  ‘In old Scotland Yard,’ Corner remembered. ‘That was a real police station in those days.’

  ‘Worked with my old man on the murder at the village of Road – the Constance Kent Case.’

  ‘I worked with Inspector Whicher,’ Corner put him right. ‘Your old man came along to polish our shoes.’

  ‘Ah, we also serve who only stand and wait,’ Lestrade said, in a rare moment of poesy. ‘Rose to become Inspector. Feared by the bad, loved by the good. Retired with countless commendations on the occasion of Her Majesty’s fortieth year on the throne. Like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to whom he gave copious advice on surveillance while wearing silly hats, always got his man. Ivan Corner, this is your life.’

  ‘Not quite,’ the old man said. ‘That bit about always getting my man – sadly untrue.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down, Ivan – allow me a little artistic licence, a few emblandishments.’

  ‘No, no, Sholto. I’m not being modest. You see the one man I missed is back. Only now, he’s killing people.’

  Lestrade produced a cigar for them both. ‘I’m sitting as comfortably as I can on a London and North-Eastern Railway seat at a little past midnight on a balmy night by the light of the moon. You may begin.’

  ‘You haven’t heard the legend of Blackfriars Dan, have you? It would be before your time.’

  Lestrade shook his head.

  ‘I’d been a detective for two years. Every copper south of the Humber had been drafted in to London for the Great Exhibition. You couldn’t move for foreigners. And of course, one-third of the visitors came by train.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Well, there weren’t any trains when I was a lad, of course. All coaches and canals. I remember the first time I rode in a carriage. Shat myself because it was going so fast – but that’s another story.’

  Lestrade was glad of that.

  ‘I remember it all started in the summer of fifty-one. A terrible, hot summer it was, like this one. We’d had reports of a maniac on the trains, interfering with young women.’

  ‘Oh?’ Lestrade was all ears.

  ‘Whicher sent me out to investigate. It was like looking for a will-o’-the-wisp.’

  Lestrade had been there before.

  ‘He’d strike at night, in carriages, on lonely platforms. We couldn’t find him.’

  ‘What was his method?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘He’d stand behind his prey on a platform and put his hand down the waistband of her skirts.’

  ‘And in carriages?’

  ‘Find one with a single female occupant and engage her in conversation. Then he’d try it on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An assault of a sexual nature.’

  Lestrade clicked his tongue. ‘Why Blackfriars Dan?’ he asked.

  ‘I plotted his attacks on a map. Dug out the area from the Map Room at the Yard and found that the centre of it all was here. Right here at Blackfriars. “Dan” because I knew who it was.’

  ‘You did?’

  Corner nodded, Lestrade’s cigar clamped soggily in his teeth. ‘Of course, looking back, it all seems a bit trivial now,’ he said, ‘but at the time the papers had a field day. Whicher’s head was on the line; so was mine. That Jewish bastard Disraeli raised it in the House of bloody Commons. “The condition of England question,” he said, “will never be answered while our policemen are of the calibre they are.”’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Drove out to Hughenden Manor, his country house, and shat through his letter box.’

  ‘That did the trick?’

  ‘Well, it was twenty years before he became Prime Minister. Obviously slowed him up a bit, you know; gave him food for thought.’

  ‘So who was Blackfriars Dan, Ivan?’

  ‘We narrowed it down to three possibles,’ Corner said. ‘One was a bloke named Felix Yusupov – of Russian extraction. I was able to rule him out because he was killed by a nervous bullock in Smithfield Market while the attacks were still going on. Pity, really; he was top of my list.’

  ‘And number two?’

  ‘Alexander Beardsmore, a defrocked clergyman from Devizes.’

  ‘That sounds more promising.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Until I realized that Beardsmore was terrified of trains.’

  ‘He was?’

  ‘Totally. Oh, he certainly molested young ladies, in hotels, shop doorways, on omnibuses, and we put him away for it. But trains, never. The fly bugger had buggered back to Devizes and when I tried to bring him back by train, he fainted on the platform. I thought he’d died. Both him and the engine, completely steamed up. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘So Dan’s your third man?’

  ‘Ah, yes, the third man. One Daniel Sleigh, of private means. Married a rich woman to boot, so he had plenty of leisure. Time on his hands and money to burn – it’s a fatal combination, Sholto.’

