Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand

by M. J. Trow

  ‘And?’

  ‘He found the name of the asylum where they put Sleigh.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘In Kent. Sandwich, to be precise.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I went down there. They wouldn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Asked me if I’d come to admit myself. I didn’t like the look I was getting from some of the orderlies, so I left.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘That’s as far as I got. I had another of my turns a month ago – the old trouble. Been flat on my back since June. But he’s out there, all right, Dan the lad, still up to his old nonsense. Only now he’s hurting people. It’s them I feel sorry for. His victims. Them and his family – those three little lads.’

  ‘Little lads?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Yes. When I went to interview Sleigh’s wife the first time, there were three babies, well, toddlers I suppose, scampering around with a bloody great Borzoi.’

  Lestrade tutted. ‘These damned foreigners are everywhere,’ he said. ‘So why come to me, Ivan?’

  ‘It’s your case, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not any more,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Not officially. I’ve been suspended. It could be serious.’

  ‘Bollocks, Sholto!’ Corner staggered to his feet. ‘I was suspended more times than the Clifton Bridge. You can’t claim to be a Yard man until you’ve been suspended at least three times. And even a suspended policeman can get into an asylum, as long as he doesn’t tell them he’s been suspended. An old one can’t. Believe me; I’ve tried. Come on, we’ve got a long way to go.’

  ‘We?’ Lestrade stood with him.

  ‘Well, I’m not passing it over now,’ Corner assured him, grasping his stick firmly, ‘old trouble or no old trouble. If I can nail this bastard, Sholto, I’ll die a happy man. Oh, don’t worry. You’ll get the collar, of course.’

  ‘But it’s nearly one in the morning, Ivan,’ Lestrade told him.

  Corner led him onto the platform where the moon shone pale on the planking. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘one night, one moonlit night like this one, I came as close to Blackfriars Dan as I am to you now.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I told you,’ Corner said, ‘will-o’-the-wisp. He got away from me. One second he was there. The next, a gush of steam from the locomotive, and he was gone. To this day I don’t know how he did it. But he did. Well, I’m a greedy bugger. I want that chance again. Come on, I’ve got a trap below.’

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ said Lestrade.

  THE SUN CAME UP OVER the Sandwich Flats as the policemen, ancient and modern, clattered through the barbican of the Cinque Port and on through its incomprehensible street plan. Perhaps incomprehensible was the wrong word, but then Lestrade was driving and was never at his best in control of a one-in-hand. Away to the north, the gallant little trains of the Dymchurch, Romney and Hythe Railway rattled through the morning, crossing many a fenny border, bringing the cheque and the postal order. They followed the North Stream of the River Stour, which struck Lestrade as odd because on the map it was very definitely to the south, and came to the rather imposing sweep that led to Mandalay, nestled behind a curtain wall of rhododendron bushes and guarded by sentinel elms where sentry rooks kept watch.

  ‘You know,’ Corner said as Lestrade reined in, ‘before I met you at Blackfriars last night I had a nap. I dreamed I went to Mandalay again. And Daniel Sleigh took us on a guided tour of the rooms. Every man I’ve sent to the gallows was there, chained to the wall and heaping curses on my head. Do you ever have dreams like that, Sholto?’

  Lestrade wavered for a moment, in mid-dismount. Then he smiled and tapped the older man’s shoulder with his whip. ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘we never sleep.’

  ‘DANIEL WHO?’ DOCTOR McKechnie had had a bad night. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve had rather a bad night.’

  The policemen, past and present, exchanged glances.

  ‘Take it from me,’ he said, ‘if you’ve never spent the night talking to Joan of Arc, you’ve never lived.’

  ‘Sleigh,’ Lestrade repeated, ‘Daniel Sleigh. We have reason to believe that he was admitted to this asylum . . .’

  ‘No,’ McKechnie growled, then gentler, ‘no, we no longer use that term here, Mr Lestrade. Asylum has connotations. People chained to walls, lashed into obedience, that sort of thing. Well, it may be all right for Bedlam, but it won’t do here. We prefer the term “holiday camp”. It has an altogether nicer atmosphere, don’t you think? Here, our patients are guests, having an extended holiday. You’re lucky, actually. Today’s Friday – you can judge our Knobbly Knees Competition. Oh, don’t worry. Absolutely no impropriety, I assure you. Chap guests only.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of you, doctor,’ Lestrade said, ‘but I’m afraid my expertise doesn’t run to knees. It’s true I never forget a face, but below the waist is not my province.’

