by Trow, M J
‘That’s it,’ Lestrade rasped to Clarence. ‘No more. No more.’
‘Damn you, Lestrade. You’re not cutting up one of my officers and getting away with it. Onslow, can you stand?’
The lieutenant somehow came to attention.
‘Then get on with it.’
Lestrade flinched as the sabre flashed past his face, slicing off the very tip of his nose. He lunged from the ground and grazed Onslow’s thigh.
‘You boys, stop that!’ All eyes turned to the distant voice. At the top of the slope, beyond the knot of officers, silhouetted against the dawn sky stood a lone figure. The outline presented an immediate problem. It wore a Hussar busby and presented a generally military outline, but apparently wore a skirt as well, and was leaning against a bicycle.
‘God, it’s the Colonel,’ whispered one of the officers.
For a fleeting second, Clarence toyed with the notion of its being his formidable Grandmamma in one of her unused Colonel-in-Chief’s uniforms. But the preposterousness of the idea banished it from his mind. With astonishing presence of mind, Bandicoot threw Lestrade’s Donegal over both sabre blades and the combatants, sweating an bloody, tried to look as nonchalant as possible, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for two men to be in Highgate Cemetery this early in the morning, bleeding from sabre wounds.
The intruder leapt on to the saddle of the bicycle and scattered the Hussar officers, who sprang back in amazement. The figure screeched to a halt in the centre of the duelling ground. All parties present stared in astonishment. Before them stood an elderly lady, with grotesque theatrical makeup, in the heavily braided fur-edged pelisse and tall busby, complete with lines and plume, of the 11th Prince Albert’s Own Hussars.
‘Ah, I know you, my boy.’ She pointed an imperious finger at Clarence. ‘You’re Eddy, aren’t you? Oh, I haven’t been allowed at court for years. Your grandmother never forgave James for marrying me. But I keep abreast of court gossip, you know. “Collars and Cuffs”, eh? Yes, I see it. Besides, you’ve got your father’s poppy eyes.’
‘Madam, I don’t know from which asylum you have escaped, but I strongly suggest …’
‘Come, sir,’ one of the Hussars intervened. ‘Shouldn’t we be away?’
Reluctantly Clarence was led towards the main gates and the hill where the carriages awaited. As he left, Onslow shook hands with Lestrade. ‘If you ever tire of the Force, sir, we’d be proud to have you in the Tenth Hussars.’
Constance wrapped the Donegal around Lestrade’s shoulders, dabbing the blood from his mouth and chin. Her eyes were wet and hot. ‘Your colour, my lady.’ Lestrade managed an uncharacteristic flamboyant flourish, removing the scarf.
‘Come on, you need help,’ announced the old Hussar lady. ‘You, young man,’ this to Bandicoot, ‘take my bicycle and go on ahead. I’ve a private retreat nearby at the top of the hill. It’s called Quorn. Tell them to prepare a room …’ she glanced at Constance, ‘for two.’
There were silent protests all round, but between them the ladies helped Lestrade, dizzy from loss of blood, to the gate. Dew walked paces behind, anxiously peering through the lightening day for signs of coppers on their beat. To meet a constable in the pursuit of his duty would have been singularly unfortunate.
Lestrade fell into a fitful sleep. His head throbbed, his arm hurt, his nose was indescribable. But he had survived a duel and fell asleep holding the hand of a woman who had certainly become very important to him. It was not until he awoke that he began to take stock of the situation. The room in which he lay was pleasant enough, typically upper-middle-class, hung with mementoes of an earlier age. From somewhere he heard a clock strike – four. The blinds were drawn but it was daylight outside. Four in the afternoon. God, he was on duty in an hour. Time he roused himself.
‘Sholto.’ Constance swept noiselessly into the room. ‘You shouldn’t be getting up yet, dearest.’ Lestrade realised the wisdom of her remark when he sat upright. His left arm was very stiff and his nose felt as if it reached the far wall.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Just gone four. Shall I ring for tea? Lady Cardigan’s staff are most obliging.’
