Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring Read online

  ‘What?’ Hendey flexed his legs and wrapped his arms under his backside, testing the grass with his fingers.

  ‘The other night, the night Joey died. What I saw coming out of Dakota-Bred’s caravan. Or should I say, “Who”?’

  ‘I dunno, Huge,’ the acrobat uncoiled himself. ‘Should you?’

  ‘I dunno,’ the dwarf screwed up his face. ‘Give me a chuck, will you, Bendy? I’m stiff as an elephant’s tadger this morning.’

  The acrobat shielded his eyes from the sun, scanning the fires on which this morning’s bacon sizzled. ‘Madame Za-Za’s?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’s about right for the first throw of the morning.’ Hendey stooped, grabbing his little friend by the wrist and ankle and twirled with the natural grace of the superb athlete he was.

  ‘Mosholatubbee!’ the dwarf yelled as he sailed majestically through the air before hitting the side of Madame Za-Za’s caravan with a sickening thud. He rolled in the dust, groaning.

  ‘How’s that, Huge?’ Hendey called.

  The dwarf, winded, waved back at him as a grizzled head appeared out of the window, complete with black eyeshade and cigar. ‘Stop bouncing off my caravan, you annoyin’ little bugger!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Ah, Za-Za, my love,’ the dwarf gasped, ‘fragrant as ever, my petal.’

  ‘You’ll come to a sticky end, you will, Huge Hughie. See if you don’t.’

  The dwarf staggered upright and made his way back to the breakfast fire. ‘Evil eye,’ he chuckled to the India Rubber Man, jabbing the air over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘Old Za has put a curse on me, Bendy.’

  ‘That’s without a glass ball,’ the acrobat waved at the old girl, still spitting blood at her window.

  ‘That’s what I’ve got,’ the dwarf eased his leather trousers, ‘a glass ball. And I don’t even want to think about the other one. Still, I’m ready for anything now.’

  ‘Walk up! Walk up!’ Lord George Sanger was banging his own drum in Pontefract that morning. Not for him the comfortable life of a permanent office in London. He could have stayed at home at Astley’s and counted his money. But it was the road, the crowd, the bright faces and dancing eyes in the naphtha light – that’s what kept his blood racing. He still liked the old tricks best, the ones he’d done as a shaver at his old dad’s side, in the penny gaff and the horse fairs. The Ether Trick always brought them in.

  And today was no exception. They’d paid their money – happily collected by Major John, sitting on a blue-draped pedestal, and they stood in the sunlight of the park, eight deep around the little stage. The multi-talented Huge Hughie had landed badly on his eighth throw that morning, his thrower being a little the worse for drink and he was glad of the respite. While Bendy Hendey was dangling from a tree branch with his legs behind his ears and a copy of the Circus Gazette over his unmentionables, Sanger went into his patter.

  Lestrade had finished his breakfast near the Big Top and had spent the morning in the rather dangerous company of Dakota-Bred, watching in astonishment as the cowboy shot straws out of the hand of his good lady squaw, who proceeded to stand in her sacking with the same degree of animation as half a hundredweight of murphies. Had she come from Eastern Europe, she’d have passed for a totem pole. But above the crash of gunfire, there was suddenly a scream, then several, and Lestrade turned to see women and children hurrying away from the ether booth, while a bald-headed George Sanger was appealing to them for calm. As Lestrade’s stride turned to a run, he saw the India Rubber Man unsnake himself and drop silently from his tree before racing across to the little stage, elbowing people aside and twisting through them like quicksilver.

  By the time Lestrade got there, it was all over. Huge Hughie lay writhing on the boards, his mouth a livid white. Dark, bloody vomit had splashed over his scarlet jacket and he was doubled up, his knees under his chin.

  ‘Huge! Huge!’ Hendey broke through the cordon of horrified onlookers.

  ‘That’s bloody realistic,’ one of them muttered.

  ‘Help me get him behind the curtains, Bendy,’ Sanger hissed.

  ‘Got him, Boss,’ the acrobat had snatched up the little twisted bundle and whisked him out of the public gaze. In the cramped darkness behind the drapes, Lestrade crouched with the others.

  ‘It’s the throwing,’ said Hendey, trying to straighten the little man out. ‘It’s hurt him inside. Twisted something.’

  ‘Throwing, be buggered,’ muttered Lestrade. ‘This man’s been poisoned.’

