Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  ‘You must prepare yourself for a shock,’ Lestrade told her.

  The girl swallowed hard. ‘Go on.’ she said.

  ‘I have reason to believe that your sister is dead, Trottie,’ he said softly. ‘She was murdered on the Underground near Stockwell Station late last night.’

  For a moment she looked at him, her head to one side, wistfully, as though browsing her shelves for a good book. She tried to speak, but the words would not come. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. A thousand thoughts hurtled through her brain. She saw a laughing girl with a bucket and spade on a sandy beach; the rush of water through childish fingers; heard the tinkle of sisterly laughter. Then blackness.

  THE PERIODICALS, MENTION of which had so outraged Miss Dalrymple, came in extremely handy later when Lestrade remembered his First Aid for Policemen and fanned Trottie True back to consciousness. Admittedly, he had had to compromise her honour by loosening a stay or two and despite the fact that part 2, page 316 of that journal had specifically recommended such action, it was clear that neither Miss Dalrymple nor Mr Hathersuch had read it. Instead they kept peering round the door at the pair until Lestrade used his ultimate authority and threw all eight volumes of With Rod and Line up the Titikaka in their general direction. After that, the nosiness stopped.

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘You fainted, Trottie.’ He stopped rubbing her hand. ‘It’s only natural after the shock you’ve had.’

  She looked at him, her eyes full of tears, but determined not to cry. ‘What happened to her?’ she asked, afraid to hear his answer.

  ‘She was strangled,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  ‘Trottie.’ He leaned back against a remaindered stack. ‘There are questions I must ask you. This is of the essence. I cannot wait.’

  He fancied he heard a sharp intake of breath from the staircase overhead, but it was probably the swish of Miss Dalrymple’s stamp and he passed it off. ‘Did your sister know a lady called Emily Bellamy?’

  ‘No,’ Trottie said, ‘I don’t believe she did.’

  ‘What about Jane Hollander?’

  The librarian shook her head.

  ‘Sarah Culdrose?’

  ‘These names mean nothing to me, Inspector. Who are they?’

  ‘Let’s just say fellow travellers,’ he said grimly, ‘on life’s Underground.’

  ‘Wait a minute. They’re the others, aren’t they? The other women who’ve died. I remember reading about them now. Who can it be? What sort of madman is responsible?’

  He looked into the desperate, pleading eyes, at the outreaching hand in the shadows of the basement room. And he could not tell her. He could not tell her anything.

  ‘Was your sister . . . did she have any gentlemen friends?’

  ‘Yes. Two.’

  ‘Two?’

  Trottie’s glance fell to the ground. ‘She was to have made her choice last night. She went for a walk, she said. To be alone. To think things through.’

  ‘What time did she leave?’

  ‘About six, I think.’

  ‘Weren’t you alarmed when she didn’t return?’

  ‘I went out too. By the time I got back, it was gone midnight. I didn’t want to disturb Very, so I went straight to bed.’

  ‘And this morning?’

  ‘I overslept. Very wasn’t in her bed and I assumed she’d gone off as usual.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘My sister does . . . did . . . good works. Inspector, as I do. I’m only here one day in sixteen. I believe she was due at Dr Barnardo’s today’

  ‘You didn’t find it odd,’ he asked, narrowing his eyes, ‘that her bed had not been slept in?’

  ‘My sister was fastidious, Inspector. She always made her bed as soon as she rose.’

  ‘You have no maid?’

  ‘No. We are not well off, Mr Lestrade. Librarian’s wages are woefully inadequate. And good works pay not at all.’

  ‘How do you live?’

  ‘Carefully,’ she told him. ‘We have a modest endowment from our father. We eke.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Lestrade looked round for the mouse.

  ‘We eke out an existence. But Very had been about to change all that.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Lestrade ran a finger over the thick dust that carpeted One Hundred and One Things to do with a Piece of Knotted String. ‘Her choice of lovers.’

  He thought he saw a librarianly blush flush her cheek, but it was probably a trick of the light. ‘Lovers is too strong a word, Mr Lestrade. We Trues have been brought up with propriety.’

  ‘I shall need their names,’ he said.

