Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus Read online

  ‘And I remember Nepherkheprure-Waeare,’ Kat’s number two chipped in.

  The embalmer looked at him. ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he said. ‘Right. Bit of cassia in the thorax now and I think we’ve finished. Where’s my needle?’

  Haph, up to his wrists in viscera, looked down wistfully at the dead king’s face. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, ‘I’d say somebody stitched him up good and proper, wouldn’t you, Kat?’

  The embalmer glanced up and grinned under the mask. ‘You know what they say, Haph,’ he said. ‘The king is dead. Long live the king. Know what I mean?’ And he tapped the side of the jackal’s snout.

  Haph nodded. ‘Nod’s as good as an ankh to a blind camel,’ he said. ‘Natron?’

  Kat nodded. ‘Three gallons should do it. And then we’ll stand watch for seventy days in the time-honoured tradition. Who’s doing grave goods for this one, Haph?’

  ‘Dunno. Merymery, I s’pose.’

  ‘Oh, Gods, no.’ Kat paused in mid stitch. ‘Better get the papyrus out then. It’s going to be a long night.’

  Virginia Water, 17 March 1923

  He lay with his arms flexed at the elbow, in the manner of long dead Egyptian kings, the forearms across his chest, the left above the right. In his hand lay the fly-whisk, its white horsehair trailing elegantly over his waistcoat.

  ‘Daddy!’

  The head came up and with it the body. He blinked, not sure, for the moment, of his surroundings.

  ‘Daddy? Are you awake?’

  The opening of the door sent a ray of sharp sunlight into the room, the dust particles dancing in the air.

  ‘Oh,’ the voice was softer. ‘You were asleep. I’m sorry.’

  The fly-whisk snaked out, hissing through air, spraying the dust into the sunbeam. ‘Got you, you little bastard.’

  He let his feet find the slippers and tottered over to the murder scene. But there was no corpse. The little bastard must have fallen somewhere behind the curtains.

  ‘Not sleeping, my dear,’ he said, crouching with the whisk at the ready. ‘Just lulling our little buzzing friend into a false sense of obscurity. The first flies of the season are little buggers, aren’t they? Damned if I know where they go in winter, but I’m bloody certain where they are every spring – swarming around my ears.’

  ‘That was Fred Wensley,’ she told him.

  ‘What was?’

  She looked at her father. She knew he was too old for all this. Too old for the rough and tumble. He should have retired years ago. Come to think of it, he had retired years ago; yet here he was, staring his three score years and ten squarely in the face, still chasing shadows, still listening to the testimony of ghosts. She smiled at him. To be fair, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Sholto Lestrade OM didn’t look a day over sixty-five. And he’d looked like that since he was nineteen.

  ‘The telephone,’ she told him. ‘That was Fred on the telephone. There’s been some trouble at St Bart’s. A nightwatchman has been killed.’

  Lestrade got to his feet. The girl in front of him was his Emma, a woman grown. He wasn’t happy about the daringness of her hem-line, the cut of her cloche or the rakish angle of her cigarette holder, but this was 1923. And if Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade was a little on the mature side for a flapper . . . well, it was hardly his place to say so.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you call me?’ he asked her.

  ‘I did.’ She put her hands on her hips and shook her head at him. ‘Will you take the train? Or shall I drive?’

  He didn’t like that, either. His little girl should still be in frothy dresses and mutton-chop sleeves, lashing out with her ping-pong bat or tying up the Bandicoot boys in the old orchard at Bandicoot Hall. Instead, here she was, smoking and driving like a man. Still, the war had caused all that. Deciding her breasts would let her down in the Light Infantry, she’d elected to drive a tram instead. For nearly two years, passengers in Croydon and Thornton Heath went in fear of their lives.

  ‘Why doesn’t Fred send a car?’ Lestrade asked her.

  ‘Why doesn’t Fred send a policeman?’ she countered. ‘A real one, I mean.’

  ‘Thank you, daughter dear.’ Lestrade ferreted in the wardrobe. ‘Where are my spats?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Daddy.’ She patted his shoulder and kissed his forehead.

  He looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. You think I’m too long in the tooth for all this, don’t you? Better I’m put out to grass, I suppose. From Scotland Yard to knacker’s yard. I wish it was that simple.’

