Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra: Inspector Lestrade, #17

By M. J. Trow

Book seventeen in the Inspector Lestrade series.

Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. And it took him back to the good old days, when coppers lived in station houses, that nice Mr Campbell-Bannerman was at Number Ten and Britain had the biggest empire in the world. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling!

Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth.

Will any of them live to tell Dew's tale? The tale of a rat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BLKDOG Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201612108

M. J. Trow

M.J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King’s College, London and is probably best known today for his true crime and crime fiction works. He has always been fascinated by Richard III and, following on from Richard III in the North, also by Pen and Sword, has hopefully finally scotched the rumour that Richard III killed the princes in the Tower. He divides his time between homes in the Isle of Wight and the Land of the Prince Bishops.

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Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra

The Inspector Lestrade Series – Book Seventeen

M. J. TROW

Copyright © 2021 M. J. Trow.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-913762-99-5

First published in 2014.

This edition published in 2021 by BLKDOG Publishing.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover art by Andy Johnson.

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

www.blkdogpublishing.com

Caveat lectorum – Let the Reader Beware!

From Police Constable to Political Correctness

IN 1891, THE YEAR IN which The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade is set, Thomas Hardy had his Tess of the d’Urbervilles published in serial form by The Graphic, one of the country’s leading magazines. The editor was not happy with certain scenes which he felt would upset Hardy’s genteel readership. In one instance, when Angel Clare has to carry Tess over a minor flood, Hardy had to write in a handy wheelbarrow so that Tess and Angel had no bodily contact. When it came to Tess’s seduction by the dastardly Alec d’Urberville, the pair go into a wood and a series of dots follows ...

Even with all this whitewash, reviews of the revised version were mixed and it was many years before some of the Grundyisms* were restored to their original glory and Tess of the D’Urbervilles was established as another masterpiece of one of Britain’s greatest writers.

In the Lestrade series, I hope I have not offended anyone, but the job of an historical novelist – and of an historian – is to try to portray an accurate impression of the time, not some politically correct Utopian idyll which is not only fake news, but which bores the pants off the reader. Politicians routinely apologize for the past – historical novelists don’t. We have different views from the Victorians, who in turn had different views from the Jacobeans, who in turn ... you get the point. When the eighteenth century playwright/actor Colley Cibber rewrote Shakespeare – for example, giving King Lear a happy ending! – no doubt he thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t.

That said, I don’t think that a reader today will find much that is offensive in the Lestrade series. So, read on and enjoy.

*From Mrs Grundy, a priggish character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough, 1798.

Reviews for the Lestrade Series

‘THIS IS LESTRADE THE intelligent, the intuitive bright light of law and order in a wicked Victorian world.’

Punch

‘A wickedly funny treat.’

Stephen Walsh, Oxford Times

‘... M.J. Trow proves emphatically that crime and comedy can mix.’

Val McDermid Manchester Evening News

‘Good enough to make a grown man weep.’

Yorkshire Post

‘Splendidly shaken cocktail of Victorian fact and fiction ... Witty, literate and great fun.’

Marcel Berlins, The Times

‘One of the funniest in a very funny series ... lovely lunacy.’

Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph

‘High-spirited period rag with the Yard’s despised flatfoot wiping the great Sherlock’s eye ...’

Christopher Wordsworth, Observer

‘Barrowloads of nineteenth century history ... If you like your humour chirpy, you’ll find this sings.’

H.R.F Keating, Daily Telegraph

‘Richly humorous, Lestrade has quickly become one of fiction’s favourite detectives.’

Yorkshire Evening Post

‘No one, no one at all, writes like Trow.’

Yorkshire Post

Dedicated with love to my favourite rat phobic – you know who you are!

‘And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.’

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning

Chapter One

‘L

ook at him,’ Ethel Martin beamed proudly. ‘You wouldn’t think he was nudging seventy-five, would you?’

‘I wouldn’t think he could nudge the skin off a rice pudding,’ her husband looked up briefly at the moustachioed gent sitting in the conservatory. ‘When’s he going home?’

Ethel tapped the Croydon Advertiser her husband was reading with her fork, cascading a quantity of scrambled egg down the Sports page. ‘You’ve never liked my father, have you?’ she hissed.

