Lestrade and the Deadly Game

by M. J. Trow

  Yes, Lestrade knew.

  ‘I hunted tiger with his old man, you see.’ The Lieutenant General, a perfect model if ever there was one, snooked a curling shot which kissed the cush before driving relentlessly into the bottom pocket. ‘With the Fifth in India. Damned fine body of men, the Fifth.’ Baden-Powell leaned on his cue to reminisce for a moment. ‘Not like these blasted Territorials. I shouldn’t say it, Lestrade, but really! Butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s hope there isn’t another war, eh? I promise you, it’ll go hardly for us.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Lestrade nodded ruefully. ‘Would you know if Lieutenant Fitzgibbon had any enemies?’

  ‘Enemies? God knows. But then, what man has not? There are a few Boers wouldn’t mind my bandoliers around their neks, I can tell you.’

  ‘Quite, quite.’ Lestrade waited patiently with his cue. ‘Would you say he was the suicidal type?’ he asked.

  ‘Suicide?’ Baden-Powell paused in mid-crouch. ‘Old Bolsover wouldn’t let him, surely?’ and he downed the last ball. ‘I say, Lestrade, I’m sorry. I seem to have cleared the field and you haven’t played a shot. Ah well, beginner’s luck. Set ’em up again?’

  Lestrade replaced his cue in the rack and reached for his bowler. ‘I must be going, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I have to say, Lestrade,’ Baden-Powell reached into the pockets for his balls, ‘Fitzgibbon wasn’t much of a soldier. The papers said he was shot with a duelling pistol.’

  ‘That is correct,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘But he never had any interest in guns. I remember his old man telling me he couldn’t get the boy to go shooting with him at all.’

  ‘But the guns were in his room,’ Lestrade said, frowning.

  ‘Well, I’ve got a sampler in mine,’ guffawed Baden-Powell, ‘but I didn’t embroider the bally thing. Why should a man kill himself with something he didn’t know from his elbow?’

  ‘How would you have done it, sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’ Baden-Powell brushed past him to the cue rack, selecting an altogether longer stick. ‘And I don’t think young Fitzgibbon did either. Go back to the old man, Lestrade. I know Bolsover. There’s something he isn’t telling you. Can you find your way out?’ He lunged into his pocket. ‘I have a ball of twine here that might help.’ He lunged into another pocket. ‘Or a compass, perhaps.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Lestrade tipped his bowler. ‘I’ll just walk through the door, thanks.’

  And, careful to open it first, he did.

  Lestrade never liked leaving London. And even in the stifling heat of mid-afternoon, he was grateful to return to those familiar streets, meaner somehow in the dust and the sharp shadows of summer. As he turned the corner into the Yard, a guttural honk on a passing police launch told him that Mungo Hyde was going off duty. He wondered if anybody would notice. All the way down on the train, the problem had been taxing him. Anstruther Fitzgibbon was not the suicidal type. Everyone said that. Yet he had a past awash with murkiness. Ever since Mr Labouchere’s bill, people of Fitzgibbon’s sexual inclinations walked in the valley of the shadow. And the law was no respecter of persons. Look at Oscar Wilde . . . but none too closely, God rest him. There again, there was no suicide note. Not compulsory, of course, but in Lestrade’s experience there usually was one. Something along the lines of ‘Can’t go on. Stop. Must end it all. Stop. No point in living. Stop. Cost of living. Stop. End of world is nigh. Stop. Liberal Government. Stop.’ And there was nothing. No note. No explanation. Then there was the gun. An antique heirloom, difficult to operate, awkward to stick in your ear. And supposedly fired by a man to whom guns were a mystery. Mystery indeed. There again, bearing in mind Fitzgibbon’s inclinations, plenty of room to make enemies. Twisted, frightened men who would kill rather than let the world know their secret. Bland had searched Fitzgibbon’s house in Berkeley Square. No hint of blackmail. No whiff of scandal. All tracks were very carefully covered.

  Perhaps, thought Lestrade as he acknowledged the salute of the desk man, he could find a use for Baden-Powell’s ball of twine after all. But above all, and he kept coming back to this time and time again as he kicked the Yard lift into motion, above all there was that damned locked room. That said it all really. Bland had been right. There was no way into the room at all other than by the door. And the door had been bolted on the inside. For a fleeting moment, he wondered how the late, great Sherlock Holmes would have coped with this one. He’d probably have smoked a few pipes of shag and scratched on that fiddle of his. Lestrade shook himself. It must be the heat. That and his age.

