Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  ‘How the devil do you know that?’ Marshall Hall asked.

  ‘I’ll ask the questions,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Trottie and I go back a long way,’ the Actor-Manager explained. ‘I knew the family.’

  ‘Yet you didn’t know about her sister?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Verity True.’

  ‘Of course. What of her?’

  ‘She too died at the hands of the Underground murderer,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘The deuce she did!’ Bancroft’s monocle fell off. ‘Well, fan my flies. Now I see why you’re asking me all these questions.’

  ‘It is a coincidence, is it not, Mr Bancroft? Your old leading lady and the sister of your new leading lady both strangled to death in the same month.’

  ‘By Jove, yes,’ Bancroft pondered while the flunkey served the brandies. ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘It’s a brandy,’ Marshall Hall told him. ‘Rich people like us drink it regularly.’

  ‘No, I mean that.’ Lestrade pointed more precisely.

  ‘That’s my thumb, Lestrade,’ the Actor-Manager confessed.

  ‘That.’ Lestrade poked a purple ridge running transwise across it.

  ‘It’s an old scar,’ said Bancroft. ‘I’d like to say it was the result of an old flesh wound from Macbeth, but actually I fell off my rocking horse when I was a boy.’

  ‘Well, Mr Bancroft,’ Lestrade downed his brandy, ‘offer up a prayer to that wooden charger tonight. That fall may just have saved you from the drop. Good morning, gentlemen.’ And he exited, stage right.

  ‘Well, you were useful, Marshall Hall!’ Bancroft thundered.

  The advocate smiled. ‘That’s the price you pay, Squire,’ he said. ‘I’ll send my man Bowker around tomorrow morning, shall I? Give you a chance to embezzle a bit of ticket money.’

  ‘I’M SORRY, GUV. I KNOW your views on the matter, but Mr Abberline insisted.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Lestrade pushed his way down the basement stairs at the Yard, where, on a clear day, you could hear the lap of the water and the swishing of the tails of the rats.

  He didn’t stop until his hand was resting on the cell door that Constable Corkindale had banged open with his shoulder. The only damage was a slight dent in the metal.

  ‘Mr Bayruth,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘That’s Bayreuth,’ the suspect corrected him again.

  ‘Is it?’ said Lestrade, throwing his boater on to the bed and squatting on Bayreuth’s latrine. ‘Do you know what they call you in the sergeants’ mess next door?’

  ‘If it’s anything unpleasant, I shall sue,’ Bayreuth said, shaking his stump with some defiance.

  ‘Your first name is Edward, isn’t it?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘They’re calling you Edward the Confessor. Now you see the position that puts me in, don’t you?’

  ‘Up for promotion, I would have thought. Here I am, on a plate.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m tempted to let Constable Corkindale over there eat you. How about it, Corkindale?’

  ‘Ooh, no, sir,’ the Constable grimaced. ‘That would be cannibalism and contrary to the laws of nature.’

  Lestrade looked at the man. ‘Did Mrs Miniver up at the school teach you that?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir. It’s in the Police Manual.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yessir. Sergeant Dixon read all that to me when I joined, sir.’

  ‘Of course. I remember. You followed the lines with your finger, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Corkindale beamed.

  ‘Right. Now to weightier matters.’ Though it was difficult to find much that was weightier than Corkindale. ‘Who have you killed this time, Mr Bayreuth?’

  ‘The latest one,’ the prisoner answered. ‘Henrietta Fordingbridge.’

  ‘Why?’ Lestrade lit a cigar.

  ‘Give me the come-on, she did. Well, what do you expect? She was an actress, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I fully believe that you are guilty of reading the papers, Mr Bayreuth. What I want is one cast-iron reason why I should charge you for the murder.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Abberline was convinced,’ Bayreuth said petulantly.

  ‘Yes, of course he was,’ Lestrade said. ‘That’s because Chief Inspector Abberline makes Constable Corkindale look like a college professor. Now I thought I made it clear last time that a man with your . . . infirmity . . . cannot possibly kill a full-grown, healthy woman, come-on or not.’

  Bayreuth stood up, his jaw flexing. ‘I may be manually disadvantaged,’ he said, ‘but my bosom harbours thoughts the like of which the world cannot encompass.’

