Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Mr Crockett,’ Lestrade looked up at him from the seat he’d felt he’d had to collapse into. ‘Could we have a word in private?’

  ‘Er . . . Fred?’ Crockett glanced at his fellow-tamer.

  Fortescue was in mid-bite, but played the white man, scooped up a few comestibles and was gone. ‘I’ll look for Mac, then,’ he said.

  ‘This tea’s fresh, Mr Lister,’ Crockett raised the pot.

  ‘Mrs Minogue,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Please don’t be obtrude, Mr Crockett,’ the sergeant warned. ‘I know you were at “Duntentin” the night before last.’

  ‘Who told you?’ the tamer demanded to know.

  ‘The good landlady herself,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Says you and she have a thing going.’

  ‘Well, what of it?’ Crockett said. ‘No law against it, is there?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Lestrade. ‘I assume you and she are both adult and consenting. It’s just Mrs Crockett . . .’

  Lestrade had rarely seen a florid man lose his colour so fast. His hand shook so that the preserve plummeted to the floor with a soft plop. ‘Mrs Crockett is living in Skegness,’ he said, with the look of a man facing the drop. ‘I write to her when I can. Not that it’s any of your business, but we have not shared a marital bed since 1863. On that last occasion, we were celebrating the fall of Vicksburg, Mrs Crockett being a keen devotee of current affairs – and having a soft spot for General Grant.’ He shuddered. ‘Not, all in all, a happy memory.’

  Lestrade wasn’t sure whether Crockett was referring to starvation on the Vicksburg Bluff or a roll under the eiderdown with Mrs Crockett. Or possibly even her soft spot. He’d leave that stone unturned. ‘So you take your pleasures where you can?’

  Crockett nodded. If he had to take his pleasures with the likes of Kindly Minogue, here was a desperate man indeed. ‘What time did you arrive at number 86?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the giant said, ‘perhaps half past twelve. I wasn’t carrying a watch.’

  ‘I want you to think carefully,’ Lestrade said. ‘What happened when Mrs Minogue opened the door?’

  The lion tamer closed his eyes. ‘Er . . . oh, God, I’m no good at Hanky-Panky.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down,’ Lestrade urged. He was a generous man at heart. ‘Mrs Minogue seemed to have no complaints in that direction.’

  ‘Mrs Minogue?’ Crockett seemed confused. ‘What’s that got to do with Kindly? Oh, I see. You thought Hanky-Panky meant . . .’ and he chuckled his booming laugh so that the table shook. ‘No, Mr Lister, Hanky-Panky is circus for memory act. Shocking memory, I’ve got. Absolutely shocking.’

  ‘I see. Well, let me help you, then’ Lestrade offered. ‘She let you in. What then? Did you kiss her?’

  ‘Er . . . yes, I think so.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘On the cheek,’ Crockett frowned. Not for him the Saucy Seventies.

  ‘No, I mean, which part of the house were you standing in at the time?’

  ‘Oh, the hallway.’

  ‘Right. Then what? You made for her room?’

  Crockett’s eyes were tight shut again. ‘Yes,’ he nodded.

  ‘Which is on the first floor. Now, think, Mr Crockett. Think carefully. After you’d got in, after you’d said “Hello” to Mrs Minogue and given her a kiss, did she lock the door?’

  ‘Hers, do you mean?’

  ‘No, the front door. Did she lock the front door?’

  The lion tamer’s face twisted with the effort. ‘No,’ he finally said as if it had been wrung from him. ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘Are you sure? Because she said she did.’

  ‘No, I’m sure,’ Crockett insisted. ‘’Cos she had her lamp in one hand and my . . . person in the other. How could she have locked it?’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Lestrade. ‘I can see she had her hands full. Thank you, Mr Crockett.’

  ‘Look,’ the lion man leaned forward, ‘why does the Graphic need to know all this? You ain’t going to print any of it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Lestrade answered him, ‘rest assured, Mrs Crockett won’t hear a word. I’ll see myself out.’

  Fearless Fred Fortescue was sitting as dawn came up like thunder, on an upturned barrel, stitching away at a scarlet tunic.

  ‘Waddya think of this, Mr Lister?’ He held it out to the passing newspaperman. ‘Got it orff an officer of the Second Punjab Cavalry. Nice, ain’t it?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Lestrade nodded.

