Lestrade and the Brigade Read online

Then, for Douglas at least, the smoke cleared. He was on the guns. To all sides, grey-coated Russians were scattering. There were horses and men heaped around the cannon, blackened and hot with the rapidity of fire. The remaining Seventeenth were leaping over them and Douglas leapt with them. A knot of the Eleventh, led by Loy Smith, were behind him. All semblance of order was lost, the lines so beloved of Maidstone and the Curragh gone in the frantic rush for the guns. Dunn was scything about him, hacking at the gunners. Palmer and Trevelyan rammed home their spurs into their chargers; flecked flanks and leapt into the battery smoke. Flames and screams were all about them. Will Spring felt a searing pain in his shoulder and his horse dragged him for several yards before his foot fell free of the stirrup. Gregory Jowett tried to reach him, but he was beaten back by the weight of numbers.

  In the mill beyond the guns, Bond and Bentley found themselves together. Neither man could believe his eyes. Cavalry. Russian Cavalry. Perhaps four or five times their own number were advancing along the sand towards them. What was left of the Seventeenth and Eleventh were fighting in tiny knots, steel flashing and ringing in the sun. There wasn’t time for a word, or a glance, before the two sergeants were parrying for their lives. Bond wheeled his horse, hacking behind him in the most difficult cut of the 1796 Manual. Bentley did likewise, but his opponents were lancers. He felt a lance tip jab through his busby, parting his hair for a second time that morning. Another thudded into the saddle, an inch or so from his groin. He was turning in air like a man possessed, snapping off one lance pole, then another. As he hacked, he prayed. But it wasn’t Almighty God who cantered to his side, but Lieutenant Alexander Dunn, scything down one Russian, then two. He wheeled his charger across Bentley’s.

  ‘“Rear protect” never was a sensible guard.’ He grinned and batting aside another lance jab with his bridle arm, drove his blade through the teeth of its owner.

  Pennington’s mare had fallen, sending her rider sprawling under the wheels of the guns. By the time he scrambled to his feet, the first line of the Eighth Hussars swept past him. Pennington caught sight of the old Woman leading his men in, clearing the guns with a thud and a spray of dust.

  ‘Grab the rein, man.’ The bark of a sergeant-major snapped him back to reality. He snatched the leather, somehow found the saddle and found himself charging the Russians with the Eighth. The field was now a mass of individual duels. Gregory Jowett was laying about him alongside Roger Palmer. To his fury, his blade was bouncing off Russian greatcoats around him and he cursed the Birmingham cutlers who had made such useless weapons. In the end he used the hilt like a knuckle-duster, aiming for the moustachioed faces under the fur caps. Lieutenant Palmer, swinging at his side, having given up the neat cuts of the Manual, was unaware of the Russian carbine aimed at his head. Jowett saw it and for a split second remembered that Palmer had upbraided him days before for being asleep at his post. The split second passed and Jowett’s sword sliced down through neck and collarbone, the carbine shot flying wide. After all, he reasoned with himself, Palmer had not had him flogged. He owed him that at least.

  Douglas, at the head of D Troop, had outflanked the guns on the left. His was the only unit marginally intact and he pointed his sword at the Russian squadrons advancing to meet him. ‘Right Engage.’ Stragglers of the Seventeenth, bleeding, their lance caps gone, wheeled in behind him.

  ‘Rally, men!’ Douglas shouted. ‘Rally men of the Seventeenth.’ But in the dust and smoke the majority of the lancers were not the Seventeenth. Palmer saw it first.

  ‘That’s not the enemy!’ he said and swung in to the attack again. A rifle exploded near him, bringing down a soldier of the Fourth Lights who had just swept past the guns. For a moment, he caught sight of Lord George Paget, a bedraggled cigar in his mouth, and then he turned to look for his own regiment.

  Alex Dunn saw a remarkable sight he would remember for the rest of his days. Through the choking smoke he saw Cardigan, unhurt and upright, facing a mass of Russian lancers. The officer in their centre seemed to know Cardigan and the two men saluted each other with their swords. The general of Hussars wheeled away to another part of the field.

