The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  Jacky ran out to greet him, then spun around and ran in ahead barking a welcome. He was a devoted little dog, but not a jealous one.

  Stephen Reed’s father, the town’s onetime harbormaster, was setting a kettle on the fire to make tea. He said, “Well? Are you any further on?”

  “I wasted my time,” Stephen Reed admitted. “I gave him the newspaper and he showed me his tomb in his private chapel. Out of all the estate, it’s the one part he seems to be keeping in repair.”

  “Really? I can’t imagine old Owain letting his property fall into ruin.”

  “You might be surprised,” Stephen Reed said.

  Before he’d been forced to sell it, Sir Owain’s steam yacht had been on a permanent mooring in the harbor. His father had known Sir Owain then, but would never claim to have known him well. He said he hadn’t disliked the man. But he’d thought him a little too eager to play the stepfather to all, as if buying the land had also bought him the town and the people, like a ready-made flock.

  He said, “Did he admit to anything? Or is he still insisting that dinosaurs followed him home?”

  “Father.”

  “The man’s as mad as a box of bats.”

  “Knowing that’s one thing. Proving murder’s another.”

  “Then what about your tinker?”

  “He’s never guilty.”

  “Everybody’s guilty of something,” his father said, and went to get the teapot.

  Stephen Reed stared into the fire. The fire had been made with wood from the beach, and a little coal. After decades of public responsibility, his father’s life was simple and his needs enviably few. Add to that his dog, and the rum and tobacco and his meals brought over by a woman from the Mermaid Inn, and you had it all.

  Stephen Reed’s own life seemed anything but simple, right now. These matters ate at him from within. He’d checked with the local grocer and learned that the coarse flour bags that had covered the two girls’ faces were of the same brand as those supplied to Arnside Hall. But the same could be said of half the hotels and larger private houses in the parish. And the bags turned up everywhere, reused for everything from onions to oyster shells.

  When the kettle started to boil and his father came back with the pot, Stephen Reed said, “No tea for me, Dad. I’ll have to be getting back.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Why, thank you, Father. It’s always nice to know I’m welcome.”

  “You should know what I mean. Get back to your proper police work and leave it, Stephen. Don’t go sticking your neck out. If it goes wrong, you’ll be made to suffer. And even if you’re proved right, you’ll only make enemies.”

  So Stephen Reed returned to his lodgings and his county duties. He signed in the next morning and by midday was out in the marshes with two uniformed men, hunting a thief named Little Billy. Little Billy stole from boats, stripping their brass fittings when he could find nothing of portable value. The three spent a fruitless afternoon among the barges and marsh cottages, where they were met with silence and hostility. When Stephen Reed trudged home that evening, he was wet and mud-soaked and short of temper.

  During the long walk back under a wide and empty sky, his thoughts inevitably strayed from Little Billy to the murdered children, and to the mystery surrounding Grace Eccles and Evangeline Bancroft.

  He hadn’t known Grace Eccles well. In fact, because of her father’s reputation, he’d been discouraged from having much to do with her at all. But he remembered her utter and abject poverty, and wished that he’d been kinder. She’d been open and cheerful then, as if no one had yet pointed out her disadvantages to her.

  And Evangeline. Sad Evangeline. The librarian’s daughter. A childhood friend in more innocent times, a distant island now.

  His lodging was in a house of single men, and because of the hour this was one of the few occasions when he didn’t have to queue for the bathroom. Mrs. Williams had the downstairs fire lit, so there was hot water from the back boiler. He left his topcoat and other clothes out for his landlady to do with what she could, lay in the bath, and let the day’s aches and chills soak away.

  He grew drowsy. Later, he might read. Though his married colleagues reckoned they had it harder and their expenses were greater, the things that they always complained about were the things that many single men could envy. Home, companionship, family, and an outlet for desire. The married men, in their turn, envied the single man his freedom.

  It would ever be thus, he imagined. It was one’s lot to achieve one state, only to yearn for its opposite. Nothing was ever so dear as that which had been lost.