Albert Martin looked at the man again. The old boy was still upright, still the five foot nine he had been when he joined the Met back in the Dark Ages. He had less hair these days and what there was of it was silver, although his natty little moustache refused to follow suit and remained resolutely pepper and salt. He was clacking away on an old upright Remington, his pipe clamped firmly between his teeth, his eyes squinting through the smoke.

People kept turning up at the door to talk to him. Two years after Albert and Ethel had married, newspapermen from the Sunday Express came to see the old boy asking his views on the disappearance of Agatha Christie, the novelist. ‘Foul play,’ he had told them. ‘They’ll find her body hidden somewhere near her house or where her car was found.’ Actually, she’d been to a hotel near Harrogate. The Express men were back the following year wanting to know who he thought had shot Constable Gutteridge. He gave his opinion that the killer was a Sikh gentleman, very tall, with a pronounced limp. Sure enough, two years later, two Cockneys swung for the murder. Then there was the Birdhurst Rise case in ’29, just around the corner in Croydon. It just went on and on.

‘No,’ Albert said, flatly. ‘And I repeat, when’s he going home?’

‘Not until the painting’s finished at the Wee House,’ she told him. ‘You know how allergic he is. It gets up his nose.’

‘Yes,’ Albert sighed. ‘I know the feeling. It’s a bit much, isn’t it, leaving Florence to do it all?’

‘She loves it, Albie,’ Ethel said, ‘And anyway, she’s a lot younger than he is, you know.’

He leaned towards her with a wink. ‘Hasn’t stashed her in the cellar, has he? You know, like . . . ’

But he couldn’t finish the sentence because she’d hit him around the head with a coffee pot.

‘Now then, you two,’ the old man chided, pausing to take the pipe out of his mouth. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Ethel flounced out of the kitchen and joined her father in the conservatory. ‘It’s just Albert.’

He looked at his son-in-law dabbing the blood from his forehead. ‘What possessed you to marry a bank clerk?’ he muttered and not for the first time. She looked at him, remembering how people from all over the world, but mostly the Sunday Express, came to ask him things. He had told them they would probably find Miss Christie in that hotel in Harrogate. And he’d fingered those two layabouts Browne and Kennedy for the murder of poor PC Gutteridge. And of course he had solved the riddle of Birdhurst Rise when the Yard itself had no clue. He was the most famous ex-policeman in the country – ex-Chief Inspector Walter Dew, the man who, among other things, had caught Crippen.

‘How’s it coming along?’ she sat by him, refilling his teacup. ‘The memoir?’

‘Oh, fine. I’ve called it From Pitch-and-Toss to Murder. What do you think?’

‘Brilliant,’ she smiled.

‘It’s got me thinking, though,’ Dew said.

‘What about?’ his daughter asked.

‘Well, I would never have caught Crippen if the guv’nor hadn’t suggested I search that cellar.’

‘The guv’nor?’ Ethel frowned.

‘Lestrade. Superintendent Lestrade he was by then. You know, it’s funny, I miss the old bugger now. And it’s got me thinking about another case we worked on . . . oh, it must have been five years before Crippen.’

‘I’m off to work, then,’ Albert called as he gingerly placed the trilby on his head. Neither of the Dews acknowledged him.

‘Banker,’ the ex-Chief Inspector muttered as he heard the door slam.

‘What was that other case, then, Dad?’ Ethel asked, arranging herself on the rather passé Ottoman.

He looked at his eldest girl, the one most like the first Mrs Dew, who used to pack his tripe sandwiches for him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m not sure you’re ready for this one . . . ’

Chapter Two

‘I

’m not sure I’m ready for this,’ the young constable said, trying to polish one boot on his trouser leg and ease the stiff collar from his sweating neck at the same time.

‘Piece of cake,’ the other one said, checking his carefully macassared moustache in the pocket mirror he carried with him at all times. ‘Just be yourself, Sven. All right, so it’s our first day at the Yard and we’re being interviewed by a Superintendent. What’s not to like?’

