Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  ‘Ah,’ said Lestrade slowly, stooping to pick up Dew’s lamp and what was left of the Constable’s dignity, ‘you wouldn’t be Sun That Warms The Mountains, would you?’

  ‘If you asked me nicely, He Whose Feet Smell Of The Droppings Of The Buffalo. You are a policeman. At the Reservation, the policemen kill my people. You will empty your pockets.’

  ‘Guv’nor?’ Dew whispered.

  ‘Do as he says, Walter,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Carefully, now.’

  ‘He Who Is Afraid Of His Shadow would be wise to do as his white chief says.’

  Dew would have contended that remark but something in the glint of the Indian’s eyes and the glint of the Bowie knife in the Indian’s hand made him think again.

  Sun’s sharp eyes fell on the brass knuckles that Lestrade placed on the table. He snatched them up, cradling them in his massive painted fist. ‘Good,’ he said without smiling. ‘My cousins the Cheyenne could have done with a few of these at Wounded Knee.’ He clicked the tiny button and the deadly four-inch blade licked out in the darkness. ‘Well, well, hokai-hey,’ he chuckled. ‘Isn’t eastern technology wonderful? I must send for one of these the next time I get a replacement for my bears’ teeth necklace.’

  ‘You get these from the white man’s city in the east?’ Lestrade said, waving his hands in all directions. He’d had a sneaky read of a few of Ned Buntline’s Dreadfuls. ‘Chicago?’

  ‘Birmingham,’ the Indian told him, ‘and not the one in Alabama.’ He snatched up the bead bracelet that Lestrade had tugged from his pocket. ‘Ah. Where did you get this?’ The Oglala closed to his man.

  ‘From the body of Jane . . . Sun That Warms The Mountains,’ Lestrade said.

  The Oglala sheathed his knife and held the bracelet briefly to his cheek. ‘Manitou, Wakan Tanka will punish the wrongdoer.’

  And who is the wrongdoer, Sun?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Wakan Tanka knows,’ shrugged the Indian. ‘That’s what you fellas are paid huge amounts of wampum to find out, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Lestrade. ‘When did you see your wife last – apart from this morning?’

  ‘Three suns ago,’ the Indian said, ‘at her tepee in the Quex Road. She was on her way to see me today. The brothers and I were re-enacting the Little Big Horn. Major Burke, One Who Looks Like Bill Cody But Hasn’t Got His Essential Je Ne Sais Quoi, he say a woman wearing a Sioux bracelet found dead. It was written in your papers. Smoke signals would have been quicker, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lestrade was forced to agree.

  ‘Er . . . sir . . .’

  ‘Not now, Walter,’ Lestrade said. ‘Tell me, Sun . . .’

  ‘Guv’nor, you know that French bloke . . .’

  ‘Dew! I said not now.’

  ‘It’s just that he seems to be trying to kill the Kraut, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  Lestrade joined his subordinate at the window. Across the stadium, in the darkening O, two men were knocking seven bells out of each other with sabres. Feet from them, a doddery old man was using both hands to slash the fur cap off an unsuspecting Cossack. Lestrade heard him say that the next one would be his head.

  He didn’t wait to hear any more.

  ❖ 3 ❖

  F

  rost’s grandmother had the most annoying tic in the world. But she lived in Lincolnshire and it was the Assistant Commissioner’s clock that got right up the nostrils of Inspector Lestrade the next morning.

  He stood with his legs planted firmly apart, hands locked behind him, staring defiantly ahead. To his left and slightly behind him, Constable Dew looked appallingly sheepish, partly because he was holding two bowlers, Lestrade’s and his own.

  Facing them across the well-worn mahogany sat ‘His Nims’ himself, he of the bulldog breed, and a smug Chief Inspector Abberline, never happier than when a subordinate was on the carpet. Especially if that subordinate was Sholto Lestrade.

  ‘I’m looking at a bill,’ Frost said softly, ‘to the tune of four hundred and six pounds three and eightpence from the Earls Court Exhibition Committee. Is your constable there capable of the mental arithmetic to work out how old you two will be by the time you’ve paid that little lot off?’

  Only the clock broke the silence.

