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  Lestrade and the Gift of the Prince

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Nine

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Lestrade and the Gift of the Prince | The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Nine

  M. J. TROW

  Caveat lectorum – Let the Reader Beware! | From Police Constable to Political Correctness

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  ❖ The Sawdust Ring ❖ | 1879 | ‘In the circus, nothing is what it seems ...’

  ❖ The Sign of Nine ❖ | 1886 | ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’ | ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’ | ‘Hello, hello, hello ...’

  ❖ The Ripper ❖ | 1888 | ‘Oh, have you seen the Devil ...?’

  ❖ The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade ❖ | 1891 | ‘Such as these shall never look | At this pretty picture book.’

  ❖ The Brigade ❖ | 1893 | ‘And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade.’

  ❖ The Dead Man’s Hand ❖ | 1895 | ‘There was no 9.38 from Penge.’

  ❖ The Guardian Angel ❖ | 1897/8 | ‘And a naughty boy was he ...’

  ❖ The Hallowed House ❖ | 1901 | ‘Quid omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur.’*

  ❖ The Gift of the Prince ❖ | 1903 | ‘Lang may your lum reek, Lestrade.’

  ❖ The Mirror of Murder ❖ | 1906 | Beyond the mountains of the moon ...

  ❖ The Deadly Game ❖ | 1908 | ‘The Games a-foot’

  ❖ The Leviathan ❖ | 1910 | ‘To our wives and sweethearts – may they never meet!’

  ❖ The Brother of Death ❖

  ❖ Lestrade and the Devil’s Own ❖

  ❖ The Magpie ❖ | 1920 | ‘There was a Front; | But damn’d if we knew where!’

  ❖ Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus ❖ | 1922 | ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

  ❖ Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra ❖ | 1935 | ‘So, Sholto, let me and you be wipers | Of scores out with all men, especially pipers!’

  ❖ The World of Inspector Lestrade ❖

  Lestrade and the Gift of the Prince

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Nine

  M. J. TROW

  Copyright © 2021 M. J. Trow.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-913762-86-5

  First published in 1991.

  This edition published in 2021 by BLKDOG Publishing.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover art by Andy Johnson.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  www.blkdogpublishing.com

  Caveat lectorum – Let the Reader Beware!

  From Police Constable to Political Correctness

  In 1891, the year in which The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade is set, Thomas Hardy had his Tess of the d’Urbervilles published in serial form by The Graphic, one of the country’s leading magazines. The editor was not happy with certain scenes which he felt would upset Hardy’s genteel readership. In one instance, when Angel Clare has to carry Tess over a minor flood, Hardy had to write in a handy wheelbarrow so that Tess and Angel had no bodily contact. When it came to Tess’s seduction by the dastardly Alec d’Urberville, the pair go into a wood and a series of dots follows ...

  Even with all this whitewash, reviews of the revised version were mixed and it was many years before some of the Grundyisms* were restored to their original glory and Tess of the D’Urbervilles was established as another masterpiece of one of Britain’s greatest writers.

  In the Lestrade series, I hope I have not offended anyone, but the job of an historical novelist – and of an historian – is to try to portray an accurate impression of the time, not some politically correct Utopian idyll which is not only fake news, but which bores the pants off the reader. Politicians routinely apologize for the past – historical novelists don’t. we have different views from the Victorians, who in turn had different views from the Jacobeans, who in turn ... you get the point. When the eighteenth century playwright/actor Colley Cibber rewrote Shakespeare – for example, giving King Lear a happy ending! – no doubt he thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t.

  That said, I don’t think that a reader today will find much that is offensive in the Lestrade series. So, read on and enjoy.

  *From Mrs Grundy, a priggish character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough, 1798.

  Reviews for the Lestrade Series

  ‘THIS IS LESTRADE THE intelligent, the intuitive bright light of law and order in a wicked Victorian world.’

  Punch

  ‘A wickedly funny treat.’

  Stephen Walsh, Oxford Times

  ‘... M.J. Trow proves emphatically that crime and comedy can mix.’

  Val McDermid Manchester Evening News

  ‘Good enough to make a grown man weep.’

  Yorkshire Post

  ‘Splendidly shaken cocktail of Victorian fact and fiction ... Witty, literate and great fun.’

  Marcel Berlins, The Times

  ‘One of the funniest in a very funny series ... lovely lunacy.’

  Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph

  ‘High-spirited period rag with the Yard’s despised flatfoot wiping the great Sherlock’s eye ...’

  Christopher Wordsworth, Observer

  ‘Barrowloads of nineteenth century history ... If you like your humour chirpy, you’ll find this sings.’

  H.R.F Keating, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Richly humorous, Lestrade has quickly become one of fiction’s favourite detectives.’

  Yorkshire Evening Post

  ‘No one, no one at all, writes like Trow.’

  Yorkshire Post

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  ‘And he that will this health deny,

  Down among the dead men let him lie.’

