One

Thebes, the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom

T

he boy-king sat in the shadows, his almond eyes shining in the guttering candle-flames. His wife sat beside him, as patient as she was ever likely to be with her husband, her stepbrother, the Living Image of Amun, ruler of Upper Egyptian Heliopolis. She sighed, patted the clammy hand idling in his lap and half turned in the darkness.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to him, stroking the smooth expanse of his shaven head, ‘I’m not going far – and Ay will be here soon.’

‘Horemheb,’ he said, his voice not as deep as hers. She saw the full lips tremble, the gold shimmer in the pierced ears. She looked across to where the statuette of the great general sat, cross-legged, grinning with his monkey-jowls at the royal couple, his breasts hanging over his paunch.

‘It’s only a piece of limestone,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ll have it taken away.’

‘No.’ her husband said quickly. ‘No. What if he should find out? It was a present . . .’

‘What if the moon is made of sycamore figs?’ She shook his gold-ringed fingers and let the hand fall. Then she’d tired of the game, of humouring him, and she stood up straight, towering over the intercessor between man and the gods. ‘Horemheb is a soldier,’ she said. Her voice was as cold as his limestone likeness. ‘A servant. Why don’t you kick him as you would a dog?’

The boy-king whimpered. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I forgot. The last time you kicked your dog, it bit you, didn’t it? Well,’ the disgust on her painted face said it all. ‘You win some, you lose some. Or in your case, little Tutankhaten, you just lose some.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ He was on his feet, shouting at her with that pubescent squeak that always escaped his lips when he’d lost his temper. She looked at him in the acrid sulphur smoke where the great hawk-headed god loomed at his shoulder, gleaming in basalt and gold. He looked younger than his sixteen years. She wondered idly if his testicles had dropped yet. Certainly she hadn’t seen them lately, but she really had little desire to. When you’ve got eight Nubian slaves to carry you everywhere and every one of them is hung like a donkey, what lies under the Pharaoh’s thingy is more or less by the by. Still, she thought it was a bit forward of the royal embalmer to comment in her presence the other day that the only time he’d see the king erect is when he taped his organ of Ankh to his navel. She’d giggled at the time, but with hindsight, she must have the man’s tongue cut out.

She crossed the cold of the marble hall to where Ay, her husband’s man, stood in the shadows. He moved like a cat and only his shorn head was visible as she reached him.

‘Majesty,’ he muttered with a voice like the gravel of the Nile. ‘How is he tonight?’

‘One of his turns,’ she hissed. ‘He’s panicked for days about the Hittites and the Mittani and whatever the hell’s happening below the Fourth Cataract. Now it’s Horemheb.’

‘Tut, tut,’ Ay nodded.

‘Speak to him, Ay.’ The queen held the man’s shoulder. ‘You’re his most trusted adviser. He’ll listen to you . . . Gods, I can remember the time he wouldn’t let a slave wipe his bottom unless he checked with you first.’

‘Ah,’ Ay smiled. ‘The good old days. By the way, great and magnificent Ankhasenamun, are you available tonight?’

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. ‘You dirty old adviser,’ she said. ‘A man of your age should know better. Kindly,’ she lifted his fingers, ‘take your hand off my breasts. You’ll just have to wait.’ And she caught him a nasty one in the groin with her fly-whisk as she slid into the dark.

Ay sank to his knees in the royal presence. Marvellous what a bit of the old genuflection did for the lad’s ego. Tutankhamun, Lord of the Nile, Ruler of the Delta, Master of Upper and Lower Egypt still stood, up to his knees in cushions, still quivering with rage at the exit of his queen and in his fear at the likeness of his general.

‘She!’ he screeched, pointing into the blackness. ‘She called me Tutankhaten, Ay. That’s heresy.’

The royal adviser knelt back on his heels. ‘It is, divine one,’ he growled. ‘Shall I summon the executioner?’

‘Yes!’ The boy’s eyes flashed in the candle-flame. ‘No! Oh, I don’t know, Ay. What do you think?’

‘Er . . .?’ The adviser spread his arms wide, glancing down at his knees.

‘Oh, please.’ The boy-king crossed to him on his spindly, barely haired legs. ‘Get up.’

‘Thanks, Majesty,’ Ay grimaced. ‘You know these marble halls play merry hell with my sciatica. How are we today?’

‘Horemheb, Ay,’ the boy whispered. ‘What’s he doing? Where is he?’

The adviser took the boy’s hand and walked him back to the low throne and sat him down where the golden lions yawned under the royal elbows. ‘Well,’ the older man said. ‘He was last heard of in Sulb. That’s for definite. But I have heard reports he’s making for Tushka.’

‘Oh, my God.’ The boy sank back into his throne, his gilded fingers caressing the lions’ heads for reassurance. Perhaps, somehow, he’d absorb their strength. ‘That’s getting nearer, isn’t it?’ He suddenly jerked forward and grabbed the retainer’s robe. ‘Well, isn’t it? You taught me geography, for God’s sake. Is it getting nearer?’

Ay patiently removed the boy’s hand. ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at the hysterical demi-god. ‘Yes, Tushka is nearer to us than Sulb.’

‘What’s he doing? What’s he doing?’ the king blurted out.

Ay held his master’s hands firmly in his own. ‘What does Horemheb do?’ he asked. ‘For a living, I mean?’

‘He kills people.’ The king knew the answer to that one only too well.

‘Right. And where is he? Assuming he’s reached Tushka by now, I mean?’

‘Er . . .’ The king was less sure now. ‘Upper Nubia.’

‘Lower.’ The old tutor tapped the boy’s knuckles. ‘Lower Nubia. So who’s he killing?’

There was a pause. ‘Nubians?’ the king hazarded.

