Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Or they might bugger off here in droves, sir,’ Lestrade said. ‘They still do guided tours of the Ratcliffe Highway where I come from – and those killings were in 1811.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s as may be,’ the Inspector clamped anew on his briar stem, ‘but that’s Lunnon for yer. Wouldn’t do up ’ere, I assure you. There’s nowt s’ queer as folk. ’Appen.’

  Lestrade was quickly losing the thread of this conversation, but he held on. ‘I just thought that an article in the local paper might help identify the man. We’re not going to get far with a face like that.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Bosomworth. ‘But you’ll ’ave t’ find another way.’

  ‘All right,’ Lestrade sighed. ‘Do you mind if I keep this letter? And this watch? Maybe my guv’nor can shed some light.’

  Bosomworth turned to the prostrate policeman who lay like the death of Chatterton. ‘’Im? Couldn’t shed skin, ’e couldn’t.’ The clock in the corner caught his eye. ‘Bugger me. ’Alf past. My Rest Day started twenty minutes ago. If you need me, I’m not abloodyvailable until Monday.’

  ‘Good God, Lestrade,’ Inspector Heneage was muttering as Lisbon flew hither and thither with the smelling salts, ‘are you telling me that you regularly have to view ... things like that?’

  ‘Bodies, sir? Oh, yes,’ Lestrade applied his frozen hands to the radiator. ‘They tend to crop up now and then in the course of a murder inquiry.’

  ‘Good God. Oh, Lisbon, do stop fussing, there’s a good chap. I’m perfectly all right.’

  ‘I promised Lady Heneage, sir,’ the man’s man reminded him.

  ‘I know you did, Lisbon,’ the Inspector said, taking the ice pack off his head, ‘but Mama of sainted memory has been in Kensal Green now these eight years. Having spent a term on Humanism at Oxford, I’m not convinced she’s actually aware of what’s going on nowadays.’

  Lisbon managed to look outraged and crestfallen at the same time, but busied himself in preparing the mid-evening eggnog with his portable Silber and Fleming eggnog maker.

  ‘So, Lestrade,’ Heneage did his best to concentrate, ‘what did you learn from that revolting spectacle?’

  ‘Very little, sir, I’m afraid,’ the sergeant said, ‘unless you want an infantry of the dead man’s wounds.’

  ‘No, Heneage said, a little too quickly to be casual. ‘No, I don’t think that will help. Do we have an inkling of who he may once have been?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Lestrade unlaced his boots and wrung his socks out over the carpet. ‘Er . . . you don’t mind, sir? Only, I’ve been tramping the moors while you’ve been . . . um . . . resting and I can’t actually feel my feet.’

  ‘Quick, Lisbon,’ Heneage called, ‘hot water. And plenty of it. Towels. Jump to it, man.’

  A pompous face appeared around the adjoining door. ‘Is Mr Lestrade about to give birth, sir?’ he enquired.

  ‘Oh God,’ Heneage’s colour drained, ‘if that’s the approach of gangrene on your left big toe, Lestrade, I feel I might “go” again . . .’

  ‘No, sir,’ Lestrade was quick to reassure him, ‘that’s just the combination of a hole in my boot and wet grass. It’s difficult on a sergeant’s pay to make ends meet.’

  ‘Particularly the ends of one’s boots, apparently,’ a disapproving Lisbon said, sweeping in with a bowl of steaming water. ‘Immerse your nether limbs in that lot, sir. And would you mind not screaming? The walls in this establishment are paper thin.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised Lestrade and had to bite his lip to keep his promise. ‘Hot pains,’ he winced, ‘hot pains.’

  ‘Bravely borne, dear fellow,’ said Heneage. ‘Now, about that poor chap’s identity.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Lestrade wiped the tears from his eyes as the feeling returned to his feet. ‘That’s the thirteen bob question. This might help.’

  ‘Aha,’ Heneage took the first item. ‘It’s a handkerchief, Lestrade.’

  ‘Very good, sir. What do you make of the initial?’

  ‘Now, that’s an “N”, Lestrade. Forgive me for being blunt, but do you have the basic skills?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Can you actually read?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you, sir,’ the sergeant felt his hackles rising along with the agony in his calves. ‘I was hoping you might know who “N” was.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ a frown darkened Heneage’s handsome features. ‘Hmm. That’s a bit of a facer, isn’t it? Could be almost anybody.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. What about this?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s easy. That’s a watch, Lestrade,’ the Inspector caught the look on his sergeant’s face, ‘but I suspect you’d already deduced that. Let me see, it’s an Albert. Belcher chain. Ah, Lisbon, the nog. Many thanks,’ and he sipped it from the silver mug. Lestrade wasn’t offered any. ‘Oh, it’s broken. What a shame.’

