The Belgian and The Beekeeper Read online

  The Belgian and the Beekeeper

  A Novella

  Plus

  The Bruce & Rathbone Radio Mysteries

  By Peter Guttridge

  Copyright Peter Guttridge 2012

  All rights reserved

  CONTENTS

  The Belgian and the Beekeeper

  And

  An Appendix (of sorts) to the Belgian and the Beekeeper

  Plus

  The Bruce & Rathbone Radio Mysteries

  1. The Great Detective

  2. His Final Bow

  3. Seven Days in Hollywoodland [excerpt]

  The Belgian and the Beekeeper

  A Novella

  1909

  Frank Howel Evans publishes the first adventure featuring Jules Poiret, formerly of the French Secret Service

  1919

  Mrs Marie Belloc Lowndes publishes the first adventure featuring Hercules Popeau, lately retired from the French CID

  1920

  Agatha Christie publishes The Mysterious Affair at Styles the first adventure featuring the retired Belgian policeman Hercule Poirot

  The Belgian and the Beekeeper

  Contents Page

  Prologue – The Good Doctor

  1 – The Public Burning

  2 – The Vicar and the Flickers

  3 – The Belgian and the Beekeeper

  4 – Monsieur P.

  5 – The Accusation

  6 – A True Account?

  7 – Old Friends Reunited

  8 – The Battle of Maiwand

  9 – Of Wealth and Wives

  10 – The Vicar of Ormond Sacker

  11 – Mr George Adlam

  12 – The Three Sikhs

  13 – Black Water

  14 – Escape from the Andamans

  15 – The Interview

  16 -Tea At The Grand

  17– The Mystery of Mary Morstan

  18 – The Plot Thickens

  19 – The Howling Boys

  20 – The Sign of the Three

  21 – Jules and Sherlock

  22 – Raining Umbrellas

  23 – Princess Louise

  24 – A New Suspect

  25 – A Gathering

  26 – Enter Stage Left

  27 – Truth Will Out

  28 – Exit Stage Right

  29 – New Beginnings

  Epilogue

  September 1916

  Prologue

  The Good Doctor

  When the garrotte came round the doctor’s thick neck he was slow to respond. He had just eased back in his chair, resting one hand on his belly almost by instinct, the other holding a generous glass of brandy. His eyes were bleary, despite wearing his spectacles. The handwriting on the pile of forms in front of him was cramped, often indecipherable. Doctor’s writing.

  The brandy glass crashed to the floor as his arm flailed. But he was more canny in a tussle than his age suggested. He’d been in his share of scrapes. He twisted as he brought his other arm up, carrying in his fist the heavy lamp from the desk.

  He’d exercised with weights for years. Although old he had strong arms. Fighting for breath he nevertheless had the strength to swing the lamp behind him at his assailant. It connected with a solid thunk but he didn’t know where. It didn’t seem to have any effect so he gave another solid thwack. The garrotte loosened.

  The doctor coughed and hit out again. The garrotte fell away from his neck. He slid his chair back but fell over as he did so. On all fours, conscious of his vulnerability, his spectacles hanging somewhere around his jaw, he looked wildly around. He saw the garrotte, a simple length of knotted rope, abandoned on the floor.

  He pushed himself to his feet, raised his fists. But there was nobody to fight. He was alone.

  Dr Watson picked up the brandy bottle by the neck and walked through the open French windows onto the balcony.

  He scanned the Royal Pavilion gardens below. There were men huddled around the bivouac fires spread across the lawns, other men strolling, but nobody obviously declaring himself a thuggee. In the flickering light he could see the occasional glittering eye or flash of white teeth, glimpses of white clothes.

  The wounded of the Indian Army. These poor devils don’t know what has hit them, he thought, coming to the Western Front.

  He steadied his breath and felt at his neck. He uncorked the brandy and took a swig.

  The evening air was humid. Beyond the Pavilion, Brighton’s lights glimmered in the night. Raucous music floated from variety halls and dance parlours.

  There was honeysuckle growing on the walls either side of the balcony. He inhaled it. He felt the scent catch in his moustache so stroked it down. He sniffed his fingers. Mostly tobacco. A seagull swept by, ghostly white in the darkness. He felt in his inside pocket and drew out a cigar. He looked down again at the shapes clustered round the fires. He wondered which one of them wanted to kill him. And why.

  Chapter One

  The Public Burning

  The smoke puzzled the two girls. First a black belch then a slender pillar rising into the blazing blue sky. They were sitting cross-legged in their over-sized smocks, munching rinds of cheese and stale bread, listening for the rumble of the big guns from across the channel. The guns that their father had told them protected their uncle and his mates of the South Downs regiment from the Hun.

  The smoke was coming from the fold in the hill below the pasture for their small herd of Southdown sheep. Ada, the elder sister, rolled up the cheese and bread in a muslin cloth and the two girls walked hand in hand down the slope.

  They reached the rim of the fold and Ada stepped in front of her little sister, Jennie, the moment she realised what she had just seen. Not that she had made sense of the sight.

