Lestrade and the Sign of Nine

by M. J. Trow

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Lestrade. ‘For a while I thought you were.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Holmes nodded. ‘Mrs Hudson, be a dear, will you, and summon police assistance. That’s quite enough excitement for a woman of your years for one night. I think we’ll need a Maria for this lot.’ She skipped off up the aisle, having given each of the Coons a cheerful slap around their faces before she went. ‘Lestrade, Watson, I’m hanging up my magnifying glass once and for all.’

  ‘What do you mean, Holmes?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Giving up the great game, dear fellow. Stopping sleuthing, dropping detection. How can a man be so wrong?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Watson and both he and Lestrade fancied they saw a tear in the Great Detective’s eye. ‘But my friend Conan Doyle is sharpening his pencil as we speak, to put your already legendary exploits into print.’

  ‘Er . . . Mr Holmes,’ said Lestrade, feeling the lump growing on the back of his head, ‘I had some correspondence recently concerning a rather bad business at 3, Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road.’

  ‘Really?’ said Holmes dully.

  ‘Yes. Something about a murdered American.’

  ‘An American?’ Holmes looked up.

  ‘Murdered.’

  ‘A murdered American?’ Holmes’s eyes blazed.

  ‘A man is dead,’ Lestrade confirmed.

  Holmes clapped his hands for joy. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, frowning again, ‘that was a little callous, perhaps.’

  ‘Frankly, I’ll have so much paperwork from this case . . . Look, I know it’s a little unorthodox, but I wondered if you and Watson . . . oh, but of course, you’ve just retired.’

  ‘No,’ said Holmes, a little too quickly to be convincing. ‘No, I . . . er . . . I think Watson and I can come out of retirement . . . just this once, of course,’ he wagged a warning finger. ‘Just to help a chum.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Holmes,’ said Lestrade. ‘See my man George at the Yard tomorrow. He’ll fill you in.’

  ‘Come along, Watson. There isn’t a moment to lose. The game’s already afoot. I feel it in my water!’

  ‘Er . . . Lestrade?’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Doctor,’ Lestrade said. ‘Perhaps if you wouldn’t mind leaving me your pistol, just until the Maria arrives? This lot look docile enough now, but a few minutes ago they were ready to dec . . . depac . . . cut my head off.’

  ‘Be my guest, Lestrade. Er . . . about that firearms licence.’

  ‘What licence is that, Doctor?’ And Lestrade sat on the edge of the stage, the Chocolate Coloured Coons crooning over their dead leader, glycerine tears trickling down their cheeks.

  ❖10❖

  A

  gentleman with a mournful face and obsolete Dundrearies picked his way through the debris of the half-finished Opera House. With him, on that lovely spring morning, hobbled an odd-looking cove with a bandage round his head and what appeared to be black makeup under each eye.

  ‘Wot of capital, then, Arfur?’ Clarence asked, leaning on his shovel.

  ‘Well, Ricardo tells us, oh Bruvver-in-Chains, that capital is that part of the country’s wealf which is employed in production and consists of food, cloving, tools, raw materials and machinery necessary to give effect to labour, does he not?’

  ‘Indeed he does, Arfur,’ Clarence concurred. ‘Economic capital, by the harnessing in a scientific way of the forces of nature, enables mankind to perform the tasks demanding millions of times the strengf of the human upper limb.’

  ‘True,’ said Arfur. ‘And such materials to which you so rightly adduce is referred to, is it not, by Karl Marx, as “constant capital” because of itself . . .’

  ‘Statutory elevenses, Clarence?’ Arfur asked.

  The younger man stood on tiptoe to see the clock. ‘Statutory half past tenses, possibly, Arfur. ’Ere it’s that mournful bloke with the obsolete Dundrearies again. I thought we’d ’eard the last of ’im.’

  ‘Oh, I don’ know, I can always listen to the bootifully rounded vowels of the ’aute bourgeosie, Clarence. It’s one fing they still do well. Blimey, ’ave a butchers at that sketch wiv ’im.’

