The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade

by Trow, M J

  Lestrade ignored these fanciful lunges into mid-air. The man had clearly no notion of the mechanics of murder. ‘Have – or had you – among your officers, Colonel, one called Peter? The Christian name, I would surmise.’

  Templeton-Smyth strode around the room. ‘Peter, Peter,’ he mused to himself, stroking the long, lean chin. ‘Well, I’ve been with the Thirteenth for fifteen years now since Cornet. There’s only one Peter I’ve known among the officers.’

  Lestrade straightened. Was this it? Had his gamble, his expensive, unrequisitioned trip to Dublin, paid off? Did he have a link with this fashionable cavalry regiment? What was Templeton-Smyth covering up?

  ‘Peter Endercott. He’s out there.’ He pointed to the window.

  Lestrade hauled himself upright, grimacing with pain. Those damned gun-limber wheels must have broken his toes. He reached the window. Below, a squadron of the 13th Hussars were going through their sword drill exercises, even though the afternoon was drawing in under a threatening sky. The clash of steel punctuated the harsh commands of the drill sergeants. Lestrade remembered his own days of such practice as a constable with the Mounted Division. He could see four officers standing casually around watching the men go through their paces.

  ‘Which one is he, sir?’

  Templeton-Smyth looked oddly at him and realisation dawned. ‘Oh, no, my dear chap. Over there.’ He pointed beneath a clump of elms, some distance from the parade ground. ‘Third grave from the left. T.B., poor chap. Family insisted he be buried here. Full military honours, of course.’

  ‘When?’ Lestrade’s optimism had already reached his bandages.

  ‘Oh, three – no, four years ago. June it was. Shame. He made up a good foursome.’

  ‘Foursome?’

  ‘Whist, Captain. Do you play?’

  ‘Er … no, sir.’

  ‘Pity. Now there’s a good game for boys.’

  The door opened and a tall angular woman in a frothy white dress appeared. ‘My dear, I’m sorry tiffin is late today. Shall we take it in the … oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company.’

  Lestrade staggered to his feet.

  ‘Oh, no, please don’t get up.Gout can be a frightful business, can’t it?’

  ‘This is Major Lestrade, my dear, of the Metropolitan Police,’ offered Templeton-Smyth. ‘Major, my sister.’

  ‘Inspector, ma’am,’ groaned Lestrade as Miss Templeton-Smyth shook his hand heartily.

  ‘We were discussing a delicate matter, my dear …’ said the colonel.

  ‘Oh, Robert, my dear, can’t it wait? This poor man deserves some tea.’ She helped Lestrade to his bandages and steadied him on a wiry arm. ‘Girls,’ she said as they limped from the colonel’s office. ‘As a policeman, you must meet some of the wayward ones.’

  Lestrade had been here before.

  ‘Well, we have to train them, Inspector, to make something of them. I was talking it over with one of my brother’s officers, Captain Baden-Powell, before he left for Malta. He rather ridiculed the whole thing.’ The colonel fell into step behind his sister. ‘We’ll have tea and I’ll tell you of my idea …’

  So Lestrade had drawn another blank with the 13th Hussars, as he had with Tennyson. He had bruised his toes, been violently sick on the crossing back from Dublin and had been subjected to Templeton-Smyth’s interminable ramblings about organising the youth of Britain into some ghastly regiment of paragons, helping old ladies across the road and hiking pointlessly around the countryside. What a fatuous idea – that Baden-Powell fellow had got it right. And how silly Colonel Templeton-Smyth would look in short trousers.

  For the next eighteen days, a team of constables working from the War Office tracked down and interviewed the twenty-four Peters who were serving or had served in the ranks with the 13th Hussars. Lestrade was desk-bound while his toes subsided, but he was rather surprised that there were so many of them – Peters, that is, not toes. It was not after all so common a name. He was disappointed not to find anything tangible in the follow-ups. Eight of the Peters were dead, three of them were in jail. Two were abroad and likely to remain so and of the remaining eleven, no links could be established with Shanklin, Isle of Wight or the disappearance of a middle-aged man in a labourer’s smock. At least Lestrade now knew that the smock denoted Norfolk, but enquiries by telegram and telephone to the chief constable of that county achieved nothing – partly because the chief constable did not have a telephone. But there were no reports of a missing person answering to the description of what was once the man in the Chine. Several cats of course were listed and one rather nasty salamander, but no farm labourers; indeed, no people at all.