  ‘Really? You know, Bayreuth.’ Lestrade rose to go, ‘you’re the sort of bloke who ought to report to a police station every Thursday for a damned good smacking . . . Except that you’d probably enjoy it too much. See this . . . gentleman out, Corkindale. Take him the pretty way via the river. I don’t want Joseph Public thinking he’s helping us with our inquiries.’

  At the bottom of the stairs, Lestrade turned to the faithful Dew. ‘Are they ready?’

  ‘In your office, sir,’ the Constable told him.

  AND THEY WERE. THREE ladies of the night, each encased in whalebone and plastered with make-up.

  ‘Well, bounce a bit, Bromley,’ Lestrade snapped. ‘Good God, man, you’re about as enticing as a cardboard box.’

  The detective of that name swayed his hips but only looked as if he was limbering up for the Metropolitan Tug-o’-War Team.

  ‘Show him, Johnnie,’ Lestrade sighed.

  Inspector John Thicke obliged. After all, he had been doing it for years. ‘Like this,’ he said. ‘More flair. More grind. Remember, you’re not coppers now; not for tonight, anyway. You’re part of the oldest profession in the world. And look as if you’re enjoying it.’

  ‘What’s your view on our man, Johnnie?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Well,’ the Inspector rolled down his bodice to pull a cigar from his cleavage, ‘I’ve been trailing madmen now for seven years, man and woman. The Ripper, the Penge Flasher and now the Underground Strangler. Oh, and in between, the Toilet Torch of Teddington.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dunno. Never caught him.’ Thicke lit up so that the lucifer flame lit up his strangely convincing features. ‘Never caught the Ripper neither, come to think of it. And now La Rue’s in charge of dressing up, I don’t hold out much hope for the Flasher. However, I digress.’

  ‘Indeed you do,’ Lestrade agreed.

  ‘Let’s get to cases, then,’ said Thicke. ‘Our man is a sexual pervert. He doesn’t have time to carry out the appalling interference he plans and dreams of because he has to wait for his moment. A crowded train is no good. So he waits until the last one or maybe the one before. But he can’t risk striking when somebody might get on at a station, so he has to kill on the last stretch. That doesn’t give him time to do more than lift the lady’s skirts; which makes him more exasperated and frustrated than ever. The blood lust in him must be rising, which for us is good.’

  ‘Not so good for some unsuspecting woman, though,’ Russell observed.

  ‘I’ll do the morality, lad,’ Thicke told him. ‘You just stick out your bum at any bloke on that last or pen . . . pelu . . . last-but-one train. Any bloke, understand? Be he bishop or woman. I know our friend’s sexual proclivities, but I’m buggered if I know what he looks like. These women are still out there riding the Underground, despite the warnings Mr Lestrade has issued and the field day the Press have had. That points to one thing. Well, two things. Well, three, I suppose.’

  ‘And they are, Johnnie?’ Lestrade tried to pin his man down. It would soon be time for the last trains.

  ‘One,’ and he held up a thumb with a long red nail, ‘the women in question can’t read. Two,’ a finger joined it, ‘they like a laugh. Three,’ and he’d stopped the use of the digits by now, ‘they think that they can trust t
he bloke. Which means he could be a vicar or a woman.’

  ‘Or a guard,’ Bromley said.

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous, Bromley,’ Lestrade and Thicke chorused.

  ‘Right,’ said Lestrade. ‘Now, no heroics. You’re all armed, gentlemen?’

  Thicke hauled up his frock to reveal the ebony life-preserver tucked alluringly in his garter. Russell flicked a catch in his handbag to flash a set of gleaming steel knuckles. Bromley pulled out a powder puff.

  ‘What in God’s name will that do to him?’ Lestrade asked. ‘Make him smell nice as he chokes the life out of you?’

  ‘It’s pepper, sir. It’ll blind him. My boots’ll do the rest.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, son,’ the Inspector said. ‘Who’s on where, Johnnie?’

  ‘Russell’s on the Circle moving east from Earls Court. Bromley’s doing the reverse, heading west. I’m going up and down the City and South London like a yo-yo in drag. And I calculate our chances of catching him are about three hundred and eighteen thousand to one.’

  ‘I know,’ sighed Lestrade, ‘but we’ve got to try something. He’s making fools of us all – well, Abberline, anyway. Good luck, ladies – and don’t talk to any strange men.’

