7

H

is Imperial Majesty Napoleon III always had a thing for England. The house in Leamington Spa where he stayed as a young man still stands and to the end of his colourful life, he continued to cherish the hardwood tipstaff they gave him when he was sworn in as special constable to thump the Chartists on Kennington Common. And when the end of that colourful life did come, they buried him in the unpretentious acres of the mausoleum at Farnborough and with him, his wife Eugenie, who had lived out her years at Farnborough Hill.

But something else had happened at Farnborough. A man had been killed. It was a sign of the times perhaps that he died two days after a delegation had gone to see the Prime Minister, demanding he consider a tunnel under the Channel. That was how mad the world was in the year of our Lord 1913.

If Sam Cody was honest with himself, which he hardly ever was, he’d have had to admit that he was a little narked that J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon had carried out the first officially observed flight at Stepney five years before; that Charlie Rolls had whizzed backwards and forwards like some blasted flying shuttle across the Channel and back; and that T. O. M. Sopwith had reached Belgium on a wing and a prayer. And yes, it did rankle that his name was not among the first eight who were to aviate under the auspices of the Royal Aero Club. What really got his goat, however (the animal was very loyal, for a pet) was that B. C. Hucks had looped the loop and flown upside down without falling out two years before. Cody did try to console himself with commenting to all and sundry that all one could do with a loop was loop it, but it didn’t really convince anybody.

So here he was, on that gorgeous August day, striding manfully to the controls of his Codified Deperdussin, gleaming and shining in the sunshine. As usual, he was alone. It was still early. In the meadows he saw old Hatfield driving his cows slowly o’er the lea for milking, his dog a black and white speck, harrying and chasing at their cloven heels, adding to the dust and noise of their progress.

He patted the crate’s fuselage. Funny how these old totems clung. He was nearly fifty-two years of age, too old, too slow, too heavy. And above all, too mononumular. Everybody else in the flying business seemed to have a double-barrelled name; Moore-Brabazon, Santos-Dumont, Graham-White, Mortimer-Sizer, even Rolls-Royce. Never mind, he’d show them. He’d show them all. He clambered into the cockpit, fitting the leather driving helmet under his chin and hauled on the gauntlets. Should be bliss up there today. Wind from the south-west, no sign of thorms. He’d be up there with the swallows in a jiffy. He waved to Murchison on the ground and the funny little mechanic who was his factotum raised his thumb and leapt up to catch the propeller shaft. Cody’s thumb hit the joystick button and it coughed once, twice, then belched into action, shuddering like some juggernaut. The wheels of the old perambulator slid forward over the yellow grass of summer and the dust flew out behind him as he hauled on the controls and swung to his left.

His rudder flapped in vague accordance with his efforts and he just had time to see the red calling card jammed in his dashboard before he was careering on to the long runway, Murchison disappearing in a cloud of dust. He paused before he pulled his goggles down and pulled the card out of its jam. A face, was it? It was jiggling around as the throttle eased forward and he couldn’t focus properly. Yes, a face. A devil’s face. Leering. Evil. He knew that face. He’d seen it before. He flipped the card over and just as the wind took it and ripped it out of his grasp and up under the upper wing, where it caught in the struts, he made out the number ‘14’.

Now the great hangars tilted as the plane gathered momentum. Grass flitches flew skywards as the pram wheels cut and gouged into the hard earth. Cody braced himself, trying to ignore the old trouble in his back as the wind whipped like rawhide and he felt his stomach bounce off his chin and he was in the air.

There was turbulence at thirty feet, calm once he’d cleared the cedars. Now the rush of air was sweet and good and he was at one with the morning. He saw the runway below like a silver pencil on a parchment table-cloth and the yellow fields waiting for the harvest in still patience. He checked that he had the necessaries between his legs – Fry’s chocolate and the ingredients for making soup. This was Hampshire – it paid to take precautions. He saw the Whitewater like a glittering ribbon in the distance and the cluster of houses around the great squares and barracks at Aldershot. By his own reckoning now he was travelling south-east, over Dogmersfield towards Long Sutton, at about two thousand feet.

Above him was all azure and silence, flecked with the tails of the racing mares, chequered with the spluttering roar of his own engines. How marvellous it would be, he thought, tilting back his goggles, to switch off that damned Antoinette for a moment and just drift. What a silence that would be. Gliding like an eagle on the currents, like a leaf on the stream.

And Sam Cody, too old, too slow, too heavy, was still thinking that when it happened. The unthinkable. The impossible. The Antoinette coughed, spluttered like a consumptive with ruptured lungs and died. But Cody heard no silence. He heard the pounding of his heart, smashing in his ears, drumming in his head. He tugged off the helmet so that his wild hair blew free. His thumb pumped the button. He twisted this way and that, wrestling with the joystick, fighting the plane and the air together.

