The False Inspector Dew Read online

  The False Inspector Dew

  Peter Lovesey

  Peter Lovesey

  The False Inspector Dew

  FOREWORD

  Sixty years have passed and no-one has explained the mystery of the false Inspector Dew.

  It was confidently thought that the only scrap of evidence had been destroyed, shredded on the orders of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. But Scotland Yard was unaware of the existence of another file. It was in the Cunard Company archives. It contained the statements of the captain and certain officers of the Mauretania. And it contained the crucial wireless message drafted by the captain and transmitted to the Cunard office at 9.30pm on 9 September, 1921, and telegraphed to Scotland Yard for information.

  This reconstruction of the salient events begins the following morning, when the Commissioner picked the message off his desk.

  PART ONE

  The Tramp

  1

  SS MAURETANIA. 9 SEPT 1921.

  REFERENCE SUSPICIOUS DEATH ON BOARD HAVE INVITED CHIEF INSPECTOR DEW OF SCOTLAND

  YARD TO INVESTIGATE.A. H. ROSTRON, CAPTAIN.

  Chief Inspector Dew. The Commissioner remembered Dew. He was the man who had pulled in Dr Crippen. That was back in 1910. He was damned sure Dew had quit the force the same year.

  He picked up a pencil. Under the message he wrote:

  What's this tomfoolery? Comedians are your department.

  Smiling to himself, he addressed it to his deputy.

  The Deputy Commissioner was at Waterloo that day with Charlie Chaplin. Two hundred constables with arms linked were standing in support. Chaplin had come back to London after nine years in America. He had gone there as a member of the Karno troupe of music hall comedians. He was returning as one of the world's most famous men. Thousands had gathered at the station.

  When the train steamed in, the Deputy Commissioner and his senior men raced towards the compartment reserved for Chaplin. They seized him like a prisoner and hustled him along the platform. Beyond the barrier where the crowd was waiting, the blue line stood firm. Chaplin was funneled into a waiting limousine. Few people saw him.

  The Deputy Commissioner in a police car drove ahead towards the Ritz Hotel. In Piccadilly it was like Armistice Day again. They took the back way through St James's into Arlington Street.

  Chaplin and a cousin sat white-faced in the Lanchester, the doors locked and the windows up. Grinning faces pressed against the glass. The cars inched forward. More police materialised. Chaplin was ordered out. They had reached the Ritz side entrance. He refused to use it. He was home in triumph. As a lowly music hall performer, he had often dreamed of staying at the Ritz. The crowd had come to see him take his place among the rich and famous, the little tramp among the toffs. He announced that he would enter at the front.

  The cars edged into Piccadilly. Chaplin got out and stood waving on the running-board. The people surged towards him. The Deputy Commissioner was in despair. By some amazing gift of character or training, Chaplin controlled his public. He made a simple speech. They listened solemnly. They cheered. They let him go inside. But they would not disperse. A double line of traffic stood from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus. Chaplin was in the Regal Suite. He had the windows opened. He gathered the carnations from a vase and threw them to the crowd. It was hours before the police could be withdrawn.

  Late that night, the Deputy Commissioner came back to Scotland Yard. He had to clear his desk. He was hungry and his feet ached. He went swiftly through his correspondence. He read the wireless message and the Commissioner's droll comment: Comedians are your department. He did not smile.

  Walter Dew was vivid in his memory. It was his opinion that Dew was not a great detective, despite his reputation. He had been careless over evidence. He had been far too tender-hearted. He had betrayed a lot of sympathy for the murderer Crippen. He had been lucky to convict him and he knew it. On the day that the appeal was lost, Walter Dew had left the force. He was only in his forties at the time. The Deputy Commissioner had never seen a man so glad to take his pension. Dew had gone to live in Worthing, on the coast. It was strange that he should turn up on an ocean liner, offering to assist with an investigation.

  But Dew was an enigma. And at sea, the captain's word was law. It would be interesting to see if Chief Inspector Dew was. equal to his legend.

