The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade (2 page)

It surprised Lestrade therefore, in view of the need for secrecy, that the whole area of the Chine should be ringed, not only by constables, but by troopers of the Hampshire Yeomanry. He tackled his contact, a Sergeant Bush, about as soon as he could.

‘Ah well, sir,’ was the sergeant’s reply, ‘it’s Her Majesty, y’see. She’s at Osborne for Easter – and we can’t be too careful, can we?’

‘Quite so,’ replied Lestrade, but for the life of him he couldn’t see how the presence of the Hampshire Carbs, complete with helmets an plumes, around the Chine could protect Her Majesty some miles away at Osborne. From what McNaghten had told him, this didn’t sound like a Republican terrorist killing. But then McNaghten hadn’t told him much. As Lestrade correctly surmised, McNaghten didn’t know much.

He followed Bush and the two constables down the winding path that had been hacked in the Chine wall. The breeze from the sea caught them as they turned a corner. The sergeant ducked under a rope cordon and seemed to disappear through a cleft in the rock. The constables took up their sentinel positions on the path.

‘You’ll need to watch your step,’ the sergeant’s voice echoed. Lestrade emerged in a world of total darkness. The smell was ghastly.

‘Can we have a light, Sergeant?’ he asked.

He felt a hand grip his arm.

‘Inspector, this is not going to be pretty.’ The sergeant was grim.

‘I’ve been in the Force fifteen years, Sergeant. You get used to the Sights.’

But Lestrade wasn’t ready. Not for this one. Bush’s arm swept up to strike the match and higher to show the ‘sights’. A foot or so from Lestrade’s face was the head. One eye had gone, the mouth gaped open, a gash in the livid skull. The hair stood on end, like a manic shrub blasted by the sea wind. The face flickered in the unreal sulphur glow. Lestrade swept Bush’s arm down and the match went out. There was a silence. None of the three men in the chamber breathed. Lestrade turned for the entrance and breathed fresh air again. The helmets of the constables reassured him. Do I look as green as I feel? he asked himself. Come on, man, pull yourself together. You’ve been fifteen years in the Force. And these country bumpkins need your help.

Recovered, checked, in command, he faced Bush again. Now the sergeant
was
green. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he croaked. ‘I can’t get used to it. I’ve seen some Sights. Drowning, you know. Suicides in the Chine. Off Culver Point. But this …’ The sergeant’s voice tailed away.

‘Makes you glad of the sunshine,’ commented Lestrade. ‘Can we get to the beach down there?’ He pointed ahead of him. Bush nodded. ‘Be so good as to ask your man to stay here. Let’s walk awhile.’

On the beach, drying now under the sun of the late morning and safe for an hour or two from the onslaught of the next tide, both men had a chance to clear their brains. At the back of each was a hideous head. Lestrade had not had time to view the rest.

‘Tell me again,’ said Lestrade.

‘Well, sir. Workmen found it … er … him. Two days ago, it was. Let’s see. Tuesday it would be. The Chine needed repairs. Erosion, you see. The land slips and we do get fierce winds in the winter. Well, the tourists will be here soon. Why, these sands are knee deep in donkey …’

‘Spare me the holiday brochure, Sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir. So, anyway, these blokes were chipping away at the cliff face in that particular area of the Chine when they found this crack.’

‘Fissure.’

‘Bless you, sir. Being of an inquisitive nature, these fellers cleared the rubble and went in. Well, at first they couldn’t see nothing. Then, when they strikes their lucifers … well, there it were. They got hold of old Tom Moseley, then and there – he’s the local constable. Old Tom ain’t very quick but he got the sense to rope off the place and inform me and I sent a telegram right away to Pompey. I don’t think I expected them to send to Lunn’un though, sir. I mean, Scotland Yard itself – well!’

Lestrade sat on a breakwater, following the line of sandstone cliffs with his eyes. Above them a solitary gull wheeled and dipped, scanning the sea for movement.

‘Pompey got the coroner over, but told him he was to leave … it … where it was.’

‘Cause of death?’ asked Lestrade, flicking the guano deftly from his cuff.

‘Coroner didn’t rightly know, sir. Said he’d been dead a long time.’

Lestrade stood up. ‘Get me a lantern, Sergeant. We must go back.’