  ‘There was a bloke to see you, Super,’ Constable Hollingsworth informed him.

  ‘Really?’ Lestrade grabbed the chipped cup and the day’s paper simultaneously, before slumping heavily into his chair.

  ‘Yeah. Some Kraut. Newshound, he was. From Berlin.’

  ‘What did he want?’ Lestrade scanned the inner recesses of The Times. There it was. MARQUESS’ SON SLAIN BY OWN HAND. Well, that was all right then. If The Times said it, it must be right. If he’d read it in the Mail, he might not have been so sure.

  ‘Dunno. I told him you was away. He just asked you to contact him at this address. Oh, and he said two words.’

  ‘Oh?’ Lestrade gulped the contents of his cup. Hollingsworth may not have been the world’s best detective, but his Rosie Lee was without peer.

  ‘“Nana Sahib”.’

  Lestrade blinked. He’d missed the German for Detectives lecture. ‘Which means?’

  ‘Buggered if I know, begging your pardon, Super. He probably wanted some angle on police coverage of these here Games.’

  Lestrade looked at the address. 36 Freedom Street, Battersea.

  ‘This is where he’s staying?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘I s’pose so, Super. Shall I go and see him?’

  ‘Detectives of Scotland Yard have better things to do with their time, Hollingsworth. Like, for example, pouring me another cup of your excellent bevvy.’

  ‘Delighted, Super.’ Hollingsworth bowed.

  ‘Nana Sahib,’ Lestrade repeated absent-mindedly. ‘Sounds more Indian really. Oh, Hollingsworth?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘When you’ve poured that, you can cut along to the Strand. You’ll find young Bourne in one of the dress shops. Tell him he’s had long enough and I want him back here at the double. Where’s Mr Dew?’

  ‘He’s been called to the White City, sir. They wanted somebody official to supervise the pouring in of the Tod Slaughter.’

  ‘The . . . er . . .?’

  ‘Water, sir. Into the swimming pool they’ve put up. Must take a lot of bloody buckets, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Lestrade, whose thoughts rested infrequently on cubic capacity, ‘I suppose it must.’

  The door crashed back, sending papers flying in all directions.

  ‘Ah!’ Lestrade looked up. ‘Sergeant Valentine. Still a young man in a hurry, I see.’

  The detective sergeant removed his boater and removed the breath from his fist. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he gasped. ‘There’s a high-level conference going on in the lift. I had to take the stairs.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s all right. Constable Hollingsworth is making a fresh pot.’

  ‘I’m sure, sir, but I haven’t time.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lestrade was at his most wistful in the middle of a hot afternoon. ‘“Time, you old gippo, will you not stay?”’

  ‘Superintendent McDowell’s compliments, sir. He’s got a little problem.’

  Lestrade chuckled. ‘Yes, I know, but he’s past all help from me.’

  ‘He’s got a body, sir. In Battersea.’

  Lestrade’s smile faded. ‘Address?’ he asked.

  ‘Freedom Street, sir. Number 36.’

  Lestrade shot to his feet, snatching up his bowler. ‘Did you hear that, Hollingsworth? Freedom Street. Step on it.’

  And superintendent and sergeant exited at the double.

>   ‘One lump or two, Sarge?’ Hollingsworth emerged from the ante-room. He dropped both cups as though he’d been pig-stuck. ‘Gor blimey, Freedom Street,’ and he leapt over the mess on the floor, careful not to step on it.

  The body of Hans-Rudiger Hesse lay slumped over a desk in an upstairs room. He was a man in his fifties, sandy-haired, clean-shaven, with the unmistakable fingers of a journalist. Lestrade lifted the right hand and peered at the middle finger.

  ‘Writer’s ridge,’ he muttered.

  McDowell had gone but the message he had left at the front door was clear enough. The victim was a foreigner. The Franco-British Exhibition was at its height. McDowell had the misfortune to be able to speak French and he, and the other two coppers of the Metropolitan Police Force who could, had been drafted into Shepherd’s Bush to help with the communications problem. Particularly from Frenchmen who had not yet come to terms with Waterloo and who shouted loudly in French at shop assistants. McDowell had no time for murder. Especially of a German.

