The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade (7 page)

‘My dear Hector, how positively dreadful. We came as soon as we heard. Swinburne hasn’t been well. How is poor Dorothea taking it?’

‘Badly, I’m afraid. You can imagine what a shock it must have been – finding poor Harriet like that. She’s with her sister in Congleton.’

‘Harriet?’ asked the newcomer.

Everyone looked at him rather oddly.

‘No, Dorothea.’

‘Ah, of course.’

Introductions were perfunctory. ‘Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, Inspector Swallow of the Cheshire Constabulary, my dear friend Watts-Dunton, the poet. And Mr Swinburne.’

Wemyss led his friend, the poet, to the door, the latter commiserating with him as he went. The door slammed shut and Mr Swinburne stood before it, rather spare and out of place. Lestrade took Swallow aside and asked him to find Miss Spink. He then tackled the little man.

‘Algernon Charles Swinburne?’

The little man spun round as if he had been slapped. ‘It’s a lie. I wasn’t there.’ And then, more calmly, ‘Oh, forgive me, Inspector. I forgot myself.’

Algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet?’

‘I have that honour, sir.’

‘Do you recognise the style of this, sir?’ Lestrade pulled from his pocket copies of the doggerel connected with the last two murders on his mind. He suspected that this one, bizarre and tragic, may be a third, but couldn’t be sure yet.

‘They’re not mine,’ said Swinburne. ‘They’re probably Browning’s.’

Lestrade’s professional ears pricked up. Swinburne knew something. ‘Indeed?’

Swinburne relaxed a little now and sat on the settee. He reached in his pocket for a hip flask and uncorked it. ‘Oh,’ he paused, eyes pleading pathetically, ‘you won’t tell Watts-Dunton, will you? He thinks I’ve given it up.’

Lestrade waved aside the possibility.

‘This Mr Browning. Would you happen to know where he is?’

‘Westminster Abbey.’

‘Poet’s Corner?’

Swinburne nodded.

‘You would assume that these verses were written recently?’

‘Beats me!’ Swinburne said and chuckled to himself. ‘Browning’s been dead these two years.’

Another brick wall reared up at Lestrade, but Swinburne was already off on another tack.

‘Tell me about police brutality,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘Oh, come now, Inspector. When you have a man in custody – what is that quaint euphemism you chaps use – “helping the police with their enquiries” – isn’t that it? What do you use? Truncheons? Whips? Thumbscrews?’ His voice rose imperceptibly by degrees as he spoke, savouring each word. His knuckles were white as he gripped the arm of the settee. Lestrade narrowed his eyes as he began to see Mr Swinburne’s problem.

‘Rubber tubing,’ he said.

Swinburne’s mouth sagged open with pleasure and astonishment. Lestrade became confidential. ‘It doesn’t show, you see.’

Swinburne’s voice was a rasping whisper. ‘Where do you do it?’

‘Cell Block A.’

‘No, no, I mean where on the body? Buttocks, thighs?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Lestrade. ‘I am trying to give them up.’

He left the room as Swinburne took refuge in his hip flask, and slowly began to tighten the knot of his tie so that his eyes bulged and his colour rose. ‘Chastise me!’ were the last words Lestrade heard as he made for the stairs.

In the study sat Miss Spink, a prim, demure lady in her mid-thirties, hair strained back in the characteristic bun of the professional spinster. Swallow stood behind her like something out of a studio photograph.

‘I would like to see you alone, Inspector,’ she said to Lestrade. Swallow was about to object but Lestrade’s gesture of the head sent him shambling to the door, grunting under his breath the while. ‘Mr Swinburne is in the drawing room, Inspector,’ Lestrade called after him. ‘See that he doesn’t come to any harm, there’s a good chap. And don’t let him put your handcuff on!’

‘Inspector?’

‘Ma’am.’ Lestrade sat down in front of the governess. She was not conventionally attractive, perhaps, but there was a certain something about her. She gazed deeply into Lestrade’s eyes. ‘I could not bear to tell that oaf,’ she motioned to the retreating figure of Swallow, ‘but I feel there is something you should know.’

‘I am all ears, ma’am.’

Miss Spink swept upright with a rustle of petticoats. She turned her back on Lestrade. ‘This is very difficult for me, Inspector. You can’t imagine what a shock all this has been.’

Lestrade sensed when a particular approach was needed with a witness. He laid a reassuring hand on the governess’ arm. She gasped and pulled back, but the expression on her face indicated that it had been precisely the right thing to do. She blushed and glanced at the ground. ‘Harriet was seeing … a man,’ she said.