  A group of fierce-looking, dark-skinned, black-bearded men with white cloths wrapped around their heads were gathered around a bonfire. The bonfire was in a rectangular pit and on it, Ada realised after a moment, the men were burning a human being.

  She saw the head an instant before one of them raised a wooden stave and brought it down. She shielded her sister when she saw the skull cave in.

  She looked back over her shoulder to see another man pouring something from a jar over the broken skull. Jennie was wriggling, trying to escape from her grasp to see what was going on in the valley below.

  “Let me go!” she cried.

  Ada ignored the command as something caught her eye on the opposite rim of the valley. A tall, thin man, leaning on a stick, also watching the scene.

  She looked back to the burning body. All the men were now gathered at its feet. She could hear their wailing. She tugged her sister back up the incline to their herd of sheep.

  “What was it?” her sister said.

  “I don’t know,” Ada said truthfully. “But it was horrible.”

  She looked across to the opposite rim. The tall, thin man was gone.

  Chapter Two

  The vicar and the flickers

  Some hours later a be-whiskered old clergyman made his way along the seafront with the help of a thick gnarled stick. He sat on a bench near the Palace pier and looked out to the horizon. The sun flecked the calm blue waters. The wealthy and the titled promenaded behind him. A tram trundled along the upper esplanade, ragamuffins hanging off the back.

  A motor car blew past, throwing up dust on the dirt road, a huge canvas balloon attached to the gas-burner at its rear: the bizarre but effective solution to wartime petrol shortages. Horses clopped by pulling tradesmen’s carts and dropping dung.

  It was a scene from an Edwardian summer but for the sound of guns from across the Channel trembling in the warm air.

  “Someone’s copping it,”
a costermonger burned black by the sun said from behind his barrow of fish. He touched his temple with two fingers in polite salute. The vicar looked over the round spectacles perched on his long nose then nodded.

  “It could be worse,” he said.

  “If you mean at any moment German battleships from a mile out at sea could bombard the buggery out of the town – begging your pardon - or a zeppelin might drift over to drop bombs on us instead of the munitions factory in Hove, well then you’re right. Thank God for small mercies, reverend.”

  “Thank God indeed.”

  The vicar heaved himself off the bench with the help of his stick and, picking up a small Gladstone bag, hobbled across the road. Here, new villas jostled with slum-dwellings. Raggedy women sat outside their hovels, dead-eyed and pale, smoking cheap clay pipes, watching him totter by.

  He made his slow way along the Old Steine. On the left the Royal Pavilion, the Prince Regent’s Pleasure Palace, with its minarets and onion domes and castellated roof. It had been converted into a hospital for the wounded of the Indian Army. Mahomedans and Hindus and Sikhs. Big men with tall turbans and fierce black beards. Small, lithe men flashing white teeth in ready grins. There were some in clusters by the railings with townspeople on the other side attempting conversations with sign language and raised voices, thrusting arms between the railings to shake hands, welcoming these exotic and brave men of the Empire to their little seaside town.

  The clergyman nodded greetings as he walked by and on up the Steine. He wondered if any of the wounded troops would go to the Duke of York’s Theatre for the matinee show. It was the new seven-reeler Sherlock Holmes flicker starring William Gillette. A group had been taken there by chars-a-bancs on the day he had seen the show.

  His own progress took him along North Street and the top of the Pavilion gardens to the Theatre Royal. He mopped his brow with a blue polka-dot handkerchief when he entered the vestibule of the theatre. It was five minutes before the play was due to start. He seated himself in the back row of the stalls, setting his bag down in the seat beside him. He smiled as the curtain came up on a familiar room. He chuckled at the first appearance of the matinee-idol actor Harry Saintsbury in noble profile and smoking jacket. He shook his head when Saintsbury first declaimed: “Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow.” Then he sank lower into his seat, rubbing his long-fingered hands lightly together.

  He was chuckling when he left the theatre and set off up the arduous road to the railway station. He struggled up the last steep incline beneath the arch that held up the station forecourt. At the ticket office he somehow balanced carrying his Gladstone bag and stick with mopping his brow and purchasing a single ticket to Hassocks.

  He boarded the train and seated himself in an empty compartment. No one else joined him before the train pulled out. Occasionally, as the train trundled up to Preston Park and beyond, people passed by his compartment along the corridor. Some might have glanced in but nobody paid any particular attention to an elderly clergyman chuckling to himself as he gazed out of the window.

  Had anyone noticed him they might have been puzzled that he was no longer in his compartment when the train emerged from the pitch darkness of the long tunnel just before Hassocks. And, further, that another gentleman, a long, lean fellow in his early sixties had somehow spirited himself onto the train and into the now vacant compartment.

  This gentleman alighted at Hassocks and strode rapidly away, swinging a small Gladstone bag.

  Chapter Three

  The Belgian and the beekeeper

  A man was perched, knees together, on a chair in the garden of a ramshackle Downs cottage. He held a bowler hat in one hand. With the other he jerkily wafted away the bees that buzzed around his head.

