Brigade: The Further Adventures of Inspector Lestrade (6 page)

True, Lestrade was more suitably attired. Whenever his job took him to maritime areas, he tried to dress the part, but the jaunty black sailor’s peaked cap and the matching pea-jacket could not disguise the landlubber’s inability to roll with the ship. Most of the time, in fact, he rolled against it, barking his shins on lobster creels and smearing his sleeve with tar and foul-smelling bait. The smack bellied and plunged on the roaring surf, making interrogation of a crucial witness well nigh impossible.

Bradstreet’s task was to commit the vital deposition of Blogg the fisherman to his notebook, but when he looked the page of jottings, he realised that it would do justice to Mr Isaac Pitman, except that it wasn’t shorthand. When Lestrade saw it later, in the relatively tranquil surroundings of the Fisherman’s Arms, he pronounced it unintelligible. As well, then, that Lestrade’s memory served to record the conversation. William Bentley, it transpired, was a native of Yorkshire, had served some time in the Army, and had been lighthouse keeper for eight years. He was past retiring age really, but nobody else wanted the job. It didn’t pay well and most of the younger men were either fishing or moving into the new profitable tourist trade that was becoming the vogue along the coast. Folk from Lunnun mostly and it was the railway that brought ’em there. Blogg spat volubly and contemptuously into the hurtling waters in scorn of both institutions. The act alone was enough to send Bradstreet over the edge, not literally, but metaphorically, and he vomited copiously over the side.

Friends? Only one really – a royal coachman from Sandringham, the Prince of Wales’ estate, who came over once a month to play chess with Bentley. Enemies? Wei there was the Tuddenhams. Tough bunch they were. Bentley had fell foul of ’em almost as soon as he arrived. Blogg didn’t rightly know why. The Tuddenhams, it transpired, were family of fishermen from nearby Mundsley whose names were well known to the local constabulary as trouble makers, drunkards and shifters. Jem Rook had had his nose broken by one of them only last year, simply because the constable ha smiled at him funny one morning. Yes, the Tuddenhams were the boys. If anybody had murderous inclinations in the area and bore Bill Bentley a grudge, it was them.

The conversation ended there, as nets were cast and hands dashed here and there, flinging ropes, hauling weights. Bradstreet was quietly wishing he was dead. Even Lestrade felt a little green round the gills, much like the wet, flapping mackerel that flopped down on the slippery deck. There were shouts and laughter and it was well into the afternoon before Bradstreet’s prayers were answered and Blogg turned his smack for home.

Another magic evening, the sun casting long shadows across the shingle. Lestrade’s legs had returned to his body and leaving Bradstreet fiat on his back in his room at the Fisherman’s, the inspector walked the beach with Bill Bentley’s daughter. Emma Hopkins, as she now was, was a middle-aged woman who still retained much of the striking good looks of her youth. She spoke fondly of her father, but was not surprised that he had enemies.

‘Always in trouble, that was Dad,’ she was saying with her soft-spoken Yorkshire accent. ‘If there was a family like that here that didn’t like him, you can bet – mind you, ’e weren’t a betting man – but you can bet ’e’d put up a fight.’

‘Liked a scrap, did he, your dad?’ Lestrade asked.

‘Aye, ’e did.’ Emma Hopkins chuckled. ‘Eeh, there were times Ma didn’t know what to do wi’ ’im, but ’is heart was in’t right place. Y’know, I’ve seen that man take on’t bare-knuckle champion of Bradford just to buy me a dolly I’d seen in Mr Althorpe’s toy shop. He damn near won, too. I can see ’im now, Mr Lestrade, smilin’ as ’e give me the doll, ’is knuckles all red and raw and ’is face a mass of cuts. I loved ’im, Inspector. ’E was a darling old man,’ and she brushed a single tear from her cheek. ‘No,’ she breathed in the sea air sharply to recover herself, ‘I’m not surprised ’e died the way ’e did, though I’ll wager – not that I do wager, y’understand – they didn’t give ’im a fighting chance.’

Lestrade ignored the fact that Mrs Hopkins was contradicting herself. It was one of the more controlled manifestations of grief. He’d seen it before, countless times. Why was it, he mused to himself, that even before the season began, they exercised donkeys on these beaches? And he shook his trouser leg with the resignation of a man who did not always look where he was going.

‘I ’adn’t seen ’im in, oh, five or six years,’ Mrs Hopkins was going on. ‘Well, you know ’ow it is when you’ve a family. My own children are nearly full grown now and there’s John, my ’usband. Have you a family, Inspector?’

Lestrade hadn’t.