‘Cardigan? Oh, I see. That accounts for the uniform.’
‘Yes, my dear. I’ve talked a great deal with her in the last three days. Ever since her husband, the seventh Earl, died, she has worn his uniform when in public. It somehow eases the pain of his going. Oh, he had a full life and she knew only too well that he was not exactly faithful, but they were fond in their own way. She took up bicycling a few years ago. She bicycles everywhere.’ Constance chuckled. ‘Even, it seems, around the colonnade in Highgate Cemetery.’
‘Two days?’ Lestrade stood up and immediately wished he hadn’t. ‘Good God, woman, have I been here for two days?’
‘Calm yourself, Sholto. I am not used to being referred to as “woman”, especially by a man I hardly know.’ She was smiling tauntingly at him.
‘I’m sorry, Constance. Good God, woman, here I am in my combinations at four o’clock in the afternoon and here you are, a recently widowed lady, in the house of a mad old eccentric, who …’
‘That’s less than kind, Sholto. Lady Cardigan is certainly eccentric, but she has placed her London home and its staff completely at our disposal. She has returned to Deene, her country home. She finds London a frightful bore now the season has ended. Anyway, I didn’t know you were such a prude. This is 1891, you know. I have heard the new decade will be known as the “naughty nineties”. Wouldn’t you like to be just a little bit naughty with me?’
‘Madam, you miss my point. I fought the duel on the morning of Saturday the sixteenth. What day is it today?’
‘Tuesday the nineteenth.’
‘Exactly. I have missed one turn of duty and am about to miss a second.’
‘Bandicoot has reported you down with influenza, dearest. There’s a lot of it about. No one will query your absence. Aren’t you allowed to be ill in the Metropolitan Police?’
‘In H Division, now.’ Lestrade sat back heavily on the bed. He was beaten, he realised that. The thought of a cab or train ride to his lodgings and then to a pile of paperwork at the Yard did not appeal. Still less did applying his mind to the Struwwelpeter case. And before him, in the semi-darkness of the room sat the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He looked at her smiling face, warm and soft. He reached out his good arm and ran his fingers round the smooth curve of her cheek. She pressed her head into the palm of his hand and kissed the fingers. Lestrade took her head with both hands and kissed her forehead lightly.
‘I’m not going to break, Sholto,’ she said and their lips found each others’ in the darkness. It was not the most romantic love-making on record. Sholto Lestrade had never been a ladies’ man, until now. He was no novice, of course, but was certainly a little rusty and most of his muscles had been put to the test too recently for this to be easy for him. Constance was of course no virgin, but despite her outward forwardness, she was still a woman of her times and the new decade was still too new to sweep away the time-honoured traditions of a lifetime.
The second time was better, however: both of them relaxed. It was nearly midnight before Constance lay curled up in Lestrade’s arms, nuzzling her raven hair against his chest.
‘Tell me about Shock-Headed Peter,’ she whispered.
Lestrade shifted uneasily. ‘At a time like this?’ he asked.
‘Sholto, you could have been killed three days ago. My husband and my cousin are dead already. This may not be the time. But it may be the only time. You will return to your beloved Yard tomorrow or the next day. I must go home to Warwickshire.’
He turned her head to him. ‘What if I want you to stay?’ he asked her.
She took his hand, squeezing it hard. ‘You are a policeman, an Inspector of Detectives. I am a widowed lady with modest means and no future. We don’t suit, Sholto. We wouldn’t fit.’
‘You once told me you didn�
�t give a damn about convention,’ Lestrade reminded her.
‘I didn’t think I did,’ she answered. ‘With another man, another time, I might not. But tell me, what would happen if your superiors found out that you were here and that I was here with you?’
Lestrade chuckled. ‘I’d have another drubbing down from Sir Melville, then there would be a brief enquiry and I’d be kicked out of the Force. Your name would probably be dragged through the mud, though they wouldn’t get it from me and they’d probably board this place up as a bawdy house and arrest Lady Cardigan as a brothel-keeper. The Commissioner’s a stickler for the morals of his men.’
