Lestrade and the Sawdust Ring

❖1❖

‘G

one?’ the Prime Minister repeated. And again, for good effect, ‘gone?’ 

There was a nod from the crimson face across the room.

‘A curiously simple word,’ the Prime Minister observed. Well, he had, a long time ago, written the best political novels in the English language. ‘Yet I don’t like the way it rolls out. When the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army comes to me on Shabbas . . . er . . . Saturday and says Gone, then I know there’s trouble in the wind.’

He leaned back on the ottoman, named for the Empire he had always backed through thick and thin – the sick furniture of Europe.

‘Perhaps you’d better tell me all about it, Your Royal Highness.’

His Royal Highness always knew when the Prime Minister was furious. His little goatee would twitch, his eyes would narrow and he would use people’s full titles. So what, he thought to himself and felt his aiguillettes tauten as his chest puffed. He was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, for God’s sake. Duke of Cambridge, for God’s sake. Cousin to the Queen ...

‘For God’s sake, George, he was under your care!’ the Prime Minister had exploded rather earlier than usual. ‘Having him doing tricks at Woolwich is one thing, but how could you have lost the little abortion?’

‘Well, you know he gave an interview at Windsor?’

‘Yes, I read it.’

‘And another one at Woolwich?’

The Prime Minister nodded. ‘Yes, I read that too.’

‘And a few little impromptu words at the Army and Navy Club, at which nearly one hundred Gentlemen of the Press happened to be present?’

‘On all of those occasions, no doubt, with his hand tucked firmly into his waistcoat, like his great uncle?’

Cambridge nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

The Prime Minister’s eyes rolled in his head so that he looked even more like a gargoyle than ever.

‘Well, anyway, Napier saw him to the station.’

‘Old Whiskerandos? He must be nearly three hundred. You’d think that the Conqueror of Scinde would have something better to do with his time.’

‘Gaga, I’m afraid,’ Cambridge said.

Takes one to know one, mused the Prime Minister, arranging the tassel of his smoking cap. ‘Then what?’

‘Instead of saying his customary few words, he darted for another platform. Last seen waving from the quarter past eight from Victoria.’

‘Who?’

‘The Queen, God Bless Her,’ the Prime Minister explained, as though to the regimental goat. ‘Your cousin by the Grace of God.’

‘Oh, God, she doesn’t know,’ Cambridge fiddled with his Mameluke hilt and wiped his rheumy eyes with the bullion tassels of his sash, ‘and I’m not going to be the one to tell her.’

The Prime Minister looked at the Commander-in-Chief. Sixty, if he was a day. Old soldiers never die, he reflected – they just become Commanders-in-Chief. Odd, though, how the family likeness had come out. Cambridge had the same waist measurement as his cousin, the same red-rimmed, poppy eyes. Only the fluffy sidewhiskers were fuller.

‘Did no one stop the train?’

‘Mrs Cambridge could stop a clock. But you can’t stop a train . . . can you?’

‘There are such things as stations in life, Your Royal Highness. Such is my intimate knowledge of the Southern and Kent Railway network that I can tell you he should have stopped at Bromley.’

‘I had a man waiting there,’ Cambridge said, clearly proud of himself. After all, he had had a horse shot from under him at Inkerman. He was not a nincompoop. ‘Sent ahead a telegram.’

‘And?’

‘Cow on the line at Penge East. He must have got off there.’

‘What was he wearing?’

‘Undress RA,’ Cambridge told him.

‘If my encyclopaedic knowledge of the British army serves me aright, that’s a natty little blue number, narrow red stripes on the trousers, fetching little pillbox and Austrian knots to the cuffs.’

‘That’s the ticket.’

‘Not everyday wear at Penge East, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘Mr Disraeli,’ the Duke of Cambridge leaned forward as far as his girth and gilt decorations would allow. ‘We must assume that His Highness the Prince Imperial had been planning this little disappearance for a while. Had it orchestrated to a tee, honed to a whisker. It’s my belief he’d bribed an employee of the Southern and Kent Railway Company to have a civilian suit stashed aboard at Victoria. As I believe one of your predecessors is reputed to have said, Every man has his price.’

‘Let’s leave Lord Derby out of this equation, shall we?’ Disraeli snapped. ‘You don’t have to live with his choice of wallpaper in the bathroom – quite gives Lady B the staggers, I can tell you.’

‘I just felt you ought to know, that’s all,’ Cambridge shrugged.

