The Bedlam Detective (42 page)

The conservatory opened out before him. A soaring structure in cast iron and glass, a temple of light and dense, humid air. Within it was contained an entire world in miniature, a jungle facsimile of palms, orchids, lianas, and ferns. A pathway wound through to its center. Sebastian’s heart was beating, faster and faster.

My dust would hear her and beat, had I lain for a century dead
.

Elisabeth was waiting.

There she stood, her back toward him. She wore a plain high-collared blouse and a long, light dress the color of smoke. Not as he’d seen her last, in the somber luxury of a chapel of rest, but as in life, unharmed. She seemed not to be aware of his approach. Her head was tilted, as if listening to music.

As soon as he saw that, he heard the music too. He remembered another Sunday in Willow Grove Park, a trolley ride out of Philadelphia, with Sousa on the bandstand. He’d worn a suit and a straw boater. They’d been younger then and, had they only known it, very happy. It seemed to him that Elisabeth looked exactly as she had on that day.

It took him a surprising amount of courage to speak.

He said, “A woman once told me that a man who can dance is always going to be in demand.”

She didn’t look at him. But she showed no surprise. She’d known all along that he was there.

Reaching out to touch the dull, spiky flowers on the towering grasses that grew beneath the palms, she said, “A wise woman. What happened to her?”

“She left when I wasn’t looking.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“It feels that way.”

She let the drab petals trail through her fingers. “Did you know,” she said, “that when bamboo goes into flower, it flowers at the same time all over the world? No one can explain it. But somehow it knows.” And she started to move away.

“Wait,” he said. “Please.”

Elisabeth stopped. She looked at him then, with those large gray eyes he remembered so well.

“What?”

“I know it’s too much to ask,” he said. “And I know it can’t happen. But I so want you back.”

“Good-bye, Sebastian,” she said. “This hour must pass. It’s time to let me go.”

“Not yet,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to.”

“I know,” she said. “But you must do it anyway. For both of us.”

S
IR
O
WAIN WAS AWAKE AND ALERT WHEN
S
EBASTIAN FINALLY
returned to the stairs landing and dropped back into his place on the floor beside him. The man didn’t seem to have much strength for rising, and didn’t try. But his manner was eager enough.

“Well,” he said, “did you see them? The monsters?”

Sebastian took a deep and heavy breath; when he let it go, it was as if a small measure of his pain was washed out of him with it.

“No,” he said. “Not monsters.”

“What, then?”

Sebastian looked down and made no reply. Sir Owain went on, “You’ve seen her. Haven’t you? You can see her too? I’ve always known she was out there. But she always runs from me. What did she say? Did she mention me at all?”

Sebastian looked at him then. He knew that Sir Owain was speaking of his own wife, not of Elisabeth. But he was willing to let Sir Owain believe that his were the only ghosts that haunted the premises.

He said, “What would you want her to say?”

“Don’t just tell me what you think I want to hear,” Sir Owain said. “Tell me honestly. Did she say if I can ever be forgiven?”

Sebastian hesitated, and considered his own experience. Then told him, “She said to let her go.”

“Let her go? She said that? What does it mean?”

“What do you want from her?” Sebastian said. “She can’t come back to you. Stop wondering when the pain will go. It won’t. It’s part of what she left you. You’ll have to learn to love it.”

“What about my son?”

“From what I know, your son is happy,” Sebastian said.

“Did
he
have a message for me?”

“I’m sure he wants you not to worry. You’ve suffered enough. Believe that he forgives you.”

Sir Owain lowered his head, and his shoulders began to shake with silent weeping. Sebastian had mixed feelings about the lie, but no conscience. What mattered, here? He had his own consolation, rooted in a new and very shaky faith; let Sir Owain now have his.

He put his hand on Sir Owain’s shoulder.

“It’s over,” he said. “Now, please. Where did you hide those keys? I need your telephone.”

T
HE KEYS WERE
in the hallway cabinet, the one that contained the warship model. The glass lid lifted, and the keys were inside one of the steamer’s funnels. Sir Owain unlocked the study door and reconnected the telephone, which took him no more than a minute.

Sebastian placed his call, and as he waited for a messenger to return with someone from the Sun Inn to speak to him, he became aware that Sir Owain was no longer standing in the doorway. He felt a twinge of alarm. Sir Owain was subdued now, but far from harmless. Dr. Hubert Sibley lay dead, somewhere hereabouts. That might not be enough to save the tinker, but it would remove Sir Owain from human society.

Dolly came to the telephone. Not Stephen Reed, not Parish Constable Bill Turnbull, but the Sun Inn’s cook. She began to tell him that the two men were already on their way to Arnside Hall; they’d made a troubling discovery, but she did not know what it was. While she was still explaining, Sebastian heard a shout. It came from outside. Sir Owain must have taken the keys and opened the main door.

Sebastian heard, “Monster! Monster!” and then the sound of a gunshot, ferociously loud in the courtyard. “Oh, Lord,” he said. He abandoned the telephone and ran into the hallway, skidding when he hit the rug, but not stopping as he dived onward toward daylight and the open air.

Sebastian had once seen half of a man’s head blown clean off, gone from the eye sockets up.

