Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Slower, slower, sonny,’ Lady Pauline whispered. ‘Remember you’re a man of fifty-five.’

  ‘Fifty-three, my petal,’ Sanger reminded her.

  He took the corner at Beetwell Street, past the silent Market Hall with its porticoes and columns and crossed the broad concourse of Markham Road. The park lay dark ahead, its bushes shadowed under the moon. Once there, however, the ground was clear and he was bathed in light. The cricket square stood flat before him, a solitary stump in its centre. And something was flapping from it. He looked around. No one in sight. He reached the wicket and snatched up the paper he found tied there.

  Even with the bright moon, he couldn’t read it. He struck a Lucifer, as near his face as he dared. Who knew who watched him from the bushes? Who knew how soon his greasepaint would smudge and melt? Rose Hill, he read silently, hoping his lips weren’t moving with nerves. Where the hell was that? He turned back, for beyond him lay open country and the rest of Derbyshire. He retraced his steps, then found a passer-by and asked directions. He’d guessed right. Through New Square he paced, no sound in the town now but his own footsteps and a distant, barking dog. Ramnuggar’s elephants must be asleep. At Rose Hill he stopped to read the nameplates. Damn! There was a Rose Hill East and a Rose Hill West. Not to mention Rose Hill itself. Which one was it? Then he caught sight of a paper flapping in the stiffening breeze, jammed behind a drainpipe. He ran to it.

  Old Whittington, it said. The Cock and Pynot. Where the hell . . . He saw the answer to a policeman’s prayer. At the bottom of the hill, dozing at the head of a cab rank, sat a cabman on his growler. Lestrade grabbed his hat and thundered down the hill.

  ‘Bloody ’ellfire!’ the cabman woke with a start, steadying his horse in its traces. ‘You’re in a bloody ’urry.’

  ‘Old Whittington!’ Lestrade roared.

  ‘There’s no need to be bloody offensive, young man,’ the cabman reminded him. ‘Oh, I see. Old Whittington. Oh aye. All right then. Aye up, it’s after midnight now – double fare, mind yer.’

  ‘Just get here,’ Lestrade ordered. ‘I’ll qua . . . qua . . . give you four times the fare if you’re there in ten minutes,’ and he fell backwards as the hack jerked forward to the driver’s whip.

  North across Newbold Moors they raced, the moon flying with them, until they clattered into the old inn yard of the Cock and Pynot. He poked his head out of the window, glancing up at the creaking sign. Like Lestrade himself, the sign painter had obviously drawn a blank trying to work out what a Pynot was and had contented himself with a painting of a Rhode Island Red heralding the morn. Lestrade alighted, slipped his man some silver and stood alone on the cobbles.

  Dark in the dark old inn yard, a stable-wicket creaked. Lestrade stepped silently aside until his shoulder brushed the brickwork. There were no lights at the windows, only the breathing of the wind sighed with him. Then he heard it. The rattle of a chain. And the snick of a bolt. A chain he could probably handle. But if that was the bolt of a Martini-Henry, he probably wouldn’t strike so lucky.

  ‘Don’t turn round, Mr Sanger,’ a female voice called. ‘Just put the case down where you are.’

  ‘Where is my lion tamer?’ Lestrade barked in an approximation of the showman’s voice.

  ‘Where he can’t whip another lion,’ came the reply. ‘Put the case down.’

  ‘Not until I see Maccomo.’

  There was a muttering at his back. Lestrade guessed by the sound that whoever it was was at the casement, above and to his left. There was no telling how many of them there were, however, or where the lion man was.

  ‘You really have no choice,’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh, but I do.’ Lestrade still had not turned. ‘If I choose to walk away now, you’re one thousand pounds worse off.’

  ‘And you’ll have one dead persecutor of innocent beasts on your hands.’

  He took the chance and turned, careful to keep the brim of his hat over his eyes. ‘I’ve got other lion tamers,’ he said.

  ‘You’d allow your own man to die?’ the woman’s voice shook with disbelief. Under the overhand of the thatch, Lestrade could see she was not a bad looking piece, but with outsize teeth and a riding habit.

  ‘Goodnight, madam,’ Lestrade called. ‘It’s been very pleasant having our little chat, but it is rather late and I’ve another show tomorrow. Got some elephants to beat to death.’

  ‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Wait.’ She turned back into the room and there was more hurried conversation. ‘All right,’ she called to him. Wait there.’

  So wait he did.

  It was Maccomo who came out first, from the door below. Either that or he was a particularly careless coal miner who had not availed himself of a zinc bath in front of the fire. The man had manacles on his wrists but his legs were free.

  ‘Put the suitcase down on the ground in front of you,’ the woman ordered.

  Lestrade did. ‘Are you all right, Mac m’boy?’ he shouted.

  The negro grunted so that Lestrade was unsure of the answer. He couldn’t see any damage to the man, but he was still in shadow. And he was black.

  ‘Now you will come over here,’ the woman said. Three men had clustered around her now, all of them young and well dressed. Not one of them appeared very good at this.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Lestrade. ‘You send Maccomo to me. I’ll stay here.’

  She turned and whispered agitatedly to her co-conspirators.

  ‘Here,’ he threw the suitcase across the yard so that it landed halfway between him and them. ‘One thousand pounds – oh and you can keep the case. But once Maccomo reaches it, you let him walk on to me and our business is done.’

  The young men hissed angrily at her, pulling at her mutton-chop sleeves. She spread her hands, calming herself as much as them, then slipped the negro’s chain and motioned him to walk forward. He walked steadily, the moonlight shining on the slope of his forehead and the tight curls of his hair. At the suitcase he stopped. In the silence, had Lestrade been wearing his own clothes, a pin would no doubt have dropped. As it was, only the sign creaked and the wind sighed.

  ‘Now!’ Lestrade shouted and the negro’s shoulders bunched. His chained fists came up and his feet left the ground. In two strides, he was at Lestrade’s side, then running past him for the gate. Lestrade turned after him, saw the danger and ran backwards. Behind him, to block the runaway’s path stood three more young men, as young and well dressed as the others. Maccomo skidded to a halt on the gravel and stood there, tense and ready.

  Lestrade had dashed the other way, leaping over the suitcase, and careered into the knot of Animals’ Friends standing dithering in the doorway. He snatched the mutton-chop of the lady as he hurtled past and swung her with him, her arm tight behind her back, his switchblade at her throat.

  ‘Let him go,’ he bellowed.

  The seven men in the yard all turned to look at him.

  ‘When I was at the Sierra Leone Military Academy,’ the negro suddenly said, ‘I was taught that the best method of defence is attack.’ His left foot came up like lightning, jabbing into the stomach of his first captor. As the man jack-knifed, the right foot crunched against the second man’s temple. The third was still standing there when the negro’s two feet thumped him into the gate behind him – what is colloquially known as the middle of next week.

  ‘And when I was at Mr Poulson’s Academy in Blackheath,’ Lestrade bellowed, not wishing to be outdone, ‘I was taught to pick on people your own size, which is why I am holding a knife at your throat, Mrs . . . er . . .?’

  ‘Miss,’ she gasped. ‘Janet Spennymoor-Spalding.’

  ‘Not the Dorsetshire Spennymoor-Spaldings?’ Maccomo jumped on one of the three who still appeared to have some fight in him.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman gulped. ‘Do you know my family?’

  ‘Rather,’ smiled Maccomo, his teeth flashing in the moonlight. ‘My great-great-great-grandfather was one of your great-great-grandfather’s slaves.’ He rattled hi
s chains at her. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how history repeats itself?’

  ‘Now, then, gentlemen,’ Lestrade said. ‘I wonder if we could stop all this rather unpleasant head-stomping and lie on the ground. I’d hate to slip through sheer nerves,’ he let the knife flash in the moonlight.

  ‘You’re not George Sanger,’ the nearest young man said.

  ‘Correct,’ Lestrade told him. ‘I am Joseph Lister of the Graphic. This will make a first-rate story in next week’s edition. Is Spennymoor spelt with an m-o-r-e or an m-o-o-r?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s m-o-o-r, Mr Lister,’ Maccomo said, joining the group, ‘as in blackamoor.’

  ‘Right. And let’s see, Miss Spennymoor-Spalding, your organization is the Society of Animals’ Friends?’

  ‘Fellowship,’ she rasped. ‘Fellowship of Animals’ Friends. We are its militant branch.’

  ‘And you disapprove of circuses?’