  On returning to his room, he found that a note had been slipped under his door. He’d barely opened the note when Mrs. Williams came knocking to ensure that he’d seen it.

  He dressed in haste and went to find a telephone. It took the operator several minutes to get the connection to Arnmouth, and a while longer for Lydia Bancroft to be fetched to the receiver.

  “Stephen?” he eventually heard the librarian say. “Is that you?”

  “Mrs. Bancroft,” he said, “what is it? Has something happened to Evangeline?”

  “It’s Grace Eccles,” she said.

  “What about her?”

  “I hardly know how to say it.”

  But she went on to explain. A horse had been found wandering loose on Arnmouth’s main street that morning. It was a large and handsome animal, and it shied away from every approach and panicked at any attempt to get a rope onto it. No one could say where it might have come from, until someone spotted that it was missing an eye. Shy of people, and confused at its surroundings, the animal had taken some time to corner in a yard behind the Schooner Hotel; along the way it had kicked in a shop window, which had increased its agitation, and it had trampled several gardens, which had done nothing for local tempers.

  Someone remembered that Grace Eccles had been treating a one-eyed animal, and she was sent for. Word came back; she could not be found, but the gates to her fields were open, her animals had scattered to the moors, and her cottage had been ransacked. The doors had been thrown wide, her few pieces of furniture upset, and there was blood on the floor. In an incongruous detail, two measured glasses of clean drinking water stood untouched amid the chaos.

  Parish Constable Bill Turnbull had found her, lying in heather just a few hundred yards from her home. She was dead, and, as Lydia Bancroft put it, she had been “cruelly used.”

  “Stephen,” Lydia Bancroft said. “Please. It’s as if there’s a an awful shadow that has never left this town. If Grace was not safe after all these years, then I fear for Evangeline. They keep telling us it’s over. But it isn’t. What can we do?”

  Were it told in a romance that a female of delicate habit, accustomed to all the comforts of life, had been precipitated into a river; that, after being withdrawn when on the point of drowning, this female, the eighth of a party, had penetrated into unknown and pathless woods, and travelled in them for weeks, not knowing whither she directed her steps; that, enduring hunger, thirst, and fatigue to very exhaustion, she should have seen her two brothers, far more robust than her, a nephew yet a youth, three young women her servants, and a young man, the domestic left by the physician who had gone on before, all expire by her side, and she yet survive; that, after remaining by their corpses two whole days and nights, in a country abounding in tigers and numbers of dangerous serpents, without once seeing any of these animals or reptiles, she should afterwards have strength to rise, and continue her way, covered with tatters, through the same pathless wood for eight days together till she reached the banks of the Bobonasa, the author would be charged with inconsistency; but the historian should paint facts to his reader, and this is nothing but the truth.

  ACCOUNT OF THE ADVENTURES OF MADAME GODIN DESODONAIS, IN PASSING DOWN THE RIVER OF THE AMAZONS, IN THE YEAR 1770. LETTER FROM M. GODIN DESODONAIS TO M. DE LA CONDAMINE ST. AMAND, BERRY, 28 JULY 1773

  THIRTY-NINE

  When Evange
line went looking for Sebastian Becker at his home, she got no farther than the funeral wreath on the door. She knocked and waited, then knocked again, but no one answered. The wreath was a striking weave of laurel, lilies, and black feathers, but in the week since the funeral the petals had fallen and the leaves were beginning to curl. This was her third attempt to reach him. Perhaps Sebastian had taken his son and sister-in-law and gone away? She made inquiries at the wardrobe maker’s, but no one there could help.

  Then, in a moment of inspiration, she made her way through the borough’s streets to the pie stand under the railway bridge and there he was, at the stand’s folding side counter. He was a figure apart from the cabbies, looking through his work messages while taking sips of hot tea from a tin mug.

  He was unaware of her approach. She was almost at his shoulder when she spoke.