This time Lestrade went in alone. He felt safer of his own emotions without Bush. The stench was still nauseating, but the steady light of the lantern gave the corpse a less hideous, less unreal aspect. This time Lestrade gave the task in hand his full concentration, his full professionalism. The body before him was make. Age, uncertain. He would guess about forty. The skin was the colour of old parchment, but here and there the bones of the skull were visible, a muddy, sickly white. One eyeball, or what was left of it, dangled from sinews onto the cheek. The other eye, sightless and pale, stared straight ahead. The clothes, muddied and drab, were those of a seaman perhaps – or a farm labourer. The dust from the sandstone had powdered them with grey and rivulets ran down the chest and arms where rainwater had seeped in. The bones protruded through. The hair caught his attention again – matted and long and grey – but, curiously, standing on end. He dropped to his knees and held the lantern at the floor. Gaiters. The man had been a farm labourer. What he saw next jarred him somewhat. The hands. Coarse, rough, almost devoid of flesh, but the nails were long – three or four inches long each one, curling out black and sharp. No working man grew his nails like that – he hadn’t the leisure or the time. For a moment, an image of mandarins came to mind. He had seen photographs of the Empress, and even a few of the Chinamen in his own city had nails like that. But the next moment he had dismissed it. What could be the connection? Opium? Secret Societies?He told himself to keep his mind open, not to be parochial. It wasn’t every day a hideous corpse turned up in a beautiful valley in an English coastal resort.

Back to the matter in hand. Theories could come later. The body was propped up in a standing position, the legs turned in with the weight of the trunk, but it was clear that ankles, wrists and neck had once been tied. Strangulation? That was possible, but there was not enough of the neck left to tell. There was no more he could do. In the cramped space of the chamber it was too dark and airless for further work. He returned to the sunlight, older, wiser. He gave instructions for the body to be removed, and would supervise it himself. He must talk to the coroner, check the chamber measurements and look for clues. He must talk to the labourers who found it … him, to the Shanklin Chine Company.

But first Mrs Bush, rotund, homely, busy, was clattering around her kitchen. Lestrade sat in a withdrawn huddle, seeing the dead face before him as Grace was said.

‘Shepherd’s pie, Inspector Lestrade?’

The labourers were unhelpful. They had been working under contract for the Chine Company for seventeen years, man and boy. The Chine had been closed earlier than usual the previous year because of a landslip. By early September, the ropes and chains had been strung up and the gates locked. Was it possible for anyone to enter? Yes, if they had a key. But in daylight, with a body? Unlikely. A night-time job, then? Certainly, but the path was treacherous and steep, with sharp turns and jutting ledges. It would have to be someone who knew the place – and knew it well. One false step, carrying a full-grown man, and it would probably have been two bodies in the Chine.

It took Lestrade a week to interview all those who had regular contact with the area. At the end of it he was satisfied that no one knew anything. The inspector of works commented that there was evidence of rock cutting and new mortar in the chamber, that the height had been altered and the body in effect bricked in.

‘Are you familiar with the works of the late Mr Allan Poe?’ he had asked Lestrade.

‘Fleetingly, sir.’ Lestrade had pondered the similarity already, as he faced the eighth consecutive shepherd’s pie presented with glowing pride by Mrs Bush. But the connection didn’t help him. Or did it? He had an uneasy feeling, as he crossed to Portsmouth to the coroner’s office; and it wasn’t just the rolling and pitching of the steam packet.

‘Dead for several months, I’d say.’ The coroner was poring over a severed limb arranged tastefully on a slab. ‘Yes,’ adjusting his pince-nez, ‘several months.’

‘Cause of death?’

The coroner stopped his routine examination of the matter in hand and straightened. ‘I’m not sure.’ He twanged off his surgical gloves and rinsed his hands under a tap. ‘Are you familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe?’ lest experienced an immediate déjà-vu – either that or the coroner was the inspector of works’s brother. ‘Fleetingly.’ He really had had this conversation before.

‘The short story called
The Black Cat
?’

‘The cat is walled up in the cellar with the deceased?’

‘Just so. No cat in the Chine chamber, eh?’

Lestrade shook his head. ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked. ‘that the cause of death was …’

‘Suffocation, I suppose,’ was the coroner’s verdict. ‘That would have resulted before other things – starvation, madness.’

‘And the nails? The hair?’