  Lestrade was about to conclude that an unidentified man whose name may or may not have been Peter, who may or may not have had association with the 13th Hussars, had met his end by foul play by person or persons unknown, when a letter arrived by second delivery. It was a mourning letter, black-edged and the message was typed. Lestrade read it just once to realise its import –

  Just look at him! There he stands,

  With his nasty hair and hands.

  See! His nails are never cut;

  They are grim’d and black as soot;

  And the sloven, I declare,

  Never once has combed his hair.

  The postmark was London and it was addressed to ‘Inspector Lestrade, Scotland Yard.’ The inspector looked again at the doggerel. Home-made? Yes, he surmised so. He wished he knew rather more about poetry but the crammer he had been to had not thought it necessary and most of his colleagues at the Yard – Gregson, Athelney Jones, even McNaghten – found poetry and poets faintly limp and unmanly. The typescript was odd – slightly uneven with a decided kick on the letter ‘n’ so it stood a little way below the line. He had always thought there must be a way of detecting a faulty typewriter, but he was damned if he could see how.

  He remembered again the Ripper letters. Two of them he knew were genuine. Nearly two hundred were from cranks, oddities who crawled from the woodwork whenever murder walked abroad. But these two had carried inside information. And so did this verse; the hair alone had been mentioned in the local papers and the case – for such it had become – did not reach all the dailies. Only the coroner’s report, that of Sergeant Bush of the Hampshire Constabulary and Lestrade’s own carried full information. There was the possibility of a leak, mused Lestrade, as he painfully took the lift to the ground floor. Perhaps someone in the coroner’s office – that spotty lad Spilsbury, for instance – perhaps one of Bush’s constables. But he didn’t think so. In his heart of hearts he knew that this letter had been written, and the verse composed, by the murderer.

  Well, so be it. This was 1891 and this was Scotland Yard – the foremost police headquarters in the world. This was Britain, the workshop of the world. Forensic science was at his disposal. Here, in the gloomy basement festooned with pipes of gas and water, here were the most brilliant men of science that Europe could boast. If they could not find clues in the letter, no one could.

  ‘Fingerprints?’ repeated the boffin as he stared at the outstretched letter in Lestrade’s carefully poised fingertips. ‘What are they?’

  Ball of Lightning

  Lord Frederick Hurstmonceux lay on the billiard table in the gaming room. His normally immaculate hunting coat was thrown back in tatters, his shirt lacerated and congealed with blood, as were his hands and face. He had been dead for some six hours when Lestrade arrived, at McNaghten’s personal request. The house, an extravagant Palladian monstrosity nestling in a curve of the downs, was still and silent. After the shaking and rattling of the Daimler Wagonette horseless carriage, that silence was bliss. A grim butler met him at the door and showed him into the tiled entrance hall. His policeman’s eye took in the aspidistrae, the elegant sweep of the staircase, the portraits of the Hurstmonceux, fathers and sons in their hunting pinks. A row of hushed, frightened servants, stiff in their starched white aprons lined the passageway. They were unsure how to
behave to Lestrade. They knew he was a police officer and why he was there, but many of them had never seen an officer from Scotland Yard, a man in plain clothes. Some of them curtsied, others followed him with their eyes.

  The butler threw back the double doors. Lestrade blinked in the bright electric light which flooded the table. He looked down at the body. ‘Ruined the baize,’ he murmured.

  ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Would you ask Sir Henry to join me here?’

  The butler vanished. Lestrade gave the body a cursory examination. Cause of death he assumed to be severe lacerations and shock. Or blood loss, he mused, as he turned the matted head to find the jugular ripped. Of his clothes, only the mud-caked hunting boots remained unscathed. This was messy, a sticky end, even for a country squire of Hurstmonceux’s reputation.

  ‘McNaghten?’

  The voice made him turn sharply.

  ‘Oh, I expected Assistant Chief Constable McNaghten,’ said the voice.

  ‘Inspector Lestrade, sir.’ ‘At your service’ sounded too deferential. ‘Sir Henry Cattermole?’