  ‘This is Inspector Lestrade,’ shouted Norman Shaw, ‘from Scotland Yard. He is investigating the recent finding of a torso in these very foundations.’

  ‘’Ere, Clarence,’ Arfur nudged his friend,’ wasn’t it your very own peepers that made the tragic discovery, wot brought us all to that brush wiv mortality?’

  ‘I blush to say it was, Arfur,’ Clarence said.

  ‘Anyone working here four months ago,’ Lestrade said, ‘I shall want to talk to in the next hour or so. No one is to leave the site without my permission.’

  ‘Unfinkin’ lackey of a bourgeois Imperialist State,’ Arfur nodded, accepting Clarence’s wad of tobacco. ‘Vis is where I came in.’

  Lestrade remembered to duck as he entered the foreman’s shed. Somewhere, in the bowels of this very building, he would one day have an office of his own. One that was not merely a converted privy, jammed floor to ceiling with dusty shoeboxes. One day, one day . . .

  What was it Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Monro had said? ‘Well done, laddie. A good job well done. Now get over to Mr Rodney. He wants a word.’

  And what was it Assistant Commissioner (Traffic) Rodney had said? ‘Thank you, Abberline, for nailing my cousin’s er . . . but there’s still the matter of the torso under the . . . er . . . foundations of . . . you know.’

  And so here he was on his Rest Day. His leg hurt, his head hurt, but he had nevertheless a glow of satisfaction about him. Commissioner Warren was in his Heaven and all was tolerably well with the world. And the case of the Nine Men’s Morris was over at last.

  ‘Show me,’ he said to Shaw’s foreman,’ where the body was found.’

  ‘Er . . . here, sir,’ the man pointed a stubby finger.

  ‘What’s this?’ Lestrade’s eyes widened.

  ‘Er . . . ‘the foreman twisted the paper sideways. ‘That’s the main sewerage trench, sir. Where the body was found.’

  ‘Not that, man,’ Lestrade bellowed. ‘This.’

  ‘Er . . . well, that’s it, sir. That’s the whole Opera House. The plan for the new Scotland Yard. Is something wrong?’

  Lestrade blinked in disbelief at the squares before him, one inside the other, rather like a maze, or a rather geometric spider’s web. He dashed to the door.

  ‘Er . . . Mr Shaw,’ he called. ‘Could I have a little word?’

  .

  Other titles in the Inspector Lestrade series for your consideration:

  ❖ The Sawdust Ring ❖

  1879

  ‘In the circus, nothing is what it seems ...’

  Walk up! Walk up! This way for the greatest show on earth! It is 1879. Disraeli is at Number Ten. The Zulu are being perfectly beastly to Lord Chelmsford. And Captain Boycott is having his old trouble again.

  What has this to do with the young Detective-Sergeant Sholto Lestrade? Absolutely nothing. Or has it? He has his work cut out investigating mysterious goings-on at ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s Circus. First, the best juggler in Europe is shot in full view of a thousand people. Then Huge Hughie, the dwarf, dies an agonizing death under the Ether Trick. Finally, the Great Bolus dies by swallowing the wrong sword. And all of this after two bodies have been found with multiple slashes ...

  And what is the link with Mr Howard Vincent, founder of the CID? And has the Prince Imperial really been caught by the Impis? A trail of murder is laid among the llama droppings as the World’s Second Greatest Detective goes undercover to solve the Case of the Sawdust Ring.

  ❖ The Sign of Nine ❖

  1886

  ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’

  ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’

  ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’

  It was a puzzle that faced Scotland Yard from its very beginning – whose was the limbless body found among the foundations? And in the murderous world of Sholto Lestrade, one quest
ion is invariably followed by another – what do a lecherous rector, a devious speculator and a plagiaristic novelist have in common? Answer: they’re all dead, each of them with a bloody space where his skull used to be. And six others are to join them before our intrepid inspector brings the perpetrator to book.