He knew of course that there was no danger. Andre Jacques Garnerin had leapt out of a balloon at 3,000 feet up over London as long ago as 1802. He was sick of course, but that may have been to do with his landing in St Pancras. And an American chappie, Captain Albert Berry, had hopped out of his Benoist over Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, only two years ago. He’d hit the ground running and reported at once to his commanding officer. Even a woman had done it, for God’s sake, albeit an American, only two months ago over Griffith Park, Los Angeles. There was absolutely no problem. Except one, of course. The one that mattered. Sam Cody didn’t have a parachute.

He fought those controls all the way down. Keep away from that church, from those children on their way to the harvest fields, from that haywain and those plodding horses. The Deperdussin slid like a blasted bird, hanging and dead, past the cedars that ringed the lake. If only he could reach the water, all would be well. Keep her nose up. Up. That’s it. That’s the way. Ease to starboard. More. More.

There was no more. Only the sickening crash as the aircraft tore through the beeches, ploughing into the copse like a bullet through butter. The propeller bent, the fuselage disintegrated. Pram wheels spun off in all directions like King Richard’s crown at Bosworth Field, to lie neglected in the shrubbery yards away. Sam Cody’s neck snapped at the fourth vertebra, as surely and cleanly as if John Ellis, the hangman, had come to call. They heard it in Aldershot. They saw the smoke in Basingstoke. They felt it most keenly in the Aero Club. For Sam Cody never knew how much they all thought of him – J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon and the others. Only that morning, among his effects back at the airfield, the police found a letter he’d never opened, inviting him to join.

* * *

‘SAMUEL CODY,’ JOHN Kane said, stroking the granite chin that was already marking him out as a manhunter of the Yard under the big three. The pieces of paper plastered over his office wall were beginning to multiply. The plump corpse of Millicent Millichip looked up at him from her photo on the slab, the dead eyes still open, taunting him, mocking him. ‘Come on,’ they seemed to say. ‘It’s been eight months. What have you been doing?’ His eyes flickered to the photograph of a wrecked plane, its fuselage twisted like chicken wire in the spinney into which it had ploughed. ‘Samuel Cody,’ he said again.

It had reached him, the short straw. The Millichip case was dying and Edward Henry, the policeman’s policeman, couldn’t keep men on cases like that for ever. He’d transferred eight of Kane’s lads to Traffic, now that someone had decided that buses were dangerous. Time to descale the operation. Take stock. Move over. Move over to Samuel Cody.

‘This looks familiar.’ Kane turned at the sound of the old voice.

‘Guv.’ He’d been startled none the less. ‘I was miles away.’

‘Farnborough, by the looks of it.’ Lestrade recognized the smashed plane.

‘Samuel Cody.’ Kane nodded.

‘No relation to ...?’ Lestrade suggested.

‘No.’ Kane shook his head. ‘Mere coincidence.’

‘You’ve been there?’ Lestrade asked.

Kane nodded. ‘There was hardly one bone left in place,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to go that way.’ He sighed, straightening his tortured back. ‘I wouldn’t really want to go at all, but I certainly wouldn’t want to go that way.’

‘Perhaps he did.’ Lestrade perched on the corner of Kane’s desk, scattering a stand of pens as he did so. He tried to catch them and knocked over an inkpot. ‘Oh, bugger. Sorry, John.’

‘What? Suicide, you mean?’

‘It’s a thought.’

‘No.’ Kane shook his head. ‘Know what this is?’ He passed a piece of fractured metal to Lestrade while mopping up the flow with his tea-towel, inspectors for the use of.

‘Not part of Ned Kelly’s armour, is it? I know old Waverley in the Black Museum’s been after that for quite a while.’

‘It’s a fuel pipe,’ Kane told him. ‘Off the plane Cody was flying when he crashed.’ He stood up and placed the wet blue cloth into the hands of a passing constable. ‘What do you make of that?’

Lestrade peered at the copper tube. ‘It’s been cut,’ he said. ‘Jewel saw, I’d say.’

‘So would I, guv. Now why would a man who wanted to kill himself bother to saw through his own fuel pipe? All he need have done, if he had to do it in a plane, was to pull the joystick. Or push it. Whatever you do.’

‘Point taken,’ Lestrade agreed. ‘So somebody wanted Mr Cody dead.’

Kane nodded, still staring at the wall. ‘They did,’ he said. ‘And you’ll never guess what my lads have come up with – the three Mr Henry’s left me, anyway.’

