Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Are you saying John Samson was killed by lightning?’ Sanger asked.

  ‘No, no,’ the vet said. ‘I don’t think that’s possible, is it? I mean, the wagon around him was untouched, except for the floor.’

  ‘He would have died instantly?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Look, Lister, I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m only a vet, for God’s sake. An old soldier.’

  ‘You’re the nearest thing we’ve got to a doctor,’ Lestrade told him, ‘and to a forensic scientist.’

  ‘A what?’ Sanger asked.

  ‘It’s what they call a man who gives expert testimony in a court of law. Er . . . I’ve often reported on them in the Temple, for the Graphic, you understand.’

  ‘What were you working on, Nat?’ Sanger looked at the boffin. He sat hunched and silent. Slowly the frosted eyes came up. ‘An electric chair,’ he said.

  They all looked at him.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain that, Mr Isinglass,’ Lestrade suggested.

  The boffin swigged again at the brandy balloon. ‘You remember Tom Norman, Boss? His Electric Lady?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sanger clicked his fingers to focus his memory. ‘Gladys Eck – “A Lady Born Full of Electricity”.’

  ‘That’s right. Tom made a fortune by getting people to watch sparks fly out of her body and give her hand a shake.’

  ‘Shocking,’ chuckled Sanger. ‘Man after my own heart, Tom Norman. How was that done, Nat?’

  ‘Simple,’ the boffin said. ‘Gladys was wired up under her frock to an induction coil. Another lead was attached to a metal plate under a dampened carpet. The punters stood on the carpet and when she touched them, their hair stood on end and their fingers tingled. Two thirds of ’em kept coming back for more.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ nodded Sanger. ‘She’s dead by now, I suppose?’

  ‘Anyone can do it, Boss,’ Isinglass wheezed. ‘It’s the wiring, not the woman. I was trying to go one better than that. My wiring was the same, except that it was hooked up to a dynamo of differing frequency.’

  ‘Er . . .?’ Lestrade dithered for them all.

  ‘Has the rain stopped?’ Sanger asked. ‘You can show us, Nat.’

  ‘No,’ the boffin said quickly. ‘No, Boss, I . . . couldn’t go there. Not tonight. I couldn’t look him in the face . . .’

  Sanger patted the man’s quivering shoulder. ‘Right you are, Nat,’ he said softly. ‘Just tell us,’ and he poured the man another snort.

  ‘The dynamo is a bicycle – a three-wheel Facile – I bought it in Harrogate. By fixing it to the ground outside the Sparks Wagon . . .’

  ‘The Sparks Wagon?’ interrupted Lestrade.

  ‘My laboratory, Mr Lister. You must have seen it around. It’s always parked a little way away from the other caravans in case of fire or in case the static unnerves the animals. As I was saying, by fixing the dynamo to the ground outside, I can wire up the leads and pedal like blazes. Of course, because it’s fixed, I’m not actually going anywhere, but the faster I pedal, the greater the power surge.’

  ‘Isn’t that . . . rather dangerous, Nat?’ Sanger asked, looking at the others.

  ‘Damnably!’ growled Masters.

  ‘No,’ Isinglass insisted, ‘not if you pedal sensibly. The only way the charge would be great enough to be dangerous is if somebody pedalled like mad. They’d have to be very fit. And . . .’ he looked around the assembled company like a frightened hare, ‘they’d have to do it deliberately.’

  ‘What time did you close the Sparks Wagon last night?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Let’s see,’ the boffin clutched the glass with both hands. ‘It must have been about ten. The show was just finishing. I had some last-minute adjustments to make.’

  ‘Did you lock the wagon?’ the sergeant checked.

  ‘Oh, yes. You can’t be too careful,’ Isinglass told him. ‘Howes and Cushing’s people are about by now, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sanger nodded. ‘It’s about that time, isn’t it? We’ve had a fortnight of shows ahead of them. Now would be about right. I’m doubling the watch at night.’

  ‘When I checked the wagon a few minutes ago,’ Lestrade said, ‘the lock had been picked.’

  ‘Expertly?’ Sanger asked.

  ‘Not particularly,’ Lestrade told him, ‘but it’s a Beaver and Black. I know four-year-olds who can pick one of those.’