  Paget had lost his own Fourths and was busy directing an aimless mass of the Eleventh. Loy Smith was doing the same thing beyond the furthermost guns. Instinctively, knots of survivors were breaking away, hurling tired insults at the hesitating Russians. Without cohesion or any real leadership, the enemy dithered at the end of the valley, allowing the British cavalry to pull back. Still the firing went on: Loy Smith’s horse was now swinging a broken leg. The sergeant-major kicked himself free of the stirrups and ran as soon as his feet touched the ground. Bullets were kicking up the dust at his heels as he caught a riderless mount and clinging on for dear life, rode back up the valley. He saw Pennington running back too, but hadn’t time to reach him before he fell, blood spurting from his leg. Undaunted, the soldier rolled upright, unbuckling his equipment to give him extra speed and hobbled onwards, as Russian swordsmen swung at him. A soldier of the Eighth lifted him awkwardly behind him and they galloped to cover.

  To his right, Trevelyan saw the flashing sabres of the Chasseurs D’Afrique, briskly silencing the guns on the heights. The next moment, he felt a crippling pain as riderless horses, terrified by the noise and lack of weight, crowded in against his legs. Their staring eyes and foam-flecked nostrils were as painful to him as his legs, but he found himself using his sword to cut himself free of them.

  Slowly, in ones and twos, the remnants of Cardigan’s brigade limped back up the valley. They rode or stumbled over the debris of battle – horses with their intestines steaming on the ground – men with smashed limbs and unrecognisable faces. Here and there, a wounded man dragged between comrades. And as the bullets lessened and the shots died away, an eerie calm fell over the field.

  Alex Dunn sheathed his sword, dark brown with the blood of Russians. He took his position at the head of D Troop and waited in the numbed silence as the stragglers came back through the smoke. Medical orderlies were everywhere and amid the cries for stretchers and the shots of farriers going about their grisly business, the solemn roll call was taken. In his own regiment the gaps were cruel – Lieutenants Cook and Houghton were unable to answer, Sergeants Jones and Jordan dead, Corporals France and Williams. And as the list increased, Dunn found himself counting the dead and felt the tears trickle down his cheeks.

  Sergeant Bentley saw Dunn with his head in his hands and thought that this was not the moment to thank him for saving his life. Jim the Bear was cantering on his blown chestnut along the line, still steady as a church. Bentley caught only part of it . . .

  ‘It was a mad-brained trick, men, but it was no fault of mine.’

  Behind him, the sergeant heard a voice. ‘Never mind, My Lord, ready to go again.’ Bentley prayed that Cardigan had not heard.

  ‘No, no, you have done enough.’ And he rode away from his old regiment.

  IN THE SILENCE OF HIS tent that night, John Douglas wrote to his wife. My Dearest Rosa . . . but he could not find the words. Of the 142 officers and men of the Eleventh Hussars on parade that morning, 25 were dead, 31 were wounded, 8 were missing and over half the regiment’s horses lay rotting in the biting night wind out there in the valley. Alex Dunn walked the cavalry lines, cradling for a moment the head of his charger as he passed. He patted the animal’s neck and, pulling his cloak around him, went into his tent. His orderly had laid out the writing case as he had asked. He forced his numbed fingers around the quill and began to write. Darling Rosa . . . and the lamplight flickered on the canvas walls . . .

  It was October 25th, 1854. A day to remember.

  THE FIRE CRACKLED AS the logs fell. Joseph Lestrade straightened up and looked behind him.

  ‘Time that boy was in bed, Martha.’

  ‘Let’s try him again before he goes, Joe, one last time.’

  Lestrade looked at the woman kneeling on the hearthrug and the round, curly-headed boy on her lap.

 
‘All right, Sholto. Come on, come on. Come to your dad.’ The little boy gurgled and his eyes flashed, but he made no move. Joseph Lestrade knelt down, arms outstretched across the rug.

  ‘Come on, lad. You can do it.’ The boy’s eyes caught sight of something flashing silver in the firelight. His father saw it too.

  ‘What’s that, Sholto? My coat? The numbers, isn’t it? The numbers on the collar.’ And the proud father spelt them out, ‘PC one-six-five,’ he whispered.

  With a gabble of nonsense, Baby Lestrade struggled to his feet. For a moment he swayed back against the comforting breasts of his mother. She held him to her and then he was gone, staggering now to the left, now to the right. His eyes were flashing in the firelight as he advanced on his father and his father’s coat.

  ‘That’s it. That’s it. Good lad. Come and get it. Come on.’

  And Baby Lestrade collapsed into his father’s arms, his fingers grabbing at the buttons. ‘He did it, Martha. How about that? Nine months old and his first step. How about that?’

