The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  The volunteer Special was on his feet again. Stephen Reed came out of the room and closed the door behind him. He closed it gently, as if not to disturb the sleep of those inside.

  He straightened and said to the first of the two intruders, “Now, sir. What can you tell me?”

  And the older man leaned forward and put his hand on the detective’s arm. He looked intently into Stephen Reed’s eyes and said, in a tone as if imparting a deep confidence, “Those children were torn by beasts.”

  Stephen Reed’s expression did not change.

  “Beasts,” he said.

  “Of a form that the human mind can barely encompass. Your search parties won’t find them. They arise, do what they will, and then vanish away.”

  He waited for a reaction. The second man stepped in close and touched his companion’s shoulder; the older man was aware of it, and the shift in his posture acknowledged it, but he did not take his eyes from Stephen Reed’s. He would stay there until he had a response.

  The detective said, “Thank you, Sir Owain. I’ll make a note of that.”

  The other man had a proper hold on Sir Owain, and Sir Owain, satisfied that he’d been heard, allowed himself to be drawn away. Not so much by a friend or a companion as by a keeper.

  Speaking out for the first time, Sebastian called after him, saying, “Sir Owain Lancaster. Yes?”

  Sir Owain turned back on hearing his name.

  Sebastian went on, “My name is Sebastian Becker. You should be expecting a visit from me.”

  The second man, whom Sebastian assumed to be Dr. Hubert Sibley, Lancaster’s personal physician, said, “Surely not tonight?”

  “We’ll make it tomorrow morning,” Sebastian said. “I’m staying at the Sun Inn. Can you send your car to pick me up at ten?”

  Sibley didn’t try to argue. “I’m sure that will be acceptable,” he said. “We’ll be ready for you then.”

  As for Sir Owain, it was as if he’d said his piece. Now he was happy to do whatever he was told.

  Dr. Sibley finally succeeded in drawing his patient away and ushered him out to their waiting car. Stephen Reed let out a breath and then closed his eyes, taking a moment to settle his mind. Outside, Sebastian could hear the Daimler being started on its crank.

  Here in the corridor, there was a moment’s silence. The Special waited for the reprimand that he probably didn’t think he deserved.

  Then, choosing his words with care, Stephen Reed said, “You know more of this than you’ve been saying, Mister Becker, and you’ve known it all along.”

  “The camera?” Sebastian prompted.

  Stephen Reed hesitated, wary of saying anything more that the Special might overhear and repeat.

  “This way,” he said to Sebastian, and led the way to a storage room adjoining the scullery.

  The room was small and had been cleared of its usual contents in order to fit in two more of the folding tables. All the pieces of evidence from the woodland scene had been laid out separately, like parts of a puzzle or a toy requiring assembly. Shoes, the contents of the wicker basket, the bloodstained cloth bags fished from the gorse.

  Stephen Reed surveyed the arrangement.

  “Any sign of interference?” Sebastian said.

  “I don’t believe so.”

  In the middle of one table stood the varnished wooden box that Sebastian had taken from the boy soldier, and which had been taken from him in turn.

  “Is that the camera you meant?” Stephen Reed said. “I took it for some kind of an instrument case. It’s not like any camera that I’ve seen.”

  “Nor me,” Sebastian said. “But there’s a maker’s plate and a patent number, and that surely is some kind of a lens on the side. We shouldn’t try to do anything with it. This calls for professional advice. Did I see a photographer’s studio on the main street?”

  “The local photographer went out with the search,” Stephen Reed said, turning the box around and squinting to read the maker’s plate in the poor light. “I’ll have him look at this first thing in the morning.”

  Carefully, he set the box back in its place. Sebastian was looking at the two bloodstained bags. The blood had dried and the print was difficult to read, but they appeared to be flour bags.

  “Those were lying close to the bodies,” Stephen Reed said.

  “Not covering the faces?”

  “I think they probably were. They may have been pulled from the heads of the children as they were dragged out into the open. But I can’t get the soldiers to say.”

  “Why did the soldiers move them at all?”

  “Because they thought it was required of them. Like corpses from the field of battle. They’d have put the bodies on a cart and brought them back into town if they’d had one.”

  “This is not a consequence of child-stripping,” Sebastian said. “You surely can’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, you and I. But I suggest that now it’s time to share your knowledge.”

  “That is awkward,” Sebastian said, “given that it involves both Sir Owain and your own superiors to some degree.”

  “In what way, exactly?”

  “Come to the inn when your business here is done,” Sebastian said, “and I can show you what I mean.”

  EIGHT

  As Sebastian Becker was leaving the assembly rooms in Arnmouth, back in South London his wife was locking away the ledgers that she’d been studying for the past two hours. The heavy books with their pages of close writing went into a cupboard in the receiving office of the Evelina Hospital on Southwark Bridge Road.

  Elisabeth Becker had been working late, getting the August report for the Committee of Management into order. Elisabeth was the clerk to the hospital’s receiving officer, whose role it was to assess each patient’s family for their ability to pay. Treatment was free to children whose parents were without means. The Evelina was a charity hospital, and most of its patients were the children of the poor.

