The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  I have thought about that moment often, and I often remember the look that passed between the two.

  We did not leave the raft for three days. The cut on my foot began to fester. By then Sir Owain had grown delirious, and my own condition was not much better. I’ve been told that my wound turned gangrenous.

  I remember him screaming that the beasts were in the water and were now conspiring to follow him home. And I remember one time opening my eyes, and in a brief moment thinking that I could see the world with equal clarity and now understood what he’d told me; that we may not see our beasts, but with practice and understanding we may perceive their shapes in the spaces where they’d been. But of our eventual rescue, I’m afraid I remember very little at all.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The Coastal Milk Train got him into Arnmouth just after daybreak. As Sebastian was once again putting his name into the Sun Inn’s guest book, Stephen Reed appeared at his side.

  “Bill Turnbull told me you’d sent ahead for a room,” Stephen Reed said. “Let’s speak plainly.”

  “Let’s.”

  They moved to the inn’s part-time police office, which had been brought back into service after the murder of Grace Eccles.

  “You and I know that tinker never killed those two children,” Stephen Reed said. “And there can be no doubt that Sir Owain is dangerously insane. His wealth and reputation have kept him above suspicion. I believe that if Doctor Hubert Sibley doesn’t actively collude, he at least looks the other way.”

  “Then let’s catch them out on that,” Sebastian said. “What exactly happened to Grace Eccles?”

  “Are you saying you agree?”

  “Absolutely. I know the man’s history now. It’s a recipe for tragedy. How did she die?”

  “She appears to have let someone into her home. Someone she knew. She wasn’t expecting to be attacked.”

  “That’s a big supposition.”

  “The door was unlocked.”

  “I’d look for more than that to support it.”

  “She poured a glass of water for her guest. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but … you’d have to know Grace. It was him, it has to be.”

  “Was there a further violation?”

  “Not in the police surgeon’s opinion.”

  “No offense,” Sebastian said, “but when a missing-children case turned to murder they replaced you pretty damned quickly. How come you’re back in charge?”

  “That case was important to someone,” Stephen Reed said. “Grace Eccles is important to no one. You’ve been a long time away from policing, Mister Becker. You of all people should know how it plays.”

  He gave Sebastian a quick account of what was known of Grace’s murder. She’d invited her attacker in. Bloodstains showed that he’d turned on her once inside the house. When she fled the building, he pursued her out onto the estate. After killing her and making little attempt to conceal her body, he returned and searched the house. He might have intended to return to deal with the remains, but at that moment the search mattered more. There was no saying what he was looking for, or whether he’d managed to find it.

  Sebastian said, “What’s happening with the tinker? Is the execution still on, or is there a stay?”

  “There’s been no word of any stay. I’ve suggested that this new killing may call his guilt into question, but without hard evidence I can’t get anyone to listen. He put his mark to a confession, for God’s sake. Even his own counsel thinks he’s guilty. How did the news get to London? To most people it’s no more than a local affair.”

  “I heard it from Evangeline Bancroft,” Sebastian said. “Her mother wrote to her.”

  “Evangeline?” Stephen Reed said. “You’ve seen her?”

  “I tracked her down. We shared information. Her life has been marked since her childhood, but she remembers nothing of how. She sends you her best wishes. I’ve warned her to stay away.”

  Evangeline stood by her bicycle before Grace’s cottage, her heart heavy, her skin cold. Her oldest friend was dead, and here was where she’d spent her final hour. Now someone was close by, moving around in the yard.

  It was a man. An old man, bent and white-haired but able-bodied. Arthur had seemed exactly the same for as far back as she could remember. At one time or another he’d carried out odd jobs for just about everyone in town. Her mother had paid him to paint their shed once. Now he was putting out feed for Grace’s chickens, and hay for Grace’s horses.

  When he was done he came over and they stood side by side in silence for a while, watching the horses eat.

  Eventually Evangeline spoke. “What’s to be done with them?” she asked.