‘A man, ma’am?’

‘All men are beasts, Inspector,’ she suddenly shouted, then realised the stupidity of the remark. ‘Forgive me. Present company is of course excepted.’

‘This man – who is he?’

‘I don’t know, Inspector. I have been guilty of neglect. I beg of you, don’t tell the Reverend or Mrs Wemyss. I could not bear for them to know the truth.’

‘And what is the truth, ma’am?’

Miss Spink began to cry, decorously, of course, into a tiny lace handkerchief. Lestrade was the soul of consolation as she gradually pulled herself together.

‘I regularly accompanied Harriet to Macclesfield. Beddoes drove us in the trap. We would visit the library, and the tea-rooms and on fine days walk in the park. Occasionally we would go further afield – to Buxton to the pump-rooms, for example, or Congleton.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, about a month ago, Harriet went into Macclesfield alone – with Beddoes, of course, but the disgusting man finds a tavern and stays there until an agreed hour.’

‘You were not present, ma’am?’

‘No, I was … indisposed. When Harriet returned that day, she was excited, agitated. She danced and sang and chattered incessantly to me, to her mama, to her papa. She would give no reason for this new elation – she was usually so quiet a child – except that her life had changed and that she would never be the same again.’

‘From which you concluded …?’

‘I could not believe it at first. A young lady of Harriet’s refinement, the daughter of a clergyman, but I suspected – no more than that – that she had an admirer.’

Lestrade’s headshaking and clicking of the tongue were taken at face value by the strait-laced Miss Spink.

‘Pray continue, ma’am.’

‘Harriet became a different girl. She went into Macclesfield two or three times a week and each time she returned she was ruder, more unbridled. She refused to attend to her studies and took to the vilest habits.’

‘Habits, ma’am? Are you suggesting she was embracing the Catholic faith?’

‘Why no, Inspector. She … smoked.’

‘
Smoked
?’

‘Here.’ Miss Spink produced a tin of tobacco papers from a pocket in her voluminous skirt. ‘Shameful, isn’t it? A young lady of her refinement. The servants knew, of course, but we were at pains to keep it from her poor parents.’

‘And how do you account for the acquisition of this habit, ma’am?’

‘That man, that filthy beast whom she met in Macclesfield and whom she went on seeing in that clandestine way. It was he, I am sure, who introduced her to the habit … and Lord knows what else besides.’

‘I repeat, ma’am. Who is the man?’

‘I only saw him once. On one occasion I ignored Harriet’s insistence that she go alone to Macclesfield. I went with her. As we neared the park, I saw her signal to a figure in the bushes. It was only a split second, of course, because the figure vanished. I asked Harriet who it was and she laughed and said a friend. I could extract nothing more from her.’

‘Could you give me a description of the man?’

‘That’s very difficult, Mr Lestrade. He was large, big-built, wearing a long coat and a dark hat. I could not see his face. But I knew instinctively that he was a beast.’

‘Of course,’ Lestrade concurred, his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. ‘And you never saw the man again?’

Miss Spink shook her head.

Swallow burst in. ‘That Swinburne’s a right …’

‘Thank you, Mr Swallow.’ Lestrade stood up sharply, gesturing to Miss Spink. Swallow coughed awkwardly.

‘I am to join Mrs Wemyss in Congleton, Inspector. Please treat all that I have told you in the strictest confidence.’

‘Of course, ma’am. Would you be so good as to ask Mr Beddoes to see me presently?’

Miss Spink floated out in a profusion of dignity. She tossed her head disdainfully at Swallow and glided across the hall beyond him.

‘That one needs a bloody good …’

‘Quite so, Inspector,’ Lestrade interrupted him again.

‘Ee, that Swinburne,’ Swallow returned to his former topic. ‘’E’s sittin’ there, gettin’ cats to sink their claws into his legs. Bloody weird, I call it.’

‘Bloody weird most of us call it, Inspector. But it is hardly a police matter.’

Swallow shrugged.

Beddoes began by being far from helpful. Trouble at t’Vicarage was something he rather revelled in. A man of his class, he was no deferential tenant and it was clear that he had no time for the carriage folk whom he served. Yes, he had taken Miss Harriet on several occasions into Macclesfield. Yes, he had noticed a change in her mood, but that didn’t surprise him. All carriage folk behaved badly to him. They upbraided him, looked down on him, ignored him. So the girl was going off the straight and narrow. Typical. Nothing about the gentry surprised him. A man? No, he knew nothing about a man. But then, he had spent his time in Macclesfield at the Rose and Crown, so he wouldn’ a seen nowt, would ’e? But then, nothing about the gentry surprised Beddoes.