  The voice brushed past Lestrade and looked down at the corpse on the billiard table. ‘Yes, I’m Cattermole.’

  ‘Assistant Chief Constable McNaghten was unavoidably detained, sir. He asked me to give you his regards. I shall have to ask you a few questions, sir.’

  Cattermole had not taken his eyes off the body. ‘Come into the library,’ he said. ‘I can’t look at him any more.’ Lestrade followed him across the hall. Servants and butler had gone. The library was typical of these country houses, wall to wall with leather-covered books, which no one had read.

  ‘Cognac?’

  Lestrade accepted the proffered glass. ‘In your own time, sir.’

  Cattermole quaffed the brandy and refilled.

  ‘Freddie Hurstmonceux was a bastard, Inspector. A professional bastard. Oh, not in the sense of lineage, you understand. They don’t come with bluer blood.’

  ‘I found it rather red, sir.’ Lestrade could have kicked himself for the tastelessness of that remark.

  ‘No, Freddie deserved this. Or at least, I’m not surprised by it.’

  ‘Could you tell me what happened, sir?’

  ‘He was out hunting. We all were. Freddie loved having open house and riding to hounds with his cronies. They all hated him, but he exuded a certain raffish charm. Anyway, we’d got a view and the hounds were off. This was in the Lower Meadow and Freddie, as ever, was off in hot pursuit. Whipping his hunter unmercifully.’

  ‘He didn’t treat horses well?’

  ‘Horses, dogs, people. He didn’t treat anything well. I’ve seen him whip a horse to death.’

  ‘You didn’t stop him?’

  ‘Damn it, Lestrade. What business is it of yours?’ Cattermole paused. Then, more calmly, ‘You don’t cross a man like Freddie.’ A long pause. ‘Well, he came through the thicket ahead of me, away to the left. Barite Cairns and Rosebery were with him, but as he topped the rise he must have left them behind. Ploughed fields there of course, tough going. Freddie was a better rider than any of them. By the time I got to the rise, all hell had broken loose. The hounds set up the devil of a row beyond the wall. I thought they’d got the fox. They were tearing, limb from limb, howling and yelping. But Bertie and Rosebery were galloping down there, taking the wall and laying about them with their crops. It was obvious something was wrong. When I got there it was all over. The dogs were being hauled off and I could see it wasn’t a fox. It was Freddie.’

  Cattermole buried his face briefly in his hands. Lestrade returned to the subject of the body.

  ‘Foxhounds did that?’ he said incredulously.

  Cattermole sat back in his chair. ‘Impossible to believe? I saw it, Lestrade. They went for his throat. He had no chance at all.’

  ‘Forgive me, sir. I don’t mean to be in any way awkward. But this is accidental death. A quirk of nature in the breasts of vicious beasts.’ He congratulated himself on having got that out in one breath. And then, perhaps a little pompously, ‘I am from the C.I.D., sir, the Detective Branch.’

  Cattermole stood up sharply. ‘Inspector –’ his face was dark – ‘I could have called in the village bobby, but I didn’t want huge feet trampling over the last vestiges of what was once a great family. That is why I contacted McNaghten. God knows I had no time for Freddie. He’s dead and damned to all eternity. But there,’ he pointed dramatically to the massive portrait over the empty fireplace, ‘is the fourth Baron Hurstmonceux – and a better man never drew breath.’ Henry Cattermole was of the old school, honest and loyal. ‘Friendships forged at Eton and Quetta don’t die, Inspector.’ The inspector took his word for it. ‘It’s for his sake I sent for the Yard. No fuss, no scandal, you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, sir.’

  ‘Poor Georgie. Freddie was his only son. The bastard killed him.’

  ‘Would that be on our files, sir?’

  ‘Oh, not literally, Lestrade. He didn’t actually put a revolver to his head. But with his … ways … he might just as well have done.’ Cattermole gazed long at the portrait. Then, ‘Come with me, Inspector.’