  ‘I’ve been propositioned by Sergeant Challoner already,’ Russell moaned.

  ‘What did he do?’ quipped Thicke. ‘Pull rank?’

  Russell fluttered his false eyelashes. ‘A lady doesn’t answer that kind of question, Inspector,’ and he held open the door while the others flounced out.

  A tight-lipped man of indeterminate age sat open-mouthed as the three traipsed through the outer office to the whistles and applause of passing detectives. Lestrade caught his eye. ‘Well, we don’t get many perks on this floor, Mr . . . er . . . ?’

  ‘Galton,’ the man said, ‘Francis Galton. Are you Inspector Lestrade?’

  ‘I am. What can I do for you?’ Lestrade offered a chair. It was Walter Dew’s.

  ‘Ask rather what I can do for you,’ he beamed.

  ‘Ah, it’s riddle night,’ said Lestrade. ‘You’ll forgive me if I’m a little frayed, Mr Galton, but it’s late and I’ve forgotten where I live. Could you get to the point?’

  ‘Clearly,’ Galton bridled, ‘you don’t realize who I am.’

  ‘Clearly,’ agreed Lestrade.

  ‘I am Francis Galton, the anthropologist.’

  ‘Oh, we never discuss politics here,’ Lestrade assured him.

  ‘The meteorologist.’

  ‘Or religion.’

  ‘I am the originator of the theory of eugenics . . .’

  ‘Well, I’m happy for you,’ said Lestrade. ‘Allow me to be the first to congratulate you.’

  ‘A few years ago.’

  ‘Ah, then I’m too late.’

  ‘Give me your hand, Mr Lestrade.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hand.’

  With some trepidation, the Inspector did so. He sensed Walter Dew peering over a pile of papers at him.

  ‘Ah,’ Galton said, squinting in the bad light at Lestrade’s thumb, ‘the bifurcated ridge. Don’t ever commit a crime, Mr Lestrade. That thumb would hang you.’

  Lestrade had said something curiously similar to Squire Bancroft that very morning. ‘Why so?’ he asked.

  ‘The lines,’ said Galton triumphantly. ‘Five years ago I proved conclusively that each of us has a unique pattern of lines on the tips of our fingers – and thumbs. Your loops and whorls will be the same now as on the day you were born – and will not change until the day of your death. Moreover, yours are quite unlike mine or anyone else’s.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, all you have to do is to check the throats of your Underground victims and you’ve got him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The murderer.’

  ‘I see.’ Lestrade looked at his fingertips. ‘It’s that simple?’

  ‘It is. The Chinese were using thumb prints as signatures as long ago as two hundred years before Christ. Purkenje at Breslau suggested a classification system in 1823 and William Herschel in Bengal . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t this depend on one thing?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘On knowing what our man’s whoops are like?’

  Ah, yes. But all you need to do is take fingerprint samples from all the passengers . . .’

  ‘All the passengers?’ Lestrade roared. ‘Well, that’s a mere fifteen thousand a day on the City and South London line alone, Mr Galton. That’s assuming they’d actually let us do it, of course. You’ll be telling me next that you can divide people up by the kind of blood they’ve got or tell a man’s physical characteristics by his bodily secretions! Now, I’m a very busy man, Mr Galton. Have you ever thought of writing sketches for the music hall?’

  ❖ 8 ❖

  A

  ll that was left of Fanny Chattox lay in a smoking heap below the Stockwell gradient. Other than the darting bull’s-eyes of the Railway Police, the entire tunnel was a tube of utter blackness.

  ‘I just don’t believe it, Sholto,’ John Thicke was saying. Another one right under my nose.’

  ‘Don’t reproach yourself, John. There are a lot of miles to cover.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Thicke hauled off his bonnet. ‘Maybe it’s time I hung up my chemise.’

  ‘Now, don’t say that,’ Lestrade insisted. ‘Good women like you are hard to come by. Let’s have it again – from the top – as I expect Squire Bancroft would say.’

  ‘I was in a padded cell pulled by locomotive Number Eight. We’d just pulled in to Stockwell and I was about to change trains for the ride back when the lights went out.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All the electric ones, yes. Even the gas gave a bit of a flutter. There was the most weird noise – I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  ‘It was like . . . like a thousand nails scratching at once on a bucket. It was the sound of Fanny Chattox frying, dying on the line behind me.’