  Then Dew shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘I’ve got the eightpence, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Dew!’ the other three chorused and in the face of such a unanimous order, the Constable fell silent.

  ‘Then of course,’ Frost went on alone, ‘there are the charges. One,’ he held up the relevant digit, ‘breaking the nose of a lieutenant of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. Do you have any comment on that, Lestrade?’

  ‘I’m not sure if you saw that, did you, Walter? The Comte de la Warre walking into that flagpole?’

  Frost cleared his throat. ‘A frozen shoulder suffered by a Cossack of His Imperial Majesty’s Bodyguard named Michail Bogdanovitch.’ He waved another sheet.

  ‘Hum,’ Lestrade mused thoughtfully, ‘that’ll be the cold in Siberia,’ he said. Had not Mr Poulson himself, all those years ago at the Blackheath Academy for Nearly Respectable Gentlefolk, taught the future Yard man all there was to know about the lack of global warming?

  Frost twisted his already incredulous lip. ‘I’m not sure the heart attack suffered by ex-Sergeant William Bird, late Eighth Hussars, is down to you or not,’ he said. ‘But just thank your stars it was a mild one.’

  ‘We were merely following a line of inquiry, sir,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘A line of inquiry, Lestrade?’ Frost’s jowls trembled. ‘A line of inquiry? Three men are in hospital, half a stadium is wrecked, tonight’s show at Earls Court has had to be cancelled and sixteen policemen had to be taken off other duties to assist you and this idiot in your line of inquiry. I don’t have the men, Lestrade. I don’t have the money. Above all, I don’t have the time to bail you and Dew out every time you ask people a few questions. And I don’t even want to know what a war bonnet is and how you came to bend it. You realize of course that you’ve created an international incident? Any minute now there’ll be a telegram from the French Embassy, a memorandum from St Petersburg, smoke signals or whatever from the Standing Rock Indian Agency. And,’ Frost had quivered to his feet, his knuckles white on the desktop, ‘you know of course that this overdressed marjorie, Buffalo Bill, is a close friend of the Prince of Wales, don’t you? Now I’m not one for personal aggrandizement, God knows, but I would like to keep my job for a while!’

  He subsided, purple in the face. The ever-solicitous Miss Featherstonehaugh stuck her wizened little head round the door, constantly on the defensive as Protector of Her Master’s Arteries as she was. One look at the Assistant Commissioner, however, and she beat a hasty retreat.

  ‘It was a fraught situation, sir,’ Lestrade explained calmly. ‘If it had not been for Constable Dew and myself, someone would have been killed.’

  Frost’s look might have accomplished much the same, but he broke away to the window where the April sun was already spreading spring along the Embankment. ‘It’s the Railway Police for you, Lestrade,’ he said through clenched teeth.

  The Inspector positively blanched. He saw Abberline’s poisoned grin and checked himself. ‘Oh, goodie,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘Two women murdered on the Underground in three months,’ Frost went on without turning, ‘and you’re having punch-ups with a maniac bunch of foreigners at Earls Court. Inspector Tomelty’s your man. You’ll find him at Finchley. Now get out.’

  Lestrade spun on his heel.

  ‘And Lestrade . . .’ The Inspector stopped.

  ‘Keep your bloody nose clean. Or it’s the horse troughs. Understood?’

  ‘Perfectly, sir,’ Lestrade said and left, Dew at his elbow. No sooner had the door closed than Frost snarled out of the comer of his mouth at Abberline, ‘Follow him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘I said “follow him”, Abberline. Fo
llow him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Frost’s flabby face was turning spectrum-hued again. ‘I am not given to explaining myself to subordinates, Abberline, but I cannot allow Lestrade to plant his elephantine feet all over international sensibilities. I know that man. He’s what the Americans call a maverick.’

  ‘Isn’t that a cow?’ Abberline had once read a Buntline Special.

  ‘No. Well, yes. It is. But it’s a cow that goes its own way. Doesn’t like the herd. Well, I’m all for a certain unconventionality. My father was a grocer for God’s sake. But Lestrade, well, he’s beyond the pale.’

  ‘I am fully aware of Lestrade’s method, sir.’ Abberline folded his arms smugly, careful to avoid the gardenia. ‘You should have seen his performance on the Attaché Case. But the point is that I am a Chief Inspector.’