  The office was on the ground floor, close to the house surgeon’s rooms. This was an odd-shaped building, designed to fit a donated site in a crowded and busy part of Southwark. It was tall, with long curving sides and a flattened front end. Seen from the appropriate angle, its lines could remind a visitor of the rear view of an old-fashioned galleon towering overhead.

  On her way out Elisabeth bade a good evening to Mr. Briggs, who supervised the porters and kept order in the public areas. A onetime military man with no family, he lived in sparse quarters behind the postmortem room but was rarely to be found there. By day he stood in the hallway and directed visitors to their various destinations. By night he patrolled the stairwells and corridors. He had a straight back and a stern eye, but a bout of pneumonia last winter had left him perceptibly frail. Now he patrolled with the aid of a stick, and had been discouraged from passing through the wards after his shadowy figure and the steady thump of his staff had raised nightmares in some of the children.

  “Good night, Mister Briggs,” she said.

  “A good night to you, Mrs. Becker,” he said, with a slight bow of his head.

  It was a pity about the nightmares. They were understandable, but undeserved. Mr. Briggs always had a kind word for the children. It was their guardians who sometimes needed a reminder of authority. Most were respectful of being in a hospital, but some showed behavior that was affected by guilt, grief, drink, or any other of those factors that can render the human personality unpredictable under pressure.

  At the door, she passed two of the nurses coming in. They wore blue uniforms with white caps and aprons. They’d probably been over to Guy’s; Guy’s Hospital was only a few streets away, and staff often had cause to pass between the two.

  She stepped onto the street. Her head buzzed with figures, and her eyes ached from the strain of close work. It was already dark outside. But at least she was in the open now, if this busy and noisy road could be called such. Despite the racket of a passing tram, she felt a little o
f the tension lift.

  Her eyes hadn’t always ached so. Elisabeth’s last birthday had been her fortieth. She’d approached her forty-first year without any special apprehension, but now she didn’t know what to make of it. Every Englishwoman of forty or over seemed to regard herself as old, and to behave accordingly; but Elisabeth was a Philadelphian American, and didn’t care to consider herself among them.

  Was this reasonable? Or did she fool herself? The mirror showed lines, but not so many. Her mind was sharp, and she was still trim. But on the inside, there was a kind of dismay.

  She regretted none of the choices she’d made in her life. She might, however, have appreciated some advance warning about the speed with which life’s options would narrow.

  Heading up Southwark Bridge Road, she breathed in the air. South London air, a chilled brew of river and coal smoke and horses and fog. Ahead of her, several lines of railway track passed above the road on a mighty iron viaduct that roofed over the world as she entered the space beneath. For the next hundred yards ran a low riveted sky. Here in its shelter stood the all-night pie stand where cabbies stopped to refresh themselves and where Sebastian, when he was around, had an arrangement to pick up his messages.

  Once she’d had a goal, which was to find some excuse to bring their troubled son to London. A bad turn in her husband’s career had provided it. Now they were here, and she was finding it hard to settle on any further purpose to her life beyond the day-to-day.

  She often wished she could discuss these matters with Sebastian. But whenever she felt able to speak of them, Sebastian was always away on Lunacy business; and when he spent a few days at home, it was as if all the wrong feelings came rising to the fore.

  And she knew how he would respond. He would make suggestions. Tell your troubles to a man, and to the best of his ability he’d advise you how to fix them. Complain at that, and you’d bewilder him. Why seek advice, only in order to reject it? What, otherwise, could have been the point of the conversation?

  The evening fog put a hazy ring of light around every streetlamp. Five minutes’ walk ahead was the river. Beyond the river, the great shining capital, while behind her spread Southwark’s unhealthy warren of tenements, warehouses, and overcrowded dwellings, along with its churches, workshops, and gilded public houses.

  She rarely crossed the river. When she reached Southwark Street, she turned right. These days her journeys were always the same; from home to the Evelina, from the Evelina to her home.

  Such as it was. Four rooms and an attic above a wardrobe maker’s, reached by a stairway between two shops. It was her second home in London, and their sixth or seventh in the past nine years. Back when Sebastian had been the rising British Pinkerton man in the Philadelphia office, they’d rented a neat row house in a nice part of town.

  Life was different now. And in at least one respect, it surely was better. It was for Robert’s sake that she’d sold her mother’s emeralds to get them here, and there could be no question that he’d gained by the move.

  She was passing the chocolate factory, a Victorian building that was straining to be something more French and fancy. Its windows were busy with flutes and fruit and columns and added detail. She was close to home now. Her last turn would be into a side street after the next railway bridge, across from the Borough Market.

  Their son, Robert, had recently turned eighteen. He’d been a child of fearsome intelligence and overpowering obsessions; loving, articulate, and blessed with a phenomenal memory. But he was also a child who could be rendered mute and uncooperative by any attempt to impose discipline upon him. Rare was the teacher or physician who’d spare the time or the patience to understand the boy’s needs. Everyone to whom they turned would class him as subnormal, or as feebleminded at best.

