Lestrade and the Sign of Nine Read online

  Collins was on his second bottle. ‘For my arthritis,’ he explained, his eyes like bags of blood. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not a thing.’

  ‘How about Osbaldeston Ralston?’

  The great crime writer shook his huge head. ‘This is for my gout,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll lay off the colchicum and morphine tonight. Mustn’t overdo it.’

  ‘Or perhaps this,’ Lestrade passed over a piece of paper with a concentric design on it.

  Collins peered at it, raising his spectacles. ‘Those people,’ he said. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They have all died by violent means in the last three weeks,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘By the same hand?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I fear the list is merely provincial at the moment.’

  ‘Have you counted the letters?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Collins put down the paper and slurped from a blue glass bottle. ‘Spot of laudanum, Mr Lestrade?’

  ‘Er . . . isn’t that poisonous?’

  ‘Rubbish. And it’s not true about my man Hellow dying after taking half my dose. He had a seizure, that was all.’ Collins’s eyes began to roll in his head. ‘It could happen to any of us. In fact,’ and he leaned forward confidentially, ‘it will happen to me if ever my feet reach the ground.’

  ‘I see,’ Lestrade said. ‘Er . . . you asked me if I’d counted the letters.’

  ‘Yes. Of the names of the deceased. Hereward the Wake was it? Not a very good book, that. I did say that to Charles, but he never could take criticism. Probably went home and whipped his wife – you know these Canons of the Church of England.’

  ‘Hereward Rodney,’ Lestrade said, not having understood a word of the mystery man’s last few sentences.

  ‘Fourteen,’ muttered Collins. ‘Got a mind, you see,’ he tapped his bulging temple, ‘like a differencing machine. That’s why papa put me to work all those years ago with Messrs Antrobus, the Tea Brokers.’

  Lestrade hadn’t realized it was possible to break tea. Fast and wind, yes. But not tea.

  ‘Who were the others?’

  ‘Er . . . Osbaldeston Ralston,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘Eighteen,’ Collins nodded. ‘And the third?’

  ‘Byngham Batchelor.’

  ‘Sixteen. That’s your average. That’s your clue. It’s something to do with sixteen.’ Collins shut his eyes tight. ‘One six, six one, one sixth, one sixteenth. This has something to do with numbers, I’m sure of it. Tell me, Inspector Whicher was before your time I suppose, at the Yard.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but my old dad worked with him on the Constance Kent case.’

  ‘My old dad was a bastard,’ Collins said. ‘Saw me in the tea trade, in the law, anywhere but where I was happy.’

  ‘And where’s that sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Here,’ Collins tapped his little blue bottle. ‘Right here,’ and he chuckled wheezily.

  ‘Does that design mean anything to you, sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘This?’ Collins scrutinized it again. ‘It’s a maze, isn’t it? Hampton Court?’

  Lestrade looked again. ‘Too simple?’ he suggested.

  ‘How dare you!’ Collins hissed. ‘I’ll have you know that The Moonstone is the finest detective story in the English language. Do you know what I earned in the financial year beginning April 1863?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Er . . . neither do I now, but it represents a lifetime’s salary for you, Lestrade.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to criticize your theories, sir,’ Lestrade said. ‘I merely meant that Hampton Court Maze is more complicated than the design would comply.’

  Collins leaned back on the sofa, his rocking less pronounced, his stoop less in evidence, his little white hands clasped under his barbed wire bristle of beard. ‘Numbers,’ he hummed, almost tunefully. ‘The clue to this case lies in numbers.’ And he began to snore.

  The Inspector tiptoed towards the door, watching out for a green woman with prominent incisors. In the hall, Lestrade glanced back at the literary genius wheezing in his laudanum haze, swathed in blankets and he was very, very glad that he wasn’t anybody’s detective creation.

  ❖5❖

  ‘I

  see head lice are in the news again,’ Dr John Watson only consulted The Thunderer’ for the medical page.

  ‘Head wounds are more our stock in trade at the moment, my dear fellow,’ his companion said. ‘Mrs Hudson!’

  The little woman of that name bustled into the drawing-room.

  ‘Yes, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Is everything packed?’

  ‘It is, sir. Where away this time?’

  ‘The wilds of Wales, Mrs Hudson. A particularly revolting little village called Blaenllechau in the Rhondda Vach.’

  ‘That sounds pretty wild to me, Mr Holmes. I’ve put in an extra shirt. And Doctor, your bag.’