‘How long have you got?’ A ferret-faced man with sad, dark eyes swept past them, making for the lift. He paused at the mesh gates, saw the name ‘Schindler’ stamped on the wrought iron and took the stairs. He wasn’t kow-towing to the Germans, not since the Kaiser had been so beastly over the Jameson Raid and had congratulated Kronje on his haircut and his splendid efforts in the Boer War. No, he would leave Schindler’s lift to the less well-principled. And anyway, he had got his fob watch caught in the grating once and he was not anxious to repeat the experience.

Scotland Yard sweltered along with the rest of London that summer, in the year of nearly everybody’s Lord 1905. The dim corridors in the basement where the sergeants lived and the sun never shone reeked of the river, old Father Thames chugging brown and mysterious only yards away. Jaded cab-horses stood dejectedly in their harnesses in the courtyard and the Commissioner’s new de Dion was on the blink again, a small army of constables in their shirtsleeves, grimy arms buried deep in its engine-housing. At least, they all muttered under their breath as the morning’s labour progressed, horses didn’t break down. Just wind.

Only half the windows on the first, second and third floors were open on account of the breeze along the river blew loose papers in all directions and constables spent most of their time picking them up and trying to decide which shoe-box they had flown from in the first place. Only on the top floor were the windows resolutely closed and the blinds drawn. This was the Special Branch, where everything that wasn’t classified was top-secret and for their eyes only. The air up there was heavy with the scent of paranoia.

‘It’s time, then,’ the dandier constable said, flicking out his half- hunter. ‘I’ll race you. Last one in Lestrade’s office is a cissy!’ and he dashed for the stairs. He was about halfway up when he collided with a bowler-hatted gent coming down.

‘Now, then, young feller,’ the gent snapped. ‘We’re in a tearing hurry, aren’t we? Is there a fire?’

‘No,’ the constable said, ‘But you really should look where you’re going.’

The gent looked him up and down, his little moustache bristling. ‘I might say the same of you, Mr . . . er . . . ?’

‘Bang,’ the young man told him, ‘Detective Constable Bang to you.’

‘Oh,’ the gent smiled. ‘My apologies, Detective Constable, if I got in your way.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ Bang called as the gent trotted on down the steps, ‘Mr . . . er . . . ?’

‘Dew,’ the gent called back. ‘Chief Inspector to you.’

As far as there could be silence with the Chief Inspector’s boots clattering away down the stairs and half London rattling and blaring its way along the Embankment outside, it hit the constables like a wall. ‘Well, that’s a great start, Arnie,’ Sven Olufsen said, looking at

Walter Dew’s fast disappearing head in something akin to terror. ‘Ah,’ Bang shook himself free of the moment, ‘He’s nobody. Come on.’ And he swung left along the narrow corridor, past the door marked Criminal Records and out onto a landing.

‘You!’ he called to a lugubrious man walking along the passage- way with an orchid in his hand. ‘Do you work here?’

‘After a fashion,’ the man said.

‘Where’s Lestrade’s office?’ Bang wanted to know.

‘Lestrade?’ the lugubrious man repeated as though struggling with a foreign language.

‘Oh, God!’ Bang sighed. ‘Superintendent Lestrade. I mean, how many of them have you got here?’

‘Oh, just the one,’ the man said pleasantly. ‘First stairway on your left, then third door on the right. You can’t miss it.’ And he wandered away.

‘They didn’t tell me the first test as a detective was to find a bloody needle in a haystack. How hard can it be?’

The ferret-faced man swept past the pair again. ‘How long have you got?’ he asked for a second time and disappeared round a corner.

‘You know, this is a bit creepy, Arnie,’ Olufsen muttered. ‘I’ve got the weirdest feeling I’ve seen that bloke before.’

Bang looked at him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘It’s like that old joke, isn’t it? Art nouveau all over again. Well, come on, then. It won’t do to keep the Superintendent waiting.’

‘This can’t be right, Arnie.’ Olufsen was frowning, looking up and down the deserted corridor. ‘I’m sure that bloke with the flower said third door on your right. This is the . . . ’

But Bang had barged his way through already. ‘Mr Lestrade,’ he held out a firm hand. ‘Delighted. I am Detective Constable Bang. This is Detective Constable Olufsen. We’re . . . ’

‘. . . in the wrong office,’ the wavy-haired gentleman sitting at the desk told him. ‘Two doors along. You can’t miss it.’

