Текст книги "The Bedlam Detective"

Автор книги: Stephen Gallagher

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AFTER A LONG WAIT FOR HIS TRAIN IN WALTON STATION, SEBASTIAN walked home from Waterloo. There were no messages at the pie stand, but he stopped and exchanged a few words with a couple of cabmen. By now Sebastian was a familiar enough figure to have earned himself a nickname; to the cabbies he was the Bedlam Detective.

Walking on in the late-evening darkness, he thought about trick films and puppets. Something had been said about the tinker having puppets. About how children would bring him rags, and he’d make the puppets dance for them.

But a trick film? That seemed like the least likely explanation of all.

Frances was sitting before the fire, her clenched hand raised to touch her lips, gazing into the flames. The room smelled of coal smoke, along with the ever-present smell of moldering wallpaper that hung around the suite of apartments. She didn’t seem aware of him at first. He stopped to look at her; and in the second or more before she registered his presence, he had the sense that her innermost thoughts would be within his reach, if he were only to ask.

But then she looked at him; and when their eyes met he smiled briefly and found some reason to look away as he spoke to her, much as he always did.

“Where’s Robert?” he said.

“In his room,” she said, “reading the book you gave him.” And then she returned her gaze to the flames.

ROBERT SAID, “I can’t do what you asked for.”

“That’s all right,” Sebastian said. “I know it was difficult.”

“It’s not a matter of being difficult,” his son said. “You asked the wrong question.”

“Did I,” Sebastian said.

Usually as tidy as a bug collector’s cupboard, Robert’s room was in some disarray. But it was disarray with a purpose, as Sebastian could see. Spread out across the bed were a dozen or more of his magazines, arranged in some kind of significant order. Some lay open, others had pages marked with slips of paper. There were books close to hand as well, and he had a notebook in which he’d been writing. Sir Owain’s memoir carried even more annotation slips. By the looks of it, Robert was still only halfway through.

Sebastian said, “And what question should I have asked?”

“It’s not a matter of where truth ends and fantasy begins,” Robert said. “You should have said where fact ends and fantasy begins. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“No, it’s not. Mother’s like a spring flower. That’s not strictly a fact. But it is true.”

The phrase sounded familiar. “Where’d you hear that?” Sebastian said.

“I heard you say it once.”

And it was true, he had. He remembered now. In another life entirely.

Robert went on, “In the book, the narrator’s party is dogged by all these various trials and they see terrible destruction along their way. He listens to the stories of the natives and draws conclusions about the causes. He imagines these great creatures and then he looks for the evidence. What you’re calling his fantasies are actually how he pictures his fears. So they may not be factual, but to his mind they represent the truth.”

“Read on,” Sebastian suggested, picking up one of Robert’s older dime novels and looking at the cover. “He becomes more explicit.”

“I hope he does produce some monsters,” Robert said. “A dinosaur or two can gee up a tale no end. There’s not a single one in Along the Orinoco, and it’s all the poorer for it.” He looked up. “Will there be dinosaurs?”

“Not exactly,” Sebastian said, and held up the story magazine. It was issue number 130 of the Frank Reade Library, dated April 3, 1896. Authorship of Along the Orinoco was credited to “Noname,” as well it might be; a glance inside showed the lines to be brief, the language vigorous but rudimentary.

“Where did this one come from?” he said.

“I brought it with me. From home.”

He meant Philadelphia. Laying the magazine down again, Sebastian said, “I can see you’ve been researching the subject.”

“You said you’d pay me a shilling or two for an opinion,” Robert said, reaching out and returning the issue to its proper place in the order. “If I don’t put in the effort, how else am I going to form one?”

“All I’m trying to resolve, Robert, is whether the man who wrote that story believes it to be his actual experience.”

“You want to know if he’s intending fiction or deception.”

“Exactly.”

“Is this for your Lunacy work?”

“It is.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because I can no more trust in his answer than I can believe in his book.”

Robert turned around and reached for a bound volume that lay on top of a stack of others on his bedside table.

He said, “This one’s called Among the Indians of Guiana. It’s exploration, not fiction. Mister Everard Im Thurn says of the Guiana Indians that they make no distinction between their dream lives and waking lives. If a man dreams of being hurt by his neighbor, he’ll go round and punch him the next morning.”

“Trust a savage not to understand the difference.”