  ‘So they tell me,’ Lestrade said. ‘Maybe I’ll find out one day. What made you suspect him?’

  ‘The description,’ Corner replied. ‘Three of the eight women saw him distinctly. Their accounts tallied in every particular – and they also fitted Sleigh.’

  ‘And Yusupov and Beardsmore?’

  ‘Yes,’ shrugged the old man, ‘but not half so well. Sleigh had no alibi for the nights in question and it was obvious when I spoke to his wife that he had . . . abnormal appetites.’

  ‘What?’ Lestrade frowned. ‘You mean he ate a lot?’

  ‘No, Sholto.’ Age had made Ivan the Terrible short on patience. ‘I mean matters of the flesh. Carnal relations.’

  ‘The wife admitted this?’

  ‘She didn’t have to. I took the advantage of her afternoon nap to snoop around the house. There was a marriage bed, although she apparently napped downstairs of an afternoon and it had a bolster down the middle.’

  ‘A lot of married couples employ that as a means of controlling births,’ Lestrade said, although he and his Sarah had never found the need.

  ‘Yes, but with iron spikes on the top? I tell you, Sholto, Daniel Sleigh was a fiend.’

  ‘But you couldn’t nail him?’

  Corner shook his head. ‘All these years it’s bothered me. That’s the sole reason I’ve never written my memoirs – that and the fact I can’t write. Couldn’t bear the duplicity you see, not to mention Blackfriars Dan. And couldn’t bear the shame of mentioning him either.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘His wife had him put away.’

  ‘Could she do that?’

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way. She did. Last I heard he was in a private sanatorium somewhere, chained to the wall.’

  ‘What has this got to do with my case, Ivan?’

  ‘Dan’s back,’ Corner said grimly.

  Lestrade looked at him. ‘No. How can that be? He’d be older than Methuselah by now.’

  ‘Would he? When I talked to Daniel Sleigh he was my age – twenty-six at the time. That would make him, all things being equal, seventy now.’

  ‘All right, then, Ivan, and I do beg your pardon, but are you seriously expecting me to believe that a seventy-year-old man could strangle six women and a man?’

  ‘Simultaneously, no,’ said Corner, ‘but one at a time, why not?’

  ‘Come on!’ Lestrade was incredulous. Suddenly, he felt a thump to his temple. The cigar flew from his mouth and he found himself kneeling on the floor with Corner’s left arm locked round his throat and his head twisted sharply
to one side.

  ‘And this is my bad arm,’ the old copper grunted.

  Lestrade slapped the man’s forearm for all he was worth. The waiting room was beginning to swim in his vision and his chest threatened to burst. Corner released his grip, and Lestrade slumped forward. ‘I thought we agreed,’ he rasped, ‘no tricks.’

  ‘Sorry, Sholto,’ Corner helped him up to the seat again, ‘but I had to make a point.’

  ‘Yes, yes, quite.’ Lestrade tried to screw his head back on. All to no avail. It veered to the right for the rest of the night. All right. So a seventy-year-old man could strangle people, at least a seventy-year-old man with police training. ‘How do you know Sleigh isn’t dead? In my experience, people don’t live long in those places.’

  ‘He got out, Sholto, that’s how I know. It was in The Times, no less – a little piece just under the Hunjadi Janos Laxative advertisement. Back in February, this was.’

  ‘February?’ Lestrade made a valiant attempt to prick up his ears.

  ‘Exactly,’ Corner read the transparency that was Lestrade’s mind. ‘The month Mrs Culdrose died.’

  ‘You’ve known about this all this time and you haven’t come forward before?’ Lestrade snapped. ‘Why not?’

  ‘At first, I wasn’t sure. Remember that back in the ’fifties Sleigh didn’t kill anybody. I reasoned after a while that that was because he didn’t get the chance or because his mania hadn’t fully developed. God knows what forty years of incarceration have done to his libidinous tendencies.’

  ‘Not to mention his lusts after young women,’ Lestrade added.

  ‘I watched the papers. Mrs Hollander I wasn’t sure about. She seemed to have so many men in her life, it could have been anybody. But by the time Miss Bellamy was found, I decided to act. I nipped into the Yard and got young George Dixon to look up Records.’