‘Go on,’ Lestrade said. ‘I could do with a chuckle about now.’

‘Samuel Cody and Millicent Millichip knew each other.’

‘Go on,’ said Lestrade again, this time with a different emphasis. ‘In what way?’

‘She did for him.’

‘Don’t be silly, John,’ Lestrade said after the enormity of Kane’s statement had sunk in. ‘She’s been dead for ... oh, I see. She was his cleaner.’

‘At his house in Mortlake. Some years ago, of course.’

‘She ran a pub, didn’t she?’ Lestrade had had his hands full since Millicent Millichip had collapsed into his arms in the pea-souper. Details whirled in his head like dervishes.

‘Came into some money, I’ve discovered.’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade said. ‘A rich uncle?’

‘A benefactor of sorts,’ Kane told him. ‘But I’m damned if I know who at the moment. And that isn’t all. Seen this before?’ He passed the battered red card to Lestrade. ‘We found it in the wrecked plane,’ Kane said.

‘The devil’s calling card,’ Lestrade muttered.

‘Can I help you, by the way?’ Kane asked.

‘Hmm?’ Lestrade was staring at Mrs Millichip now too, and at the calling card. ‘I thought you wanted to see me, John.’

‘Did I? Oh.’ Kane slapped his forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s been one of those days. Did you ever find your chiv? The one with the brass knuckles?’

‘No.’ Lestrade shook his head. ‘Oh, it’ll turn up. I do feel lostish without it, though. We’ve been together through some scrapes, those knuckles and I. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, no reason. Does this look familiar to you?’

Kane flicked open a ledger on his desk and handed Lestrade another scarlet card with a devil’s face.

‘My God,’ Lestrade said. ‘Are you printing these, John? Where did you get this one?’

‘Between the floorboards at the Phlebotomist’s Arms. I had my lads tear the place apart, in some desperation, I might add. Didn’t please the old girl’s clientele one little bit, all that hammering and sawing. Put a hell of a froth on the beer, though. And that isn’t all we found.’

‘Oh?’

Kane crossed to a filing cabinet, scarred with years of policemen’s finger-nails and policemen’s feet. He hauled out three canvas sacks from the bowels of a drawer.

‘Cash?’ Lestrade’s eyebrows rose.

‘Nearly three thousand pounds in used notes.’

‘Three thousand?’ Lestrade whistled through his teeth. ‘Plenty of money in the brewing trade, then.’

‘Too much, in my opinion,’ Kane said. ‘I talked to Millicent’s paramours, George Potter, Arthur Weston, Archie Emblin. They were all very fond of the old girl, but they don’t remember her coming into money or flashing it about.’

‘Perhaps she was just mean,’ Lestrade shrugged. ‘And didn’t want the banks to have it. Or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some people are like that.’

‘No, they’re not.’ Kane chuckled. ‘No one’s like the Chancellor of the Exchequer! Now, about that card ...’

‘Aha!’ Lestrade wagged a finger. ‘So that’s it. Here you are, inviting me round for tea and Peek Freans ...’ He coughed at this point to help the penny to drop.

‘Oh, God, yes. Sorry, guv. Dangerfield!’

‘Sir?’ A fresh-faced copper shoved his head around the door.

‘Tea and biscuits. Make them snappy!’ Kane ordered.

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ the lad said.

‘... tea and Peek Freans,’ Lestrade continued, with a wistful smile on his face. ‘And all the time, you’re picking my brains and pinching my cases. Well, I tell you, John.’ The guv’nor slid into Kane’s best chair. ‘You can have ’em. All of ’em. I’m getting too old for the murder game, I can assure you.’

‘Nonsense, guv.’ Kane chuckled. ‘You’ll go on for ever. Now ...’

‘I know, I know, the card.’ Lestrade picked it up. ‘Mine had a “14” on the back.’

‘Yours?’

‘The one somebody sent to old Worsthorne Griffin, of Raleigh Harman in the City. I think it was designed to kill him.’

‘Kill him?’ Kane’s ears pricked up. ‘Bit hit and miss, wasn’t it?’

‘Hit and miss?’ Lestrade repeated.

‘Well, yes. Sorry to teach my Superintendent to suck eggs, guv, but ... well, a knife, a gun, a blunt instrument, any of that lot will do nicely, but a calling card ...’ Kane picked it up. ‘All right, it’s horrible, I’ll grant you. But I doubt it would frighten my Michael and he’s only eight – not that many people know that, of course.’