  “Sergeant Reed told me to graze them until someone decides,” Arthur said.

  “Stephen Reed? He’s here?”

  “Hereabouts,” Arthur said.

  When the hay was gone the animals stood in their paddock looking toward the house, as if expecting Grace to appear in the doorway. After the one-eyed horse had been roped and led back from the main street, the others had returned on their own.

  “Can I go inside?” Evangeline said.

  “No one’s stopping you,” Arthur said.

  She left her bicycle by the gate and pushed at the cottage door. The house had not been secured. People would probably avoid it for a while because of what had happened here, but after a few days the superstition would wear off and then anything that wasn’t nailed down would be fair game. Anything that was nailed down would be fair game thereafter. Left unattended for long enough, such a remote building would be stripped of its lead, slates, and timbers, with the dressed stone to follow.

  Unless, of course, Sir Owain took the necessary steps to safeguard his property. She knew he had designs for it; Dr. Sibley had advised him so. The house and land would need some investment to turn it into a rentable concern, but she knew that Sir Owain’s advisor had some scheme in mind for that.

  Perhaps if Grace had quit the property, she’d be alive now. Evangeline wondered if her defense of Grace had helped to seal her old friend’s fate.

  Inside the house, all was silent. The smell of damp, held at bay by for so long by a lit stove and human occupation, had quickly established itself. Someone had been in and tidied; the furniture was arranged all wrong. Broken crockery and ornaments had been swept into one corner by a wide broom that had left its marks in the dust.

  Evangeline felt sick. Poor Grace. Brave Grace. As good as any of them, despised by all. Now she would never tell Evangeline-or anyone-what she’d known.

  But why ransack the house after Grace’s death? Why had he killed her, and what could he have been looking for? Evangeline could remember the last conversation that had passed between Grace and herself.

  “That doctor friend of his … he wants me paying rent or he wants me out. Well, he can want. There’s worse than him to watch out for.”

  “Like who?”

  “If anything ever happens to me, I daresay you’ll know where to look to find out.”

  At the end of the cottage, a set of wooden steps led up through a trap to the loft where, as a child, Grace used to sleep and the two of them used to play. Evangeline picked up a simple bentwood chair and climbed the steps with it.

  The loft was filled with rubbish now … old tools, mildewed cloth, broken mirrors, broken harness. Evangeline made a space on the floor under the roof beam, set the chair down, and climbed onto it. The heavy beam, a hundred years old or more, was in two pieces with a pegged joint in the middle. Many times over the years it had been painted with bitumen to preserve it, so that it was almost black. This concealed the fact that, between the two interlocking halves of the joint, there was a gap plugged by a matching timber wedge.

  Evangeline worked the wedge free, uncovering the space behind it. Their secret place. There was a box in the space that Evangeline didn’t recognize.

  She took it out, climbed down, turned around and sat on the chair, and inspected the box on her knees. By the fad
ed paper label, it had once held cotton reels. When Evangeline had looked at it from every angle, she opened the lid.

  The box might not be familiar to her, but some of its contents were. They were mostly childish treasures. A hat pin and a tortoiseshell comb, mementoes of Grace’s mother. Some foreign coins they used to play shop with, and a pebble from the Holy Land, one of a sackful brought to their school and handed out to each child by a visiting missionary. There was a fancy livery button, and the remains of some papers; if these had been deeds or title papers of any kind, then they’d be of no value to anyone now. Mice had somehow entered the box and shredded them into a mass of pulp and little black droppings.

  Evangeline closed the box and looked around. If Grace had meant for her to find something here, she couldn’t imagine what it was. Perhaps it had been taken. What an irony that would be, if Grace had kept some kind of evidence to protect herself only to be killed for it.

  She took the box outside and placed it in the pannier of her bicycle. Arthur had finished his work with the animals and was sitting on the stile beside the outer gate, his attitude stoical, his breath feathering in the cold air. At his feet was the rope-handled bag, made from a jute sack, in which he always carried his tools. Evangeline wheeled her bicycle through the gate and closed it behind her.

