Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus Read online

  Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Sixteen

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus | The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Sixteen

  M. J. TROW

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

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  ❖ 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 Kiss of Horus

  The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Sixteen

  M. J. TROW

  Copyright © 2021 M. J. Trow.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-913762-98-8

  First published in 1995.

  This edition published in 2022 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

  To Tali, for his patience.

  One

  Thebes, the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom

  T

  he boy-king sat in the shadows, his almond eyes shining in the guttering candle-flames. His wife sat beside him, as patient as she was ever likely to be with her husband, her stepbrother, the Living Image of Amun, ruler of Upper Egyptian Heliopolis. She sighed, patted the clammy hand idling in his lap and half turned in the darkness.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to him, stroking the smooth expanse of his shaven head, ‘I’m not going far – and Ay will be here soon.’

  ‘Horemheb,’ he said, his voice not as deep as hers. She saw the full lips tremble, the gold shimmer in the pierced ears. She looked across to where the statuette of the great general sat, cross-legged, grinning with his monkey-jowls at the royal couple, his breasts hanging over his paunch.

  ‘It’s only a piece of limestone,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ll have it taken away.’

  ‘No.’ her husband said quickly. ‘No. What if he should find out? It was a present . . .’

  ‘What if the moon is made of sycamore figs?’ She shook his gold-ringed fingers and let the hand fall. Then she’d tired of the game, of humouring him, and she stood up straight, towering over the intercess
or between man and the gods. ‘Horemheb is a soldier,’ she said. Her voice was as cold as his limestone likeness. ‘A servant. Why don’t you kick him as you would a dog?’

  The boy-king whimpered. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I forgot. The last time you kicked your dog, it bit you, didn’t it? Well,’ the disgust on her painted face said it all. ‘You win some, you lose some. Or in your case, little Tutankhaten, you just lose some.’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ He was on his feet, shouting at her with that pubescent squeak that always escaped his lips when he’d lost his temper. She looked at him in the acrid sulphur smoke where the great hawk-headed god loomed at his shoulder, gleaming in basalt and gold. He looked younger than his sixteen years. She wondered idly if his testicles had dropped yet. Certainly she hadn’t seen them lately, but she really had little desire to. When you’ve got eight Nubian slaves to carry you everywhere and every one of them is hung like a donkey, what lies under the Pharaoh’s thingy is more or less by the by. Still, she thought it was a bit forward of the royal embalmer to comment in her presence the other day that the only time he’d see the king erect is when he taped his organ of Ankh to his navel. She’d giggled at the time, but with hindsight, she must have the man’s tongue cut out.

  She crossed the cold of the marble hall to where Ay, her husband’s man, stood in the shadows. He moved like a cat and only his shorn head was visible as she reached him.

  ‘Majesty,’ he muttered with a voice like the gravel of the Nile. ‘How is he tonight?’

  ‘One of his turns,’ she hissed. ‘He’s panicked for days about the Hittites and the Mittani and whatever the hell’s happening below the Fourth Cataract. Now it’s Horemheb.’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ Ay nodded.

  ‘Speak to him, Ay.’ The queen held the man’s shoulder. ‘You’re his most trusted adviser. He’ll listen to you . . . Gods, I can remember the time he wouldn’t let a slave wipe his bottom unless he checked with you first.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ay smiled. ‘The good old days. By the way, great and magnificent Ankhasenamun, are you available tonight?’

  She clicked her tongue and shook her head. ‘You dirty old adviser,’ she said. ‘A man of your age should know better. Kindly,’ she lifted his fingers, ‘take your hand off my breasts. You’ll just have to wait.’ And she caught him a nasty one in the groin with her fly-whisk as she slid into the dark.

  Ay sank to his knees in the royal presence. Marvellous what a bit of the old genuflection did for the lad’s ego. Tutankhamun, Lord of the Nile, Ruler of the Delta, Master of Upper and Lower Egypt still stood, up to his knees in cushions, still quivering with rage at the exit of his queen and in his fear at the likeness of his general.

  ‘She!’ he screeched, pointing into the blackness. ‘She called me Tutankhaten, Ay. That’s heresy.’

  The royal adviser knelt back on his heels. ‘It is, divine one,’ he growled. ‘Shall I summon the executioner?’

  ‘Yes!’ The boy’s eyes flashed in the candle-flame. ‘No! Oh, I don’t know, Ay. What do you think?’

  ‘Er . . .?’ The adviser spread his arms wide, glancing down at his knees.

  ‘Oh, please.’ The boy-king crossed to him on his spindly, barely haired legs. ‘Get up.’

  ‘Thanks, Majesty,’ Ay grimaced. ‘You know these marble halls play merry hell with my sciatica. How are we today?’

  ‘Horemheb, Ay,’ the boy whispered. ‘What’s he doing? Where is he?’

  The adviser took the boy’s hand and walked him back to the low throne and sat him down where the golden lions yawned under the royal elbows. ‘Well,’ the older man said. ‘He was last heard of in Sulb. That’s for definite. But I have heard reports he’s making for Tushka.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ The boy sank back into his throne, his gilded fingers caressing the lions’ heads for reassurance. Perhaps, somehow, he’d absorb their strength. ‘That’s getting nearer, isn’t it?’ He suddenly jerked forward and grabbed the retainer’s robe. ‘Well, isn’t it? You taught me geography, for God’s sake. Is it getting nearer?’

  Ay patiently removed the boy’s hand. ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at the hysterical demi-god. ‘Yes, Tushka is nearer to us than Sulb.’

  ‘What’s he doing? What’s he doing?’ the king blurted out.

  Ay held his master’s hands firmly in his own. ‘What does Horemheb do?’ he asked. ‘For a living, I mean?’