  ‘Inspector Bosomworth believes it was broken in the attack, sir.’

  ‘Tsk, tsk, how dreadful,’ muttered Heneage. ‘Wait a minute. What’s this?’ He had found the back of the watch.

  ‘It’s an inscription, sir. In a foreign language.’

  ‘Foreign be damned, Lestrade,’ the Inspector sat up. ‘It’s French.’

  ‘It is?’ Could there be some usefulness in this idiot after all, Lestrade wondered.

  ‘N’oubliez pas Eylau,’ Heneage mused with a perfect accent. ‘Don’t forget Eylau.’

  ‘Eyelow? Who’s he, sir?’

  ‘Damned if I know, Lestrade,’ the Inspector shrugged. ‘Could it be the dead man? Could he be Eylau?’

  ‘Why would he carry a watch reminding him not to forget himself, sir?’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Heneage put down the eggnog.

  ‘Well, it’s an old watch, sir, I’d say. Older certainly than the corpse under the Cow Rock. If it’s a family heirloom, say, then it might refer to another Eylau altogether.’

  ‘Brilliant, Lestrade. How does that help us?’

  ‘I’m not sure it does, sir,’ Lestrade rescued his feet from Lisbon’s caustic bowl and applied the soothing balm of the towel, ‘but this might.’

  ‘Ah,’ Heneage took the letter, ‘une lettre d’amour, if I’m any judge.’

  ‘If you say so, sir,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Heneage turned the thing over, ‘it’s signed “Maman”. Unless of course we’ve stumbled upon an example of the Oedipal strain.’

  Strain was the very word surfacing in Lestrade’s mind at that moment for all sorts of reasons. ‘Is that French too, sir?’

  ‘Yes. It says, “My dear Louis. Thank you for yours of the 4th ult. I hope you are wearing your long combs in this inclement weather. I am glad that things continue to go well for you at The Shop, but please, no more of the Alpine Club. All is well with us. I remain, your devoted Maman.” Well, well. Deductions, Lestrade?’

  ‘We may assume then that the man is a Frenchman . . .’ the sergeant postulated. After an hour on the moors, it was hardly surprising.

  ‘Further,’ Heneage was in full cry now, ‘we may assume that his name is Louis Eylau. And that he is a shopkeeper and a member of the Alpine Club.’

  ‘You know the Alpine Club, sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Heneage said, ‘but if this Eylau was a Frenchman, he may have climbed those noble peaks often. He may even be, not French at all, but Swiss. Although . . .’

  ‘Although?’

  ‘Well, there are certain peculiarities of Swiss French, as opposed to French French, I mean. I don’t detect them in this letter.’

  ‘It’s an old letter,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘Is it? How do you know? There is no date.’

  ‘Look at the creases, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Brown edges along the folds. That letter’s been in a drawer for a while, perhaps years. Can you show me the word for “shop”, sir?’

  ‘Shop? Yes . . . er . . . here it is. “Epicerie”. What about it?’


  ‘What kind of shop is that? Greengrocer’s? Baker’s?’

  ‘General store, I suppose.’

  ‘Does that word usually have a capital letter?’

  ‘Er . . . no, not usually. Not in the middle of a sentence, anyway. Perhaps Mrs Eylau is not as literate as she ought to be. Lestrade,’ Heneage leaned forward, ‘you have a strange expression on your face. What is it?’

  The sergeant leaned back against the radiator until the heat on his neck made him sit bolt upright again. ‘I can’t help wondering why a Frenchman is found hacked to death on a Yorkshire moor, wearing the clothes of a Yorkshire labourer.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Heneage mused. ‘It is a bit of a teaser, isn’t it?’

  ‘And there’s something else.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘His face was unrecognizable.’

  Heneage quivered.

  ‘Why should someone go to the trouble of attempting to destroy a face and then leave so many clues about pointing to the man’s identity?’

  ‘No,’ said Heneage. ‘You’ve got me there.’

