The Bedlam Detective (18 page)

“She’s dying.”

“Nothing the doctors can do?”

“No.”

“Then why not let him take her, if there’s nothing to be done?”

“His home is a sty. And his children only matter when he’s drunk. And the more drink he takes, the more sentimental he becomes. He’s the kind of man whose love is all noise and self-pity; at least she’ll die where the sheets are clean.”

He touched her shoulder. “You’re worn out,” he said. “You should go to bed.”

“I think I will.”

She went about half an hour later. In many people’s minds, working in a charitable children’s hospital was an extended fantasy of rescued orphans and grateful Tiny Tims. But the truth of it was not for the soft of heart.

Sebastian was left with the publishing-house letter in his hand. There was no point in pushing Elisabeth to read it; unlike him, she wouldn’t take courtesy for encouragement. Not today, at any rate.

He became aware that Frances had paused in her work and was looking at him. Then she quickly pretended that she wasn’t and returned her attention to her decorative embroidery, held only inches from her face.

He said, “Have you enough light?”

“Enough for what I need,” she said.

He had a rolltop bureau in the corner of the room. When he was home, it served him for an office. He put the letter in one of its drawers and then picked up his copy of Owain Lancaster’s book.

It was a nice piece of binding, in blue cloth with printed boards and a number of tipped-in illustrations on slick paper. He’d bought it at Wilson’s on Gracechurch Street, billing it to his employer. He opened it at the copyright page. Due in part to the scandal that had driven its author from town and from London society, the book had sold in its thousands and was now in its fifth impression.

He closed up the desk and then moved to the doorway.

“Good night, Frances,” he said.

She laid the fancy work in her lap. “Good night, Sebastian.”

Before going upstairs, he moved toward Robert’s room with the book in his hand. It was “fancy work” of a different kind. As fiction, it would be a commendable account of a fantastical expedition to a far-off land. One that had involved perils and wonders, tragic loss and heroic survival. The maps and doctored photographs would have enhanced its grip on the imagination.

But Sir Owain had insisted it was no fiction. He’d even been prepared to take the Royal Society to court for casting doubt on his word. His vigorous defense had led to a public accusation of fraud and the equally public destruction of his reputation. He’d sued the Society and several newspapers, and lost every action.

And now here he was, withdrawn from public life, struggling to preserve his liberty and to retain control of his fate and his finances.

Sebastian tapped on Robert’s door before going in. Robert was writing. His bed was covered in slips of paper, all crammed with lines in his neat hand.

“I thought you were reading,” Sebastian said.

“I’ve read my serial. I’m not ready for anything else just yet.”

“I know what you mean,” Sebastian said. “It doesn’t do to rush onward. It’s nice to stay in the tale.”

“At least for a while. My favorite time of the day is when I’m waiting to go to sleep. I like to just lie there and think.”

“What about?”

“Things,” Robert said.

Sebastian knew that he made stories of his own, but he wouldn’t share them. Sebastian had sneaked a look at some of his writings, once. It was all gangs and pirates and Martian war machines, jumbled together in a single tale.

Sebastian said, “I have a job for you. It’s worth a shilling or two.” He handed over Sir Owain’s book and said, “Tell me what you think of this. Have you read it before?”

Robert turned it around and looked at the title.

“No,” he said.

“The author would have us believe that it’s a true account of his adventures. He travels to the Amazon, and his party is attacked by monsters unknown to science. He speaks of members of his expedition being discovered, torn by beasts. See if you can tell me the point where the truth ends and his fantasy begins.”

“All right,” Robert said.

Sebastian had half-expected him to argue. It wasn’t often that Robert read a book. It was periodicals that fascinated him. To his mind a book was a dead thing, fixed, detached from real time.

The boy laid the volume aside and returned to his writing.

“Good night, Robert,” Sebastian said, and Robert murmured something that Sebastian couldn’t hear. He didn’t take his eyes from the page.

E
LISABETH WAS
sleeping when Sebastian went upstairs. Or at least, her eyes were closed and she didn’t open them. He undressed in the dark and lay down beside her. She was turned away.

He wondered how the world must seem through Robert’s eyes. He could not imagine it. Elisabeth’s hope had always been to see Robert take his place in ordinary human society. But now Sebastian sensed a reluctance in her whenever there was any real suggestion of letting the boy go. As if she wanted to see him stand, but would not risk seeing him fall.

His request had been a serious one, not meant simply to indulge or occupy the boy. Robert’s knowledge of such fantastical literature was detailed and comprehensive.

Sebastian stared up at the ceiling until shapes started to form. Then he closed his eyes.

The shapes did not go away.

In the forests were various beasts still unfamiliar to zoologists, such as the
milta
, which I have seen twice, a black doglike cat about the size of a foxhound. There were snakes and insects yet unknown to scientists; and in the forests of the Madidi some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps—possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal—huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.

F
ROM THE MANUSCRIPTS AND LETTERS OF

L
T
. C
OL
. P. H. F
AWCETT
, DSO, FRGS

W
RITTEN
1909–1925

C
OLLECTED IN
Lost Trails, Lost Cities
, 1953

S
EBASTIAN HAD RETURNED THE MOVING-PICTURE CAMERA AND
its developed roll of negative to Stephen Reed, but he’d retained the positive copy. He now had the film roll in his pocket, wound tight in its wrapping of stiff paper, and a number of questions about its content that the fairground people hadn’t been able to answer.