Ay smiled and patted the boy’s cheek. ‘Got it in one,’ he said. ‘So, what’s your problem?’

‘It’s when he stops.’ The boy-king tried to concentrate, to clear his head. He couldn’t find the words with Ankhasenamun. He never could. But with Ay, it was different. He’d always been there, like the father he’d never known. Firm, but fair. A bastard, but not a mean one. Ay always understood. Always knew. Always cared.

‘When he stops?’

‘Yes. When he’s finished killing Nubians. What if . . . what if he wants to kill me?’

Ay chuckled and shook his head. ‘Now, why should he want to do that?’ he asked. ‘Why, little one?’

The boy sat, blinking back the tears. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps he wants this throne.’ He glanced across to the giant doors of the robing room where all his regalia lay. ‘My crown. The crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. Perhaps he’s after them.’

Ay let the king’s ringed fingers go. He looked into the face of the Pharaoh and saw no wrinkled lip nor sneer of cold command. Only a poor, pathetic little idiot who’d had the bad luck to be born to the great Akhenaten of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom and his sixth wife. He rose to his feet, driven by his incipient sciatica and a more pressing urge and crossed briefly into the shadows. He lit a taper from a candle and lit another to give himself better light. ‘Perhaps he is,’ he said softly as he reached down to the base of a pillar. ‘Perhaps Horemheb does want your throne, oh wise Lord of the Desert and of the River and of the Sea. But it doesn’t matter, really, does it?’

‘It doesn’t?’ Tutankhamun’s heart soared with hope. The worst terrors of his young life were being confirmed, but his oldest counsellor, his truest friend, was telling him that it didn’t matter, it would be all right.

‘Why not, Ay?’ the boy-king asked. ‘Why doesn’t it matter?’

He sat upright on his gilded throne of the yawning lions. He was staring at the sullen, monkey-scowling limestone face of General Horemheb. He didn’t see Ay with a deft movement snatch up the cherry-wood club studded with silver. He didn’t hear the whirr of it as it came at him through the air. And no one could say whether he knew what hit him as the weapon crunched through the back of his skull and the bone fragments bit deep into his brain.

Ay watched the boy-king’s blood arc crimson to spatter on the basalt beak and torso of the hawk-god. He saw the boy-king’s narrow shoulders hunch and his fingers flutter uselessly on the lions’ heads. He watched him slump to the floor among the pile of cushions and he knelt tenderly beside him, stroking the sleek, dead head.

‘It doesn’t matter, little Tutankhamun,’ he crooned, ‘because Horemheb is in Lower Nubia. And I am here. That’s why it doesn’t matter.’ And he stooped to plant a last kiss on the shattered skull.

The royal embalmer muttered when he saw the dead king laid out. Then he said nothing as his team got to work to prepare the body for the afterlife. Leaning over the newly washed body and wearing the jackal-head of his calling, he twisted his iron hook up the king’s nostrils to poke for his brain and teased it out, collecting it carefully before placing it in an urn, the canopic jar to his left, the lid of which resembled a hawk. His servants held the boy upside-down briefly while he poured his potion into the nasal cavity and rinsed out the empty skull. The resin would come later. He heard the curiously empty click as the boy’s head rested on the wooden pillow again. He washed the mouth out and carefully placed inside the gums the oil-soaked wads of linen. Then he reamed out the nostrils of their contents and plugged them with wax. He took the camel-hair brush from a servant and began to coat the dead boy’s face with resin. Finally, he placed a piece of linen over each dull eye and pulled the eyelids down over them.

‘Well, ’e can’t be more than seventeen, Kat, eh?’ the embalmer’s number two speculated, peering at the expressionless face.

‘Indeed. It’s a crime, isn’t it? Go on, then, call the bastard in.’ The nameless one stood outside the tent, the flat, black Ethiopian stone gleaming dully in his hand, honed to a razor’s edge. He entered to the rhythmic chanting of the priests. Again, the jackal head bent over the body, Kat in the likeness of the great god Anubis, and drew with his rush pen a five-inch line of ink down the dead king’s left flank.

There was a rip and a squelch as the Ethiopian stone sliced through skin and muscle. Kat’s numbers two and three buried themselves in the open abdomen and removed the organs they found there. The nameless one placed them in the jars with the lids of the dog’s head and the jackal’s and the man’s.

‘Right,’ Kat had joined the body on the slab again. ‘Palm wine.’ He clicked his fingers and an assistant brought a ewer. He poured it into the body cavity. ‘Just a quick rinse, I think. That’ll do nicely. Pounded spices. Now.’

At a signal from the royal embalmer, the priests turned on the nameless one, spitting at him, hurling abuse. He turned on his heel, in the time-honoured way, rivulets of phlegm running down his sinewy back.

‘Who’d have his job, eh?’ Haph asked.

‘Somebody’s got to do it,’ Kat said.

He clicked again and another servant slapped the spices firmly into his right palm. ‘Hmm,’ Kat breathed them in. He began to probe inside the body with his practised fingers. ‘You can’t beat a bit of infusion, that’s what I always say. Gentlemen, over to you now. And Haph, go easy on the pure bruised myrrh, there’s a good embalmer’s mate, only I’m still reeling from Nefertiti, gods bless her amulets.’

‘And I remember Nepherkheprure-Waeare,’ Kat’s number two chipped in.

The embalmer looked at him. ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he said. ‘Right. Bit of cassia in the thorax now and I think we’ve finished. Where’s my needle?’

Haph, up to his wrists in viscera, looked down wistfully at the dead king’s face. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, ‘I’d say somebody stitched him up good and proper, wouldn’t you, Kat?’

The embalmer glanced up and grinned under the mask. ‘You know what they say, Haph,’ he said. ‘The king is dead. Long live the king. Know what I mean?’ And he tapped the side of the jackal’s snout.