  ‘Of course,’ she winced. ‘Will you let me go, you brute? You’re hurting my arm.’

  ‘What was the idea?’ Lestrade ignored her, ‘to bankrupt George Sanger?’

  ‘We didn’t want his money,’ one of the men blurted, ‘we wanted you . . . er . . . him.’

  ‘Shut up, Charles, you poltroon!’ she tried to lash him with her riding boot but Lestrade held her fast.

  ‘I see,’ he nodded. ‘So that was your game. You weren’t interested in cash, just the Boss.’

  ‘Of course.’ She struggled. ‘He’s one of the worst abusers of animals in the country. The time will come when they’ll ban circuses, and zoological gardens. When vicars and people together will kneel down in common prayer for tamed and shabby tigers and dancing dogs and bears.’

  ‘Not to mention the wretched, blind pit ponies, Janet,’ Charles reminded her.

  ‘Yes, and the little hunted hares,’ another threw in.

  ‘Well, I must confess to being rather hurt,’ Maccomo assisted the men, as they lay down in accordance with Lestrade’s wishes, by kicking their feet out from under them. ‘First you didn’t believe me when I told you that our animals are really quite well looked after. And now it transpires that you didn’t want me at all, but Lord George.’ He rolled his eyes and rattled his chains. ‘Well, lordie, lordie.’

  Lestrade dragged the woman backwards to the gate. ‘Pick up that case, Maccomo, would you? It contains neat bundles of circus posters. I’d hate to lose those.’

  ‘You swine!’ Janet Spennymoor-Spalding hissed. ‘You devious swine.’

  ‘Steady, madam.’ Lestrade said. ‘That’s very unkind to a very well-meaning body of pig. Maccomo, did they teach you to run at the Sierra Leone Military Academy?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the negro, ‘backwards, of course, when discretion becomes the better part of valour. What about you at Mr Poulson’s Academy?’

  ‘In any direction, really. That’s what educational freedom does for you.’

  ‘From the gate, then?’ Maccomo asked.

  ‘Last one in his kipsey-sack’s a cissy!’ Lestrade clicked back the blade, pushed the struggling animal liberator forward so that she fell among her co-conspirators, and joined Maccomo on the long road back.

  ❖10❖

  T

  he Mandingo stretched himself under the elm tree that spread its arms across the road through Newbold Moor.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ Lestrade wheezed, the greasepaint trickling with the sweat down his cheeks and behind his ears.

  ‘In the blood, old boy,’ Maccomo told him. ‘The American branch of my family were always doing it, splashing through the mangrove swamps and wading through the Mississippi with an army of bloodhounds behind them. My second cousin Rastus was a stationmaster with Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad.’ He looked at the sunken eyes, the heaving chest of his fellow sprinter. ‘If you think this is tough, you should try it with a ball and chain. By the way, I never thanked you for your timely rescue. It was deuced good of you to impersonate the Boss like that.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Lestrade said. ‘Do you think they’re following?’ The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor. It looked empty enough.

  ‘Well, they all ride velocipedes and such,’ Maccomo said. ‘Don’t want to damage the flanks of any warm-blooded quadrupeds by riding them. Personally, I think we knocked the fight out of them.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Lestrade threw his hat on the grass and rolled over in an attempt to catch his breath. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what happened?’

  ‘Well, it was rather silly, really. I had this note from what I took to be an admirer.’

  ‘Miss Spennymoor-Spalding?’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t use her correct name. She simply signed it “Janet”. Well, it was rather prurient, really.’

  ‘It was?’ Damn. Lestrade wasn’t carrying his dictionary.

  ‘I thought so. Let’s put it this way, it wasn’t the sort of letter I’d expect to receive anywhere along the Niger, I can tell you. It said she was a new woman, whatever that meant. And that she had stirrings in her blood and longed to “go” with a black man. Well, Lister, as a journalist you’ll appreciate the nuance of the inverted commas. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Knowing, as I did, that all six of my wives back home have the adulthood to cope with this situation; that my marriages were sufficiently “open”, I thought I’d give it a whirl, so to speak. Well, call it lust, call it vanity, call it damned foolishness, but I went into the night at the hour suggested in the letter. I hadn’t told a soul of course, because I guessed my fellow tamers would try to talk me out of it. I’d just reached the Sparks Wagon . . .’

