Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  And foolish tears would flow.’

  Claribel

  Recovering from a broken leg after his ignominious fall from the Titanic, Superintendent Lestrade goes to convalesce at the home of his betrothed, Fanny Berkley and her father Tom, the Chief Commissioner of Surrey.

  It should have been a relatively peaceful time, apart from Lestrade’s lack of dexterity in steering his Bath chair, but an attempt on the life of his father-in-law (that kills the butler instead) makes him realise that a policeman is never really off duty. What is even more puzzling is the arrival of a letter which simply reads ‘Four for the Gospel Makers’ – and it isn’t the first Lestrade’s been sent.

  So begins one of Sholto Lestrade’s most mystifying cases; a case that encompasses not only the present, but the past. Lestrade walks down Memory Lane to the time when he was a young and very naïve constable. He looks back on episodes in his career that never came to a satisfactory conclusion and that hold other clues as to who the sender of the letters is – because whoever it is, it is a cold blooded killer.

  ❖ Lestrade and the Devil’s Own ❖

  1913

  ‘From his brimstone bed at the break of day,

  A-walking the Devil is gone,

  To visit his snug little farm, the earth,

  And see how his stock goes on.’

  Coleridge and Southey

  ‘Sholto Joseph Lestrade, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Mrs Millicent Millichip on January 13th last in the City of Westminster.’

  Lestrade had never been arrested before. Neither had he faced the drop. But when a woman died in his arms in the middle of a London pea-souper, the Fates were stacked against him. Millicent Millichip, as it turned out, was not the only victim in a series of murders where the only clue was the Devil’s calling card. And the Devil struck in such diverse places as the croquet lawn of Castle Drogo, the theatre of war games on Hounslow Heath and the offices of Messrs Constable, publishers extraordinary, in Orange Street.

  The condemned cell at Pentonville is a lonely place, even for a man with a loving family and powerful friends. But are they powerful enough?

  ❖ The Magpie ❖

  1920

  ‘There was a Front;

  But damn’d if we knew where!’

  England in 1920 is a land fit for heroes. So why is one of those heroes found dead in a dingy London hotel? And why does his war record show that he has been missing, presumed killed in action, for three years?

  The deceased is none other than the fiancé of Inspector Lestrade’s daughter and when her tears are dry, she sets out on a quest to find his murderer. And as always with Sholto Lestrade, one murder has a habit of leading to another; a second body turns up, linked to the first. How can a woman killed in an air raid in 1917, be found with a bullet through her head three years later?

  When a succession of foreigners is murdered with the same tell-tale weapon, has World War Two started already? Can it be Hunnish practices? Or the Red Peril? Perhaps the Black and Tans?

  A colourful web of intrigue unfolds as Lestrade and his daughter go undercover in the War Office, the Foreign Office, a film studio and at the Yard itself. When Lestrade’s daughter is kidnapped, the writing is on the wall. And the writing says ‘MI5’.

  ❖ Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus ❖

  1922

  ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

  Shelley

  ‘And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh ...’

  The wings that retired Chief Superintendent Lestrade came on were those of a de Havilland Hercules, named Olivia. The archaeologist, Howard Carter, had made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings, but all around him, men were dying: Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, fell prey to a mosquito bite; Alain le Clerk left the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert; Aaron G. String, the railway magnate, blew his brains out yards from the tomb’s entrance.

  And so it was that Sholto Lestrade flew East to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the sphinx. People remarked on the funny old Gizeh, in his bowler and Donegal, battling the elements against sand, revolting Egyptians and the Curse of the Pharaohs ...

  But could he avoid the Kiss of Horus?

  ❖ Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra ❖

  1935

  ‘So, Sholto, let me and you be wipers

  Of scores out with all men, especially pipers!’

  The original version of The Piped Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning

  Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. And it took him back to the good old days, when coppers lived in station houses, that nice Mr Campbell-Bannerman was at Number Ten and Britain had the biggest empire in the world. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling!

  Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth.

  Will any of them live to tell Dew’s tale? The tale of a rat.

  ❖ The World of Inspector Lestrade ❖

  Many readers of the Lestrade books wonder what is fact and what is fiction – and the author is delighted that they can’t always tell! So, for all the readers out there who have ever asked that question, here is the World of Inspector Lestrade. In this book, the lid is taken off the Victorian and Edwardian society in a way you’ve never seen before. Lestrade knew everybody, from Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel, to General Baden-Powell, cross-dressing on Brownsea Island, to the hero of Damascus, General Allenby – ‘you can call me Al.’ Have you ever wondered whether Howard Vincent, Director of the brand new CID really had a pet iguana? Find out inside.

  The Lestrade canon features the great and not so good of Britain when London stood at the heart of the Empire, the biggest in the world on which the sun never set. The novels on which this book is based are genuine whodunnits, with gallows humour and laugh-out-loud moments. Here you will find all the little peccadilloes that Lestrade took for granted. This is history as it really was – and I bet you wish you’d paid more attention at school now!

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