The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade (21 page)

‘Virgo intact?’ asked Bandicoot.

‘I don’t see their birth sign has much to do with it,’ commented Dixon sagely. ‘They say they’re all the same length lying down. Mind you, I’m a family man, me. If any pimp laid hands on my girls, I’d break his neck.’

‘Or suffocate him?’ Bandicoot was proud of that quip. It was worthy of Lestrade.

‘I don’t think immoral earnings was Mr Faye’s only vice,’ said Lestrade, sweeping towards the lift. ‘Come on, Bandicoot, we’ve got work.’

Faye ad served a four-month sentence for procuring back in ’86. Since then, he appeared to have been clean – or lucky. But Lestrade had discovered, via his usual street sources, that the deceased had recently been moving in a rather different circle. He had gravitated, if that was the right word, from little girls to big boys.

‘I always thought he had a hand in the Cleveland Street business in ’87,’ Jones grunted, picking his teeth with a gold pin. ‘Mind you, there were too many big names involved in that. Half the Royal Horseguards, for a start.’

‘For your benefit,’ Lestrade turned to Bandicoot, ‘a male brothel was uncovered in Cleveland Street. Some very prominent people, MPs, army officers and so on, were discovered to be using the place as a regular meeting point with errand boys.’

‘Unfortunately, most of them got off,’ slurped Jones. ‘Well, when you’ve been in this business as long as we have, Constable, you’ll learn that the big fish usually get through the net.’

‘And Philip Faye was a big fish?’ asked Bandicoot.

‘No,’ said Lestrade levelly. ‘And when you’ve been in the business as long as Inspector Jones has, you’ll learn that the little fish usually get through the net as well.’

The Cadogan Hotel was one of the most impressive in London. Like the Metropole, it was one of the most fashionable among the Smart Set, in or out of season. It was mid-morning when Lestrade and Bandicoot arrived. They ordered their coffee and brandy (Bandicoot was paying) and waited. Their targets were not long overdue. First, a large, scented man with a fur coat, thick, sensitive lips and a rather ridiculous Neronian haircut. With him, but always a little in his shadow, a slim, blond young man with classical features.

‘Mr Oscar Wilde?’

‘I am he.’

‘Inspector Lestrade, Scotland Yard. This is Constable Bandicoot.’

‘Oh, how quaint. Part of the long arm of the law. You know who I am. May I present Lord Alfred Douglas?’ The slim young man bowed. ‘Bosie, be an angel and get us all a drink, will you? Unless of course you gentlemen are on duty and don’t.’

‘We are on duty and we do,’ answered Lestrade.

‘Now, gentlemen, pray be seated. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Pleasure, Mr Wilde?’

‘Oh, Inspector.’ Wilde tapped Lestrade’s knee. ‘You are a wag.’

‘Philip Faye,’ said Lestrade.

‘Oh, dear me, yes. Poor Philip.’ Wilde’s face darkened and he rested his head in his hand in a flamboyant gesture. ‘A tragedy. An absolute tragedy.’

‘When did you last see him?’ A waiter brought a tray of brandies to Lord Alfred Douglas.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘put them on Mr Wilde’s bill.’

‘Ah, let me see, Bosie, was it Monday last we saw poor Philip? At the Albemarle?’

‘Possibly, Oscar. You know I always found him irritating.’

‘Irritating, My Lord?’ asked Lestrade.

‘He had St Vitus’s Dance, Inspector.’

‘Oh, come now, Bosie. He may have been a prey to nervous disorders. He always reminded me of a character in my
Canterville Ghost
. Have you read it, Inspector?’

‘I only read the
Police Gazette
, Mr Wilde. Has it appeared there?’

‘Oh, Inspector, I see I must watch out. You are within an ace of snatching my reputation.’

‘Your reputation is quite safe with me, Mr Wilde.’ Lestrade was emphatic. ‘Have you any reason to wish Mr Faye dead?’

‘Good heavens, Inspector, Philip was one of my dearest friends.’

‘Did you know he had a criminal record?’

‘You mean that phonograph thing old Tennyson did? Yes, it was pretty awful, wasn’t it?’

Lestrade brushed aside the attempt at levity. ‘No, I mean procuring little boys and girls.’

Wilde licked his lips. ‘He was just misunderstood.’

‘Now he is dead,’ Lestrade went on. ‘Tell me, Mr Wilde, did you kill him?’

