Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  ‘Then you will receive no answers,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘Please,’ Culdrose interrupted, ‘I have been in this stinking cell for three months. Can we get on with it? Ask me your questions, Inspector.’

  The seconds were out. It was Round One. And the first blood had gone to Lestrade.

  ‘How long had you and your wife been married, Mr Culdrose?’

  ‘A little less than five years,’ the grey man said.

  ‘Children?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘What is your occupation?’

  ‘I am . . . was a speculator.’

  ‘I see,’ mused Lestrade. And in what do you speculate?’

  ‘You needn’t be too precise here, George,’ Marshall Hall was quick to point out.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Culdrose said. ‘I began in railways. I now dabble chiefly in South African mining. And I’m heavily involved in rubber, Inspector.’

  Lestrade flashed a knowing glance at Constable Dew, but the man was still struggling with the spelling of speculator and the moment passed him by.

  ‘How’s business?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘For the last three months, non-existent,’ Marshall Hall reminded him.

  ‘Quite.’ Lestrade had, not for the first time, shot himself in the foot. ‘Tell me, Mr Culdrose, did you love your wife?’

  ‘Objection,’ said Marshall Hall.

  ‘This is not the Old Bailey, Mr Marshall Hall,’ Lestrade reminded him.

  ‘Neither is my client in the dock,’ said the lawyer. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I am giving him the chance to do something he cannot do in court,’ said Lestrade, ‘and that is to speak in his own defence.’

  ‘Please, Marshall,’ Culdrose struggled on the edge of his seat. ‘I want to get this over with.’

  Marshall Hall’s cold grey eyes flashed at his client, at Lestrade, at Dew. He threw his arms into the air in one of those histrionic gestures the Bailey clientele knew so well and admired so much.

  ‘No, Mr Lestrade,’ Culdrose almost whispered. ‘I did not love my wife. Sarah was the daughter of a business partner. It was a marriage of convenience that became an inconvenience; a pact made in hell. And all in the name of consoles.’

  ‘And did anything console you, sir?’ Lestrade raised an inquisitorial eyebrow.

  ‘If you mean did I take a mistress, no. I was brought up in the Methodist faith, Inspector. A tot of medicinal brandy would have me up before the minister; but a mistress . . .’ He positively shuddered. ‘I’d be excommunicated.’

  ‘When did you last see your wife?’ Lestrade asked, trying not to look like that man in the painting.

  ‘We had a row on that Tuesday morning . . .’

  ‘George . . .’

  But Marshall Hall’s growled warning went unheeded as Culdrose stormed on. ‘I can’t actually remember what it was about now. I left to go to the City and that was that.’

  ‘Did she say anything before you left, about going out?’

  ‘No. Sarah was a hypochondriac, Mr Lestrade. She never left the house in the winter unless she had to.’

  ‘Er . . . excuse me, sir.’ Dew’s wrist was flagging at his notebook. ‘Is that a branch of the Methodist movement?’

  ‘What?’ Culdrose was confused.

  ‘The Hypochondriacs.’

  ‘Never mind, Walter.’ Lestrade patted the man’s arm. ‘I’ll explain it later.’ The Constable had been the first policeman on the scene to find the battered body of the last of the Ripper’s victims in the slaughterhouse of Miller’s Court. You had to make allowances.

  ‘Do you have servants?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘One maid of all work. The bottom had fallen out of rubber late last year and I had to let old Gonad go.’

  ‘Best thing for it,’ Lestrade nodded. ‘When was the first time you were aware anything was amiss?’

  ‘When I came home that night. Amelia – that’s the maid – said that Sarah had gone out shortly before dark.’

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘No. Except that she couldn’t bear to be in the house on my return.’

  ‘Had she done this sort of thing before?’

  ‘Once. About a year ago. She went to her mother’s.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘Uxbridge.’

  ‘Make a note of that, Dew.’ Lestrade peered over his man’s shoulder and tapped the notebook. ‘The Underground train from Aldgate to Liverpool Street does not go to Uxbridge. I assume that your mother-in-law had not seen your wife?’

  ‘No. I called her on the telephone.’

  ‘You have a telephone?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Oh, a hideous expense, I know. And for long I racked my conscience as to which should go – the telephone or old Gonad. But in the modern world of lofty technology, Mr Lestrade, the telephone was indispensable.’