‘Yes,’ Bang sighed. ‘I’ve been told that once already.’

‘It’s like art nouveau all over again,’ Olufsen plucked up the courage to add.

The wavy-haired gentleman looked at him. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you,’ he beamed.

‘We won’t, Mr . . . er . . . ?’

‘Henry,’ the man said. ‘Edward Henry.’

Olufsen was rigid with fear as Bang closed the door. ‘Henry,’ he repeated with scarcely a sound escaping his lips. ‘Isn’t that . . . ?’

‘Well, come on, you two!’ a voice called from two doors away. ‘I don’t have all day whatever the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner might just have told you.’

The constables wandered as if in a dream along the corridor. How had a day that had started so well have gone so horribly wrong? They peered around the frosted glass to see the ferret-faced man again, his feet up on his desk, his bowler dangling from the hat rack, a cup of tea in his hand.

‘Er . . . Superintendent Lestrade?’ Bang wondered whether he might not have a few fences to rebuild.

‘That’s what it says on the door,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Well, come in, gentlemen. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t bite.’

The man was the wrong side of fifty; but then, who wasn’t in London these days? His skin was the colour of parchment and the tip of his nose appeared to be missing. But it was his eyes that held you. At once weary of the world, at once flashing fire, they raked the constables from head to toe. ‘Which of you is Olufsen?’ he asked, flicking open a folder.

‘Me, sir,’ the detective straightened. ‘Sven Olufsen.’

‘Of the Viking persuasion, are we?’ Lestrade asked. All right, the lad was blond and blue eyed but he didn’t appear to have any horns on his bowler.

‘My grandfather emigrated from Sweden, sir.’

‘Sensible chap,’ Lestrade commented. ‘Two years in C Division; is that right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How many collars?’

‘Sir?’ The Viking looked confused.

‘Arrests, man. How many arrests?’

‘Er . . . four, sir. If you count the vicar.’

‘Four in two years?’ Lestrade’s eyebrows nearly reached his hair- line. ‘We’ll have to improve on that, lad. What had the vicar done, by the way?’

‘Exposed himself in the pulpit, sir. His sermons were excruciatingly long and he claimed he’d lost his Policeman’s Friend.’

‘Policemen don’t have friends, Olufsen; I hope you told him that.’

‘Er . . . no, sir; I didn’t think of it.’

‘Yes,’ Lestrade sighed. ‘We’ll have to improve on that, too. Right.’ He flicked open another folder. ‘Ah, now this is interesting. I assume this is a topographical error. It says your name is Bang.’ He looked at the second constable.

‘Er . . . no, that’s correct, sir. Arnold Bang.’

‘I see.’ Lestrade narrowed his eyes at the taller, brasher man. There was a hint of the ginger in the detective’s moustache that the superintendent didn’t much like. ‘Three years in Lost Property. Not exactly the cutting edge of crime, is it?’

‘We had our moments, sir,’ Bang said proudly.

‘Yes and you’ve had quite a few of those this morning, haven’t you, Bang? First, you fail to recognize me, a superintendent of Scotland Yard, not once, but twice. Second, you bump into a Chief Inspector and claim it was his fault . . . And that was Walter Dew, by the way, your immediate superior – apart from any sergeants and inspectors you might have seriously pissed off between floors, that is; for they, also, are your superiors. Third, you all but click your fingers at Major Wodehouse, Acting Assistant Commissioner . . . ’ He caught the look on Olufsen’s face. ‘That’s right, the melancholy major with the orchid. And fourth, you barge in on Mr Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who, it is rumoured, is up for a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List.’ He paused for effect. ‘It’s difficult to imagine a worse start to your predictably short careers here at the Yard, gentlemen.’

Both the rookies shuffled their feet and suddenly found Lestrade’s carpet surprisingly interesting; considering they were well and truly on it.

‘Now,’ the superintendent was calmer, ‘Do either of you know how to make a cup of tea?’

The old lady chewed the end of her pipe defiantly. She looked at her grandson through malevolent, hooded eyes. ‘He does’ she drawled.

