Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Penge?’ repeated Lestrade.

  ‘Where my publisher lives. I go there often.’

  ‘By public transport?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I do love the omnibus, don’t you? Particularly watching young ladies walking upstairs.

  ‘They don’t often do that,’ Lestrade observed.

  ‘They do when I’m downstairs,’ he beamed. The policemen paid in cash and fled.

  SO CORNER OF THE YARD had still not got his man. And the legend of Blackfriars Dan was destined to be buried in the dusty archives of Scotland Yard and the memory of an old copper. During their chat at Hephzibah’s Tea Rooms, Lestrade had sized up the old reprobate. He’d also had a good, hard look at Daniel Sleigh. Wherever the old man had been, it was not Morocco or Tangiers. Neither, Lestrade suspected, was it the Underground. At least, not on the nights in question. He and Corner had made other inquiries around Sandwich and certainly, Sleigh had made a nuisance of himself from time to time. He had been caught leering outside the Sunday School on the day Sarah Culdrose had died. He had offered his services to help school children across the road when Jane Hollander was found. As Emily Bellamy had gasped her last, he was falling out of a tree overlooking a bedroom of the vicarage, and as Verity True expired he was noticed by the local constabulary adding to his collection (subsequently removed by the said constabulary) of ladies’ underwear. In short, the bent old bastard had alibis for several of the nights in question and Blackfriars Dan had proved to be another red herring in a sea of red herrings. Whether Chief Inspector Abberline would overlook him on his suburban case was another matter.

  On the journey home, Corner had a relapse of his old trouble and his protégé put him to bed, hanging up the old man’s truncheon for the last time.

  At least, though, Lestrade could eliminate three other people from his inquiries. Under cover of darkness that night, when the barges bobbed black on the river and the growlers ceased to growl under the stars; at a time when Chief Inspector Abberline was surveilling furiously at No Forty-eight Fitzloosely Street Road, Penge, and Assistant Commissioner Frost was at home hardening his arteries, Lestrade crept into the Yard.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he’d called all three into one cell with Dew and Corkindale at his back, ‘John Sleigh, William Sleigh, Arthur Sleigh – I think it’s time you all went home, don’t you?’

  The brothers looked at each other.

  ‘There’ll be a little delay,’ the Inspector said. ‘For reasons too procedural to go into, I am unable to sign your release papers tonight. Chief Inspector Abberline will do that, assuming he’s mastered the joined-up writing by then. Goodnight, gentlemen.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Arthur stood up. ‘What about our father?’

  ‘Shut up, Arthur, you idiot!’ John snapped.

  ‘He knows, John,’ Arthur said. ‘If he knows our names, he also knows about Papa.’

  ‘Do you, Lestrade?’ William asked.

  Lestrade looked at the brothers. ‘More or less,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve found him?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Thank God,’ John said. ‘Inspector, we have to know. Is it Papa? Is it he who has been carrying out these appalling attacks on the Underground?’

  ‘No,’ said Lestrade. ‘I don’t believe it is. By the way, he seems to think you three are nearly eleven.’

  William shook his head. ‘Poor papa,’ he said. ‘Mad as a hatter after all these years.’

  ‘Would you care to tell me about it?’ Lestrade lolled in the cell doorway.

  ‘John?’ Arthur said. ‘You’re the eldest.’

  The eldest of the Sleighs stood up wearily. ‘We are an honourable family, Mr Lestrade, I beg you to believe that. There was a Ranulf de Sley who came over with the Conqueror. And it was Aymer de Sley who handed King John his fountain pen to sign the Magna Carta. There was a regiment in the Civil War called Sley’s Lobsters. We go back a long way.’