‘Exactly. That’s not a bright future for either of us, is it?’
He began to say something, but she stopped him with a kiss.
‘How did you know about Shock-Headed Peter?’ he asked her afterwards.
‘It was just something I overheard at the Ball. An orang-utan was talking very confidentially to Marie Antoinette, I believe.’
‘Oh, God. Arabella McNaghten wheedled it out of Forbes. I’ll kill him.’
‘Oh, Sholto, is it that secret? Isn’t she the daughter of the Head of your … what do you call it, S.I.D?’
‘C.I.D. That doesn’t matter. Regulations are very clear. All cases are classified information. They must not be divulged to any member of the public. Forbes knew that. I’ll have that bastard … begging your pardon, my dear … I’ll have that bastard back on the street for this.’
‘Sholto,’ she turned in the bed, pressing her naked thigh against his. ‘You mean you aren’t going to tell me anything about the case?’
She caressed Lestrade between the legs, her fingers sliding lightly at first, then harder as he rose to the occasion. ‘Stop it, Constance,’ he shouted hysterically. ‘I’m too ticklish.’
For a while, as he travelled back to the Yard, Lestrade let his mind wander over the leave-taking. She said she was going. Back to Warwickshire. To sell the house. To move away. To begin again, without memories, without heartache. Change her name, perhaps. Go somewhere where no one knew about Albert Mauleverer, where Struwwelpeter with his sad cheeks was simply a child’s fairy tale, not some sinister, ghastly reality. Lestrade had shaken his head as he held her hands. He had felt an iron lump in his throat. He was not a man of words. He was not a troubadour from one of Walter Scott’s novels. He was not as silver-tongued as he wanted to be for Constance. ‘I’ll find you,’ was all he had said. ‘When this case is over, I’ll find you.’ Then it was her turn to shake her head. She did not cry. Her voice remained strong, her smile as dark and deep as ever. Lestrade had cried, inside, alone, but he was a hard-bitten copper and he betrayed no emotion at all. At least he hoped he hadn’t.
Despite all this whirling in his brain, the atmosphere at the Yard was tangible. He noticed that in his brief absence, the scaffolding had been removed and that the new quarters gleamed in the afternoon sun that flashed on the river. But the place was like a morgue. A grim, silent desk-sergeant saluted him. He entered the lift with two ashen-faced detectives from Gregson’s division.
‘Sir Melville would like to see you, sir,’ said Constable Dew as Lestrade reached his office. There was no cheery greeting, no cup of tea, no enquiry into the inspector’s health. Lestrade knocked on the veneered door. A growl told him to go in.
McNaghten looked ten years older. Lestrade suddenly saw his whole career flash before him. Someone, Lady Cardigan perhaps, regretting her kindness, or Clarence, in a fit of pique, had shopped him. He even felt himself reaching into his pocket to hand over handcuffs and whistle.
‘Forbes is dead,’ McNaghten told him.
‘Forbes?’ Lestrade repeated.
‘Dead. Gangland slaying. His body was found in an alley off the Minories this morning. I sent constables. Where the hell were you?’
‘Er … recuperating.’ No point in giving the game away now. There was nothing to be gained by it.’
‘I don’t like it, Lestrade.’ McNaghten was rubbing his moustaches repeatedly, smoothing the cravat every third or fourth rub. ‘When a policeman is killed in the execution of his duty. I don’t like it at all.’
‘But what was he doing in the Minories, sir? He was supposed to be on the Struwwelpeter case. All my men are.’
‘According to Bandicoot, he’d had a tip-off. A nark, I suppose, told him to go to The Minories at midnight last night.’
‘And he went alone?’
‘Good God, Lestrade, you and I have done it dozens of times.’ Lestrade laughed inwardly. He knew he had, but doubted it of his rather more feather-bed leader. He knew McNaghten had never walked a beat in his life. ‘You don’t take half the force with you for fear of scaring your tipster off. Come alone, the man says, and if you want what he’s selling, you go alone.’ The advice and the reasoning were sound enough.