‘No, he doesn’t, Gran!’ the exasperated boy maintained. Defiance ran in the Daley family.

‘Yes, he does. I remember. I seen it. Twice.’

Willie Daley looked at the old girl. He had known her all his life. And for all those thirteen years she had been a pain in his backside. She had prodded him with her knitting needles, blown her pipe smoke in his face, eaten his morning porridge. When he was seven, she’d taken the saddle off his bike. When he was eleven, she had insisted on entering farting contests with his mates. And she always won. Now, the old crone was insisting black was white.

‘If you’ve seen it twice,’ he reasoned with her, ‘You’ll remember that Bronco Billy Anderson shot him six times; emptied his gun into him.’

‘Are we talking about the same nickelodeon?’ she grimaced as the smoke drifted upwards.

‘The Great Train Robbery, yes,’ the boy concurred.

‘Down the Troxy.’

‘Well, I saw it at the Wurlitzer; but, yes, it’s the same film. Ten minutes of dazzling brilliance.’

‘That’s right,’ she crooned. A modicum of rapprochement had ensued. ‘And he’s just pretending to be dead. ’E comes back in a minute.’

‘Well, they’re all pretending to be dead, Gran.’ Willie’s arms spread wide. How much more gaga could the old girl get? ‘It’s a film. It’s not real.’

Gran Daley was horrified. ‘Waddya mean, not real?’

The doorbell sounded the end of Round Seven and Mary Daley was only too glad of it. It had been her lot in life to draw a number of short straws. The first was that she had the mother-in-law from Hell, a cantankerous old biddy without a friend in the world, who could argue for England. The second was a wastrel husband, Thomas, who had been hanged at Maidstone seven years before for beating a woman to death with a poker. The third was that Willie, her only, had the misfortune to argue like his Gran and look like his dad; in Mary’s eyes, the worst possible combination. Still, Mary Daley was a stoic, God-fearing woman. The Lord had decided this was how it must be and He, after all, had His reasons. Even so, she wasn’t quite prepared for the sight that greeted her on her front doorstep that sun-gilded evening in June. The man standing there took off his cap and stood looking at her.

‘Hello, Mary,’ he muttered. ‘How’ve you been?’ And Mary fainted dead away on the doormat.

‘Who is it?’ Granny Daley screeched, hearing the thud of her falling daughter-in-law.

Willie Daley was on his feet staring at the man on the pavement, the one with his cap in his hand, the one who looked so much like him. ‘I think . . . ’ he managed at last, ‘I think it’s my dad.’

‘See,’ the old girl trilled, happy to be proved right. ‘I said he’d come back in a minute.’

They couldn’t remember, in the depositions they gave to the police or in their memories in the days and weeks ahead, which they remembered most – the sight or the smell. He had lurched towards them along the Strand, swaying from side to side. His breathing was harsh, an agonized scraping in his chest. His pale eyes blinked as though the sun hurt them and his cough racked his body as he stumbled from lamppost to railing and steadied himself by the cab- horse rank. Growlers on their growlers shook their whips at him and crossing sweepers swung their brooms. Refined ladies held their gloved hands to their mouths and refined gentlemen hurried them away.

As always, it was left to the Metropolitan Police to do something about him. After all, that was their job, wasn’t it? To deal with public nuisances? And what could be more of a nuisance than this repellent fellow, of the ragged and filthy attire and a smell that defied description? As the constables took him in charge, they saw puncture wounds on his hands and arms and shoulders. They saw lice crawling in his hair. But he wasn’t resisting. It was as though he was trying to understand where he was and what was happening to him. Trying to grasp that this was London, the most modern and wealthy city in the world. And that this was 1905.

The constables risked a few quick inhalations. The stench was appalling, but there was no horror of drink on this man. He was as sober as a judge – and a lot more sober than many of the judges the constables knew.

‘Who’s the Prime Minister?’ one of them asked him and the man looked confused.

‘What day is this?’ the other one asked, holding the man’s jaw firmly and trying to make him focus his eyes.

‘Where are you from?’ the first one asked. ‘Where’s home?’

The man stopped swaying. He looked at his interrogators.