  ‘What time was the big bang?’ Masters asked.

  ‘You weren’t here?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘No,’ the vet said. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I’ve been on the road. I’d only just got back to my wagon when I saw people running in all directions and the flames going up. Was that from the floor?’

  ‘And the curtain to one side of him.’ Lestrade nodded. ‘The explosion must have been about two o’clock.’

  ‘Two ten,’ Sanger said. ‘It knocked the clock off my shelf. Caught Lady Pauline a nasty one.’

  Everyone knew that Lady Pauline could stop a clock, but they were all too nice to say so.’

  ‘Certainly flustered the animals,’ Masters muttered. ‘I thought Cicero had had a heart attack.’

  Sanger nodded. ‘Minkey went berserk,’ he said. ‘Lady Pauline’s been in the wars one way or another. First the clock, then the monkey. Bit her something terrible.’

  Lestrade nodded too, but there were worse places the monkey could have bitten her.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ sighed Sanger, after a while. ‘You know, I’m almost relieved.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Lestrade.

  ‘Well,’ said the showman, unbuttoning his waistcoat, ‘that this one was an accident. Samson must have been nosing around in there. Whoever his accomplice was must have pedalled too fast and accidentally killed him.’

  ‘Howes and Cushing?’ Masters asked.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ Sanger nodded. ‘I must be getting old, Harry. I took Samson on trust. Didn’t ask enough questions. Pity, he was a damned good rigger.’

  ‘Who’s the accomplice?’ Lestrade asked.

  They looked at each other.

  Sanger shrugged. ‘Could be anybody,’ he said.

  ‘Could be the pale horseman,’ Masters volunteered.

  ‘Who?’ the others chorused.

  ‘Stromboli told me about him,’ Masters said. ‘I must admit I hadn’t noticed. Then about three days ago, I saw him.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Lestrade asked.

  Masters shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘Nondescript sort of bloke. Big ’tache. Rides a grey. When I saw him he was just sitting, watching.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’ Lestrade asked.

  Masters looked at him oddly. ‘Well,’ he smiled and frowned at the same time. It’s funny you should ask that. He seemed to be moving his horse into different positions and he had a telescope. I can’t imagine why, but . . . he seemed to be watching you, Lister.’

  ‘It’s the Apocalypse,’ Isinglass whispered.

  They all looked at him.

  ‘No, Nat,’ Sanger patted the man, ‘it was an accident. Samson and the pale rider got greedy, that was all. Snooping for Howes and Cushing. They shouldn’t have broken into your wagon. It’s that simple. Now, gentlemen,’ he stood up straight, ‘it’s late and it’s Lucinda Brodie’s funeral tomorrow. I’ve yet to see to John Samson – the laying-out and so on. Let’s call it a night, shall we? Try and get some sleep? Nell, my love,’ he called back into the curtained recesses, ‘look after Nat, will you? He’s not so good.’

  The Lion Queen staggered out dutifully, her fingers wrapped in bandages, her forehead badly bruised, victim as she was of clock and monkey. The guilty creature was obviously feeling quite contrite and was draped like a stole around her wrinkly old neck, kissing her chin every now and again.

  ‘Come on, Nat,’ she forced the sleep from her eyes and put her arm round the narrow, hunched shoulders. ‘You tell old Nell all about it – your big bang theory.’

  ‘I can’t understand it, Pa
uline,’ the boffin muttered as they clattered down the steps. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. I got this letter from Sing Sing prison in America the other day. God knows how they’d found out about it, my invention. I don’t suppose they’ll want it, now.’

  ‘Well,’ Masters yawned, ‘I’ve just about had it. Must get some liniment on these legs. Goodnight, Boss. Goodnight, Lister,’ and he squelched away through the mud, re-booted.

  ‘Well, Lestrade,’ Sanger yawned. ‘I’ll bid you goodnight, too.’ He reached to extinguish the lamp.

  Lestrade did not move. ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You once told me – in fact almost everybody’s told me – that in the circus nothing is quite what it seems.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, you’re right. John Samson wasn’t what he seemed.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘No,’ Lestrade persisted. ‘No, Mr Sanger, not obviously. He didn’t play the spy for Howes and Cushing. He played the spy for . . . well, it doesn’t matter who. The point is that he was looking for me. His name was Oliver Steele and he was a private detective.’

