The Bedlam Detective (7 page)

He walked into a fug of beer and smoke. In the hour since his return from the assembly hall, the bar had been opened. The saloon and public rooms were now filled with local men, some the whistle-wetters from that afternoon, others still in their volunteer armbands. Despite the shadow that had been cast by the day, there was nothing subdued about their conversation. Tragedy always sharpened a community.

“Will you take a drink, Mister Becker?” the landlord asked him over the roar. The landlord’s name was Bill Turnbull, and he’d shed his constable’s jacket to work the pumps.

“I was hoping to get some supper,” Sebastian said. “Is there any possibility?”

“I’ll send Dolly out when she’s got a minute,” Bill Turnbull said, “if you don’t mind a wait.”

Supposing it would make no difference if he did mind, Sebastian agreed that he didn’t. He ordered a brandy and then, turning from the bar, spied Ralph Endell. The blacksmith was behind a table with three or four others, in a nook between the fireplace and the dining room. Endell made a gesture of invitation, and Sebastian went over.

They made space for him. Sebastian supposed that he’d be expected to stand the group a round at some point, and that point came rather quickly. He called Dolly over. She fetched the drinks on a tray and took his order for a sandwich and a bowl of the local fish stew.

They knew that he’d been to the spot where the bodies were found, and wanted to know more. He gave them an account of his arrival at the scene and his treatment at the hands of the army, with as little of the indelicate detail as he could include. In return he picked up the taproom gossip and speculation, which had no real substance to it at all. No local man could ever do such a thing, so it must have been gypsies, tinkers, or German spies.

“We’ll see what happens tomorrow,” one of the party said. “When the proper police get here.” He had small hands, wire spectacles, and a hank of hair that he’d arranged across his balding head in the hope of persuading the world that it grew there.

Ralph Endell had spoken the truth when he’d said that no man was ever a prophet in his own land. Penny Dreadfuls and story papers had recreated police detectives as exotic figures of adventure. A local boy like Stephen Reed could never expect to be taken seriously as one of their number.

After twenty minutes or so, and with no sign yet of his supper, Sebastian saw Stephen Reed enter. Reed called the landlord down to the end of the bar, and the two of them were in conversation for a while. Then Bill Turnbull reached under the bar and brought out the residents’ register.

Sebastian excused himself to the company and went over.

He found that Stephen Reed was arranging rooms for the senior detectives and other officers who’d be arriving in the morning to take over the case. The young detective sergeant didn’t seem despondent about it. If anything, he seemed relieved. A weight would be off his shoulders. He explained as much to Sebastian and declined to join him in a brandy.

He said, “I’m not here to drink. I’m here for what you know.”

“Upstairs,” Sebastian said, and led the way.

T
HE RESIDENTS’
corridor was as silent as it could be with a public bar directly beneath. As Sebastian stepped first into his room, he took a moment to look around before touching anything.

“What?” Stephen Reed said.

“I was downstairs for less than an hour,” he said.

He went over to his Gladstone and looked inside. The bag was exactly as he’d left it, but there was no mistaking that the contents had been disturbed. Sebastian knew his own packing. Or rather, he knew Elisabeth’s. She folded everything with precision and stowed it to a certain plan. No intruder could ever hope to recreate the effect.

He looked at Stephen Reed.

“I do believe I’ve been searched,” he said.

“Not by me,” Stephen Reed said.

The bedcovers didn’t appear to have been touched, and when Sebastian tipped over the bolster, his book and the papers were still there. “Do you know what this is?” he said, holding the volume up.

Stephen Reed shook his head.

“It’s Sir Owain’s account of his Amazonian adventure. Though it purports to be a factual account, it’s actually a fantasy of the most extreme order. He leads an expedition party into an unknown land. They find that they’ve ventured into a territory where monsters roam. The party is cut off from civilization and attacked from all sides. His men are carried off, one by one. At first the creatures move by night but then openly, by day. In the end, Sir Owain barely escapes with his life.”

“And he presents all that as truth?”

“He offers photographs and documents as proof of his story, all manufactured. The truth of it seems to be that these are the facts as he believes them.”

“Hence your interest.”

“He’s been of interest to my employers since the book was first published. You heard nothing of this? It caused quite a stir at the time.”

“All I know is that he lost his wife and child under tragic circumstances in South America. I can imagine that being enough to damage any man’s reason.”

“Not just his wife and son. His entire party, from the mapmakers and surveyors right down to the cook. There’s no true account. The inquest took place in a town where the British consul appeared to spend his nights in local whorehouses and his days sleeping off the drink, and his reports were useless.

“Questions from the bereaved families were met with offers of generous settlements. But the families have never been satisfied. There’s a thirdhand rumor of a Portuguese bearer. He’s supposed to have walked out of the jungle with a tale of the mad white captain who turned on his own crew when the river took his mind.”

“More storybook stuff.”

“That’s how it’s been dismissed,” Sebastian said, taking the papers from out of the book. “Your police commissioner’s response was a robust exoneration based on his personal knowledge of Sir Owain’s character. I have a copy of his letter here.”