‘Hmm,’ Lestrade said. ‘But it’s the connotations, isn’t it? An old man, dicky ticker, never the same since his son died, sees something that reminds him of something. Wallop! Zing go the strings of his heart.’

‘All right,’ Kane said. ‘But where does that leave Mrs Millichip?’

‘Chiswick Crematorium, if I remember aright,’ Lestrade said, straight-faced. ‘She’ll be coming up roses this month, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Your tea, guv’nors.’ The fresh-faced bobby was back. ‘Oh, and ... er ... Mr Lestrade, sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I have your autograph, sir? Oh, it’s not for me, you understand, it’s for my young lady friend.’

Lestrade frowned. ‘What’s this, Inspector?’ he growled. ‘You allow your officers to have lady friends?’

Kane smirked at him.

‘It wouldn’t have done in my day.’ And he scribbled his signature on the boy’s extended pocketbook. ‘There,’ he said. ‘And think yourself thankful that I’m not your guv’nor. Was she sent it, d’ you think?’ Lestrade was back to the red card, to the job in hand.

‘I don’t know,’ Kane admitted. ‘Perhaps she was the sender.’

‘Perhaps she was.’ Lestrade nodded while Kane was mother. ‘It’s food for thought, anyway. And when I’ve demolished this food for flesh, I’ll see if there’s a connection between old Griffin and the dear-departed publican. And then, of course, we need to know who sent the card to Samuel Cody.’

‘Guv,’ Kane said, his face stern in the glint of the afternoon sun. ‘I must admit I wouldn’t object to a little help on this one. I’ve got dead publicans, dead aviators. The only thing that isn’t dead around here is a certainty.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Lestrade nodded. ‘And we mustn’t forget Miss Emily Davison and how she fits in to this little devil’s triangle, must we?’

* * *

THE LANCHESTER WAS coughing a little these days. It had been eleven years since His Late Majesty, Edward VII, by the Grace of God, had given it to the then Chief Inspector Lestrade as a mark of his affection and gratitude. After all, the chief inspector, as was, had just saved the king’s life.

People said to Lestrade, ‘Why don’t you trade it in, Sholto? A Darracq perhaps, or a Hispano-Suiza? After all, you’re comfortably off now, married a rich woman and so on. You can’t be short of a bob or two.’ No, he wasn’t. And yes, he’d married a rich woman, but the Lanchester’s seat fitted his bum pretty well and she usually started first crank in the morning.

So Elsa coughed her way up the gravel drive that sun-gilded evening. They had company. Fanny was sitting on the terrace with a woman in a monstrous feathered hat. Old Glich stood by the cedar of Lebanon looking as if he was rooted to the spot.

‘Evening, Glich!’ Lestrade called, as he always did when he saw the old boy anywhere in the grounds. But for once, old Glich didn’t respond. Usually, he’d doff his cap in mock deference. Mock, because Lestrade happened to know that he was a fully paid-up member of the Gardeners’ and Odd-Jobbers’ Union, Surrey Branch and was in regular correspondence with a Russian named Trotsky. This time, however, the old Socialist stood to attention, with nary a flicker on his weather-beaten old features.

As he rounded the corner, the sun was full in Lestrade’s eyes and he grabbed the brake. Elsa slewed sideways, her rear wheels spinning in a dust cloud, which, when it cleared, revealed Madison, Fanny’s man, standing, as he normally did, with Lestrade’s brandy glinting in his hand.

‘What’s the matter with old Glich, Madison?’ Lestrade clambered out of his motor. ‘Standing there as if he’s got a shotgun up his arse?’

He did a double take as he realized that Madison had adopted the same pose, with a frozen grin etched on his narrow face. Lestrade took the glass from him and passed him his bowler, as was their custom. A daycap for a nightcap, Lestrade called it when the dark drew in.

‘Madison?’ Lestrade said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Mr Madison has had rather a shock,’ a female voice rang out. ‘Your entire male household has.’

Lestrade shielded his eyes from the sun. Standing by the ivy trellis at the corner of the house was a little woman Lestrade had met before. ‘Boadicea,’ he growled. He glanced at her motor, shimmering in black, half-hidden in the shrubbery. To his surprise, it had no knives on the wheels.

‘It’s a Bugatti “Black Bess”,’ she told him. ‘More souped-up than cock-a-leekie. It’s for fast getaways.’

Lestrade glanced back. An Amazon he recognized as Godiva was removing a twelve bore from the smock old Glich habitually wore and she pushed him ahead of her up the drive. Esmerelda slid noiselessly from the rhododendrons, a brace of hatpins in her hand.