  ‘He kills people.’ The king knew the answer to that one only too well.

  ‘Right. And where is he? Assuming he’s reached Tushka by now, I mean?’

  ‘Er . . .’ The king was less sure now. ‘Upper Nubia.’

  ‘Lower.’ The old tutor tapped the boy’s knuckles. ‘Lower Nubia. So who’s he killing?’

  There was a pause. ‘Nubians?’ the king hazarded.

  Ay smiled and patted the boy’s cheek. ‘Got it in one,’ he said. ‘So, what’s your problem?’

  ‘It’s when he stops.’ The boy-king tried to concentrate, to clear his head. He couldn’t find the words with Ankhasenamun. He never could. But with Ay, it was different. He’d always been there, like the father he’d never known. Firm, but fair. A bastard, but not a mean one. Ay always understood. Always knew. Always cared.

  ‘When he stops?’

  ‘Yes. When he’s finished killing Nubians. What if . . . what if he wants to kill me?’

  Ay chuckled and shook his head. ‘Now, why should he want to do that?’ he asked. ‘Why, little one?’

  The boy sat, blinking back the tears. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps he wants this throne.’ He glanced across to the giant doors of the robing room where all his regalia lay. ‘My crown. The crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. Perhaps he’s after them.’

  Ay let the king’s ringed fingers go. He looked into the face of the Pharaoh and saw no wrinkled lip nor sneer of cold command. Only a poor, pathetic little idiot who’d had the bad luck to be born to the great Akhenaten of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom and his sixth wife. He rose to his feet, driven by his incipient sciatica and a more pressing urge and crossed briefly into the shadows. He lit a taper from a candle and lit another to give himself better light. ‘Perhaps he is,’ he said softly as he reached down to the base of a pillar. ‘Perhaps Horemheb does want your throne, oh wise Lord of the Desert and of the River and of the Sea. But it doesn’t matter, really, does it?’

  ‘It doesn’t?’ Tutankhamun’s heart soared with hope. The worst terrors of his young life were being confirmed, but his oldest counsellor, his truest friend, was telling him that it didn’t matter, it would be all right.

  ‘Why not, Ay?’ the boy-king asked. ‘Why doesn’t it matter?’

  He sat upright on his gilded throne of the yawning lions. He was staring at the sullen, monkey-scowling limestone face of General Horemheb. He didn’t see Ay with a deft movement snatch up the cherry-wood club studded with silver. He didn’t hear the whirr of it as it came at him through the air. And no one could say whether he knew what hit him as the weapon crunched through the back of his skull and the bone fragments bit deep into his brain.

  Ay watched the boy-king’s blood arc crimson to spatter on the basalt beak and torso of the hawk-god. He saw the boy-king’s narrow shoulders hunch and his fingers flutter uselessly on the lions’ heads. He watched him slump to the floor among the pile of cushions and he knelt tenderly beside him, stroking the sleek, dead head.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, little Tutankhamun,’ he crooned, ‘because Horemheb is in Lower Nubia. And I am here. That’s why it doesn’t matter.’ And he stooped to plant a last kiss on the shattered skull.

  The royal embalmer muttered when he saw the dead king laid out. Then he said nothing as his team got to work to prepare the body for the afterlife. Leaning over the newly washed body and wearing the jackal-head of his calling, he twisted his iron hook up the king’s nostrils to poke for his brain and teased it out, collecting it carefully before placing it in an urn, the canopic jar to his left, the lid of which r
esembled a hawk. His servants held the boy upside-down briefly while he poured his potion into the nasal cavity and rinsed out the empty skull. The resin would come later. He heard the curiously empty click as the boy’s head rested on the wooden pillow again. He washed the mouth out and carefully placed inside the gums the oil-soaked wads of linen. Then he reamed out the nostrils of their contents and plugged them with wax. He took the camel-hair brush from a servant and began to coat the dead boy’s face with resin. Finally, he placed a piece of linen over each dull eye and pulled the eyelids down over them.

  ‘Well, ’e can’t be more than seventeen, Kat, eh?’ the embalmer’s number two speculated, peering at the expressionless face.

  ‘Indeed. It’s a crime, isn’t it? Go on, then, call the bastard in.’ The nameless one stood outside the tent, the flat, black Ethiopian stone gleaming dully in his hand, honed to a razor’s edge. He entered to the rhythmic chanting of the priests. Again, the jackal head bent over the body, Kat in the likeness of the great god Anubis, and drew with his rush pen a five-inch line of ink down the dead king’s left flank.

  There was a rip and a squelch as the Ethiopian stone sliced through skin and muscle. Kat’s numbers two and three buried themselves in the open abdomen and removed the organs they found there. The nameless one placed them in the jars with the lids of the dog’s head and the jackal’s and the man’s.

  ‘Right,’ Kat had joined the body on the slab again. ‘Palm wine.’ He clicked his fingers and an assistant brought a ewer. He poured it into the body cavity. ‘Just a quick rinse, I think. That’ll do nicely. Pounded spices. Now.’

  At a signal from the royal embalmer, the priests turned on the nameless one, spitting at him, hurling abuse. He turned on his heel, in the time-honoured way, rivulets of phlegm running down his sinewy back.

  ‘Who’d have his job, eh?’ Haph asked.

  ‘Somebody’s got to do it,’ Kat said.

  He clicked again and another servant slapped the spices firmly into his right palm. ‘Hmm,’ Kat breathed them in. He began to probe inside the body with his practised fingers. ‘You can’t beat a bit of infusion, that’s what I always say. Gentlemen, over to you now. And Haph, go easy on the pure bruised myrrh, there’s a good embalmer’s mate, only I’m still reeling from Nefertiti, gods bless her amulets.’