Lestrade and the Sign of Nine
Lestrade and the Sign of Nine
The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Two
Table of Contents
Title Page
Lestrade and the Sign of Nine | The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Two
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.’
❖ 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 Sign of Nine
The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Two
M. J. TROW
Copyright © 2020 M. J. Trow.
ISBN 978-1-913762-57-5
First published in 1992.
This edition published in 2020 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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T
he gentleman with the mournful face and obsolete Dundrearies wandered through his own foundations for the last time. He kicked, in the melancholy way that architects do, the footings of the drains that would have led, in another, less practical world, from those urinals where the illustrious of the world of opera would have relieved themselves. Don Giovanni peeing hand in hand with Die Fledermaus.
Feet below him, where Ancient Britons had thrown all manner of things into the London clay, two workmen hacked at the grey, unyielding slime with pick and shovel. Sweat ran from their leather caps and soaked the scarves tied roughly around their necks.
‘’Ow did you get on wiv ’Egel, then, Clarence?’ the older man asked, rolling up his drooping sleeves.
‘All right, Arfur,’ his mate said, grunting as the pick bounced on a particularly recalcitrant boulder. The sparks flew upward. ‘I particularly liked his concept of Being.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well,’ Clarence paused, inverting the pick and resting on its head as generations of construc
tion workers had done since Time Immemorial, ‘Being and the idea are identical. The idea, y’see, contains of itself the capacity for developin’ into all the determinin’ attributes of being, into all that makes Being Being.’
‘Wiv you so far,’ Arfur thrust home a shovel.
‘O’ course,’ Clarence wiped the sweat from his mouth, ‘Being is at first indeterminate, wivout properties or qualities. It passes out o’ this condition and into uvverness, its negation, you might say, its opposite.’
‘So,’ Arfur took up the man’s drive, ‘then, this negation, as ’Egel rightly calls it, becomes the principle of a continuous series of ’igher and successive affirmations. Am I right or am I right?’
‘You ain’t wrong, squire,’ Clarence assured him, easing himself down on an upturned bucket. ‘Vus, pure light is the same as darkness and is at first invisible, but after it ’as passed into darkness, it returns to itself, takes on colour and vus becomes visible. I’m not bein’ too didactic ’ere, am I?’
‘Not in the slightest, Clarence.’ Arfur perched himself on a protruding rock. ‘After all, when all’s said and done, everythin’ must ’ave an opposite or contradictory – were it not so, nuffink could come into existence.’
‘Quite. But on the uvver ’and, take panfeism . . .’
A whistle shattered the morning.
Arfur scanned the skyline of the Strand in search of a clock. ‘Not tea break yet, is it, Clarence?’
‘It is not, Arfur. ’Ello – that mournful bloke wiv the obsolete Dundrearies looks as though ’e wants a word.’
‘We should always listen to the bourgeoisie, Clarence. At least for the time being.’
‘In what sense are you usin’ the term being there, then Arfur?’
‘Gather round, you men!’ the mournful bloke took a central position on a pile of bricks. ‘Good morning, men.’
There were a few grumbles in return. A handful of the brown, sweat-soaked veterans took off their caps under the sun. Arfur and Clarence did likewise.
‘I am Norman Shaw,’ the mournful bloke told them, ‘the Architect of this magnificent edifice on the foundations of which you are now actively engaged.’
‘Got a good articulacy, ain’t ’e, Arfur?’ Clarence observed from the corner of his mouth.
‘Brilliant, Clarence.’
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, men,’ Shaw went on.
The tapping of a hammer from near the river stopped.
‘There, I said ’e looked mournful,’ Clarence whispered.
‘Just as well,’ Arfur observed, ‘I was beginnin’ to fink ’e always looked like that.’
‘I received confirmation this morning that this building is not to be used as an Opera House after all.’
There were boos and cries of ‘Shame!’
‘Oh dear,’ muttered Arfur, ‘there goes Rigoletto out the winder.’
‘Bleedin’ disgustin’,’ Clarence nodded.
‘But fear not,’ Shaw continued, ‘your jobs are not in jeopardy. This building ... ’ and he turned away from them for a moment to compose himself. ‘This building is to be handed over to the Metropolitan Police as their new Headquarters.’
There was a stunned silence.
‘Stone me,’ breathed Arfur, ‘the unfinkin’ lackeys of a bourgeois, Imperialist State.’
‘As I live and breave,’ Clarence agreed.
‘Well, that’s all chaps,’ Shaw fought back the tears. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’
Another silence.
Arfur broke it in the time-honoured way. ‘Never mind, sir. Free cheers for Mr Shaw, lads. ’Ip-’ip!’
‘’Ooray,’ the workforce chorused.
‘’Ip-’ip!’
‘’Ooray.’
‘’Ip-’ip!’
‘’Ooray.’
‘Men, men,’ Shaw held up a carefully manicured architect’s hand, ‘I am more touched than I can say. You are white men all.’
‘There is that as consolation,’ Clarence took up his pick again.
‘What’s that, ol’ son?’
‘We are white men. ’Uddled masses, yes. Downtrodden minions of the lumpenproletariat, but at least we ain’t black.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ Arfur observed.
