The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  Sebastian said, “I want the telephone.”

  “I can imagine you do, which is why I’ve disconnected it. Try to concentrate on what I’m telling you. It concerns you more than you can imagine.”

  Sebastian said, “Sir Owain, listen to me. Yours is one of the great minds of our age, but experience has damaged it. Now it’s as dangerous to others as any broken machine. You may imagine you’d be the first person to know this, but believe me. You’ll be the last.”

  “You’re wrong, Mister Becker,” Sir Owain said, more seriously than before. “I do know I’m broken. I need to know how I’m broken. And if I cannot trust my own intellect to appraise the damage, then I must devise some other way to compare and assess. Somewhere in this fog of what is real and what is not, I have lost myself. I am desperate to find myself again. And for that I need you.”

  “I won’t help you.”

  “Your consent is not required.”

  “You’re making your situation worse.”

  “Not possible,” Sir Owain said. “Believe me. Let me explain what I intend for you here.”

  Sebastian started to rise. In an instant he found himself facing his own revolver. He let himself fall back onto the couch.

  Despite the gun in his hand, Sir Owain went on as if nothing had happened.

  He said, “I start from a theory. When we were deprived of our supplies in the jungle, Somerville and I survived on a grub that we’d seen the Indians eat with safety. They’d lie around in a stupor and be useless for work, but show no ill effects.

  “The grub caused vivid dreams. So vivid that I felt as if I were both in that terrible place and somewhere else. I felt that division of body and spirit that the Indians take for granted.

  “When I remembered this and put it to Doctor Sibley that it might have been the beginning of some permanent separation, he disagreed. Not least because all the known hallucinogens are derived from plants, and not insects. But he did agree to let me conduct my own study, on the understanding that he’d share credit for any findings.”

  Sebastian was only half-listening. Stephen Reed knew where he was. When Sebastian failed to appear and could not be reached by telephone, he’d surely come looking.

  Sir Owain said, “But I faced a problem. What was this grub? I knew that it developed in flowering bamboo. But to the untrained eye, one moth larva resembles another. There were no existing studies to guide me, so it was some time before I identified a likely candidate. In the end I landed on Myelobia smerintha, the bamboo grub that the Indians call bicho de taquara. I imported some eggs and bred a small colony of them in my conservatory. The larvae flourished until the glass was broken and the temperature fell. Now they’re all gone.”

  “None of this means anything to me,” Sebastian said.

  “Well, it ought to,” Sir Owain said. “I fed the last of them to you last night.”

  “You did what?”

  “Your dessert. Take away the repugnant appearance of the insect and you’re left with the texture and flavor of vanilla cream.”

  “As well as drugging me with wine, you fed me worms?”

  “Now you’re making me sound like a bad host.”

  Sebastian put his hand to his mouth. It was a quick gesture, and it caused Sir Owain to move back a little with the pistol, to be sure of staying out of his reach.

  “I can tell you there’s no point in trying to vomit up the active ingredient,” Sir Owain said. “It’s been several hours since the meal. Whatever reaction you’re feeling now is only the beginning.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite true. Is it? Your skin is sallow. Your limbs are heavy. Your energy is sapped. You want to run but you can barely rise. I want you to think about it, and tell me. How does the light feel to you? What do I sound like?”

  “I’m not playing your stupid game,” Sebastian said. “You’ve poisoned me.”

  “Look,” Sir Owain said reasonably. “I admit that I made a mistake and killed my doctor. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing now. I’m guiding you along a path that I’ve followed myself. Only with you I can make reliable observations, whereas before I could only interpret my own suffering.

  “Shall I tell you what I felt at this stage? I felt as if I was on the threshold of another world of possibilities. One where there’s a blurring of the line between what we know to be true and what we wish or fear to be true. I sensed the existence of a world of unseen marvels. But when that faded, it left me with the permanent feeling that I could not trust my own world anymore. I see so many things that I cannot believe are there.”

  Now he leaned forward.

  “If you begin to see the world I see,” he said, “I’ll take that as a strong indication that it has some objective reality. I mourn the loss of your wife. But I can’t deny that it enhances the conditions for my observations.”

  Sebastian said, “I’m not your experiment!”

  “I’m sorry to hear you say that, Mister Becker,” Sir Owain said. “Because I’m afraid that’s exactly what you are.”

  Elsewhere in the house, not too far away, there was a sound of banging.

  “There’s someone at the door,” Sir Owain observed. “We get very few visitors here. Can I trust you to stay quiet while I deal with them? No, it isn’t fair to ask you. Of course I can’t.”

  He got up from the chair and moved toward the medical bag. As soon as Sir Owain turned away, Sebastian launched himself from the couch, only to find that his confidence in a fast recuperation was misplaced. As the narcotic effect of the wine had worn off, the hallucinogen from the grubs had begun to increase its effect.

  His legs might support him now, but his balance was unreliable. He got as far as the door and collided painfully with the jamb. He bounced out onto the landing, where he fell and hit the carpet hard.

  The long gallery was to his left. The stairs were to his right. The hallway and the main door were down below. He tried to crawl toward the stairs, but the unsecured rug bunched up underneath him and he did little more than swim in place.