  The doctor was clearly disappointed.

  ‘But it’s about impropriety and things below waists that we’ve come, in fact.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Once again, the name of the luna . . . guest I’m looking for is Daniel Sleigh. S-L-E-I-G-H. Sleigh.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector, I can spell. Spelling is essential in a doctor of psychiatry – that word alone is a bitch – and a fluency in Latin gerundives is, of course, de rigueur.’

  Damn, thought Lestrade, three of the very skills he lacked – spelling, Latin and Spanish. Had it not been for the way the Great Foreman in the Sky handed out jobs, he could have been wearing a white coat now, managing the loonies in the nuthouse.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Dan. I do remember him actually. Let me see,’ and he ran a medical finger down the lists in his ledger, ‘yes, here we are. Admitted, 18 September 1851. He’s not with us at the moment, of course.’

  ‘He escaped?’ Corner asked.

  The doctor’s face fell still further, but he screwed it into a determined smile. ‘Again,’ he said, struggling with his tombstone-sized teeth, ‘not a term we use here. No, Mr Sleigh merely “went for a walk”, as we say.’

  Lestrade stayed frosty. ‘Our fear, doctor,’ he said, ‘is that Mr Sleigh has been for several walks, always down the platforms of Underground stations and often committing murder on the way.’

  ‘Impossible,’ McKechnie said.

  ‘That sounds a little definite,’ Lestrade said. ‘Is there something we don’t know?’

  ‘I know that Mr Sleigh is not the murderous type, Inspector. In fact, he’s not a criminal at all in the conventional sense of the word. Oh, his tastes may be a little odd . . .’

  ‘Why was he committed?’ Corner asked.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly tell you that,’ McKechnie said.

  ‘Professional etiquette?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Lost records,’ McKechnie confessed. ‘No, I only have the bare essentials here. Lived in Portman Square and Cannes. Had a villa in Ventnor.’

  ‘Who committed him, then?’ Corner wouldn’t leave it alone.

  ‘It doesn’t say,’ McKechnie told him, ‘but it’s normally the next of kin – wife, husband, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But you knew Sleigh,’ Lestrade checked, ‘before he esc . . . went for his walk?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What kind of man was he?’

  The doctor perched the glasses on the end of his nose, leaning back in the chair. ‘Cultured. Intellectual. Not without a sense of humour. Suffers from obsessional neuroses of course.’

  ‘What?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘He’s mad as a snake,’ McKechnie translated for the policemen’s benefit.

  ‘I assumed that,’ said Lestrade, ‘or he wouldn’t be here . . . would he?’

  ‘Oh no,’ McKechnie said. ‘Some of our guests are as sane as you or I,’ but he squinted at Lestrade as he said it.

  ‘They are?’ Corner was surprised.

  ‘I’ve got t
hree crime writers in at the moment gleaning research for their novels.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little unusual?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘It’s their funeral,’ McKechnie shrugged. ‘We’ve tightened up on security since Sleigh “went for a walk”. Walking is strictly supervised now. They’ll never get out.’

  ‘Sleigh did,’ Corner reminded him.

  ‘We were perhaps a little under-zealous,’ the doctor confessed. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Do you know where he is now?’ Lestrade asked.

  The doctor consulted his hunter. ‘Hephzibah’s,’ he said, ‘taking breakfast.’

  The policemen were astonished. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Lestrade said.

  ‘It’s a little restaurant in the town,’ McKechnie explained. ‘They do a particularly choice scrambled egg.’

  ‘Are you telling us that Sleigh is still in the area?’

  ‘Oh, of course. The ways of the rationally disadvantaged are strange, Mr Lestrade. Mr Sleigh was with us for over forty years, before he “went for his walk”. We are, effectively, his home – the only one he can remember, anyway. It’s typical of the ambivalence of the neurotic. He can’t live with us any more, but neither can he live without us. We keep his room free and his bed aired.’