“Let me understand this,” Stephen Reed said, with no more than a glance at the letterhead. “You’re telling me that Sir Owain is no mere eccentric. He’s known to be mad.”

“There are degrees of lunacy.”

“But you’ve known this for some time and he’s allowed to go free.”

“One needs a good reason in law to deprive a man of his liberty.”

“Especially a prominent man.”

“Prominence should have nothing to do with it,” Sebastian said. “But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. This list was compiled by my predecessor. A more meticulous man than I.” He gave the handwritten sheet to Stephen Reed.

As the young policeman scanned it, Sebastian went on, “My predecessor toured every parish with a border adjoining Sir Owain’s estate and noted every death or disappearance in recent years. Suspicious or accidental, report or rumor, they all went in. A woman drowned in a pool. A girl who set off for school and neither arrived nor returned. The disappearances were always at a time when Sir Owain was at home.”

Stephen Reed looked up from the list. “I know two of these names,” he said.

“You do?”

“Grace Eccles and Evangeline May Bancroft. Local girls. They’re my age. I knew them growing up. We went to the same school.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

“I remember some concern when they were lost on the moors one night. But it turned out they’d each misled their parents and gone camping together. They were found the next morning, miles from anywhere.”

“Where are they now?”

“Evangeline’s gone. She went away to London. And Grace is not an easy woman for anyone to speak to.”

“Easy or not, this is no time for reticence. What if today’s crime has a precedent?”

“It’s not a matter of reticence,” Stephen Reed said. “Believe me. If you were to meet Grace, you’d understand. May I hold on to this?”

At that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Dolly, to say that Sebastian’s supper was waiting for him in the dining room.

“Keep it,” Sebastian said. “And do with it what you can.”

E
XTRACT FROM
The Empire of Beasts
BY
S
IR
O
WAIN
L
ANCASTER
, FRS

I
T WAS
the morning after the night attack on our camp. The dead and the injured lay where they had fallen. Everyone came down out of the trees and out of their hiding places and began to share their stories of what they had seen. One of the
camaradas
told, in his halting English sprinkled with phrases from his native Portuguese, of seeing four of our fellows carried off alive.

I had witnessed no such thing myself. I am ashamed to say that the attack had been too sudden, and too overwhelming, for any response other than hasty self-preservation. One moment we had been sitting by our separate campfires, doing our best to raise each other’s spirits for the further trials ahead; the next, it was as if a combined landslide, whirlwind, and stampede descended upon us, all at once.

You might say that, after our earlier experience upon the river, we should have been more prepared for something like it on dry land. In our defense, I should say that even the most fertile and apprehensive imagination could never have anticipated what came to befall us. First had come the sound, like the thunder of an approaching wave, to which had quickly been added the crashing of falling trees. We had barely time to rise to our feet and then the herd was upon us, charging through the camp, scattering bodies and trampling our fires.

What little I saw, I saw by firelight. I could make no estimate of their number. Each of those beasts was a giant, of a species hitherto unknown to science. They seemed to move as easily on two legs as on all fours, their long tails providing balance and their forelimbs as well adapted for gripping as running. At the time their attack appeared to have no purpose other than to terrify and destroy.

But now, as we counted our number that morning and found no less than three of our fellows and one of the
camaradas
missing, it seemed that the simple
peon’s
story was true. There was a purpose to the attack after all; we had been harvested. There was much grieving and wailing, and a great sense of gloom and despair settled upon the camp, and I resolved that if I did not act to dispel it, our adventure might end there, and all the struggles we had endured and the losses we had borne would be for nothing. I gathered everyone together and addressed them thus:

“We have already lost many of our number and most of our supplies in that terrible incident upon the river. Last night, we suffered losses again. But for those of us who have survived, let us remember that a certain providence has brought us this far. We live because it is clearly God’s purpose that we should, and to give up now would be to go against his plan.”

I saw hope in their faces as I spoke. Truth to tell, we had all been through a dreadful ordeal. To see one’s comrades torn by beasts is a terrible thing. The river serpents that had upset our boats and taken our companions had left many in a state of shock, and I knew that from now on a few among us would need to have courage for the many. And with that in mind I set out the following plan.

Those injured in the night’s attack would be moved to a new camp on higher ground. Dr S———— would supervise their care and set about the gathering of certain plants and herbs that would alleviate their injuries. I, meanwhile, would take my buffalo gun and follow the clear trail left by the night’s attackers, in the hope that I might find and rescue some, or even all, of our fellows.

I credited those rampaging creatures with some dim intelligence, in that they had surely taken their victims alive for some purpose. What that purpose might be was too horrible to contemplate, but it gave me all the more reason to proceed without delay. I loaded the buffalo gun and gathered my remaining ammunition, after which I devised a way to hang it around my shoulders in a makeshift bandolier.

My enemies would be formidable, but thus armed I was confident that we might be evenly matched. My greatest danger was that they might come at me all at once, for the buffalo gun carried but a single round and required a reloading after every discharge. I was, however, banking on the prospect that the devastating effect of a large-bore hit upon one of the creatures would be enough to cause its fellows to turn and flee.