  She said, “Shall we walk back together?”

  “You carry on,” he said.

  “Are you sure? I can walk with the bicycle.”

  “You ride on home,” he said. “Don’t fret about me. I’ve another job to go to.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Sebastian was still working his way through Stephen Reed’s notes when Dolly-from-the-kitchen came through with a message for him. After taking it from her and opening the envelope, he said, “Here I am trying to think of how best to confront Sir Owain, and look what shows up.”

  He passed the envelope and its contents across to Stephen Reed. The police detective read over the handwritten card and said, “A dinner invitation.”

  “It’s for tonight,” Sebastian said. “He must have sent his chauffeur to deliver it. The man’s up to something. Do I go?”

  Stephen Reed handed back the invitation with an equivocal shrug. “Lion’s den,” he said. “Perhaps we should both of us go.”

  “If he’s wondering why I’m back,” Sebastian said. “I’d rather keep him guessing.”

  “Perhaps he means to confess.”

  “Staking his claim to an insanity plea by confessing to the Visitor’s man before the police? I suppose it’s possible. But why should that require a dinner invitation?”

  “His farewell to freedom.”

  “Unlikely. I’ll keep an open mind but go armed.”

  Up in his room, the detective watched as Sebastian took the revolver and box of cartridges from his Gladstone. Sebastian loaded the gun with five rounds and set the hammer on the sixth chamber, empty.

  “A nice short barrel,” Stephen Reed observed. “That’s lucky. It won’t spoil the line of your dinner suit.”

  “Do I look like a man who owns a dinner suit?”

  Sebastian might not have owned a dinner suit, but William Phillips, the town’s photographer, had four on the dressing-up rack behind his studio backdrop. Two were shabby, one was huge, and the other just about fit.

  “You look most elegant,” Phillips assured him as he stood before the studio’s full-length mirror.

  “I look like the headwaiter at Simpson’s,” Sebastian said.

  Sir Owain’s car drew up outside the Sun Inn at the appointed time that evening. Stephen Reed stayed out of the way. The driver held the car’s door open for Sebastian, who said, “How many will there be at dinner tonight?”

  “Just the three of you, sir.”

  “No one else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you plan to abandon me again?”

  “That was a misunderstanding, sir. You can be sure my employer chastised me for it.”

  The drive seemed even longer at night. The landaulet’s headlamps-six of them in all, including carriage lamps on the passenger cab-cast a lemon electric wash onto the bumpy road ahead. Sebastian tried to keep a mental track of their route as he remembered it-estuary, farmland, grouse moor, woodland-but after a while he gave up looking for landmarks and sank back into the leather. He did not try to speak to the driver again.

  When the Hall finally came into sight, it was like a pale shining castle on the hill. Perhaps not a light from every window, but enough of them to make a startling impression from its place above the valley. A shaft lit up the waterfall that tumbled below it, and a string of bulbs illuminated the final part of the driveway that led around and up to the court.

  The main doors were open and Sir Owain was waiting before them. As Sebastian stepped out of the car, Sir Owain said, “Welcome, Mister Becker.”

  “Thank you for the invitation,” Sebastian said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “It’s probably of no significance to anyone else. But I’m assured of my home and my liberty for another year, and it’s you I must thank for it.”

  “Sir James made the decision.”

  “But you made the report.”

  “You don’t know what my recommendations were.”

  “But you are a professional man. Forgive my defensive manner the last time we met. I should have trusted in your judgment.”

  He led Sebastian through the house. They came to a vaulted drawing room, with a wide expanse of floor on which stood a maple-inlaid piano. The back of the room was dominated by a massive marble fireplace, beside which Dr. Hubert Sibley waited to serve them with sherry.

