Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘It is,’ Lestrade agreed, but his mind was racing on. A monosyllabic moron with the courage of a lion he’d been ready for, but an intellectual with a cut-glass public-school accent had thrown him a little. ‘Tell me, did you know John Samson, the rigger?’

  The negro looked at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why the past tense?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Lestrade said, watching the man’s bloodshot eyes closely, ‘you were . . . away. John Samson is dead.’

  ‘Dead? Good Heavens. Fall?’

  ‘Electrocution. He died of shock. His face was as black as . . . er . . .’

  ‘. . . your hat, yes,’ Maccomo smiled. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘I thought you might know.’

  ‘Did you?’ Maccomo looked at him oddly. ‘How strange. I have no knowledge whatever of electricity – that sort of thing is all part of the White Man’s Burden, isn’t it? Not for the likes of me – an everyday story of tribal folk.’

  ‘He died strapped to Nat Isinglass’ chair in the Sparks Wagon,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Maccomo tutted. ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘That’s what I want to find out.’

  ‘I say, Mr Lister,’ the negro leaned across to him. ‘You aren’t a policeman on the q.t. are you?’

  ‘A policeman?’ Lestrade hoped he wasn’t blushing under the five and nine. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There was a chappie who used to hang around Sandy McPherson’s residence back home. Forlorn-looking party with an air of mistrust. He was always asking people where they were going to or coming from. Always got the same reply too – your average Mandingo never knows whether he’s coming or going. I believe he shot himself in the end. He was Chief of Police and there was something in his manner which resembles yours.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Lestrade lied. ‘Give me an upright Remington and a pencil stub any day. I wouldn’t know what to do with a truncheon and bracelets.’

  They went on, walking this time now that the fanatical Fellowship seemed to have lost their spoor, and Lestrade asked as many questions as he dared, bearing in mind that his bearer seemed to be on to him.

  ‘Of course, it’s not easy,’ Maccomo told him, ‘being of the coloured persuasion at the moment. What with Cetewayo on the warpath. And our – sorry, your – fine chaps out there going down like ninepins. Bit of a blow, Isandlwhana, wasn’t it? I do hope the Prince Imperial will be all right.’

  Lestrade missed his footing on the outskirts of the town. ‘The . . . er . . . Prince who?’ he asked as innocently as he could.

  ‘You know, Napoleon Eugene Louis Bonaparte. Something of a national hero in French West Africa – great white hope and all that. Well, we’re all ardent royalists over there; it goes with the territory. Apparently, the Boss has a new finale in mind for the next port of call. It’s called “The Prince Imperial Wins Through”. I’m playing, with a certain predictability, you might think, King Cetewayo and everybody else is blacked up.’

  Lestrade looked at him under the green of the gaslight. ‘No need for you to, though?’ he asked, ‘er . . . black up, I mean?’

  ‘Are you attempting levity, Mr Lister?’ the Mandingo asked. ‘That is a little like taking coals to Newcastle, don’t you think?’

  What was left of Fearless Fortescue lay in the Props Wagon, by now the regular unofficial morgue of Lord George Sanger’s circus. His right arm was dangling from his shoulder by a twisted thread of muscle and his face had all but gone. His throat had been torn out and his sequinned chest was dark brown with blood across the place where the great heart used to beat. The Indian cavalry jacket had been ripped off his back and all that remained of it was dumped over a chair.

  The loquacious Maccomo took one look and sat outside by the blazing fire, his legs hooked beneath him, his arms outstretched. He spoke with no one and no one spoke to him. For all he had tasted the Pax Britannica, he was Mandingo at heart and the death of Fred Fortescue had cut to his roots. In groups and singly, Sanger’s people came to pay their last respects to the greatest lion tamer on earth.

  ‘When?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘After the show,’ Sanger said, the tears trickling down his cheeks. ‘It didn’t happen in the ring. No, no one saw it. No one saw it, Freddie,’ he patted the man’s good hand that someone had laid across the ghastly blood. He looked up at the sergeant of detectives. ‘His tigers loved him, Lestrade,’ he said softly. ‘All of them. Why? Why would they do this?’ He stood up suddenly. ‘I’m going to get him, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Whoever did this, whoever caused it. He’s going to pay. Tomorrow, Lestrade, I’m closing the show. It’s over.’