  But 1886 was a bad year for the Metropolitan Police. The People of the Abyss have heard the whisper and the spectre of Communism haunts the land. There is a new Commissioner, a regular martinet, at the Yard. And then, there is that very odd couple, sometime of Baker Street ...

  Lestrade braves haunted houses, machine-gun bullets and two Home Secretaries in his headlong hunt for the truth. And at last, this is the book that chronicles his now legendary impersonation of the Great Sarah Bernhardt. The Police Revue was never the same again.

  ❖ The Ripper ❖

  1888

  ‘Oh, have you seen the Devil ...?’

  In the year 1888, London was horrified by a series of brutal killings. All the victims were discovered in the same district, Whitechapel, and they were all prostitutes. But they weren’t the only murders to perplex the brains of Scotland Yard. In Brighton, the body of one Edmund Gurney was also found.

  Foremost among the Yard’s top men was the young Inspector Sholto Lestrade and it was to his lot that the unsolved cases of a deceased colleague fell. Cases that included the murder of Martha Tabram, formerly a prostitute from Whitechapel, and that of the aforementioned Gurney.

  Leaving no stone unturned, Lestrade investigates with his customary expertise and follows the trail to Nottinghamshire, to a minor public school, Rhadegund Hall. It is his intention to question the Reverend Algernon Spooner. What he finds is murder.

  As the Whitechapel murders increase in number, so do those at Rhadegund Hall and so do the clues. What is the connection between them all? As if it weren’t confusing enough, Lestrade is hampered by the parallel investigations of that great detective, Sherlock Holmes, aided by Dr Watson. Who is the murderer of Rhadegund Hall and are he and the man they call ‘Jack the Ripper’ one and the same?

  ❖ The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade ❖

  1891

  ‘Such as these shall never look

  At this pretty picture book.’

  It is 1891 and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Ripper murders when Inspector Lestrade (that ‘ferret-like’ anti-hero so often out-detected by the legendary Sherlock Holmes) is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Chine.

  But this is only the start of the nightmare. It is merely the beginning of a series of killings so brutal, so bizarre and, apparently, so random, that only a warped genius – and a master of disguise – could be responsible. Even when Lestrade pieces together the extraordinary pattern behind the crimes from the anonymous poems sent after each murder, he is no closer to knowing the identity of the sinister, self-styled ‘Agrippa’, the ‘great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man’.

  It becomes a very personal battle and Lestrade’s desperate race to avert the next death in the sequence takes him all over the country, from London to the Pennines and back, resulting in a portfolio of suspects which covers the entire range of late-Victorian society.

  ❖ Brigade ❖

  1893

  ‘And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade.’

  There is a new broom at Scotland Yard; Nimrod Frost. His first ‘little’ job for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall, a supposed savager of sheep and frightener of men. Hardly a task for an Inspector of the Criminal Investigations Department.

  Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead, horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to another suspicious death and then another ... All old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection – is there a mass murderer at work?

  Lestrade’s superiors discount his speculations and he finds himself suspended from duty, but that is a mere technicality to the doughty Inspector. He moves from workhouse to royal palace, from backstage at the Lyceum to regimental dinner in search of clues and enlightenment.

  When can his glory fade?

  ❖ The Dead Man’s Hand ❖

  1895

  ‘There was no 9.38 from Penge.’

  Anon.

  The London Underground Railway, in 1895, was described as ‘dark, deadly and halfway to Hell’. Only too true, for as the last train rattled into Liverpool Street, the one remaining passenger did not get off. How could she, when her eyes stared sightless and her heart had stopped?

  There was another corpse at the Elephant in the morning, wedged between the seats like an old suitcase. And another had missed the late-night connection at Stockwell. What was left of her lay on the floor of the ‘padded cell’, her shoes kicked off in the lashings of her agony as she died.

  There is a maniac at large and Inspector Lestrade is detailed to work with the Railway Police, something he needs a little less than vivisection. Heedless of warnings to ‘mind the gap’ and ‘mind the doors’, the doughty detective plunges through a tangled web of vicious deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London goes in fear of her life.

