Lestrade and the Sign of Nine

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Fleet Street,’ said Lestrade. ‘That’s where I’ve been told they keep the newspaper offices.’

  ‘All right!’ Monro bellowed, then quieter. ‘All right. You’d better sit down, Lestrade. What I’m about to tell you is so hush-hush it scares even me. Understand?’

  Lestrade shrugged. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘but I hope I’m about to.’

  ‘You’ve got a little list,’ Monro said.

  ‘Yes, I fell off a . . . pavement,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘No, not your deformity,’ Monro explained. ‘A list of names.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way. It wasn’t in your office. It wasn’t in your home.’

  ‘My home?’ Lestrade was on the edge of his seat.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lestrade,’ the Assistant Commissioner blustered. ‘But you must admit the lads did an excellent job there. You didn’t even know it had happened, did you?’

  Lestrade had to admit he didn’t, but his inscrutable face gave nothing away: ‘You mean this list?’ he said, producing from his inside pocket a piece of paper. ‘The one given to me by Mr William Morris.’

  ‘Um . . . yes,’ Monro said casually. ‘I believe that may be the one.’

  ‘All you had to do was ask,’ Lestrade said. ‘I thought we were all on the same side.’

  Monro looked at his man. ‘Ach, laddie, so did I. Och, I’ve never walked those mean streets. I’ve never worn that stupid helmet. Never reported of a freezing night to the fixed point station. But I’m a copper nonetheless. Through and through. But the times, Lestrade, are a-changing. Out there, for all I now streets away from us as we speak, are a whole bloody race of bastard Irishmen.’

  ‘The Fenians?’

  ‘Aye,’ Monro growled, ‘the Fenians. The dynamite campaign.’

  ‘I have heard of these things, sir,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Aye, laddie,’ Monro leaned back. ‘Ye’ve also heard, I ken, of Section D.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Lestrade smiled grimly. ‘Section D.’

  ‘It’s also known, rather fatuously, as my secret department. Well, it is a department, it is secret and I suppose it’s mine after a fashion. It’s still bloody fatuous that it has to exist at all. And doubly bloody fatuous that it’s got to be secret. It’s the Special Irish Branch of the Yard, Lestrade. I created it eighteen months ago out of sheer necessity. Section D is up in the attic with a growing list of Irish malcontents, dynamite users, known sympathizers and the like. It’s headed up by Littlechild. Recently, we’ve widened the net to include political ne’er- do-wells and layabouts like this William Morris laddie. You can see how vital that little list is.’

  ‘As I said,’ Lestrade said, ‘all you had to do was ask. That’s all I did to get the list in the first place.’

  ‘Really?’ Monro chuckled. ‘Well, don’t tell Littlechild it’s as easy as that. He’ll have your throat out. Er . . . the list?’

  ‘Er . . .Mrs Hudson?’ Lestrade withheld the paper for a second.

  ‘Never heard of her,’ Monro shrugged, ‘Superintendent.’

  Lestrade smiled and passed the paper over. ‘No thank you, sir. When I get to Superintendent, I’d like it to be for what I’ve done rather than what I know.’

  Monro crossed to him again. ‘Well spoken, Lestrade,’ he said, ‘I knew you had some Scots blood in there somewhere. Oh, by the by,’ he whispered in his ear, ‘not a word to anybody, mind, about Section D. It is, if you’ll excuse the pun, dynamite.’

  ‘Your secret department’s safe with me, sir,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Good!’ Monro slapped him on the back. ‘Looking forward to tomorrow night, by the by. Mrs Monro will be there, the Commissioner and Lady Warren. Mrs Monro told me to tell you that last time she saw your Sarah Bernhardt, she laughed for a week.’

  The lights burned late at the Yard that night. Down the Embankment, in the echoing halls of the Mother of Parliaments, the cry went up ‘Who Goes Home?’

  Not Sholto Lestrade at any rate. He sat with his head in his hands, chewing over as he had so many times in the past weeks the murders of the Nine Men’s Morris. Eight victims, all save the last two, unrelated. All dead by the same means, a crushing blow to the head, delivered by person or persons unknown. And the clues? A piece of blue serge cloth plucked from the barbed wire on a lonely hillside. And even that may have had no bearing on the case at all. And as for the eye-witness descriptions, the murderer was clearly a chameleon, able to change not only colour but height and weight and girth at will. Hereward Rodney, despoiler of young girls; Osbaldeston Ralston, swindler; Byngham Batchelor, pincher of other people’s literary ideas; John Guest, exploiter of workers; Amos Flower, gang leader turned Napoleon of Crime; Anthony Rivers, frequenter of fallen women; and Mr and Mrs Kelly, genial host and hostess with a menu of murder on the side; all in all, not a very prepossessing lot.

