The Bedlam Detective (39 page)

“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.

H
ER 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 got 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.

They were on the estate, but this had to be one of the less-used roads. The track became rougher as they went along it. Perhaps the chapel had its own approach? As far as she could remember, the chapel and its little graveyard weren’t so far from the main house. Not that she knew the main house well. There had been a time when Sir Owain and his family had thrown open the grounds every summer to host garden parties for local people, but the house itself had stayed out of bounds.

Something was wrong here. She’d glimpsed the Hall through the trees, but they weren’t making the final ascent to it. Instead they zigzagged through a screen of conifers on a track that ended at a complex of stables and estate workers’ buildings, all shuttered up and deserted. She knocked on the partition window to ask the driver for an explanation, but the driver didn’t respond.

She didn’t know his name. Once numbering as many as three hundred souls—including stonemasons, gardeners, gamekeepers, and laborers—the estate’s workers had always been a self-sufficient community apart from the town. Evangeline stared at the back of his head with a sense of growing, formless dread that threatened to coalesce into a certainty at any moment.

These buildings were not completely disused. Part of the stables was now the landaulet’s garage space. But looking all around she saw broken glass and boarded windows, tall weeds, a clock tower whose face had no hands. The driver braked to a halt in the overgrown stable yard and went to open up the stable doors, ignoring all of Evangeline’s attempts to get his attention. When she tried to open the door to get out, there was no handle on the inside. They’d been removed. Both of them.

Her heart pounding, Evangeline sank back into the buttoned leather. Her nails dug into the seat as she gripped it on either side of her thighs. The same disabling panic that had gripped her in the Greenwich tunnel was threatening to overwhelm her now.

As he walked back to the car, the driver glanced at her once. Though he’d been around for as long as she could remember, take him out of Arnmouth and she could never have picked him out of a London crowd. She did not know him. His was the anonymous face of the anonymous servant. And yet the past was beginning to unfurl for her now, like a dark flower in bloom.

The car rolled into the stable and stopped. The engine died, and all was silence. The driver stepped down from behind the wheel and went to close the doors behind them. Evangeline suddenly launched herself forward and tried to slide open the partition between the cab and the driver’s bench, but found it locked in place.

Meanwhile, behind her, the daylight was being shut out of the stable, one half at a time.

T
HE STABLE BLOCK WAS ONE LONG ROOM WITH ROOF BEAMS AND
small, high windows. There were wooden stalls for long-gone horses. Evangeline could see that the walls were whitewashed and the cobblestone floor sloped toward a central drain. The unused part of the stable had become a storage area for broken-down carts and farm equipment. The two nearest stalls now served for an auto workshop.

Over by the workbench, Sir Owain’s chauffeur was putting on a serviceable leather apron. He tied its strings behind him, blind, and with his attention momentarily absorbed she knew she ought to make a move; but she was hit again, this time by an overwhelming memory of sensations triggered by the sight of the apron. The male, stale smell of sweat and old leather. Like cooking bones.