  Who is the legendary Blackfriars Dan? What are the secrets of the Seven Sisters? Whose body lies at Ealing? Will the London Transport System survive, or will Lestrade run out of steam?

  ❖ The Guardian Angel ❖

  1897/8

  ‘And a naughty boy was he ...’

  He was in his forty-third year and knee-deep in murder. Well, what was new? Sholto Lestrade wouldn’t really have it any other way.

  The first fatality in a series of killings which was to become the most bizarre in the celebrated Inspector’s career, was a captain of the 2nd Life Guards, found battered over the head in the Thames at Shadwell Stair, an Ashanti War medal wedged between his teeth. Lestrade’s next summons was to the underground caves of Wookey Hole where the demise of an Egyptologist – a scarab clamped between his molars – prompted the question; can a man dead for a thousand years reach beyond the grave and commit murder?

  The further death from a cadaveric spasm of an enobled young subaltern whilst on picquet duty (this time a locket is his dying mouthful) forces Lestrade to impersonate ‘Lt Lister, Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry’ and into becoming a barrack-room lawyer of incisive command.

  As the body count rapidly rises, Lestrade, constantly and relievedly touching base with his ‘family’, Harry and Letitia Bandicoot of the Hall, Huish Epsicopi, varies a volatile lifestyle with dinner at Blenheim Palace; a disastrous cycle tour ending in a night in gaol; a near-fatal trip in an air balloon; and masterful mediation in East End gang warfare on the Ratcliffe Highway.

  Eventually, some seven cadavers later, things begin to fit into place and the final conundrum emerges; who or what is Coquette Perameles?

  ❖ The Hallowed House ❖

  1901

  ‘Quid omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur.’*

  Edward I

  Britain has entered the twentieth century. Queen Victoria is dead and the Boer War rages on. Inspector Lestrade is called upon to investigate the brutal death of Ralph Childers, MP. It is but the first in a series of bizarre and perplexing murders that lead Lestrade around the country in pursuit of his enquiries.

  The connection between the victims appears to be politics. Is someone trying to destroy the government? It would seem so, particularly when a bomb is found in the Palace of Westminster. But who is responsible? The Fenians? Or have the Suffragettes decided upon a more drastic course of action to further their cause?

  During his investigations, Lestrade encounters some old and some new faces. Amongst the new ones are the brother and cousin of the late Sherlock Holmes who died eleven years ago at the Reichenbach Falls. But is Holmes really dead? Dr Watson doesn’t think so. Someone wants to keep Holmes alive and Lestra
de is forced to tread the boards (playing himself) to discover the truth. And, as if things aren’t serious enough, the King is kidnapped just before his coronation.

  Amidst all this, Lestrade is faced with the knowledge that his daughter is growing up not knowing who her real father is.

  *Look it up on Google – do I have to do everything for you?

  ❖ The Gift of the Prince ❖

  1903

  ‘Lang may your lum reek, Lestrade.’

  Sholto Lestrade had never smelt the tangle o’ the Isles before Arthur, Duke of Connaught put him on the trail to the Highlands. Murder is afoot among the footmen on the Royal Household; a servant girl, Amy Macpherson, has been brutally murdered.

  Ineptly disguised as a schoolmaster in his bowler and Donegal, with his battered old Gladstone, the intrepid Superintendent is impelled by a villainous web of conspiracy northwards to the Isle of Skye by way of Balmoral.

  With the skirl of the pipes in his ears and more than a dram of a certain medicinal compound inside him, Lestrade, following the most baffling clues he has yet unravelled, takes the low road alone, save for the trusty yet mysterious Alistair Sphagnum in his twin-engined, bright red boneshaker. Narrowly escaping the inferno of Room 13 in the North British Hotel, Lestrade falls foul of The McNab of That Ilk and The Mackinnon of That Ilk and plays a very odd game of ‘Find the Lady’ in Glamis Castle.