  ‘It is that simple,’ she told him. ‘Frank Froest, Edward Henry, Abberline; they’ve all gone, Daddy.’

  ‘Fred’s still there.’

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded, ‘he is, but he’s fifteen years younger than you.’

  ‘And Walter Dew.’ Lestrade had found his spat. Now all he needed was the other one. ‘He’s still going strong.’

  ‘But he’s snow white.’

  ‘No,’ Lestrade shook his head. ‘More like Dopey.’ He saw that she wasn’t smiling. ‘Emma,’ he took her hands in his, the spat thrown on the bed, ‘don’t you see? I can’t sit around here all day, moping. Now that Fanny’s gone, life is . . . well, it’s empty. You know me . . .’

  She did. Only too well.

  ‘Give me the thud of size elevens on the pavement, the rattle of the keys, the click of the cuffs. It’s like a drug, I suppose. The battered corpse in the alley. The body in the library. Murder at the manse.’

  She clicked her tongue and shook her head. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know. I’ll get the car. Why are you putting those things on? You know you hate spats.’

  ‘They were the last thing Fanny bought me,’ he told her. ‘The last present. It’s what she would have wanted.’

  ‘Daddy,’ Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade raised an eyebrow. ‘You know perfectly well your good lady wife is having a whale of a time on the Riviera with Cousin Val. You were supposed to be going with her. Letitia and Harry Bandicoot also asked you to go on safari to Africa with them.’

  ‘Too busy,’ he shrugged. ‘Besides, Cousin Val and Fanny may get on like a house on fire, but to me she’s the kiss of death. One whiff of her aftershave and I’m reaching for my revolver – well, I would if I had one. Talking of which, what’s that smell I can smell?’

  ‘It’s me,’ she beamed. ‘Coco Chanel’s new perfume. Number Five. Do you like it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Vaguely better than Number Two, I suppose. Oh, all right.’ He tossed the spat back into the recesses of the wardrobe. ‘A bloke can’t go around in one spat – people would talk about him.’ And he hauled out his second-best Donegal, the one fashionable people had stopped wearing in 1895.

  There were once three chapels in the precincts of the ancient hospital of St Bartholomew. Only one still stands – the Holy Cross, known to all and sundry as St Bartholomew-the-Less. St Bartholomew-the-Great stands outside the hospital walls, with its front to Smithfield, where armoured knights once clattered down Giltspur Lane to joust at the tilting yards there and Queens Mary and Elizabeth, God Bless Them, burnt people with religious zeal and lots of firewood. As for St Bartholomew-the-Inbetween, only God knew where that once stood.

  Emma wanted to go with her old dad through the gateway they’d put up in 1702 when they’d realized it was time for some Queen Anne architecture, but her old dad had said no. It might be grisly. And his words were punctuated by the dull thud as another bullock dropped like a stone in the meat market behind them.

  ‘Pick me up from the Yard, later,’ he said. ‘And don’t talk to any strange men.’

  There was as strange a group of men as Lestrade would care to meet standing in a huddle in the gloom of the underground passages that ran like rabbit runs, criss-crossing Smithfield, linking wards and medical school. Two of them Lestrade recognized.

  ‘Inspector Macclesfield.’ The ex-Detective Chief Superintendent tipped his bowler.

  ‘Mr Lestrade.’ The Inspector’s finger snaked along h
is trilby- brim. Macclesfield was built like a Brixton privy, without the green- and-cream tile covering of course, and had a face like a dray horse. There were those, like Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade for instance, who called him handsome. The other one was Wilhelmina Macclesfield, his mum. Good copper, though, was Macclesfield; recently promoted, and rightly so, for his work on the Hard case.

  Standing next to Macclesfield was a bad copper, Inspector McNulty, of the City Force, that strange band of no-hopers the late Home Secretary, Mr Robert Peel, had never quite had the balls to deal with. McNulty was the one who’d put the ‘un’ in unpleasant.

  ‘Didn’t you see the blue tape?’ he growled at Lestrade. ‘The police cordon?’

  ‘Tsk,’ Lestrade shook his head, ‘these old eyes of mine. Missed it completely.’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t have,’ McNulty said. ‘Because it’s waist high, see, and would’ve hit you at waist level.’

