The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  He could not easily relate the figures on the screen to the bodies that he’d seen the night before. Though made of nothing but light, these girls were life itself. Whereas those bodies, though flesh and blood, had borne the full weight of death.

  Now here they were, in summer dresses and grown-ups’ hats, with a backdrop of lawn and rhododendron. One bright girl, one dark one. Their antics would never change. Nor would they age.

  Nothing really happened. The girls were doing the kinds of things that people do when someone points a camera at them for no special reason. Just standing there in the garden, hesitant, smiling, uncertain.

  Sebastian was disappointed. These scenes had been made earlier in the summer, probably by Florence’s father. They told nothing of the night the girls had died.

  Then the scene changed. Though the film continued, the screen went dim.

  Sedgewick turned to the open door of the projection booth and called out to Will, “What’s the neg like?”

  “Very thin,” Will replied.

  Satisfied, Sedgewick returned his attention to the screen.

  Something was happening there. It was hard to make out what. Something seemed to move in the shadows, and then to rush toward the camera.

  “My God!” one of the sideshow workers said.

  The rest of the film was blank after that.

  Around the same time, back in her old bedroom, Evangeline May Bancroft sat on her bed with the curtains thrown back, looking at the moon across the rooftops. The moonlight caused roof slates to shine like polished iron.

  She had made it home with nothing to spare. When she’d climbed off the bicycle to walk it back into the shed, her legs had been unsteady. Through the anxiety or the exertion, it was impossible to say.

  After her conversation with Grace, the hunger to know was fiercer than ever. Something had once happened to her. Something had shaped her, but she couldn’t say what. However awful, she needed to understand it. If she knew herself better, her life might be different.

  This had been Evangeline’s first return to Arnmouth in some time. A year, at least, since her cousin’s wedding, where the local women had gathered at the church gate for a sight of the bride. She wrote to her mother every week, and received a letter in return, so she was reasonably au courant with local affairs-who’d left, who’d died, which of her contemporaries was now married and to whom. For her part, she wrote of exhibitions and concerts that she’d attended, of anything interesting that happened in her work, and the seesawing health of her landlady’s cat, which was a fighter.

  One time, when Lydia had written at unusual length about cousins and weddings and children, she’d responded, Few men in London seem to care for a provincial girl with strong opinions about life. I rather fear, Mother, that you may have to resign yourself to having raised an old maid.

  She hadn’t been entirely honest in writing it. She’d had no lack of suitors in London, despite her making no efforts to invite them. They appeared, they persisted for a while, and then eventually they gave up and looked elsewhere. She did nothing to drive them away. She actually preferred the company of men to women. But she did nothing to encourage them beyond a certain point.

  In Evangeline, the prospect of intimacy raised complex emotions. Intimacy was like a ship to her. A picturesque thing on the horizon, but intimidating when it loomed overhead.

  She’d indicated to her mother that a life alone-much like Lydia’s own, in fact-was more appealing to her than any alternative.

  And in that, she supposed that she’d lied.

  TWENTY

  Where can I find detective Reed?” Sebastian asked when he finally reached the Sun Inn, late the next morning. “I have something for him.”

  “He’s over at the assembly rooms,” Dolly the cook said. “He’s been looking for you, too. I had to tell him your bed wasn’t slept in.”

  “I spent the night elsewhere. Though not by design.”

  She looked him over.

  “So I can see,” she said, and she reached across the bar counter and plucked a piece of straw from his lapel. She said, “You missed all the excitement.”

  “What excitement?”

  “Over the murderer, of course. They’ve caught him.”

  That snapped him to full attention. Sebastian had been fighting the urge toward a hot bath and a shave, after sleeping in his clothes in one of the traveling fair’s spare wagons. Midmorning he’d transferred to a boneshaker of a bus that served the valleys. It had dropped him within half a mile of the town, and he’d walked the rest of the way. Sir Owain would be getting a strongly worded note about his driver’s behavior.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “Some gypsy,” she said. “Just like everyone thought.”

  THE INQUEST had taken place earlier that morning, in the main hall of the assembly rooms. At one point the jury had trooped through to the back room to view the bodies. Even as the coroner had been reviewing the events leading to the girls’ discovery, the detectives had been making their arrest. Now there was a police van outside the assembly rooms, and all of the doors had been thrown open to air the place. A caretaker was scrubbing down the corridors. Sebastian had to step around him to get to the back rooms, where Stephen Reed was labeling his evidence boxes for transfer to the waiting vehicle.

  Sebastian said, “I’m told you’ve got your man.”

  “An itinerant,” Stephen Reed said. “A rag-and-bone man with a puppet peep show. We’re pressing him for a confession, but he’s a simpleton.”

  “You’re not happy.”

  “Of course I’m happy,” Stephen Reed said with ill-concealed bitterness. “In my experience, a simpleton’s good for a confession to anything. In fact the same can be said of any man, if you go at him for long enough.”

  Sebastian said, “Is there a witness? Or any evidence?”

  “Evidence enough for an arrest,” Stephen Reed said. “He had some of the girls’ clothing on his cart. The parents have looked at the pieces and identified them.” He tilted one of the unsealed boxes to show the tagged and labeled clothing inside it.