  But Martha’s eyes were wet with tears. She whirled away to fetch her house-book and snatching up the quill wrote:

  Little Sholto took his first step today, October 25th, 1854. A day to remember.

  ❖ The New Broom ❖

  S

  holto Lestrade’s walking had come on admirably. But then he was nearly forty years old. He found himself looking at his feet particularly hard that morning. That silly magazine Punch had been caricaturing Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police again, and inevitably most of the humour was of the street and at gutter level – tortuous jokes about ‘A Policeman’s Boot is not a Happy One’. Nothing outsize there, Lestrade thought to himself.

  ‘Mornin’, sir.’ Dixon’s hearty greeting brought his eyes up to the usual level.

  ‘Sergeant,’ acknowledged Lestrade. ‘Anything for me today?’

  ‘’Is Nibs,’ Sergeant Dixon motioned heavenwards, ‘would like to see you when you can spare a moment.’

  ‘’Is Nibs?’ queried Lestrade.

  ‘Assistant Commissioner ’isself, sir. Proper gent, ’e looks.’

  Lestrade made for the stairs, then remembered the possible effect on his feet and took the lift instead. It whirred and clanked in the time-honoured tradition of a contraption less than three years old to the second floor, where Lestrade had his palatial office, wedged between a broom cupboard and a latrine. Constable Dew was waiting for him, mug of tea in hand.

  ‘Not this morning, Dew, I’ve had the call.’

  ‘What could it be, sir? Mrs Manchester’s tart?’

  But Lestrade had gone, leaving Walter Dew with one of those inevitable silences to which his humour usually entitled him.

  The door, which Lestrade always thought of as McNaghten’s, stood square and solid before him.

  ‘Enter.’

  It was not McNaghten. He had retired a month ago, lost and bewildered over the death of his daughter, and in his place stood one of the largest men Lestrade had ever seen. He weighed, Lestrade guessed, nearly nineteen stones and most of that lay somewhere between his chest and his knees. He had the look of a bulldog on heat, red-rimmed eyes and loose, quivering lips.

  ‘Inspector Lestrade, sir. You wished to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’ The bulldog came snarling out from behind his desk. ‘My name is Frost. Nimrod Frost.’ The bulldog circled Lestrade, swinging his girth ahead of him like a costermonger’s cart in Covent Garden. ‘Assistant Commissioner. The new Head of the Criminal Investigation Department.’ Each word was delivered with precision and relish. Lestrade tried to place it. Dixon was wrong; wherever the bulldog came from, he was no gentleman. The voice was worked, moulded, hammered into shape by a man who had waited, watched, come up the hard way. There was no tougher policeman. ‘You’ll hear a lot of me in the days ahead.’ The bulldog completed the circuit and regained his seat.

  ‘Sholto Joseph Lestrade.’ Frost’s eyes narrowed over the stub that was his nose. ‘Bachelor.’ The word sounded like an accusation. Frost seemed to be waiting for some kind of admission. ‘Born – Pimlico. January eighteen fifty-four. Father, Police Constable Joseph Lestrade, Metropolitan Police. Mother, Martha Jane Appleyard, laundress.’ The bulldog waited again for some sort of statement. There was none. ‘Eldest of three children, the others dying in infancy. Education . . .’ Frost paused. ‘Hmmm. School at Blackheath. Right, let’s stop there.’ The bulldog was padding round the room again. Occasionally he let his eyes wander to the window and the sun gilding the statuary of the Houses of Parliament. ‘Lestrade,’ he suddenly said. ‘That’s a foreign name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Huguenot French, sir. Or so I’ve always believed.’

  ‘Frog?’

  ‘Some time ago, sir. One of the things I picked up at Mr Poulson’s Academy, Blackheath was that large numbers of Huguenot weavers came to this country in the late seventeenth century. My grandfather used to say the Lestrades came from La Rochelle and settled in Spitalfields where—’

  ‘Thank you for the history lesson, Lestrade.’ The bulldog appeared to have bitten off more than he could chew. ‘Why did you become a policeman?’ He turned again to the file on Lestrade.

  ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’

  ‘Quite. Regrets?’

  ‘About the Force? No, sir. It’s always with you.’

  ‘Quite. McNaghten spoke highly of you. You’ve got some good collars.’

  Lestrade was surprised momentarily by the compliment. ‘I think smartness and efficiency go together, sir,’ and as he said it, he realised Frost was referring to arrests, not his sartorial elegance.