Much the same thing had happened to Thomas Arnot, Sir Owain’s chauffeur, as he’d stood trying to drown a young woman at the horse trough. Only he didn’t seem to know it yet. His body was still standing, half turned toward Sir Owain. Sir Owain stood in the middle of the courtyard with his hunting rifle half lowered. Arnot, his brains gone, seemed perfectly capable of carrying on without them. He seemed about to release his victim and start a jerky walk toward his would-be executioner.

But then the pretense crumbled, and the chauffeur’s body fell. His legs gave way, and he slid to the ground like a rotten building falling into its own foundations. Sir Owain still held the rifle, but Sebastian had a more pressing concern. Arnot’s victim remained half submerged and had ceased to struggle.

The water in the trough was all befouled with blood and fragments of bone. Even after Sebastian had pulled her out of it and lowered her to the courtyard floor, her long hair streaming like a mermaid’s, it was several seconds before he recognized Evangeline. He froze in horror. She did not move, or breathe.

“Here,” Sir Owain said, thrusting the hunting rifle into Sebastian’s hands and shoving him aside. “Delay can be fatal.”

He moved with purpose. He rolled Evangeline to lie facedown and drew up one of her arms so that her forehead could rest upon it, keeping her head clear of the ground. He placed his hands against the small of her back and pressed on it, in a more thorough version of the technique he’d used to keep Sebastian alive. Water streamed from Evangeline’s nose and mouth, as if squeezed from a goatskin. She showed no discomfort, or even awareness. Though she drew in breath when Sir Owain removed his weight from her, she gave no voluntary sign of life at all. Sir Owain repeated the action, again and again, the abdominal pressure forcing her diaphragm upward to act upon her lungs.

Sebastian looked down at the rifle in his hands. It was a large-bore, single-shot buffalo gun. Little wonder that it had caused such damage at this range.

“You see?” Sir Owain said, with a sideways glance toward Arnot’s body. “They do. They walk among us. Invisible to all.”

Evangeline suddenly spasmed and began a coughing fit just as the vehicle bringing Stephen Reed made its noisy entrance into the Hall courtyard.

Stephen Reed jumped down from the wagon and was arrested by the sight before him. Sebastian with the hunting rifle. The bedraggled sea creature that was Evangeline. Sir Owain crouching over her.

And the body of Thomas Arnot, his head topped like an egg, his body’s blood now snaking across the courtyard stones in search of a drain.

Sebastian laid down the rifle and helped Sir Owain to lift Evangeline to a sitting position. She was dazed and seemed not to know where she was.

“Who did this?” Stephen Reed said, torn between the fascinating sight of the mutilated chauffeur and concern for Evangeline.

Sebastian was about to speak, but Sir Owain spoke first.

“I did,” he said, and a peculiar little smile played about his lips.

He said, “I slew the beast.”

I
T WAS A BRIGHT SPRING DAY IN
L
ONDON AND
S
TEPHEN
R
EED
was walking up Bell Yard from Fleet Street, behind the Royal Courts of Justice on his way to the chambers where Evangeline Bancroft worked. They’d arranged, by letter, to meet that day during the half hour she had for lunch. But Stephen had taken a room in a boardinghouse off the Strand and was intending to spend several of his leave days in town. He was hoping that she might consent to allowing him to spend some of that time in her company.

He had much to tell her. The tinker had been freed, without apology. A billhook in Thomas Arnot’s workshop had been matched to the broken piece held in evidence. With Arnot gone, piecing his story and his motives together proved difficult. He had become public property, with one person’s theory as good as any other’s. A number of learned men, some of them from distant parts of Europe and all eager to dissect the psychology of this very twentieth-century phenomenon, had descended upon the resort and been thoroughly fleeced of their cash in return for interviews and information. Some of the information fed to them was even based in fact. One of the few conclusions that could be agreed upon was that it must have been as a child that Arnot had first noticed Grace; barely out of childhood himself, he’d watched her when her father and his own had done some dealing in horses.

A search of his living quarters above the former stables had revealed accommodations that were both squalid and austere, as if a monk had elected to live in a pigsty. A small collection of well-thumbed French postcards had been found hidden above a beam and, behind the laths of the wall, items of children’s clothing. They suggested other assaults and disappearances of which the police had known nothing.

Despite knowing of Arnot’s guilt from the day of her own assault, Grace had not given him up. Such was her nature. She never gave anything to the authorities, her lifelong enemies. Whatever knowledge Grace had, she hoarded for her own advantage. When the time was right, it appeared that she had blackmailed Arnot. Unable to make a living in a dying trade, she’d set out to supplement her income from his.

In her own mind, there was probably a certain aptness to this. He’d done her harm, and now it was his time to pay, with money he earned by the machines that were wiping out her livelihood. Little matter that the evidence she could threaten him with—nothing more than her own word and a livery button from his uniform—was so insubstantial. It had been enough to compel him.

The rest was guesswork. The most credible theory was that when Sir Owain’s fortunes declined to the point where he could no longer pay wages, Arnot was trapped. Grace cared nothing for his difficulty—it was his problem, not hers. Let him steal if he had to. Evangeline spoke of “poor Grace,” but inside poor Grace was a heart of flint. Only such a heart could let more children suffer, knowing what she knew. She had survived; so must they. And if they did not … such were the laws of the human jungle.

Unable to pay, unable to preserve himself by any other means, Arnot had silenced Grace and searched for the evidence she’d claimed to hold.

Stephen Reed now reached the Inns of Court. He asked for directions of one of the servants of the Inn, and quickly found Evangeline’s building.