‘’Ere, did you know?’ Clarence’s pick bounced off the outcrop again, ‘did you know that them there stones for the foundations ’ave come from Dartmoor? Where some poor wronged individual what ’as ’ad the misfortune to be born among the People of the Abyss is, even as we speak, spendin’ ’is daylight hours crackin’ rocks for ’Er Majesty the Queen?’
‘Well, there you ’ave it, Clarence.’
‘I do?’
‘You do. You do realize that your namesake, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, will, when ’e comes of age, inherit the biggest and most corrupt Empire the world ’as ever known, don’t you?’
‘It ’ad occurred to me, Arfur. Let’s not be small-minded. That’s the politics of envy, that is. Besides, this is Gladstone’s England, you know.’
‘Sadly, Clarence, I am well aware whose England it is. ’Owever, the time is coming.’
‘Ah yes, the Millennium of the People. When’s the Revolution planned for again?’
‘February the sixth of next year. Can you make it?’
‘I’ll ’ave to consult my calendar . . . oh, bleedin’ ’ell’
Clarence froze in mid swing.
Thinking that some new point of the dialectic had occurred to his young friend, Arfur waited, his shovel loaded with the greasy grey of London’s river. Then he saw what Clarence had seen and dropped the lot. The younger man’s pick had hacked into what once was a woman. Now it was a torso, a headless, legless, armless thing lying in the London clay. The acidity of the ground had preserved it perfectly and the breasts still had something of the pertness of life.
‘Lends a ’ole new meanin’ to the body politic, don’t it, Arfur?’ Clarence whispered.
‘It bleedin’ well does, son. Get that architect bloke over ‘ere, will you? Should be an hour or two’s rest in this.’
There was not, on the fact of it, a lot happening that February. Policemen all over the Metropolis faced the rather daunting task of executing the Act of the 49th Victoria, viz and to wit that all dogs wandering in the region of the capital should be muzzled. That probably had something to do with the fact that a fox had been killed in Marylebone High Street. Mr Terriss was wowing them at the Adelphi and our brave boys in Burma were complaining, with some justification, that their bayonets were bending on contact with Burmese bandits rather than going straight through the little yellow bastards. There were red faces at Enfield where they made the things. Then the snow came . . .
They crept out from between the black buildings crowned with white, the half-starving People of the Abyss. But there were no women in this crowd, no children. Just ragged lines of ragged men, their faces blue and pinched above their knotted scarves, their eyes dark hollows under their beaver hats. Their hobnails crunched on the unbroken snow and their breath snaked out on the crisp air.
No one saw them at first, certainly not the occupants of the hansom parked in Hanover Square. The cabbie leaned against his hack, drawing on the roll of darkest shag he had spent the last half an hour creating. In the relative snug of the vehicle two men sat swathed in plaid blankets, one of them sipping now and then from a flask.
‘Deuc’d nippy this afternoon, Holmes,’ the ruddier of the two noted, tapping on the frosted window.
‘February the eighth, Watson.’ His companion had no need of a calendar to tell him. ‘Minus two.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder. Cocoa?’
The taller man rejected the offer with a quiver of his aquiline nostrils.
‘Do you think he’ll be much longer?’
‘Patience, Watson,’ Holmes smiled with the serenity of an anaconda, ‘is a virtue known only to a select few – like myself, for instance.’
‘I’m not cut out for surveillance,’
the good doctor observed. ‘Haven’t the bottom for it.’
‘Nor the top, I fear, Watson.’ Holmes tapped his cranium without taking his eyes off the house in the far corner of the square.
‘As you say, Holmes, as you say. What do you think he’s doing?’
‘The Count?’ Holmes allowed himself a hollow chuckle. It was a rare moment in their relationship. ‘Mark my words, Watson, in . . .’ he fished out his silver hunter from the folds of his Ulster, ‘. . . a little under three minutes, a gnarled old woman will emerge from that house. She will have a severely pronounced limp, of the left leg, I fancy a spinal curvature which would put my Meerschaum to shame and at least two molars will be missing, presumed lost.’
‘Good heavens, Holmes, you never cease to astound me.’
‘I know, Watson.’
‘Who will she be, Holmes, this vile harpy of the night?’
‘This “vile harpy of the night”, Watson,’ Holmes sighed, ‘will be – and indeed is – Count Ortega Y Gomez himself.’
‘The swine!’ Watson bounced the flask on his blanketed thigh so that the cocoa drenched them both. ‘Oh, sorry, Holmes! The swine! So that’s what he’s doing in there – changing.’
‘Not uniquely, old fellow,’ Holmes mechanically sponged himself down. ‘He’ll be forging the government papers we spoke of.’
‘Ah, he has the testimonials!’ All was becoming clear to Watson now.
‘Of course. You only have to look at him to know that.’
There was a tap on the window and a grimy cabbie thrust his head in, wreathing Watson momentarily in smoke, ‘Er . . . gents, the meter’s runnin’ you know.’
Watson batted aside the smog. ‘You’re being handsomely paid, fellow,’ he reminded him.
‘Not well enough for them, I ain’t.’
Watson followed the driver’s jerking thumb. Dark-coated dark-eyed men were crossing the square, like a ragged battalion on the march, dressing from right to left, cudgels at the slope.
‘Er . . . Holmes,’ the doctor muttered.
‘Shut the window, there’s a good fellow.’ Holmes was intent on the house in the opposite direction.