  ‘I’d just like you to go back to 1851,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘In that year – we don’t remember it, of course; I was three, William was two, Arthur one – in that year, our father, Daniel, was put away by our mother and her brothers. He was sadly deranged, responsible, she believed, for attacks on young ladies in railway carriages. The police were on his trail. It was either the asylum or the prison cell. She chose the former. But polite society shunned us. We toyed with changing the family name, but tradition dies hard. We’d all had our names down for Eton but they wrote to us saying there was no room. Trinity took us, however, in a fit of liberalism – but then, they took Lord Byron too, so that’s no recommendation. When we were of age, we scattered to the corners of the globe. I enlisted in the Indian Army and became a Lieutenant in the Thirty-second Pioneers. William took to sheep-farming in the Dandenong and Arthur cattle-ranching at the Cape. Mama lived with my brothers by turns as soldiering was too impermanent a life for me to have her and she died some years ago.

  ‘It was in the Chitral passes that I happened upon an old copy of The Times. It said a woman, one Sarah Culdrose, had been found strangled on the railway. I feared at once it might be Papa, up to his old tricks.’

  ‘But he never attacked anyone on the Underground before,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Only, I suspect, because there was no Underground in 1851,’ Arthur said.

  ‘Neither did he strangle anyone,’ the Inspector reminded them.

  ‘Perhaps no one had resisted him with enough vehemence before,’ William said.

  ‘Whatever,’ said John, ‘it was not a chance we could take. I sent a telegram to William and took ship from the Gulf of Cutch. Arthur and I reached London simultaneously. It took William longer, of course, from Australia.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘We knew that Papa had been incarcerated in the asylum at Sandwich. We learned that he had escaped, but had no idea where he had gone.’

  ‘Down the road,’ Lestrade told them. ‘He seems to flit between the asylum and Hephzibah’s Tea Rooms, with the possibility of the odd excursion to Penge.’

  ‘Ah,’ said William. ‘This Hephzibah – big woman? Careless of dress? Morals not as rigid as they might be?’

  ‘Hmm, possibly’ Lestrade wobbled his hand as a sign of uncertainty. ‘I didn’t see her for long and her kitchen was a little dark.’

  ‘That follows the pattern Mama told us about,’ John remembered.

  ‘Mama’s words were actually “anything in a skirt”, John,’ Arthur corrected him.

  ‘And then she was being kind,’ William said. ‘She might have added “or trousers”.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ John went on, ‘the authorities at the asylum were singularly unhelpful and I smelt a cover-up. We feared the worst. Papa had absconded from the place in February, in time to attack Mrs Culdrose. In fact, by the time we’d all arrived, two other women had died.’

  ‘Jane Hollander and Emily Bellamy.’ Lestrade crossed their eyes and dotted their teas for them.

  ‘So, we haunted the Underground,’ John said. ‘I never want to see an Underground train again. God, the sights we saw . . .’

  ‘There was one chap who wore a frock,’ Arthur remembered.

  ‘David Appleyard,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘He looked as miserable as sin.’

  ‘Ah, then that was Inspector John Thicke,’ Lestrade told them, ‘one of us.’

  The Sleighs sincerely hoped not.

  ‘But it was hopeless. Three of us trying to cover miles of the Underground. Thousands of passengers. We never even came close.’

  ‘We hoped,’ William took up the tale, ‘that something in the method of murder, or the appearance of the victims or their clothes, that something would give us a clue.’

  ‘So you pretended to be various relatives of the deceased?’

  ‘We did,’ John said. ‘Like Daniel in the lions’ den, but it had to be done.’

  ‘We should have come to you in the first place,’ Arthur said. ‘We’d have saved a lo
t of time and worry. But the family name – it was too important.’

  Lestrade nodded ruefully. ‘What will you do now? Go for a bite at Hephzibah’s Tea Rooms?’

  ‘No,’ John shook his head. ‘We’ve never met our father, Mr Lestrade, and we’ve been brought up to despise him. We all have our lives elsewhere. If you’re certain he’s not the Underground murderer, we’ll try to take up where we left off. I have to try to make my peace with the Colonel. I left him somewhere in the Chitral snows. Looked at one way it was desertion in the face of the enemy. I’ll be lucky to escape a court martial.’

  ‘I’ve got to round up a few thousand sheep,’ William said, ‘if the dingoes haven’t got them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lestrade, ‘we all have a touch of the dingoes from time to time. And you, Mr Sleigh?’