  ‘You’re a half-wit, Abberline,’ Frost corrected him, crashing back into his chair, ‘which at least gives you the edge over Lestrade.’

  Abberline tried a different tack. ‘But I’m on extended surveillance at Penge, sir. The flasher . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes. Leave that to whatsisface.’

  ‘Inspector Cottingley, sir?’ Abberline was aghast.

  ‘Yes. “Fairy” Cottingley. Good man. Good man. Besides,’ Frost winked at the Chief Inspector, ‘following Lestrade around the Inner Circle, you’ll be home that much earlier. Now wouldn’t Ermintrude like that?’

  QUEX ROAD, KILBURN, was like any other Victorian suburb. Row upon row of villas, each identical with the rest, all built by Norwood builders as the metropolis grew outward and the well-to-do moved further to escape it and allowed the middle classes to live as a buffer between them and the People of the Abyss who walked the mean streets of the East End.

  Jane Hollander had occupied a tiny set of rooms in the upper storey of Number 31. It was neat but not gaudy, and the two policemen who trampled all over it now had the task of piecing together the broken jigsaw of her belongings.

  ‘Well, Walter?’ Lestrade stretched his feet out on the chaise-longue. ‘What of Mrs Hollander?’

  ‘A kept woman, sir,’ the Constable said.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘No visible means of support. She’s got . . . what . . . three changes of clothes in the wardrobe. That’s too many to be walking the streets. And yet . . .’

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘No job. At least none we’ve come across. Her old man didn’t mention one. The landlady downstairs . . .’

  ‘Mrs Dunnose.’

  ‘Mrs Dunnose, she said Mrs Hollander went out irregularly, so there’s no daily job. Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘Unless she’s a woman of the streets.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But if she is, she’s doing well on it. What do you reckon the old bag charges for rent?’

  Lestrade took in the damp walls, the shabby furniture. ‘Enough, I expect. So, a kept woman, then?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But by whom, Walter – that is the question.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Come on, man, out with it. You’ve been at my knee now for what – seven years? You’ve served your apprenticeship. You know my methods, Dew. You’re a detective, man. Detect.’

  ‘Well, I’d prefer to deduce at this stage, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps we should be called deductives, then?’ Lestrade mused. Kilburn did that to some men. It made them pensive, philosophical. ‘All right, Walter. That kettle should have boiled by now, shouldn’t it? I’m sure Jane Hollander wouldn’t begrudge us a cup of tea. After all, we are in the process of catching her murderer. Start with Mr Hollander. I’ll hear you.’

  ‘Well.’ Dew busied himself in the kitchen, out of sight of Lestrade. The quality of his tea was legendary the length and breadth of the first floor at Scotland Yard. ‘Mrs Dunnose was very forthcoming on that point. Apparently, the Hollanders occupied half the house until the summer of ninety-one.’

  ‘And then?’ Lestrade lit a cigar.

  ‘They fell on hard times.’

  ‘What was he again?’

  ‘He was then in ladies’ underwear. Do you think we should follow that up, by the way?’

  ‘Live and let live,’ Lestrade shrugged. ‘This is the Naughty Nineties.’

  ‘Oh, right. Anyway,’ Dew brought in a tray with two steaming cups, ‘financial penury caused a rift in the family superstructure.’

  Lestrade raised an eyebrow. Dew had clearly been at the dictionary again. ‘Handles, Walter!’ he said, taking the cup. ‘What an unaccustomed luxury. You didn’t find any Bath Olivers, I suppose?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Only half a packet of Garibaldis, but there seem to be flies squashed on them.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the heat,’ Lestrade commented. ‘So what happened to Hollander?’

  ‘I’ll have to confirm this with the shoe boxes, guv’nor, but Mrs Dunnose says they parted and he’s still in ladies’ underwear somewhere in Beckenham. Old Birdie says he cuts the grass in Kensal Green. It’s a separation, not a divorce, and she doesn’t think he contributes anything.’

  ‘No children,’ Lestrade observed.

  Dew shook his head.

  ‘So as far as we know, there’s been no contact between the deceased and her husband for four years?’