  ‘So are you, Mrs Hudson . . . oh, I do beg your pardon,’ the good doctor rarely gave vent to his personal feelings, especially at the expense of his syntax, but he was still reeling from the brilliance of Holmes’s Welsh pronunciation. And he was still wiping Holmes’s spittle off his dressing gown ‘I still feel, Holmes, that we’re letting Miss Ratcliffe down rather badly. You promised to look into the financial affairs of her father.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday, old fellow?’ Holmes sipped his second coffee of the morning.

  ‘Er . . . Whymper’s, Holmes, having my brolly re-ferruled.’

  ‘Quite. And while you were there, I was at the Stock Exchange.’

  ‘Good Lord, were you really?’

  ‘I have said I was, Doctor. Surely you don’t want a second opinion?’

  ‘Er . . . good lord, no, of course not.’

  ‘Admiral Ratcliffe had, to cut an exceedingly long financial story short, been swindled by Osbaldeston Ralston. Not once, I gather, but on several occasions. And the Admiral was not his only victim.’

  ‘Look here, Holmes, you don’t think Miss Ratcliffe bashed in his cranium, do you? Pretty little thing like that?’

  ‘Since we have not been able to view the corpse, Watson,’ Holmes said, ‘I have no idea how pretty Ralston’s cranium was. But in answer to your question did she kill him? The answer is an emphatic “No”.’

  ‘But she had the motive, surely?’

  ‘So did half the bulls and bears in Throgmorton Street.’

  ‘Ah,’ mused Watson, finishing his kedgeree, ‘the mark of the beast.’

  ‘No,’ said Holmes. ‘She simply wasn’t strong enough, old fellow. If the description of the wound given to us by the Ralston brothers is accurate, that would have taken some strength. Miss Ratcliffe reached your tie knot, that makes her five foot two. Her right hand, when I shook it, was small and sparse, with little metatarsal vigour. I have no reason to assume that her left was any different, unless she exhibits herself oft-times in a freak show. Any more coffee, Mrs Hudson? My nerves are shot to pieces this morning.’

  The little woman called something muffled from the kitchen.

  ‘No, we’re looking for a man,’ the World’s Greatest Detective assured his friend.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Watson bridled. ‘Oh, I see. One of the Ralston brothers, then? But they’re our clients too, Holmes. Isn’t it just a teensy bit dishonest, acting for them both? Especially since each one says the other did it.’

  ‘Dishonest, Watson? No,’ Holmes ran an elegant finger the length of his elegant nose. ‘I prefer the word “delicious”. You remember the Affair of the Gallstone?’

  ‘The priceless ruby half-inched from that country house?’

  ‘The same. A routine business, very much below my intellectual par, were it not for one thing.’

  Watson thought hard – rare for a doctor in Gladstone’s England. ‘Er . . . the identical pair of Nubians,’ he beamed.

  ‘Exactly,’ Holmes permitted himself a smile. ‘But my mention of the Gallstone reminds me that Lestrade went to call on Wilkie Collins three n
ights ago.’

  ‘Wilkie who?’

  ‘Collins, Watson. He is a writer of detective fiction, unlike your friend Conan Doyle, who clearly is not. He wrote a book called The Moonstone.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but I thought he was dead.’

  ‘No, merely his talent,’ Holmes said. ‘Although I must say, there was one thing in The Moonstone he got absolutely right.’

  ‘The intricacy of plot? The attention to detail?’

  ‘The stupidity of the Metropolitan Police. Now why do you suppose Lestrade should visit Collins, whose best work was done twenty years ago? He’s been a virtual recluse since his American tour in ’seventy-three.’

  ‘I suppose America does that to a man.’

  ‘What if I tell you that Wilkie Collins lives in Blandford Square?’

  ‘What if you do?’ shrugged Watson. It clearly hadn’t helped.

  ‘It is within blunt-instrument-throwing-distance of Lisson Grove,’ Holmes sighed, ‘where the body of one Byngham Batchelor was found four days ago.’

  ‘Ah, I see. So you think that Lestrade thinks that this Wilkie Collins . . .?’

  Holmes held up his hands in horror. ‘No, Watson, no. But I would have given Mrs Hudson’s right arm to have been a fly on the wall. What does Lestrade know that we don’t?’

  Watson didn’t have to think long about that one. ‘Nothing at all, Holmes,’ he said. ‘Surely? Nothing at all.’