‘Miss Esmerelda was entertaining us earlier,’ Madison said, rather shakily, ‘to a darts contest. I used my red-and-white feathered jobs, she just used her hatpins. I thought I’d better just stand here, after that, like she said.’

Realization dawned on the superintendent. His house had been occupied by the enemy. ‘Fanny!’ he roared and was about to dummy past Boadicea when the wife of the same name strolled around the greenhouse with her guest in the feathered hat.

‘Sholto, whatever is all the noise? I believe you know Mrs Pankhurst.’

Lestrade did. Their paths had crossed on two occasions. He had hoped never to meet her again. But the Gorgon, She-Who-Must-Be-Arrested, looked old and tired and ill. She’d lost weight on her prison fare and the hunger strike hadn’t helped.

‘Mrs Pankhurst,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Indeed it has, Mr Lestrade,’ she said, her grey eyes still sparkling, her smile still winning, unlike her Cause. ‘My ladies were just admiring your lovely house. Godiva was discussing tradescantia with your groundsman. Esmerelda has been playing darts with your valet.’

‘So I understand,’ Lestrade said.

‘Delilah is seated near the telephone in case it rings – I would have hated my conversation with your charming wife to have been interrupted.’

‘Oh, really, Emmeline.’ Fanny chuckled. ‘There was no need for that.’

‘Oh, but there was.’ Mrs Pankhurst beamed. ‘Wasn’t there, Mr Lestrade?’

The years had hardened Emmeline Pankhurst. At first, it was a novelty, a lark even. Throw flour at an MP, knock off a policeman’s helmet. But now, they forced rubber tubes down women’s throats, they cut off women’s hair and wore it like battle honours on their lapels. Now, a woman was dead. It wasn’t a game any more. It was real.

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Fanny, we’re under siege here. Have they hurt you?’

Fanny Lestrade looked at her husband. She was always afraid of this moment. Her uncle Wilfred had gone the same way. He was last seen wandering along the Great North Road muttering ‘Beecham’s Powders, Beecham’s Powders’. The problem was, he was a High Court Judge. ‘Sholto ...’ she said.

‘Shall we go inside?’ Emmeline suggested. It seemed a reasonable idea. Lestrade knew that the neighbours to their left were deaf anyway. And to the right was Virginia Water Cemetery Anyone there with twenty-twenty hearing would not be of much use to Lestrade tonight.

He filed into the drawing-room, past the terrace, gently prodding Fanny ahead of him. A woman sat by the phone, knitting like some old crone at the foot of the guillotine. He continued into his study where another old besom sat copying out addresses from Lestrade’s address book.

‘If you can read that,’ he said, leaning over her, ‘thank a man.’

‘Shall we?’ Emmeline spread her satin skirts and invited the Lestrades to join her. The copyist closed the book, and stood sentinel on the door. Boadicea stood beside her, twirling a .38 slowly around her index finger.

‘Emmeline ...’ Fanny was now beginning to wonder whether there wasn’t something in her husband’s fears after all.

‘Emily Wilding Davison,’ Emmeline said suddenly, ignoring her hostess. ‘What progress has there been?’

‘You could have come to the Yard,’ said Lestrade. He reached inside his jacket for a cigar, but Boadicea’s pistol whirled into action and he heard the click of the hammer as she extended her arm.

‘There’s no safety catch on a Mark IV Webley, Mr Lestrade,’ she said.

Fanny started, but Lestrade’s glance quieted her. ‘So I believe,’ he said. ‘Cigar, Mrs Boadicea?’

‘Thank you, no,’ she said.

‘It’s a disgusting male habit.’ Emmeline nodded.

‘It is,’ Fanny agreed, gliding across to her husband. She slipped a hand inside his jacket. ‘I keep telling him, but will he listen?’ He felt her pull out the Havanas. He also felt something heavy drop into his inside pocket. His brass knuckles. His companion of a mile. She’d found them. She winked at him and turned away, tutting. ‘Now, don’t you get those out again, Sholto Lestrade; not unless you really have to.’

‘So,’ said Emmeline. ‘Emily Davison.’

‘Emily Davison,’ Lestrade repeated, wondering which would be faster, his knuckles or Boadicea’s bullet. ‘I’ve seen the moving pictures.’

‘Moving pictures?’ Emmeline and Boadicea chorused.

‘Taken by a man,’ Lestrade said triumphantly. ‘I’d tell you his name, but you’d only invade his house, threaten his staff and otherwise outrage common decency.’

The Ladies of the Hat Pin ignored him. ‘What does it show?’ Emmeline asked. ‘This moving picture?’

‘It shows Miss Davison on the rails. Then it shows her off the rails.’