  ‘As far as we know,’ Dew said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Well, if Hollander isn’t paying the rent, who is?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘The old man,’ Lestrade prompted him. ‘First-class bevy, Walter.’

  ‘Thank you, guv’nor,’ Dew smiled. ‘Tripe sandwich?’

  ‘Er . . . no thanks. Bit early for me. The old man.’

  ‘Yes. William Bird. Ex-hussar. Crimean hero. Cantankerous old bastard. Homicidal in a geriatric sort of way’

  Lestrade would really have to confiscate that dictionary. ‘Is he our man, then?’

  ‘Well, he’s earning peanuts carrying a flag around a ring,’ Dew said. ‘Unless he’s an eccentric with a bit stashed away for a rainy day, he couldn’t afford to pay his daughter’s rent.’

  ‘Could he have killed her?’

  Dew looked blank. ‘What would be his motive, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘We must accept, Walter,’ the Inspector said, ‘that the late Mrs Hollander put it about a bit. What if he found out about the Frenchman, the German, the Russian and the Indian? Had it out with her? They quarrelled and he killed her.’

  ‘Of course!’ Dew clicked his fingers. ‘Brilliant, sir. I’ll get the warrant.’

  ‘Now, hold on, Dew. We’re still in the realms of suppository here. The problem with strangulation is what?’

  ‘Er . . . ?’

  ‘How long does it take?’ Lestrade prompted again.

  ‘Well, that depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Age and strength of the victim. Age and strength of the killer. Actual method used.’

  ‘Make a guess then with Jane Hollander.’

  ‘Well, she was young and strong. Two, perhaps three minutes.’

  ‘There goes your theory,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘It does? Why?’

  ‘Look at me, Walter.’

  Dew did.

  ‘You’ve annoyed me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, guv’ The Constable shifted in his chair. ‘No, no. Just for the sake of argument. You’ve annoyed me and I lash out. What do I lash out with?’

  ‘Er . . . your spoon?’

  ‘My fist,’ Lestrade told him. ‘That first punch takes away the bulk of my anger. If I’m really miffed, I might hit you again. Perhaps a third time. Then what?’

  ‘Well, by that time I’m on the floor, sir, and you kick the shit out of me.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the police manual way, Walter, but we’re not talking about that. After three or four punches, I’ve worked it out of my system. Anything else is planned, calculated, premeditated.’

  ‘I see. So the mu
rder method . . .’

  ‘Implies a deliberate will to end life, yes. This is no chance blow in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘What if, once started, the killer wanted to silence his victim? What if she went to the authorities and charged him with assault and battery? Perhaps he had to shut her up?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Lestrade agreed, ‘but it takes a special kind of maniac to watch the daughter he gave rise to turn blue and choke under his hands. Do you think Old Birdie is that man?’

  ‘No, sir. I don’t.’

  ‘Neither do I. What about the others?’

  ‘Ah, more than likely,’ Dew said gleefully. ‘They’re all foreign.’

  ‘Your British sense of fair play does you credit, Walter,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘But unfortunately we’ve got to play the white man about all this.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the Indian,’ Dew said.

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘Well, stands to reason. We’ve had no sightings, have we? No one was seen with the dead woman. On the Tube, I mean?’

  ‘The papers say not. But we’ll need to check that with the Railway Police.’

  ‘Well even if he left off all that warpaint and stuff, he’d be noticed, wouldn’t he? There can’t be many Ogl . . . Oga . . . Sioux Indians riding around the Inner Circle.’

  ‘Especially not on Thursdays,’ Lestrade agreed. ‘Which leaves us with?’

  ‘The Frenchman, the German, the Russian.’

  ‘And the American,’ Lestrade sighed.

  ‘Major Burke? But I thought he hadn’t been intimate with the dead woman.’

  ‘You’d have thought he comes from Arizona, too, but a little chat with Captain Bruno as we were carrying the others into hospital elicited the information that he’s never been near the place.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Dew clicked his eurekan fingers again. ‘Burke did it precisely because he had not been intimate with the dead woman.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, he knew she was putting it about with all the others in the show, except him. He made advances to her. She didn’t want to know. So he killed her.’

  ‘On a train.’

  ‘Yes, on a train. Is that a problem?’