Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus Read online

  ‘What school do you go to, Cedric?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Brighton and Hove Grammar School, Mr Lestrade. Do you know it?’

  ‘Mercifully, no,’ Lestrade scowled. ‘Tell me, are they all as bright as you are?’

  ‘Oh, Lord no,’ Simpson grinned. ‘I was voted Chap Most Likely To last term.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘What have you got on the cause of death?’ Simpson ignored him.

  ‘What have you got?’ Lestrade threw it back at him.

  ‘Well.’ Simpson looked about him conspiratorially. ‘If you’d like my help . . .’

  ‘Oh, I would,’ Lestrade humoured the lad. ‘I would.’

  ‘Five blows to the left side of the head.’

  ‘Five?’ Lestrade frowned. ‘I only counted four.’

  ‘Ah ha,’ Simpson grinned. ‘That’s because you forgot to use your thumb for counting.’

  ‘What?’ Lestrade said levelly.

  ‘No, seriously though,’ Simpson chuckled. ‘The first swipe was to the parietal region.’

  ‘Where?’ Lestrade blinked.

  ‘Up here.’ Simpson pointed to the top of his head. ‘That would have caused loss of balance, quite severe bleeding and an absolute blinder of a headache. The second blow was like unto it, as they say in chapel readings – only lower. A horizontal biff that caught the temporal and parietal suture.’

  ‘And the third?’ Lestrade wasn’t sure he was hearing all this from a seventeen-year-old Brighton and Hove schoolboy.

  ‘The poor old duffer – oh, begging your pardon, Mr Lestrade – must have been rolling around now and the third was delivered as he fell, at the base of the occipital region. That’s where the neck bone’s connected to the head bone.’ Simpson could sense that Lestrade was seriously out of his depth. ‘The fifth blow – the one that in the darkened recesses of the passageway you understandably missed – was delivered virtually over the fourth, but by this time the deceased was on the ground and the impact caused a compound fracture of the zygomatic arch – as I think you’ll find when they X-ray.’

  There was silence.

  ‘And the weapon?’ Lestrade eventually found his voice.

  ‘Heavy. Blunt. An iron bar, I would think . . . Oooh, eight or nine inches long, tubular, perhaps with a two-inch diameter. Conjecturally I would suggest a crowbar.’

  ‘He didn’t die in the passages, of course,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Lord, no. In the pharmacy next door.’

  ‘The . . . May I ask you, Mr Simpson, how you know that?’

  ‘Blood-stains on the stairs, Mr Lestrade,’ the boy answered. ‘And a particularly interesting cluster of blood on the carpet in front of the poisons cabinet. That’s where his cheek was smashed – where the last blow was delivered.’

  Silence again.

  ‘You never actually answered my question,’ Lestrade told him, as if in a dream. ‘Why were you in the underground passageways?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I?’ Simpson frowned. ‘Sorry. I was lost. Got a head like a sieve, you know.’

  It was a relief to Lestrade to talk to someone who wasn’t seventeen and sieve-headed. Just your ordinary run-of-the-hospital pharmacist.

  While he was doing it another jurisdiction row broke out between the fingerprints boys from the Yard and the City; then another between their respective photographers. It hadn’t been like this since the good old days of the Ripper. Lestrade didn’t intervene. Norroy Macclesfield was big enough and ugly enough to hold his own. And if he chose to hold anybody else’s, they’d know about it soon enough.

  William Pargetter was a lean, pasty-faced boffin who looked as though he went to bed in his white coat. Assorted shades of litmus paper burst like a buttonhole from his top pocket and his lapels and cuffs were canvases of chromatography. He also owned the most ill- fitting set of dentures in the world.

  ‘I really can’t understand it,’ he clicked, as his upper set refused to be parted for long from their lower cousins.

  ‘What?’ Lestrade was peering into huge carboys of purple and amber liquid. The pasty head of the pharmacist swam mauvely into his vision on the other side,

  ‘Old “Whizzo”. Didn’t have an enemy in the world.’

  ‘Old “Whizzo”?’

  ‘Albert. Albert Weez. Everybody knew him as “Whizzo”. Salt of the earth type. Dressed up as Santa for Christmas and did the children’s ward. Pity, really, he was due to retire next month.’