  ‘To your mother-in-law too, it would seem.’

  ‘Sarah insisted upon it. The old crone is over eighty and deaf as a doornail. I had to shout. There was no need for the telephone at all, come to think of it.’

  ‘What did you do when you realized that your wife had gone?’

  ‘I called my mother-in-law as I said. Then I went to the police.’

  ‘Straight away?’

  ‘As I told you, Inspector, my wife never left home voluntarily in the winter months. She was not at her mother’s. We have few friends to speak of, merely business acquaintances, and she had been very upset when I’d left her in the morning.’

  ‘This would have been . . . which police station?’

  ‘Wimbledon. I caught a train.’

  ‘And what was next?’

  ‘I was visited the next morning by an Inspector Greatorex.’

  Marshall Hall snorted.

  ‘He proceeded to drop cigar ash all over Sarah’s mother’s Wilton and was generally unpleasant.’

  ‘About par for the course,’ Lestrade and Marshall Hall chorused.

  ‘He began questioning me in the most belligerent manner, asking personal things about . . . personal things. He insisted on seeing our bedroom.’

  ‘Outrageous!’ hissed Marshall Hall. ‘The man hasn’t the remotest idea of procedure.’

  ‘In the end I showed him the door.’

  Lestrade nodded. He knew ‘Julie’ Greatorex of old. All people ever showed him was the door. Ever since his first adolescent fumblings with the vicar’s daughter, behind the rhododendron bushes.

  ‘I thought they were the worst days of my life,’ Culdrose went on. ‘Then Chief Inspector Abberline called and I knew they weren’t. He began pleasantly enough . . .’

  ‘Cunning bastard,’ chorused Marshall Hall and Lestrade.

  ‘Then he came right out with it.’ Culdrose had turned a whiter shade of pale. ‘He said they’d found Sarah in a carriage of a train in a siding at Liverpool Street. An Underground train. She’d been dead, apparently, for nearly three days. The train had not been in service. She’d been . . . strangled. He cautioned me that I need not say anything and then I was arrested for Sarah’s murder.’ Culdrose buried his face in his hands and hung there, like a man tired of London and tired of life.

  ‘And what brought you thundering to the rescue?’ Lestrade turned to the lawyer.

  ‘Bowker, my clerk,’ Marshall Hall said. ‘He has a nose for a good brief. Until this morning, I think you’d have found us more than ready, Lestrade, to devastate the puerile case for the prosecution. Pity, really. I was particularly relishing the prospect of cross-examining Abberline. Bit like swatting a fly in a way.’ He yawned ostentatiously.

  Lestrade sighed in sympathy. ‘Until this morning?’ he said.

  ‘Come on, Lestrade,’ the lawyer chuckled. ‘Are you telling me there are two stranglers working the Underground at the moment?’

  The Inspector looked at him, then at Culdrose. ‘I don’t know if this morning’s victim was strangled,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because you don’t read the lunc
htime edition of the Standard.’ Marshall Hall threw it at him. ‘Headline news. The gentlemen of the Press are so subtle, aren’t they? I remember, as I’m sure you do, the field day they had with the Ripper Case. The only occupation they didn’t point a finger at was, surprise, surprise, journalists. Odd that. Show me an innocent journalist and I’ll show you an intelligent policeman.’

  ‘Or an honest lawyer,’ Lestrade said levelly. ‘Doubtless with your vast experience, Mr Marshall Hall, you will be aware of copycat killing. Mr Culdrose kills his wife on the Underground . . .’

  ‘Allegedly,’ bridled Marshall Hall.

  ‘And someone else does the same thing “just for jolly, wouldn’t you”?’

  ‘Why?’ Marshall Hall challenged him. ‘Tell me why?’

  Lestrade summoned Walter Dew to his feet. ‘Because it’s there, Mr Marshall Hall. The Underground. Dark and deadly and half-way to hell. We’ll see ourselves out.’

  THE MORTUARY ATTENDANT, the one with the stoop, slopped his bucket along the marble slab in the silent basement of Old Montague Street. He sniffed. Why did all mortuary attendants sniff, Lestrade wondered. Was it an essential part of the job, which they automatically included in their curriculum vitals?

  ‘Cup of tea, Mr Lestrade?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks, Igor. It’s a little early for me.’