‘He must have been robbed. His watch had gone. We don’t know if he was carrying money. Presumably, going to see a nark, he would have been. I want the man who did this, Lestrade. You are to drop the Struwwelpeter business and use all your available men on this. You can have dogs, back-up from Jones’s division, anything you like. But these scum have got to learn.’ He thumped the desk for effect. ‘On my patch, no one kills a copper and gets away with it.’
Lestrade clattered down the corridor towards the mortuary. McNaghten must have been upset for he had not asked him to account for the bandage across his nose. He had worked out elaborate plans to explain an accident with the door of a hansom. He had also wrenched his arm, just for the record, should anyone ask, which would account for it hanging stiffly at his side. In the event he needn’t have bothered. McNaghten’s mind was elsewhere. It was largely in fact on the body of the man who now lay before Lestrade on the slab in the gleaming new white-tiled mortuary at Cannon Row. Forbes lay contorted, twisted slightly to one side, his body still stiff with rigor mortis, his face still wearing a slight look of surprise.
‘Stabbed through the heart,’ said the mortician cheerfully. ‘Slim-bladed weapon. Might have been a hat pin.’
‘A hat-pin?’ Lestrade was incredulous. ‘They’re breeding a new type of East End rough, aren’t they?’
‘I thought that. Mind you, I had a subject in the other day. Now, where was it? Yes, that was it, washed up near Shadwell Stair, stark naked. Exactly similar stab wounds, but through the back.’
‘I should have thought a common or garden chiv would have suited a sailor or a doxy.’
‘You’ll pardon me for saying this, Inspector. I mean, it’s not strictly my job, I know, but I’m something of a student of the criminal classes. I’ve noticed that murders go in waves. A certain type of weapon catches on and hey presto, they’re all at it.’
Lestrade looked at the cadaverous features of the mortician and the centre-parted, lank hair. All in all, he looked a lot worse than Forbes. Sensing that the inspector did not care particularly for his amateur sleuthing, the mortician shifted his ground.
‘Of course, it could be a lady’s hat pin.’
If anything, that suited Lestrade less.
‘Stabbing is not a female technique,’ he said. ‘Too physical, too messy. In twelve of murder enquiries, I have never known a female knifer.’ But at the back of his mind, and not entirely for reasons of pleasure, lurked the face and form of Constance Mauleverer. He dismissed the notion immediately. She had been with him at the time Forbes had been killed. All the same, he felt vaguely uncomfortable. Something about Forbes’ death did not sit well.
‘Of course, this is odd as well,’ the mortician was saying and he pulled back the green sheet to expose the pale corpse. Lestrade visibly rocked backwards. Forbes’ hands lay across his private parts. The mortician had forced them into that grotesque position as rigor was beginning to lessen, minutes before. Lestrade could not believe it. Both the thumbs had gone.
‘Hacked off with a pair of scissors, I shouldn’t wonder. Tough work, mind. The bone is very clean.’
But Lestrade had gone, nur
sing his arm as he leapt up the three flights of stairs to his office.
‘No stomach for it, these brass hats,’ muttered the mortician.
Feverishly, Lestrade opened the book. There it was –
… The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys who suck their thumbs,
And ere they dream what he’s about,
He takes his great sharp scissors out
And cuts their thumbs clean off – and then
You know, they never grow again.
‘Dew, where’s Bandicoot?’
‘The Minories, sir. He said he ought to follow the trail while it was still warm.’
‘You mean he’s alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good God, man, you should have gone with him. What’s an Old Etonian going to do in the East End? They’ll have him for breakfast. Get a Maria and hurry.’
It was dusk before Lestrade and Dew found their quarry. Bandicoot was sitting in a corner in a dimly lit cellar bar of the White Elephant in Portsoken Street.
‘I’ve been all over Aldgate and Houndsditch, sir. Nothing.’
Lestrade pointed at Bandicoot’s beer. ‘I hope that’s not on expenses. Dew, your round.’
Dew disappeared into the jostling and the smoke.
‘Who have you spoken to here?’
‘No one, sir … yet. But I’m told an eyewitness comes in here every night about eight.’