  What could Scotland Yard do now, except take note?

  The Deputy Commissioner ticked the message, tossed it in a tray, dismissed it from his mind and went to find a taxi.

  Next day a clerk consigned the message to a box-file.

  2

  The man who would become the false Inspector Dew was called Baranov. His life had been unexceptional until 7 May, 1915, when he was unwittingly involved in one of the notorious incidents of the first world war.

  The water off the southern coast of Ireland was dead calm, and a pure, pellucid green. Reflected sunlight shimmered on the huge hull of the Cunard liner Lusitania, steaming towards the port of Queenstown with nearly two thousand passengers and crew and a secret cargo of two hundred and twenty tons of ammunition and sixty-six tons of the explosive pyroxylin. She had been instructed to divert into Queenstown following reports of a German U-boat in the channel ahead.

  At 2.10pm the lookout in the crow's-nest saw a clear white track cleaving the water on the starboard side. From its line and speed it could only be the trail of bubbles of compressed air emitted by the driving motor of a torpedo. It was certain to hit the ship. He shouted to the bridge.

  Captain William Turner had taken lunch on the bridge as usual. He was a veteran of the days of sail, with no liking for the social life aboard a modern passenger liner. On the previous evening he had steeled himself to join the first class passengers for dinner. After it, in the smoking room, they had staged a veritable inquisition. They had a spokesman called Baranov, a veteran music hall performer who was travelling back to England with his son. Baranov senior had his leg in plaster. His manner was aggressive. He had demanded to be told why the cabin stewards had blacked out the portholes, why the lifeboats had been swung out on their davits and why the officers were stopping passengers from lighting their cigars on deck. Captain Turner had explained that these were routine precautions in a war zone. This had not appeared to reassure Baranov.

  The torpedo struck the Lusitania slightly forward of the bridge. A mass of water, smoke and wreckage blocked the captain's view. He shouted to the quartermaster to close all watertight doors that were not already secured. He checked the instruments for evidence of fire or flood below. The ship was listing fifteen degrees.

  A second, heavier explosion rocked the Lusitania. It was not another torpedo. It was the secret cargo destroying her from within. Captain Turner gave the order to lower the boats, and then was horrified to feel a coolness on his face through the smoke and dust. Incredibly, the ship was still under way. So long as she was moving, the lifeboats could not be safely lowered.

  Third Engineer George Little heard the captain order full speed astern to halt the onward movement of the ship. He felt sick with fear. The last inspection of the valves in the low pressure turbine had revealed a defect. The captain had been warned that full speed astern could cause a dangerous feedback of steam. Little had no choice. He obeyed the order. There was an immediate blowback, fracturing a main steam pipe. Stunned and frightened, Little reacted by throwing the engine room controls back to full steam ahead. The blowback had reduced the head of steam, but the Lusitania still made way steadily.

  Lunch is never hurried on an ocean liner, and many first class passengers were in the white and gold Louis Seize dining saloon when the torpedo struck. Walter Baranov was with his crippled father at a table near
the entrance staircase. He led the movement to the deck to see what had happened. The foredeck was already under water and it was obvious that the ship would sink. He forced his way back to his father. Baranov senior was an acrobat. Touring in America, he had fallen from the highwire and sustained a compound fracture of the leg. The son, an army dentist, had been granted leave to help him back to England. The father's crutches slowed them. They were the last to leave the saloon.

  On the boat deck things were happening that would haunt the dreams of survivors for their remaining lives. The listing of the ship had swung the starboard lifeboats out of reach, so there was a rush to occupy the lifeboats on the port side. When Staff Captain Anderson, the officer responsible, assembled his men at their stations, the eleven conventional lifeboats and the thirteen collapsibles underneath them were crammed with frightened passengers, up to eighty in each. As a precaution against a dangerous inward swing, each boat was fitted with a chain that linked the inboard gunwale to the edge of the deck. Third Officer Albert Bestic asked for help to swing the first boat outwards, over the ship's side. It weighed almost five tons when unladen; the human cargo was as heavy again.