  ‘Good God!’ Sanger sat down heavily. ‘He was still a damn good rigger. I’d swear he was circus. How did you find this out?’

  ‘He told me. He knew who I was, of course, and one thing led to another.’

  ‘So his death . . .’

  ‘Was about as accidental as the Custer Massacre. You see, he was on to the murderer. He told me he had three more people to interview out of your entire company. Three more and he’d have had him.’

  ‘Really?’ Sanger was astonished.

  ‘We can assume, I think, that Nat Isinglass was one of them. He and his Sparks Wagon are about as noticeable as dandruff on a white muff. I hadn’t seen him. Chances are Steele hadn’t either. And unless Isinglass is the best faker since Maskelyne, he’s innocent as the driven.’

  ‘I agree,’ Sanger said, ‘been with me for years. I don’t know who’s more shocked, him or Samson.’

  ‘That means that Steele had narrowed it down to two. Two out of three hundred. Only I don’t know which two.’

  ‘That’s a bitch,’ the showman observed. ‘Didn’t he give you any clue?’

  ‘Oh, I’m awash with clues,’ Lestrade said. ‘I know who I’m looking for.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘His name but not what he looks like.’

  Sanger frowned. ‘Any Irish blood in you, Lestrade?’ he asked.

  ‘Any Frenchmen with the circus, Mr Sanger?’

  ‘Frenchmen?’ Sanger thought. ‘Er . . . let me see. Well, yes, all the Buttresses are.’

  ‘The Flying Buttresses?’

  ‘The same. They’re really the Elbeufs, from Nancy.’

  ‘Six in the troupe, aren’t there?’

  ‘That’s right. Three men. Three girls.’

  ‘Er . . . rather a delicate question, really,’ Lestrade hesitated to ask it, ‘but, they are girls, the three?’

  ‘Of course they are,’ Sanger frowned. ‘That bastard Phineas Barnum’s got the Human Hermaphrodite – Half-Man, Half-Earthworm. I’d kill for him, er . . . her . . . um . . . it.’

  ‘What about new people?’ Lestrade asked. ‘Who’s new this season?’

  ‘God, a lot of ’em,’ Sanger said. ‘Riggers and labourers by the score. A circus can’t function on its stars alone. You need a lot of hands. Dakota-Bred’s new, of course. It’s his first season. Henry Masters – except that he was vet with Powell and Clarke for years. Stromboli – he was with Gentz until last year. Quite a coup, he is. Then there’s Maccomo.’

  ‘The lion tamer?’

  ‘That’s the chappie.’

  ‘Black?’

  ‘As your hat. From French West Africa, I understand.’

  ‘Is he?’ Lestrade felt the hairs on his neck crawl. ‘Is he now?’

  ‘Does that help?’ Sanger shouted as the sergeant dashed into the night.

  ‘It might,’ Lestrade called back. ‘It just might.’

  He crossed the compound under the shadow of the Big Top, a black silhouette against a threatening sky. The rain had stopped, but water still dripped from awning and roof, splashing in puddles that carried the reflections of the coming dawn. It was the middle of May, but the blossom nodded tightly budded on the trees and the nights were raw and cold still. Where was spring? Where was summer? Miss Stevens turned in her straw-filled bed at the crunch of his boots on the gravel. No, it wasn’t Huge Hughie. She went back to sleep. And to wait.

  ‘Lestrade,’ the hissed name made him turn. The white lips the orange hair, the softly whizzing bow tie. He’d seen them somewhere before.

  ‘Stromboli,’ the sergeant stepped up to his ankle in water. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘I know,’ the clown said, ‘but there’s something I think you should know.’

  ‘Really,’ he backed with the august into the shadows as the camels chewed the cud behind them, staring with patient eyes.

  ‘Something Bendy Hendey said the other day.’

  ‘I’ve talked to Hendey,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘I know you have. So have I. But this was just general chat. We were waiting to go on last night. The Sultan’s elephants were in the ring. I was arranging my buckets with Whamsical.’

  ‘Please, Mr Stromboli,’ Lestrade said, ‘I don’t have much time.’

