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  Lestrade and the Mirror of Murder

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Ten

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Lestrade and the Mirror of Murder | The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Ten

  M. J. TROW

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

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  ❖ 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 Mirror of Murder

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Ten

  M. J. TROW

  Copyright © 2021 M. J. Trow.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-913762-88-9

  First published in 1993.

  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

  In Association with

  Huish and Episcopi

  Helping Lestrade with his Inquiries

  Prologue

  T

  he dead man lay propped on his silk pillows, his shattered head thrown back, his right hand still clutching the silver-chased pistol which had ended his life. A small, neat, dark hole had punctured his right temple and the bullet had burst its way out of the other side of his head, taking most of the skull with it.

  A photographer was crouching in one corner of the palace hall, his head buried under a black hood, trying to make the best of the poor Abyssinian light. At least his subject wasn’t moving around much. The doors crashed back and the soldiery in the smoke-filled room clicked to attention.

  ‘As you were, gentlemen,’ the poppy-eyed General with the enormous sidewhiskers put them at their ease. ‘Well, well, well.’ He tugged off his forage cap and knelt beside the body on the dais. ‘The Emperor Theodore, as I live and breathe. Staveley.’

  A slim man of indeterminate years was at his elbow, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Anybody see this?’

  ‘The 4th Foot got here first. I have the report of Sergeant Pepper, if it’s of any interest.’

  The General looked at his second-in-command with contempt. At least the man had his boots on this morning and
hadn’t stormed the gates of Magdala in his carpet slippers, but that cravat . . . and that wideawake . . . Had he no dress sense at all? All in all, bad form in front of the men. Deuc’d bad form.

  ‘Out there,’ said the General softly, ‘I have thirteen thousand fighting troops, minus those we lost on the Arogee plateau and in today’s assault. I have fourteen thousand, five hundred camp followers – at least eight of them, incidentally, have accused you of fathering their children, but we’ll deal with that later. I have a clutch of scientists, thirty-six thousand pack animals and forty-four elephants. We have hired more than two hundred ships including seventy-five steamers. All of which has cost the British taxpayer in this Year of Our Lord 1868 alone, the appalling sum of two million pounds. “If it’s of interest”, you say. “If it’s of interest”! Everything about this campaign is of interest to somebody, Staveley – politicians, military historians in the years to come, apologists of Empire; not to mention the families of those poor blighters who won’t be going home. What does this man Pepper say?’

  Staveley knew a dressing-down when he heard it. He stood up as his General did, ‘Verbatim, sir?’

  ‘Of course . . . No, wait a minute. Did you say Pepper of the 4th Foot?’

  Staveley had.

  ‘The same Pepper who brought that despatch last week from Charlie Speedy?’

  ‘The same, sir.’

  The General blanched. ‘No. I was sitting there nearly an hour. The gist, man. Give me the gist.’

  ‘The gist, sir, is what you see before you. We must assume that the Emperor Theodore III took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’

  ‘Hmm,’ the General gazed on the pallid face on the pillow. ‘Wife died. Ruler of three hundred and ninety-five thousand square miles of sand. Hot as buggery on the Red Sea Coast and wet as Lord Aberdeen for six months of the year. Then of course his people are Christians, Mohammadans, pagans and Jews and I don’t even want to think about the admixture of races.’

  ‘His people deserted him in the end, Pepper says,’ Staveley commented.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ the General unhooked his water-canteen and took a swig. His eyes swam and his throat locked. ‘Apparently, our Lord suffered a man from Abyssinia to carry the cross.’ He marched to the window and gazed down to see the men of the 4th Foot rounding up disarmed warriors and herding them into the square. ‘Well, I don’t suffer Abyssinians at all. Just imagine one of these fellows with their tightly braided hair walking down the Strand of a Sunday afternoon. God, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Where’s Charlie Speedy?’

  ‘Sir?’ Staveley frowned.

  ‘Speedy. Captain Speedy. Where is he?’

  ‘Er . . . General Napier,’ a muffled voice broke in.

  ‘Who said that?’ Napier whirled around.

  ‘I did,’ the photographer’s tousled head appeared from the black hood, ‘Charles Tenterden, sir. London Illustrated News.’

  ‘Ah yes. Look, I’ve seen the work of that Matthew Brady chappie in America – lines of dead fellows at Chickamauga and so on. Not much of a war, the American Civil, but a deuc’d good collection of photographs. You’ll have to go some to beat him, you know.’

  ‘I’m not actually a photographer, General, I’m a journalist.’

  ‘What? Some damned scribbler?’

  Staveley crossed the darkening hall from a whispered conversation at the door. ‘No one has seen Captain Speedy since last night, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I saw him then,’ Tenterden said, ‘at my campfire on the Arogee. He was helping me with an article for the News.’

  Napier raised an eyebrow. ‘An Intelligence Officer talking to a newspaperman? Deuc’d unprofessional. I hope he didn’t divulge any secrets.’

  ‘You know Charlie,’ Tenterden said, ‘the soul of discretion. As far as secrets go, I might as well have talked to the regimental goat. But he was going into the citadel.’

  ‘When?’ Napier and Staveley chorused.

  ‘Last night,’ Tenterden said, ‘directly after he left me. We all knew the assault was planned for this morning. He said he had one or two things to do.’

  Napier and Staveley exchanged glances. Then the General called his Number Two aside. ‘“One or two things to do”?’ he whispered.

  ‘You didn’t . . .’ Staveley frowned.