  And over it all that damned silly game. Lestrade was idly playing with it now as he pondered the imponderable, moving the nine pieces mechanically around the maze on his desk, meeting, like them, the brick wall of the next piece. Just like a maze, this case; every corner an obstacle, every twist a blind alley; every ray of hope blocked by an impenetrable hedge.

  Then it came to him, as he sat in the lamplight with only the mice for company and somewhere away in the building the erratic knock of a broom on the stairs. Eight murders. Only eight. And yet the name of the game was the Nine Men’s Morris. Nine. One of the pieces slipped from his grasp to bounce on the wooden floor and lost itself behind some shoeboxes. He got up and crossed to the window, saw himself reflected in the half-light; the parchment skin, the hollow eyes, the face of the ferret. Out there, he thought to himself; somewhere out there alone, perhaps. Perhaps like him staring into a glass darkly. Out there was murder victim number nine.

  And all Lestrade had to do was find him.

  Eight o’clock. Nestling Hall. Conduit Street. It was Commissioner Warren’s first Police Revue and he was late. Behind the curtain, a nervous Sholto Lestrade chewed the end of his cigar. He flung it into the nearest sand bucket as he suddenly realized he had been champing on the wrong end. He thanked his God it hadn’t been alight at the time.

  ‘Ah, Lestrade,’ a top-hatted gent wearing too much rouge swept past him with doves fluttering out of every orifice, ‘I’d check that lipstick if I were you. People will talk.’

  Instinctively, Lestrade’s hand came up to his lips. No. The moustache was still there. Was it the crown of the Lower Satrap that had slipped? The blue-gold eyeshadow from Abu Simbel? Damn the stage for a lark. He hauled up his skirts and skipped on gossamer sandals past a chorus line of scantily clad lovelies he vaguely recognized as G Division’s Tug-o’-War team. His dressing room was up a flight of stone steps and left a bit. True, he shared it with the Amazing Armbrusters and Mr Memory Maurice, alias Sergeant Spettigue of Lost Property, but as the ranking officer it was his name over the door. He felt the power of the myriad sulphur bulbs around the mirror scorch his face again. Damn, that idiot with the doves was right. He remembered now. When the Armbrusters had been rehearsing something truly amazing, his hand had jumped in surprise and drawn a crimson track across his cheek. How did the women manage this stuff, he wondered. Let alone Queens of Egypt.

  A sweating Sergeant George appeared at his elbow. ‘Sorry, guv,’ he wheezed, ‘seems there’s a bit of a run on ostrich-feather fans. World shortage.’

  ‘World shortage?’ Lestrade snorted. ‘What happened to your face?’

  A purple bruise had developed across the sergeant’s left temple.

  ‘Delegation from the Plumage League; you know, those old biddies who are opposed to using feathers for trimmings. I sort of . . . bumped into them.’

  ‘Hmm. Occupational hazard.’

  ‘Sir, sir,’ a gasping Constable Green tumbled in through the door. ‘No asps, Inspector. Not the season.’

  ‘Dammit, man, I didn’t want a live one. Stuffed. I wanted it stuffed. Didn’t you try Ottersh
aw’s in Drury Lane?’

  ‘Yessir. They had a python. But I thought a thirty foot reptile might detract from your act.’

  Lestrade sighed. And did so again as he saw an exhausted Constable Tyrrell drag himself into the reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ the Inspector said, adjusting his left breast. ‘You couldn’t find a little black boy anywhere.’

  ‘You guessed it, sir,’ Tyrrell told him. ‘Some old Jew offered me a little white girl, but I said the Yard wasn’t interested. He turned quite pale at that point and scarpered.’

  ‘Ho-hum,’ said Lestrade.

  ‘Don’t suppose he had change for a pound.’

  ‘Never mind,’ the Inspector buffed up the eagle-headed god whose wings crossed his forehead, ‘the show must go on. Is this wig all right, George?’