  ‘Blaen where?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘No, guv, I don’t think it’s Blaenwhere. It’s Blaenllechau.’

  ‘It sounds like the Blaen leading the Blaen, if you ask me,’ Tyrrell said.

  Nobody had, of course, and six hostile eyes looked at him oddly. Lestrade muttered to George, ‘I’d watch that one if I were you. Got ideas above his station.’

  The station to which they embarked was Cardiff, staying at the Angel in the shadow of the Marquess of Bute’s attempt to rebuild the great Norman castle of Robert Fitz-Hamon. From there it was pony and trap up the twisting roads of the Rhondda Vach where the rows of miners’ cottages lay under their blankets of mist and rain and the smoke of the pits wreathed the pit wheels, standing like monolithic monsters against the treeless heaps of slag.

  ‘There was a time, min’,’ the driver told them, ‘when a wiwer could travel from one end of the valleys to another an’ never touch the groun’.’

  ‘A Wiwer?’ George repeated.

  ‘Oh, sorry. That’s my Welsh Standard Three comin’ back to me after all these years. Squirrel to yew, butty,’ and he hauled in his reins outside the Workmen’s Hall. ‘That’ll be ninepence three farthin’s.’

  ‘George,’ Lestrade tottered down from the cart and left the luggage and the tip to his inferior. Well, that was what sergeants were for.

  Their timing was immaculate. The Coroner’s inquest was nearly over as the Yard men squeezed their way into the smoke-filled room. Top-hatted gentlemen lined the front, interspersed with ladies in feathered hats and muffs. Near the back, where Lestrade sagged against a freezing radiator, grimy miners with cloth caps, ragged scarves and moleskin trousers did as they were told by hard-faced women in head shawls. Around the edge of the room, the sombre dark blue and enlivening silver of the Glamorgan Constabulary made up the lunatic fringe.

  ‘Mr Lestrade, is it?’ a portly plainclothesman elbowed his way towards him.

  ‘It is,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘Detective-Inspector Mortimer, Pant-y-Grdl CID.’

  Lestrade shook his hand, ‘You called us in.’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d better, seein’ as ’ow it’s who it is that’s dead.’

  ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘Up at the ’ouse. Wanna see it?’

  ‘In the fullness of time.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ a full-bodied voice bellowed. ‘This is a Coroner’s inquest; more, it is my inquest. I will not have casual conversation during it. Matters are too grave. Who are you, sir?’

  ‘Detective-Inspector Mortimer, Mr Pryce, Pant-y-Grdl CID.’

  ‘Not you, Mortimer. The other one – you, sir, face like a ferret.’

  ‘Do you mean me?’ Lestrade felt constrained to ask, although he had heard the description before.

  ‘Of course,’ the Coroner bawled. ‘I shudder to think what the odds are against two men with ferret-like faces talking at my inquest.’

  ‘Pity it isn’t an inquest on him,’ Lestrade hissed to Mortimer. ‘Inspector Lestrade, sir, Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the Coroner was not good at climbing down. ‘Well, you’re a mite late.’

  ‘Minor havoc at Chepstow,’ Lestrade explained. ‘Wye flooding.’

  ‘Why indeed,’ muttered the Coroner. ‘Well, as I was saying – there is only one conclusion to which this inquest can come, namely that Mr John Nathaniel Wallace Lionel Guest met his end at the hand and behest of person or persons unknown. I don’t think you need to leave the room to discuss that, do you, Mr Jenkins?’

  The foreman of the jury stood up, ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘Excellent. And is that the verdict of you all?’

  ‘We . . . er . . .’

  ‘Good!’ the Coroner’s gavel came down with a crack. ‘This inquest is closed. Good morning.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lestrade, ‘now that the case is over, perhaps we can start to investigate it. Mr Mortimer, what is the quality of the local brew?’

  ‘So-so,’ was George’s comment on the local brew – ‘Prince of Ales’ it most certainly was not. But then, George was a Londoner and he had his loyalties. Anyway he’d hardly got a half down his neck at the Blaenllechau Working Men’s Club, formed years earlier by thirsty miners determined to beat the licensing laws of their ‘dry’ county, when the Pant-y-Grdl station wagon arrived and the policemen, Welsh and English, rattled up the twisting labyrinth of streets, slowing to allow innumerable sheep and their new-born offspring to cross in front of them. They alighted on a windswept, barren hillside, where the soil was black and arid and a thin covering of grass and heather had been cropped short by the untended flocks. Led by Mortimer, they clambered over derelict dry-stone walls at crazy angles on the hillside.