  ‘No,’ Lestrade took the man’s shoulder; identically dressed as they were, it made an odd sight.

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do with my own bloody show,’ Sanger hissed. ‘I want no more blood in the ring, do you understand? It’s finished.’

  ‘It will be if you close down,’ Lestrade said. ‘Whoever our man is, he’ll just walk away – and start again somewhere else. And then,’ he gripped both Sanger’s shoulders, ‘then, Boss, you’ll never get him, will you? Now. Trust me. Can I have a word with your good lady wife?’

  Lady Pauline de Vere, the Lion Queen of Bostock’s, sat with her head in her hands and on her head sat the colobus monkey, similarly morose. Her veil was lifted to show the ghastly scarring that mottled her right cheek. Six of her ‘family’ were dead and like a mother too dumb with grief to cry, she just looked at Lestrade.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ He laid his bowler on the traces in front of the wagon, looking up at her.

  She shook her head and the tears started. ‘Who knows?’ she sniffed. ‘Perhaps he was too slow on the turn. Perhaps he slipped. They don’t like it if a man goes down. It panics them. And they lash out.’

  ‘How is it done? Taming tigers, I mean?’

  She hooked the monkey down and let it run through her fingers, curling itself around in her lap. ‘You never tame them, not really. Tigers are different from lions, lions from panthers and so on. And they’re like us, Mr Lestrade, they’re greedy and sullen and small-minded and vain. And they’re irritable – and some of them are murderers, just like you and me. But they’re also good and kind and fair. Give me a straight choice between a cat and a man and I know which I’d take, every time. The best cat tamers feed them themselves, first with a pole from outside the bars, then inside without one. You walk quiet, you look into their eyes, you never show fear. No fast moves, no harsh words, for it rouses the dormant devil in ’em. You stroke them down the back,’ her hands were moving now, over and beyond the monkey, ‘moving up to the head. If you’ve never heard a tiger purr, Mr Lestrade, you’ve never lived. And you’ve got him, for ever. Trust. It’s all based on trust. Take, for instance, putting your head in a cat’s mouth. You take his nostrils, in your right hand, and you lower his jaw and lip. Keep this pressure up and he can’t close his mouth. You’re in more danger putting your head in a linen cupboard, what with the bugs and all.’

  ‘How long had Fortescue been with the tigers?’

  ‘All his life,’ Lady Pauline told him. ‘I knew him at Bostock’s and he did a stint with Wombwell’s before that. Nobody finer.’

  ‘Could this have been an accident?’

  She mopped her eyes, red and liquid. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know. Perhaps he sneezed.’

  ‘Sneezed?’

  ‘A sharp noise like that would do it. A cough you can control, unless you know you’re ill – in which case you stay out of the cage. But a sneeze – it comes up on you with the speed of a cobra and there’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘Was he feeding the cats?’

  ‘Yes, it was their supper. We’d had the usual goats sent over this morning.’

  ‘So there was nothing unusual about the routine?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The first I knew, there was a snarling and a screaming. Everybody ran outside. Jim
Crockett was there before everybody else and he drove the beasts back with red-hot pincers Tom the smith had on his forge. They shook him around, poor Freddie, as if he was a rag doll. A broken, dirty rag doll.’

  ‘You’ve no way of knowing which one attacked first?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘They all had their claws on him. But it was Bahadur with his jaws on Freddie’s throat. He’d have started it. George will shoot him in the morning.’

  ‘He will?’

  ‘Of course,’ she struggled bravely with her tears. ‘He’s tasted blood, Mr Lestrade. Not three-day-old goat carcass, but fresh, warm, human blood. Nobody’d face him now.’

  A silence between them.

  ‘Mr Lestrade,’ the old sinewy hand stretched out to him. ‘Do you know?’ she asked with a voice that dragged through his soul, ‘do you know who’s doing this? Can you stop him?’

  ‘Madame,’ he said softly, ‘yes and no. Yes, I can stop him. But not until I know who he is. And no, I don’t know who he is.’