‘Inspector, I have been patient.’ Wilde’s inane grin had vanished. ‘But when you accuse me of the murder of a very dear friend …’

‘I have accused you of nothing, Mr Wilde.’

‘I must ask you to lower your voices, gentlemen,’ snapped Douglas. ‘Mr Wilde and I are regular patrons here.’

‘So, Faye’s twitching annoyed you.’ Lestrade now turned his attention to the young man.

‘Eh?’

‘You said he had St Vitus’s Dance. You said you found him irritating.’

‘And that’s not all I found him doing, eh, Oscar?’ Douglas smirked.

‘You wicked boy,’ scowled Wilde. ‘Bosie, sometimes you can be so vulgar.’

‘A lover’s tiff?’ Lestrade threw the challenge to the air.

Wilde and Douglas were both on their feet, protesting. Bandicoot thought he’d better get up too. He hadn’t been happy about the way Douglas had been looking at him. Lestrade remained seated. ‘He was a cottage loaf, My Lord – a homosexual under the meaning of the Act.’

‘Act?’ Douglas was furious.

‘Say nothing, Bosie. Remember your father.’

‘Do you know who he is?’ Lestrade asked.

Douglas aimed a punch, which Bandicoot caught and held easily in midair. Douglas scowled defiantly at Bandicoot’s collar stud, on a level with his eyes. ‘Doesn’t say much for the Queensbury Rules, sir,’ Bandicoot couldn’t resist saying to Lestrade.

‘You obnoxious bastards!’ Douglas screamed at the policemen.

‘Please, My Lord,’ replied Lestrade. ‘This
is
the Cadogan Hotel.’

Wilde stopped in mid-fume. ‘What a superlative phrase, Inspector. I wish I had said that.’

And to a man, the clientele of the Cadogan Hotel turned and with one voice chanted, ‘You will, Oscar, you will.’

The White Lady

McNaghten had reached the end of his tether. Complaints from the family of Queensbury had been flooding in all week. Complaints too from a story writer named Wilde. The latter McNaghten could ignore – he had never heard of the man. But the Marquis of Queensbury, objectionable little man though he was, was of the ‘fancy’, the coterie of the P.O.W. himself. And that could not be ignored. One more instance of innuendo without fact, threats without proof and Inspector Lestrade would become Constable Lestrade, directing traffic in Piccadilly.

In the meantime, the inevitable mourning letter had arrived –

Lestrade checked his copy of
Struwwelpeter
. Bandicoot had not remembered this story. It was too trivial, too ridiculous. And even Agrippa, it seemed, was finding it difficult to match a homosexual pimp with the innocuous boy who fidgeted at his papa’s dining table. Lestrade was wondering who Johnny Head-in-Air might be and what might befall him when Arabella McNaghten swept into his office.

‘Sholto, you must come for Christmas. Papa is taking us all to Lynton. And I know you have three days’ leave. Now, not a word. We shall expect you on the twenty-third.’

And she left.

Bandicoot buried his face in some suddenly absorbing papers. Dew was freezing quietly in the street some miles away, keeping a vigil near the house of Dr Conan Doyle, who had not yet gone south for the winter.

‘Lynton,’ Lestrade repeated mechanically.

‘It’s a rather quaint village, sir, situated above the mouth of the Lyn river, near Barnstaple.’

‘Thank you, Bandicoot. We can dispense with the guide book. Is the woman mad?’

Was this another of Arabella’s flights of fancy, he wondered to himself, continuing the rhetorical questions in the confines of his own mind. Or was it a clumsy attempt by McNaghten Senior to patch up the damage of a whole series of recent stormy exchanges in his office? Certainly, Lestrade had not been invited before, although it was not unheard of for McNaghten to invite his staff, singly or in pairs, to his country house in the west country. But he had no more time to ponder it at the moment. A tall young man with waxed moustache and a centre parting appeared at the door.

‘Mr McGillicuddy, sir,’ a constable announced him.

‘Oswald McGillicuddy,’ the young man extended a hand. ‘I expect you know my father, the balloonist?’

‘No,’ said Lestrade. He was not at his best at this hour of the day, especially as it was Saturday and he had just been rattled by the unrattlable Miss McNaghten.

‘I’ve come to report what I think may be a murder.’

Lestrade felt even worse. ‘Bandicoot, some tea for Mr … er …?’

‘McGillicuddy. Oswald.’

‘Tea for Mr McGillicuddy.’

Exit Bandicoot.