  There were mutterings that night. And dark forebodings. Two deaths in four days. They all took chances, every one of them. If an elephant went berserk; if a tiger got spiteful; if a rope snapped . . . circus folk walked hand in hand with death and they did not fear it. But this – this was different.

  The Parade of course had gone on – the flags and the prancing horses and the plumes and the brave tones of the marching band. The show had gone on too – to a packed Top of Pontefract punters. And the canvas had come down and the wagons rolled again. All except one wagon. The one shared by the India Rubber Man and the dwarf. That still rested, the Clydesdales cropping the flattened grass nearby at their tether ends, the rain bouncing off their steaming flanks. The India Rubber Man had said his tearful goodbye. ‘Well, old friend,’ he’d squatted beside the little body, ‘you’ve had your last throw.’

  George Sanger had taken the little cold hand in his. ‘Your tiny hand,’ he murmured, ‘is frozen. Good roads, Hughie, good times,’ he placed the hand across the breast, ‘merry tenting.’ And they watched a tear roll down his cheek.

  Now it was just the three of them – Lestrade, the policeman, Masters, the vet and Hughie, the dead man. Three men in a wagon. By the oil lamp’s glare, Masters worked quickly, his sleeves rolled up, a grubby apron tied across his waistcoat. Lestrade held the lamp closer.

  ‘Are you sure we should be doing this, Lister?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve done it before, haven’t you?’

  ‘On a giraffe or horse, yes. But a man . . .’

  ‘We must know what killed him, Mr Masters,’ Lestrade said.

  The vet sighed and ripped open the abdomen. He looked up at Lestrade.

  ‘The viscera,’ the detective said, ‘note the position of the viscera.’

  Masters shook his head. ‘It all looks so different in an Aberdeen Angus. Pass me that jar.’ He lifted out the stomach with his forceps and went to work on the gullet with his ivory-handled knife. ‘Are you all right?’

  Lestrade’s green pallor had nothing to do with the matter in hand – it was the shade of the lamp that was to blame.

  ‘Check the mucous membrane,’ he said.

  ‘You know a devil of a lot about post-mortems,’ Masters said, ‘for a journalist.’

  ‘My dad was an undertaker,’ Lestrade lied. ‘This sort of thing stays with you.’

  ‘Too right it does. Look, I don’t know what you hope to learn by all this. I’ve no microscope, you know. Not even a retort.’

  The last thing Lestrade wanted was repartee, so Masters’ remark seemed irrelevant.

  ‘Well, that’s the best I can do,’ Masters dumped his bloody instrument on a sideboard. ‘Where did I put my cocoa?’

  Lestrade peered under the lamp. The dwarf’s lips were still pale, his tongue swollen and bloated. The stomach lining and the oesophagus glowed a worm-eaten white. ‘Pass me that bottle, Mr Masters, the one George Sanger used.’

  The vet did so and Lestrade sniffed it. There was little smell. He placed a finger in the glass neck. ‘Lister!’ Masters cried but it was too late. Lestrade’s face contorted and his cheek muscles twitched. He spat viciously, them snatched Masters’ cup of cocoa and downed it in one.

  ‘Are you mad?’ the vet demanded to know.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Lestrade said. ‘There’s no sugar at all in that cocoa. Tell me, Mr Masters,’ he kept his tongue moving so that it didn’t swell, ‘can one horse pull this wagon?’

  ‘Yes, of course. A f
ull-grown Clydesdale could pull three of these in tandem – not for long, of course, or at very great speed. Why?’

  ‘Because I have to go back into Pontefract and I’ll need to take a horse to catch up with you again. You’ll find Sanger’s burial party down the road. Somewhere near the pines. Old Hughie was partial to pines, apparently.’

  ‘Look, Lister, you’re a man of the world. Is all this burying at crossroads and so on strictly legal? I mean, oughtn’t we to be calling in the police and appropriate authorities?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Lestrade hedged, lifting up the stomach and placing it into a knapsack, careful to ensure it was secured in the glass jar first of course. He stuffed Sanger’s bottle into his pocket. ‘I believe the Boss sees himself as authority enough in these matters,’ he said, still feeling the burning sensation in his mouth so that his teeth ached, ‘at once magistrate, vicar and captain of his ship. As for legal, what’s going on in this circus has nothing to do with the law, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Where are you going, exactly,’ Masters called as his man all but disappeared in the driving rain.

  ‘Just popping out for some matches,’ Lestrade said.

