Lestrade and the Mirror of Murder Read online

  ‘But Mr Montfitchett . . .’

  Poulson’s right hand came upright, ‘I will not hear it!’ he thundered. ‘I have heard the stories concerning Mr Montfitchett and I am disinclined to believe almost all of them. Anyway, I suspect that most of the slanders came from the diseased mind of that friend of yours – the one I expelled last year. What was his name?’

  ‘Derbyshire, sir,’ Lestrade hung his head. He missed him still.

  ‘No, not him, the other one. Looked like a dung beetle.’

  ‘Oh, Mellor.’ He didn’t miss him at all. Nobody did.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. But this, Lestrade, this on top of all your other outrages comes as the last straw which you may accept has broken my over-generous back. On page sixteen of this . . .’ he held the book by his fingertips, ‘. . . this lamentable excuse for scholarship; just about where Mr Taylor was attempting to instil into you Hammurabi’s foreign policy, you have written . . .’ he adjusted his spectacles, ‘. . . well, perhaps you’d like to tell me what you have written.’

  ‘“General Napier is a B.O.F.”, sir.’

  ‘“A B.O.F.”,’ Poulson enunciated, ‘and what does that signify?’

  ‘Er . . . a brilliant officer fundamentally, sir.’

  Poulson closed his eyes. ‘Lestrade,’ he said, ‘in your time at this Seat of Learning, you have taken the ancient art of lying to unparalleled heights. I will ask you once more – what does “B.O.F.” stand for?’

  Lestrade took a deep breath. The little glass dangly bits on old Poulson’s lamp were tinkling with the vibrations of their owner’s voice. Time perhaps to come clean.

  ‘Boring Old Fart, sir,’ he blurted and watched the headmaster’s knuckles turn white.

  ‘That is quite the filthiest word in the English language.’

  ‘Chaucer uses it, sir,’ Lestrade countered, ‘Mr Chubb says that in the Miller’s Tale . . .’

  ‘“Mr Chubb says”,’ Poulson repeated viciously. ‘Perhaps you’d care to rephrase that.’

  ‘Er . . . Mr Chubb said . . .’

  ‘When he was briefly with us, precisely. I sacked the man, Lestrade. His references were clearly written by a libertine. Did he not also use the word “Stocking” on one occasion?’

  ‘I wasn’t with Matron at the time, sir,’ Lestrade informed him.

  ‘Well, well,’ Poulson cleared his throat, ‘to the point, Lestrade. The point is not only that you are defacing an expensive exercise book – for which the National School down the road would give its eye teeth, may I remind you; not only are you doodling when your mind and soul should be riveted on ancient . . . wherever . . . but you have libelled one of Her Majesty’s greatest soldiers, viz and to wit Lord Napier of Magdala. Did you not realize he has received a special vote of thanks from Parliament for his recent campaign? That the civilized world can rest easy in its bed because when the Heathen thundered at our gate, one man stood tall?’

  ‘I . . . I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, sir.’

  ‘Of course you hadn’t, Lestrade. And if you’re unusually and meticulously honest with yourself, you’d admit that you don’t think at all. Well, laddie, the time has come. How many strokes of the cat have you felt?’

  ‘I told you, sir. I didn’t see it. It was dark.’

  ‘Not the school cat, you poltroon,’ Poulson snarled, ‘the leather one.’

  ‘Oh, three hundred and twelve, sir. If you remember, you forewent the other three as it was my birthday.’

  ‘Ah!’ a leather-stalled finger shot skyward, ‘charity. My first mistake. Well, there’ll be no more, Lestrade. You will clear your locker by four of the clock. You will return all books to Mr Martinet, the Bursar and you will not cross these portals again on any pretext whatsoever.’

  Poulson caught sight of something about the young reprobate before him that was untoward. ‘What’s that on your upper lip, Lestrade?’ he asked, peering under the pince-nez rim.

  ‘It’s my nose, sir.’

  ‘Let’s not dabble in comparative anatomy, shall we? I’ll have that abomination Professor Huxley writing to me again. That fuzz, man, that appears to be adorning, for want of the correct word, your face.’

  ‘It’s a moustache, sir.’