‘I reported it at Bow Street yesterday,’ the young man went on. ‘They wrote it all down and then told me to see you. Er … you are Inspector Lestrade?’

‘At the moment. What is your news?’

‘Well, perhaps I should explain, if you are not aware,’ McGillicuddy looked a little hurt, ‘that I come from an aeronautical family.’

Lestrade attempted to look sage. ‘Do you mean you are a trapeze artist?’

‘No, no, Inspector. We are balloonists. It is a little-known fact that my great-great-grandfather gave Etienne Montgolfier his first lesson. Anyway, more recently, we have become interested in other forms of flight. My cousin Albert, you may remember,’ Lestrade did not, ‘leapt from the Eiffel Tower the year before last in an attempt to prove da Vinci’s theory.’

‘Which was?’

‘Wrong.’

‘Ah.’

‘Well, we are a family used to sudden bereavement, Inspector. And to injury in the cause of aeronautical science. You’d never guess, would you, that this arm is not my own?’

‘Good God,’ marvelled Lestrade. ‘Whose is it?’

McGillicuddy waved a marvellously wrought limb. ‘It’s made of painted gutta-percha, you know. I can do almost anything with it, but I must take care when toasting crumpets.’

‘A wise precaution.’

‘It might melt, you see.’

Lestrade was becoming convinced he was in the presence of a madman when Bandicoot arrived with the tea. McGillicuddy deliberately used his left hand, curling the fingers by means of a switch wired beneath his coat lapel.

‘Another of my family’s interests,’ he beamed.

Lestrade left no stone unturned. ‘Your murder?’ he said.

‘Ah, yes. My cousin, John Torquil. He died when his Maxim steam-powered Bisley hit a tree at thirty-eight miles an hour.’

‘You mean he was driving a horseless carriage?’

‘No, no, Inspector. The Maxim Bisley is an aeroplane. A featherless bird. The tragedy was that Hiram Maxim was there at the time. I do hope he doesn’t lose hope. It was not his machine that was at fault, you see.’

‘Do I understand,’ persisted Lestrade, ‘that your cousin, the deceased, was actually flying?’ He and Bandicoot felt their chins hitting their respective desks.

‘Ah, there’s the rub, Inspector. For flight to be called flight, an aviator must take his craft off the ground for a reasonable period of time. It cannot in other words be a fluke – a spring bounce or a gust of wind. John was, in my opinion, as a somewhat partial observer I admit, about to manage sustained flight, when the machine dipped and his superstructure disintegrated. Without wings, of course, he ploughed through a hedge, hit an oak and ended up in the lake. There was a resounding crash. We all ran to him, but it was too late. Poor fellow had broken his neck.’

‘Forgive me, Mr McGillicuddy, but isn’t what you’re describing merely a regrettable accident?’

‘Ah, no, Inspector. I thought you would say that, so I took the liberty of bringing along proof.’

McGillicuddy stepped into the corridor, operated his artificial arm and lifted a piece of steel about four feet long, from which hung wires and wooden struts, dangling with canvas.

‘Observe the end,’ he said. ‘Sawn through, gentlemen. Sawn through. When one is a scientific aviator, one is aware of stresses in metals. If steel sheers off, it does not do it like that. This machine was tampered with before John Torquil took to the air – if took he did.’

‘And who had access to the machine prior to the … er … flight?’

‘The mechanics who built it. Hiram Maxim who designed it. Myself and John Torquil. Oh, and possibly Armytage Monk.’

For a brief moment, Lestrade toyed with a Catholic-inspired plot, then he rejected it.

‘I have been in the Force long enough to know that I cannot exclude you, sir. Oh, please, do not take umbrage. I suspect that Bandicoot here is of the opinion that no sane murderer would walk voluntarily into two police stations and obligingly point a finger, albeit a false one, at himself.’

Bandicoot nodded. Lestrade felt a little pompous, rather like the late, lamented Sherlock Holmes, but he was in his stride now an refused, mixed metaphor though it was, to back up.

‘I, however, have known guilt parties do just that, in the mistaken belief that suspicion may be averted. Tell me, did the deceased leave a will?’

‘I don’t believe so. Both his parents are still living and he himself was unmarried. Presumably his worldly goods revert to his mater and pater.’

Lestrade faced the window. ‘Where did this accident take place?’

‘At Bisley, on the rifle ranges. Hence the machine’s name. One needs the level ground, you see, for take-off.’

‘Bandicoot. Inform the desk sergeant. You and I are bound for Bisley.’