  ‘Clarence Holdsworth and George Cross,’ she told him, ‘of the Sylvester Theatre Company.’

  ‘Actors?’

  ‘Dancers,’ she said.

  ‘Dancers?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Formerly of the Ballet Rambo.’

  This was a new one on Lestrade. He’d never heard of men dancing professionally before. He changed tack accordingly. ‘You said your sister went out for a walk. Can you tell me how she came to be riding the Underground?’

  The girl thought for a moment, a quizzical expression crossing her lovely face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wish I did.’

  He helped her to her feet. ‘Thank you, Trottie,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ she told him. ‘I feel so . . . so useless. So empty. Do you know what it’s like?’ She looked up at him. ‘To lose someone you love. Do you know what it’s like?’

  He thought of his dear, dead Sarah, alone in the cold of Abney Park. He leaned forward and kissed the girl’s forehead. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  AN ORCHESTRA WAS TUNING up, for want of a better phrase, in the aptly named pits the next morning. Lots of bow and not much rosin, the sounds screamed through Lestrade’s ears as he fumbled forward in the darkness of the theatre. To be fair to him, he was not to know that there was a mop resting in a pail a little to his left. He walked straight into it and it caught his right as well, doubling him up for an instant and bringing tears to his eyes. The clatter of the pail brought an instantaneous reproof in the form of a sharp ‘Sshh!’ from a tall, elegant man with locks that flew all over his shoulders.

  He clapped his hands. ‘Now, gentlemen, if you please.’

  The orchestra struck up and a row of men in ludicrous tights hurtled across from stage left and disappeared stage right.

  ‘Is that it?’ the tall man wailed after a stunned pause.

  One of the chorus line stuck his head round the door. ‘No good, George?’

  ‘Like a row of beans,’ George mumbled into the carefully manicured hand that covered his face in horror. ‘Not that I know what that looks like. Some of you . . .’ he shouted stentorianly and he waited for them all to appear on stage like a gaggle of naughty schoolboys caught behind the temporary buildings with their first cigarette, ‘some of you clearly do not know a jetée from a harbour wall. May I remind you, gentlemen, that you are supposed to be Lords of the Spirit World, come from the Realms Beneath to rescue Fair Eleanor: anyone seen Morag?’

  ‘Who?’ one of the chorus line asked.

  ‘Morag Finisterre . . . Fair Eleanor. The prima ballerina. Oh, this is hopeless.’

  ‘Of course it is, George,’ another arch voice called from the darkness. ‘You’re directing.’

  The silence could have peeled wallpaper.

  ‘Not now, Clarence. My head really couldn’t take it. It’s going to be one of those days, I just know it is . . .’

  His voice tailed away as a gormless fellow in a nasty brown suit stumbled on to the stage, walking as though his arabesque was decidedly penché.

  ‘Ah,’ George managed, when his artistic temperament had mentally stripped away the modern impedimenta, ‘at last. We’ve been waiting for over an hour. Don’t bother to change now. What do you do?’

&
nbsp; ‘Er . . . solve crimes,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Oh, very droll,’ George snapped. ‘Clarence, is he one of yours?’

  ‘Never seen him before,’ Clarence said, peering at Lestrade through a pair of ivory opera-glasses. ‘Doesn’t appear to have the calves for it.’

  ‘Well, just give us some attitudes. We’ll build to the fouettée en tournant when I’m feeling stronger.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh, Lord, that’s all we need. A deaf primo ballerino. I said . . .’ he shouted.

  ‘I know what you said.’ Lestrade moved forward so that his face was a ghastly green above the sulphur of the footlights. ‘What I didn’t do was understand it. I am Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. I am looking for Clarence Holdsworth. Would you be him?’

  The tall man’s nostrils quivered with emotion in the half light. ‘Not if you ripped out my quadriceps femoris.’

  Lestrade wouldn’t know where to look for that, let alone rip it out.

  ‘I am Clarence Holdsworth.’ The disembodied voice emerged into the light, half a head shorter than the other, but with the same aesthetic hair. All he lacked was a lily. And he was probably carrying that somewhere where the sun never shone.

  ‘And George Cross,’ Lestrade continued.