  ‘Excellent, guv.’

  ‘Mind my frock, Tyrrell. You ladder these stockings and I’ll set the crocodiles on you. You don’t think the lads will mind, do you? Sarah Bernhardt with a limp?’

  George took the liberty of patting his guv’nor’s shoulder. ‘If they can handle the moustache, guv, they’re not going to baulk at a bit of gamminess down . . . there. Break a leg, guv’nor.’

  ‘Thanks, sergeant.’ The fixity of Lestrade’s grin could have cut glass.

  Below in the auditorium, the ripple of white glove on white glove told the artistes that Commissioner and Lady Warren had arrived. The band (B Division Philharmonic) struck up ‘for He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and the Lion Comique who was Master of Ceremonies pounded his gavel and introduced the first act.

  ‘Commissioner Warren, Lady Warren, Assistant Commissioners and their ladies, Superintendents, Chief Inspectors, Sergeants, lads. It gives me great pleasure – but that’s really none of your business, is it?’

  Howls of laughter from all except the Commissioner and his lady who clearly had no intention of being amused. Bemused, possibly. But amused? Never.

  Out of courtesy to his exalted rank, Assistant Commissioner Monro led off, assuring the audience that his heart was in the Heelands.

  ‘Take it away, Maestro,’ he said, extending a gloved hand towards the orchestra pit. It fazed him just a little when a constable walked off carrying a double bass, but he was soon in his stride. It left Constable Tinker of the Police Gazette wondering in the notes he was scribbling for his review where, if the Assistant Commissioner’s heart was in the Heelands, his voice had gone. A polite applause saw him off.

  The Armbrusters then did various Amazing Things, at least two of which Lady Warren had never seen before (but then she had led a very sheltered life), and the idiot with the doves followed in swift order, until his shoulders were encrusted with guano and he looked vaguely as though he’d been tarred and feathered.

  Constable Elton persisted in telling some rather off-colour jokes relating to various members of the Royal family and ending with what he described as everybody’s favourite – ‘There’s No Shove Like The First Shove’. Lady Warren had to have smelling salts applied smartly to her nostrils and the hard-eyed Commissioner passed a note to Monro, who had apparently relocated his heart and other bits of his anatomy and now sat in the front row on the wrong side of Lady Warren. Elton was to be on the carpet tomorrow at eight am sharp and on the horse troughs by nine.

  Glee Clubs various came and went with ditties appropriate to the occasion and then Culpepper’s Crooning Chocolate Coloured Coons, a rag-bag of assorted coppers with wide check trousers, huge bows under their chins and burnt cork and flour on their faces. Lestrade waited impatiently in the wings as the Coons strummed their little banjos for all they were worth and ran through the culinary favourites of Mammy’s little baby. The little fat one on the end kept breaking out of the line and with his hands waving frantically, screamed out ‘put on de skillet’, whenever the company seemed to flag. Still, mused Lestrade, they were billed as from different forces. It must have been a bitch to find time to rehearse.

  The interval came and went and the raffle was drawn. A jeroboam of champagne was the prize, won, by the most astonishing coincidence, by Commissioner Warren. He accepted graciously. Part Two began with Prestidge the Prestidigitator, who turned out to be the same idiot with the doves who had appeared in Part One. Only now he was producing rabbits from his topper and the stage was quickly sprinkled with currants the Coons were presumably quite partial to.

  ‘Who is that?’ Lestrade hissed to Mr Memory Maurice beside him.

  ‘Ooh, now you’ve asked me,’ the constable admitted.

  ‘That’s Inspector Reid, J Division,’ a passing Armbruster told him. ‘One of the most remarkable men of our century.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘He did,’ he and the Armbruster chorused.

  Constable Runciman of P Division followed, singing to a small guitar, which seemed peculiarly unmoved by the experience and Sergeant Whitman gave everybody his Little Nell. Lady Warren felt unhinged at the very idea, but the sergeant soldiered on and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  The act that Lestrade had to follow was a model of wit. Sub-Inspector Catchpole from the Dock Police belting out a dialect they only understood along the Ratcliffe Highway –

  ‘Now kool my downy kicksies – they’re the style for me

  Built on a plan very naughty.’

  Lady Warren felt constrained to adjust her opera glasses at that point.

  ‘The stock around my squeeze is a guiver colour see’ Catchpole thundered.