It was mid-afternoon when the three arrived. Raw. Cold. The sky promised snow, a return of the bitter weather of the previous winter. Lestrade inspected the mangled wreck of the Bisley, housed in an improvised shed McGillicuddy referred to as a hangar. Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the famous machine-gun whose carriage had once run over Lestrade’s feet, was a large, voluble American, though his accent broke through the interminable jargon of the scientifically obsessed only occasionally.

‘The Bisley’s wingspan is a hundred feet. The body is sixty-seven feet. The propeller is driven by a fifty-horse-power steam engine weighing three and a half tons. I think on my next attempt I’ll use rails to help stabilise the thing.’

‘You mean you’re going to try this again?’ said Lestrade.

‘Of course,’ Maxim and McGillicuddy chorused. ‘The march of science,’ Maxim went on alone.

‘As I told you, Inspector,’ McGillicuddy continued, ‘the Bisley’s prop was sawn through. This was no accident.’

There were only two mechanics who had worked on the Bisley on the days before the tragedy. Lestrade and Bandicoot interviewed them together and Lestrade was convinced at any rate they were honest as the day was long. Bandicoot was less certain; one of them, it came out in conversation, was a socialist.

Over brandy at the Commandant’s house where the American inventor was a guest, Hiram Maxim that evening also convinced Lestrade of his innocence. Bore he may have been, murderer he was not. And as the snow flurries thickened across the silent ranges at Bisley, Lestrade became more convinced than ever that he had his eleventh victim. Agrippa had struck again, John Torquil was Johnny Head-in-Air.

‘Tell me about Armytage Monk,’ said Lestrade, rolling the brandy balloon between his hands.

‘Not much to tell,’ McGillicuddy answered. ‘John brought him to Bisley about a fortnight ago. I hadn’t met the man before and I gathered John didn’t know him well. It seems he was a keen aviator though and very anxious for John to fly the Bisley.’

‘If he was such a keen aviator, why didn’t he fly it himself?’

‘Ah, he couldn’t. He’d had an accident the year before himself and had permanently damaged his neck.’

‘His neck?’

‘Yes, he couldn’t speak properly, poor chap. Had a guttural, sort of rasping voice – and he always kept his throat muffled, even indoors. There was one odd thing, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, this is going to sound ridiculous, but John and Armytage often seemed to be … well, giggling is about the size of it. Exchanging the odd glance as though they were enjoying some sort of private joke. Probably at our expense.’

‘Is Monk a big man?’

‘Yes, I’d say so. About six foot and broad.’

Lestrade leaned forward penetratingly. ‘What was the colour of his eyes?’

‘Good God, Inspector, I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘They were blue, Inspector,’ Maxim offered from the corner. ‘Icy blue.’

‘Why should you remember that, sir?’ asked Lestrade.

‘Why should you ask it?’ Maxim countered.

‘I have my reasons, sir.’

‘I am a scientist, Inspector – a trained observer. I notice all sorts of things about all sorts of things – and people.’

‘And what else did you notice about Armytage Monk?’

‘I didn’t like him, certainly. He had an air of falseness about him. And he didn’t know a great deal about aeronautics for all that, as McGillicuddy says, he was so keen for Torquil to fly the Bisley.’

Lestrade tried to forget, at least for a while. It was Christmas, or nearly so. He caught the west-bound train to Swindon and cursed Mr Brunel anew for his wide gauge. One day they would need to change the damned thing and there would be no need to sojourn in Swindon again. By midday he was at Minehead and made the rest of his way by coach. This was a mistake and he regretted his momentary whim for the old-fashioned. Porlock Hill was still slippery with the morning frost where the sun had not penetrated through the thickly clumped trees. After a few horrendous slides and the whinnying terror of the horses, the driver gave up and demanded that the passengers get out and walk on up with their baggage. After an hour or so of whipping and yelling, the coach reached the top. Lestrade sat frozen on his Gladstone bag. The Christmas spirit, not surprisingly, had left him.

Consequently, it was nearly nightfall before the inspector arrived at The Tors. It was an immense house rather more like an hotel than anything, jutting out boldly from a dense covering of evergreens on the craggy outcrop below Countisbury Foreland. Lestrade looked out at the wintry sea curling under the ringed moon. What was he doing here? He looked at the opulent house and voiced silently his suspicion of a policeman with private means. Such things shouldn’t exist. Then the house was alive with shouts, dogs barking and lights scurrying here and there in the driveway.