  ‘I have that pleasure,’ George said.

  ‘Though not often,’ sneered Holdsworth.

  ‘May I see you gentlemen in private?’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Cross threw up his hands with the exasperation of the encumbered impresario and bellowed to the yellow-tighted oafs on stage, ‘Take five minutes, gentlemen. And while you’re taking them, you might learn to dance.’

  He led the way through a maze of corridors, scraping past painted flats and flapping paint. At last they entered a dressing room with a single star. ‘Well?’ Cross snapped. ‘As you see, we are very busy men – at least, I am.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Lestrade said when the door was closed, ‘it is not normally my custom to interview two murder suspects simultaneously . . .’ and he waited for the strangled cries to reach fever pitch until a raised hand quieted them. Such was the long arm of the law.

  ‘Murder?’ Cross challenged him.

  Lestrade nodded. ‘Of Miss Verity True,’ he said.

  They looked at each other. Suddenly, Holdsworth lashed out with a powerful right leg and Cross pranced away out of reach, up on the points of his toes. Lestrade, not quite ready for the alongée, was still standing there when a shin caught him in the place earmarked by the mop minutes earlier.

  ‘You swine!’ Cross hissed at his partner in mime.

  ‘Beast!’ Holdsworth countered.

  ‘Do I assume,’ Lestrade squeaked, stepping a little less than manfully between them, ‘that you believe each other guilty of her murder?’

  ‘Of course.’ Holdsworth tossed his lion’s mane and reached in his long coat for a cigarette holder, then a cigarette. ‘You see, Constable, Very was about to accept my hand in marriage.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cross hissed, ‘it was the rest of you she couldn’t stand.’

  ‘That’s what made George so unnaturally jealous.’ Holdsworth ignored him. ‘Not only has my talent as a dancer and choreographer eclipsed his, but I had also won Very’s heart.’

  ‘I expect you cut it out, you degenerate,’ Cross countered. ‘You’ll be charging him, of course, Sergeant?’

  ‘All in good time,’ said Lestrade, finding odd comfort in the stock police phrase now and again. ‘Perhaps we could all sit down, gentlemen. I’m not the man I was when I came in here,’ and he breathed a sigh of relief when the lethal legs on both sides of him crossed over their respective knees and came to a stop. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘Mr Cross, when did you see Miss True last?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ Cross said. ‘We both did.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Holdsworth said. ‘Except of course that George saw her at least once more.’

  ‘Oh?’ Cross and Lestrade chorused.

  ‘Of course.’ Holdsworth blew elegant smoke rings from his cigarette. ‘When he killed her.’

  ‘That’s an outrageous slur,’ Cross sneered.

  ‘You’re the outrageous slur,’ Holdsworth told him. ‘A blot on the scutcheon of ballet.’

  ‘How long have you gentlemen known Miss True?’ Lestrade broke in lest the pair resort again to footicuffs.

  ‘I met her last year,’ Cross said, ‘April. Over a year ago. She came backstage to congratulate me on my pas de deux.’

  ‘Why, is one of the unanswered questions of our time,’ Holdsworth bridled. ‘It was actually my arabesque she admired – it was the talk of the town.’

  Cross snorted. ‘Let’s face it, Clarence, that little lad we saw in Russia last year has more poise than you, that lad Nijinski.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Holdsworth remembered. ‘He had the legs of a racehorse.’

  ‘Well, there you are, Inspector.’ Cross snapped his fingers. ‘I knew it. Little boys and their legs are about the summit of Clarence’s sexual experience. He is secretly a misogynist.’

  Lestrade had not expected the Masonic connection. But then no one ever did.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Holdsworth sneered.

  ‘Fact!’ snarled Cross. ‘The only reason you feigned interest in Very at all was so that people wouldn’t talk about you . . . though who would wish to talk about you I can’t imagine.’

  ‘You’ll take that back!’ Holdsworth was on his feet.

  ‘Come any nearer and I’ll scratch your eyes out!’ Cross assured him.