Haph nodded. ‘Nod’s as good as an ankh to a blind camel,’ he said. ‘Natron?’

Kat nodded. ‘Three gallons should do it. And then we’ll stand watch for seventy days in the time-honoured tradition. Who’s doing grave goods for this one, Haph?’

‘Dunno. Merymery, I s’pose.’

‘Oh, Gods, no.’ Kat paused in mid stitch. ‘Better get the papyrus out then. It’s going to be a long night.’

Virginia Water, 17 March 1923

He lay with his arms flexed at the elbow, in the manner of long dead Egyptian kings, the forearms across his chest, the left above the right. In his hand lay the fly-whisk, its white horsehair trailing elegantly over his waistcoat.

‘Daddy!’

The head came up and with it the body. He blinked, not sure, for the moment, of his surroundings.

‘Daddy? Are you awake?’

The opening of the door sent a ray of sharp sunlight into the room, the dust particles dancing in the air.

‘Oh,’ the voice was softer. ‘You were asleep. I’m sorry.’

The fly-whisk snaked out, hissing through air, spraying the dust into the sunbeam. ‘Got you, you little bastard.’

He let his feet find the slippers and tottered over to the murder scene. But there was no corpse. The little bastard must have fallen somewhere behind the curtains.

‘Not sleeping, my dear,’ he said, crouching with the whisk at the ready. ‘Just lulling our little buzzing friend into a false sense of obscurity. The first flies of the season are little buggers, aren’t they? Damned if I know where they go in winter, but I’m bloody certain where they are every spring – swarming around my ears.’

‘That was Fred Wensley,’ she told him.

‘What was?’

She looked at her father. She knew he was too old for all this. Too old for the rough and tumble. He should have retired years ago. Come to think of it, he had retired years ago; yet here he was, staring his three score years and ten squarely in the face, still chasing shadows, still listening to the testimony of ghosts. She smiled at him. To be fair, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Sholto Lestrade OM didn’t look a day over sixty-five. And he’d looked like that since he was nineteen.

‘The telephone,’ she told him. ‘That was Fred on the telephone. There’s been some trouble at St Bart’s. A nightwatchman has been killed.’

Lestrade got to his feet. The girl in front of him was his Emma, a woman grown. He wasn’t happy about the daringness of her hem-line, the cut of her cloche or the rakish angle of her cigarette holder, but this was 1923. And if Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade was a little on the mature side for a flapper . . . well, it was hardly his place to say so.

‘Well, why didn’t you call me?’ he asked her.

‘I did.’ She put her hands on her hips and shook her head at him. ‘Will you take the train? Or shall I drive?’

He didn’t like that, either. His little girl should still be in frothy dresses and mutton-chop sleeves, lashing out with her ping-pong bat or tying up the Bandicoot boys in the old orchard at Bandicoot Hall. Instead, here she was, smoking and driving like a man. Still, the war had caused all that. Deciding her breasts would let her down in the Light Infantry, she’d elected to drive a tram instead. For nearly two years, passengers in Croydon and Thornton Heath went in fear of their lives.

‘Why doesn’t Fred send a car?’ Lestrade asked her.

‘Why doesn’t Fred send a policeman?’ she countered. ‘A real one, I mean.’

‘Thank you, daughter dear.’ Lestrade ferreted in the wardrobe. ‘Where are my spats?’

‘You know what I mean, Daddy.’ She patted his shoulder and kissed his forehead.

He looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. You think I’m too long in the tooth for all this, don’t you? Better I’m put out to grass, I suppose. From Scotland Yard to knacker’s yard. I wish it was that simple.’

‘It is that simple,’ she told him. ‘Frank Froest, Edward Henry, Abberline; they’ve all gone, Daddy.’

‘Fred’s still there.’

‘Yes,’ she conceded, ‘he is, but he’s fifteen years younger than you.’

‘And Walter Dew.’ Lestrade had found his spat. Now all he needed was the other one. ‘He’s still going strong.’

‘But he’s snow white.’

‘No,’ Lestrade shook his head. ‘More like Dopey.’ He saw that she wasn’t smiling. ‘Emma,’ he took her hands in his, the spat thrown on the bed, ‘don’t you see? I can’t sit around here all day, moping. Now that Fanny’s gone, life is . . . well, it’s empty. You know me . . .’

She did. Only too well.

‘Give me the thud of size elevens on the pavement, the rattle of the keys, the click of the cuffs. It’s like a drug, I suppose. The battered corpse in the alley. The body in the library. Murder at the manse.’

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know. I’ll get the car. Why are you putting those things on? You know you hate spats.’

‘They were the last thing Fanny bought me,’ he told her. ‘The last present. It’s what she would have wanted.’

‘Daddy,’ Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade raised an eyebrow. ‘You know perfectly well your good lady wife is having a whale of a time on the Riviera with Cousin Val. You were supposed to be going with her. Letitia and Harry Bandicoot also asked you to go on safari to Africa with them.’

‘Too busy,’ he shrugged. ‘Besides, Cousin Val and Fanny may get on like a house on fire, but to me she’s the kiss of death. One whiff of her aftershave and I’m reaching for my revolver – well, I would if I had one. Talking of which, what’s that smell I can smell?’

‘It’s me,’ she beamed. ‘Coco Chanel’s new perfume. Number Five. Do you like it?’

He shrugged. ‘Vaguely better than Number Two, I suppose. Oh, all right.’ He tossed the spat back into the recesses of the wardrobe. ‘A bloke can’t go around in one spat – people would talk about him.’ And he hauled out his second-best Donegal, the one fashionable people had stopped wearing in 1895.