  ‘Good God.’ Lestrade recoiled a step or two. ‘The old faculties are more diminished than I thought. I didn’t feel a thing down . . . there. Still,’ he sighed. ‘At my age, you don’t.’

  ‘Now, look . . .’ Gerald McNulty might have been an oaf of the worst water, but he knew when he was being sent up. It happened to him most days. But he didn’t like the way Norroy Macclesfield turned away, chewing the rim of his trilby to stop himself guffawing. ‘Fred Wensley called me in, Inspector,’ Lestrade said to the City man. ‘Where are we, Norroy?’

  The big Inspector turned back to Lestrade. Surely the old boy wasn’t really gaga, was he? ‘St Bart’s Hospital, Mr Lestrade,’ he told him.

  ‘Yes.’ Lestrade was patience itself. ‘But where vees-ah-vee the City boundary?’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ Macclesfield had caught his drift. There was to be a jurisdiction dispute and Lestrade needed ammunition. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you glance down, sir, you will see the mortal remains of Albert Weez, nightwatchman and boiler man to St Bart’s. His nether regions are lying in the City of London, but his torso is in E Division, Metropolitan Area.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ snorted McNulty.

  ‘As I said, Gerald,’ Macclesfield held his ground, ‘they are in the City of London.’

  ‘All of him is in the City of London,’ McNulty insisted. ‘The bloody boundary is a quarter of a mile that way,’ he waved towards the Bailey. ‘No, that way,’ he waved towards St Paul’s. ‘Well, whichever bloody way it is, we’re inside City limits here. It’s bad enough, Macclesfield, that you come trampling over my manor, but some old fogey . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ Lestrade wagged a finger at him. ‘But you’re forgetting the Whittington Sanction.’ He smiled.

  ‘You what?’ McNulty blinked in the half-light.

  ‘Tell him, Norroy.’

  ‘Fourteen twenty-three, I think you’ll find, Gerald,’ the Metropolitan Inspector began. ‘In the gift of the then late Mayor of London, Richard Whittington – he who kept having the turns – St Bartholomew’s Hospital – and the Bailey, come to think of it – was granted to the Priory of St Greavsey-at-Westminster. That Sanction has never been revoked. In other words, this is our turf.’

  ‘But you just said . . .’

  ‘Oh, his legs are yours, yes. That’s because, of course, the place has expanded a bit since fourteen twenty-three and whoever brought an untimely end to Mr Weez had the awkwardness to fell him precisely on the borderline. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

  ‘Think about this positively,’ Lestrade urged. ‘With things as they are, you’ve only got half the paperwork to do. Now, a man is dead, Inspector. Can we get on with this?’

  McNulty wasn’t at all sure about the Whittington Sanction. But he’d crossed the great Fred Wensley before and Lestrade was a legend in his own life-style. Better bite the bullet and do as the old man said.

  ‘Who found the body?’ Lestrade could get down on his knees all right; as to the getting up, somebody else might have to shift for him.

  ‘Some kid poking about.’ McNulty riffled through his notepad. ‘Here we are. One Cedric Keith Simpson.’

  ‘Patient?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ McNulty shrugged. ‘I didn’t spend that long with him. He seemed affable enough.’

  ‘No.’ Lestrade’s head was down, checking the corpse. ‘I mean, is the lad Simpson a patient here at the hospital?’

  ‘No, he’s an intending medical student, sir,’ Macclesfield told him. ‘We’ve got him upstairs.’

  ‘Upset?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Macclesfield repeated, louder this time.

  Lestrade sighed and looked up at both inspectors. There wasn’t much to choose between them, really, IQ for IQ. ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Well . . .’ McNulty began, but Macclesfield cut in.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ He wagged a warning finger at his oppo. ‘Cause of death is to the head, Gerald,’ he said. ‘My patch, if you remember our previous conversation.’

  McNulty frowned.

  ‘Blunt instrument, sir,’ Macclesfield went on. ‘I counted three blows.’

  ‘Four,’ Lestrade corrected him. ‘Delivered from which side?’

  ‘The left.’

  ‘Attack from in front? Behind?’

  ‘The side.’

  ‘You wouldn’t care to impound the type of instrument?’