  The two men left the house by the vine-covered south wing and crossed the velvet lawns to the stables. Beyond the main buildings here, where the hunters and thoroughbreds steamed after their exercise, they came to the kennels. Lestrade was not taken with dogs. One or two of his superiors were keen on the use of bloodhounds, but they always seemed to urinate on him whenever he had been involved with them. He often wondered whether it was anything personal or whether it was somewhere he had been. In a yard, thirty or forty foxhounds, smart in black, tan and white, licked and snuffled. Lestrade was glad there was no growl, no howl. Not wishing to let Sir Henry believe he was afraid of these curs, he extended a sure hand, praying that it didn’t shake. A heavy jowled dog, perhaps older, certainly darker than the rest, buried its nose in his palm. Lestrade ruffled its ears. ‘Good boy, good boy.’

  ‘Do you notice anything about these dogs?’ Cattermole asked.

  Lestrade hated being put on the spot in this way. Give him a burgled tenement, a done bank or even a forged fiver and he was on home ground. But hunting and shooting weekends and country houses were somebody else’s patch. He checked the obvious – leg at each corner. None of the dogs had tried to pee on him yet.

  ‘You mean …’ Long years in the force had given him the slow amble, developed to the point which would give his questioner time to chip in.

  ‘Apart from the blood.’

  Lestrade whipped back his hand and hoped that the gesture hadn’t been too sudden. He hadn’t in fact seen the blood – until now. But there it was, dark and caked around many mouths. Human blood. Hurstmonceux blood.

  ‘They’re so docile,’ Cattermole went on, ‘you wouldn’t think that six hours or so ago they tore a man apart, would you?’

  Lestrade shuffled backwards as far as protocol would allow.

  ‘That one by you,’ Cattermole pointed at the dog which Lestrade had been patting. ‘That’s Tray, the lead hound. He would have gone for Freddie first. Rosebery said it had him by the throat.’

  Lestrade was grateful for the fresh air. Across the courtyard, still in his hunting pinks strode Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery. He was an anxious-looking forty-four.

  ‘Ah, Rosebery. This is Inspector Lestrade – of Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Rosebery caught the proffered hand.

  ‘My Lord,’ Lestrade bowed stiffly. ‘Can you shed any light on this unfortunate affair?’

  Rosebery looked around him like a stag at bay, his large watery eyes flashing to every corner of the yard. He took Lestrade’s arm and led him away down the lawns. Cattermole sensed his air of secrecy and suspicion and walked back towards the house. ‘I’ll see to your room, Lestrade,’ he called.

  ‘Thank you, Sir Henry.’

  ‘Look, Balustrade, there’s a Garter in the offing for me.’

&nb
sp; ‘My Lord?’ Lestrade would believe anything of the aristocracy, but Rosebery did not strike him as one of those.

  ‘No scandal, y’see. I can’t afford any scandal. Not now. I mean, Home Rule is one thing. And the gee gees, but this … God, poor Freddie.’

  ‘What sort of a man was he, sir?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lord Hurstmonceux.’

  ‘Oh, a bastard. An absolute bastard. He had his moments, mind.’ Rosebery chuckled a brittle, distant laugh. ‘No, I suppose Freddie wasn’t what you would call a decent sort. Look here, er … Balcony … this won’t become common knowledge, will it?’

  Lestrade had met this kind of pressure before, but from a man like Rosebery, Gladstone’s right-hand man, a foremost politician and Peer of the Realm, it was disconcerting. He wouldn’t budge Lestrade himself, but an inspector’s hands could easily be tied and he wasn’t at all sure about McNaghten. Influence and the old school tie were all they had once been, despite the extension of the franchise.

  ‘You can’t conceal the death of a member of the House of Lords, My Lord.’

  ‘Death?’ Rosebery’s tone suggested that he had been misjudging Lestrade. Then, more calmly, ‘Oh, quite so. Quite so.’

  But Lestrade had been quicker. He had read the signs. Rosebery was hiding something.

  ‘Do you think it was something more, My Lord?’

  ‘More?’ Rosebery’s attempt to effect unconcern was pathetic.

  ‘Murder, My Lord.’ Lestrade turned to face the man so that their perambulations came to an abrupt end. Rosebery stared at him, his mouth sagging open.

  ‘How?’ was all that he could manage.

  ‘That’s exactly what’s bothering me,’ confessed Lestrade. ‘I don’t know. Yet.’

  Rosebery blinked and walked on, following Lestrade’s lead. The tone of the conversation had changed. The policeman was now in charge, leading the noble lord around with an invisible ring through his aristocratic nose.