  As the volunteers began to push, someone released the chain.

  The boat lurched inwards over the helpless volunteers and crashed onto the people sitting below it in the collapsible. The wreckage of two lifeboats and a hundred screaming injured slid forward with the tilt of the ship and smashed against the superstructure of the bridge.

  Within seconds the carnage was repeated with the next boat. Even as officers screamed at passengers to climb out, three more lifeboats hit the deck and careered into the bloody heap of splintered wood and bodies.

  Cabin stewardess Katherine Barton was below on BDeck checking that the first class passengers were all alerted. Many of the doors stood open. The richest passenger on board, Alfred Vanderbilt, had vacated number 8, and the theatre producer, Carl Frohman, was out of 10, but there was a sound from 12, the stateroom of Mrs Delia Hawkman, a New York socialite. Stewardess Barton looked in and saw someone at the dressing table. It was not Mrs Hawkman. It was a stocky young man in a dark suit. He was in the act of filling his pockets from an open jewel case. Stewardess Barton challenged him. The looter turned and swung the jewel case at her head.

  In the same corridor, cabin steward Hamilton was checking the odd-numbered staterooms, unaware of what had happened. He heard a door slam and saw a young man he did not recognize come towards him. Hamilton reminded the young man to take a life jacket, but he pushed past without a word and sprinted towards the companionway. Hamilton resumed his check. He reached the end and realised that stewardess Barton had stopped checking the other side. He went back and found the door of stateroom 12 was locked. She was inside on the floor, insensible, blood running from her mouth and nose. Both Hamilton and Barton were among the survivors.

  On the boat deck, Staff Captain Anderson had succeeded in persuading sufficient passengers to vacate a lifeboat to manhandle it over the rails. As it was lowered to the level of the promenade deck below, more people tried to climb aboard. Those inside had to fight them off with oars. Someone in the boat shouted upwards to the crewmen to lower away. Something went wrong. The fall supporting the stern of the lifeboat gave way. The boat upended, pitching everyone into the sea. It swung a moment there, and then the bow fall broke. The five-ton lifeboat plunged onto the people in the water.

  Three more lifeboats splintered on the projecting rivets of the Lusitania's port flank. They broke up and sank.

  Staff Captain Anderson was one of the Lusitania's dead.

  Isaac Lehmann, a New Yorker, had collected a revolver from his stateroom. He went to a lifeboat that had not been launched. It was packed with passengers. A seaman stood, axe in hand, waiting to cut the falls as the deck sank to the level of the sea. Lehmann insisted that the boat was launched without delay. He drew his gun and threatened to shoot to kill. The seaman freed the snubbing chain and the boat plunged onto the collapsible below it and slid, like the others, down the slope of the deck. Some thirty people were crushed to death. Lehmann survived.

  A number of passengers and crew declined to join the scramble for the lifeboats. Alfred Vanderbilt and Mr and Mrs Carl Frohman were seen in the entrance hall tying life jackets to the basketwork cots in which several babies had been sleeping in the nursery after lunch. Vanderbilt, the Frohmans and the infants in the cots were drowned.

  Some fifteen minutes after the first explosion, the bow of the Lusitania struck the granite ocean floor. The stern pivoted high above the water, the propellors still revolving. Hundreds were still aboard. Some worked hopelessly to free more lifeboats. Others waited calmly to step into the waves as the stern settled. Among them were Walter Baranov and his crippled father. They kept afloat until they were helped aboard a lifeboat.

  A boiler burst. One of the four huge funnels heeled over in a cloud of steam and sparks. Seconds later, the ship itself was gone. Its captain, William Turner, remained clinging to the navigation bridge until the water swept him clear. He was one of the survivors. As he arrived for the subsequent Board of Trade inquiry, he was handed a white feather.

  In all, the survivors from the Lusitania numbered 764. Many of these had fallen or jumped or stepped into the water and climbed aboard the half-dozen lifeboats successfully launched from the starboard side. Others stayed afloat by clinging to wreckage. One officer and his mother climbed aboard the grand piano from the main lounge.