  Now Lestrade had never quite taken to the equestrian side of life. It was for people like him that the young Gottlieb Daimler and the even younger Carl Benz were working, that very night, on various internal combustion engines, somewhere in Europe. True, Lestrade had done his stint in the Mounted Division, but he and his horse, Killer, had not represented a marriage of minds and the vicious animal had, on more than one occasion, thrown him into the Thames mud with unerring accuracy and then proceeded to attempt to demolish his head. Indeed, the helmet so pulverized by the beast’s flying hooves was destined to be on display for many years in the Police Museum at Scotland Yard.

  This animal filled him with even greater trepidation. Certainly, it lacked Killer’s fiery spirit. Its very name – Sloth – spoke volumes for its persona, but the thing stood nearly eighteen hands high and even when Lestrade had managed to rope it and mount it, by climbing up the side of the wagon, the span of his legs as he straddled its great bare back brought tears to his eyes. Early morning risers, tramping to work in mill and mine on their clattering hobnails, stared under their flat caps at the apparition – a bowler-hatted man, bedraggled to within an inch of his life, the sodden Donegal dripping from every fold. His feet were at right angles to his body and he seemed to be riding a sofa with legs. It was as well they couldn’t see, in dawn’s early light, the contents of the glass jar in the knapsack under his arm. And as well for the drunken Irishman who had caught the Clydesdale’s bridle on the road and demanded a swig from said jar, that Lestrade had been less than convivial.

  He slid wetly off the horse’s back and staggered like a man with tin legs to the doorway. Here he hammered, too wet and cold to care how many neighbours he woke. Eventually, lights glimmered in the upper windows and a sash slid upwards.

  ‘Yes?’ a peeved voice croaked.

  ‘Are you the chemist?’ Lestrade shouted.

  ‘Do you dough what time it is?’ the head demanded.

  Lestrade fumbled under the folds of his coat for his half-hunter. ‘It’s nearly four o’clock,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but my business is urgent.’

  There were growled mutterings from above. ‘They told be,’ he said, ‘they told be “Do’t live over t’shop”, but did I pay ady heed? Did I hell as like.’ And he vanished, only to emerge later in nightgown and dangling cap, carrying an oil lamp.

  ‘Thank you, Mr . . . er . . .’

  ‘Dudstad,’ said the chemist.

  ‘Dudstad?’ Lestrade repeated.

  ‘Dudstad!’ the chemist pointed at the brass plate off which the rain bounced.

  ‘Oh, Dunstan,’ Lestrade read aloud.

  ‘Dat’s what I said,’ the chemist explained. ‘I’m a bartyr to by siduses. Always the sabe. Every April ad Bay like clockwork. Dow, who are you ad what do you want?’

  ‘My name is Detective Sergeant Lestrade, Scotland Yard, and I want you to have a look at this.’ He held up the glass jar and the chemist recoiled, horrified.

  ‘What the bloody hell is that?’ he wheezed, clutching his throat.

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me,’ Lestrade said. ‘Can I come in? Only I’m quietly catching pneumonia on your doorstep.’

  Dunstan led the way through a murky passageway into a back room, filled from floor to ceiling with an astonishing array of phials and jeroboams full of garishly coloured liquids.

  ‘Who is it, Digel?’ a voice called from another room.

  ‘It’s dobody, Dadette. Go back t’sleep, will yer? By wife,’ he explained.

  ‘She has sinus trouble too?’ Lestrade sympathized.

  ‘Dough,’ said the chemist, ‘whatever bakes you think that? Hag on, let’s get sobe bore light in here.’

  He applied his taper to various wicks and the laboratory lay bathed in light. ‘Dow,’ he said, ‘show be that . . . thig again.’

  Lestrade placed the jar on a table. The chemist squatted beside it, peering through a misty pair of pince-nez. ‘If I didd’t dough bedder, I’d say that was sobebody’s stobach. Though it looks like a traid chibadzee has taken it out.’

  ‘And you’d be right,’ Lestrade said, ‘about the stomach, I mean. I can’t speak for the removals man.’

  The chemist looked at him in horror. For the first time he took in the yellow-faced young man in the dripping Donegal. He could have escaped from somewhere. ‘Do you have ady proof that you’re a detective?’ he asked warily.

  ‘About as much as you have of being a chemist,’ Lestrade said, wondering where his tipstaff had landed after he’d flung it to the verges on the advice of Lord George Sanger.