There were once three chapels in the precincts of the ancient hospital of St Bartholomew. Only one still stands – the Holy Cross, known to all and sundry as St Bartholomew-the-Less. St Bartholomew-the-Great stands outside the hospital walls, with its front to Smithfield, where armoured knights once clattered down Giltspur Lane to joust at the tilting yards there and Queens Mary and Elizabeth, God Bless Them, burnt people with religious zeal and lots of firewood. As for St Bartholomew-the-Inbetween, only God knew where that once stood.

Emma wanted to go with her old dad through the gateway they’d put up in 1702 when they’d realized it was time for some Queen Anne architecture, but her old dad had said no. It might be grisly. And his words were punctuated by the dull thud as another bullock dropped like a stone in the meat market behind them.

‘Pick me up from the Yard, later,’ he said. ‘And don’t talk to any strange men.’

There was as strange a group of men as Lestrade would care to meet standing in a huddle in the gloom of the underground passages that ran like rabbit runs, criss-crossing Smithfield, linking wards and medical school. Two of them Lestrade recognized.

‘Inspector Macclesfield.’ The ex-Detective Chief Superintendent tipped his bowler.

‘Mr Lestrade.’ The Inspector’s finger snaked along his trilby- brim. Macclesfield was built like a Brixton privy, without the green- and-cream tile covering of course, and had a face like a dray horse. There were those, like Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade for instance, who called him handsome. The other one was Wilhelmina Macclesfield, his mum. Good copper, though, was Macclesfield; recently promoted, and rightly so, for his work on the Hard case.

Standing next to Macclesfield was a bad copper, Inspector McNulty, of the City Force, that strange band of no-hopers the late Home Secretary, Mr Robert Peel, had never quite had the balls to deal with. McNulty was the one who’d put the ‘un’ in unpleasant.

‘Didn’t you see the blue tape?’ he growled at Lestrade. ‘The police cordon?’

‘Tsk,’ Lestrade shook his head, ‘these old eyes of mine. Missed it completely.’

‘Well, you couldn’t have,’ McNulty said. ‘Because it’s waist high, see, and would’ve hit you at waist level.’

‘Good God.’ Lestrade recoiled a step or two. ‘The old faculties are more diminished than I thought. I didn’t feel a thing down . . . there. Still,’ he sighed. ‘At my age, you don’t.’

‘Now, look . . .’ Gerald McNulty might have been an oaf of the worst water, but he knew when he was being sent up. It happened to him most days. But he didn’t like the way Norroy Macclesfield turned away, chewing the rim of his trilby to stop himself guffawing. ‘Fred Wensley called me in, Inspector,’ Lestrade said to the City man. ‘Where are we, Norroy?’

The big Inspector turned back to Lestrade. Surely the old boy wasn’t really gaga, was he? ‘St Bart’s Hospital, Mr Lestrade,’ he told him.

‘Yes.’ Lestrade was patience itself. ‘But where vees-ah-vee the City boundary?’

‘Ah, I see.’ Macclesfield had caught his drift. There was to be a jurisdiction dispute and Lestrade needed ammunition. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you glance down, sir, you will see the mortal remains of Albert Weez, nightwatchman and boiler man to St Bart’s. His nether regions are lying in the City of London, but his torso is in E Division, Metropolitan Area.’

‘Bollocks!’ snorted McNulty.

‘As I said, Gerald,’ Macclesfield held his ground, ‘they are in the City of London.’

‘All of him is in the City of London,’ McNulty insisted. ‘The bloody boundary is a quarter of a mile that way,’ he waved towards the Bailey. ‘No, that way,’ he waved towards St Paul’s. ‘Well, whichever bloody way it is, we’re inside City limits here. It’s bad enough, Macclesfield, that you come trampling over my manor, but some old fogey . . .’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade wagged a finger at him. ‘But you’re forgetting the Whittington Sanction.’ He smiled.

‘You what?’ McNulty blinked in the half-light.

‘Tell him, Norroy.’

‘Fourteen twenty-three, I think you’ll find, Gerald,’ the Metropolitan Inspector began. ‘In the gift of the then late Mayor of London, Richard Whittington – he who kept having the turns – St Bartholomew’s Hospital – and the Bailey, come to think of it – was granted to the Priory of St Greavsey-at-Westminster. That Sanction has never been revoked. In other words, this is our turf.’

‘But you just said . . .’

‘Oh, his legs are yours, yes. That’s because, of course, the place has expanded a bit since fourteen twenty-three and whoever brought an untimely end to Mr Weez had the awkwardness to fell him precisely on the borderline. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

‘Think about this positively,’ Lestrade urged. ‘With things as they are, you’ve only got half the paperwork to do. Now, a man is dead, Inspector. Can we get on with this?’

McNulty wasn’t at all sure about the Whittington Sanction. But he’d crossed the great Fred Wensley before and Lestrade was a legend in his own life-style. Better bite the bullet and do as the old man said.

‘Who found the body?’ Lestrade could get down on his knees all right; as to the getting up, somebody else might have to shift for him.

‘Some kid poking about.’ McNulty riffled through his notepad. ‘Here we are. One Cedric Keith Simpson.’

‘Patient?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Dunno,’ McNulty shrugged. ‘I didn’t spend that long with him. He seemed affable enough.’

‘No.’ Lestrade’s head was down, checking the corpse. ‘I mean, is the lad Simpson a patient here at the hospital?’

‘No, he’s an intending medical student, sir,’ Macclesfield told him. ‘We’ve got him upstairs.’

‘Upset?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Upstairs,’ Macclesfield repeated, louder this time.

Lestrade sighed and looked up at both inspectors. There wasn’t much to choose between them, really, IQ for IQ. ‘Cause of death?’

‘Well . . .’ McNulty began, but Macclesfield cut in.

