by M. J. Trow
‘How do you know?’
‘Years of experience, gentlemen. Look here.’ He pointed to the tell-tale stains on the shirt and waistcoat. ‘Vomit,’ he said. ‘Were the lights off, you could probably detect a glow. He has been poisoned with phosphorus.’
‘Good God!’ the partners chorused.
‘What will the press make of it?’ Liberty asked, bewildered.
‘What time did you close yesterday?’ Lestrade rummaged routinely in the man’s pockets.
The partners looked at Lazenby. ‘Six o’clock,’ he said, ‘as is usual for a Saturday in winter. Next week we shall be open for longer, of course, as it’s Christmas.’
‘Did anyone see this man in the shop yesterday?’
‘We’d have to call our staff,’ said Lazenby. ‘They don’t work on Sundays, Mr Lestrade.’
‘Unfortunately, we do,’ Lestrade said. ‘How is it you three are here?’
‘I was stocktaking,’ Lazenby told him, ‘when Gimlet rushed in with the news of this unfortunate. I immediately contacted Mr Liberty and Mr Howe. Was he a burglar?’
Lestrade fished out a letter from the dead man’s inside pocket. It was perfumed and its passages were purple. His eyes widened as he read it. He didn’t believe its contents were physically possible. Obviously, his years of experience had been of the wrong kind. ‘In a way, he was,’ he said. ‘But I think we’re after much bigger fry, Mr Lazenby.’
He returned to the Grand by late afternoon to talk to Harry about his wife’s extraordinary cousins. But the Bandicoots had gone, left suddenly, despite their original intention of spending a few more days at the hotel, and Lestrade was just leaving the elegant vestibule when the bell-boy scurried round calling out, ‘Mr Chesney, telegram for Mr Chesney.’
‘Here, boy,’ Lestrade said on an impulse. It was a name he knew and he had met it too recently and too importantly to ignore. The lad in his maroon stable jacket and cap stood there with his hand out. Lestrade shook it heartily and said to him, ‘On your lift.’
He opened the telegram and read the contents: VERY WELL STOP USUAL PLACE NO GOOD STOP ALBERT MEMORIAL STOP TEN O’CLOCK SUNDAY STOP H STOP. He crossed again to the reception counter and the clerk in his pince-nez looked up.
‘Since Mr and Mrs Bandicoot have gone, I wonder if Mr Chesney is in?’
The clerk ran his fingers over the pigeon-holes behind him. ‘No, sir. I’m afraid not.’
‘Thank you,’ beamed Lestrade and made for the stairs. He had seen the clerk’s fingers come to rest at number forty-two and it was this door he found now, on the second floor. He tried it. Locked fast. He checked the corridor left and right; all clear. He whisked out his brass knuckles, clicked forward the knife blade tucked inside them and inserted it into the door jamb. In a second, it gave under his weight and he went in, careful to close the door again behind him.
The room of the late Mr Chesney, whose corpse Lestrade had left not an hour before on the floor of Messrs Liberty & Co., was neat and untouched. There was no rifling as there had been in the rooms of Hughie Ralph. And Lestrade was convinced that the comparison was valid, since the late Mr Chesney was another in the long line of deceased that began with Captain Fellowes. Murder by the same hand. The inspector checked drawers, wardrobe. Most of the clothes were new; some, he guessed, unworn – as was the suit Chesney had been lying down in at Liberty’s. The cases were new as well, and the hat-boxes. Mr Chesney seemed to have acquired a whole new wardrobe recently. His paperwork, however, was older. A particularly interesting bundle of letters caught Lestrade’s eye. They were bound in scarlet ribbon as befitted the contents, although arguably purple should have been the colour. The letters followed the same pattern as the one on the body – written to ‘Darling Clementine’ and signed ‘Ever Yours, H.’ What passed between those phrases made Lestrade’s hair stand on end. But he was a man of the world and he understood most of it.
It was well and truly dark by the time he had read the correspondence and he peered around the door, checking the corridor to effect his exit. The telegram had said ten o’clock Sunday. Was that ten in the morning? If so, he was too late. Was it ten at night? That seemed more likely, since the bell-boy had been calling for Mr Chesney only a few hours before. He would chance it.