Disraeli rolled upright on the ottoman, as sprightly as a man can be at seventy-five with more than his fair share of gout. ‘And I feel you ought to know, Your Royal Highness, that I disapproved from the start of the prince being here in the first place. I know his dad was a Special Constable in Chartist days and I know he had a house in Leamington, but Good God! The man is a poseur, a charlatan. You only have to look at the way he waxes his moustache!’ The Prime Minister struggled to his feet and staggered around the study with the aid of various pieces of furniture. ‘It was, was it not, the machinations of the little abortion’s ghastly mother that got him a commission?’

‘Er . . . only my cousin can grant commissions, Lord Beaconsfield,’ Cambridge said. ‘You know that.’

Disraeli spun on his good leg, his dark eyes smouldering, his rococo curl flashing in the morning lamplight. He looked at the silver trowel on the sideboard and the little bunch of primroses beside it. ‘The Empress Eugenie was responsible,’ he said, mindful of the loyalty he owed to Her Majesty. He rather liked being Prime Minister. He rather liked being Earl of Beaconsfield. He rather liked his eighty-two-roomed mansion at Hughenden. And he didn’t want to lose any of them. True, the country chose its leaders nowadays, not the monarch, but the monarch’s enmity could be fatal – look at Gladstone. He’d never be resting his dubious backside on this ottoman again because it was common knowledge that the Queen detested him. True, Disraeli had the Queen around his little finger, but his little finger was giving him gyp these days.

‘And you,’ Disraeli pointed at the rotundity before him, ‘you acquiesced, nay, you make acquiescence into a fine art.’ The Prime Minister sat down in his desk chair. ‘God help us if that bastard Gladstone ever finds out.’

There was a knock at the study door and a rather pompous flunkey entered. ‘That bastard Gladstone to see you, sir.’

‘Not now, Thatcher. Tell him I’m busy. Affairs of state. When am I free next?’

The pompous flunkey consulted a pocket diary. ‘May 1884, sir,’ he said.

‘Five years.’ Disraeli’s grasp of mental arithmetic was legendary. ‘Yes, that should do it.’

The study door crashed back and a seventy-year-old politician stood there, top hat firmly on his head, collar awry around his scrawny, chelonian neck.

‘Gladdy!’ Disraeli extended a hand. ‘My dear fellow, why wasn’t I told you were here? Thatcher,’ he caught the flunkey a nasty one around the side of the head with his cane, ‘you’re fired.’

‘Very good, sir,’ and the flunkey exited.

‘Dizzy, my dear fellow. Brother in Christ,’ and Gladstone shook the Prime Minister’s hand warmly.

‘Do you know the Duke of Cambridge?’ Disraeli motioned the Leader of the Opposition to a seat.

‘Of course,’ Gladstone shook the man’s hand with the sinews of a keen axe man. ‘Can I apologize in advance for the cuts?’

‘The cuts?’ Cambridge rattled his sabre.

‘That I intend to make in the army next year.’

There was silence.

‘You know,’ Gladstone explained in his melodious Lowland Scots accent, ‘after the election, when I move in here. I hope you haven’t changed that lovely wallpaper in the bathroom, Dizzy. Mrs G. does so adore it.’

‘What is it, Gladdy?’ Disraeli flipped open his cheque-book, an object of virtue few living men had ever seen. ‘A contribution to the Destitute Liberal Politicians’ Fund or perhaps a token for your excellent work as founder of the Church Penitentiary Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women?’

‘Ah, generous as always,’ Gladstone’s thin lips snaked into the icy smile for which he was famous. ‘By the way, did you ever pay dear old George Bentinck back for buying your country estate for you?’

Cambridge cleared his throat. ‘Good Lord, is that the time? I must be away. Mrs Cambridge will have ratafias.’

‘No, no,’ Gladstone held his arm. ‘It’s rather fortuitous your being here this morning, Your Royal Highness, with Dizzy. Two birds with one stone, so to speak.’

‘If it’s Afghanistan . . .’ Disraeli began.

‘Well, if it’s the Egyptian matter, I assure you that the Khedive . . .’

‘No,’ Gladstone beamed, enjoying the rattle of his Nemesis across the desk from him, ‘not the Khedive.’

‘Don’t tell me there’s been another Bulgarian Atrocity?’ Disraeli widened his eyes. ‘I don’t think any of us have recovered from the last one.’

‘Neither did some twelve thousand Christian souls butchered in the most barbarous way imaginable. Unspeakable tortures, Cambridge. Fates worse than a fate worse than death.’

‘Fancy that,’ was all the Commander-in-Chief could think of to say. He didn’t like the blaze in Gladstone’s eyes or the whitening of his knuckles, even the missing one covered by the black finger stall.

‘What then?’ Disraeli was prepared to risk the worst rather than hear another speech on the subject. At the very worst, he’d quickly reinstate Thatcher and get him to kick Gladstone out of his study, bag and baggage.