  Lestrade took in the room. Comfortable. Middle-class. The rent was probably quite high. He glanced out of the window where the lace nets wafted in the cool evening breeze. Below, in the middle of Freedom Street, a cordon of blue helmets held back a crowd of middle-class noses. He went into the bedroom. ‘Anything been touched in here?’ he asked Valentine.

  ‘Not that I know of, sir. Shall I do it?’

  ‘Tell me, Valentine.’ Lestrade placed his bowler on the bed. ‘How did you become a sergeant in the CID?’

  ‘Sir?’ Valentine looked confused.

  ‘Did no one ever tell you not to volunteer for anything?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So how did you become sergeant?’ Lestrade repeated.

  ‘I volunteered for it, sir,’ he and Valentine chorused.

  ‘Who found the body?’ Lestrade asked.

  Valentine had no need to consult his notepad. ‘A Mr Chesterton, sir. Lives down the hall.’

  ‘Anyone spoken to him yet?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘All right. Get a photographer over here. And a fingerprint man. Better get Inspector Collins from the Yard for that. I don’t mind who you get for the photographs, as long as it’s no one from C Division.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘And Valentine,’ Lestrade called him back softly, ‘take your time. This bloke’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Valentine rushed out slowly.

  ‘Constable,’ Lestrade called to the uniformed man in the passage.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘No one at all in here for the next ten minutes. Understand?’

  ‘No one at all, sir. Very good, sir,’ and he closed the door.

  There were four rooms. A living-room, in which Lestrade stood now, a bedroom, a kitchen and a usual office. Not palatial, but solid and respectable and good enough for a brief let for a man with a mission, as he supposed the late Hesse to have been. He flicked through the drawers, using his fingernails where possible so as not to make life too difficult for Stockley Collins when he arrived. One or two newspapers, heavy with the Medieval German script; personal letters in the same characters. He’d need to get that lot to the Yard’s cypher room, that mysterious green door beyond which he had never ventured. He wasn’t even sure which way up the pages went.

  An ornate paper-knife was embedded in the back of the man from Berlin. It was of silver, and a knight in prayer formed its chiselled hilt. The evening sun caught it as the nets shivered aside. Hesse had been writing something when the blow had been struck. His pen lay at an odd angle in a corner of the roll-top desk, a trail of ink spattering the paper. The dead man’s knuckles on his left hand were formed into a fist. There were the first signs of rigor. He had been dead since the morning. Already the face was turning a nasty grey and the flies which followed Lestrade everywhere buzzed and gathered in anticipation.

  Stabbed from behind. Lestrade circled the body, crouching to get the angle. All the furniture was in place. No rucking of the carpet. No sign of a struggle. The end must have been sudden and without warning. Hesse had been writing his letter, his back to his caller – if caller he was. If ‘he’ it was. But the paper-knife? That would probably have been on the desk itself, to Hesse’s left or right. Lestrade did not want to disturb the weapon until the man with the camera had arrived, but the blade was probably blunt. It would have taken a fair amount of strength to force the tip through jacket, shirt and perhaps singlet. Not a woman’s hand, surely? There again, some women he knew could crack walnuts with their thighs. Difficult to stab a man, of course, with your thighs. Better keep an open mind at this stage. The aim was good, though – that surely ruled out a woman. One clean, straight thrust below the shoulder blade and into the heart. Was it, he wondered as he paced the carpet in front of the fender, a professional killing? An assassination? Perhaps this one had something to do with professional jealousy? A rival newspaper, perhaps? He wouldn’t put anything past Alfred Harmsworth.

  Lestrade opened the door and checked with the constable on his way out. Mr Chesterton lived at the furthest recesses of the dark corridor. The superintendent knocked on the door and a pretty, dark lady opened it.

  ‘Superintendent Lestrade, madam, Scotland Yard,’ he introduced himself.

  ‘Ah, yes. You’ll want to see my husband. He’s in the theatre.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Lestrade, always a little wary of actors.

  She led him through a much larger configuration of rooms into an empty space. The windows here were hung with black and Mrs Chesterton smiled and excused herself, en route to provide some tea.

  Lestrade appeared to be alone, but ahead of him, in the gloom, he could make out a raised platform, like a stage.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ he asked.