The coroner wiped his hands on his waistcoat. He was uncomfortable. ‘A ghastly thing. Shocking. Mind you, I can’t account for it. Never seen anything like it myself, not in twelve years. Bizarre. That’s the word. Bizarre.’

‘What do you make of the man’s occupation?’

‘From his clothes, a labourer, I’d say. Smocking on the chest. Not from round here, though. Not the right pattern. Ah, but this was odd.’ The coroner rummaged in a cluttered drawer. ‘What do you make of this?’ He handed Lestrade a piece of dirty material, metallic and torn.

‘Military lace?’

‘I am impressed, Inspector. Army, cavalry probably. But officer’s, certainly. How many officers of cavalry do you know who become farm labourers?’

‘I take your point, sir.’ Lestrade frowned, the plot deepening so fast as to make his head spin. But it was a clue, a tangible piece of evidence.

‘And this is even more interesting.’

Lestrade saw, in the weave of the scarf, fragments that had been tucked under the collar of the corpse, the name ‘Peter’, embroidered in a coarse, childlike hand. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘As yet, sir, precisely nothing. But it’s early days yet.’

The coroner showed Lestrade to an outer office. ‘The lad will show you out. Spilsbury?’

A short-sighted urchin with acne lurched from an adjacent room. ‘Look at him,’ the coroner muttered. ‘My cousin’s boy from Leamington. He wants to be a coroner one day.’ Under his breath he added, ‘No hope, no hope at all. I think he’s suicidal, you know.’

Not wishing to be a burden to Sergeant Bush any longer and totally unable to face his tenth supper of shepherd’s pie, Lestrade moved in to Daish’s Hotel. Daily he walked on the pier, breathed in the salt air. Daily he returned to the Chine, asked himself over and over – who? Why? What, after all, did he have? A body. The body of a middle-aged man, walled up in an improvised cave at a popular holiday resort. The man was a labourer, named Peter, who may or may not have had contact with the Army. It was thin, very thin.

But there was one last witness to see. A wild-eyed, melancholy old man with a massive barbed-wire beard mingling with the morning egg and pipe tobacco. Lestrade took a passing haywain by way of the worst roads he had ever travelled to the vast, overgrown country house at Farringford. Its owner, the Poet Laureate, was hobbling in the garden on his stick, examining with failing eyes the daffodils on the rolling lawns.

‘Who is it?’

‘Inspector Lestrade, sir, of Scotland Yard.’

‘Lestrade of the Yard?’ Tennyson would do anything for a rhyme.

‘Very good, sir, very droll.’

‘I don’t usually see visitors, Inspector.’

‘Quite so, My Lord.’

‘Tea?’

Lestrade bowed. From nowhere, a butler brought the silver and porcelain.

‘Cream and sugar, sir?’ The butler was pompous – he disliked policemen.

Lestrade felt uncomfortable in the presence of genius. He was not one himself and was acutely aware that the Laureate did not tolerate visitors gladly. It was even rumoured that he leapt from rear windows and fled through orchards rather than face his butler’s announcement of imminent guests. He had better get this over with. It would probably be of little value anyway.

‘Forgive me for disturbing you, My Lord. I am told you are a frequent visitor to Shanklin Chine – out of season.’

‘When I am at Farringford, I often wander there, yes.’

‘You have a key?’

‘No. My man calls on the gatekeeper when I wish to enter.’

‘Have you been there recently?’

Tennyson’s concentration began to wander. Lestrade busied himself searching in the delicate porcelain for a vestige of tea. How he loathed the habit of filling only half the cup. He declined the butler’s cream puff – for one thing the man had his thumb in it.

Lestrade flicked a glance at the butler, who remained immobile, pompous.

‘Er … quite.’ Try a different tack, he thought. Eccentricity will out. ‘On recent visits did you notice anything unusual?’ He cursed himself for that vagueness. It opened the floodgates for senility.

Amen to that, rejoined Lestrade silently. ‘Did you notice any evidence of digging, My Lord?’ He found himself talking loudly, as though to a deaf mute or a foreigner. ‘Some new work on the Chine wall? A new cleft in the sandstone?’ It was very hard work.

That was more to the point. So Tennyson knew something. He was aware that there had been a murder. The papers had not yet released the story. The Noble Poet was hiding something.