The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade

by Trow, M J

  Back to the matter in hand. Theories could come later. The body was propped up in a standing position, the legs turned in with the weight of the trunk, but it was clear that ankles, wrists and neck had once been tied. Strangulation? That was possible, but there was not enough of the neck left to tell. There was no more he could do. In the cramped space of the chamber it was too dark and airless for further work. He returned to the sunlight, older, wiser. He gave instructions for the body to be removed, and would supervise it himself. He must talk to the coroner, check the chamber measurements and look for clues. He must talk to the labourers who found it … him, to the Shanklin Chine Company.

  But first Mrs Bush, rotund, homely, busy, was clattering around her kitchen. Lestrade sat in a withdrawn huddle, seeing the dead face before him as Grace was said.

  ‘Shepherd’s pie, Inspector Lestrade?’

  The labourers were unhelpful. They had been working under contract for the Chine Company for seventeen years, man and boy. The Chine had been closed earlier than usual the previous year because of a landslip. By early September, the ropes and chains had been strung up and the gates locked. Was it possible for anyone to enter? Yes, if they had a key. But in daylight, with a body? Unlikely. A night-time job, then? Certainly, but the path was treacherous and steep, with sharp turns and jutting ledges. It would have to be someone who knew the place – and knew it well. One false step, carrying a full-grown man, and it would probably have been two bodies in the Chine.

  It took Lestrade a week to interview all those who had regular contact with the area. At the end of it he was satisfied that no one knew anything. The inspector of works commented that there was evidence of rock cutting and new mortar in the chamber, that the height had been altered and the body in effect bricked in.

  ‘Are you familiar with the works of the late Mr Allan Poe?’ he had asked Lestrade.

  ‘Fleetingly, sir.’ Lestrade had pondered the similarity already, as he faced the eighth consecutive shepherd’s pie presented with glowing pride by Mrs Bush. But the connection didn’t help him. Or did it? He had an uneasy feeling, as he crossed to Portsmouth to the coroner’s office; and it wasn’t just the rolling and pitching of the steam packet.

  ‘Dead for several months, I’d say.’ The coroner was poring over a severed limb arranged tastefully on a slab. ‘Yes,’ adjusting his pince-nez, ‘several months.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  The coroner stopped his routine examination of the matter in hand and straightened. ‘I’m not sure.’ He twanged off his surgical gloves and rinsed his hands under a tap. ‘Are you familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe?’ lest experienced an immediate déjà-vu – either that or the coroner was the inspector of works’s brother. ‘Fleetingly.’ He really had had this conversation before.

  ‘The short story called The Black Cat?’

  ‘The cat is walled up in the cellar with the deceased?’

  ‘Just so. No cat in the Chine chamber, eh?’

  Lestrade shook his head. ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked. ‘that the cause of death was …’

  ‘Suffocation, I suppose,’ was the coroner’s verdict. ‘That would have resulted before other things – starvation, madness.’

  ‘And the nails? The hair?’

  The coroner wiped his hands on his waistcoat. He was uncomfortable. ‘A ghastly thing. Shocking. Mind you, I can’t account for it. Never seen anything like it myself, not in twelve years. Bizarre. That’s the word. Bizarre.’

  ‘What do you make of the man’s occupation?’

  ‘From his clothes, a labourer, I’d say. Smocking on the chest. Not from round here, though. Not the right pattern. Ah, but this was odd.’ The coroner rummaged in a cluttered drawer. ‘What do you make of this?’ He handed Lestrade a piece of dirty material, metallic and torn.

  ‘Military lace?’

  ‘I am impressed, Inspector. Army, cavalry probably. But officer’s, certainly. How many officers of cavalry do you know who become farm labourers?’

  ‘I take your point, sir.’ Lestrade frowned, the plot deepening so fast as to make his head spin. But it was a clue, a tangible piece of evidence.

  ‘And this is even more interesting.’