‘Is this a conundrum, Mr Lestrade?’ Emmeline asked.

Lestrade looked at her. ‘I believe they call it a tantalus,’ he said, nodding at the locked decanters by the Suffragette’s elbow.

‘What else did the moving picture show?’ Her voice was deeper than his.

‘A man’s hands,’ he said. ‘Clearly placing Miss Davison on the rails; I would say against her will.’

‘Could you see the man’s face?’ Boadicea asked.

Lestrade shook his head. ‘No,’ he told her.

‘You’re sure?’ Emmeline asked.

‘As God is my witness,’ Lestrade said.

‘And She is not mocked,’ Emmeline assured him. And if anyone should have known that, it was Emmeline Pankhurst. ‘After such a tragic life.’ She sighed. ‘Born on the site of the great feudal uprising in 1381.’

Lestrade remembered that from his days at Mr Poulson’s Academy. Funny how those little things stay in your mind. It had happened under the school’s foundations on the bare uplands of Blackheath. And if Lestrade remembered it aright, the Peasants’ Revolt had been largely, if not exclusively, carried out by men.

‘Wattie Tyler,’ Mrs Pankhurst reminisced, as though she’d been there. Looking at her in the gathering dusk, she might have been. ‘A woman of the plough,’ she mused. ‘Salt of the earth, soul of iron. Yes. Emily was born to a proud heritage.’

‘What did her father do?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Her father,’ Emmeline scowled, ‘was a failure. Charles Davison. A businessman of sorts. Flutterings in the City, I believe. He was “hammered” in 1893 and died soon after. He didn’t live to see his little Emily get her degree, God Bless Her. Not that he’d have approved, I don’t suppose. So ... whom do you suspect?’

‘A woman,’ Lestrade said.

Fanny wondered inwardly whether that was wise.

‘A woman?’ Emmeline Pankhurst was barely audible and Boadicea’s pistol was steady as a rock in her tiny fist.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me. Either of your ladies outside could pass muster. Godiva or Esmerelda. Put a false moustache and a Homburg on either of them and I’ll stand next to them in any urinal in the land.’

All the suffragettes shuddered and closed their eyes.

‘It would be very easy for either of them to haul Miss Davison up on to the rail. Perhaps they taunted her, shouted something daft like, “Why not be a martyr and throw yourself under the king’s horse?” Perhaps she didn’t cotton on to the idea, was a little reticulated about it. So one or both of them gave her a helping hand. Let’s have a big hand for the little fanatic from Blackheath!’ And he began clapping slowly, ironically, mocking the fanatics sitting before him.

Unnerved, Boadicea glanced at Emmeline. This was Lestrade’s moment. Looking back in later years, Fanny remembered it as one of pure poetry. Lestrade’s brass knuckles flew across the room, clashing on Boadicea’s Webley which exploded, shattering the tantalus by Emmeline’s elbow. As the woman by the door shrieked and rushed forward, Fanny Lestrade’s foot came up and the Amazon stretched her length on the goatskin rug.

When the hysteria had died down, Lestrade had Boadicea’s head tucked gently but firmly under his arm, like something out of the Bloody Tower.

‘Now,’ he said, having picked up the Webley with a deftness surprising for one of his vintage and juxtaposition. ‘When I have any news on the murder of Emily Davison, rest assured I shall be in touch with her family in Northwood. Until then, I’d be grateful if you people gathered up your skirts and left.’

Fanny removed her boot from the Amazon’s neck. The door crashed back and Emmeline’s seconds now stood there, panting in their exertions to restrain Madison and old Glich on hearing the shot.

‘Ah, ladies.’ Lestrade smiled. ‘It has been fun. But,’ and the grin vanished from his face, ‘if you so much as put one of your size tens on my gravel again, I’ll have you inside so fast, your heads’ll spin.’ And he pushed little Boadicea gently so that her ladies caught and steadied her.

‘Emmeline,’ said Fanny, ‘I’m not one to bear a grudge. I welcomed you to my home in all good faith earlier today. I should, of course, have known better. You see, I am on something of a pedestal in this house, not because I am a woman, but because I am loved by a man. That might be something you ladies might like to try one day. But in the meantime, please accept this little memento of your visit.’ And she caught Emmeline Pankhurst a beauty with her right cross.

* * *

MRS ALLARDYCE WAS A mousy little woman to whom the years had not been kind. She peered around the front door as one used to dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses and door-to-door lavatory cleansing salesmen.

‘Yes?’

Inspector Kane flashed his warrant card. ‘John Kane, Scotland Yard,’ he said. ‘This is Detective-Constable Jenkins.’