“They don’t believe there is a difference. But their thinking is quite sophisticated. In their world it’s the spirit that’s responsible for the deed, not the body. And the spirit can live in all kinds of forms and cross from dreams to life and back again.”

Reaching into his pocket, Sebastian said, “So a man gone native may lose his sense of what’s real. That’s worth a shilling.”

“I don’t want it,” Robert said. “I haven’t earned it yet.”

“But you’ve given me something that I can tell Sir James. Does this Mister Im Thurn have anything to say about the state of mind of a man who sees monsters?”

“Oh, yes. That’s half the fun of a lost world. The Indians say that every inaccessible place in their jungle is inhabited by monstrous animals. They say there are huge white jaguars and eagles on the plain of Roraima, high above the Amazon. And down by the rivers there are monkey men and water beasts. It’s like Challenger’s world in the serial I’m collecting. That has dinosaurs.”

“Have you not yet reached the episode with the nest of monsters? Or the sea serpent that pursues the rescue boat?”

“No,” Robert said. “But don’t spoil it for me.”

THERE’S ONE OF THEM.”

She was just making the turn into Paddington Street. Lights burned in some of the upper windows, but the pavements were empty. It was now almost half an hour after nine o’clock. She looked back and saw a group of three men. They were crossing Baker Street toward her.

“Oi,” one said. “Miss. You. Come here. I want to talk to you.”

As they passed under a streetlamp, their foreheads and faces lighted up like bone and their eyes were plunged into deep shadow. They wore cheap suits, and cheap boots. The one who’d spoken had a lock of hair in his buttonhole, worn like a trophy.

“Not tonight,” she said.

She turned away and put on speed.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” she heard. “I’ll bloody teach yer.”

She could hear their boots on the pavement. She glanced back and saw the three of them striding after her. The foremost of them, the one with the lock of hair on his lapel, was balding and had a wide, dense mustache over a weak chin. His two friends were giggling behind, and one was checking behind them to see if anyone was watching.

She looked ahead and saw that the short length of Paddington Street was empty of people.

She broke into a run, to reach the next corner before they could reach her. If she could get around the corner they’d be seen, and she’d be safe.

But the next street was empty as well. There was a dray pulling along at its far end, but it was heading the wrong way. Right behind her and even closer now, she could hear the delighted snorting of her pursuers at their own outrageousness as they flouted all that was holy. For she was only one of those suffrage hoydens, come from the place where they were known to gather, alone and fair game for any sport.

She saw the etched glass and dim yellow lights of a public house, and in that she saw sanctuary. Without any hesitation she slammed open the doors and fell inside.

She looked around. She was in a small snug with aged woodwork and gleaming brass, and room for about a dozen men. She saw old men, bearded men, men squat as toby jugs, some with caps, some with pipes, all with stolid, phlegmatic expressions as if their lives had run out early and they wished nothing more than to sit out the rest of their days in silence, right here, with little to say.

“Hey, Captain,” one of them called out. “Woman on the bridge.”

And another one added, “She’s out on her own.”

Any hope of sanctuary was dashed by the appearance of the landlord, all brawn and shirtsleeves and red-faced perspiration. His eyes were hard and his face was set.

“Come on, you,” he called from behind the bar. “Out.”

“I’m being followed,” she said.

“I don’t care what you are,” he said, speaking over her and shouting her down. “No women in the snug.”

“Nor gentlemen either,” she retorted, whereupon with a “Why you—” he threw back the counter flap with such violence that she felt a sudden and genuine fear for her safety, even more immediate than the threat she’d felt on the street. She dashed through into the adjoining public bar rather than face him down.

It was as if the world had tipped and turned over in the space of a minute, and she’d fallen into London’s shocking through-the-mirror counterpart. From the public bar she came out into the street and almost collided with a night-patrolling constable.

She stopped. Relief flooded through her like a laudanum rush.

The policeman looked at her and then at the public house behind her and said, “What’s this?”

“Ask the roughs who decided to chase me,” she said.

He didn’t look around. “Where?”

She was gathering her breath now. “Back on the street,” she said. “They were waiting around outside the Portman Rooms. I was at a meeting there. I made the mistake of coming out alone.”

Now he looked around. But pointedly. Suddenly she didn’t like the way that this was going. He was a big man, as all of London’s policemen tended to be. And he had a country accent, as so many of them seemed to have. There were very few sharp-witted cockneys walking the streets for the Metropolitan Police, but there were a great number of these slow-moving, blue-caped and helmeted oxen.