  It took three days for Lestrade to interrogate all eighteen of Bosomworth’s suspects. It would have taken him one, were it not for the presence of Inspector Heneage, who persisted in checking the antecedents of all of them and sending then back to their cells with a well-delivered diatribe on the morality of the Saucy ‘Seventies. At first sight, the last of them, old Samuel Clinch, was the least prepossessing of all.

  ‘Good God!’ Heneage read the documents on the table before him. A solitary candle lit the gaunt, yellow face of the man across the room from him, hardening the features into a mask of evil. So much for Lestrade. Old Samuel Clinch looked the soul of integrity. Indeed, he was wearing his collar backwards. ‘It says here, Clinch, that you exposed your person to three little maids from school.’

  ‘Parson, sir,’ Clinch said. ‘That’s a misprint, is that. T’ should say, ’e exposed ’is parson, id est, I revealed to t’lasses as I were a lay preacher.’

  ‘Skilled at laying on of hands, we gather,’ Lestrade said from the relative darkness behind the man.

  ‘I do God’s work, wherever and whatever,’ Clinch told the policemen.

  ‘No, no,’ Heneage said, ‘that can’t be right, Clinch. I have the sworn deposition here from a Miss Daisy Applegate who says that you dropped your trousers and called to her from the Calf Rock on 12 February last.’

  ‘Aye. I ’ad a wasp in my kicksies, sir,’ Clinch explained. ‘Nearly stung my unmentionables, did it.’

  ‘In February?’ Lestrade growled. ‘How often do you see a wasp in February?’

  ‘Well, that’s just t’point, sir,’ Clinch turned to him, ‘I didn’t see this one until it were inside me clouts.’

  ‘You called to the young lady,’ Heneage quoted, ‘“have you ever seen one as big as this?”’

  ‘T’wasp, sir,’ Clinch insisted, ‘I was referrin’ t’ t’wasp. Proper ’uge, it were.’

  ‘According to Miss Applegate, you proceeded to . . . in February? Good God, man, you could have died of exposure.’

  ‘Nay, nay,’ said Clinch, ‘it were all a misunderstandin’. I fully intended t’ pull my kicksies up as I approached the young lady, but I stumbled and was unable to do so.’

  ‘How far away were you when you stumbled?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Er . . . ooh, about thirty yards or so.’

  ‘The ground,’ Lestrade asked, ‘was it level?’

  ‘Aye. ’Appen,’ nodded Clinch.

  ‘So you “stumbled” for thirty yards across completely flat ground and landed with your hand on this young lady’s breast?’ Lestrade had read the deposition too.

  ‘I felt a right tit, I can tell yer. Well, I did apologize.’

  ‘Later that day, you did the same thing to a Miss Emily Tripp, on her way home from the Corn Exchange. This time you were in an alleyway and merely unbuttoned your flies,’ Heneage read.

  ‘Still looking for the wasp?’ Lestrade yawned.

  ‘I ’ad cross-threaded my kicksies from t’wasp incident earlier in t’day,’ Clinch assured the interrogators. ‘My combinations were in something of t’bunch. Most uncomfortable, I can tell yer.’

  ‘Sadly for you,’ Heneage said. ‘Miss Tripp is a Latin scholar from the Ilkley Grammar School. She says she quite clearly saw your membrum virile and it was erect.’

  ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about,’ Clinch said blandly.

  ‘And on Thursday, Miss Evadne Grimaldi reported that you offered her sixpence to hold the very same membrum virile while you answered a call of nature, as both your hands had been burned in a fire and you were unable to pass water unaided. Is that true?’

  ‘Emphatically, no,’ Clinch contended. ‘Anyway, you can’t trust a word any of the circus people tell yer.’

  ‘Circus people?’ Lestrade echoed.

  ‘Aye. Lord George Sanger’s circus. Wintered ‘ere, they did. In Ilkley. Left town three days ago. Gipsies, tramps and thieves. That’s all they are.’

  ‘What have you to do with the body of a man found at the foot of the Cow Rock?’ Heneage asked.

  ‘Bugger all,’ Clinch held his arms out, ‘I told that Inspector Bosomworth, it’s all a case of mistaken identity. That’s what it is.’