  ‘I’ve got to go to the doctor back home,’ said Arthur. ‘See if I can’t help change the course of Anglo-Boer relations and South African history.’

  ‘Well, then, gentlemen,’ Lestrade said, ‘don’t let me keep you from any of that.’

  ‘And what of you, Mr Lestrade?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Me?’ Lestrade paused as he turned to go. ‘I’ve got to catch me a murderer.’

  ❖ 11 ❖

  ‘I

  thought you ought to see this, guv’nor,’ Walter Dew said. He was unusually dishevelled for a smart young detective with a loving wife, but then he hadn’t been home for three days and colleagues like Russell and Bromley were careful to keep upwind of him.

  ‘What is it, Walter?’ Lestrade hadn’t slept either, but his dishevel wasn’t so obvious.

  ‘It’s a letter, guv.’ Dew was a little surprised at the Inspector’s lack of perception.

  ‘Thank you, Walter. Pull up a park bench.’ He waved his hand at one where the starlings pecked at his breakfast.

  Naked little boys splashed in the Serpentine some yards away, laughing and shouting.

  ‘Shall I move them on, sir?’ Dew asked.

  ‘Certainly not, Walter.’ Lestrade opened the envelope. ‘They’re doing no harm. Funny isn’t it, we let our children do that and if Daniel Sleigh so much as loosens his tie, we put him away for forty years.’

  ‘They say they’re the best years of your life,’ Dew nodded, but Lestrade wasn’t sure who he was referring to.

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Dew said. ‘I said to Russell and Bromley, “Good God!” I said.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Lestrade folded the paper again, ‘what do you make of it, Walter?’

  ‘A hoax, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I sent Russell round to Miss True’s this morning, first thing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She wasn’t there.’

  ‘What?!’ Lestrade was on his feet and the starlings, startled, flapped skyward.

  ‘It’s all right, guv. There was a note on the door saying she was at rehearsal at the Prince’s.’

  ‘And was she?’

  ‘Er . . . ?’

  ‘Didn’t you check?’

  ‘I sent Bromley’

  ‘Yes,’ snarled Lestrade. ‘That’s like sending Edward Bayreuth to climb a rope. Last one to a cab is a blithering idiot.’

  NO, SQUIRE BANCROFT was adamant, he had not seen Trottie True that morning, only a tiresome succession of policemen. First, a detective constable who was clearly twenty years too old for the job. He had been spirited away by Mrs Bancroft who insisted on showing him her cuttings. Then had come Lestrade and some other buffoon, panting and worried. Why were they worried, Bancroft had demanded to know. They hadn’t got to perform the Bard’s most ambitious masterpiece in front of Sir Henry Irving in three days – and that without a second gravedigger. Yes, Trottie True should have been with them. She’d certainly promised to be the night before. But surely, Lestrade knew what women were? It was only half past ten – early yet. But if she’d responded to an emergency call from the library, he’d be furious.

  Lestrade didn’t wait to hear more. He dispatched Dew to the Camberwell Branch Library, extricated a sobbing Bromley from the clutches of the ghastly Mrs Bancroft and posted Russell on permanent duty outside Trottie’s villa in the Walworth Road. None of which was bad for an inspector under suspension without actual power to break wind on his own.

  In the growler back to Covent Garden, he read the letter again. No address of course. Even the envelope’s postmark was smudged. Damn the General Post Office! A halfpenny to send a postcard was bad enough, but the gross incompetence of some anonymous sorter meant that Lestrade couldn’t even pin down a postal district. At that moment, he would dearly have loved to have pinned down a postal sorter.

  ‘If you want to see Agnes True again,’ it read, ‘you will come alone to Blackfriars Underground Station to catch the last train tonight. If you are not there and if you are not alone, they’ll find what is left of Miss True scattered the length of the City and South London line. I am sure you follow my train of thought.’

  And it was signed ‘A. Commuter’.