  Sir Owain came out and knelt beside him.

  “I learned another little trick from the Indians,” Sir Owain said. “They put this on their arrows.” Sebastian felt a sharp jab in the side of his neck, and then Sir Owain left him and went to descend the stairs. One hand held the pistol behind his back. He let something fall from the other as he walked away; it was a lancet, almost certainly the cause of that momentary pain. As he went down the stairs he dropped from Sebastian’s floor-level view like a ship over the horizon.

  This was a piece of luck. Sebastian hadn’t expected Stephen Reed to come looking for him so soon. The gun in Sir Owain’s hand could pose a problem. He had to get to the rail and shout a warning. He could do that much.

  Except that he couldn’t. The latest addition to his bloodstream cocktail was already having its effect. A sudden paralysis was taking possession of his body, like a fast-spreading blight.

  His senses were unaffected. Enhanced, even. Sir Owain would no doubt be interested to know of it. Though he’d failed to reach the rail and could not see into the hallway below, Sebastian could hear every click and tumble of the main door being unlocked down there. The creak of the hinge as it opened. The change in the acoustics of the hallway as its enclosed space was opened to the world outside.

  He’d expected to hear Stephen Reed’s voice. But it wasn’t the detective. It was Thomas, Sir Owain’s sometime cook and regular driver.

  “I’m sorry to bang on the door, sir,” Sebastian heard him say, “but everywhere’s locked up.”

  “I know it is,” Sir Owain’s voice came with an extra helping of irritation. “What do you want?”

  “Might I have the use of the car today, sir?”

  “For what?”

  “Nothing you’d disapprove of, sir. And it’s only for an hour or so.”

  “A young lady, is it?”

  “Something like tha
t, sir.”

  Though he and Thomas Arnot had a combustible history, Sebastian had gathered from Sir Owain’s own words that the driver knew nothing of his master’s current plans or past misdeeds. Though the man might not want to be disloyal, he surely wouldn’t want to be branded a conspirator. Sebastian took a breath to call out to him.…

  But he failed to draw in any air. The paralysis that had disabled his limbs was now affecting his entire body.

  He could hear Sir Owain saying, “Fine, it’s nothing to me. But I’m not buying your petrol.”

  “No, sir.”

  Sebastian was suffocating. He’d breathed for his entire life without ever thinking how. Now this simple gift had deserted him.

  Sir Owain seemed to take his time resecuring the doors and then climbing back up the stairs. Sebastian could hear every beat of his measured tread. Sir Owain seemed to be slowing down as he ascended, and Sebastian could feel his heart slowing along with him.

  “Now,” said Sir Owain, lowering himself to sit on the floor beside Sebastian. “Where was I?”

  Almost absently, he leaned over and pressed down on the small of Sebastian’s back. Air was driven from Sebastian’s lungs and, on removal of the pressure, enough fresh air rushed back in for the increasing mental fog to recede a little.

  “Schafer’s method of artificial respiration,” Sir Owain said. “A trick from the Amazon. Saved one or two of our number after a drowning. Though little good it did them in the end.”

  Continuing from where he’d left off, and seeming to find nothing strange in this situation, Sir Owain said, “If those beasts are a mere projection of my madness, then it means that innocents are dying by my hand. I’m no better than Somerville, in a frenzy, chasing his sister down the street with a knife. I do harm, while convinced that I’m acting for the best.

  “But I see them. I hear them. And I know them by the damage they have done to those I loved. If they have some objective reality, and there are two of us who know it … don’t you see? You and I can take them on together, and make all the children safe.”

  He pressed down again. Without too much exertion on his own part, Sir Owain was working the bellows of his lungs as much as was needed to keep Sebastian alive, until Sebastian could once again sustain himself.

  He said, “It will settle the question once and for all. If there is this invisible world of beasts and wonders, and it occupies the same space as our own, and you can see it too … then my sanity will cease to be the issue.”

  Sebastian wanted to tell Sir Owain that no experiment was required. He both was mad, and stood alone in his madness, no question about it.

  But he did not yet have the breath to say so.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Her mother had already left for church when she went downstairs. Evangeline attended services in London, but never at home. Not since the vicar had spoken in his sermon of the “taint” that clung to Grace Eccles and, by implication, to Evangeline as well. By way of protest, her mother had switched her religious allegiance to a Wesleyan chapel whose congregation met in a tin shack on the beach. It was a half hour’s walk to reach it, and there was no road. All who worshipped there were seen as slightly mad. When the wind blew, God showed up and rattled the roof.

  Evangeline took an old newspaper and spread it out to protect the kitchen table before bringing Grace’s cotton-reel box down from her room and placing it in the middle of the open pages. She lifted the lid and-well, there was nothing for it but to get her hands dirty. When she lifted out the mass of shredded pulp, dried mouse droppings pattered down onto the newspaper like tiny hail.

  At least they were dry. She swept up as many as she could and put them in a twist of paper from the corner of a page. Then she began to unpick the shreds, looking for any fragment that might bear a word, a signature, or any other clue as to what the document might have been. As she sifted, from out across the rooftops came the sound of church bells ringing.