  ‘What would he have been doing up here? In the pharmacy, I mean?’

  Pargetter shrugged and shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘He came on duty at eleven, if my memory serves, and checked the boiler in the basement. You’re sure he died in here?’

  Lestrade crossed to the tell-tale stain, brown and sticky on the floor. ‘The trail leads that way,’ he said. ‘Down the stairs to the passage under the courtyard where we found him. What’s in this cabinet?’

  Pargetter peered through the shattered glass and felt more of it crunch under his feet. ‘Poisons,’ he said.

  ‘Anything missing?’

  Pargetter nodded. ‘I’ve checked the inventory. One bottle of potassium cyanide. That’s all.’

  ‘Who’s responsible for security in this building?’

  ‘Well, in this room, I suppose I am. There’s only one key to the poisons cabinet.’

  ‘And where’s that kept?’

  ‘Around my neck.’ Pargetter lifted his tie to reveal the little brass key.

  ‘Any doctors have access to it?’

  ‘Not without signing the book – and not without using the key.’

  ‘What if you’re off sick?’ Lestrade asked.

  Pargetter pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Please,’ he said, his incisors clashing. ‘I haven’t lost a day in sixteen and a half years.’

  ‘But if you had . . .?’

  ‘Then whoever needed access would need to contact me. I am not on the telephone.’

  ‘You live . . .?’

  ‘Frugally enough,’ Pargetter clicked.

  ‘No, I mean, where do you live?’

  ‘Eighty-three, Splendesham Villas, Norwood.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘With my sister, Miss Pargetter.’

  ‘What about during the day?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  Lestrade mechanically checked the windows. ‘I mean, what happens if someone wants the cabinet while you’re at lunch?’

  ‘They’ll have to wait.’

  ‘And while you’re . . . er . . . answering the call?’

  Pargetter looked at the ex-Superintendent oddly. ‘I’m not a religious man, Mr Lestrade.’ he said.

  ‘This is where they got in,’ Lestrade muttered, half to himself and prised up a piece of twisted window frame. He looked out of the lower pane. It was a first-floor window. ‘Quite agile,’ he mused.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘I was thinking, whoever broke in must have a certain agileness.’

  ‘Agility,’ Pargetter corrected him.

  ‘Probably,’ Lestrade nodded, pressing his blunt old nose against the blunt old glass. ‘He’d need to haul himself up by the drainpipe and then fiddle about with that overflow pipe. Not a climb for an old man.’

  ‘But why kill Whizzo?’ Pargetter rattled.

  Lestrade looked at his man. ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr Pargetter,’ he said. ‘Sometimes that just happens, I’m afraid.’

  It was the third time they’d called it Scotland Yard – a little place by the river, crammed from floor to ceiling with shoe boxes, files, fingerprints, murder weapons, death masks. The lunch-time shift was just marching out in column of twos when the cab dropped Lestrade off. One by one, the older hands flew up to helmet rims, saluting the old guv’nor. He knew them all, by nickname at least – Grinder, Hoof, Methuselah, Dimples; fine lads whose collective shoe size was 160. As for their collective IQ, better leave that stone unturned. And they in turn knew h
im. He’d been part of the furniture at the Yard when the oldest of them cut his teeth on a Metropolitan Water Trough. He was a man you reckoned, a man you rated. Keep wide of him if a case wasn’t breaking, if the cocoa wasn’t hot, if the Freans were less Peakish than usual; but when the chips were down and your back was to the wall, there was no one they’d rather have there.

  He took the lift to the third floor. In the old days, he’d have bounded up the stairs three at a time, but he’d loosened too many teeth doing that and he wasn’t sure his knees would still be with him by the time he reached the top. The door of the Chief Constable was open wide and the Chief Constable himself sat facing it, his large ears lit by the spring sunshine streaming in through the window.

  ‘Fred?’ Lestrade instinctively paused in the doorway. The Chief Constable had gone a funny colour. He was changing like a chameleon through puce to mauve and the veins stood out on his forehead. Lestrade hurtled in through the door. In two bounds he’d crossed the room and had wrestled the Chief Constable to the ground. He pinned his man to the floor, wrenching at his tie, ripping the studs from his collar.