  Lestrade saw, in the weave of the scarf, fragments that had been tucked under the collar of the corpse, the name ‘Peter’, embroidered in a coarse, childlike hand. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘As yet, sir, precisely nothing. But it’s early days yet.’

  The coroner showed Lestrade to an outer office. ‘The lad will show you out. Spilsbury?’

  A short-sighted urchin with acne lurched from an adjacent room. ‘Look at him,’ the coroner muttered. ‘My cousin’s boy from Leamington. He wants to be a coroner one day.’ Under his breath he added, ‘No hope, no hope at all. I think he’s suicidal, you know.’

  Not wishing to be a burden to Sergeant Bush any longer and totally unable to face his tenth supper of shepherd’s pie, Lestrade moved in to Daish’s Hotel. Daily he walked on the pier, breathed in the salt air. Daily he returned to the Chine, asked himself over and over – who? Why? What, after all, did he have? A body. The body of a middle-aged man, walled up in an improvised cave at a popular holiday resort. The man was a labourer, named Peter, who may or may not have had contact with the Army. It was thin, very thin.

  But there was one last witness to see. A wild-eyed, melancholy old man with a massive barbed-wire beard mingling with the morning egg and pipe tobacco. Lestrade took a passing haywain by way of the worst roads he had ever travelled to the vast, overgrown country house at Farringford. Its owner, the Poet Laureate, was hobbling in the garden on his stick, examining with failing eyes the daffodils on the rolling lawns.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Inspector Lestrade, sir, of Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Lestrade of the Yard?’ Tennyson would do anything for a rhyme.

  ‘Very good, sir, very droll.’

  ‘I don’t usually see visitors, Inspector.’

  ‘Quite so, My Lord.’

  ‘Tea?’

  Lestrade bowed. From nowhere, a butler brought the silver and porcelain.

  ‘Cream and sugar, sir?’ The butler was pompous – he disliked policemen.

  Lestrade felt uncomfortable in the presence of genius. He was not one himself and was acutely aware that the Laureate did not tolerate visitors gladly. It was even rumoured that he leapt from rear windows and fled through orchards rather than face his butler’s announcement of imminent guests. He had better get this over with. It would probably be of little value anyway.

  ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, My Lord. I am told you are a frequent visitor to Shanklin Chine – out of season.’

  ‘When I am at Farringford, I often wander there, yes.’

  ‘You have a key?’

  ‘No. My man calls on the gatekeeper when I wish to enter.’

  ‘Have you been there recently?’

  Tennyson’s concentration began to wander. Lestrade busied himself searching in the delicate porcelain for a vestige of tea. How he loathed the habit of filling only half the cup. He declined the butler’s cream puff – for one thing the man had his thumb in it.

  ‘Men may come and men may go,

  But I go on for ever.’

  Lestrade flicked a glance at the butler, who remained immobile, pompous.

  ‘Er … quite.’ Try a different tack, he thought. Eccentricity will out. ‘On recent visits did you notice anything unusual?’ He cursed himself for that vagueness. It opened the floodgates for senility.

  ‘Break, break, break,

  On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!

  And I would that my tongue could utter

  The thoughts that arise in me.’

  Amen to that, rejoined Lestrade silently. ‘Did you notice any evidence of digging, My Lord?’ He found himself talking loudly, as though to a deaf mute or a foreigner. ‘Some new work on the Chine wall? A new cleft in the sandstone?’ It was very hard work.

 
‘But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

  And the sound of a voice that is still!’

  That was more to the point. So Tennyson knew something. He was aware that there had been a murder. The papers had not yet released the story. The Noble Poet was hiding something.

  ‘What makes you say that, My Lord?’

  Tennyson stared unblinkingly under the over-shadowing brim of his Wide-awake. ‘Forgive me, Inspector.’ His tone was different. ‘Sometime I forget myself. Vain of me, isn’t it, to quote my own work?’