‘Uh-uh.’ He wagged a warning finger at his oppo. ‘Cause of death is to the head, Gerald,’ he said. ‘My patch, if you remember our previous conversation.’

McNulty frowned.

‘Blunt instrument, sir,’ Macclesfield went on. ‘I counted three blows.’

‘Four,’ Lestrade corrected him. ‘Delivered from which side?’

‘The left.’

‘Attack from in front? Behind?’

‘The side.’

‘You wouldn’t care to impound the type of instrument?’

‘Life preserver would be my guess.’

‘Inspector?’ Lestrade wanted a second opinion.

‘I’d go along with that.’ McNulty thought it best to concur.

What was left of Albert Weez lay on his right side, the arm pinned beneath him pointing along the darkened passageway to the door beyond. His mouth hung open and his grey eyes stared lifeless and dull, sunken in their sockets as though shrunk back from the sight they saw before somebody demolished his skull. His jacket had been wrenched back over his shoulders, pinning one arm behind him. The other he’d obviously torn free in the struggle before he’d gone down.

‘He didn’t die here,’ Lestrade muttered, peering along the corridor. ‘Constable?’

‘Yessir.’ The Metropolitan instinctively clicked to attention.

‘What size boots do you take?’

‘Ten, sir.’

‘My man takes eleven,’ McNulty chipped in, rather gratuitously, Lestrade thought.

‘Show me.’ Lestrade was still talking to the Met officer. He lifted a single sole.

‘Which way did you come in?’

‘From there, sir,’ the constable told him. ‘Same way you did.’

‘No blood,’ Lestrade mumbled, half to himself. ‘Which means he was dragged that way – and by the wrist, I’d say. Norroy, have you got Fingerprints on the way?’

‘On the way, guv,’ Macclesfield nodded.

‘So are mine,’ McNulty assured the assembled company.

‘Well, then.’ Lestrade flapped his arms in the air until both Inspectors caught him and hauled him upright. ‘This place is going to get like Piccadilly Circus in a minute. Where’s this lad Simpson?’

The lad Simpson was seventeen, though he looked older. He had the kind of ears, downturned at the top, that looked as though someone had swung him round by them shortly after birth. That same rather vicious assault had produced a loosening of the jowls so that the post-pubescent Simpson could have passed for a blood- hound. Nature had given him a superfluity of teeth, too. Quite a bitch, Nature.

‘Cedric?’ Lestrade peered at the lad.

‘People call me CKS.’ He stood up and extended a hand. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ And he put the pathological specimen back in its jar.

‘Do they, Cedric?’ Lestrade was still peering. ‘I am Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Lestrade, attached fairly loosely to Scotland Yard.’

‘Gosh.’ The boy grinned so that all his teeth were on show.

‘I understand that you found the body.’

‘That’s right,’ Simpson smirked. ‘Bit of a facer, isn’t it?’

For the first time, Lestrade took in their surroundings. They stood facing each other in a museum of the macabre, where indescribable bits of dead people floated in formalin. Anything with eyes appeared to be staring directly at Lestrade. And this was one time when staring back probably wouldn’t have much effect.

‘Tell me,’ Lestrade scraped a chair forward and ushered the boy into another one, ‘how you came to be in the passageways beneath this building. What, in short, are you doing at Bart’s, Simpson?’

‘Ah,’ Simpson beamed. ‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that.’

‘You did?’

‘Oh, yes. You see, I know a little of police procedures. First, Mr McNulty asked me that question. Now he’s the nasty policeman. Called me Simpson and assumed I’d done it.’

‘And then?’

‘Then Mr Macclesfield asked me the same question. Now, he’s the nice policeman, called me CKS and assumed I didn’t do it.’

‘And where does that leave me?’

‘Well.’ Simpson leaned back, cradling his right knee in his clasped hands. ‘You’re the guv’nor,’ he said. ‘You’re walking a very clever middle road. You’ve asked me the same question and you’ve called me Cedric and Simpson, knowing I prefer CKS . . .’

‘And who do you think I think did it?’ Lestrade asked him.

‘Er . . . Ah.’ Collapse of precocious kid.

‘Actually,’ Lestrade leaned forward and whispered, ‘it could very well be Mr McNulty, but we’ll draw a veil over that for the moment. You’d better follow procedure, then, and answer my question.’

‘What I was doing in the underground passages, you mean? Well, Mr Lestrade, I was visiting the hospital this morning . . .’

‘Visiting a patient?’

‘No, the hospital. Giving the place the once over. You see, I’m hoping to be a doctor. I’ve been to Tommy’s and to be honest, I wasn’t very impressed. I’m off to Guy’s tomorrow. I really can’t decide whom to honour with my presence.’

‘What school do you go to, Cedric?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Brighton and Hove Grammar School, Mr Lestrade. Do you know it?’

‘Mercifully, no,’ Lestrade scowled. ‘Tell me, are they all as bright as you are?’

‘Oh, Lord no,’ Simpson grinned. ‘I was voted Chap Most Likely To last term.’

‘And have you?’

‘What have you got on the cause of death?’ Simpson ignored him.

‘What have you got?’ Lestrade threw it back at him.

‘Well.’ Simpson looked about him conspiratorially. ‘If you’d like my help . . .’

‘Oh, I would,’ Lestrade humoured the lad. ‘I would.’

‘Five blows to the left side of the head.’

‘Five?’ Lestrade frowned. ‘I only counted four.’

‘Ah ha,’ Simpson grinned. ‘That’s because you forgot to use your thumb for counting.’

‘What?’ Lestrade said levelly.

‘No, seriously though,’ Simpson chuckled. ‘The first swipe was to the parietal region.’

‘Where?’ Lestrade blinked.