  The combination of chimes and souvenirs reminded her of the time at school when, during one of the vicar’s twice-weekly visits to give the children religious instruction, Grace had asked him why a God who preached humility required so much in the way of praise and worship. Was he very vain? By then Evangeline was convinced that Grace knew exactly what she was doing when she provoked authority so. She took every reprimand or beating as a kind of affirmation.

  Authority might have been satisfied by Grace’s punishment that day, but the damage was done. Through all the years since, Evangeline had remembered Grace’s question and had yet to hear a convincing answer to it.

  Her careful disentangling of the paper convinced her that this was the legal letter that, in Grace’s eyes, had given her the right to remain on the land after her father’s death. It had been handwritten, professionally done in copperplate. No useful part of it remained. If this was what she’d been murdered for, then she’d been murdered for nothing. Evangeline kept the few pieces with readable words on them, and swept away the rest. Then she restored everything to the box and rolled up the newspaper until it resembled a wrapped fish supper. This she jammed into the grate behind the coal for that evening’s fire.

  She then spent five minutes scrubbing her hands clean with hot water and carbolic soap, and a while longer sitting with the box on the table before her. She ought to pass it on to Stephen Reed. Perhaps, being a detective, he’d find some significance in this bric-a-brac that escaped her.

  She wrote him a short note, to explain the circumstances. Then she got into her outdoor clothes and went out to the shed to get her bicycle. She might be accused of interfering with evidence. But her only other choice was to cycle back to Grace’s cottage and return the box to its hiding place, to be either lost forever or looted by a stranger.

  With the box once again in her bicycle’s pannier, Evangeline freewheeled downhill toward the middle of town. She’d leave the box with Bill Turnbull at the inn.

  The sudden honk of an approaching car’s horn almost sent her into the bushes at the side of the road. She wobbled, she braked, and the big landaulet swerved by and stopped just past her.

  She was hauling the bicycle’s front wheel onto the road as the driver came back. She’d recognized Sir Owain Lancaster’s car, and now she recognized his man.

  She said, “You nearly scared me off the road.”

  “Profound apologies, Miss Bancroft,” the driver said. “Sir Owain sent me out to look for you. He says, can you kindly spare him some of your time?”

  “When?”

  “Now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Did he say what it’s about?”

  “He’s put aside a burial plot for Grace Eccles. He regrets the bad feelings of these last few months. He intends her a place by his private chapel, so she won’t get a pauper’s grave. No more than half an hour, he says. I’m to drive you to the house.”

  “I’ve got my bicycle.”

  “I can put it on the back.”

  He directed her attention to a folding rack for luggage on the rear of the landaulet. It was big enough to take a bicycle. But knowing what she now knew, Evangeline had no intention of risking her safety out at the big house alone, and in Sir Owain’s company.

  She said, “I don’t wish to offend your employer. But I don’t think I ought to go. I mean, to the house on my own. It wouldn’t be proper. My mother frowned on it the last time. She can be very old-fashioned.”

  “Your friend Mister Becker’s there already. So is the detective. It’s they who persuaded Sir Owain to send me for you.”

  “Really?”

  That changed everything. For both Stephen and Sebastian to be at the house … it suggested that some swift conclusion was in the offing, and they needed or wanted her to be a part of it.

  “Very well,” she said, and allowed Sir Owain’s man to help her up into the landaulet’s cab. Then he went around the back and seemed to secure her bicycle in no time at all. She sat, feeling the vibration of the Daimler’s idling engine. The driver g
ot back behind the wheel, released the parking brake, and they were on their way.

  The earliest of the morning services had ended, and Arnmouth was beginning to come back to life. They passed several family groups on the lanes, all walking home in their finest clothes. This was nothing like the resort’s fashion displays of high summer, when chapel numbers were swelled by dapper city men, slim-waisted women with their straw hats decked with flowers, and children with a nanny in tow. These were just ordinary local people in their Sunday best, walking out on the one day they felt able to dress with a little pride. Soon all would go quiet again, as every household settled to Sunday lunch and the smell of boiled cabbage mingled with the sea air.

  Sir Owain’s man sat forward of the cab, a short windshield his only protection. Many of the cars that she saw in London now enclosed the driver and no longer owed their entire design to the horse carriages they’d replaced. Evangeline supposed that Sir Owain’s crumbling fortunes forbade him any new toys. She noted that one of the car’s passenger windows had been replaced with a sheet of oiled parchment. It let in the light but it was clouded, like a milky eye. It had the brightness and density of Greenwich fog.

  She wondered what part she was to play here. She would be alert. Whatever hint Sebastian or Stephen Reed might give her, she would fall into the role.

  She was nervous, there was no denying it. Her heart was racing now. It would not do to let it show.

  Evangeline closed her eyes and mastered her breathing. She was strong. Nothing could daunt her. She told herself this, over and over.

  When the jarring of the vehicle caused her to snap her eyes open, she looked out of the one good side window and saw that this was not the usual way to the Hall.