  He searched the canvas bags and rough kipsey-sack of Oliver Steele, the dead detective, one more time. In case he had missed anything before, in case a miracle should be lying there. Perhaps the list of those he had interviewed – the list of two hundred and ninety-seven names with only three missing. The three Steele hadn’t seen. The three who weren’t there on the days before he died. One of whom was the Prince Imperial, heir to the throne of France, blue-eyed boy of his mother, Great White Hope of the Mandingo – and murderer.

  Nothing. Just an expenses claim with a Downing Street stamp and a battered map and a book called How To Rig Trapeze, translated from the French by M Jules Leotard. He’d just finished when the camp began to stir itself and the rays of the May morning gilded the watch-fires of the night. But the spark had gone. The show would go on, because that’s what the Boss had ordered. But the heart had stopped. Men tossed cudgels to each other through the air or somersaulted over the dewy grass. The Sultan of Ramnuggar polished the toes of his elephants. Dakota-Bred stripped and reassembled his guns. But the eyes were watchful, frightened and sharp. The smiles hollow and afraid. The band played solemn music, all of which sounded like the Dead March from Saul. George Sanger walked bareheaded through his people, his good lady lion tamer on his arm, the monkey round her neck like a stole. Everywhere, the whispered word, the hand on the shoulder, the fatherly hug. The Sangers held their children to them in the morning.

  ‘The Nondescript, Lestrade.’ George Sanger looked up from the furry beast whose glass eyes stared into him. ‘Extinct, of course. This is the last specimen, shot off Zanzibar in the reign of his late Majesty King George IV. Sorry,’ he shrugged, ‘can’t resist the old showman’s patter. Actually, it’s the skin and fur of a howler monkey stretched over a frame. Could be anything though, couldn’t it? Defies description.’

  Lestrade found himself knee deep in pigs, that sniffed and snorted against his legs.

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve met my Intelligent Pigs,’ the showman said, ‘Gloucester Old Spots, brighter than Tamworths, friendlier than Cumberlands. Like to see ’em count to ten?’

  ‘I’d like them to tell me who my murderer is,’ Lestrade said, shaking his trouser leg where a porker had widdled on it.

  ‘Hmm,’ Sanger nodded, ‘do you know, I had a pony once – an intelligent one. He’d trot round the ring until he found the wickedest man in the tent. Well, of course, he was trained to halt behind me, the ringmaster, and the crowd would applaud. One night, though, he stopped by this bobby – no offence – and he wouldn’t move on. The bobby was in his uniform, of course – they never took ’em off, did they, in the old days? He was getting his rag out, I can tell you, but the crowd loved it. Funny thing was, of course, the pony was blindfolded.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lestrade, ‘there is a funny thing. Show as usual tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sanger said determinedly, ‘you were right. If I close now, we’ll never nail the bastard. God, is that the time?’ he checked his hunter, ‘We’re rehearsing the Zulu War for tomorrow night – “The Adventures of the Prince Imperial and How He Won Through”.’

  Lestrade smiled grimly. ‘Change that,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The title – and the ending. Call it . . . “The Death of the Prince Imperial”.’

  ‘The death? But the man’s alive. Isn’t he?’

  ‘At the moment,’ Lestrade nodded.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to tempt fate like that, Lestrade,’ the showman said. ‘I performed before him, you know, when he was a boy. He insisted on meeting me afterwards and said – I’ll never forget it – he said “When I grow up, Mr Sanger, I want to join your circus”.’

  Lestrade looked the showman in the face. ‘That’s just it, Boss,’ he whispered. ‘He has.’

  The lights burned dim in the caravans. The elephants stood like giant boulders against the pearl of the May sky. He tapped on the shuttered window and a gnarled old head in a tea towel appeared.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Madame Za-Za? It’s Joseph Lister, of the Graphic.’

  ‘So it is, sonny,’ she said, peering at him under her lunatic fringe. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

  He was not quite ready for the owl that stared back at him, its tufted ears upright, its talons and wings spread. Thank God it was, like the Nondescript, stuffed. The skull didn’t move around much either, but the empty eye sockets seemed to watch him as he sat down in the candlelit wagon, the sockets that reminded him of the dead man on Ilkley Moor where the Cow Rock meets the sky. Black wax dribbled over the eyebrow ridges and into the snuggle of the teeth from the candle stub fluttering on the cranium.