  John Dyer

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  he rain set in early that night. She listened to it throbbing on the tear-streaked windows at Windsor, splashing in the gutters that had killed him. But she would not accept that. She would never accept that. It was Bertie. Bertie the disappointment. All his appalling peccadilloes. At the Curragh. At Cambridge. It was that that had broken her darling’s heart.

  ‘Indeed, Mama,’ the reprobate had said, ‘I will be all I can to you.’ And she had kissed him.

  But that was earlier. In the Red Room where Phipps and Leiningen had half carried her. Her liebchen had only just gone and a stunned Household whispered in corners of the passing of Albert the Good. Now, in the early hours with only the December rain for company, she had had time to think. She forced herself to stand, away from the sofa, alone. She looked
at Dr Watson’s draught of brandy-and-something-to-make-her-sleep. She could not sleep. She would not sleep. She was a widow. And a mother. And a Queen. And she found herself wishing, suddenly, that she was none of these. That one of her ghastly old uncles had sired a boy who would have ruled in her place. And that she and Albert had been allowed to skip away, hand in hand, across the primroses at Osborne or the heather at Balmoral . . . Balmoral. And the scent of the Highlands was on the air.

  ‘Ma’am.’ There was a guttural cough behind her and she turned to see the kilted nether limbs of her dead husband’s ghillie, standing like a Douglas fir in the doorway, with the light at his back.

  ‘Brown,’ she said, without emotion.

  ‘I came as soon as I heard he was ill,’ he growled, sweeping off the tam-o’-shanter with its familiar bunch of pheasant feathers. ‘Ye have ma condolences, Ma’am.’

  She crossed the room to him. And they stood, the Queen and her servant for a long time, listening to the rain.

  ‘Hold me, John,’ she whispered.

  He reached out a tweedy arm and took her gently by the shoulder, cradling the glossy head and placing it against his chest. She looked up at the tangle of beard, for all the world like the chevaux de frise those awful Americans used in their entrenchments, and breathed in the smell of the Highlands – the waft of the heather, the scent of the glens, the hint of the haggis.

  ‘Oh, John, John,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know.’ He bent to kiss her parting, grateful she was not wearing her tiara. Many was the mouthful of rubies he’d had in the months past. ‘I want you to remember,’ he said, in the broad Scots he used just for her, ‘that yon Prince’s death changes nothing. I love you now as I always have and always will.’

  She looked up again, her eyes swimming with tears. ‘Can a woman love two men?’ she asked him. But John Brown’s experience did not run to such things. He had once read of the possibility, in a naughty bookshop in London, but he was a Highlander. He shared his bed with no one. Except that sheep that time.

  ‘Nay, lassie,’ he told her, ‘dinna let his going cloud your judgement.’

  She sniffed with the ferocity of an Ironclad and broke free of him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But . . .’ and the voice was hard again, in command, ‘there must be no hint of . . . us . . . to the outside world. The great and small vulgar, as Mr Peel used to say, must never know.’

  ‘So your journal, Vicky . . .’

  ‘Will contain no word of it. I will, I must, be the dutiful wife. And the dutiful widow.’

  He nodded, chewing his heavy moustache.

  ‘There will be a time,’ she said, ‘when I must observe the niceties.’ She turned to the window again and saw through its tears and her own the outline of the trees in the park, tossing their heads in the winter gale that roared along the Royal Mile and the darker speck in the distance that was her bronzed grandfather, George III, riding to nowhere for ever.

  ‘Full mourning is for one year,’ she said. ‘Black, like the colours of the night. I shall wear it for the rest of my life.’ She whipped round, as though sensing the sneer at her back. ‘And I’ll have no talk of hypocrisy, John Brown.’ Her eyes flashed with the fire that had reduced court officials and visiting dignitaries. God help Mr Gladstone if the unthinkable should happen and he should become Prime Minister.

  ‘Indeed not, Ma’am,’ Brown assured her with the old look she knew so well. ‘Nothing is further from my thoughts.’

  ‘I did love him . . . once. But he changed. He became maudlin. Self-absorbed. I can’t. . . We can’t love someone like that. And besides, his jokes were excruciating. He had no sense of humour. And you know, Brown,’ she was Queen again, ‘I do like a laugh.’

  ‘Indeed, Ma’am,’ and as the careful positioner of countless banana skins on the polished floors of Balmoral, he knew that only too well. ‘So you dinna want to see what a Scotsman wears under his kilt?’

  She looked at the strong face, the powerful legs. Yes, dammit, she would use the term ‘legs’ again. It was only Albert, with his Teutonic obsessions, who insisted on the proprieties. And such euphemisms were so horribly middle-class, weren’t they? Nether limbs, indeed. She shuddered, wrestling inwardly with the sensuality which, for all her nine confinements, smouldered beneath her bombazine surface.

  ‘Not tonight, John,’ she said softly. ‘It . . . wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘Well, I must be awa’. Oh, tell me . . .’ He paused in mid-bow. ‘Ma tincture. The one I sent by post-boy. It did no good, then?’

  Victoria, by the grace of God, blinked. ‘Oh, no,’ she said suddenly recalling it, ‘he was too far gone.’