He said, “Where are they, then?”

A glance, and then she said, “Gone.”

“Gone, are they?”

“They chased me from Baker Street.”

“If they ever existed.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no man safe from your kind,” he said. “Is there?”

She was shocked.

She said, “Is this how you respond to every woman who asks for your help?”

“There’s women and there’s women,” he said, glancing down at her coat. “I know where you’ve come from. And I know what you are. So move on. Go home to your husband. If a woman like you can get one.” He leaned forward slightly. “Whore.”

He said this last word low, and between his teeth, so that even if anyone had been standing close, they’d be likely to miss it.

As fast as the relief had run through her, she was now flushed through with ice.

“What did you call me?”

“I called you nothing,” the policeman said, straightening up again. “You must be hearing things.”

She glanced down and realized what he’d been looking at. Her suffragette pin with its green, white, and violet colors. Some wore amethyst and pearls. Hers were paste.

She walked, unsteadily, the rest of the way to the Underground station, knowing that the constable was following and watching her from a distance, but taking little comfort from the fact. His presence might deter anyone from approaching her with ill intent; but were they to do so, he’d probably turn away.

Her train carriage on the return journey smelled of sweat and leather, like cooking bones. She caught herself shaking, and made herself stop. The short walk home was a new trial.

Safe in her rooms, she did not burst into tears as she was thinking she might, but was violently sick into the basin from under the washstand. Her landlady was partially deaf and unlikely to hear. Evangeline sank to the floor by her bed, hugging the basin, teary and miserable with the vomit searing her sinuses, and sat there without any sense of the passage of time. It might have been for minutes, it might have been an hour.

Eventually she rose, and cleaned everything up, and washed her face in cold water.

With her self-control regained, Evangeline looked to her future. Fear would turn to anger. Perhaps not tonight, but in time. She would take care not to be caught so again. She would continue to wear the badge of her belief, though not, out of prudence, at her place of work; if its significance were to be understood, her dismissal would probably follow.

She undressed and put on her nightgown, and then quickly climbed into her cold bed and shivered under the layers of heavy blankets until her own body heat warmed the space she lay in and made it into a nest. She told herself she was safe. She’d felt threatened, but she had not been hurt. She tried to compel herself to appreciate the difference.

Eventually, Evangeline slept. Inevitably, it was troubled sleep.

She had a nightmare of her childhood, the first in a very long time.

Grace was screaming, and Evangeline could not bring herself to turn around and see why.

That was all.

LYING IN THEIR BED AND WATCHING THE LACE PATTERNS CAST across the ceiling from the streetlamp outside, Sebastian sensed that Elisabeth had an inclination to talk. So he stirred a little, to signal that he was wasn’t asleep.

“Are you awake?” she said.

“I suppose,” he said.

“Frances tells me that Robert’s teacher has been talking about finding him employment again.”

The last time he’d raised the subject, she’d had no enthusiasm for it. But now her tone was optimistic.

“That’s encouraging.”

“Yes. It is.”

Sebastian said, “I wish someone could say where he’d fit in. I know he’s good for something. If I didn’t know the boy was troubled, sometimes I would think him a genius.”

“He’s no longer a boy.”

“If he were merely slow, employment would be no problem. There’s many make a living with a shovel or a broom that can barely speak their own names.”

“He isn’t slow.”

“Anything but,” Sebastian agreed.

After a moment, Elisabeth said, “I do have a strange feeling that all’s going to be well.”

Given her recent moods, Sebastian was surprised to hear this. “What’s caused that?” he said.

“Nothing I can begin to explain.”

Then she began to explain.

“I went up to see the little girl. The one I told you about? The one whose drunken father came in and threatened the nurses. She’s a beautiful child, the way so many consumptives are. Large eyes and a lovely transparent complexion. She said that she hoped her sisters won’t cry too much when she’s gone.”

“Who told her she’s dying?”

“No one’s had to. She just knows. We understand nothing, Sebastian. We don’t know where we’re going or why. We think that what we know is all there is. But sometimes you just get a sense of what’s beyond it. And that can take your breath away.”

They lay there in silence for a while. And then he felt her leg against his own. He laid his hand on her stomach, and she rose to press against it; and from there the journey of intimacy took its familiar, though of late less frequent, course.