  ‘Life preserver would be my guess.’

  ‘Inspector?’ Lestrade wanted a second opinion.

  ‘I’d go along with that.’ McNulty thought it best to concur.

  What was left of Albert Weez lay on his right side, the arm pinned beneath him pointing along the darkened passageway to the door beyond. His mouth hung open and his grey eyes stared lifeless and dull, sunken in their sockets as though shrunk back from the sight they saw before somebody demolished his skull. His jacket had been wrenched back over his shoulders, pinning one arm behind him. The other he’d obviously torn free in the struggle before he’d gone down.

  ‘He didn’t die here,’ Lestrade muttered, peering along the corridor. ‘Constable?’

  ‘Yessir.’ The Metropolitan instinctively clicked to attention.

  ‘What size boots do you take?’

  ‘Ten, sir.’

  ‘My man takes eleven,’ McNulty chipped in, rather gratuitously, Lestrade thought.

  ‘Show me.’ Lestrade was still talking to the Met officer. He lifted a single sole.

  ‘Which way did you come in?’

  ‘From there, sir,’ the constable told him. ‘Same way you did.’

  ‘No blood,’ Lestrade mumbled, half to himself. ‘Which means he was dragged that way – and by the wrist, I’d say. Norroy, have you got Fingerprints on the way?’

  ‘On the way, guv,’ Macclesfield nodded.

  ‘So are mine,’ McNulty assured the assembled company.

  ‘Well, then.’ Lestrade flapped his arms in the air until both Inspectors caught him and hauled him upright. ‘This place is going to get like Piccadilly Circus in a minute. Where’s this lad Simpson?’

  The lad Simpson was seventeen, though he looked older. He had the kind of ears, downturned at the top, that looked as though someone had swung him round by them shortly after birth. That same rather vicious assault had produced a loosening of the jowls so that the post-pubescent Simpson could have passed for a blood- hound. Nature had given him a superfluity of teeth, too. Quite a bitch, Nature.

  ‘Cedric?’ Lestrade peered at the lad.

  ‘People call me CKS.’ He stood up and extended a hand. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ And he put the pathological specimen back in its jar.

  ‘Do they, Cedric?’ Lestrade was still peering. ‘I am Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Lestrade, attached fairly loosely to Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Gosh.’ The boy grinned so that all his teeth were on show.

  ‘I understand that you found the body.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Simpson smirked. ‘Bit of a facer, isn’t it?’

  For the first time, Lestrade took in their surroundings. They stood facing
each other in a museum of the macabre, where indescribable bits of dead people floated in formalin. Anything with eyes appeared to be staring directly at Lestrade. And this was one time when staring back probably wouldn’t have much effect.

  ‘Tell me,’ Lestrade scraped a chair forward and ushered the boy into another one, ‘how you came to be in the passageways beneath this building. What, in short, are you doing at Bart’s, Simpson?’

  ‘Ah,’ Simpson beamed. ‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You see, I know a little of police procedures. First, Mr McNulty asked me that question. Now he’s the nasty policeman. Called me Simpson and assumed I’d done it.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then Mr Macclesfield asked me the same question. Now, he’s the nice policeman, called me CKS and assumed I didn’t do it.’

  ‘And where does that leave me?’

  ‘Well.’ Simpson leaned back, cradling his right knee in his clasped hands. ‘You’re the guv’nor,’ he said. ‘You’re walking a very clever middle road. You’ve asked me the same question and you’ve called me Cedric and Simpson, knowing I prefer CKS . . .’

  ‘And who do you think I think did it?’ Lestrade asked him.

  ‘Er . . . Ah.’ Collapse of precocious kid.

  ‘Actually,’ Lestrade leaned forward and whispered, ‘it could very well be Mr McNulty, but we’ll draw a veil over that for the moment. You’d better follow procedure, then, and answer my question.’

  ‘What I was doing in the underground passages, you mean? Well, Mr Lestrade, I was visiting the hospital this morning . . .’

  ‘Visiting a patient?’

  ‘No, the hospital. Giving the place the once over. You see, I’m hoping to be a doctor. I’ve been to Tommy’s and to be honest, I wasn’t very impressed. I’m off to Guy’s tomorrow. I really can’t decide whom to honour with my presence.’