  “I came to return this to you,” Sebastian said, and set the moving-picture camera down on the table.

  Stephen Reed looked at it. “Did you find anything?”

  “A few domestic scenes. And, at the end, a few seconds of an indistinguishable shape, flying toward the picture-taker. The people I consulted did their best, but they’re show folk. A scientific analysis might tell us more.”

  The young policeman nodded slowly.

  “I see,” he said, turning away. “Well, it’s all academic now. As you say, we have our man.”

  Sebastian placed his hand on the younger man’s arm and surprised him with the strength he used to keep him in place. He checked the room behind them and then lowered his voice. “What do you think?”

  Stephen Reed hesitated for a while, as if at a door that he knew he might regret opening.

  Then he said, “There’s no way that the man we’ve arrested could also have carried out the attack on Evangeline and Grace. At that time he was in the king’s navy, far overseas. Receiving the wounds that have addled his brain.”

  “Then perhaps they’re unrelated after all?”

  “Evangeline and Grace may not have died, but they were cruelly handled in a similar way. Their hands were tied behind them and bags were placed over their heads. And whether they remember it or not, someone interfered with them. A doctor inspected them and there can be no doubt of it. After the assault they were thrown alive into a gully where gorse bushes broke their fall. They struggled free and made their way back home. They reappeared all scratched and torn and claiming no memory of where they had been.”

  “Then what-”

  “Both incidents even began with the same childish dare. The one back then, and the one this week. Both pairs of girls made a camp on the moors. Their plan was to sit up to watch …”

  “For a beast?” Sebastian said, with a suddenness th
at surprised even him.

  “Our local legend,” Stephen Reed said. “Beasts, and rumors of beasts. But never any proof of beasts. Personally, I’ve never seen a thing on the moor. But then I’ve never been a drinking man.”

  “So who do you favor for it?”

  “Oh, Mister Becker,” Stephen Reed said. “Given a free choice in a perfect world, we both know who I’m starting to favor for it. Him and his beasts and his trail of the Amazon dead. The problem is, I don’t have a scrap of evidence to offer in support.”

  “Where was Sir Owain on that first occasion?”

  “All I can establish is that he was in residence at Arnside Hall,” Stephen Reed said. “Fresh back from his South American jaunt but with his memoirs unwritten and his reputation still intact. But why should I worry? The rag-and-bone man did it.”

  “It’s time I spoke to your superintendent.”

  “Good luck with that,” Stephen Reed said.

  The man waxed his mustache. In Sebastian’s book, that was never a good sign. His name was George Hartley and he accepted Sebastian’s credentials at a glance, without seeming to be impressed by them.

  “I know the Visitor’s role,” he said. “It’s to protect the business affairs of lunatics. What have you to offer me? I can spare you five minutes.”

  “I fear that a wider issue is being overlooked.”

  “You think so? Convince me.”

  “I have a list of earlier incidents from this area. All of them with some aspect in common with your case.”

  “I’ve seen your list. There are no actual murders on it. Whereas for this one I have a culprit, and I have his confession.”

  “A confession from an ill-educated man who’s probably yet to grasp, in any meaningful way, that his eagerness to comply with his captors will send him to a hanging.”

  “His education has nothing to do with it.”

  “There are many similarities between this and the one fully documented case on that paper.”

  “And many differences, too.”

  “They don’t undo the comparison, or make it any less valid. I think they give a tantalizing picture of a madman’s mental process. The differences make sense if you take them as evidence of an evolving state of mind.”

  Sebastian went on to explain. With Evangeline and Grace, their assailant had tied their hands and thrown them alive into a gorse-filled gully on a forlorn part of the moor. He had not killed them, but had surely meant for them to die. It was the action of a man who wanted a certain result, but not to feel responsibility for it. He did not consider himself a murderer. By some peculiar logic, he probably felt that he could avoid guilt by being elsewhere when death finally came.

  It was their survival and return that had forced a change in his method the next time. Only luck had saved him from discovery. This time, he’d battered them to be sure. Bagging their heads had saved him from seeing their faces when he did it. He still did not consider himself a murderer. A man who killed when forced to it, perhaps. But in his mind the fault lay with the forces, not with him.

  On both occasions, Sir Owain Lancaster had entered the story uninvited and shown his concern for the victims. He was a prominent local figure, and both discoveries had been made on land that was part of his estate. But the fact that he blamed imaginary creatures, and was now under investigation by the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, must surely call his innocence into question.

  George Hartley said, “There’s nothing here I haven’t heard before. What’s your game, Mister Becker? What exactly were you sent here to achieve?”

  “I’ll be open with you, sir. My task was to establish whether Sir Owain Lancaster is merely a harmless fantasist or a man capable of expressing his madness by causing suffering in others.”

  “And you have not done so. Good day to you, sir.”

  Then Sebastian and Stephen Reed took a shortcut up a winding flight of steps behind the Ship Hotel and the Methodist church to the houses above the town, with the intention of calling on Evangeline Bancroft.

  She wasn’t at the house. No one was. Stephen Reed looked in the shed, and her bicycle was there.