Afterward, they said nothing. Within minutes, she was breathing deeply and he knew she was asleep.

Sebastian could not sleep. Normally his work did not prey on his thoughts. But this case was different.

He found himself constructing a rough sequence in his mind. How old was Grace Eccles now? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Evangeline would be the same. Their ordeal had taken place two years after Sir Owain’s return from his South American expedition. Then a gap of years in which deaths and disappearances had certainly occurred, but none that drew so much notice as these present murders.

Something troubled him. He could construct a narrative in which Sir Owain roamed his estate in search of the beasts that lived on in his mind. But try as he might, Sebastian could not reconcile this narrative with the indecencies that had been practiced upon the victims.

Perhaps he simply lacked the necessary education in man’s psychological complexity. He certainly knew of man’s capacity for harm, and he’d heard rumors of soldiers abroad whose actions beyond the sight of God and country were a disgrace to their flag and their uniform. But try as he might, he could not quite believe it of the man he had met.

Evangeline had returned to London, and was somewhere close. One way or another, he would find her.

After that afternoon’s visit, he even had an idea for how he might go about it.

Perhaps the nature of these beings is best made clear by saying that they correspond very closely to the dragons, unicorns, and griffins, and to the horned, hoofed, and tailed devils of our own folk-lore.… The one common quality which these animals have for us is that they are all fabulous and non-existent. But our knowledge of this fact is derived entirely from science. The Indian, being without even the rudiments of scientific thought, believes as fully in the real existence of an animal as impossible as was ever fabled, as he does in that of animals most usual to him. In short, to the Indian the only difference between these monstrous animals and those most familiar to him is that, while he has seen the latter, he has not himself seen the former, though he has heard of them from others. These monstrous animals, in short, are regarded as on exactly the same level as regards the possession of body and spirits as are all other animals.

EVERARD F. IM THURN,

Among the Indians of Guiana:

Being Sketches Chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1883

SEBASTIAN HAD INTENDED TO BEGIN HIS SEARCH FOR EVANGELINE Bancroft as soon as his other duties allowed. But when he read the midmorning message waiting for him at the cabmen’s stand, he forgot all else and ran. There was a crowd on the street outside the Evelina, and half of it seemed to comprise policemen. One of them tried to direct him away, but he pushed by and ignored the angry shout that followed him into the building.

In the hospital’s chaotic entrance hall he stopped the first sergeant that he saw and said, “Where is she?”

“Who are you?”

“Sebastian Becker. I’m the husband.”

“Who of?”

“Elisabeth Becker! The receiving officer’s clerk! I had a message to say she was attacked.”

“Ah,” the sergeant said. “One of the doctors is stitching her up.”

The entire place seemed to be in turmoil. By contrast the dispensary wing was almost empty, and the outpatients’ waiting area had been completely cleared. It was in one of the adjoining treatment rooms that Sebastian found his wife receiving care from one of the senior medical men. Sebastian recognized him; he was one of the doctors from Guy’s.

For a moment, Sebastian stood in shock. Elisabeth sat with her dress cut away to her bodice and her arm raised; her arm was bared, but covered in so much dried blood and iodine that it might have belonged to a terra-cotta statue, freshly dug from the wet earth. By contrast, her face was deathly white. Her expression was calm and serious. A few flecks of blood had peppered her neck and chin. A blood-spattered nurse held her steady while the surgeon, in waistcoat and rolled-up shirtsleeves, made at her arm with a needle that looked as if it might belong to a sailmaker.

“Oh my Lord,” Sebastian said.

The nursing sister, whom he didn’t know, was about to speak, but Elisabeth saw him and said, “Sebastian. Don’t be too distressed. It looks much worse than it is.”

But a brief glance up from her surgeon seemed to suggest otherwise. He met Sebastian’s eyes for a moment and then returned his attention to the work.

The fresh wound spiraled all the way around the length of Elisabeth’s forearm, like apple peel. Her fingers were bent, her wrist cocked. The surgeon had sutured about three-quarters of the slash. The wound above the stitches gaped, like a shallow rip in a cushion.

Sebastian said, “Can I stay?”

“If you’re prepared to help,” the surgeon said without taking his eyes from his work.

“How can I do that?”

“Hold her other hand. She’s got my knee squeezed down to the bone.”