  “Sebastian,” she said, and he looked around in surprise.

  Her heart lurched at the sight of him. He bore all the signs of the blow that he’d sustained. The sleep-deprived pallor of his face, the dazed look in his eyes. As if they gazed on a reality other than this one, seeing a fading version of the world that he was reluctant to leave.

  He started to speak, hesitated, turned and set down his tin mug, and then said, “Miss Bancroft.”

  “Sebastian-” She had been pursuing him. With reluctance, but knowing that she must. But speaking to him now for the first time since the day of their return from Greenwich to find tragedy in his home, all that she could say was, “I am so sorry.”

  “Please,” he said, raising a hand before she could go on. “I never had a chance to thank you.”

  “Thank me? What is there to thank me for?”

  “The care you took of Robert that afternoon. He speaks of you often.”

  “How is he?”

  “Confused. I know the loss has touched him. And before too long I’m sure it will show. Until then … he goes on exactly as before. Are you well? I’d have been in touch to ask, but I didn’t know where to find you.”

  “I came to the funeral,” she said.

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I stayed back. I wasn’t properly dressed. But so many people!”

  Elisabeth Becker’s funeral service had been conducted by the hospital’s chaplain in the Evelina’s own small chapel. Evangeline had hurried over in the middle of the day and slipped into the nave behind some nurses standing at the back. Even greater in number than those crowded into the chapel had been the families and children that filled the passageway outside it, joining in with the hymns, bowing their heads in silence for the prayers.

  Sebastian said, “Elisabeth was a good friend to many. Had it been my funeral and not hers … I think it would have been a much quieter affair.”

  “I do wish I could have spoken to you on the day. How are you, Sebastian?”

  He gathered and placed the half-dozen message slips-hers among them, she noticed-inside his notebook, closed it, and put it away inside his jacket. “I get along,” he said. “I follow Sir James’s advice. He has the same answer to all of life’s ills. ‘Work, and plenty of it.’ Of course, for him it’s a choice. For the rest of us, a necessity.”

  She said, “I hesitate to raise this. But I can see no other way. Have you had any news from Arnmouth?”

  “Arnmouth has not been very close to my thoughts, I’m sorry to say.”

  “So you don’t know that Grace is dead.”

  “Grace Eccles?”

  “You didn’t know.”

  He shook his head. Evangeline went on, “Cruelly murdered. Close to her cottage. How much more there is to it, I don’t know yet. Mother put it in a letter, but she spared me the details.”

  “Does it relate to the other murders?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  She’d hoped to ignite him with this news, and he tried to respond; but it was like an invalid’s brief effort to rise, quickly abandoned.

  He said, “I can’t pursue this with you, Evangeline. Look at me. I don’t sleep. I drag myself through the days. And if that weren’t enough, I have to support three of us on half the income.”

  “I know,” she said. “And believe me, I am ashamed to be intruding on your grief. But I’ve located the other survivor of the expedition. He’s close to London.”

  “And?”

  “I can get no further.”

  “If you can do such detective work, you clearly don’t need me.”

  “But I do,” she persisted. “He’s in the Broadmoor Asylum. They’ve refused me a visit. That’s why I’ve had to seek you out. I don’t imagine they can turn away a Lord Chancellor’s man.”

  “What’s the patient’s name?”

  “Somerville. Doctor Bernard Somerville. Not Summerfield. Our master’s mate had it close, but not quite right.”

  “I’ll give you a letter.”

  “A letter’s no use. He won’t correspond and he won’t agree to a visit. But he’s the only man who knows what really happened in the jungle. He’s our only chance of a window into Lancaster’s madness. Aren’t you even curious to know why the man’s in a hospital for the criminally insane?”

  “In all honesty? I feel very little of anything. And you’re proposing that we use one madman to explain another? That’ll wash, I’m sure.”

  But he was interested despite himself. She could see it.

  “They say his behavior is unpredictable but his thinking is lucid,” she said.