  ‘Gentlemen, please, please!’ Lestrade was the only one still sitting. ‘A woman is dead. Could we have a little decor, please?’ But his reasoned words were drowned by the flutter of dancers’ feet leaving the floor, and two flying drop kicks aimed by Cross at Holdsworth and Holdsworth at Cross fell a little short. And they felled Lestrade.

  ‘PLAYING CRICKET?’ AN incredulous Assistant Commissioner Frost recovered the use of his lower jaw.

  Chief Inspector Abberline nodded with evident satisfaction. ‘He then managed to get himself knocked out – that must be unique in the annals of the game, I would have thought.’

  ‘Hardly unique to Lestrade, though,’ Frost grumbled. ‘About par for the course for him I’d say – or is that a different game?’

  Abberline consulted his notepad. ‘We then have the complaints from Camberwell Branch Library.’

  Frost hid his chubby face with his chubby hands. ‘I don’t think I want to hear this. How overdue was he?’

  ‘For suspension you mean, sir?’

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight, Abberline. I’ll decide on matters regarding suspension. Clear?’

  ‘As a bell, sir,’ the Chief Inspector said. ‘No, it was a little more serious than that. First, he made an improper suggestion to an unmarried librarian lady, a Miss Dalrymple. Then he took another one from her place of work into a back room and was seen to catch her as she fell into his arms and he loosened her clothing.’

  Frost grimaced. ‘This complaint came from the young lady herself?’

  ‘No, from the Chief Librarian, a man called Hathersuch or Hoversuch – Sergeant Dixon wasn’t sure.’

  ‘He never is,’ muttered Frost. ‘It sounds to me as if this Hoversuch was a little miffed that the lady didn’t collapse into his arms. And until we appoint policewomen to accompany detectives on forays like this, such bodily contacts are inevitable.’

  ‘Policewomen?’ Abberline’s sidewhiskers twitched in horror.

  ‘All right, I know, I know,’ Frost said. ‘Such things are beyond your ken. But believe me, the time will come. Don’t you dare breathe a word of it to Miss Featherstonehaugh, though, or she’ll be first in line to volunteer. Where is he now?’

  ‘Lestrade? In hospital.’

  ‘Hospital?’

  ‘What I hadn’t got to, sir, on page forty-three of my Lestrade Surveillance Report, is that we have complaints from two Maryannes who run some sort of dancing school. They both accuse him of a
ccusing them of murder’

  ‘So why is Lestrade in hospital?’

  ‘They both kicked him in the head. Unfortunately. Charing Cross say he’ll recover.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Frost considered his options. ‘This could be the answer to an Assistant Commissioner’s prayer,’ he said. ‘Compassionate leave. Thank you, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Sir,’ Abberline folded away the notepad, ‘may I come off this surveillance now? Events in Penge are hotting up.’

  ‘Oh, very well. But I’m not giving you much longer on that bus business, Abberline. Your flasher hasn’t struck for a while, has he?’

  ‘I believe not, sir, but flashers are like buses themselves – there’ll always be another one along in a minute.’

  FOR THE SECOND TIME on this case, Lestrade gave an audience from a bed. True, he got some funny looks from a man with a hacking cough to his left and some wheezes from another to his right, but all was relatively discreet after Constable Russell had the presence of mind to draw a screen over the proceedings.

  ‘Well done, lad,’ Lestrade said, the new bandage swathed in place of the old one. ‘I wondered when somebody would think of that. Well, Walter, touched though I am by your concern for my well-being, I can’t help inclining that you have something to tell me.’

  ‘Right, guv.’ Dew finished the last of the grapes he’d brought the Inspector. ‘It’s this.’

  He handed Lestrade a letter. The Inspector read it. ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked.

  ‘Postmarked Bermondsey, guv,’ Dew told him.

  ‘Three o’clock yesterday.’ Lestrade could read envelopes too. ‘Addressed to the Yard.’

  ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ Dew quoted.

  ‘To whom indeed. All right, Bromley, let’s see what eighty-odd years on the Essex Force have taught you. Give me your views on the character of this anonymous letter – and don’t let me see your lips moving as you read.’

  Bromley did his best. But, in fact, the expert on Essex horse troughs was out of his depth. ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Well, thank you, Bromley. Russell?’