  ‘Ay, well, you bust adbit, it’s a little . . . peculiar, shall we say? You turd up here at four id t’bordig and say “Here’s sobebody’s stobach”.’

  ‘Please, Mr Dunstan,’ Lestrade urged. ‘A man is dead.’

  ‘I should hope he is.’ The chemist crouched by the jar again. ‘Well, what do you want be to do about it?’

  ‘Examine that stomach,’ Lestrade said. ‘Confirm what I already believe. How did the owner of that die?’

  Dunstan tutted and muttered, but began his preparations nonetheless. Holding the jar at arm’s length, he placed it on a table. Then he stood there. ‘Do you bind?’ he said, ‘oddly, I’b dot usually called upod to haddle people’s stobachs. Sort of goes against the graid, if you dough what I bean.’

  Lestrade pulled back his sodden cuffs, screwed his courage to the sticking place and lifted the mucous substance out on to the slab.

  ‘Could you wring it out?’ Dunstan asked.

  ‘Ring . . .?’

  ‘Like you were a washerwobad. Like you were a bangle.’

  Lestrade’s old mum had been a washerwoman. And one of the first household implements he’d caught his fingers in had been a mangle, so he was on home ground. Even so, he could think of more pleasant ways to spend an early Sunday morning. He squeezed and twisted and a considerable amount of liquid dripped into Dunstan’s dish. This the chemist whisked quickly away. ‘This is a job for the borgue, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Has Pontefract got one?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘A borgue? We haven’t eved got a public uridal. Here, hold this.’

  Lestrade took a test tube with slimy fingers. Dunstan put a match to his Bunsen burner and proceeded to tilt the tube this way and that. As the men watched, the colourless liquid disappeared, leaving only a sticky red residue at the bottom.

  ‘Well?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Definitely dead,’ the chemist said. ‘That’s blood left id the bottom there, that’s all.’

  ‘So where’s the other stuff gone?’ Lestrade asked. ‘The liquid?’

  ‘Disappeared,’ said the chemist.

  ‘Why?’ Lestrade kicked himself for not having attended that Bunsen Burning for Pleasure and Profit lecture at the Yard.

  ‘Because
it’s oxalic acid ad that’s what happens whed you heat it up. Bore thad that I caddot tell you, seeig as how it’s half past four id the bordig and it took be eighteed years to grasp eved the basics of chebistry.’

  ‘Would I be right is assuming that oxalic acid is the same as acid of sugar?’

  ‘You would,’ the chemist told him.

  ‘The same stuff that’s used to clean metal?’

  ‘The sabe. Dyers use it too – ad leather ad brass bakers. It dissolves iddigo ad bakes laudry blue – that is, blue used in laudry, dot all your clothes blue, if you divide the difference.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lestrade said. ‘My old mum was a washerwoman. As soon as I smelt the bottle, I knew I recognized it.’

  ‘Well, there you are, thed,’ Dunstan growled. ‘Didd’t deed to get be up at this Godforsaked hour, did you? What bottle?’

  ‘This one.’ Lestrade produced it from his pocket. ‘Can you test this too?’

  ‘Why? What’s it supposed to codtaid?’

  ‘It’s supposed to contain ether. But that would be too slow. It actually contains more of the same – oxalic acid.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Dunstan said, ‘it’s what I’ve always said – you shouldd’t buck about with aitch-two-see-two-oh-four-two-aitch-two-oh, should you?’

  ‘I try not to,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘That’ll be three and tedpedce.’

  Back he spurred like a madman, but he stopped short of shrieking a curse to the sky. Actually, of course, he had no spurs and leap about on the Clydesdale’s back though he might, the contented beast merely ambled along at his walking pace anyway. So it was nearly dawn when Lestrade arrived, shivering and saddle-sore, at the great gilded caravan of Lord George Sanger.

  The impresario had not yet dressed and what little hair he still had hung in curling tongs around his ears.

  ‘Ah,’ the showman smiled, taking in the sight, the trembling knees, the widely-separated thighs. ‘Bit of a cockchafer, old Champion, isn’t he?’

  ‘Champion?’

  ‘Bendy Hendey’s Clydesdale. I was thinking of billing him a year or two back as “Champion the Wonder Horse”, but I don’t think the world’s ready. Masters told me you’d ridden off to get some matches.’ He hung the detective’s Donegal and bowler over the little grate. ‘Are you all right, Lestrade? You look terrible.’