The couple turned for the cheap hotel in the wrong part of town where the Hopkinses were staying. Lestrade watched the darkness settle over the sea before he began his journey back.

‘Can we take ’im ’ome, soon, Inspector? The old man, t’York? ’E’d want that. We’ll bury ’im in ’is native peat. ’E’d like that,’ Lestrade heard Emma Hopkins say again, in his mind.

‘Yes, you can take him back,’ Lestrade found himself saying aloud, hoping suddenly that there was no one nearby He picked himself up from the sand of the cliff walk and made his way back to the town, the great perpendicular tower o the church black and silent now in the gathering gloom Beyond that, the sibilance of the sea, a band of mauve-grey under a purpling sky. But Lestrade, as ever, had other thing on his mind.

Blogg had told him that the Tuddenham tribe could usually be found in Cromer of a Friday night, in the tap room of the Cuttlefish, a far less salubrious hostelry than the one in which Bradstreet still lay, trying, no doubt, to make the bed lie still under him. It was one of the last refuges of the old Cromer, local Cromer, the Cromer that was the fishing village before the well-to-do began to spend their summers there. The place was crowded enough, with brawny good-natured fishermen and labourers, the smell of the salt and the brackish beaches lost in the all-consuming ether of Norfolk beer - a pint of which Lestrade ordered and took to one of the quieter corners, with his crab supper.

The girl who served him didn’t seem too anxious to help him by pointing out the Tuddenhams, but in a few minutes it became obvious that Lestrade had found his quarry. He recognised the signs, the hurried glances in his direction, the lips moving silently behind cupped hands, the emptying of the bar and the tables around. And the final signal, the abrupt end of the fiddle music in the corner. Lestrade summed up the situation. His back was to the wall, a crackling log fire to his right. He had one good hand, but the other would not serve him well in a fight.

He transferred the pewter mug to his left hand and noiselessly slipped his right into the pocket of his Donegal draped over the settle behind him. He felt warm brass and waited. Four men, rough seafaring types, stood before him, all bearing a vague resemblance to one another, watching him in silence.

‘Mr Tuddenham?’ Lestrade ventured.

‘Yes,’ the four chorused.

‘Who wants to know?’ The eldest of them edged forward, elbowing aside the rest.

‘Inspector Lestrade, Scotland Yard.’

‘Where?’

A growl and a ripple of laughter. The fiddler flashed his bow suddenly across his instrument, as though to punctuate the joke.

‘I would like to ask you a few questions,’ Lestrade went on, as the merriment subsided.

‘Oh, ar? What about?’ The older man hurled his tobacco plug around his mouth and spat it with unerring accuracy into a spittoon some yards away.

‘The death of William Bentley.’

A murmur and a rumble this time. If Lestrade had been asked to swear on oath what had been said, he would have been bound to say it sounded like ‘rhubarb’.

‘What be that to do wi’ us?’ one of the younger Tuddenhams asked.

‘Stow it,’ snapped Tuddenham the Elder; then, fixing his beady eye on Lestrade, ‘What be that to do wi’ us?’

‘Mr Bentley was murdered.’

Another ripple of rhubarb.

‘Ay, we’d heard that. So?’

‘So, how did you kill him?’ Lestrade always tried the direct approach with the lower orders. It wasted less time, and there was less chance of a charge of wrongful arrest.

The murmur ran to positive allotments of rhubarb.

‘What be you accusing us of?’ another Tuddenham asked.

‘Murder,’ said Lestrade.

‘And how are we supposed to have done it?’ the eldest Tuddenham enquired.

‘You tell me,’ goaded Lestrade.

‘Better yet,’ snarled the biggest Tuddenham. ‘I’ll show you.’ And he lunged at Lestrade with both massive hands outstretched.

It was one of those pieces of pure poetry of which inspectors of Scotland Yard are occasionally capable in moments of stress and which would be talked about in Cromer for years to come. Lestrade brought up both forearms simultaneously, spread-eagling his opponent’s arms so that Tuddenham’s chin crunched down on the table, narrowly missing the shell of Lestrade’s crab. As he landed, Lestrade brought both his fists together on Tuddenham’s temples, which would have been painful enough had they been fists, but in his left hand, Lestrade still held the pewter mug and in his right the brass knuckle-duster without which he never ventured far. The assaulted Tuddenham knelt on the flagstones with his tousled head in Lestrade’s supper, groaning. Apart from that, the tap room was silent and Lestrade had not left his seat.

After what seemed like an eternity, the other two Tuddenham children broke forward, but Papa restrained them, forcing them back with his scarred, burly arms.

The tension was broken.