  1201 lives were lost. For days after, bodies were found on the Irish beaches. The search was furthered by rewards from the Cunard Company and the relatives.?1 was offered for each body found;?2 for each American;?1000 for Alfred Vanderbilt.

  PART TWO

  Limelight

  1

  The next stage in the making of the false Inspector started in the spring of 1921.

  In the dental chair, Alma Webster focused on Mr Baranov's right hand and ignored the probe he was holding. She studied the crop of fine, fair hairs on his fingers and followed their course along the back of his hand as far as the shirtcuff. On his wrist they sprouted more thickly and wildly.

  She loved him to distraction.

  This was the third appointment in a course of treatment that would last at least six weeks. 'Not that you need be concerned about the state of your teeth,' Mr Baranov had explained. 'For a young lady of- what are you? — twenty-four? — they are in fine condition. A cavity here and there, that's all. No extractions will be necessary. I believe in conserving teeth, Miss Webster, not removing them. I work slowly, and I make no apology for that. It will encroach on your valuable time, but you have my word that you will not be disappointed with the result.'

  Alma did not begrudge a moment of her valuable time. Her dislike of dental treatment had practically evaporated when she had first stepped into the surgery in Eaton Place. It was furnished like a room in the Winter Palace, with a glittering chandelier, a log fire blazing in a massive brick and brass hearth, gilt-framed portraits of wild Cossacks on black hunters, a golden Afghan carpet and leather armchairs made for people the size of Chaliapin. There was an aroma of Balkan cigarettes. Mr Baranov had been writing at an ebony desk. He had risen at once, smiled, and given a slight bow. As their eyes had met, Alma had felt a pricking under her skin, the kindling of something strange.

  She had not corrected Mr Baranov about her age. She was twenty-eight.

  At fifteen she had discovered the romantic novels of Ouida. They had become her most treasured possessions. She had been amazed to find how much she had in common with Vere Herbert, the heroine of Moths. She, too, had a passion for books and scenery. She, too, was quite unconscious of her own great beauty. She, too, had a feckless mother who scarcely knew her. And she saw with startling clarity that there were only two sorts of men in the world — paragons like the brilliant, vulnerable tenor, Correze, and brutes like Prince Zouroff, intent on having their unspeakable way with hapless girls. It had taken writing of great force to challenge
Ouida in Alma's affection, but eventually Ethel M. Dell succeeded with the climax of The Way of an Eagle, when Nick proposed to Muriel on a mountain peak and a meteor fell from Heaven.

  That was before the war. The war had changed everything. She had stopped reading novels. She had taken a job. Like the women working in munitions factories, she had cut her hair. She had had it bobbed. She was not herself employed in a munitions factory, because there were none within a bus-ride of her home. She had dealt with correspondence to the Richmond and Twickenham Times. When she had got home after having her hair bobbed, she had looked in the mirror and discovered that her face had changed. It was no longer beautiful. It was heroic. She had deep-set eyes with long, dark lids capable of seeing the worst of the world with compassion. Her nose, she noticed, was a fraction too long in profile, but as she no longer tossed her head or turned shyly away from the opposite sex, it did not matter in the least. Her mouth had stopped looking like a cupid's bow. It was small and resolute. Her complexion was pale and her neck and ears were unadorned. She lived alone in a white, three-storied house on Richmond Hill that had once belonged to her Aunt Laura. At night she knitted socks and balaclava helmets for the men on the Front.

  When the Armistice came, it was difficult for Alma to adapt. She had learned how to conduct herself in a country at war. She was not impoverished, and she really did not need to work. She resigned her job at the newspaper. But soon she took a part-time job, three days a week, in a flower-shop next to the railway station. It made her feel useful again. It gave her opportunities to comfort the bereaved when they came in to order wreaths and sprays. She told them her man had not returned from France. She also liked the flower shop because gentlemen with spats and walking sticks called there to buy buttonholes. She started wearing a little rouge. She looked so pale among the roses.