  ‘May we see the room?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ McKechnie led the way through myriad white-painted passages adorned with precepts pinched from the workhouses – GOD IS LOVE and CHRIST IS KINDNESS. Under these, various inmates, those presumably allowed relatively sharp implements, had daubed FIND HIM IN ROOM 28. This had been crossed out several times and other numbers inserted.

  ‘Free expression,’ McKechnie explained as the policemen gazed about them in bewilderment. ‘Many of our guests suffer from delusions of grandeur. Good morning, Your Majesty,’ he bowed to an elderly gentleman in a little white lace cap. ‘That one,’ he whispered, ‘believes he is Queen Victoria.’

  ‘Isn’t he a little on the male side?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Only slightly,’ McKechnie said. ‘These things take time. Some of our guests suffer from folie à deux. Good morning, sires,’ and he bowed again to two men who walked stiffly down the corridor, as though in riding boots, their right hands tucked firmly into imaginary waistcoats. ‘Napoleon and Lucien,’ McKechnie whispered, ‘the Corsican brothers. Ah, here we are.’

  The room had no corners and only one small window. It reminded Lestrade at once of the stuffy padded cells of the City and South London line, except that it was a cold, almost painful white. Mechanically, he and Corner rummaged through the contents of a small wooden locker. Tucked away at the back, carefully, laid out in a line, were a number of tickets of the Underground railway, the Twopenny Tube.

  ‘You’d better have a look at this, Sholto,’ Corner said grimly.

  He handed Lestrade a tatty manuscript with line after line and page after page in an untidy, backward-sloping scrawl. The younger policeman’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘When he was four?’ he asked aloud.

  ‘It was the bit half-way up a church steeple that got me,’ Corner said. ‘Page thirty-eight.’

  Lestrade flicked to it. ‘Good God, yes. And it’s Salisbury Cathedral which, if I remember my Church Architecture for Policemen lecture, is the tallest in England.’

  ‘Ah,’ McKechnie broke in, ‘I see you’ve found Daniel’s little opus. He intends it for publication. To be called “My Secret Life”.’

  ‘But it’s obscene,’ Corner said, ‘or at least it was in my day.’

  ‘It still is.’ Lestrade was able to give his verdict from the viewpoint of current law. ‘Makes Marie Corelli look a bit tame. I’m afraid we’ll have to take this with us. And these.’ He stuffed the tickets inside the book. ‘I don’t know about you, Ivan, I could suddenly force down some particularly choice scrambled eggs.’

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE customer in Hephzibah’s Tea Rooms at that hour of a Friday morning. Then suddenly there were three. This sudden upswing in her financial situation greatly pleased Hephzibah, but she was at a loss to know why the two newcomers insisted on sharing a table with the dear old gentleman who had recently become a regular. He was an old love, she realized, while beaming at him from the recesses of her kitchen. Perhaps a little fidgety of finger, a little likely to take liberties, and for that reason she never allowed one of her girls to serve him, always dutifully and altruistically braving his little lunges herself. It was, she explained to her girls, no more than her place as owner and manager of Hephzibah’s Tea Rooms to bear his brunt and whatever else he ordered her to bare in the interests of customer relations. What those relations might be, no one was privileged to find out, because the dear old gentleman always paid his bill behind Hephzibah’s beaded curtain, with a great deal of heavy breathing. Hephzibah assured them that the dear old gentleman was a martyr to asthma, tinged with tuberculosis, and the exertion of getting his wallet out was occasionally too much for him.

  ‘Mr Sleigh?’ Lestrade asked when he had ordered (Corner was paying).

  ‘The same, sir. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. This is my colleague, Inspector Corner.’

  ‘Good God,’ Sleigh adjusted a smeary pair of pince-nez, ‘so it is. It’s been years, Mr Corner. I thought you were dead.’

  ‘I thought you were,’ Corner said, ‘until recently.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been away,’ Sleigh said, ‘Morocco, Tangiers, south of France.’

  ‘Blackfriars,’ said Corner.

  Sleigh looked a little uncomprehending.

  ‘We recently visited the as . . . “holiday camp”,’ said Lestrade. ‘Dr McKechnie was kind enough to show us your room.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sleigh was masticating his way around the last toast, ‘pretty enough decor,’ he said. ‘Shame about the view.’