  The answer to Lestrade’s telegram came two days later. From Inspector Bacharach of Criminal Records. No Louis Eylau. Stop. Fourteen hundred and eighty-three possibles with initial ‘N’. Stop. Was Lestrade aware there was no ‘N’ in ‘Louis Eylau’. Question Mark. There were a number of suspicious Frenchmen known to be in the country, but Mr Vincent refuses to sanction any contact with the Sûreté in case he realize he’d pinched their system of the CID and get funny about copyright. Stop. So there. Stop. By the way, you still owe me for the Christmas Dinner. Stop. Bacharach.

  ‘What a scandal,’ mused Lestrade. But he hadn’t time to reflect on the shortcomings of the back-up from Headquarters. As if to underline Inspector Bosomworth’s edict that the murder of Louis Eylau should be kept as discreet as possible, His Worship the Mayor of Ilkley had called in person on Inspector Heneage and insisted that no house to house inquiries should be made. Since His Worship’s uncle had gone to Balliol, a nod was clearly as good as a wink to a green Inspector and Heneage assured him that on no account would such a thing happen. Odd then, that the Ilkley Advertiser should plaster, all over the front page, ‘Frenchman Slaughtered On T’Moor’ and ‘Did You Know This Tyke?’ with a rather amateur attempt to sketch the mangled features. Readers were invited, on page two, to visit the remains in the basement of the Hydropathic Pump Rooms where Mr Benjamin Thirkettle, Assistant Boilerman, would be delighted, for a small fee, to pull back the shroud several times a day between the hours of ten and three. Perhaps not surprisingly, by midday on the seventh, not only was the said Mr Thirkettle looking for a new job and the basement of the Pump Rooms securely locked, but the Ilkley Advertiser had a new editor. The old one was to be found in various Ilkley hostelries sobbing into his ale that the story was given to him by a ferret-faced man in a bowler and Donegal with a hole in his boot. The new editor, in the edition of the eighth, as well as lamenting Sir Bartle Frere’s lack of judgement in Zululand, also offered a reward for apprehension of the shabby miscreant described above.

  By the time that edition appeared, however, the shabby miscreant, his boot resoled, his toes nearly working again, was rattling east by courtesy of the Great Northern Railway, his Inspector and his Inspector’s man in tow.

  There’d been another one in Harrogate.

  ❖3❖

  S

  he sat alone in the Sun Pavilion, the light of the leaden Yorkshire sky streaming in through the yellow and green of the glass dome, flecking her golden hair with spring. A desultory quartet in the corner had gone off to lunch, it not yet being the season to keep them there full time and the only sound was the rattle of teacups and the distant clatter of tureens.

  Two men, one in fashionable astrakhan, the ot
her in a rather nasty tweed Donegal, stood awkwardly in the doorway. She noticed the Maitre d’Hotel approach them, all three glance in her direction and then cross the carpeted floor between the empty tables to reach her.

  ‘Miss Clare,’ said the Maitre d’, with a French accent by way of Knaresborough, ‘zese gentlemen are from ze police.’

  She looked at then, her face pale, her eyes dark.

  ‘Inspector Heneage, Miss Clare, from Scotland Yard,’ the senior man said. ‘This is Sergeant Lestrade.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she nodded.

  Heneage took her hand and kissed it. ‘May we?’ he asked.

  ‘Please,’ she waved them to their chairs.

  ‘Will Madame be taking ze luncheon?’ the Maitre d’ asked.

  ‘No, thank you, Pierre.’

  ‘Gentlemen?’ he turned to them, notepad at the ready, pencil stub poised in an expectant white-gloved hand. ‘The Brown Windsor is particularly legendary zis morning.’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ Heneage said, ‘just a coffee. Arabica.’

  ‘Wiz or wizout sulphur water, sir?’

  ‘Without,’ Heneage said quickly.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ and the Maitre d’ bobbed away.

  ‘Please accept our condolences, Miss Clare,’ the Inspector said. ‘This must be a perfectly beastly time for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Heneage. The truth is I’m feeling rather guilty.’

  ‘Guilty?’ Lestrade’s notepad was to the fore as the Maitre d’s had been.

  ‘Why, yes. As a token of respect, the Manager has closed the dining-room today, but he neglected to tell the kitchens. There are, I believe, poissons to the ceiling and one could drown in the Brown Windsor. Personally, I couldn’t eat a thing.’

  ‘Understandably so,’ Heneage nodded. ‘Painful as it must be, Miss Clare, we have to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘I know,’ she sighed, ‘Inspector Bottomley intimated that you might.’

  ‘Bottomley.’

  ‘He of the Harrogate Constabulary.’