The Bedlam Detective (15 page)

When she passed Grace’s cottage, she didn’t slow. Then realized that she hadn’t even seen the turnoff until it had gone by. Looking down from the track she was able to make out the cottage roof by the gray smoke rising into the deeper gray of the sky, but no light escaped its shuttered windows.

By day the house’s isolation had seemed romantic, almost poetic. But at night, simply unwise. A late visitor might cause a panic; she imagined being Grace, inside her home and hearing a sudden banging at the door. How brave Grace must be, to live so far out here alone, where no cry would be heard, and with no help at hand. If she was not brave, then she was foolish. Or perhaps simply desperate—as Grace herself had pointed out, her choices were limited.

Evangeline rose in the saddle as her wheels jolted over a rock. She dropped back hard, but did not slow. It was easy to imagine that something was behind her, breathing on her back, its presence growing as she pedaled. She might have a rational mind, but no one has a rational soul. Whatever dogged her, it did not go away, but kept a distance as if biding its time.

T
HE
D
AIMLER WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN
. S
EBASTIAN WANDERED
the field among grazing horses and factory trucks that had been pressed into service for workers’ outings, thinking that perhaps Sir Owain’s man had moved the car to a safer spot. But he had a growing suspicion that he’d moved it rather more.

He stopped a couple of people and asked them. No one had seen the man or the car.

He went back to the lower field and wandered the fairground for a while, keeping an eye open for the driver. Alone at the fair, he felt awkward.

It was a long time since he’d attended such a thing for his own pleasure. The freaks, the puppet shows, the hurdy-gurdy men. A father’s role was to take along his family, and to stand back and draw his satisfaction from their amusement. He was too old to be a target for the flirtatious groups of factory girls, too respectable-looking to be hailed and challenged as he passed the boxing booth. The pitchmen on the stalls called over his head, to less sober and more likely-looking marks. He felt, to all intents and purposes, like an invisible man.

He passed the freak show a couple of times, and on the third pass he paid the money and went inside. Everyone was crowded in shoulder-to-shoulder: the nervous, the curious, the callow, and the near-hysterical. They shuffled around slowly under the harsh electric bulbs, following a course from entrance to exit. At the front of the show was a “six-legged calf,” actually an animal with bifurcated forelegs that could not support its weight. It crawled about its stall on callused knees, trying to reach a few scraps of hay that had fallen from its feeding trough. Around the corner was the fat lady, seated on a stool and knitting to pass the time. She was large, but not so large as to be worth paying to see. Then there was the usual Fiji Mermaid in a glass case, half dead monkey, half dried fish, the two halves stitched together by a taxidermist’s needle.

Last of all, in a partitioned area at the back, forbidden to children and costing an extra penny, there were the Seven Freaks of Nature. Their signage was freshly painted, so the smell of glue size mingled with the lingering odor of formaldehyde. Some balked at the extra charge, but most paid up and went through the bead curtain to see what was there.

The specimens of human tissue included a pair of lungs, one from a city dweller and the other belonging to a country person. The city dweller’s lung was gray and mottled, rather like a bad green cheese. The countryman’s lung was drained and lifeless but comparatively pink. There was a preserved half of a brain. A human uterus. A child’s healthy heart, white as folded silk as it hung there in the preserving fluid.

Among the severed heads and flayed torsos and part-dissected limbs, Sebastian found his friends from the train. They now bore the name
Lusus Naturae, The Human Monster
, but were otherwise as before; their heads merged in some fantastical lovers’ kiss, their arms around each other in a fearful embrace. Unable to function in life, earning their keep in death.

He stood before their jar for a while, until pressure from the crowd behind him moved him on. As he emerged back into the fairground, he saw Will pushing through on some urgent-seeming errand with a case of lightbulbs, and managed to catch his eye.

“Your film’s done, it’s drying now,” the young man said. “If you can stick it out until the last show, we can put your pictures on the big screen afterward.”

“I may as well,” Sebastian said. “My driver appears to have abandoned me.”

W
HEN THE
last comedy ended and the audience left, Sebastian stayed behind. All through the program of subjects, his heart had been hammering. Now he realized why. It had nothing to do with the show that he’d seen. It was for the show yet to come. Not an involuntary excitement, but an involuntary dread.

No one appeared for a while, and he wondered if they’d forgotten him. The lights on the show front were extinguished, one set after another.

But then Will arrived, carrying a heavy metal spool with not very much film on it. Sebastian followed him into the projection booth, where he watched as the young man loaded the spool onto the projector arm and threaded up the film. Sedgewick joined them before the operation was done, along with a couple of others, sideshow workers drawn by curiosity at the mention of the dead girls’ moving pictures.

“Close the doors,” Sedgewick said to them, “and put a chair across.”

The tent was secured and made private. According to Will, the Birtac was an amateur’s camera designed with a double function. With the addition of a suitable lamp housing, it could be converted into a projector to show the images it had taken.

But with no such accessory available to them, Will had made do with a carnival hand’s ingenuity. He had exposed the half-width camera negative onto normal-sized film stock to produce an oddly proportioned, but viewable, positive image. At least, this was how he told it to Sebastian. Who still failed to understand until he saw the first, running-up-to-speed, flickering image on the big screen.

One entire side of the screen was blank while on the other, two near-identical images appeared. One above, one below—until Will put his hand before the projecting lens in a crude mask, leaving just one bright image in a quarter of the screen.

It was a garden scene.

“Are those the girls?” Sedgewick said.

“I believe they are,” Sebastian said.

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.

A
ROUND 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.

W
HERE CAN
I
FIND
D
ETECTIVE
R
EED
?” S
EBASTIAN 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.”

T
HE 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.”