THE NIGHT WAS CRISP and clear as he plodded through the frost towards the Gothic monstrosity of the Albert Memorial. He looked up at the late Consort, sitting thoughtfully on his bronze throne, gazing wistfully at his Hall across the road. There were few people about, the night being so raw. Here and there, couples laughed and chattered and a foot-weary constable moved some park girls on. Then, as he lit a cigar and wrapped the collar of his Donegal higher around his ears, he saw a dark, top-hatted figure, broad and erect, approach from the far side of the park. He whistled quietly, being as nonchalant as he could, until he heard the clock strike the hour. On the stroke of ten, the top-hatted figure had reached the monument. Lestrade could not make out the face, but the cut of the astrakhan coat said it all and almost certainly explained Mr Chesney’s new wardrobe.
‘Can I interest you in a light?’ Lestrade broke the silence between them.
‘No, thank you,’ the stranger said. ‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘H?’ Lestrade ventured. He sensed the stranger stiffen.
‘Chesney?’ he said. ‘Have you the merchandise?’
‘Of course.’ Lestrade patted his coat. ‘Have you the money?’
H reached inside his pocket and produced a large envelope, pale green under the dim gaslight. Lestrade reached out for it, but H withdrew his hand. ‘First, the letters,’ he said.
‘Very well.’ Lestrade produced the bundle, but as he looked up he found himself staring into the muzzle of a nickel-plated revolver.
‘Give them to me.’ H had stuffed the money back into his pocket and was holding out his hand.
‘What is this?’ Lestrade asked.
‘I’m not cheating you,’ H told him, checking to see no one was near enough to see and hear the little transaction going on below the disapproving figure of Albert the Good. ‘You’ll get your money. I just want to check that you aren’t cheating me.’
He snatched the letters from Lestrade and began to count them. ‘They appear to be here,’ he said.
‘Do they?’ Lestrade asked. ‘How do you know? How many did you write to Clementine? Twelve? Fifteen? And who’s to say I haven’t got her letters to you?’
‘What?’ H levelled the revolver, but Lestrade sensed his heart was not in it. ‘Take your hat off.’
Lestrade complied and stood there bare-headed under the stars.
‘Y . . . you’re not Chesney,’ H said.
‘No, I am Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Now, what do I arrest you for? Threatening me with a revolver? Disturbing the public peace? Sending improper material through Her Majesty’s mail?’
H dropped the hand that held the revolver and stood staring at the ground. ‘My real crime is that I had the misfortune to marry for politics,’ he said, ‘and to have the temerity to fall in love.’
Lestrade relieved him of the pistol. ‘It’s Julian Hamilton, isn’t it? Member of Parliament for Stoke Newington?’
The Sun’s graphic artist was improving all the time.
Hamilton nodded. ‘The revolver isn’t loaded,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know how to shoot it if it were. Where’s Chesney?’
‘Unless something pretty miraculous has happened, Mr Hamilton, he’s at the mortuary. Someone killed him yesterday.’
‘What?’ The Member of Parliament visibly rocked backwards.
‘I think we’d better have a little talk, don’t you?’
JULIAN HAMILTON, MP for Stoke Newington, was of little help. If Lestrade had entertained the idea that he had killed all the others for motives he could only guess at, his behaviour that Sunday night had cleared him of the murder of Malcolm Chesney. Why would a man, competent as he would have to be in his use of poisons and sure as he would have to be of the
ir deadly effect, send a telegram to a man he knew to be dead? And further, why should he keep the appointment with a man he knew could not keep it himself?
Hamilton had fallen prey to a blackmailer. He had never loved his wife, who had been forced upon him as an aspiring young politician, eager for success. Instead, he had fallen deeply in love with a lady named Clementine. She too was married and Hamilton declined absolutely to name her further. They had met at Biarritz last year and their affair – for so it became – had blossomed quickly. They met at shooting weekends and hunting parties and stole what few, sweet hours they could. The rest of it was correspondence.
Then, the unthinkable happened. Clementine wrote a frantic letter saying that his letters to her, which she had bound in red ribbons, the colour of the rose, the colour of blood, had been stolen. She suspected a maid, had dismissed her immediately on a trumped-up charge, but could not prove the theft or reclaim her property without involving her husband. And that she could not do.