  ‘A moustache, Lestrade? A moustache? An object of masculinity confined I believe to boxing clubs of certain public schools and officers of the cavalry. You are at the wrong school, young man and judging from the comments of Mr Piggott, the Riding Master, you will never make your mark in the mounted branch of the service. When you report to Mr Martinet, be sure you are properly tonsured. Clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Lestrade,’ his headmaster’s voice stopped him at the door, ‘I don’t want you to look on this as a mere hiccough in the peristalsis of life. I want you to look on it as terminal choking. You have failed, sir. Young as you are, callow as you are. There is no hope for you now.’

  ‘Yessir,’ the boy paused at the study entrance, gazing at its musty terrors for the last time. ‘Please, sir, what’s a poltroon?’

  Poulson sighed. ‘There you are, Lestrade. My very point. You don’t listen, you see. I told you what a poltroon is – you are. Good afternoon, Lestrade. And goodbye.’

  As the door clicked shut, another opened and a little oak panelling swung outward.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, Matron. Good Lord, is that the time?’ The headmaster rummaged with his fly buttons.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him, Poulsey-Woulsey?’ She curled what was left of his hair.

  ‘Tell him what? Damn Mrs Poulson, she’s been heavy with the starch again. Can’t seem to get my . . .’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Lestrade that his dad can’t afford the fees any more?’

  Poulson looked pale. ‘Matron, please. I couldn’t be that unpleasant. Had to let the lad down gently. Don’t want him topping himself like those three last term. Oh, lock the door, will you, Gladys – and make sure the blotting paper’s wedged securely in the keyhole. I’ve been getting those threatening letters again.’

  1

  ‘B

  ee?’ the chief inspector said, checking the sheet, ‘how are you spelling Bee?’

  ‘B-e-e, sir, as in the thing that flies.’

  ‘How long on the Force?’

  ‘Three years, sir, L Division.’

  ‘Ah yes, how is old Marrion?’

  Bee looked a little shocked. ‘No ladies in L Division, sir: oh, unless you’re talking about Sergeant Clary and he underwent a medical to scotch the rumours.’

  ‘No, Chief Inspector Marrion – Ned Marrion.’

  ‘Dead, sir.’

  ‘Ned? Dead?’ the chief inspector looked horrified. A little of his own mortality confronted him. Ned Marrion and he had grown up together, copper and boy. Inseparable they were at one time – Walter Dew and Ned Marrion – the terrible twins. Went together like Castor and Oil.

  ‘Last March, sir, 1905. Went of the influenza.’

  The chief inspector shook his head, greying now around the temples. His hair was on the turn, too. ‘Well, well. You must be . . . how do you say this – Querks?’

  ‘Queue, sir,’ the other constable said, his regulation bowler firmly in the crook of his arm, ‘spelt Q-u-e-u-x. Pronounced Queue. The x is silent, as in xenophobia.’

  ‘Well, of course it is,’ the chief inspector observed. ‘Those plant names are always peculiar, aren’t they? Is that right, you’ve spent the last year in Accounts?’

  ‘It is, sir. Before that the Chelsea Polytechnic.’

  ‘For eight years?’

  ‘Double-entry bookkeeping, sir – it’s a long course.’

  The inspector leaned back at a rakish angle in his battered old chair. ‘Bee and Queux,’ he mused, ‘a total of three years’ experience – and the ex is bloody loud in that word, Queux.’

  ‘Four years, sir,’ the constable corrected him. Clearly those nights sweating away at evening classes had left their mark.

  ‘I do
n’t count Accounts, Queux,’ the chief inspector told him flatly. ‘There’s no substitute for the pounding of leather on pavement, the rain dripping off your helmet-brim, your night-stick chafing your unmentionables. And then, there’s the Yard. Look around you, gentlemen. There’s no finer institution in the world. On the ground floor we’ve got drawings of every conceivable shape of ear known to man – loads of lobes. We’ve got eyes, noses, teeth, aliases, fingerprints. Remember the Stratton brothers?’

  The new constables didn’t.

  ‘Well, last year they burgled a property. Only thing was they left their dabs all over the safe. Quick as a flash, we were on to ’em. Case made history – the first time that fingerprints were used to seal the fate of felons. On the second floor, we’ve got criminal records as long as your arm. Wall to wall shoe boxes – all the latest in technology. On the fourth floor, transport. Marias, horses, drunk carriages, horseless vehicles.’ He closed to his men. ‘There’s talk – nothing concrete yet, mind you – that we’re to get motorized vehicles this year. That’ll slow down Joe Felon a bit, I can tell you.’