  “Much like Sir Owain’s.”

  “Can I walk with you? I’ll tell you as we go.”

  Sebastian could offer no objection. They started toward the river, through the wide iron passage under the railway lines. The racket of trams and carriage wheels and overhead trains forced her to raise her voice.

  She said, “After his return to England, Somerville set up house with his sister. At some point-and from what I read in the newspaper, he swears to this day that he doesn’t know why-he beat her almost senseless against his bedroom wall and then chased her naked down a public street to finish her off. He claims that his violent acts and his inability to remember them are a product of his experience on the Lancaster expedition. He is judged to be dangerous to others. And that’s why he’s where he is now.”

  FORTY

  So when Bedlam was full, they built Broadmoor.

  Sebastian telephoned to make the appointment, and on Friday morning he and Evangeline traveled out into Berkshire on the train together. At a little station built to serve nearby Wellington College they disembarked, and from there took the carriage that was waiting to convey them to the world’s first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane.

  During the ride, which took them past the village of Crowthorne and on a steady climb up the wooded hill that overlooked it, Sebastian said, “Here’s an irony for you. You remember Joseph Hewlett? The man who slashed Elisabeth and then cut his own throat? He survives. The knife he used on her was filthy, and poisoned her blood. The one he turned on himself was the hospital’s own, and clean. The attention he received saved his life. And on the advice I gave him, he now pleads an unsound mind. So he won’t even hang.”

  “Surely they won’t let him go free.”

  He looked out into the autumn woodland, where the passing trees stood like lonely soldiers. “We’ll see how far he makes it if they do,” he said.

  She seemed startled by his tone. “Would you hunt him down?”

  “I don’t know. I know it would be wrong. But would it be unjust? Because hunting down men for justice used to be my living.”

  “You won’t do it, Sebastian,” she said, as their landau swung into the approach to the asylum’s main gate.

  “You don’t know me that well.”

  But it was empty talk, and Sebastian knew it. His thoughts of revenge were a consolation, but nothing more than that. Most likely Joseph Hewlett would be committed to some institution very like this one, if his plea of insanity were to be accepted. Those who killed, and
were judged mad, might be spared a hanging; but they were neither forgiven nor set free.

  Broadmoor Asylum’s main entrance had the look of some grim railway terminus, with brick towers and a big clock above the gateway arch between them. The gates opened at their approach, and the carriage passed inside and stopped. Thirty feet beyond this entrance was a second gate; the inner gate would not open until the outer had been secured. The asylum had been designed by a military architect, and built like a fortress.

  For an hour the previous evening Sebastian had studied the case notes of Bernard Somerville, Ph.D. After his return from the expedition, unable to work and with his health broken, Somerville had been obliged to lodge with his sister. He slept badly, and as a consequence was hard to rouse in the mornings.

  One day, following a particularly bad night, his sister had entered his bedroom with his morning tea, to find him hidden in a swirl of blankets and covers with only his big toe sticking out and visible. His sister, who sounded like a jolly sort, had taken hold of the toe and tugged on it to wake him. Whereupon he’d flown out of bed in an instant and pinned her to the wall, fixing her there with a forearm and seizing her head with the other hand to smash it into the plaster.

  She managed to escape and ran from the house. Somerville pursued her, caught her in the street, and tried to finish her off with a rock. He would have killed her for certain, had he not been restrained by passersby. He’d raged in the Black Maria, and only achieved calm in his police cell some hours later.

  His explanation to the custody sergeant had been that in the state between sleep and waking, he had not recognized his sister. He had mistaken her for something inhuman and malevolent. He had acted violently out of fear, and to protect himself.

  “I am not,” he had pleaded, “and have never been, a knowingly dangerous man.”

  Somerville was confined on the second floor, in a single room on an L-shaped corridor. Somerville had offered no threat to anyone since his arrival, saying that for the first time since the voyage home, he’d felt safe. The superintendent’s deputy was to remain with them throughout the interview.