  The attendant looked at the morgue clock. On the stroke of four. He’d always thought this was precisely the time the English took their tea, but it had to be said he lived in the Marie Walewska Home for Polish Immigrants off the Commercial Road and he didn’t meet many Englishmen. Not live ones anyway.

  ‘Tram accident in Holborn,’ he explained as he gathered up the fingers.

  ‘That’s a long way from here,’ Lestrade commented, fanning the flies away with his bowler.

  ‘Some of dem are in Charing Cross Hospital; some in St Bartholomew’s. One of dem is in Wards Four, Six and Seven. Vell, you can’t get the staff dese days.’

  Lestrade looked at the increasingly green face of Walter Dew at his elbow. ‘Indeed not. Get up, Walter, and have a little walk around. I can manage here.’

  ‘Very good, guv’nor.’ And the grateful Constable was gone, his hobnails clattering on the stone steps that led to the air and the sun.

  ‘Now, Igor. This morning’s little find.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The strangulation.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Ven I vas at home in Kracov, I vas, vat vould you call dem? A surgeon’s gofor. I attended many courts of de coroner. I hef seen dese tings before.’

  He hauled the green blanket off a body that lay in the far corner, noting Lestrade’s expression. It didn’t change. Here was a cool one.

  ‘Inspector Lestrade,’ Igor said, ‘say hello to Mrs Hollander.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I don’t,’ the Pole said, ‘but she has been identified.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘De paperwork is upstairs. Shall I get it for you?’

  Lestrade nodded and the attendant hobbled away, sniffing. Mrs Hollander lay naked, with her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her breasts. Lestrade took the cold hand and prised open the fingers now that the tension of rigor was leaving them. He noted mechanically the blue nails, the pale line where the wedding band had been. He looked at the face. A comely woman once; the strangler’s grip had changed all that. Her lips were bluer than her nails and there was a dark trickle of blood around her nostrils, running down in a brown streak across her right cheek and into her auburn hair. Her tongue protruded as though in a permanent gesture of contempt to those who had come to gaze on her now. Lestrade’s eyes focused on the throat. Finger-marks, nearly black, had discoloured the area below the jaw and there was a ragged line of cuts where the murderer’s finger-nails had torn the flesh. The jawline and the breasts were mottled where the blood vessels had burst in her death agony. He knew that the hyoid bone had snapped and the windpipe collapsed beyond that once-pretty neck. He let his eyes wander down over the ribcage, the flat belly, the pubic mound. Nothing appeared untoward down . . . there, but he would reserve judgement for now.

  ‘Comte de la Warre,’ Igor said from the steps.

  The voice shook Lestrade out of his silence. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Dat is de man who came to identify her. De Comte de la Warre.’

  ‘A Frenchman?’ Lestrade was nothing if not cosmopolitan.

  Igor shrugged. ‘It seems like. I vas not here but I tink he said he vas her husband.’

  ‘Her husband?’ Lestrade was confused. ‘You mean he was Mr Hollander?’

  ‘I do not know how you say it in England,’ Igor said, rummaging in his pockets. ‘Mrs Hollander lived wid him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Realization dawned. ‘She was his common-law wife. Did the Comte leave an address?’

  ‘No.’ Igor perused the ledger he was carrying.

  ‘Marvellous!’ sighed Lestrade. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Dese are de things Mrs Hollander had on her perzon ven she vas brought in.’

  Lestrade checked the items that Igor had splayed on the corpse. A wedding ring, of brass. Three coins. A small comb. A ticket for the Metropolitan line dated yesterday. A yellow season ticket to the Earls Court Exhibition. And a bracelet in the form of brightly coloured beads with a curious design that Lestrade had never seen before.

  ‘Vait a minute.’ Igor was resting the ledger on Mrs Hollander’s breasts. ‘Dis is peculiar.’

  ‘What?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Three udder people came to identify her.’

  Lestrade remembered the Ripper Case, when there had been queues to view the corpses. ‘Why is that peculiar?’

  ‘One of dem says dat she is Frau Hauptmann.’

  ‘Frau . . . ?’

  ‘Dat’s German,’ Igor helped him.

  ‘I know.’ Lestrade had been to the lecture on German for Detectives. ‘What is his name?’