It took Lestrade some little time to elicit this slim information, as Beddoes was broad Cheshire and Lestrade wished at more than one point for an interpreter. But as Beddoes rose to go, he threw out a remark which he considered unimportant. To Lestrade it was vital.

‘A pedlar?’

‘Aye. On’t morning of Miss Harriet’s death, it were. Soom bloke comes round to sell brushes.’

‘What did this man look like?’

‘Oh, I didn’t see him very close. I’d just come from t’school. Big bloke ’e were. ’Ad an ’at.’

‘An ’at?’

‘Aye.’

‘Beddoes, where is Mrs Drum?’

‘Vicar give ’er notice. She’s off t’Macclesfield this hour since.’

‘On foot?’

‘Nay, I took her t’station at Rainow, seein’ as ’ow I couldn’ go mysen.’

‘Get your trap, man. We’re going after her.’

‘It’s t’Vicar’s trap.’ Beddoes was suddenly astonishingly solicitous for his employer. ‘Besides, y’ve got yer own.’

‘Inspector Swallow has borrowed my trap to pursue his own enquiries. I am commandeering the Vicar’s in the name of the law.’ Then, more forcibly, ‘You wouldn’t want to be accused of obstructing the police in the course of their investigations, would you, Beddoes?’

The odd-job man grumbled and muttered as he scuttled to the stables behind the house.

‘Y’ll not catch ’er now,’ he shouted as the trap swung down the gravelled drive out on to the open road. ‘T’train from Rainow leaves in ten minutes.’

‘Use your whip, man. You’re wasting time.’

They did catch Mrs Drum. So desolate had she been while waiting in the cold drizzle at Rainow station that the stationmaster had taken her into the shelter of his office and given her the proverbial cup of tea that did not really cheer. Consequently, while the garrulous Mrs Drum poured her heart out to him and he poured tea into her, she had missed her train. Lestrade had found her, still sipping tea, still in the stationmaster’s office. She was not, however, terribly helpful. Lestrade’s forthright questions brought her out of her mood of self-pity, but her description of the travelling salesman was vague. He was a big man, she said, but his face was partly hidden by a muffler and his voice distorted accordingly. She thought he had piercing blue eyes, but under the rim of the hat, it was difficult to tell. As to the death of Miss Harriet, Mrs Drum had been in the kitchen, it being the maid’s day off, preparing dinner. It was about half past three. She remembered that because she heard the hall clock strike, but the hall clock was notoriously inaccurate. Safer to say it was between three and four. Mrs Drum had heard a roaring noise, and then the screaming started. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, it was too late. What was left of Harriet Wemyss lay blazing on the carpet. Shocked and sickened, Mrs Drum had thrown water on her and all the blankets she could drag from the beds. The smell, she said, was awful and the memory of it would remain with her always.

Lestrade gave the ex-housekeeper time to recover. It had been perhaps half an hour later that Mrs Wemyss and Miss Spink had arrived, followed almost immediately by the vicar. Mrs Drum had sent Beddoes for the police, but they arrived later still.

‘I can’t understand how it happened, sir,’ sobbed Mrs Drum. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

‘The travelling salesman,’ said Lestrade. ‘What time did he arrive?’

‘I suppose about half past twelve, sir. I told ’im we didn’t need brushes but ’e insisted on seeing the lady of the ’ouse.. I told ’im Mrs Wemyss wasn’t in, but Miss ’Arriet come downstairs and took ’im into the drawing room.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I got on with my work, sir.’

‘Did you not think it odd that Miss Harriet should deal with this pedlar herself? Was it not usually your duty?’

Mrs Drum had clearly not thought along those lines before, but she acknowledged that that was in fact the case.

‘And what time did this pedlar leave?’

‘I don’t know, sir, I was in the kitchen most of the day and you can’t see the front door from there. I suppose Miss ’Arriet saw ’im out.’

‘The pedlar used the front door. Was that not unusual?’

Again, Mrs Drum had not thought of that. Again, she concluded that it was.

Lestrade thought now that he knew how the murder was accomplished. And he knew who – or at least he had a description of the man. But he needed to prove it, and to that end he took the protesting Mrs Drum along with the complaining Beddoes back to Wildboarclough Vicarage.

He was in time to see a cab leaving with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne and he thought he heard a superfluity of whip-cracking, but he couldn’t be sure. The Reverend Wemyss was somewhat peeved to see the return of Mrs Drum, but Lestrade assured him it was necessary and she would not be there long.