  ‘What’s on the top floor, Chief Inspector?’ Queux asked.

  ‘That’s Special Branch, lad,’ the senior man told him. ‘You needn’t go worrying your not-particularly-pretty little head about them. Coppers in name only. No, it’s here. Here on the third floor that things happen. This is the nub. The gist. The very heart of criminal detection. And you know what makes a great detective, gentlemen?’

  The door crashed back before either of them could answer, and a ferret-faced man with parchment skin hurried in, throwing his bowler to a hat stand and caution to the winds. ‘The ability to make a decent cup of tea.’

  The detectives, old and new stood to attention. ‘Good God, Walter,’ the newcomer said, unbuttoning his Donegal, ‘as you were, as you were. You’ll be polishing your shoes on the backs of your trousers next. Who are these?’

  ‘New recruits, sir, Constables Bee and Queux. This is Superintendent Lestrade, gentlemen – the guv’nor.’

  They looked at him and he at them. A man easily the wrong side of fifty-two, his face like a crumpled copy of Magna Carta. A man who looked as though he had been expelled from a third-rate crammer, somewhere in the wilds of Blackheath. One look at them told him all he needed to know – two more idiots at the Yard. When, oh when were they going to set examinations for these people?

  ‘A word in your ear, Walter,’ Lestrade said and took his man into the inner sanctum, even more littered with shoe boxes than the outer one. ‘The memorandum from the Miserable Major?’

  Dew slapped his macassared forehead with his open hand. ‘Hellfire, guv,’ he hissed, ‘it went right out of my head.’

  ‘It’s only that I got another one this morning which had words like “disciplinary action” and “never in all my born days” in it. Nothing to worry about, of course; it’s just that if I ever do retire, I’d like to decide when it is I get the watch.’

  ‘God, guv,’ Dew shook his head, ‘I don’t know what to say. Look,’ he rummaged in his pocket, ‘here it is,’ and held up the tatty piece of paper. ‘Oh, no, that’s Mrs Dew’s list.’

  Lestrade raised an eyebrow, ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, Walter,’ he said, ‘try the liniment, tell her. In the meantime, I’ll be on the carpet on the floor above. If you hear a loud noise, it’ll be me, grovelling to the Mournful Major. Check those two out, will you? I’m not sure either of ’em could dunk a decent Bath Oliver,’ and he swept out.

  He took the lift. Well, he was fifty-two and his old trouble had been getting to him recently. He only jammed his fingers once in the moving machinery, those metallic murderers known at the Yard as the Gates of Hell. But, as he could have told you as the tears cleared, once was enough.

  Then he was there, the frosted glass burnished before him, his knuckles resounding on it.

  ‘Come,’ the Melancholy Major called from within.

  When Edward Henry had this office, it spoke volumes about the man. It was bright, spick and almost span. Framed pictures of the ends of people’s fingers were all over the walls and here and there was the odd Indian objay dar to remind him of the early days, in India. Now, it was gloom itself. That awful painting, known colloquially as Whistler’s Mother, by Whistler, hung none too well over the fireplace. The grate, now that spring was here, was dark and empty. The chair where years before Howard Vincent’s pet iguana had languished had all but collapsed under the appalling strain of its own chintz.

  And behind the desk sat the Morose Major himself, E.F. Wodehouse KCB, KCVO. On his left, a portrait to remind him of his early days, a particularly drab corner of the Royal Albert Dock. On his right, a portrait of the other corner.

  ‘I asked for you yesterday,’ he moaned, his mouth like an inverted crescent under the moon of his nose. Years of tea-sipping had given him roseacea. Years of moaning had given him the elbow from the City Force. Now, for everybody else’s sins, he was acting assistant commissioner with the Met.

  ‘Really, sir? I had no idea.’

  ‘Heads had better roll, then.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Lestrade shook his head while it was still attached. ‘No harm done.’

  ‘In my experience,’ Wodehouse droned, ‘harm is always done. Otherwise, it isn’t really harm, is it?’

  ‘Er . . . no, sir,’ Lestrade had never thought of it quite in those terms before. He doubted secretly whether he would again.