  ‘In it,’ the Inspector went on, ‘we found a quantity of Underground railway tickets. Sadly of course, they don’t carry dates.’

  ‘Ah, I love the Underground,’ Sleigh said. ‘The darkness affords the most wonderful opportunities – not as many as in Morocco, of course. The Moroccans have this facility for yielding up their persons – and little boys are very cheap.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lestrade. ‘It’s big girls I’m interested in.’

  ‘Oh, so am I,’ Sleigh enthused, catching his teeth just in time. ‘Shall we compare notes?’

  ‘Ah yes.’ Lestrade waited until the naturally curious Hephzibah had served their breakfast trays and reluctantly retreated to her recess to prepare Mr Sleigh’s elevenses. ‘Your notes are something else we found in your room. It seems to be a catalogue of debauch since you were four years of age.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Sleigh reminisced as his pince-nez steamed up, ‘I remember that serving girl as if it were yesterday. Enormous pair of . . .’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Lestrade interrupted. ‘Tell me, Mr Sleigh, Mr Corner and I haven’t had a chance to read your memoirs yet. I expect you’ve had some exciting encounters in the Underground, haven’t you?’

  ‘Not really,’ Sleigh said, pouring himself another coffee. ‘Oh, one or two frots on the platform, but I don’t get up to town much these days. Too busy abroad, you see. I do remember two young lasses in a four-wheeler . . .’

  ‘I remember you on Blackfriars Station,’ Corner persisted. ‘As do a number of ladies on whom you forced your unwelcome attentions.’

  ‘Unwelcome? Unwelcome, Mr Corner? How dare you!’ He shook with indignation. ‘The only one to whom my attentions were unwelcome was my lady wife, Mrs Sleigh. And I believe she went to her Maker years ago. I’ve had duchesses, serving girls, errand boys, even a Yorkshire terrier, though it was a dark night. But to a man they’ve all given me their consent; all enjoyed a gentleman’s little games. Even the Yorkshire terrier . . .’

  ‘My God,’ growled Corner, ‘there’s a law against that sort of thing. And if there isn’t, there should be.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lestrade agreed. ‘We’ll pass th
ese papers to the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals later. At the moment, I am concerned with six women and one man who have been murdered on the Underground.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Sleigh was aghast. ‘Good heavens!’

  ‘It can’t have come as a surprise to you, Daniel,’ Corner said, leaning forward, ‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’

  ‘Only Poules-de-luxe Volume III – and to be honest, the standard of the drawings is going downhill. I honestly don’t think the position shown in Number thirty-six is physically possible. Even when I was younger and fitter. Of course, they used to say about Catherine the Great . . .’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she was,’ Lestrade interrupted. ‘Tell me, Mr Sleigh, do you have children?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ the old man beamed proudly. ‘The length and breadth of the world, I should think.’

  ‘No, I mean by Mrs Sleigh.’

  ‘Oh, her.’ He fished out a piece of toast where it had become sop in his coffee. ‘Yes. Three boys.’

  ‘Named William, John and Arthur?’

  ‘Er . . . yes, I think so.’

  ‘How old would they be now?’

  ‘Ooh,’ Sleigh sucked in his whiskers, ‘getting on for eleven, I suppose. Look, I have to see my publisher today,’ Sleigh folded his napkin. ‘I’m not sure I want my name emblazoned all over the front of that.’ He pointed to the pornography in Lestrade’s hand. ‘Not the sort of thing a gentleman does, show off. What about a nom-de-plume?’

  ‘Not just now,’ Lestrade said. ‘The scrambled eggs were ample.’

  ‘No, no, a pen name. Any ideas?’

  Lestrade knew all about aliases. He looked at the ancient degenerate before him, his brain softened by years of excess. He thought of his own lieutenant, the strait-laced Constable Dew, who made Puritans like Cromwell look like libertines. ‘What about Walter?’ he suggested.

  ‘“My Secret Life” by Walter.’ Sleigh rolled the sound of it around his tongue. ‘Yes. Yes. That’s very good. Thank you, Mr Lestrade. Now, if that’s all,’ he reached under the flap of his waistcoat for his fly buttons, ‘I must pay my bill. Not to mention a generous tip. It’s a long way to Penge.’