  Elisabeth had read journals and learned papers, but it was a chance remark by her own clinician that had led her to the work in London of Dr. John Langdon Down. In a series of lectures to the Medical Society the doctor had described many of Robert’s attributes, concluding that the condition was the product of something other than the congenital or the merely accidental. Here, at last, she’d thought, was someone who might understand.

  Down had founded an institute for his patients, a family-run community on the outskirts of London, based on principles of education and compassion. Elisabeth had written to him there, only to learn that the doctor had passed on. His sons were continuing his work. Reginald Langdon Down had advised caution over her hopes for Robert. He might be helped, but it was wrong to hope for anything so conclusive as a cure.

  After an hour spent with Robert, mainly discussing the dime magazines of which the boy had an encyclopedic knowledge, Dr. Reginald had recommended a private day college run by a colleague in South Hampstead. They’d managed to secure him a place. Robert had begun to flourish there and, for the first time in his life, to be happy outside the home.

  It had been a struggle for the family. They had no income and were four in number, including Elisabeth’s unmarried sister, Frances. But then, with letters of introduction secured from the Down brothers, her husband had found employment with Sir James Crichton-Browne, the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy.

  Crichton-Browne’s investigator was on the point of retiring, and the Visitor had need of a man with Sebastian’s talents. The work suited his skills, but the pay was not good. Elisabeth had taken her job at the hospital, and Frances, when not accompanying Robert across town, took in piecework for a local haberdasher.

  Here was their street. Some would call it an alley. She looked up at the windows above the wardrobe maker’s and saw that the sitting-room lamps were lit. Their previous lodgings had been wired for electricity, but they hadn’t been able to afford to use it.

  This was not the life that she’d dreamed of, but this was the life that she had. Her son seemed happy, and only in her worst moments did she find herself resenting him for it. Sebastian would be home in a day or two.

  It was far from perfection. But what would she change? Here was one aspect of her existence that she never could have predicted: that so many of the things that she valued would have been born out of her disappointments. Which made it impossible for her to wish her disappointments away.

  And now she was home.

  She let herself into the tiny hallway between the piano shop and the wardrobe maker’s, and ascended the stairway to her waiting family.

  NINE

  It was Sebastian’s habit, when away from London,to send a postcard home at the first opportunity. His wife would be assured of his safe arrival, and if it was a picture card then Robert could add it to his collection.

  His Arnmouth card that evening was a plain one from a sixpenny packet in his luggage, and when writing it he made no mention of the afternoon’s events. He addressed it in his room and then took it downstairs to give to the landlord for the morning collection.

  He walked into a fug of beer and smoke. In the hour since his return from the assembly hall, the bar had been opened. The saloon and public rooms were now filled with local men, some the whistle-wetters from that afternoon, others still in their volunteer armbands. Despite the shadow that had been cast by the day, there was nothing subdued about their conversation. Tragedy always sharpened a community.

  “Will you take a drink, Mister Becker?” the landlord asked him over the roar. The landlord’s name was Bill Turnbull, and he’d shed his constable’s jacket to work the pumps.

  “I was hoping to get some supper,” Sebastian said. “Is there any possibility?”

  “I’ll send Dolly out when she’s got a minute,” Bill Turnbull said, “if you don’t mind a wait.”

  Supposing it would make no difference if he did mind, Sebastian agreed that he didn’t. He ordered a brandy and then, turning from the bar, spied Ralph Endell. The blacksmith was behind a table with three or four others, in a nook between the fireplace and the dining room. Endell made a gesture of invitation, and Sebastian went over.

  They mad
e space for him. Sebastian supposed that he’d be expected to stand the group a round at some point, and that point came rather quickly. He called Dolly over. She fetched the drinks on a tray and took his order for a sandwich and a bowl of the local fish stew.

  They knew that he’d been to the spot where the bodies were found, and wanted to know more. He gave them an account of his arrival at the scene and his treatment at the hands of the army, with as little of the indelicate detail as he could include. In return he picked up the taproom gossip and speculation, which had no real substance to it at all. No local man could ever do such a thing, so it must have been gypsies, tinkers, or German spies.

  “We’ll see what happens tomorrow,” one of the party said. “When the proper police get here.” He had small hands, wire spectacles, and a hank of hair that he’d arranged across his balding head in the hope of persuading the world that it grew there.

  Ralph Endell had spoken the truth when he’d said that no man was ever a prophet in his own land. Penny Dreadfuls and story papers had recreated police detectives as exotic figures of adventure. A local boy like Stephen Reed could never expect to be taken seriously as one of their number.

  After twenty minutes or so, and with no sign yet of his supper, Sebastian saw Stephen Reed enter. Reed called the landlord down to the end of the bar, and the two of them were in conversation for a while. Then Bill Turnbull reached under the bar and brought out the residents’ register.

  Sebastian excused himself to the company and went over.

  He found that Stephen Reed was arranging rooms for the senior detectives and other officers who’d be arriving in the morning to take over the case. The young detective sergeant didn’t seem despondent about it. If anything, he seemed relieved. A weight would be off his shoulders. He explained as much to Sebastian and declined to join him in a brandy.