  ‘The Sparks Wagon?’

  ‘Yes. You know – on the edge of the camp – I’d just got there when, bop. Everything went black.’

  ‘It would,’ Lestrade observed.

  ‘When I woke up, it was as though I’d had several pink gins. I had a bump on my head the size of Mount Loma and these chains on my wrists. I couldn’t work out where I was at first. Then I realized by the constant chink of glasses, it had to be a pub.’

  ‘The Cock and Pynot.’

  ‘Precisely. My captors were perfectly pleasant, but the food . . . my dear chap, it was so ordinary. Not a mung bean in sight.’

  ‘Were you able to learn anything about them?’

  ‘Their first names. Apart from Janet, there were Charles, Algernon, Sidney and Maudsley. I didn’t catch the others. They were all Merton men. Except for Janet of course, who doesn’t qualify on either score. I suppose I should feel sorry for her, but then girls of my tribe are circumcised at eight and mothers by twelve. Alongside that, the terrors of a home tutor don’t seem quite so awful, do they?’

  ‘Amateurs, then?’

  ‘Oh, grossly, yes.’ The African began to flex his muscles to get some feeling back into his arms. ‘They had me chained kneeling to a four-poster which wasn’t pleasant, but I’ve known worse. Quite an awful eiderdown pattern. They were constantly arguing tactics. How to get Lord George and so on. Quite what they intended to do with him when they got him, I don’t think they knew.’

  Lestrade loosened his tie. The gardenia had wilted spectacularly in his buttonhole, but at least his head was clearing now. ‘I hope you won’t take offence, Mr Maccomo, but your fellow lion tamers said that you didn’t say much. But . . . well . . . you do speak excellent English for a . . .’

  ‘Nigger?’ the man’s teeth flashed white in the darkness of his face. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I realized as soon as I arrived that my intelligence quotient was likely to prove something of an embarrassment. Circus folk are brave and talented, Mr Lister, but they’re all a few elephants short of a herd. I thought it best to clam up. My superior education was all due to the High Commissioner in Sierra Leone, really.’

  ‘But I thought you came from French West Africa?’

  ‘Oh, I do. At least, I was born there, but they’re an internecine sort of lot, the Africans. Constant tribal warfare. As the son
of a king I was a prized captive when the Wukari dragged me off.’

  ‘You were a prisoner before this?’

  ‘Oh, good Lord, yes. Well, there was the usual bartering and ransom and so on, but in the event I escaped. Blasted current in the Benue was so fierce it carried me the wrong way and I ended up in Lagos. Somebody found me washed up and took me to the British High Commissioner. Sir “Sandy” McPherson, OBE.’

  ‘A good man?’

  ‘The best,’ Maccomo remembered with affection. ‘Sandy the strong, Sandy the wise. He was always righting wrongs and he hated lies. I can see him now, laughing as he fought, working when he seemed to be playing. What a role model!’

  ‘He taught you English?’

  ‘Like a native,’ Maccomo said. ‘Took me into his own household and treated me like one of the family. Put me down for Eton, but apparently they’re full until the 1990s. When I was sixteen, I went back to papa – that’s King Kaunda. Oh, I was welcomed back with open arms, given the usual lion-skin shirt, the jackal necklace, run of the royal concubines and so on. But it just wasn’t the same, Mr Lister. I’d tasted the Pax Britannica and I rather liked it. Not for me a mud hut on the Niger. There’s a world out there and I decided to find it.’

  ‘So you joined the circus?’

  Maccomo laughed. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I tried for a commission in the Guards but never received a reply. The Lords Taverners were equally reticent. I made for the Black Country, assuming I’d do better there, but it was just full of white men who worked in the potteries. In the end I had to face it. There are very few men like Sandy McPherson, who look beyond the colour of a man’s skin into his soul. I was wandering through Stafford one day – well, you can’t do much else but wander in Stafford – getting some very black looks, when I saw this circus poster. It showed a man in a leotard wrestling a lion. I thought to myself – I can do that. So I looked up the Boss a month or so ago and he took me on. In fact, and here’s the coincidence, Lord George knew my father and, transversely, my father knew Lord George. The old king was on a goodwill tour of Paris when Sanger was touring there. Small world, isn’t it?’