‘Up here.’ Simpson pointed to the top of his head. ‘That would have caused loss of balance, quite severe bleeding and an absolute blinder of a headache. The second blow was like unto it, as they say in chapel readings – only lower. A horizontal biff that caught the temporal and parietal suture.’

‘And the third?’ Lestrade wasn’t sure he was hearing all this from a seventeen-year-old Brighton and Hove schoolboy.

‘The poor old duffer – oh, begging your pardon, Mr Lestrade – must have been rolling around now and the third was delivered as he fell, at the base of the occipital region. That’s where the neck bone’s connected to the head bone.’ Simpson could sense that Lestrade was seriously out of his depth. ‘The fifth blow – the one that in the darkened recesses of the passageway you understandably missed – was delivered virtually over the fourth, but by this time the deceased was on the ground and the impact caused a compound fracture of the zygomatic arch – as I think you’ll find when they X-ray.’

There was silence.

‘And the weapon?’ Lestrade eventually found his voice.

‘Heavy. Blunt. An iron bar, I would think . . . Oooh, eight or nine inches long, tubular, perhaps with a two-inch diameter. Conjecturally I would suggest a crowbar.’

‘He didn’t die in the passages, of course,’ Lestrade said.

‘Lord, no. In the pharmacy next door.’

‘The . . . May I ask you, Mr Simpson, how you know that?’

‘Blood-stains on the stairs, Mr Lestrade,’ the boy answered. ‘And a particularly interesting cluster of blood on the carpet in front of the poisons cabinet. That’s where his cheek was smashed – where the last blow was delivered.’

Silence again.

‘You never actually answered my question,’ Lestrade told him, as if in a dream. ‘Why were you in the underground passageways?’

‘Oh, didn’t I?’ Simpson frowned. ‘Sorry. I was lost. Got a head like a sieve, you know.’

It was a relief to Lestrade to talk to someone who wasn’t seventeen and sieve-headed. Just your ordinary run-of-the-hospital pharmacist.

While he was doing it another jurisdiction row broke out between the fingerprints boys from the Yard and the City; then another between their respective photographers. It hadn’t been like this since the good old days of the Ripper. Lestrade didn’t intervene. Norroy Macclesfield was big enough and ugly enough to hold his own. And if he chose to hold anybody else’s, they’d know about it soon enough.

William Pargetter was a lean, pasty-faced boffin who looked as though he went to bed in his white coat. Assorted shades of litmus paper burst like a buttonhole from his top pocket and his lapels and cuffs were canvases of chromatography. He also owned the most ill- fitting set of dentures in the world.

‘I really can’t understand it,’ he clicked, as his upper set refused to be parted for long from their lower cousins.

‘What?’ Lestrade was peering into huge carboys of purple and amber liquid. The pasty head of the pharmacist swam mauvely into his vision on the other side,

‘Old “Whizzo”. Didn’t have an enemy in the world.’

‘Old “Whizzo”?’

‘Albert. Albert Weez. Everybody knew him as “Whizzo”. Salt of the earth type. Dressed up as Santa for Christmas and did the children’s ward. Pity, really, he was due to retire next month.’

‘What would he have been doing up here? In the pharmacy, I mean?’

Pargetter shrugged and shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘He came on duty at eleven, if my memory serves, and checked the boiler in the basement. You’re sure he died in here?’

Lestrade crossed to the tell-tale stain, brown and sticky on the floor. ‘The trail leads that way,’ he said. ‘Down the stairs to the passage under the courtyard where we found him. What’s in this cabinet?’

Pargetter peered through the shattered glass and felt more of it crunch under his feet. ‘Poisons,’ he said.

‘Anything missing?’

Pargetter nodded. ‘I’ve checked the inventory. One bottle of potassium cyanide. That’s all.’

‘Who’s responsible for security in this building?’

‘Well, in this room, I suppose I am. There’s only one key to the poisons cabinet.’

‘And where’s that kept?’

‘Around my neck.’ Pargetter lifted his tie to reveal the little brass key.

‘Any doctors have access to it?’

‘Not without signing the book – and not without using the key.’

‘What if you’re off sick?’ Lestrade asked.

Pargetter pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Please,’ he said, his incisors clashing. ‘I haven’t lost a day in sixteen and a half years.’

‘But if you had . . .?’

‘Then whoever needed access would need to contact me. I am not on the telephone.’

‘You live . . .?’

‘Frugally enough,’ Pargetter clicked.

‘No, I mean, where do you live?’

‘Eighty-three, Splendesham Villas, Norwood.’

‘Alone?’

‘With my sister, Miss Pargetter.’

‘What about during the day?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Beg pardon?’

Lestrade mechanically checked the windows. ‘I mean, what happens if someone wants the cabinet while you’re at lunch?’

‘They’ll have to wait.’

‘And while you’re . . . er . . . answering the call?’

Pargetter looked at the ex-Superintendent oddly. ‘I’m not a religious man, Mr Lestrade.’ he said.

‘This is where they got in,’ Lestrade muttered, half to himself and prised up a piece of twisted window frame. He looked out of the lower pane. It was a first-floor window. ‘Quite agile,’ he mused.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘I was thinking, whoever broke in must have a certain agileness.’

‘Agility,’ Pargetter corrected him.

‘Probably,’ Lestrade nodded, pressing his blunt old nose against the blunt old glass. ‘He’d need to haul himself up by the drainpipe and then fiddle about with that overflow pipe. Not a climb for an old man.’

‘But why kill Whizzo?’ Pargetter rattled.

Lestrade looked at his man. ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr Pargetter,’ he said. ‘Sometimes that just happens, I’m afraid.’