Kelly’s London directory listed several film companies. Most of them were out in the suburbs, but there was a cluster of office addresses in Warwick Court. This was a stone’s throw from the records department of King’s College Hospital, where he intended to begin his inquiries about the medical training of the disagreeable Dr. Sibley, and from the Inns of Court where Evangeline Bancroft had let slip that she had employment.

As it turned out, the King’s College records had all been boxed up and sent across the river, ahead of the hospital’s relocation to Denmark Hill. That would have to be a job for another day. The shortest way to Warwick Court from here would be through Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

The morning was cold and dry. Lincoln’s Inn was a walled enclave of legal offices and chambers made up of town houses, alleyways, and green spaces. The grander chambers had large ground-floor rooms with chandeliers. The others packed in their lawyers from ground to gables, like warehouses of litigation. The adjoining fields were actually a fashionable square with a public garden, like a parade ground to the barracks of a lawyers’ army.

A high wall and a gatehouse separated Lincoln’s Inn from the actual fields. He stopped by the gatehouse and spoke to the porters and other servants of the inn, but none recognized Evangeline by name. As he cut through, looking this way and that on the off chance that he might spot her, black-robed “benchers” flitted through the gardens in their twos and threes like carrion birds, crossing on their way to the Courts of Justice; strollers moved more slowly, and sometimes got in their way.

Like the hospital, Warwick Court was a disappointment, but also a lead onto more promising things. The court itself was little more than a glorified alleyway on the north side of High Holborn, ending in a tall cast-iron gateway with yet more lawyers beyond it. The alley’s buildings were wedding-cake heavy with carved stone features and fancy Victorian brickwork.

In a second-floor film sales agency office that he picked at random, he explained his needs and was given an address and a note of introduction. The address was for the Walton Film Studios, the note of introduction to a Mr. Cecil Hepworth.

He was urged to “tell Cecil that Joe sent you, and sends his regards.”

“I’
M LOOKING
for Mister Hepworth?” Sebastian said.

Cecil Hepworth’s Walton Film Studio was so close to the Walton High Street that a two-minute walk out of the center had taken Sebastian some way past it. Walton on Thames, just a twenty-five-minute train ride out of Waterloo, was part riverside boating village, part office workers’ suburb. Along the river were inns, moorings, and great rafts of empty rowboats herded up against the banks awaiting weekend rental. Beyond the main street of shops and public houses spread a semirural outskirts of villas and smallholdings.

The film studio had grown up around one modest dwelling in an outer cul-de-sac, absorbing the other houses in the row and then expanding into the gaps between them and onto the land behind. Now the original buildings contained offices, cutting rooms, and workshops. Blocking out the sky behind these, risen from the suburban clay like airship hangars, were Hepworth’s number one and two covered studio buildings.

A young man in flannels and a cricket jersey led Sebastian from one place to another until they finally located the boss. They found him in an automated film-processing laboratory on the ground floor of one of the studio buildings. The long room was an elaborate and noxious-smelling laundrylike plant of racks and tanks and spindles, with exposed and processed film zigzagging through it in an endless flow. Hepworth was discussing some critical adjustment with one of the women operating it. He proved to be a tall and bookish-looking man, quietly spoken and with a pale gaze.

Sebastian introduced himself, took the small roll of film from his pocket, and explained its significance.

“There’s barely a minute’s worth of activity there,” he said, raising his voice over the clatter of the machinery. “But I need an expert’s opinion on the last picture. There’s a chance that the girls may have photographed their attacker before they were murdered.”

The young man let out a whistle.

Hepworth opened up the roll and drew it out to arm’s length. The young man in the cricket jersey scooted around behind him to look as he held it up to the light.

“What do you reckon, Geoff?” Hepworth said.

“It looks like someone printed a seventeen-point-five neg onto thirty-five mil stock,” the young man said.

Sebastian said, “A lad copied it for me in a show van on a fairground. He said it was unusual. The camera was called a Birtac.”

“That’s Birt Acres’ old camera,” Hepworth said, still studying the images against the light. “He made it for the amateur market about ten years back. Cost about ten guineas and it never took off.” He looked at Sebastian. “You don’t have the negative?”

“It was evidence. I had to give it back. This is all I could keep.”

Hepworth studied the strip again, pulling out several more feet of it until he reached the scene in question. “Is it all like this? It’s very dense.”

The young man said, “We could try making a copy and printing it up a bit.”

Hepworth nodded and Sebastian said, “What does that mean?”

“It means putting more light through it to bring out any detail that’s hiding,” Hepworth said. “But it’s not guaranteed. If it’s not there in the image, then there’s nothing to find. But we can try it for you, if you like.”

Hepworth sent the young man off with the roll, and gave Sebastian leave to wander for the hour or so needed to make and process the copy.

Sebastian went upstairs to look into the studio, hoping to see a scene or two being made, but the doors were wide open and carpenters were at work inside. The interior light on the stage was soft and gray, diffused by the clouded glass of the skylight roof. But there was nothing of great interest to see.

He saw a handcart load of costumes being taken off toward the river, but didn’t follow it. He had more luck in the other studio, where a boy had been posted at the doors to keep out visitors and signal for quiet; from inside the studio came the sound of Gramophone music. The music lasted no more than a couple of minutes and then the doors were thrown open. No one paid any attention to Sebastian as he wandered in and took in the scene.