  ‘Ho, ho!’ a voice cackled and black curtains on the stage slid back to reveal a wooden puppet dangling from strings. The figure bounced around at the puppeteer’s command. It wore a clerical collar and a flat hat. ‘Hello,’ the puppet crowed. ‘I am making enquiries of a most serious nature.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Lestrade.

  There was a squawk and a crash and the puppet flopped forwards, its heels collapsing over its head. A clatter of feet on wooden steps followed and a large, bespectacled man emerged from the blackness of the corner.

  ‘Good God!’ he said, in a voice Lestrade was gratified to hear was totally unlike that of the little wooden priest. ‘I’m terribly sorry, my dear fellow. I assumed you were my wife. What can you think of me?’

  A number of phrases sprang to Lestrade’s mind. Like short-sighted. Cloth-eared. Stupid. Deranged. He kept them all to himself.

  ‘I am Gilbert Chesterton,’ the fat man said, tugging on ropes which threw back curtains and allowed the light to flood in. ‘You must excuse my little theatre. It’s a hobby. I make all the figures myself, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ Lestrade found himself wondering why.

  ‘Yes. This one is Father Brown.’ The fat man lifted up the collapsed cleric. ‘I’m actually a writer. Well, journalist, in fact. But one day I’m going to write a novel about this little fellow here.’

  ‘Ah, a children’s book.’ Lestrade thought it best to humour him.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no. A “whodunit”, I believe they call them these days.’

  ‘Well, that’s rather why I called,’ said Lestrade.

  ‘Yes, of course, Mr . . .’

  ‘Lestrade. Superintendent Lestrade.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Poor Mr Hesse. What an unfortunate business. I’m just glad that it was I who found him, and not my good lady wife. Oh, do be careful of the . . .’

  But it was all too late. Lestrade fell headlong over a pile of cardboard flats, badly grazing his shin.

  ‘My dear Superintendent, are you all right?’ Chesterton helped him up.

  ‘Thank you, it’s my good leg,’ Lestrade explained.

  ‘Please, come into the parlour. Frances will have made some tea.’

>   ‘Francis is your man?’ Lestrade liked to leave no stone unturned.

  ‘My woman,’ Chesterton told him. Lestrade raised an eyebrow. All the same, these actor/journalist/writer chappies. ‘My good lady wife,’ said Chesterton by way of explanation.

  ‘Ah.’

  Lestrade sat where he was told, on a pile of papers.

  ‘Ah, there’s my Orthodoxy,’ said Chesterton. ‘Thank you, Mr Lestrade, I’d been looking for those notes.’

  ‘Tea, Mr Lestrade?’ Mrs Chesterton swept in with a tray.

  Lestrade tried to rise but the physical effort was too much and he merely succeeded in disarranging Chapter Three of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy once again.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Now, distasteful as it must be . . .’

  ‘I’ve never had complaints before.’ Frances Chesterton was a little hurt.

  ‘No, madam,’ Lestrade smiled, ‘I am sure the tea will be delightful. I was referring to your late neighbour, Mr Hesse. How long had you known him?’

  ‘Well,’ said Chesterton, fitting his pince-nez a little more securely, ‘it was that Monday Hilaire came down, my dear, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, dear.’ She poured the tea. ‘That was Thursday. And it wasn’t Hilaire. It was some other man.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Chesterton mused. ‘Who was the man on Thursday? That sounds a little familiar. Can’t imagine why.’

  ‘So was it Monday or Thursday?’ After all these years, Lestrade thought he may have to resort to a notebook for clarity’s sake.

  ‘What?’ asked Chesterton.

  ‘When you met Mr Hesse.’ Lestrade kept to the straight and narrow.

  ‘Ah, no, that was Wednesday,’ Chesterton told him. ‘Perceval introduced us in the lobby.’

  ‘Perceval?’

  ‘The landlord. Literary gent like myself. Only lets to tenants with pretensions,’ he chuckled.

  Lestrade gulped the tea gratefully. It was a very fine brew, for Battersea on a Friday evening.

  ‘What do you know about him?’ he asked.

  ‘Perceval?’

  ‘Hesse.’

  ‘Well, not a lot, really. He worked for the Berliner Tageblatt. A man of enormous reputation in the newspaper business. He was over here to cover the Games, of course.’