  ‘Makes the tigers feel at home, you know. Well, it’s rough for ’em. Your tiger is a solitary beast, Mr Lister. And nocturnal. We ’ave ’em up all day, practisin’ and performin’ and we puts ’em all together in a little cage. I likes to give ’em what creature comforts I can. Seein’ this tunic what they wear in the Punjab reminds ’em of Inja, see?’

  Lestrade saw. ‘Did you find Maccomo?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah,’ Fortescue went back to his needlework. ‘He must ’ave gorn for an early breakfast in the Mess wagon.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘What? Old Mac? He’s all right, he is – for a blackamoor, I mean.’

  ‘From French West Africa, I understand?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Of the Sudanic peoples according to the classification of Professor Lepsius of Berlin. Mandingo, to be exact.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mind yer,’ Fortescue clamped the cotton suddenly between his lips, ‘I think there’s more than a touch of your Bantu about ’im.’

  ‘Right. Look . . . er . . . Mr Fortescue . . .’

  ‘Fred. Call me Fred,’ the sewing lion tamer said. ‘Everybody does.’

  ‘Fred. You’ve shared a wagon with Maccomo now, for how long?’

  ‘Oooh, must be nearly three weeks. ’Course, ’e doesn’t say much. What with the bone through his nose and his natural Mandingo taciturnity.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lestrade understood. ‘But you’ve probably noticed him . . . well, how can I put this? Undressing?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fortescue said slowly. Then he chuckled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘before you ask. It’s not true.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘That black blokes are hung like donkeys. Same as you or me. Well, me anyway. Now your male Bengal tiger, well, puts us humans in the shade, I can tell yer. Got a dong like Big Ben.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ Lestrade assured him. ‘I mean, is he . . . er . . . is he black all over?’

  ‘All over?’ Fortescue stopped sewing in order to think about it. ‘Well, not really, no,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ The hairs on Lestrade’s neck began to prickle again.

  ‘No, the palms of his hands are pink; so, come to think of it, are the soles of his feet. As for his tadger . . .’

  ‘But, what I mean is, as far as you’re concerned, he really is an African?’

  ‘Well, of course he is,’ Fortescue said. ‘Black as your hat.’ Though it was true of course that Lestrade’s bowler had no pink bits at all.

  ‘’Ere, why are you askin’ that? What’s that got to do with anythin’?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ Lestrade said, quickly. ‘It’s just that in the circus, nothing is quite what it seems, is it?’

  They buried Lucinda Brodie in a quiet spot far from the Chesterfield Road. The rain dripped on to her casket, lovingly made by the Sanger Company’s chief carpenter, as Lord George said what by now were his all too customary few words. As the wagons rolled again and a tearful Spaniard knelt by the graveside and they shovelled on the earth, Sanger put back his top hat. ‘Good roads, Lucinda,’ he said, ‘good times and merry tenting.’ And they rumbled south, a stranger on a grey horse in their wake.

  Chesterfield was a town of considerable antiquity on the banks of the river Rother. It was a cotton town, famous for its worsted stockings and for the twisted spire of its church, which bent, like a few men Lestrade had met in his career so far, to the west. Most of the te
n thousand souls who made up its population cheered the circus in. The weather was a bitch, but under the flares of the Big Top, all was colour and sound and magic.

  It was when the Sangers had put up at the Angel that the note arrived. It was in beautiful copperplate, but the beauty ended there. It was a wet sergeant of police who met the circus owners in the hotel lounge.

  ‘Eggnog, Mr Lestrade?’ Lady Pauline was halfway through hers.

  ‘Thank you, no,’ he declined.

  ‘I’ll have yours, then,’ she said and descended on another.

  ‘Take off your Donegal, Lestrade,’ Sanger was warming his backside by a crackling fire. ‘I can’t take the roads like I used to. In thirty years or so, I’ll have had enough. Brandy?’

  ‘Thank you.’ That sounded infinitely preferable. ‘Major John said there was some bother.’

  He handed his hat and coat to the hotel flunkey and wrung out his trouser bottoms.

  ‘Filthy night, Mr Lestrade,’ Lady Pauline observed, absorbed between her game of patience and her nog. It was a game Lestrade himself could not afford to play much longer.

  ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘What’s the bother?’

  Sanger motioned him into an armchair near his own. The showman was taking an unusual night off and had replaced his hunting pink for a more sober black evening dress. ‘I hear you’ve been asking after Maccomo.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘May I ask why?’

  The detective was grateful, now that his own supply had run out, to accept Sanger’s cheroot. He’d have been even more grateful for a new one, but it seemed churlish to carp. ‘Because it’s possible he may be our man,’ he said.

  ‘I got the impression the other night that you were looking for a Frenchman.’

  ‘Maccomo is from French West Africa,’ Lestrade explained.

  ‘Even so,’ Sanger said, ‘hardly an everyday sight sauntering along the Bois de Boulogne, I shouldn’t have thought.’

  ‘Indeed not, but I’d like to get a closer look at his skin pigment.’

  ‘So would I,’ nodded the showman. ‘That’s why I sent for you.’ He passed Lestrade the letter. The detective read it once. Then again. He looked up at Sanger, yellow, gaunt in the Angel’s gas-lamps. Lady Pauline was searching in vain for a black king.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘If it is, I’ve yet to get the point,’ Sanger said. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘These people,’ Lestrade tapped the copperplate, ‘the Fellowship of Animals’ Friends . . . ever heard of them?’

  Sanger nodded. They were featured in the Travelling Times two months ago,’ he said. ‘A new organization, a breakaway group from the curiously respectable Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They have as their patron the Earl of Shaftesbury, no less. Nice old boy. Loves children and animals.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d be a party to kidnapping, then?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Well, I put on a show for him once,’ Sanger remembered. ‘He congratulated me at the end and said “I feel, Mr Sanger, that my business lies in the gutter and I have not the least intention to get out of it.” Mind you, he’s knocking on by now. Makes Disraeli look like a whippersnapper.’

  ‘Ah, you’re too trusting, Georgie,’ Lady Pauline quietly cheated with the eight of spades. ‘He’s a self-righteous, vain, suspicious old bastard, that one. If he ever publishes his diaries, it’ll all come out, you’ll see.’

  ‘Disraeli or Shaftesbury?’ Lestrade asked.

  The Lion Queen looked dully at him. ‘Either or,’ she shrugged.

  ‘So you think he could be a party to kidnapping, then?’ Lestrade pursued it.

  ‘You’re the policeman, Lestrade,’ Sanger reminded him.

  ‘I’m curious, Mr Sanger,’ the sergeant warmed his cockles with the brandy. ‘When Ollie Oliver vanished, you knew just where to go and what to do, albeit with a little help from me.’

  ‘I took you along, didn’t I?’

  ‘Indeed. But now you seem . . . what? To be asking for my help?’

  ‘This is unfamiliar territory for me, Lestrade. I don’t know Chesterfield. Ollie’s been through – the posters are up, the tickets are sold and we parade at ten sharp tomorrow. But I don’t know these maniacs who call themselves Animals’ Friends. I don’t know what they’re going to do. We’ve had mad parsons have a go at us before – and we’ve been arrested on trumped-up charges. But kidnapping . . . well, that’s a new business for us. Red three on black four, Nell.’

  She blew a raspberry at him, much to the horror of the passing flunkey who had never been happy letting gypsies book a room at the Angel. This one was even fortune-telling with cards.

  ‘What do we do?’ Sanger was serious. ‘In cases of ransom, I mean?’

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ Lestrade read the letter a third time. ‘The instructions tell us to go to the cricket ground in Queen’s Park. There we will find instructions on what to do next. On no account are we to contact the police and we are to be carrying a suitcase stuffed full with one thousand pounds.’

  ‘When you say “we” . . .’ Sanger raised an eyebrow.

  ‘All right, you,’ Lestrade was more precise. ‘Do you have a thousand pounds?’

  Sanger looked desperate. He glanced at Lady Pauline, who was staring resolutely at the cards. ‘I’ll have to go to a bank tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It won’t be easy.’

  ‘How much credit can you get at the bank – that’s easy, I mean?’

  Sanger blew smoke from his thin lips. ‘Say, two hundred,’ he said.