  ‘But you must have been half a mile away.’

  ‘I know. I grabbed the nearest guard and asked him what had happened. He said something or somebody must have fallen on the live rail.’

  ‘You’ve examined the body?’

  Thicke nodded. ‘Seen my supper twice,’ he said. ‘Funnily enough, I don’t remember eating any of it.’

  ‘How do we know who she is?’

  ‘Well, we don’t. Not for sure. But one of the Railway boys found a handbag a few yards away. It’s got her name and address in it. Duke Street.’

  ‘Duke Street?’ Lestrade’s raised eyebrow was invisible in the darkness.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ agreed Thicke. ‘A kept woman if ever there was one. The question is, who’s keeping her?’

  ‘Nobody now, I fancy. Have you ever seen an electrocution before, John?’

  ‘Never,’ said the Inspector. ‘And I don’t want to again, thanks. It’s the smell, isn’t it? That’s the worst part. Sort of sickly sweet, like roast pig at the fair.’

  ‘All right, have a cigar. Give me your bull’s-eye.’

  ‘Put that bloody light out!’ a voice rang through the caverns measureless to man. ‘We don’t want anybody else going up in smoke.’

  ‘Sorry!’ Lestrade called and Thicke tucked the Havana into his garter for use on a later occasion.

  The Yard man stumbled off down the line. The live rail was dead now, its current switched off. Still it shone deadly in his torch beam, a silver slash in the darkness rising a foot from the right-hand rail and mounted on curiously wrought glass insulators. The whole thing was about three inches wide where the locomotive’s collector shoes nudged it in the course of a journey. And there was a three-inch gash across the face and breast of Fanny Chattox as she lay, done to a turn, staring at the blackness of the ceiling. She had been lovely once, Lestrade could tell, but her mystery paramour at Duke Street would not want to look at her now. Her skin was
the colour of old mahogany and her hair like black wire. Her clothes lay in tatters around her and her boots lay down the line where the thump of the shock had blown them.

  But it was the mouth that Lestrade would remember all his life – the lips peeled back from the bared teeth, the throat swollen as it had convulsed for the last scream that never came. Under the bodice and the once-voluptuous breasts, the lungs had frozen and the heart had stopped.

  He shook himself free of it, the nausea of death, and he walked back down the line, taking Thicke with him as he went.

  ‘I want to see everybody,’ he whispered, his words reverberating oddly in the dome of the tunnel. ‘Everybody, do you understand, who works on this line. Day shift, night shift, it doesn’t matter. Guards, engine drivers, platform porters, ticket collectors. And I want them here at Stockwell by midday tomorrow. He’s not going to claim another victim if I can help it.’

  HE TOLD THEM TO BE vigilant. The guards especially. But as one of the City and South London’s more learned philosophers pointed out, ‘Who guards the guards?’

  It was thus that Lestrade had another look at the dusty old ledgers kept at Stockwell, among the peaked caps and gleaming ticket machines. On three of the Nights In Question, the murders of Fanny Chattox, Henrietta Fordingbridge and Verity True, the regular guards had gone sick with a curious malaise and A. N. Other had taken their place.

  ‘Who are these replacements?’ Lestrade had asked. And the supervisor had shrugged.

  ‘Well, I thought I knew all the guards on this line,’ he had said. ‘The trouble is in the summer we’re short-staffed. That Gladstone bloke’s got a lot to answer for with the Annual Holiday Act. In my day . . .’

  But Lestrade had had no time to reminisce. He questioned the three guards whose tours of duty had witnessed the three fatal rides up the line to death. Yes, they’d all come over peculiar the night before. Yes, they’d sent messages to the effect they wouldn’t be in, but by the time the under-manager had gone to the locomotive locum register, somebody had already filled in a name. That was that. He assumed that the under-under-manager (an ambitious lad) had beaten him to it. And so Lestrade was left with three different names in the same spidery hand. Bearing in mind the patent nonsense spouted by the boffin at the Yard, there was clearly no point in showing the signatures to him. And anyway, they were obviously in disguise. Neither did the names mean anything to him – Hudson, Gooch and Hackworth. They sounded vaguely like a trio who might play with Dr Grace, but that was no help.