  ‘Probably not,’ the clown said cryptically. ‘Hendey hasn’t stopped talking about Hughie the dwarf since the little fellow died.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Grief,’ the great clown said. ‘I’ve seen it before. Apparently, Hendey remembered something Hughie said on the day he died.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He’d seen something – on the day Joey Atkins died. He saw someone coming out of Dakota-Bred’s caravan.’

  Lestrade looked at his man. ‘Did he now? When did Hendey tell you this?’

  ‘Last night, during the show.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Hendey told you who it was?’

  The clown shrugged. ‘Hughie didn’t tell him,’ he said. ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘To arrest a murderer, Mr Stromboli. Want to come along?’

  ‘You . . . you know who it is?’

  ‘Let’s just say he shouldn’t have put his faith in burnt cork. Goodnight.’

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the cat-pens of the night. Lestrade had watched them perform of course for the past two weeks. But always there had been iron bars between him and them. There were still and he was grateful for that, but this time they were so much nearer. He could smell them. And they of course could smell him and had been able to for some time. They watched him pass them now, all of them apparently dozing, but all of them actually awake. The most cunning killers of all, the Bengal tigers, brindled in their deadly beauty. One of them lashed an elegant tail. Another twitched its ears and yawned. Lestrade preferred not to look too closely at the massive canines, the lolling tongue. He had never really followed statistical matters in Mr Poulson’s Academy all those years ago. Even so he knew that the odds against him dying at the claws of a tiger were many millions to one. Now those odds had shortened considerably.

  One of them growled as he reached the tamers’ wagon. It was a sound from hell. And Lestrade did not look back. He trusted to padlocks. And he trusted to steel. But Steele was dead and what if those padlocks were made by Beaver and Black? He hammered furiously on the door and didn’t wait for Jim Crockett to open it before he was up the steps and inside.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Lister?’ the red-bearded giant couldn’t help but notice that Lestrade’s forehead was turning a rather nasty shade of purple where he had collided with the half-opened door.

  ‘Who is it, Jim?’ a voice called from one of the curtained sections at the back.

  ‘Mr Lister, Freddie,’ Crockett said. ‘The man from the Graphic. He’s not looking too chipper.’

  ‘I’m looking for Maccomo,’ Le
strade told him.

  ‘Fearless’ Freddie Fortescue popped his head around the curtain. A dapper little man with a central parting and twirled moustaches, his party piece was to waltz with his tigers while the band played on.

  ‘Next door,’ he said.

  Lestrade got up to go.

  ‘No, no,’ Fortescue checked him, ‘here, I mean. The next cubicle. Mac. Mac? Bloke to see you.’

  They waited. Fortescue slid his curtain aside and slipped, appropriately, into his slippers.

  ‘What’s all this about, Mr Lister?’ Crockett asked. ‘Trouble with the cats?’

  ‘Mac? Come on, you black bugger, wake up!’ Fortescue hauled back the African’s curtain. His bed was empty.

  ‘Bugger me,’ Crockett muttered. ‘That’s peculiar.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Search me,’ the auburn man shrugged, but Lestrade had seen him in action. Searching him wouldn’t be high on the detective’s list of priorities. ‘He was here last night, after the Sparks Wagon went up, I mean.’

  ‘Hasn’t been with you long, I understand.’

  ‘Maccomo?’ Fortescue ferreted for a loaf of bread, hacking it with a sinewy limb (attached to a bread knife, of course). ‘This is his first season. He’s good, mind. He had old Cicero eating out of his hand in minutes. ’Course, it’s ’cos he’s a nigger. Well, they’re brought up to it, ain’t they? Lions. They eat ’em for breakfast. Toast, Mr Lister?’

  ‘No thanks. You say Maccomo was in his bed earlier?’

  ‘Yes,’ Crockett said, ‘but I think I heard him get up.’

  ‘Weak bladder?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Checking on the cats. Yes, he’s good with lions, but he doesn’t care for the tigers, does he, Fred?’

  ‘Nah.’ Fortescue took the marmalade out of a cupboard. ‘Well, stands to reason, dunnit? Ain’t got no tigers in Africa, have they? I didn’t hear him get up.’

  ‘No, well,’ Crockett sat at the tiny table and began to help himself to the morning goods. ‘You sleep like the dead, Fred. I definitely heard him get up. He’s around somewhere.’