  He was dressed for town not country in shoes covered by spats and a dandyish check suit that emphasized his bulk. He seemed uncomfortable in the country, certainly uncomfortable in the heat, a thin line of sweat trickling from his slicked down, almost patent hair. Every so often he smoothed his neatly-tended mustachios with a well-manicured index finger.

  “Will you stop pacing, mon ami?”

  His remark was addressed to a tall, sandy-haired soldier, a lieutenant by his pips.

  “The rumours are true, then,” the soldier said. He ran the rim of his Service Dress cap between his hands and looked over at the dilapidated cottage.

  “What rumours?” his nattily dressed colleague said, ducking his head as half a dozen bees swirled by.

  The lieutenant looked from the hole in the roof to the cracked window-panes to the broken beehives in the field beyond. The cottage needed a coat of whitewash, the door was peeling and the window frames rotting. The outhouse was a lean-to that didn’t look as if it was going to lean much longer.

  “The rumour that the greatest private detective we’ve ever known has fallen on hard times.”

  “The greatest detective?”

  The lieutenant would have done well to heed the tone of voice.

  “Well, yes – haven’t you said so yourself?”

  “I do not believe so, no. I do not believe I have ever said that. If I were to apply that sobriquet to anyone I might, with all modesty –“

  Both men heard boots crunching on the flint and dirt path that ran behind a tall hedge in front of the cottage.

  “Do carry on your conversation,” a reedy voice called. “I find it most entertaining. I like to get a sense of my guests before I meet them and the evidence on this flint path is meagre indeed. The discarded cigarette butt points to one of you being a soldier - an officer, I assume, since you have not chewed down the end of your gasper - showing a certain breeding. The second one of you – well, aside from the slight limp in your right leg which means you bear down on the heel of your left shoe and the fact that either you crept up to my house or take extremely small steps, I can deduce nothing of you. The stick you carry is of European manufacture. I believe you too are from the continent going by the cologne you apply so generously.”

  A tall, bony man appeared in the gap in the hedge and unlatched the front gate.

  “I have made a small study of accents. You are French-speaking but not French or Swiss so therefore either a Walloon or Bruxellois. I judge you are a plucky Belgian refugee.”

  He looked from one to the other of them.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully.

  The lieutenant tucked his cap under his left arm, stepped forward and held out his right hand.

  “Good morning. I’m –“

  The other man had stood and put his bowler on his head in order to doff it. He interrupted the lieutenant to say:

  “Mr Sherlock Holmes, I presume. It is a great honour to meet you.”

  Sherlock Holmes ran his eyes over the two men.

  “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “I assumed I would not need to introduce myself,” the mustachioed man said.

  Sherlock Holmes smiled.

  “You mean my ability to reveal a stranger’s occupation and habits by close observation? I fear it does not extend to deducing a man’s name.”

  “I meant,” said the man, puffing out his chest, “that you would know me by repute.”

  “Ah,” Sherlock Holmes said, squeezing the tip of his nose.

  He considered the man, from head to toe.

  “I observe that your neatness of attire is an obsession with you – I believe a speck of dust would cause you more pain than a bullet wound – which, I postulate from your limp, you also have. Your corpulence indicates you are rather too fond of food. Are you a waiter in one of the seafront hotels?”

  The little man looked indignant.

  “Corpulence? A waiter?”

  “Or perhaps a chef?”

  The man could not keep the hurt from his face. Sherlock Holmes barked a laugh.

  “I jest with you, monsieur. I see that clearly you can only be a detective. Like me you recognise the advantage of wearing a disguise – although in this instance you may have
overplayed your hand. Might I caution you that a disguise is intended to deflect rather than attract attention. That bowler hat and that moustache are both a little de trop.”

  The man flared his nostrils and began a series of little coughs. He started to speak but Sherlock Holmes threw up his hand.

  “You wear a net at night to maintain that upward-curled moustache, a moustache that suggests both military experience and time in the Belgian police service – for which I have nothing but the highest praise. You are, I judge, a retired Belgian policeman, born in Spa, who initially joined the resistance to the German invader but who was obliged to come to England as a refugee. You have been staying in a cottage in the village of Styles St Mary in Essex with fellow countrymen. Following the murder of Mrs Inglethorp – formerly Mrs Cavendish - the owner of nearby country manor, Styles Court, you were called in to investigate by a houseguest, your friend Lieutenant Hastings.”

  “Extraordinary!” the lieutenant declared.

  “Elementary,” Sherlock Holmes replied. He tapped the front page headline of the newspaper lying face-up on the garden table: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES.

  “I know your methods are closely modelled on mine,” Sherlock Holmes said. He now tapped his head and lowered his voice. “The little grey cells.” He held out his hand. “You are Hercule Poirot and it is a pleasure to meet you.”

  The man looked from the offered hand to Holmes’s smug smile. When he spoke, his voice was low but cutting.