She hadn’t realized. “Sorry,” she said, and released her grip on him. She might have blushed, if she’d had the color to spare. The surgeon smiled briefly, to tell her he wasn’t serious. Then the smile was gone.

Sebastian pulled over a chair and sat beside them. She gripped his hand tightly, and squeezed it even tighter whenever the needle passed through her skin.

“Not much longer now,” the surgeon said.

Sebastian said, “What happened?”

Elisabeth said, “It was the father of the consumptive girl. He showed up drunk again and demanded his daughter. He evaded Mister Briggs and found me in the receiving office. I asked him to leave and he set off for the wards. I didn’t know his knife was out when I tried to stop him.”

“You should have called someone.”

“There wasn’t time. Who’d imagine a man would turn on a woman like that?”

The surgeon paused in his work and asked her to move her fingers. She managed to flex them just a little, at the cost of some considerable discomfort that she tried not to show. But Sebastian felt it in her grip. He could feel every transferred nuance of her pain as the procedure went on.

He said, “I don’t mean to question your treatment. But would this not be better carried out in the operating room?”

“It would,” said the surgeon without taking his eyes off his work, “if we had the use of it. But the man’s still in the building. They’ve got him trapped upstairs.”

Sebastian needed a moment or two to take that in.

“Trapped?”

“On one of the wards, I was told.”

Then Sebastian was on his feet, with Elisabeth still clutching his hand; and the Guy’s surgeon, who’d been about to pass his needle into the skin of her forearm where the line of the wound passed over the tendons of her wrist, drew back with an unintended oath.

“Forgive me,” Sebastian said, prizing himself free, “but I deal in madmen. I may be able to give advice to bring about a safe outcome.”

“Sebastian, no!” Elisabeth said. “Stay with me!”

“Let me make the offer,” Sebastian said. “For the truth of it is, I know it’s a necessary pain, but I can’t watch you suffer like this.”

“Let him go,” the surgeon said to her, adding, without rancor, “because frankly, Mister Becker, you’re being neither use nor ornament here. If you can help the situation, please do. But be warned. Two minutes after he attacked your wife, the man killed a nurse.”

FIRSTLY SEBASTIAN had to find a way up to the wards, avoiding the pandemonium of the entrance hall. Because of his wife’s employment he had a better knowledge of the building than a casual visitor might, but he didn’t know it well. Making a turn out of the dispensary, within a few strides he found himself witness to a scene of exodus via the hospital’s back ways; all of the hospital’s sick children were being ushered down service stairs and through kitchen corridors by policemen, nurses, and some of the hospital’s civilian staff. They shuffled in near-silence, like a night-marching army. The children were mostly in nightshirts with blankets thrown around their shoulders. Some were carrying toys, while many of the smaller ones were being carried themselves.

There was Mister Briggs, big, stern Mister Briggs, craggy as a statue with a cracked heart full of well-hidden love, standing before a doorway with a hospital screen across it.

To those looking frightened by this strange experience he added to the strangeness by booming, “Go on, now, boys and girls. Go with the nurses. They will look after you. There’s nothing here to see.”

Then he glanced back at the folding screen, saw that its coverage of the opening behind it was not complete, and moved to make a careful adjustment.

“Mister Briggs, I need to pass,” Sebastian said to him.

“I wouldn’t,” the old soldier advised.

“I’m afraid I have to.”

“How is Mrs. Becker?”

“Bearing up better than I would in her place.”

Briggs nodded, and turned away.

“Do as your nurses tell you,” he called out in a ringing tone, overlooking the fact that the nurses were urging the children to conduct themselves quietly. “Obey them as you would your own mother.”

Beyond the opening was a wide corridor with offices along one side of it. Chairs stood against the opposite wall for those awaiting their turn with physicians and dressers. The chairs had been pushed askew and some personal items abandoned when the area had been cleared.

Toward the corridor’s far end lay the body of a nurse. Beyond it stood policemen and white-faced members of the Evelina senior staff and at least one member of the governing board. Someone was sobbing, and Sebastian couldn’t immediately see who. The body was uncovered and a police artist was making a sketch of its position with measurements, stepping over and around the blood to get them. It was life’s blood, an enormous static pool of it under and about the body like the satin lining of an outspread opera cloak.

Sebastian tilted his head to see the dead woman’s face. He could not say that he knew her. She looked around nineteen years of age, but was perhaps older.