It was the third time they’d called it Scotland Yard – a little place by the river, crammed from floor to ceiling with shoe boxes, files, fingerprints, murder weapons, death masks. The lunch-time shift was just marching out in column of twos when the cab dropped Lestrade off. One by one, the older hands flew up to helmet rims, saluting the old guv’nor. He knew them all, by nickname at least – Grinder, Hoof, Methuselah, Dimples; fine lads whose collective shoe size was 160. As for their collective IQ, better leave that stone unturned. And they in turn knew him. He’d been part of the furniture at the Yard when the oldest of them cut his teeth on a Metropolitan Water Trough. He was a man you reckoned, a man you rated. Keep wide of him if a case wasn’t breaking, if the cocoa wasn’t hot, if the Freans were less Peakish than usual; but when the chips were down and your back was to the wall, there was no one they’d rather have there.

He took the lift to the third floor. In the old days, he’d have bounded up the stairs three at a time, but he’d loosened too many teeth doing that and he wasn’t sure his knees would still be with him by the time he reached the top. The door of the Chief Constable was open wide and the Chief Constable himself sat facing it, his large ears lit by the spring sunshine streaming in through the window.

‘Fred?’ Lestrade instinctively paused in the doorway. The Chief Constable had gone a funny colour. He was changing like a chameleon through puce to mauve and the veins stood out on his forehead. Lestrade hurtled in through the door. In two bounds he’d crossed the room and had wrestled the Chief Constable to the ground. He pinned his man to the floor, wrenching at his tie, ripping the studs from his collar.

‘Constable!’ he roared. ‘Quick! The Chief Constable’s having a heart attack.’

The Chief Constable looked up at him and raised an eye- brow. ‘Au contraire, Sholto,’ he said, ‘I was merely conducting an experiment.’

Size eleven boots had clattered to Lestrade’s side. The ex-Detective Superintendent looked up at the anxious young man whose feet were inside them. ‘Not bad,’ he nodded. ‘But, had this been a real emergency, five seconds is a long time. See if you can do better in future.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The constable promised he would.

‘Thank you for helping us in that little test, Chief Constable,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘Er . . . get me up, lad, will you?’

The constable got him to his feet and Lestrade found the chair by himself.

‘Tea, Rockliffe,’ the Chief Constable ordered while he vaguely searched for his collar stud. ‘And you’d better break into the Bath Olivers. I’ve a feeling this is going to be a long day.’

‘Experiment, Fred?’ Lestrade placed his bowler on the corner of the desk.

‘Forty-two seconds,’ the Chief Constable said.

‘What?’

‘I’d managed to hold my breath for forty-two seconds.’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade mused. ‘Not much going on at the moment, then, Yard-wise?’

‘It’s a case I’m working on, Sholto,’ the Chief Constable was retying his tie. ‘It all hinges on the man’s ability to stay underwater for one and a half minutes.’

‘Underwater?’ Lestrade repeated. ‘But you were in the open air, over water, so to speak.’

‘Little by little, Sholto,’ the younger man said. ‘Anyway, you assumed I was having a turn as it was. If I was upside down in a bucket of water, no doubt you’d have instantly thought “suicide” and rushed to my aid, yet again.’

‘Well, Fred,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘We do go back a long way.’

Indeed they did. Lestrade remembered Frederick Porter Wensley as a rather earnest young constable from Dorset way back in the days of Whitechapel and the Ripper. He was the first detective to be given the King’s Medal and both of them had done their share of ducking and diving, especially under anarchist fire in the Siege of Sidney Street. ‘Mister Venzel’ the Chosen People called him. Coppers called him ‘Sir’; crooks called him ‘Fred’; journalists called him ‘The Ace’. But Lestrade knew his man too well. The strain around the eyes, the crook of the smile on the thin, almost furtive lips. The Ace was in a hole.

Rockliffe arrived with the tray. Lestrade was impressed. None of his lads had ever made tea so fast. He was less impressed as the sienna nectar hit his lips. Quality appeared to have floated out of Fred Wensley’s window.

‘Would you take a biscuit, sir?’ the constable asked.

‘He always did.’ Wensley grinned as Lestrade began the exact science of dunking. ‘Thank you, Rockliffe. We’re not to be disturbed.’ Young Rockliffe had rarely seen two men so disturbed in his life, at least not in the same office, but it wasn’t his place to say so and he made his exit.

‘Fine brew, Fred,’ Lestrade lied.

‘Don’t lie to me, Sholto.’ Wensley was smoothing down what little was left of his hair these days. ‘I’ve found no one to make a decent cup of tea since Walter Dew.’

‘How is Walter?’

‘Chapter Four.’

‘Er . . .?’

‘Of his great work. I Caught Crippen.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Lestrade chuckled. ‘He finished Chapter One in 1912 if I remember aright. Not bad in two years. Still . . .’ he did the necessary mental arithmetic, ‘three more chapters in twelve years – I have to deduce he’s slowing up a little.’ Lestrade leaned forward to his man, ignoring the plop as his Bath Oliver disintegrated and plummeted into his tea. ‘What’s the matter, Fred?’

‘Matter?’ the Chief Constable did his best to be nonchalant.

Lestrade gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘I’ve been retired now for five years officially; four unofficially and I haven’t had a call from you other than to invite me out to the Police Ball, for three. Then suddenly, there’s a cree-de-cur, as the French have it, and I’m up to my fob in jurisdiction disputes with the City Force.’ Lestrade waited for a sign from Wensley. He wasn’t going to get one. ‘I am right, Fred?’ he queried. ‘St Bartholomew’s is in the City of London?’

‘It is,’ Wensley nodded.

‘So I was out of my manor?’ Lestrade badgered him further.

‘As out as the Eddystone Lighthouse during the candle scandal,’ Wensley admitted. ‘But I had my reasons.’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade leaned back. ‘Now those are things I’d like to hear.’