  ‘Constable!’ he roared. ‘Quick! The Chief Constable’s having a heart attack.’

  The Chief Constable looked up at him and raised an eye- brow. ‘Au contraire, Sholto,’ he said, ‘I was merely conducting an experiment.’

  Size eleven boots had clattered to Lestrade’s side. The ex-Detective Superintendent looked up at the anxious young man whose feet were inside them. ‘Not bad,’ he nodded. ‘But, had this been a real emergency, five seconds is a long time. See if you can do better in future.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The constable promised he would.

  ‘Thank you for helping us in that little test, Chief Constable,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘Er . . . get me up, lad, will you?’

  The constable got him to his feet and Lestrade found the chair by himself.

  ‘Tea, Rockliffe,’ the Chief Constable ordered while he vaguely searched for his collar stud. ‘And you’d better break into the Bath Olivers. I’ve a feeling this is going to be a long day.’

  ‘Experiment, Fred?’ Lestrade placed his bowler on the corner of the desk.

  ‘Forty-two seconds,’ the Chief Constable said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d managed to hold my breath for forty-two seconds.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lestrade mused. ‘Not much going on at the moment, then, Yard-wise?’

  ‘It’s a case I’m working on, Sholto,’ the Chief Constable was retying his tie. ‘It all hinges on the man’s ability to stay underwater for one and a half minutes.’

  ‘Underwater?’ Lestrade repeated. ‘But you were in the open air, over water, so to speak.’

  ‘Little by little, Sholto,’ the younger man said. ‘Anyway, you assumed I was having a turn as it was. If I was upside down in a bucket of water, no doubt you’d have instantly thought “suicide” and rushed to my aid, yet again.’

  ‘Well, Fred,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘We do go back a long way.’

  Indeed they did. Lestrade remembered Frederick Porter Wensley as a rather earnest young constable from Dorset way back in the days of Whitechapel and the Ripper. He was the first detective to be given the King’s Medal and both of them had done their share of ducking and diving, especially under anarchist fire in the Siege of Sidney Street. ‘Mister Venzel’ the Chosen People called him. Coppers called him ‘Sir’; crooks called him ‘Fred’; journalists called him ‘The Ace’. But Lestrade knew his man too well. The strain around the eyes, the crook of the smile on the thin, almost furtive lips. The Ace was in a hole.

  Rockliffe arrived with the tray. Lestrade was impressed. None of his lads had ever made tea so fast. He was less impressed as the sienna nectar hit his lips. Quality appeared to have floated out of Fred Wensley’s window.

  ‘Would you take a biscuit, sir?’ the constable asked.

  ‘He always did.’ Wensley grinned as Lestrade began the exact science of dunking. ‘Thank you, Rockliffe. We’re not to be disturbed.’ Young Rockliffe had rarely seen two men so disturbed in his life, at least not in the same office, but it wasn’t his place to say so and he made his exit.

  ‘Fine brew, Fred,’ Lestrade lied.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Sholto.’ Wensley was smoothing down what little was left of his hair these days. ‘I’ve found no one to make a decent cup of tea since Walter Dew.’

  ‘How is Walter?’

  ‘Chapter Four.’

  ‘Er . . .?’

  ‘Of his great work. I Caught Crippen.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Lestrade chuckled. ‘He finished Chapter One in 1912 if I remember aright. Not bad in two years. Still . . .’ he did the necessary mental arithmetic, ‘three more chapters in twelve years – I have to deduce he’s slowing up a little.’ Lestrade leaned forward to his man, ignoring the plop as his Bath Oliver disintegrated and plummeted into his tea. ‘What’s the matter, Fred?’

  ‘Matter?’ the Chief Constable did his best to be nonchalant.

  Lestrade gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘I’ve been retired now for five years officially; four unofficially and I haven’t had a call from you other than to invite me out to the Police Ball, for three. Then suddenly, there’s a cree-de-cur, as the French have it, and I’m up to my fob in jurisdiction disputes with the City Force.’ Lestrade waited for a sign from Wensley. He wasn’t going to get one. ‘I am right, Fred?’ he queried. ‘St Bartholomew’s is in the City of London?’

  ‘It is,’ Wensley nodded.

  ‘So I was out of my manor?’ Lestrade badgered him further.

