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  Lestrade and the Devil’s Own

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Fourteen

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Lestrade and the Devil’s Own | The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Fourteen

  M. J. TROW

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

  Miles – thanks from Sholto

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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 Devil’s Own

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Fourteen

  M. J. TROW

  Copyright © 2021 M. J. Trow.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-913762-95-7

  First published in 1996.

  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

  Miles – thanks from Sholto

  ‘Needs must

  When the Devil drives.’

  1

  ‘S

  holto Joseph Lestrade, you have been found guilty of the most abhorrent of crimes short of joining the Labour party – the foul crime of murder. You, a guardian of the people, a champion of the peace ... That you should fall so low from your position of trust is inexcusable. I doubt you have a mother living, but if she should hear of this ... Do you have anything to say why judgement of death should not be passed upon you?’

  The old man in the black cap peered through his pince-nez across the crowded court of the Bailey where the morning sunlight threw its shafts on the parchment-yellow face of the man in the dock.

  ‘I believe there’s been some mistake, My Lord.’

  ‘Indeed there has, Lestrade,’ His Lordship replied, leaning back. ‘And it was yours the day you left your fingerprints all over the bombazine of Mrs Millicent Millichip. Not only a bestial murderer, but an incompetent one. Did you learn nothing from your years at the Yard? I can forgive bestiality, Lestrade, but gross stupidity, never.’

  His Lordship straightened in his high-backed chair, the sword of justice gleaming in the sunlight over his head. ‘T
he sentence of this court is that you be taken from hence to the place from whence you came and from thence to a place of lawful execution; and that you there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that your body afterwards be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been last confined. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

  The man in the dock blinked. There was a stir in the gallery behind him. He turned his head once to see a veiled lady being helped out by a tall man with blond hair. His faithful Harry supporting his darling Fanny.

  His Lordship stood up, bellowing, ‘Take him down’ and he felt the tug of steel on his wrist as he vanished below into the bowels of the building.

  ‘Missing you already,’ muttered His Lordship. ‘Clerk of Assize? Got a spare pair of trousers there by any chance?’

  The man in the dock didn’t even pass ‘Go’ on his way to Pentonville. The matched greys clattered up the long ramp off the Caledonian Road, pulling the dark police wagon with its solitary occupant under the false portcullis and the great arch. Sir Charles Barry, fresh from his Gothic excesses in the Houses of Parliament, had erected the radial wings and Italian clocktower in 1841, when Sholto Joseph Lestrade was rather less than a twinkle in his father’s eye and his father’s bull’s-eye had been gleaming on his Pimlico beat in C Division, Metropolitan District.

  The wagon lurched to a halt in the central exercise yard and the door was unbolted and swung back. Warders whose bulk blotted out the weak December sunshine flanked the condemned man along the dark corridors, through grilles and gates without number. But for two months this, for Lestrade, had been home. He’d even stopped scratching in the rough prison grey and had come to miss the broad arrows on his shirt. This, as they locked him back in the cell with grins and sneers, was the place from whence he had come. And as he turned to the wall, he knew that just down that corridor, where the green and cream of the morning turned black in the shadows, lay the place of lawful execution His Lordship had talked about. It would have a wooden floor and in it, a trap with hinges and bolts. There would be an upright post to his right, a horizontal beam above his head. A fervent chaplain would be mumbling at his elbow and he’d feel his feet pinioned together and his arms locked behind him before they threw the white hood over his face. And Death would come to Sholto Lestrade.

  And he suddenly realized that it was his fists banging on the cold, unyielding iron of the door. His voice shouting, ‘Wait a minute! You don’t understand! I believe there’s been some mistake!’

  ‘MR LESTRADE?’ A WHISKERED face peered in through the grille of the door.

  ‘Not today, thank you.’ The condemned man hadn’t moved from his bed, but the door squealed outwards anyway. A thin man stood there, with grey, twinkling eyes and an awful tweed suit somewhere below his ginger moustaches.

  ‘I’m ... ’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Lestrade said. ‘John Ellis, the hangman. And you’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. To save you any mathematical problems, I’m a little over five feet nine and I weigh approximately twelve stone one.’

  ‘How kind,’ Ellis purred in his soft Rochdale. ‘You’re very understanding. But.’ He patted Lestrade’s hard, bug-ridden bed and sat on it himself. ‘I were just going to say I’m glad I caught you in. The fact is, we don’t use the term “hangman” these days. It has ... well ... connotations. No, think of me, if you will, as Charon, a sort of ferryman what’s going to take you to t’ other side, as it were. I’d just like a brief chat with you first. Oh, don’t worry, you’ve got a day or two yet, haven’t you? The ’Ome Secretary’s been in touch, ’as ’e? You’ll ’ave ’ad the letter? Next Tuesday. Nine o’clock all right? Shame you’ll miss Christmas, but it’s gettin’ so expensive these days, you’re probably better off. Now, I don’t want you to worry.’ He patted Lestrade’s hand. ‘I’ve been ferryin’ folks about now, as senior ferryman, you understand, for nigh on seven year; served my apprenticeship, you might say.’

  ‘Oh good.’ Lestrade found it quite difficult to smile, under the circumstances.

  ‘My first were at Warwick. Lovely place. Nice old castle by the river. Perfect drop of five feet nine. Not even a quiver of that rope.’

  ‘Get away.’

  But Ellis didn’t. He just kept on reminiscing.