  Lestrade tried not to show he had not been following the drift of the last few minutes. ‘Do you know anyone called Peter?’ he asked.

  Tennyson rose with the aid of a stick and butler. Lestrade followed him towards the great house.

  ‘Why are you asking me these things?’

  ‘We have found evidence of foul play in the Chine, My Lord. The body of a man whose name may have been Peter.’

  Tennyson stopped and faced the inspector. He motioned the butler to go ahead.

  ‘Inspector, I am not long for this world now. I have seen a great deal in my lifetime. Much sorrow … much sorrow. My mind is not so clear. If a body fell at my feet I doubt if I would notice it. The shadows are closing in. There are some days when I cannot tell if I am talking to men or ghosts.’

  Lestrade, not usually a man of sympathy, patted the Laureate’s arm. ‘Thank you for the tea, My Lord,’ seemed warm enough.

  Tennyson was quoting again –

  ‘If thou shouldst never see my face again,

  Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

  Than this world dreams of.’

  He motioned the butler to him and hobbled up the lawn. Lestrade waved his hat in token that he would find his own way out.

  ‘Twilight and evening bell –‘ he heard the Poet declaim,

  ‘And after that the dark!

  And may there be no sadness of farewell

  When I embark.’

  Lestrade embarked on the steam packet later that afternoon. He had assured the authorities that there were further lines of enquiry to follow up and that the case was far from hopeless, but he was not very far forward. The local papers had been leaked the story – inevitably. And the name ‘Peter’, the labourer’s smock and the notoriety for the Chine were all there. The editor had had the good taste to suppress the grisly details – or the coroner had been unusually tight-lipped.

  No time for Lestrade to return to London. Instead, he took the train, by easy stages, via Swindon and the wide gauge of the Great Western, to Haverfordwest. He was annoyed at having missed his connecting boat and had to spend a wet, cold night in the town with what appeared to be a single street. If there were further delays tomorrow, he ran the risk dreaded by all full-blooded Englishmen in a Welsh town – a dry Sunday. Methodist revivals and Mr Gladstone’s Licensing Laws had combined to kill Haverfordwest.

  As it turned out, Lestrade would have preferred a dry Sunday to the wet Saturday he got. The ship lurched and rolled in the inhospitable Irish Sea. Lestrade, never a good sailor, found his stomach and his mind whirling together in speculation and nausea. Irish soil felt solid and safe. The cab clattered along Sackville Street and on into the suburbs. Dublin was still a lovely city, elegant, wealthy, English. And if there was an air of hostility, if the men and women did not look you squarely in the face, it wasn’t to be wondered at. After all, wasn’t that unprincipled maniac Gladstone playing with Home Rule? Playing right into the hands of the Fenians? And Salisbury couldn’t last long – the Irish MPs at Westminster would see to that. At least, so The Times said and Lestrade had a great respect for that newspaper. Not that he was a political policeman, but he believed in keeping abreast of affairs.

  Lestrade alighted at the barracks of the 13th Hussars to have his feet run over by their new maxim-gun detachment. Not wishing to appear unmanly before those fine fellows on manoeuvres, he buried his teeth in the rim of his bowler and drove his head a few times against the nearest wall.

  ‘Did ya have a nice trip, sor?’ chuckled the cabbie on his perch.

  Lestrade flashed him a livid scowl and no tip and limped painfully into the regimental offices. The surgeon duly saw him, bandaged both feet and left him in the orderly room. It was some hours before the object of the inspector’s visit arrived. Two burly privates appeared and lifted Lestrade between than down the corridor, across the courtyard and into the office of the colonel. The walls were hung with regimental trophies and photographs and the whole room had an aura of cigar smoke and horse liniment.

  ‘Boys,’ a sharp voice barked behind him. Lestrade leaped an inch or two and instantly regretted it, landing full on his bruised toes. Colonel Templeton-Smyth strode past him to his desk. He was a man of average height, brisk and straight-backed, with the inevitable military moustache, clipped somewhat thinner than Lestrade’s own. He had the face of a hawk, clear blue eyes, firm chin and tanned, parchment skin – rather an odd hawk, really. He threw his forage cap on to the desk and unhooked the short, astrakhan trimmed patrol jacket before flinging himself into his chair.