  ‘Well, to the matter in hand,’ Wodehouse unfolded a letter in front of him. Thanks to the angle of the watery April sun and a lifetime spent reading other people’s mail, Lestrade could discern the watermark of the Devon Constabulary. ‘You’ve doubtless heard of the affair at Peter Tavy.’

  ‘Would that be Peter Tavy in Devon, sir?’ Lestrade felt safe to enquire.

  ‘Is there another?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Not for the first time in his long and distinguished career did Superintendent Lestrade feel let down by Mr Poulson’s rather enfeebled grasp of geography.

  ‘You’re curiously vague this morning, Lestrade,’ Woodhouse told the superintendent, ‘I’m talking about the massacre. Four killed in a chaise crash.’

  ‘A sort of . . . death trap?’ Lestrade ventured and immediately regretted it.

  ‘Let’s leave levity to Mr Robey, shall we, Superintendent? A sense of humour has no place within these walls. How right Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan were when they said “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one”. Nor should it be. The day I find something jocular in murder, fraud, larceny and sexual depravity, they can carry me out of here in a pine box.’

  Lestrade checked the width of the door optimistically. Of course, the lift would be a problem . . . Perhaps if they tilted the Moribund Major upright a little?

  ‘They’ve called in the Yard,’ Wodehouse went on, ‘I’ve a missive here from Sir Willoughby d’Eresby, Devon’s chief constable.’

  ‘But wasn’t it an accident, sir?’ Lestrade asked. The Sun wasn’t usually wrong on these matters. All other matters, yes, but it was pretty good on horrific accidents, major catastrophes and so on.

  ‘Not unless four traces can snap simultaneously on a hairpin bend on a clear day, no.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lestrade had to concede that Wodehouse had a point. ‘Well, then I’m on my way, sir. May I take Walter Dew?’

  ‘I have to think of expenses, Lestrade,’ the acting assistant commissioner explained. ‘Anyone over the rank of sergeant causes a pecuniary shortfall of some magnitude.’

  ‘Dickens, then?’

  ‘Dickens?’

  ‘Sergeant, ex F Division, been at Headquarters now, ooh, man and boy . . .’

  ‘Well, if you must. But I want everything signed for. Keep all your chits.’

  ‘I’ll try, sir,’ Lestrade promised.

  ‘And you mind how you go, Lestrade,’ Wodehouse wagged a monitorial finger, ‘April can be a treacherous month. And I wouldn’t drink the Devon water if I were you.’

  ‘You
wouldn’t, sir?’

  ‘No. The Lady Mostlikelyto was washed up off Torbay in 1867. There’s ballast slewing around those seas yet, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘But don’t the rivers flow into the sea, sir? Not vice versa?’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself with geophysics, Lestrade. Nor with vice. This is a murder inquiry.’

  But Sergeant Dickens was not available. He’d been seconded by the London Polytechnic to answer questions in their Brian of Britain quiz. Yes, that was a misprint, but they’d had eight hundred posters printed and distributed and they had no intention of changing it. Anyway, it was only a Polytechnic. People would make allowances. So Adams it had to be.

  He sat with his guv’nor in the second class of the London and South Western on that grey April morning. ‘Do you know, Superintendent, I think spring is here. I was only saying to Mrs Adams the other day . . .’

  ‘You’ve read the chief constable’s report?’ Lestrade cut him short. Sergeant Benjamin Harry Adams had the record in the Metropolitans for the longest deposition in their history. It ran to thirty-four sides of foolscap – and back again. And there possibly was some truth in the rumour that Mr Justice Swindlehurst had died of old age listening to him give evidence at the Bailey.

  ‘I have, sir. Lovely hand, hasn’t he, the chief constable?’

  ‘Do you know Devon at all?’ Lestrade couldn’t see much of it out of the rain-lashed windows.

  ‘Clotted cream is about the size of it,’ Adams confessed, ‘though I believe an uncle on Grandmother Adams’s side once had a coracle on the Tamar.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Lestrade nodded between puffs at his Havana, ‘it’s astonishing what they let by in the old days. Here we are. Tavistock.’

  It was raining in Tavistock, drifting in off the high moors to thump and bounce off the rhododendron bushes that ringed the church and to spatter on the thick ivy that crusted the walls of the guild-hall, crenellated in its Gothic attempt to match the abbey ruins. The Met men were shown up a creaking spiral staircase of wood to an oak-panelled upper room.