Hamilton was then approached by this man Chesney, who had acquired the letters, probably directly from the maid, and was threatening to tell not only Clementine’s husband and his, Hamilton’s wife, but Hamilton’s party leader, the Marquis of Salisbury, Hamilton’s constituents and members of Hamilton’s club, the strangest in London, the House of Commons. It would have ruined them both. And Hamilton was old enough to remember what fate befell Charles Stuart Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, not to mention Charles Dilke and several ladies. But Chesney had returned one letter at a time and was milking Hamilton of all he had. Hamilton demanded all the letters or he would go to the police.
Instead, the police had come to him.
IT WAS A WORLD-WEARY Lestrade who collapsed into his chair at the Yard early on Monday morning. It was biting cold and there was no sign of the dawn. He looked at the wall opposite him, hung with its silent testimony of nine deaths, eight by the same hand. He was about to complete the report on Malcolm Chesney, to make the ninth, when his eye fell on a note marked ‘Urgent’ and written in the languid, scholarly hand of Constable Skinner. Lestrade opened it and read it aloud to himself:
‘Missed this before, sir. Sorry. Got lost in the paperwork. Perameles, the name in Rowntree’s chocolate ledger at York. It threw me at first because I was thinking of Peragale lagotis and Choeropus castanotis. It is of course Latin for . . .’ and Lestrade’s voice tailed away.
He sat there, heart thumping, mouth open, for some time. Then he went into the outer office and was about to wake the snoring Walter Dew, when he thought better of it. He collected a spare shirt and a collar and threw them into his battered old Gladstone. He checked his wallet for money and his pocket for brass knuckles. He held them to the light, flicked out the murderous blade, then placed it quietly on the desk, lest he wake the sleeping policeman.
In the yard below, a constable harnessed up a wagon for him and took him direct to the station. At each rattling mile, he hoped he was wrong, that what Skinner had found was merely a coincidence. But in his heart of hearts, he knew it wasn’t. He had his murderer.
And this was the last journey.
❖ Omega ❖
L
estrade took the gig at the station and was driven to the village of Huish Episcopi and then to the Hall. At the huge wrought-iron gates with the ornate crest of the wildebeest sejant, he alighted and let the vehicle go, while he took a lane to the south of the estate. It was still early morning and there was a thick frost lying silver on the birches and the mallard droppings through which he crunched. He found the break in the wall he remembered from earlier visits and clambered down through the stiff bracken to the rhododendron bushes that skirted the lower lake.
Here, he was a little startled to hear laughter and peering through the leaves he saw Miss Shadbolt, the nanny, whirling on the ice of the lake with a string of three little children forming a human chain. They were all wrapped in furs against the weather. First, Ivo, laughing hysterically and dragging back on his nanny’s hand. Second, his twin brother Rupert, struggling on uncertain skates to keep pace with the others. And last, racing with the wind flying through her long blonde hair, Emma, half a head taller than the boys, her little blades flashing out in the morning.
Lestrade stayed a while, overfond, and did not hear the rattle of wheels on gravel and the snort and whinny of lathered horses. By the time he did, and straightened to face the station wagon of the Somerset Constabulary, it whistled past him on its way to the house and the blue lamp protruding from one corner caught him a nasty one on the temple so that he somersaulted gracefully through the rhododendrons and slid on his back for some yards across the ice.
Nanny Shadbolt had heard the arrival of the wagon, but still she was unprepared for the undignified heap of second-rate clothing that rolled to her feet. She gathered the startled children to her.
‘It’s all right,’ shouted Rupert. ‘It’s only Uncle Sholto.’
And they carried on skating.
‘Have you come to join us, Uncle Sholto?’ Ivo asked, glancing back over his shoulder.
‘Don’t be silly, Ivo,’ Emma scolded him. ‘You can see Uncle Sholto hasn’t got his skates on.’
Lestrade looked at her laughing grey eyes. That’s my daughter, he thought to himself, ever the copper’s kid. She would notice something like that. For a fleeting moment he wished he could tell her that he was not Uncle Sholto, but her father. That time would come. But it was not now. Not yet.
‘Mr Lestrade,’ said Nanny Shadbolt, ‘may I lend you some skates?’
The inspector still sat on the ice, the moisture beginning to seep through his trousers.