  ‘Did . . . er . . . the doctors mention it?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I think Dr Watson would have tried anything towards the . . . end. But he did think the Prince looked a little brighter some days ago. That’s when he administered your tincture. Alas, thereafter, dear Albert failed. What was it, by the way?’

  ‘Ma’am?’ Brown was nearly at the door.

  ‘Your tincture. What was it?’

  ‘Oh, a medicinal compound, Ma’am. Known only to a wee few. A dram or two o’ that would be likely to get Queen Anne back on her feet. In some cases.’

  She nodded. ‘We thank you, John,’ she said. ‘When next we are in Balmoral . . .’ and she smiled at him.

  He winked at her and took his leave.

  HE PADDED ALONG THE silent passageway, lit fitfully by the unreliable emissions of the Windsor Gas Company. For a man so large, he moved like a cat, twisting along the corridors he knew almost as well as those at Balmoral, and he entered the room.

  Albert the Good lay in the uniform of a Field Marshal, with his Garter cloak in velvet splendour across his shoulders. Brown looked at the Prince, realizing for the first time how bald he’d become. He clicked his teeth at the gentle face, Teutonically composed, the lips blue, the cheeks grey.

  ‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘we’ll chase no more capercaillie together . . .’ He bent over the body. ‘You sanctimonious bastard!’

  He looked about him at the bedside clutter. As he’d hoped, it lay undisturbed in the hysteria and chaos of the day. He saw a small bottle, the one that said ‘A Present From The Highlands’ on it, and he snatched it up. He sniffed it gently, careful not to inhale too deeply. He drew back quickly and replaced the stopper.

  ‘Tsk, tsk, Albert laddie,’ he said, ‘I dinna know how you can drink this stuff,’ and he bent over the master again. ‘It’s a good thing the Royal Physician isnae acquainted with wood spirit, isn’t it? This stuff’ll strip wallpaper at thirty yards.’

  He turned the bottle round and smiled at the apt legend written on the label, ‘Afore Ye Go’. He tucked it into his sporran, patting it with pride in the knowledge that it was the biggest in Scotland, and left the mausoleum that was already a shrine. Tired already of southern comfort, he would go north.

  THE CLOCK TICKED WITH a deafening thud. Or so it seemed to the little boy standing before the huge desk. He faced a man of vast proportions who scowled at him through the bottoms of bottles that passed for pince-nez.

  ‘I want to make it quite clear to you, Master Lestrade,’ the huge man said, ‘that here at my Academy for the Sons of Nearly Respectable Gentlefolk, we do not tolerate such behaviour.’

  ‘No, sir,’ the little boy said, staring fixedly ahead, determined not to cry.

  ‘Your father is in the police, is he not?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  The little boy frowned. ‘No, sir, she isn’t.’

  For all his immense girth, Ranulph Poulson was an athlete of the first water when it came to child abuse and his right hand snaked out to catch the policeman’s son a nasty one around the side of the head.

  ‘Don’t be flippant with me, boy,’ the Headmaster snarled. ‘You forget I’ve seen your Latin Grammar book. It’s not very edifying and it leads me to suppose that you will never amo
unt to very much at all. How old are you?’

  ‘Seven, sir.’

  ‘Quite. And if you wish to be eight in some distant future, you will not respond to every question with what the lower orders call cheek. Wit it couldn’t possibly be.’ He paused in his own rhetoric and leaned back in the chair. ‘What I meant,’ he said, whipping out a handkerchief that appeared to have been picked up in Rotten Row and wiping his spectacles with it, ‘as you well know, Lestrade, is what does your mother do for a living?’

  ‘She is a laundress, sir,’ the little boy told him.

  Mr Poulson dropped his spectacles. ‘You mean she takes in washing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Other people’s washing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good God.’

  Now Poulson sat on the horns of a dilemma. Mrs Lestrade was a washer-woman. He could just picture her red hands and smell the suds. He shuddered at the thought of one eternal, life-long Monday and it filled him with dread. Some of his parents were bank clerks, under-underwriters, proof-readers and artificial limb manufacturers. What if they were to discover this terrible truth? On the other hand, the Lestrades’ money folded as well as anybody else’s and he did have overheads. On the other hand, it was bad enough that Lestrade’s father was a policeman. He knew it was a mistake to allow his secretary, Miss Minute, to enrol pupils on his day off. On the other hand, he had run out of hands. For a moment, he toyed with summoning her, calling her to account. ‘Come here, Miss Minute,’ he would have shouted. But he thought better of it.

  ‘Well, Lestrade,’ he said, when the shock had subsided a little, ‘when a man of the eminence of Mr Mountfitchett tells you to stand for the Queen and to put your hand down your trousers, what do you do?’

  Silence.

  ‘What you do not do, young Lestrade, is to take him literally. He clearly meant,’ and he stood up to emphasize the point, ‘that you place your thumbs down the outward seam of your nether garments. Not . . .’ and he blanched, ‘what you did. And in the chapel, too. Sister Chippenham fainted. And she’s had medical training.’