His heart, already chilled, grew even more cold.

A magnesium flash lit up the corridor’s far end. They were photographing the knife that had been used on her, and presumably upon Elisabeth. A scaled measuring rod lay on the floor alongside it. No one gave Sebastian a glance. He went no closer, but returned through the screen.

The service stairway was empty of children now, and he ascended without obstruction. On the next floor was a passageway running beside a long, high-ceilinged ward. The ward had four fireplaces so that it could be divided up as needed, and there were further side rooms for the smallest infants and the isolation of whooping cough cases.

As he walked the empty length of the building, Sebastian became aware of some slight, small noises. Then as he approached the end of the passageway he saw that the children who could not rise or walk had been rolled to safety on their beds, all of which were now marshaled in the infants’ room like ships in a crowded harbor. Two nurses were among them, and a policeman with a pistol guarded the door. All their eyes were on Sebastian, like those of frightened creatures in a burrow.

The armed man on the door first gave a warning signal for Sebastian to make no sound, and then waved for him to go back. But instead of turning around, Sebastian held up his Lord Chancellor’s papers with their visible crest. He made a silent face of inquiry.

The officer decided against a challenge to this stranger’s authority—though in truth, Sebastian had none to exercise—and pointed the way.

Treading softly, he entered the main stairwell. The noise from the entrance hall below drifted up, like echoes from a different world. He saw no one until he reached the next landing.

The floor above was a close counterpart of the one below. At this end of the passageway, the police had set up their siege base. The corridor’s windows looked into the ward. About half a dozen detectives and two sergeants were dug in at this spot, crouched low or pressed up against the walls, watching anxiously and craning to hear, trying to observe without drawing any attention to themselves.

Sebastian stood at the back and craned along with them. Right down at the far end of the ward he could see two men and a child, just about. Of the three, he could see the nurse-killer most clearly. The man was sitting on a bed with the child beside him, a controlling arm across her shoulders. The other man, whose back was toward Sebastian, was speaking earnestly to him.

The man holding the child was sallow and unshaven. The other, a well-dressed man, was silver-haired and broad-shouldered. They were too far away for Sebastian to make out anything of what was being said.

In a low voice he whispered to the nearest detective, “Is that his own child?”

“His child died last night,” the detective whispered back.

At that moment, the unshaven man on the bed was making some point. He was emphasizing it by stabbing at the air with a surgical scalpel. The silver-haired man quickly held up his hands and rose to his feet. The hostage-taker was growing increasingly agitated, and only began to calm when the other backed off to a distance. Sebastian heard a snick of metal on metal, and looked to his side.

He saw that one of the sergeants held a Lee-Enfield army rifle and was sliding the bolt as slowly as he could, though slowing the action did nothing to make it more discreet.

The superintendent of M Division Southwark came striding out of the ward with his face set and grave. In contrast to his hair, his brows and mustache were mostly black.

Even as their commander rejoined them, the sniper sergeant with the Lee-Enfield was murmuring under his breath, “Just say the word, sir.” But the superintendent waved him down, and hardly needed to give his reasons why; not at this distance, and not with the child so close.

Keeping his voice low, he said, “I can’t bargain with him. With the nurse dead, he’s for the drop and he knows it. What can I offer a man in that position?”

“God’s mercy,” one of his detectives suggested, “if he spares the child.”

“I fear he’s given up on that. We’ll have to rush him.”

At which point, Sebastian spoke up.

“Sir,” he said, and the superintendent’s gaze swung to him.

“Who are you?”

“Sebastian Becker, sir. From the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor. May I speak to your man?”

“To what end?”

“I’m used to reasoning with lunatics. I don’t think your man’s so different. I can suggest a case for his survival if he’ll give up his hostage.”

“And if he won’t?”

“Then I have more experience with firearms than most. If he so much as lowers his guard to think it over, I can put a bullet between his eyes with no risk to the child. But for that I’ll need to be close.”

The superintendent was looking at him without warmth or, indeed, giving any sign of his feelings at all.

“A Visitor’s man?” he said.

“Sebastian Becker. Once of the Detectives Division where I served under Clive Turner-Smith. And later of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the United States of America, where I learned how to use a pistol.” He glanced over the superintendent’s shoulder, to see that the sallow man was looking down and explaining something to the child. The child was rigid with fear, a fact that the man seemed not to notice.