  ‘Not my command,’ Napier ground his teeth. ‘What was he about?’

  ‘You know Speedy, sir. Always a bit of a rogue male.’

  ‘Loyal though.’

  ‘To the core. But a maverick.’

  ‘Trustworthy.’

  ‘Through and through. But a loner.’

  ‘What was he about? Always whistling that same damned tune.’ Napier hooked his sword up to his belt. ‘Well, well, he’ll turn up. After all, you can’t miss an Englishman who stands six foot five in his stockinged feet, can you?’

  ‘Most of these Abyssinian chappies could, I’m very glad to say,’ Staveley had found the bullet-hole in the brim of his wideawake. ‘What’ll we do with this place, sir?’

  ‘Magdala?’ Napier looked around him at the sumptuous fittings, the damask, the gold, the silver. ‘Burn it,’ he said, ‘I’ve got despatches to write. You wouldn’t care to help me with a few of the long words, Tenterden?’

  Another enormous pair of sidewhiskers. Older. Greyer. Four thousand miles away. Mr Poulson had come a long way since his old man had a barrow in the Old Kent Road. Not that his brass shingle made any mention of that. No, his curriculum vitae spoke of Oxford and the Sorbonne, of Bologna and other famous Spanish centres of learning. And here he was on that wet April afternoon, seated in the study of his Academy for the Sons of Nearly Respectable Gentlefolk on windswept Blackheath, his formidable lips pursed behind two index fingers, both leather-stalled from years of inflicting child abuse.

  And a most abused child stood before him, his badly polished boots squarely on the rather threadbare carpet where he was destined to remain, metaphorically, for the rest of his life.

  ‘Sholto Joseph Lestrade,’ the great man sighed, ‘I do believe you have managed to find the end of my tether.’

  The boy did not flinch, although the thought of Mr Poulson tied to a wall in some stable did appeal in a childishly sadistic way.

  ‘How old are you now? Eighteen? Nineteen?’

  ‘I was fourteen last January, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ Poulson’s rugged eyebrows rose approvingly. ‘Time to make your way in the world.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re the one whose father is a . . .’ and he had to force his lips to it, ‘. . . a policeman, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Lestrade stood an inch taller.

  ‘And doesn’t your mother take in washing? Other people’s, I mean?’

  The boy sank again. ‘She . . . did sir. She’s dead now.’

  Poulson was unmoved. ‘Yes, well, these things are sent to try us, Lestrade. Let’s leave the tear-jerkers to Mr Dickens, shall we? What of this?’ He suddenly thwacked a short rattan cane down on an exercise book.

  ‘It’s an exercise book, sir,’ the boy told him.

  Poulson sat back in his chair. ‘Such heights of levity may endear you to the Lower Fourth, Lestrade, but they do not impress me. Whose book is it?’

  ‘Mine, sir,’ the lad confessed.

  ‘And to what subject does it pertain?’

  ‘History, sir.’

  ‘Quite. Quite. Very astute, Lestrade. It must be these letters H-I-S-T-O-R-Y on the front that gave you the clue. For there is nothing else I fear within its covers that would otherwise lead you to that answer. I had Professor Taylor in here yesterday, Lestrade. Standing . . . no . . . kneeling where you are now. The man is forty-six, Lestrade, I don’t mind betraying a confidence. He is forty-six and he was sobbing. Do you know why, Lestrade?’

  ‘Er . . . is it because Mr Gladstone has become Prime Minister, sir?’

  The rattan cane bit the blotting paper on Poulson’s desk and the dust jum
ped.

  ‘No, Lestrade. It is because Mr Taylor cannot stand one more day of you.’ He paused to let his blood pressure subside. ‘Then there was the unfortunate affair of the Nativity Play.’

  Lestrade frowned. ‘That was five years ago, sir.’

  ‘Do not presume to lecture me on the passage of time, sir. Were you or were you not cast by the late Mr Pritchard in the role of innkeeper?’

  Lestrade knew what was coming, ‘I was, sir,’ he sighed.

  ‘And what was the one line you had to utter?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘The one line, Lestrade?’ Poulson fumed.

  ‘It was . . . er . . . “No, I’m sorry, traveller, the inn is full, what with the census and all, but I’ve got this stable at the back”.’

  ‘Precisely. And what did you say?’

  Lestrade muttered something.

  ‘What?’ Poulson roared, his sidewhiskers lifting in the draught. ‘Project, now, damn you! Did Mr Pritchard teach you nothing?’

  ‘I said “Yes, of course, there’s plenty of room. Business is surprisingly slack considering it’s census time”.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Poulson nodded, ‘thereby throwing the whole production into the utmost confusion. Mary burst into tears. Miss Raverat, the prompter, had one of her turns . . .’

  ‘You can’t blame me for the donkey, sir . . .’ Lestrade said.

  ‘How dare you interrupt me when I’m lambasting you, Lestrade? The unfortunate beast was panicked by the screaming of Miss Raverat, which, as I have already established, was entirely due to you. That was an extremely expensive organ – and as for the stains on the robes of the Mayor of Blackheath, well . . .’

  ‘I said I was sorry, sir.’

  ‘Indeed you did,’ Poulson had subsided a little, ‘but not, I vowed then, as sorry as you were going to be. Then of course there was the tragic affair of the school cat.’

  ‘I didn’t see it, sir.’

  ‘So you said,’ Poulson nodded, ‘after each gratifying swish of the cane. But I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.’