  “Look at him,” Sir Owain said cheerfully. “Doctor, manager, nursemaid, and now butler. As you see, Mister Becker, there’s no end to our Hubert’s talents.”

  “Four years of shipboard living teaches a man not to stand around going thirsty for want of etiquette,” said the affable Dr. Sibley as they each took a glass from his silver tray. “Your health.”

  “And yours,” Sebastian said, struggling a little to adjust to this air of genuine good cheer. He felt like an actor who’d been invited to drop his role and meet his fellow players out of their characters for the first time. A dangerous temptation, given what he knew.

  It was a good sherry, as far as he was able to tell. In Sebastian’s world, sherry had always been a parlor drink for judges and old ladies. They made small talk. He asked about the Hall’s extravagant lighting scheme and learned that it was the one thing on the property that came cost-free; Arnside was self-sufficient in electricity, from a hydroelectric plant of Sir Owain’s own manufacture. Its turbine was driven by the very same torrent that emerged to feed the falls below the house.

  A few minutes later, Sir Owain’s driver appeared in the doorway. Only now he was out of his chauffeur’s livery and wore a white jacket with a starched apron over.

  He said, “Dinner in five minutes, please, gentlemen,” and withdrew again, after which they took their unfinished drinks through into the dining room.

  Another fire burned in here, keeping back the autumn night’s chill. The dining room had oak paneling and green flock wallpaper. An oriental theme ran through its decor, with woven cane in the dining chairs and fringes on the light shades. The capstan table had several of its sections removed to reduce its size, and there were place settings for three.

  “In case you’re wondering,” Sir Owain said, “our Thomas is a first-class cook.”

  “Though his range can be a touch limited,” Dr. Sibley suggested.

  “Give the man credit,” Sir Owain said. “None of your fancy French sauces, but he can shoot, hang, and burn a bird with the best of them.”

  “And thank God for it,” Sibley said, drawing Sebastian’s chair out for him, “because dear old Cook wouldn’t have been able to drive the car to save her own life.”

  “All the same,” Sir Owain said, “I was sad to let her go.”

  Sebastian said, “What happened?”

&
nbsp; “No fault in the woman, just sheer financial necessity. No one believes it when you sit on an estate and plead poverty, but the land and the house just suck in cash. If you don’t farm and your tenants don’t pay, then what do you feed it with?”

  “There must be some kind of a solution. I imagine you could sell up and live well in a smaller place. Or at least rent out this house.”

  “See if he listens to you,” Dr. Sibley said sorrowfully. “He won’t to me.”

  “But where would I settle?” Sir Owain said. “That’s the question. There’s no welcome for me in London. Not since the unpleasantness at the Royal Society. And this is the only real home I know.”

  As well as driver and cook, Thomas Arnot was their server for the evening. The dining-room doors opened and he came in pushing a trolley, on which there was a white cloth and a plated copper tureen. He lifted the tureen onto the table and left them to it.

  Dr. Sibley raised the lid on a rabbit consomme, releasing steam and an agreeable aroma, and Sir Owain said, “Mister Becker, I hope I’m not being inappropriate in mentioning it, but are you in mourning?”

  “I am,” Sebastian said. “How did you know?”

  “We get the London papers here,” Dr. Sibley said, showing some skill with the ladle.

  “My dear sir,” Sir Owain said. “I’m devastated to hear of your wife’s passing.”

  “Thank you.”

  From then on, Sir Owain played the perfect host. Dinner consisted of a good pheasant each and a lot of easy conversation. The decanter passed around the table and Dr. Sibley was induced to tell some tales of his seafaring days as a ship’s medic in the Caribbean seas, prior to his meeting with Sir Owain. One of them had a supernatural theme, but he told it with a twinkle in his eye.

  Though Sebastian was itching to see their talk move on to more germane matters, a part of him was wishing for a world where all could be as it appeared, and where he could enjoy this evening as much as his companions did. He had not known such masculine company, without issues or pressure, in a long time, and had never missed it so much as he did now.