Fred Wensley nodded, the cold grey eyes not leaving Lestrade’s for an instant. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have a right to know.’ He rummaged in his waistcoat pocket and produced a key. A click to the left, then to the right and the mysterious little cupboard by his left knee swung open. He leaned over, at a rather brave angle, Lestrade thought, for a man who must be all of fifty-five, and straightened again with a piece of evidence in his hand.

Lestrade peered at it. ‘Looks like . . . looks like the corner of a warrant card,’ he said.

‘It is,’ Wensley nodded.

‘I don’t follow.’

The Chief Constable stood up, grating back the chair and crossed to the window. ‘I’ve never really liked this place, you know, Sholto.’ He was talking to the river, sparkling and brown in the spring sun.

Lestrade knew that. The view was altogether wrong for Fred Wensley. It wasn’t facing east, to his beloved City. Not for the first time, Lestrade realized that Wensley had joined the wrong force. ‘The warrant card?’ he asked.

Wensley turned back to him. ‘The warrant card’, he repeated, ‘was found near the body of one Edward Jones on Hounslow Heath two months ago.’

‘Dropped by the investigating officer?’

Wensley shook his head. ‘Dropped by the murderer,’ he said.

Lestrade’s eyebrow rose, just a threat – always a sign that something was in the wind. ‘How do you know?’

‘I was there when the Coroner found it.’

‘The Coroner?’

Wensley nodded. ‘It was wedged in the turn-up of his trousers.’

‘Snappy dresser, then, the deceased?’

‘For an old fogey, yes.’

Lestrade narrowed his eyes. ‘Old?’ he asked.

‘Edward Jones was sixty-four.’

‘A mere shaver.’ Lestrade dismissed it with a click of his fingers.

‘The first of three,’ Wensley told him.

‘Of which Albert Weez was the third?’

The Chief Constable nodded, slipping into his chair again. ‘The second was Jacob Hoare, aged sixty-nine. His body was found floating near Greenwich last month.’

‘Tell me,’ Lestrade said, ‘were all three blokes clubbed to death?’

‘Seems likely,’ Wensley said. ‘There was some doubt about Hoare because of the time he’d been in the water.’

Lestrade smiled. ‘So you’ve called me out of retirement so that an old fogey can catch a killer of old fogeys, eh?’

‘No, Sholto.’ The Ace’s face remained poker-straight. ‘I called you in because you’re the one man I know I’d trust with my life. The only one whose warrant-card corner that couldn’t possibly be.’

‘Because I no longer have a warrant card,’ Lestrade nodded wistfully.

‘Precisely,’ said Wensley. ‘Besides, didn’t you handle a similar case a few years ago? One in which old men were dying?’

‘The Brigade Case, yes,’ Lestrade nodded. ‘That was ’91. You hadn’t finished shitting yellow then.’

‘I was a constable,’ Wensley bridled. ‘Four years in the Force.’

‘That was different,’ Lestrade said. ‘All those men had served in the same regiment in the Crimea and they were all poisoned. What’s the link between your victims?’

‘That’s just it,’ Wensley sighed, ‘there isn’t one.’ He passed a ledger across the desk to Lestrade. ‘There’s the file. Different backgrounds, different addresses, different jobs – no common ground at all that I can see. But after the first one I made a point of putting different officers on the case – in view of that.’ He pointed at the warrant card.

Lestrade squinted at the torn fragment more closely. ‘Looks like a “1”,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t you trace that?’

‘There are nine figures on a Metropolitan warrant card, Sholto.’ Lestrade didn’t need Wensley to remind him. ‘I’ve traced five that end in a figure one. You’ll note it’s pale blue – detective inspectors and above. One belongs to Colin Smedley.’

‘“Deadly” Smedley? He whose breath could stop a hunger march?’

Wensley nodded, ‘But he’s been in the London Free for nine weeks with inverted testicles.’

‘Best place for him, then,’ Lestrade winced. Even at sixty-eight the prospect brought tears to his eyes.

‘Another to Dicky Tickner, P Division.’

Lestrade didn’t know him.

‘And that leaves the remaining three.’

‘Go on.’

‘You don’t know the first two, but they’re my own boys in the Flying Squad. One is Walter Hambrook. The Daily Telegraph called him “the ideal officer”.’

‘One to watch, then,’ Lestrade nodded grimly.

‘The other is Bob Fabian. Nice enough lad, but he put the bish in ambitious.’

‘And the third?’

‘Norroy Macclesfield.’

Lestrade’s mouth sagged a little. ‘Now, come on, Fred. There I have to draw the line. I’ve worked with Macclesfield before. He’s a good copper.’

‘They’re all good coppers, Sholto,’ Wensley said. ‘But I have to face the fact that one of them might be a murderer. Hambrook took the first case; Fabian the second; Macclesfield the third. I’ve got all of them but Tickner in the spotlight. If there’s a fourth, I’ll send him. What I’d like you to do is to shadow them. Macclesfield you know already. Get to know the others.’

Lestrade sighed. ‘Looking for bent coppers isn’t my idea of a cosy retirement, Fred,’ he felt compelled to say.

‘I know, Sholto,’ Wensley took back his piece of incriminating evidence and slipped it into the secret drawer whence it came, ‘but I don’t know who else to turn to. You know how it is. We’ve got the finest police force in the world in the Met, but I wouldn’t turn my back on some of the buggers – and those are the ones I like. No, I want a fresh mind on this. Somebody who’s on the outside, but who knows the system. That’s you, that is. Will you help me, Sholto?’

Lestrade looked at his man, the most popular policeman since Sergeant Getty had inherited a fortune from some American relatives a few years back. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where do I start?’