  Lestrade narrowed his eyes at the script – the same spidery hand he had read on the ledger of that company’s duty roster, the hand that had forged the signatures of Hudson, Gooch and Hackworth. The dead man’s hand. Male, certainly – look at the arcade letters. Was that an Edmonton slant? A Seven Dials scrawl? But it was broad daylight now – the Yard would be swarming with coppers of all shapes and sizes. He had about as much chance of getting to the boffin who understood these matters as flying to the moon.

  He suddenly jabbed the roof of the lurching wagon with his fist and instantly regretted it. His knuckles were still raw from their close encounter with ‘Masher’ Melhuish.

  ‘I’m putting you off here, Bromley. You catch another cab and get yourself over to George Culdrose’s – I want his signature. If he’s not there, get to Wandsworth and have a squint at his release papers. When you’ve done that, over to the Albany. I want to see William Bellamy’s signature too. Got it?’

  ‘Got it sir. What shall I do after lunch?’

  ‘Don’t be flippant with me, lad – I just saved your virtue from the She-Dragon of the Haymarket, did I not?’

  ‘I owe you my life, guv,’ Bromley said, still pale at the memory of it and jumped down from the cab.

  ‘It’s not your life that’s on the line, Bromley, it’s Miss True’s.’

  ‘Right enough, guv,’ the ex-Essex man said. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Seeing if two ballet dancers can string two words together,’ he said.

  THIS TIME, LESTRADE brooked no nonsense. He kept well away from the flying drop kicks of Cross and Holdsworth of the Ballet Rambo and demanded they write their names on a piece of paper. With much posturing and gesturing they did as they were told and he was able, through gritted teeth, to eliminate them from his inquiries. Camp they may have been, aesthetes to their tutus, and there was still an outside chance that one or both of them was a murderer; but they had not written the threatening letter – the one that threatened to snuff out the brief candle of Trottie True.

  And when Lestrade and Bromley met up that afternoon, the signatures of Culdrose and Bellamy proved that they hadn’t either. They went the pretty way, via the Walworth Road, which accounted for a pretty hefty cab fare that was put on Chief Inspector Abberline’s tab. Russell was still there. Trottie was not. There had been no sign. A little further down the road Walter Dew had become involved in an extraordinary case involving a hysterical female librarian in Camberwell Branch Library who swore he had been looking up her index. Never was a man more delighted to see his colleagues, but he had to report there had been no sighting of Trottie True there either.

  HE CHECKED, IN THE darkness of the stairway, where the down-draught caught the gasflame, that his switchblade still worked. The deadly four inches of steel flashed silver against the black. Then he walked on, his boots ringing on the metal treads. He fancied he saw movement below him, but it was only the light glanci
ng off the ornate wrought iron.

  What was she to him, he asked himself for the umpteenth time? What was he doing here, playing childish games with a practical joker? Walter Dew had told him not to; had told him flatly, then and there. There was no point. Either the madman had not got her and she was visiting a maiden aunt in Maidenhead or he had killed her already. And what if he had? What if his seizure of Trottie True meant that he had had all the time in the world to play his gentleman’s games with her? No rush job in the four minutes between stations now. It didn’t bear thinking about. Dew had been vehement; braver with his guv’nor than he’d ever been. Lestrade had silenced him with just seven words, ‘What if it was Mrs Dew, Walter?’ The detective had handed his guv’nor his boater.

  The Inspector’s instructions had been clear, whispered as they were as the four men fed the ducks in St James’s Park. No one was to accompany him. No one was to follow. There would be a police presence anyway – Abberline’s lads wasting their time. One glimpse of the genial faces of Dew, Russell or Bromley and the game would be up and they could all kiss goodbye to catching the Underground murderer and to Miss Trottie True.

  So he was alone, pacing the dusty platform at Blackfriars. Above him, the great clock struck the half-hour. Half an hour to midnight. Above that again, up the crazy tangle of stairways that led to the surface station, no doubt the ghost of Blackfriars Dan stalked his victims, perhaps long dead.

  No moon shone down here, only the green glimmer of the gas lamps. A half-whistled, half-hummed tune filled his ears. At the far end from him, where the tunnel loomed in blackness, a solitary cleaner, in the livery of the City and South London Company, was brushing his way towards him, his face a dark blur under the peak of his cap.