  ‘As out as the Eddystone Lighthouse during the candle scandal,’ Wensley admitted. ‘But I had my reasons.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lestrade leaned back. ‘Now those are things I’d like to hear.’

  Fred Wensley nodded, the cold grey eyes not leaving Lestrade’s for an instant. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have a right to know.’ He rummaged in his waistcoat pocket and produced a key. A click to the left, then to the right and the mysterious little cupboard by his left knee swung open. He leaned over, at a rather brave angle, Lestrade thought, for a man who must be all of fifty-five, and straightened again with a piece of evidence in his hand.

  Lestrade peered at it. ‘Looks like . . . looks like the corner of a warrant card,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ Wensley nodded.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  The Chief Constable stood up, grating back the chair and crossed to the window. ‘I’ve never really liked this place, you know, Sholto.’ He was talking to the river, sparkling and brown in the spring sun.

  Lestrade knew that. The view was altogether wrong for Fred Wensley. It wasn’t facing east, to his beloved City. Not for the first time, Lestrade realized that Wensley had joined the wrong force. ‘The warrant card?’ he asked.

  Wensley turned back to him. ‘The warrant card’, he repeated, ‘was found near the body of one Edward Jones on Hounslow Heath two months ago.’

  ‘Dropped by the investigating officer?’

  Wensley shook his head. ‘Dropped by the murderer,’ he said.

  Lestrade’s eyebrow rose, just a threat – always a sign that something was in the wind. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I was there when the Coroner found it.’

  ‘The Coroner?’

  Wensley nodded. ‘It was wedged in the turn-up of his trousers.’

  ‘Snappy dresser, then, the deceased?’

  ‘For an old fogey, yes.’

  Lestrade narrowed his eyes. ‘Old?’ he asked.

  ‘Edward Jones was sixty-four.’

  ‘A mere shaver.’ Lestrade dismissed it with a click of his fingers.

  ‘The first of three,’ Wensley told him.

  ‘Of which Albert Weez was the third?’

  The Chief Constable nodded, slipping into his chair again. ‘The second was Jacob Hoare, aged sixty-nine. His body was found floating near Greenwich last month.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Lestrade said, ‘were all three blokes clubbed
to death?’

  ‘Seems likely,’ Wensley said. ‘There was some doubt about Hoare because of the time he’d been in the water.’

  Lestrade smiled. ‘So you’ve called me out of retirement so that an old fogey can catch a killer of old fogeys, eh?’

  ‘No, Sholto.’ The Ace’s face remained poker-straight. ‘I called you in because you’re the one man I know I’d trust with my life. The only one whose warrant-card corner that couldn’t possibly be.’

  ‘Because I no longer have a warrant card,’ Lestrade nodded wistfully.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Wensley. ‘Besides, didn’t you handle a similar case a few years ago? One in which old men were dying?’

  ‘The Brigade Case, yes,’ Lestrade nodded. ‘That was ’91. You hadn’t finished shitting yellow then.’

  ‘I was a constable,’ Wensley bridled. ‘Four years in the Force.’

  ‘That was different,’ Lestrade said. ‘All those men had served in the same regiment in the Crimea and they were all poisoned. What’s the link between your victims?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Wensley sighed, ‘there isn’t one.’ He passed a ledger across the desk to Lestrade. ‘There’s the file. Different backgrounds, different addresses, different jobs – no common ground at all that I can see. But after the first one I made a point of putting different officers on the case – in view of that.’ He pointed at the warrant card.

  Lestrade squinted at the torn fragment more closely. ‘Looks like a “1”,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t you trace that?’

  ‘There are nine figures on a Metropolitan warrant card, Sholto.’ Lestrade didn’t need Wensley to remind him. ‘I’ve traced five that end in a figure one. You’ll note it’s pale blue – detective inspectors and above. One belongs to Colin Smedley.’

  ‘“Deadly” Smedley? He whose breath could stop a hunger march?’

  Wensley nodded, ‘But he’s been in the London Free for nine weeks with inverted testicles.’

  ‘Best place for him, then,’ Lestrade winced. Even at sixty-eight the prospect brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘Another to Dicky Tickner, P Division.’

  Lestrade didn’t know him.

  ‘And that leaves the remaining three.’

  ‘Go on.’