  “Perhaps she’s meeting her mother for lunch,” Sebastian suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Stephen Reed said.

  They went down to the library. There were four or five browsers, and one reader at the tables. Lydia Bancroft was busy in the restricted section, where the rare editions and the mildly racy subjects kept company on the shelves. She was visibly pleased to see Stephen Reed. Less pleased to see Sebastian. And she had surprising news for them.

  “Evangeline’s already gone,” she said.

  “Gone where?” Stephen Reed said.

  “She took an early train back to London. She asked me to give you this.”

  She held out an envelope with Stephen Reed’s name on it. The young policeman hesitated, and then took it. He hooked his little finger under the flap and tore it open to read there and then.

  As Stephen Reed moved aside, Sebastian said to Lydia Bancroft, “I’m sorry that I missed her. We had something of great importance to discuss. Can you give me your daughter’s address in London?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lydia said. “She specifically asked me not to.”

  “The address of her employer, then?”

  “That, too. She doesn’t want you contacting her at all, Mister Becker. No one appreciates being misled. Everyone knows who you are now. You’re the special investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy. You didn’t come here to save children. You came here to harass a decent man with a view to depriving him of his liberty.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Sebastian said.

  “And I’m sure you imagine that’s an apology,” Lydia Bancroft said. She turned to Stephen Reed, who was now replacing Evangeline’s letter in its envelope.

  “Stephen,” she said, “if you want to write to Evangeline, I can forward any letters.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bancroft,” Stephen Reed said, and gave a glance to Sebastian that suggested they should leave.

  Outside on the street, he gave Evangeline’s note to Sebastian.

  In black ink with a neat hand, she had written,

  I learned this morning that the police have their man and that is that. This alone would not have caused me to leave without further discussion, but I have to tell you that I do not appreciate the efforts of Mr Becker to make me his spy against a troubled man who has shown nothing but kindness to many. For you, Stephen, I will simply tell you this: you asked me to say if I remembered anything, and I think I have. I remember that Sir Owain came to the house after Grace and I had been found. I was lying in bed with that peculiar feeling one has when trying to remember a dream. I heard him speaking to my mother downstairs. I think he may have offered her some money in an act of simple charity. I expect he was more prosperous then. But my mother would not accept his offer. If he made the same financial gesture to Grace’s father, I expect he drank it. Please watch out for Grace, and do not allow Dr Sibley to drive her from her father’s land. She is a sad soul, and she has suffered enough.

  Sebastian said, “We can’t lose her. There’s too much at stake. An innocent man will hang and more children will probably suffer. I have an idea.”

  But the local postmistress was unable to give them Evangeline’s London address, even though she must have hand-franked a hundred or more of Lydia Bancroft’s letters. Sebastian had a suspicion that she’d been warned and wasn’t being entirely honest with them. She could remember that it was somewhere in Holborn, she said, but was blank on the name of the street.

  “Thank you, anyway,” Stephen Reed said. “And please don’t tell Mrs. Bancroft that we were asking.”

  He’d already assured Sebastian that Lydia Bancroft would learn of their ruse before the day was out.

  Sebastian said to the postmistress, “I understand you keep a monster book. A book of beasts?”

  “I put it out in the holiday weeks,” the po
stmistress told him. “For visitors to read.”

  “Did Florence Bell and Molly Button ever come in and look at it?”

  “I expect they did,” she said. “All the children do.”

  At his request, she brought it out. It was a scrapbook of handwritten stories and newspaper clippings, going back over some thirty years. He skipped the stories, which were mostly inconclusive observations, secondhand reports, or obvious fabrication. Some way back in the book he found something that caught his attention, a yellowed cutting from the area’s local newspaper. The glue that fixed it to the album was old and discolored, and was showing through. But the print was still readable.

  It was a diary piece, written to amuse, and it went:

  If you lack for entertainment, go out to Arnmouth and spend a few pennies in the bar of the Harbor Inn. For the price of a pint of the local ale, horse breeder Edward Eccles will tell you his tale of a beastly encounter on the moors; and a fine tale it is, that grows in embellishment with every retelling. In fact, we are confident that by the summer’s end, the Beast of Arnmouth will have sprouted a brood of fine children and be Mayor of the Borough. Tootle pip!

  Edward Eccles, breeder of horses; almost certainly the father of the foul-mouthed Grace. At the foot of the column was a humorous note from the editor, offering a cash prize to any visitor or local able to provide a picture or other conclusive proof of the Arnmouth Beast’s existence.

  Four young girls, separated by time. Two survived, two now gone.

  All torn by some beast.

  The police were leaving, the bodies were gone … the grieving relatives had ended their summer early and returned to the capital. Stephen Reed nursed his doubts, and a tinker sat in a police cell. The law was satisfied, even if others were not.

  On the pavement outside the post office, Sebastian said, “Don’t give up. I’ll find Evangeline in London, and I’ll press her for whatever was said. And I’ll take the printed copy of the moving-picture film and see what it can yield.”

  Stephen Reed said, “Good luck with that. I have duties now. I’ll be lucky if I even get to say good-bye to my dad.”