  ‘Here we are, then.’ Mortimer stopped before a quarry of Rhondda-grey granite that generations of miners had hacked out of the hillside to build their squat little terraces. ‘Is this where yew foun’ the body, Myrddin?’

  A round little policeman with thin lips and even thinner hair under his helmet answered him. ‘Not precisely, sir. It was a little lower down. Aye, by there.’

  ‘You found the body, Constable . . . er?’ Lestrade asked, wiping the sheep currants off his shoe.

  ‘Er, not precisely sir, no. And that’s Williams, by the way; Constable 491 Myrddin Williams.’

  ‘So who did?’

  ‘Dai Evans from Tylerstown.’

  ‘What was he doing up here?’ Lestrade asked. ‘Is he a farmer? Quarryman?’

  ‘Peepin Twm,’ Williams said.

  ‘Peeping . . .?’

  ‘Twm. Yew know,’ Mortimer explained. ‘Yew must ’ave ’em in England, mun. Blokes who like watchin’ courtin’ couples . . . courtin’.’

  ‘And this is a place for courting couples, is it?’ Lestrade found that hard to believe. They were miles from anywhere and the wind was whistling something shocking.

  ‘Well, aye,’ Mortimer assured him. ‘Yew’ve only got to look at the view, mun. Breathtakin’, innit?’

  Lestrade and George did as they were bid. In both directions stretched identical rows of miners’ terraces, like tall cloches under the rain. A lazy, leaden river, black with coal and grey from the sky’s reflection, meandered silently through their centre and the trucks of coal and slag came and went endlessly. Beyond all that, across the valley from them, the same bare precipices and desolate wilderness, dotted here and there with sheep.

  ‘All right,’ Mortimer said, ‘I’ll grant yew, Porth isn’t much to write home about, but down there, between the slag heaps – Pontypridd –
the jewel of the Rhondda.’

  ‘D’yew play, Mr Lestrade sir?’ Constable Williams asked.

  ‘Not a note,’ Lestrade admitted.

  ‘I believe the constable was referrin’ to rugby football, Mr Lestrade,’ Mortimer said. ‘It’s a second religion to us ’ere in the valleys. Oh, after religion of course.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Mr Lestrade, sir,’ Williams said. ‘I was forgettin’ yew was an Englishman. Do yew ’ave a Glee Club up at Scotland Yard, Sergeant?’

  ‘I believe we do,’ George said. ‘But you wouldn’t catch me within a hundred yards of it. Audiences have no soul these days,’ he glared at Lestrade, who looked away.

  ‘Oh, pity,’ Williams said. ‘Yew’ve got the look of a baritone.’

  ‘An’ yew’ll ’ave the look of a soprano in a minute, Myrddin, if you don’t shut up,’ Mortimer snapped. ‘The Inspector ’ere ’aven’t come to listen to yewer prattle. ’E’ve come to listen to mine.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector. Is there a rock whose lee we could shelter behind? My old riot wound’s playing me up again.’

  ‘Over by ’ere, Inspector,’ Williams called and all four men squatted in the windless side of the quarry face. Lestrade carefully removed the pointed bit of a sheep’s skull from his backside before spreading George’s Donegal flaps and sitting on them.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘Assume I know nothing.’

  The men of the Glamorgan Constabulary had already made such an assumption. ‘The name of the deceased,’ said Mortimer, ‘was John Guest. ’E was a very big man roun’ yer.’

  ‘Round where?’ Lestrade checked. After all, he had not seen the body yet and didn’t want to miss anything.

  ‘Roun’ yer,’ Mortimer explained. ‘In the valleys. ’E’s one of the Guests, see.’

  ‘The guests?’ Lestrade was on alien territory.

  ‘Duw, yew must ’ave ’eard of the Guests, mun,’ Mortimer assured the Yard man. ‘The Guests, the Crawshays, the Hills and the Homfrays ’ave these valleys sewn up. All from Merthyr, of course, but they’ve spread now as far west as Port Talbot and as far north as Abergavenny. Ever taken the hills up to Abergavenny, Myrddin?’ he asked the constable.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Lovely. Lovely. Lovely. Especially in the spring. Ah, to be in Abergavenny, now that spring is yer.’