Abel Jenkins flashed his warrant card too.

‘May we see your husband?’

‘He isn’t well, you know,’ she told them, the door remaining to the same degree of ajar that it had been since she opened it.

‘Indeed, madam,’ said Kane. ‘That is why we are here.’

‘Well, just for a moment, then. He’s still on the beef tea.’

He was. Tom Allardyce lay like Marley’s ghost, pallid and worn out on a pile of pillows. The blinds were drawn at the house in Watling Park and a glass of water gleamed beside his bed.

‘Mr Allardyce, we have to ask some questions, I’m afraid.’

‘Not long, Bayard,’ Mrs Allardyce said with a voice that could have etched glass. ‘I have told these gentlemen not long.’

She had. All the way up the stairs, past the floral wallpaper and the Chinese dado, along the landing festooned with engravings of the widows of Ashur, being extraordinarily loud in their wail, she had lectured them. ‘He’s not well, you know. Don’t keep him long. He needs his rest.’

‘Thank you, dearest.’ Allardyce’s voice was still weak.

She sat down with a satin sibilance. The men looked at her.

‘I wonder, Mrs Allardyce,’ Kane ventured, ‘if we might talk to your husband alone?’

‘Alone?’ She bridled like a scold. ‘Why?’

Kane looked at Abel. ‘It is customary police procedure, madam,’ he said. ‘Detective-Constable Jenkins will be asking you some questions too – perhaps in the drawing-room?’

Mrs Allardyce clutched her bombazine throat. ‘I’m not sure that’s correct,’ she said. ‘I understand the Women’s Social and Political Union is insisting that any woman interrogated by the police should have a second woman present. Not that I’m a feminist, you understand ... It’s just a little ...’ She looked Jenkins up and down. ‘Well, unseemly, that’s all.’

‘I’m sure Constable Jenkins doesn’t bite, my dear,’ Allardyce croaked.

Mrs Allardyce sat up sharply. ‘Don’t be vulgar, Bayard. I won’t have such vulgarities in the house!’

‘Edith ...’ But the man was no longer master here, even if he ever had been.

‘It would be of inestimable help to us, Mrs Allardyce,’ Kane insisted as gently as he could. ‘I can assure you that Detective-Constable Jenkins is the very model of delicacy. Happily married. A lay-reader at his church, I understand ...’

Jenkins was none of these things, but he was quick on the uptake. ‘Amen. Bendigedyg,’ he intoned with as much Evangelistic fervour as he could manage for a man who had never been nearer to Wales than Swindon. 

‘Very well,’ Mrs Allardyce said, after a moment’s wrestle with her conscience. ‘But I warn you, Inspector.’ She stood up. ‘One hint of impropriety, the slightest suggestion of a liberty being taken, one unbridled glance at my nether limbs, however casual it may seem, and I shall be taking legal advice.’

‘Absolutely,’ Kane assured her, standing up with Jenkins and ushering them both to the door. The inspector allowed himself a glance at the constable’s flies, just to check he had adjusted his dress since the detour to the urinals in Wimpole Street. All was well. And he saw them out.

‘Now, then, Mr Allardyce.’ He turned back to the invalid. ‘Bayard, isn’t it?’

‘No, it bloody isn’t!’ The impatient patient hauled himself upright. ‘It’s Tom. Inspector, make a dying man happy, will you? Over there, third drawer down. You’ll find a Bible.’

‘A Bible?’

‘Yes, you know. The good book. Not something I’ve seen much of recently. Is it me, or is the standard of literature dropping to an all-time low?’

Kane found the volume. Large, brass-bound. Hollow. He passed it to Allardyce, who flicked it open to Leviticus and flicked out the little flask of brandy secreted there. His head flopped back gratefully as the amber nectar hit his tonsils.

‘My wife, Inspector, as you may have gathered, is not as other women. In fact, she’s a religious maniac with a suspicious mind. Pass me a Mint Imperial, will you? Second drawer. I’d get it myself, but she’d hear the bed squeak downstairs and know I’d got up.’

‘Would that distress her?’ Kane asked, finding the sweets and passing them to the patient.

‘Oh yes.’ Allardyce sucked on a lozenge. ‘You see, it’s Tuesday. If I can get out of bed, then I can be back at work on Thursday.’

‘Thursday?’ Kane played dumb.

Allardyce scowled and handed him the brandy flask to conceal again in its holy hiding place. ‘Come off it, Inspector, you and I are men of the world. You’ve talked to Jessica.’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘You know where I go every Thursday night. Edith thinks I play cribbage. My one fear is that she’ll send a telegram tomorrow telling them I won’t be playing. And they’ll send one back saying it doesn’t matter because I haven’t played since 1910 and they’ve cancelled my subscription.’