  Igor squinted and shook his head. ‘I can’t read dat.’ He gave it to Lestrade, sniffing. ‘Can you read dat?’

  Lestrade sniffed in reply. No, he couldn’t.

  ‘And dere’s somebody else,’ the attendant tutted, clearly amazed. ‘If only I hadn’t been off zick vid dis cold dis morning. Bitches, aren’t dey?’

  ‘Who?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Zpring colds,’ Igor explained. ‘Dat’s who.’

  ‘Who did the somebody else claim she was?’ Lestrade couldn’t read the ledger from that angle.

  Igor stared at it in something akin to disbelief. ‘Mrs Sun Dat Warms De Mountains.’

  ‘Of course,’ muttered Lestrade. ‘A name well known in the Home Counties.’

  LESTRADE AND DEW REACHED the giant complex that was Earls Court, a little before dusk. The place was closed now and the spring crowds had gone home. The Great Wheel stood huge and silent, dominating the approaches from Brompton Road Station.

  A tall man with a broad white hat and long hair cascading over his shoulders sat in a brightly painted caravan near the central stadium. He appeared to be lassoing his right foot with unerring accuracy. Lestrade showed him Mrs Hollander’s yellow season ticket.

  ‘Yeah, we’re closed, buddy,’ he said. ‘Come back tomorrow.’

  ‘What is this?’ Lestrade asked.

  The long-haired man looked at the pair before him. Both in regulation serge. Both in bowler hats. He checked their ankles for the tell-tale signs of the manacles which would have proclaimed that they had escaped from somewhere.

  ‘It’s a ticket,’ he said.

  ‘To the Wild West Show?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Not really a show right now,’ the American said. ‘Justa sorta retainer. But it’s nearly seven o’clock, Great Britain Time, mister. You and your pal come back tomorrow, y’hear.’

  ‘I am Inspector Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard,’ said Lestrade. ‘This is Constable Dew. We are here on official police business.’

  The long-haired man took the cigar from his mou
th for the first time. ‘No shit?’ he said. ‘I’m John Burke, but you can call me Arizona John. What’ll I call you? Scotland Yard Sholto?’

  ‘You can call me Inspector,’ Lestrade told him.

  ‘Sure,’ Burke shrugged. ‘Well, what can I do for you guys? Police Benefit, some’n like that?’

  ‘In this country, Mr Burke,’ Lestrade said, ‘nobody gives policemen the benefit. We’re here in connection with the murder of the late Mrs Hollander.’

  ‘Mrs . . . Holy shit.’ He took off his hat. ‘So it’s true, then?’

  ‘What is?’ Lestrade gave nothing away, least of all to foreigners with silly hats and long hair.

  ‘That Jane Hollander’s dead. Holy shit.’

  ‘Did you know the lady?’

  ‘Sure,’ Burke said, pouring himself a stiff shot of Redeye from a decanter on the table. ‘Well, not in the biblical sense. I’m about the only fella round here who didn’t. Oh, apart from Old Birdie, that is. And I ain’t so sure about him.’

  ‘Old Birdie?’ Lestrade was giving Dew time to cope with the longhand.

  ‘Her paw.’

  ‘Her paw?’ Lestrade and Dew had clearly both misheard.

  ‘Father,’ Burke said.

  ‘Is there a Mr Hollander?’

  ‘Yeah. And that’s where the going gets a little rough, Inspector. I guess there was a Mr Hollander once, but now there’s four of ’em with claims on her.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Well, there’s the Comte, the beauest of beaux sabreurs around here. Then there’s Michail, a monosyllabic moron from Minsk. Not forgetting Bruno, one of the sourest Krauts it’s been my misfortune to tangle with. And then of course there’s Sun That Warms The Mountains.’

  ‘Sun That Warms The Mountains?’ Lestrade was afraid he’d heard right.

  ‘He’s a full-blooded Oglala Sioux. I sure hope you ain’t packin’.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Lestrade assured him.

  ‘What? Oh, no, I mean I sure hope you ain’t packin’ a gun. Sunny’s fine with blanks. Whoops it up like all get out, attackin’ the Deadwood Stage an’ all. But you go within thirty paces of him with a loaded thumb-breaker and he’ll part your hair.’

  ‘The friendly type then?’ Lestrade smiled.