  ’And the vestat with the bis so rorty!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the idiot with the doves and rabbits to Lestrade. ‘I think I got more sense out of old Berryman’s seal. Going to the funeral?’

  ‘You’re on, guv,’ Lestrade heard George hiss and he staggered on to the stage. A sea of faces met him over the green of the footlights.

  ‘And now,’ thundered the Chairman, slamming his gavel down with gusto, ‘The Divine Sarah as Queen Cleopatra, Yon Ribaudred Nag of Egypt.’

  There was deafening applause, which was gratifying. And a few cries of ‘Resign!’ which weren’t. Lestrade hobbled into position and struck a pose he assumed Sarah Bernhardt would strike were she portraying the consort of Caesar and Antony.

  Lady Warren consulted her programme and turned to her husband. ‘How very different from the home life of our own dear Inspectors,’ she observed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Warren scowled, ‘the moustache is about right, but what’s he think he’s playing at with that limp? Monro?’

  The Assistant Commissioner took his life in his hands by leaning across the starched frontage of Lady Warren, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Lestrade, sir. Headquarters.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Warren grunted.

  The Queen of Egypt stood centre stage, his hands on either side of his face as though his crowns were killing him, which they were, ‘Give me my robe,’ Lestrade commanded, in a Franco-Egyptian way, though in the absence of an Iris or any appropriate little black boy, nobody moved. ‘Put on my crown,’ but he already had. ‘I have immortal longings in me,’ he pirouetted to the side of the stage, as far as his gammy leg would allow. ‘Now, no more the juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip,’ and he tapped his moustache, smearing his lipstick again. ‘Yare, yare, good Iris; quick,’ and he cupped a hand behind his left ear. ‘Methinks I hear Antony call,’ he shaded his eyes with his right hand. ‘I see him rouse himself to praise my noble act; I hear him mock the luck of Caesar, which the gods give men to excuse their after worth.’ He hobbled across the stage, brushing his nether garments in the footlights. ‘Husband, I come!’ he shrieked, clutching the stuffing up his frock. The conductor of the orchestra noticed it first; a certain smouldering, a whiff of winceyette and then Lestrade turned sharply as he had read the Great Bernhardt did and the moment was lost. ‘Now,’ he was in full flight, his eyes closed, his hands clasped together, ‘to that name my courage prove my title!�
� He breathed in for the next line and suddenly smelt smoke. He glanced wildly to left and right, but the wings seemed intact. Only to his left was George George, gesticulating wildly. Idiot, thought Lestrade, I know my lines. ‘I am fire and air,’ he intoned. ‘Oh God, I’m on fire!’ and he suddenly buckled at the knees and began rolling around furiously. George hurtled on and threw a blanket over his conflagrating guv’nor.

  ‘Shouldn’t that carpet thing happen earlier in the play?’ Commissioner Warren asked his wife. He had long served in Africa and hadn’t much time for culture.

  ‘Tsk,’ Monro complained. ‘Typical of Lestrade to make a complete asp of himself.’

  And mercifully, to a mixed reaction, the curtains closed.

  It was gone midnight. The bouquets had been given, the speeches made and another Police Revue had closed after only one night. The only similarity it had to a West End run was that some of its participants ran around the West End regularly in pursuit of felons. Lestrade of course had missed the closing acts and the phenomenal finale of the Flying Filberts, inevitably from F Division. He would have liked what he saw. One of the Filberts flew rather high and sailed off the stage to land in the lap of Lady Warren and an awful lot of trouble. It was to be two years before anyone in F Division got a promotion.

  Lestrade had been down the road at Charing Cross Hospital having his burns dressed. He had thanked Sergeant George for saving his life, had sent Tyrrell and Green home with instructions to be back at the shoe-boxes by eight and he himself had limped back to his dressing room. Here he pulled off the hired crown and unstuffed his bodice. He was just about to remove the black lines that circled his eyes when he was aware of a dark figure over his shoulder, its white lips outlined in the mirror.

  ‘Just leave the flowers, Mr Culpepper,’ Lestrade said. ‘Good of you to bother.’

  But it wasn’t a bouquet the nigger minstrel carried. It was a single Arum lily. The flower of death. He threw it on to Lestrade’s dressing table. The Inspector turned as a second Coon strolled into the room, then a third, then a fourth.