  ‘Right. Do it. Tomorrow morning, before the parade, go to the bank. Wear your top hat and carry a gardenia in your buttonhole. When you’re there, make a fuss. Pretend the amount you’re drawing out is the last penny you’ve got.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because whoever wrote this letter may be watching you. They may know you’re here now, talking to me, but we’ll have to chance that. I think we can assume there’s more than one of them, so who knows how well they’ve got the town sewn up. They’ll be hoping you’ll draw out a thousand, so make it sound as if it is. When you leave the bank, clutch the case as though your life depended on it – because perhaps Maccomo’s does. Come straight back here and lock it in the hotel safe.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Go about your showbusiness as usual. Not a word to anyone. How many tickets have you sold for tomorrow night?’

  ‘Three hundred. The Top is full.’

  ‘Right. Any one of those three hundred may be Animals’ Friends. They’ll be watching your every move. While the show’s in full swing, I’ll get over here. You will already have given me your key.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll ask the questions, Mr Sanger.’ A plan was hatching nicely in Lestrade’s addled brain. ‘Before you leave the show, bring me some sticks of makeup – the sort clowns use.’

  ‘All right,’ Sanger said. ‘But what . . .?’

  ‘They want to see that you get to the cricket ground at Queen’s Park at midnight.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sanger remembered the letter’s instructions. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘The cricket ground at Queen’s Park at midnight.’

  ‘No, no,’ Sanger hissed, shaking his head. ‘That won’t do, Lestrade. The letter says I must come alone.’

  Lestrade smiled. ‘So you will, Boss,’ he said. ‘So you will.’

  It actually stopped raining the next day and the good people of Chesterfield strung flags across Knifesmith Gate, as much to welcome the sun as the circus. Sanger made himself as ostentatious as possible on the instructions of Lestrade. He raised his hat to all and sundry, helped an old lady across the road (the old bag had only just crossed the other way and was less than pleased) and threw pennies to little boys and girls. In the Chesterfield branch of Glyn, Mills and Currie, a pallid George Sanger spoke in hushed tones to the teller – tones that carried to the entrance-hall – that he had t
o see the manager on a matter of greatest urgency. Lives were at stake, blah, blah, blah. No time to lose, blah. Large sums of money, blah. For a man whose life revolved around patter, this was bread and butter and tellers and clerks were soon jumping in all directions and whispering in corners behind the showman’s back.

  He waited in the vaults while the two hundred pounds were solemnly counted out. Then he stuffed them into his battered suitcase, buckled the straps and left, clutching the portmanteau as though he were carrying the Crown Jewels or the head of Pauline de Vere. Glancing nervously left and right, he made straight for the Angel and insisted loudly that the case be placed in the safe. Then, he went to work. The rest was up to Lestrade and he sincerely hoped the lad was up to it.

  The lad sat in the Sanger wagon while Stromboli slipped and rolled his way around the tan, to the roar and delight of the crowd. He sat in front of the mirror with the oil lamps around it, painting his face as best he could to look like George Sanger’s. First, he clipped the moustache, then he thickened the eyebrows. Finally, he smeared the clown’s greasepaint over himself to give him the deathly pallor of the showman’s parchment skin. He could kick himself now that he hadn’t more experience of this. He should have accepted Howard Vincent’s offer to play Ellen Terry in the Police Revue after all. But no, there were limits. He was a Detective Sergeant of the Metropolitan Police. He would never play a woman in the Police Revue. What if the woman won? He took his eyes out a bit with a threat of magenta and just a little bit of white to accentuate the nose. Then he pulled on the frock coat with the gardenia buttonhole, tilted the beaver hat at just the right angle and made for the Chesterfield night.

  There was too much moon for his liking and it was nearly full. The clouds that had darkened the sky, it seemed since Christmas, had vanished and Orion and the Bear smiled down on him. In her cage a mile and a half away, old Miss Stevens sat in her evening gloves and mob-cap, licking the chintz, waiting for her little master to come back. Then she turned and went back to sleep and cried for Huge Hughie.

  Lestrade crossed the Low Pavement as the revellers made their way home. The show was over but he had given Sanger time to reach the wagon before he darted out, suitcase gripped in his left hand, brass knuckles in the other. In the shadows, Lady Pauline and her husband watched him go.