‘I’d settle for a hand,’ he said.
‘Of course. Children,’ she clapped her hands, ‘Uncle Sholto must be helped up. Form a circle and rally on him.’
She swept into action, gripping Lestrade’s outstretched hand and hauling him upright. Hopelessly wet, hopelessly stunned by his fall and just generally hopeless, he slewed first one way, then the other, supported now by Ivo, now by Rupert. Emma caught hold of his scarf and together, somehow, all four of them hauled him across the ice until he crunched on the far bank. Unfortunately, the sedge had not yet withered and he fetched his other temple a sharp one on the corner of the jetty.
He emerged from the white lagoon, cold, wet, bleeding and furious, and waved through gritted teeth to the chattering skaters below. He realized he’d lost his bowler and caught sight of it at the reedy end of the lake as it disappeared in a crack in the ice. He gave it up as a bad job and made for the house.
That was his first mistake that morning. His second was to be recognized by Dirck, the St Bernard, who had a thing for cold, wet policemen and who loped for Lestrade now. The inspector bobbed through the orchard, vaguely aware of a flurry of blue-coated activity up at the house. The dog bobbed too and trapped him against the bark of an old, gnarled Worcester Pearmain. The beast began contentedly enough by rising on his hind legs and returning circulation to Lestrade’s ears with his tongue. Then his loins began to think it was spring and Lestrade’s left leg came in for some attention. He managed to haul the amorous monster off and staggered for the house.
‘Oh, sir!’ A wail made him turn as he reached the shrubbery.
‘Maisie?’ He recognized a wailing maid when he heard one. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, sir. They’re taking away the master!’ and she blew with the grace of a battleship into her apron.
Lestrade pushed her aside, with rather more force than he intended, and bounded up on to the terrace in time to see a manacled Harry Bandicoot being led to the waiting wagon.
‘Sholto!’ It was Letitia now who hurtled from the French windows, still clad in nightgown and housecoat. She gripped him. ‘Thank God you’ve come. What’s happening?’
‘Inspector Guthrie?’ Lestrade put her aside a little more decorously than he had the maid, who was rushing away across the fields, screaming.
‘What’s happening, Lestrade, is tha
t I am executing my duty. What you are doing here I can’t imagine, but I trust you will not be attempting to hinder us in the execution of it.’
‘Execution?’ Letitia was not rational. ‘Stop them, Sholto!’
‘Where are you taking Mr Bandicoot?’ he asked.
‘It’s all right, Sholto.’ Harry’s head emerged from the open door, only to be forced in again.
‘All right, be damned,’ said Lestrade. ‘Guthrie, show me your warrant.’
The chief inspector turned squarely to face him. ‘You’ve poked your nose in once too often, Lestrade. Sergeant, arrest this man for interfering with police duty.’
‘Sergeant,’ Lestrade countered, ‘arrest this man for wrongful arrest.’
The sergeant dithered for a moment, but Chief Inspector Guthrie was a big fish in his particular pond and the ditherer finally pounced on Lestrade. The roar of Bandicoot’s Purdy broke the pandemonium of the morning and the characters in the mad scene froze, in keeping with the day. In the silence, Maisie’s wailing could be heard echoing back from the woods beyond the lake, but all eyes had turned to the French windows.
‘I am not terribly au fait with these gadgets, gentlemen,’ a tousled old head was saying, drawing a set of beads on the head of Chief Inspector Guthrie, ‘but I do remember that Mr Bandicoot said this one had a hair trigger.’
There was a strangled cry and within seconds the only things upright below the terrace were Guthrie’s horses, their driver lying along their necks, praying.
‘Nanny,’ Harry cautiously peered out, ‘it’s all right. Really. Please. Take your thumb off that metal bit very slowly and point the gun at the ground.’
For a moment, Miss Balsam hesitated, then she relented and stood in her gloved hands feeling rather silly. Lestrade stood up first, followed slowly by Guthrie and the rest. Letitia crossed to the wagon’s door and held Harry’s handcuffed hands.
‘Right!’ Guthrie spun on his heel. ‘Shooting at police officers,’ he growled. ‘That old besom will be buried inside!’ and he made for her. Letitia blocked his path and with all the force at her disposal, slapped him soundly across the face.