‘You lead something of a double life, Mr Allardyce,’ Kane was bound to comment as he replaced the Bible and the Mint Imperials.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Allardyce moaned.

‘Tell me,’ Kane said. ‘Does your wife ever visit you at the office?’

‘At Constable? Good Lord, no, we print books on themes other than religion,’ he said. ‘Edith had a strict Baptist upbringing. She doesn’t approve.’

‘How long have you and Miss Fry ...?’

‘Been having an affair?’ Allardyce sotto voced the rest of Kane’s sentence for him. ‘Nearly four years. It has been something of a strain. Sometimes I ask myself, why do I stay with Edith? Do you know, I have never seen my wife naked, Inspector. Her body from neck to knee is a mystery to me. Certainly better than most of the mysteries I’m asked to read these days. I had some tosh from Arthur Conan Doyle the other day. Worse, if that’s possible, than his Sherlock Holmes drivel.’

‘Does your wife know, Mr Allardyce?’ Kane asked. ‘About you and your secretary, I mean?’

‘Edith?’ Allardyce had gone pale again. ‘God, no. If she had so much as an inkling, I’d be out on my ear. The house, the car, the life insurance, the various endowment policies, they’re all hers. That’s why I stay with her, Mr Kane. Pathetic, isn’t it? Pathetic and predictable.’

‘So, in the poisoning department.’ Kane wanted clarification. ‘You don’t think that your wife ...?’

‘Edith?’ The thought had obviously not occurred to Allardyce. ‘Well, now you come to mention it. There was some rather dubious blancmange she made last year ... but surely, if Edith wanted to kill me, she’d do it here, at home, wouldn’t she?’

‘Not if she wanted to allay suspicion, no,’ Kane told him. ‘Here, she’d be in the frame. The first person we’d talk to. At the office, the world is wide. Anybody could have slipped in and doctored your coffee.’

‘I had two visitors that morning,’ Allardyce remembered. ‘A Mr Adams, whom I missed, and your Superintendent Lestrade.’

‘Why did he come to see you?’ Kane pondered.

‘Following up the hit-and-run I saw back in the January pea-souper. Wanted to know what sort of car it was.’

‘What sort was it?’

‘A Fiat Mephisto, like Fryer’s.’

‘Fryer?’

‘I do a bit of driving in my spare time, Inspector,’ Allardyce told him. ‘Whenever Edith lets me out.’

‘Never on Thursdays, presumably?’

‘Cribbage!’ Allardyce winked at him. ‘I’ve never been known to miss a match. I occasionally drive at Brooklands. I’m not bad, either. But I can’t beat Fryer. Nobody can. Drives like the devil, he does.’

‘And he drives a Fiat Mephisto?’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Kane tried to be casual, ‘that Mr Lestrade had literary pretensions?’

‘What?’

‘The book he left with you – Thirty-five Years at the Yard. I gather you didn’t like it.’

‘Didn’t like it? I’ve never heard of it. What are you talking about, Inspector?’

Kane blinked. ‘There was a manuscript on your desk, Mr Allardyce,’ he said. ‘With Lestrade’s name on it. You had rejected it. There was a line written on it in your handwriting.’

‘My handwriting?’ Allardyce repeated. ‘Not possible. I’d be delighted to publish anything written by the great Superintendent Lestrade. In fact, on Thursday ... no, let’s make it Friday, shall we? I’ll be on the telephone to him. There could well be a book in it.’

* * *

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE DRAWING-room, as icy as its owner, despite the heat of the August day, Edith Allardyce made sure that Detective-Constable Jenkins wrote down the name clearly, sitting as he was at the opposite end of the room from her. ‘Fry.’ She pursed her lips around the word with some distaste. ‘Jessica Fry. My husband has been touching this woman’s private parts for the past four years, mostly on a Thursday evening when he purports to be playing cribbage. He does this presumably because he has the appalling basic instincts of a man and because there is insufficient privacy in the premises at Orange Street. Take my word for it, Detective-Constable, my husband is an animal with unnatural appetites. I am his wife. I allowed him access to me in the March of 1911. What more can any normal man ask? And I’ll tell you something else – write it down – my husband poisoned himself.’

Jenkins paused in mid-sentence, looking at the woman in disbelief.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Poisoned himself. How is obvious. Why is still a mystery. But that’s the job of you Scotland Yard chappies, isn’t it? What are you waiting for?’

To get a word in edgeways, Detective-Constable Jenkins was tempted to say. But he didn’t have the nerve.