  ‘Mr Za-Za,’ the old girl chuckled softly, by way of introduction, catching Lestrade’s fascinated stare. ‘He’s a bloody sight more useful to me now than ever he was when he was alive. Smoke?’

  She waved a hookah at him. He shook his head.

  ‘Well, perhaps later,’ she smiled through teeth every bit as snaggled and brown as those of her late husband. ‘You’re looking for a murderer.’

  He put the bowler down on the maroon table-cloth as calmly as he could. ‘Am I?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she cackled. ‘It’s not the crystal ball. It’s common knowledge. Now, tell me, sonny,’ she sat down, the light of the candle eerie on her wrinkled features, the bags under her eyes like great grey sacks. ‘You’re no more from the Graphic than Nell Sanger is a raving beauty. So what are you? Copper?’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Oh, not me, sunshine,’ she leaned back, her hands gnarled on the tablecloth, her talons outstretched. ‘I am a receptacle, that’s all I am, a tube, a conductor of the vital force between the world of man and the world of spirit. I am the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter – that makes me special, you know.’

  ‘It does?’

  She leaned forward. ‘You ask a bloody lot of questions, don’t you?’ she rasped. ‘See that?’ She held up a withered arm, criss-crossed with ancient scars and purple weals. ‘That’s the mark of a survivor, that is. The blokes what done that to me also did for my father and mother. Killed ’em both back in the winter of ’31. Drove us out, they did. Called us witches and worse.’ Her eyes flickered and for a while she was away, over some windswept moor, through the mists of time, only a short step from hell. ‘They hanged him, you know, my old man. From a wild rowan tree. I can still hear the sound – the creaking of the taut rope. And her, my old mum. I can still hear the swish of her dress in the wild weather.’ She was back with him suddenly, fiercely. ‘And you want me to help you catch a killer.’

  ‘I don’t believe in tea leaves,’ he told her.

  ‘Don’t you now? Well, then, give me your hand on it.’ Her own snaked out. He hesitated, then she caught his palm and twisted it into the light. ‘There are seven types of hand,’ she crooned, stroking his.

  ‘Don’t!’ he withdrew it suddenly.

  ‘Afraid?’ she snapped.

  ‘
Ticklish.’ He rubbed it on his trousers.

  She snatched it back. ‘Hmph!’ she snorted, throwing it away, ‘as I thought. The Elementary, clumsy and coarse, indicating the lowest type of mentality.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He’d never looked at his hand quite in that way before. It would be quite depressing if he weren’t suicidal already.

  ‘I, of course,’ she twirled her jewelled fingers by the candlelight, ‘have the Psychic hand, unworldly, supernatural. Still,’ she sniffed and took his again, ‘we must do what we can. Ah,’ she bent his thumb painfully at right angles, ‘you’ve a powerful phalange, sonny,’ she said.

  ‘I thought we were talking about hands,’ Lestrade said, but she ignored him.

  ‘Strong will,’ she diagnosed. ‘Ah, yes. Yes,’ she tapped the base of his thumb, ‘this is your problem, sonny. This is why you haven’t caught the bastard yet. A feeble second phalange – no logic. Quite plump, though.’ She wagged her own finger at him, grinning through her gritted teeth. ‘The Mount of Venus, you naughty man. We’ll draw a veil over your powerful, thrusting sexual urges, shall we?’

  ‘I wish you would,’ Lestrade said, hoping that the dim light spared his blushes.

  ‘Then, of course,’ she peered closer at his wrist, ‘the Line of Lascivia is marked.’

  ‘Is this helping?’

  She sighed patiently. ‘I am the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,’ she said. ‘Trust me, sonny. I’ve got to know what you are before I can divine whether you’re a match for the monster that stalks Sanger’s circus.’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘One thing at a time,’ she lisped. ‘Yes,’ she shook her head, ‘your Line of Head is irregular, broken.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That you have the intellectual bite of a cucumber,’ she said, without taking her eyes off his hand. ‘Mind you, there’s an offshoot line up to your Mount of Jupiter – ambitious little bugger on the quiet, aren’t you?’