‘That’s Matthew,’ he said, pointing to the prostrate Tuddenham. ‘This be Luke, this be Mark,’ pointing to the other sons. ‘I be John.’

‘I thought you might be,’ said Lestrade. ‘Landlord.’ A figure answering that description appeared from behind the bar. ‘A pint of your best ale for the Messrs Tuddenham – and some butter for the head of this one.’

Lestrade proffered a chair to John Tuddenham and as he took it, slowly, uncertainly, the whole tap room unfroze and returned to life. The fiddle struck up, even the fire crackled anew. The Tuddenham boys carried off their fallen brother like some tragic hero in a play.

‘Did ’im good, that,’ mused Tuddenham senior over his pint. ‘I ’ope ’e didn’t spoil your supper, sir.’

Lestrade shook his head. The new-found submission he could do without. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘about Bill Bentley.’

‘I’m not sorry ’e’s gone. I won’t say that I am. Whatever else I am, I bain’t be no ’ypocrit.’

‘I’ve heard of your feud. That’s what brought me to you. What caused it?’

‘That’s no secret.’ Tuddenham gazed obviously into the abyss of his tankard and continued only when Lestrade had signalled mine host to refill it. ‘When ’e first come ’ere – upstart ’e were. From Yorkshire. What did ’e know of the sea? Landlubber, ’e were. We don’t cotton to strangers here. Saving your pardon. We don’t mix wi’ them Lunnuners wi’ their airs and graces.’

‘The feud,’ Lestrade reminded him.

‘Oh, ar. Well, ’e accused us Tuddenhams o’ wrecking. I be a fisherman, Inspector. All me life. Man and boy. And my father before me. Why, there’s been no wrecking on this coast for years. Not since I … not for years.’

‘So you hated each other.’

‘We did.’ Tuddenham Senior quaffed off his second half pint. Lestrade signalled for a third. He promised himself it would be the last. He didn’t yet know how Nimrod Frost reacted to ‘expenses’.

‘Mind you, we didn’t kill ’im. Matthew there, ’e’s always been a bit hasty, but in a way ’e was right. If we wanted to do in old Bill Bentley, I’d ’ave gone round there and wrung his neck like a chicken.’

Looking at Tuddenham’s fist around his mug, Lestrade was in no doubt that that was so, but he wasn’t letting the old fisherman off the hook just yet.

‘So it was you who broke his neck?’

‘It was not.’ Tuddenham was adamant. ‘Is that how he died, then?’

Lestrade finished his drink.

‘No, Mr Tuddenham, it wasn’t. Can you account for your movements on the twentieth inst?’ And as he said it he realised the futility of his breath and changed tack. ‘Where were you last Monday?’

‘At sea, with me ‘ol’ family, and that’s gospel.’

And from a man named John, with sons called Matthew Mark and Luke, that seemed fair enough.

Lestrade ate a hearty breakfast – of crab – while Bradstreet resolutely looked the other way and sipped his water. As Blogg had surmised, Bradstreet had come up with nothing in connection with the foreign-sounding ship moored off the lighthouse. He had of course come up with much else, but was not material to the case. Then out into the cold grey of the first morning of May, 1893. Over the cobbles the policemen trudged, wrapping their Donegals around them. Constable Rook dragged their valises and loaded them onto the station wagon. Much to the chagrin of Bradstreet stomach, it lurched forward to the driver’s whip, and they were gone, rattling out of Cromer across the pastureland of Norfolk.

‘God, it’s flat,’ was really the only comment Bradstreet could muster.

‘I smell something,’ said Lestrade, trying to doze under his tilted bowler.

‘I’m sorry, sir. I thought I’d sponged my waistcoat.’

‘Not you, Bradstreet. I was being metaphorical.’ He hoped that was the right word. ‘I smell conspiracy.’

‘Anarchists?’ Bradstreet had woken up.

Lestrade opened a weary eye from under the rim of his hat. The question was not worthy of comment, but Bradstreet would not leave it alone. ‘So that’s why we’re going to Sandringham. I knew it wasn’t just the coachman you were after. It’s the Royal Family, isn’t it? They’re in danger.’

‘For all I know, Bradstreet, a madman with a Maxim has killed them all and they’re lying on Sandringham’s lawns as we speak, but that’s not my case. I’m concerned with Bill Bentley, lighthouse keeper of Cromer. Your views?’

‘An old man.’ Bradstreet was marshalling his powers o detection. ‘Suffocated. That would be easy. He died – let me see – latish on Monday afternoon, probably. Perhaps he was taking a nap.’

‘Motive?’

‘Not robbery. Nothing had been taken – Blogg told us that. Didn’t he? I wasn’t really concentrating on his boat.’