  ‘Boys,’ he repeated, sliding a cigar box across to Lestrade. ‘What do you think of ’em, Sergeant-Major?’

  ‘Inspector, sir. Inspector of Police.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Sorry. Find these rank things confusin’, what?’

  ‘I think that boys have their place in the scheme of things, sir. They will at very least be boys.’

  ‘Ah, yes. But you are a policeman. Right?’

  Lestrade nodded.

  ‘You must know some of these youngsters. You know, the ones old Barnardo doesn’t get. I’ve got an idea …’

  ‘Forgive me, sir,’ – Lestrade was trying to be formal, despite the throbbing in his toes – ‘but I’m on important police business.’

  ‘Ah, yes, ’course. Light?’

  Somehow Lestrade leaned forward and puffed gratefully on the cheroot. The grandmother tolled the hour of four.

  ‘Ah, tiffin.’ The colonel rang a silent bell near his desk. ‘But the prevention of crime, man. That Ripper chappie – he was a boy once. We can’t wait until they grow up twisted and bitter. We’ve got to train them, make them into useful citizens. Now, my idea …’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ Lestrade cut in.

  ‘Ah, yes, ’course. Fire away. Ha! Good that, what? Military joke, don’t you know, fire away!’ Templeton-Smyth saw that Lestrade was not amused. ‘Well, to business.’ His face straightened.

  ‘I am making enquiries into a suspected murder which took place recently at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, sir.’

  ‘Ah, yes? How can I help?’

  Lestrade fumbled in his wallet and threw the scrap of material on to the colonel’s desk. ‘What do you make of that, sir?’

  Templeton-Smyth scrutinised it closely. He took it to the light of the window. Something in the square caught his eye and he threw open the sash.

  ‘Not like that, Corporal,’ he shouted. ‘It’ll never get better if you piquet!’

  Back in the room, the colonel answered the inspector’s question. ‘Officer’s lace, Thirteenth Hussars. Shoulder belt.’ A pause, then – ‘Could be the Fourteenth Hussars, of course.’

  ‘Thirteenth.’ Lestrade was emphatic. ‘This object was found in the lining of the clothes of the deceased, sir. I took the trouble of cleaning it. I also borrowed a copy of Her Majesty’s Dress Regulations for Officers from Messrs Gieves and Company, Portsmouth branch. A brief consultation of that told me that the lace belongs, as you say, to a shoulder belt of either the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Hussars. If however you look again at the object’ – the colonel did – ‘you will notice that one edge of it is brighter, less tarnished than the rest.’

  ‘I don’t follow you, Inspector.’

  ‘Your batman would, sir. Any man who has the job of cleaning regimental lace would know that where it is covered by a metal ornament, the lace is clean. The clean area of the scrap you have correspond
s in size and shape with a metal scroll on which a battle honour is blazoned. I need hardly tell you, sir, that the Thirteenth is the only cavalry regiment that wears its battle honours on its pouch belt.’

  Templeton-Smyth’s jaw fell slack. ‘I admire you police chappies. First-class piece of deduction, Lieutenant.’

  ‘That’s Inspector, sir.’

  ‘Ah yes, ’course.’ Templeton-Smyth returned the lace. The significance began to dawn on him. ‘So this chappie, your … er … deceased. An officer of the Thirteenth?’ His moustaches began to bristle with distaste.

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out, sir.’

  ‘Now, look here, Lestrade. This isn’t on, you know. I mean, officers and gentlemen and all that. Bit unseemly, what? Chappie from one’s own mess endin’ up done to death.’ But curiosity overcame the scandal. ‘Tell me, how’d it happen? Sabre? Carbine? Maxim?’