  ‘What I don’t like in detective inspectors,’ growled the bulldog, ‘is a sense of humour. It doesn’t become them.’ A weighty pause, then a new tack. ‘Are you familiar with the latest Home Office paper on the Metropolitan Police, Inspector?’

  Blank.

  ‘I thought not. Junior policemen, good, bad or indifferent tend not to read such things. A pity. An awareness of the views of the hands that feed us is no bad thing.’ Lestrade was vaguely aware of a mixed metaphor, but let it pass.

  Frost produced a welter of official-looking documents, cleared his throat and read aloud. ‘“An inspector is looked upon as a guide, guardian and referee by those whose unpleasant business causes them to see police aid. In contrast with bygone days an inspector must be a man of education” – the bulldog paused pregnantly – “and capable judgement; the public must feel a firm reliance in him as such.” Well, Lestrade, are you that man?’ A dramatic finger stabbed the air inches from the inspector’s face. ‘Good God, man.’ Frost was suddenly astounded. ‘You’ve got no tip to your nose!’

  ‘Some of it is probably still lying on a pavement in Cambridge, sir. In the line of duty. Still more of it is interred in Highgate Cemetery. That was a private matter.’

  ‘Very cryptic,’ scowled the bulldog, but Lestrade knew it wasn’t a joke. ‘This department,’ Frost went on, ‘is in for a shake-up. People haven’t forgotten the Ripper.’ Neither had Lestrade. ‘Or the Struwwelpeter murders.’ Nor had Lestrade. ‘The magazine Punch’ – it was as though Frost had been reading his mind on the way to the Yard – ‘persists in calling us the Defective Force. It’s not funny, Lestrade, not funny at all.’ His voice fell from the crescendo he had been building to all morning. ‘Sir Melville McNaghten spoke of you as his best man.’

  ‘That’s very flattering, sir.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? But I want to know if he’s right. I don’t want prima donnas on my Force, Lestrade. I want a team of dedicated, trustworthy officers.’ He began his perambulations again. ‘So I’ve got a little job for you . . .’

  TO SERGEANT DIXON THE new Head of the Criminal Investigation Department quickly became, behind his back and always in hushed tones, ‘His Nims’, on account of his name. The new broom swept through the stuffy corridors of New Scotland Yard, kicked out the infestation of sergeants which had lurked for nearly three years in the basement, insisted tha
t Inspector Athelney Jones replace the ill-fitting patrol jacket he had worn man and boy for sixteen years, and generally made his presence felt. If anything, communication within the great building was slowed down as the lifts, built to carry eight men, now carried five and Assistance Commissioner Frost. It did the other three good to run up and down stairs. After all, exercise was next to Godliness.

  But Inspector Lestrade knew little of this. On the day after his first meeting with Nimrod Frost, he was Swindon-bound. The last time he had taken this route he had had to change because of Brunel’s blasted wide gauge. Now at last the railway companies had seen sense and demolished it. He still had to change at Swindon, however, because of track works, and the tea and sandwiches at the Great Western buffet were as nauseating as he remembered them. Mrs Manchester had begged him to take some of her pasties, but making for Cornwall as he was, there was something of coals and Newcastle about the whole thing. He browsed through the periodicals on the shelves of the W H Smith bookstall and shuddered as his fingers alighted on a copy of the Strand Magazine. For a moment, he wondered if that idiot Watson was still feeding Conan Doyle those ludicrous stories about Sherlock Holmes, even though the man had been dead these eighteen months. He had no time to ponder as the whistle was blowing and he dashed through the steam to catch the twenty past two for Exeter.

  He spent the night, warm for April, within the sound of the cathedral bells. Lestrade was not a romantic in the conventional sense, but the great grey stones and the solemn bell had a haunting quality all of their own. Supper was modest enough on the expenses Frost had been meagre enough to allow him and he dozed fitfully.

  The following afternoon found Inspector Lestrade flanked by a sergeant and two constables of the Cornwall Constabulary overlooking the Helford River. Behind them was the huge, silent earthwork which surrounded the little church of Mawnan. Through the strange, stunted trees below them, the policemen could see the sea, shifting in its greyness, rolling in its quest for the coast. There was a stillness Lestrade found odd. He was still happiest in the clatter of the city, even if he hadn’t actually been able to hear Bow Bells when he was born.