  ‘Two year ago, I took Henry Thompson across. He were the most callous man I ever met. We had to wake ’im up on the morning of departure and you know what ’e said?’

  ‘No.’ Lestrade sighed. ‘But I have a curious feeling you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Aye, I am.’ Ellis nodded, producing a pipe. ‘Shag?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Thompson said, “Well, I shall be senior to Crippen in the other shop.” Fancy that! You knew Crippen, didn’t you?’

  ‘I interviewed him, yes, along with my old friend Chief Inspector Dew.’

  ‘Well, that was the first time I waited at the place, as it were, rather than walking ahead of the traveller. Less distressing. Do you know, if I’d been allowed to keep the rope, I could’ve sold it for £5 an inch.’

  ‘Bothers you, does it?’ Lestrade asked him. ‘Distressing people?’

  ‘Well, we in the removals business ’ave our sensitive side, you know. I were fair touched by poor old Seddon.’

  ‘So was Eliza Barrow,’ Lestrade commented.

  ‘No, you see.’ Ellis glanced from left to right, to make sure they were alone in the nine foot by six foot cell. ‘I shouldn’t be tellin’ you this, but I am a Royal Antediluvian.’

  ‘Really?’

  Ellis nodded, inhaling noisily on his pipe stem. ‘I was at Seddon’s trial – in fact, that’s where I first clapped eyes on you. You remember he made the sign?’

  ‘The sign?’

  ‘The Masonic sign.’ Ellis’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘I can’t be too graphic, you understand, but the judge, ’e were the Provincial Grand Master of Surrey. It’s like cuttin’ your own throat. I did my best for ’im, though – twenty-five seconds it took to take ’im over. Cool as a cucumber ’e were. Ooh, bloody ’ell, this psittacosis is giving me gyp!’ And he scratched furiously at his hand. ‘That’s bloody parrots for yer. Are you an animal lover, Mr Lestrade?’

  The condemned man shook his head.

  ‘No, only I read the judge’s comment at your trial, you know. I like to take an interest in my passengers. I’ve all the cuttings. When he said your crimes were bestial, I wondered if ... No, no, well, I didn’t think so. I mean you bein’ Church of England an’ all. But, you know what they say, there’s nowt so queer as folk. By ... is that t’ time?’ The executioner had found his watch. ‘I must fly.’ And he was at the cell door.

  ‘By the by.’ He paused once he’d thumped on it. ‘I do occasionally – just occasionally, mind – get a bit of the jitters; like yer do. What wi’ t’ neuritis an’ psittacosis an’ what yer might call stage fright. But dinna mind. Look into my eyes next Tuesday morning, Mr Lestrade and I’ll get yer across all right.’

  He beamed at the condemned man. ‘’Til Tuesday, then. Lookin’ forward to it!’ And he was gone.

  ‘TWENTY-ONE,’ LESTRADE said, resting his head on his hand.

  ‘Oh, bloody ’ell, Mr Lestrade.’ The warder threw down his paltry hand in disgust. ‘What’s that I owe you now?’

  ‘Er ... eight thousand four hundred and sixty-one pounds, one and eightpence three farthings.’

  ‘You couldn’t wait ’til after Tuesday, could you? Only I’m a bit short ... oh, bloody ’ell.’

  Lestrade smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s all right, Tom,’ he said. ‘There’s many a slip. I’m not quite ready to meet my maker yet. By the way, I’m prepared to waive the eightpence three farthings.’

  ‘Sholto!’

  Lestrade would have recognized that nasal twang anywhere and sure enough, framed in the doorway stood Ashley Congleton, muscular in his Christianity and deep in his devotions.

  ‘Chaplain
! I’m afraid I’ve nothing for the collection plate this evening.’

  ‘Ah, what doth it profit a man, et cetera, et cetera? Tom, be a good warder and bugger off, would you? I’d like a word with this sinner.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Tom scraped back his chair and jingled his way to the door. ‘Cocoa at eleven, Mr Lestrade?’

  ‘Delicious, Tom.’ Lestrade nodded. ‘Any threat of a Peek Frean?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can half-inch from the lads on D Wing.’

  ‘You’ll do me the honour of dining with me, of course?’

  ‘Mighty big of you, Mr Lestrade.’ Tom winked and he clashed and rattled his way out.

  The Reverend Congleton was built like an outside lavatory. He wedged himself into the warder’s chair, still warm from his penitential bottom. He surveyed the cards on the table. ‘Ah, the devil’s picture book,’ he said, then suddenly leaned forward. ‘Are you familiar with the rules of what our American cousins call Five Card Stud?’

  Lestrade leaned forward too. ‘Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George?’

  ‘And while I’m dealing, Sholto, put that ace of diamonds back in the pack and tell me how the merry hell you came to be in this predicament.’

  Lestrade smiled as he eased the offending card from his left cuff. ‘Where did you serve your curacy, padre?’ he asked.

  ‘Sing Sing,’ Congleton said. ‘After Harrow and Brasenose it was a rest cure, I can tell you. Ready for a spot of confession, then?’

  ‘All right,’ Lestrade said, trying not to show his total despair at the lousy hand fate and the chaplain had dealt him. ‘For days now you’ve been coming here, beating me hollow at every-game-known-to-man, and it’s sneakily been leading up to this, hasn’t it? Well, vicar, if you’re sitting comfortably ...’

  Congleton eased himself back and smiled at the three kings in his hand.

  ‘... then I’ll begin.’