Текст книги "The Bedlam Detective"

Автор книги: Stephen Gallagher

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

HER 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.

THE 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.

She’d wasted a moment. Now he’d turned to the bench and was looking along the tools that hung there. While his back was to the car, Evangeline slid across the seat and punched the parchment out of the broken window on the opposite side. Then she reached out and groped around for the handle to let herself out.

It wasn’t easy. Not hard to find the handle, but hard to turn it at that angle. By the time she’d thrown the door open and was spilling out, he’d reached her. He came around the back of the car and grabbed her, dragging her out and down onto the stones before she got a chance to gain her balance. She tangled in her skirts and went sprawling.

She was scrambling to rise, but he put his foot underneath her and hooked her over onto her back. Then he put one foot on her chest and leaned toward her, pinning her down with his full weight. She thought her ribs would break but had not the strength to throw him off or the breath to scream. She grabbed and scratched at his high leather driving boot, but it made no difference.

He said, “Where is it?”

She gasped. “What?” she tried to say, but no breath came out.

“I know you took a box from the cottage. The old man saw you. I went all over that place, and I never saw any box there. What have you done with it?”

In fear and pain, Evangeline cranked her head around and tried to look toward the car so that she could point to the pannier on her bicycle. But it wasn’t there. He’d lied, and hadn’t brought it.

Which meant he’d almost certainly lied about everything else; no Sebastian Becker, no Stephen Reed, no final resting place for Grace’s body. He’d set out only to find Evangeline and bring her here for this. A drive through town with her bicycle displayed on the back of the car would have been a poor excuse for stealth.

With no bicycle, she couldn’t appease him with the box he wanted. In which there was nothing anyway. She fought against his weight and he pressed down harder, and she felt her chest begin to crack. In her terror, she could think no more than a few seconds ahead. What could she do? What could she give him to make him stop?

Her eyes became fixed on the livery buttons on his uniform coat.

The livery button in Grace’s box, the button that Evangeline had disregarded, was a match for them.

Her fear was no less. But her mind was no longer so clouded.

There was the corner where she’d once stood. He’d brought them here from the moors, later to take them out again and leave them for dead. Grace had been screaming, and young Evangeline could not bring herself to turn around and see why.

Forgive me, Grace, she thought.

He had one foot on her, the other on the floor. His stance was extended, like a fencer’s in a lunge. Evangeline was pinned, but she was young and she was supple. She drew in both legs and kicked upward, feet together, hard into his jewels, which presented an open target.

The result was instantaneous and spectacular. Far more so than she could have imagined. This bit of wisdom had been shared between the sisterhood at their meetings, but few had ever seen the results.

He did not scream. It was much worse than that. He folded around the middle, turned white, and fell to the ground. There he squirmed like a cut worm, hugging himself and making tiny, high-pitched kitten sounds.

She scrambled to her feet and away, fearing his reach and recovery. As she got to the stable doors, she heard him vomit. She ran out into the yard and almost lost her footing on the cobblestones, looking all around for a way to run. She saw an archway and ran for that. Beyond the archway were derelict greenhouses. Beyond the greenhouses was woodland.

She knew what she should have done, of course. While he was helpless she should have gone to his workbench, selected a suitable hammer or a wrench, and beaten him like a jellyfish on a rock until there was no harm left in him. Now he would come after her when he was able, and he wouldn’t give her the same chance twice.

He wanted the button. The button would betray him. Plucked from his uniform jacket, bearing Sir Owain’s crest, kept by Grace for all these years. Grace had always known their attacker, but she’d kept it to herself—kept it from her. To what purpose, Evangeline could not imagine. She would have an angle; Grace always had. But as with her teachers, with the church, with the law, Grace had always played a defiant and potentially dangerous game.

He would follow her, Evangeline had no doubt. The beast of all their myths stood revealed, not as the monster of Sir Owain’s tragic imaginings, but as a nobody with a horrific soul. Behind all the nightmares stood the reality of the cold floor, the pitiless appetite. He would deal with her and then go looking to retrieve the evidence against him.

She dared not stop. If she stopped, he would find her.

She did not even know his name.

WHEN SEBASTIAN COULD ONCE AGAIN BREATHE UNAIDED, SIR Owain propped him with his back against the balustrade and then lowered himself to settle on the floor beside him. Sebastian sat with his head tilted back, looking up. It was a handsome stairway, one of the finest features in the house. It was paneled up to shoulder height, with exposed light stone above. On the stone hung sets of antlers on oak plaques.

As Sir Owain settled, he said, “I’ll tell you a story. This is one you won’t find in the book.”

Sebastian had nothing to offer in reply.

“I swear to you,” Sir Owain went on, “that when I stood up in London before my colleagues to present my observations, I had no idea of the storm I’d be causing in that room, or of the grief that I’d be bringing upon myself. As if I hadn’t grief enough already.

“Picture the scene. The room was crowded. I took the numbers as a sign of interest in what I had to say. But word had already spread, and they were out to deny me a hearing. They had no interest in my proposal that an expanded mind perceives a genuine extended universe. I was a fraud who was trying to sell them monsters, and that was the end of it.”

He looked to Sebastian for a reaction.

“I know what Somerville says about me,” he went on. “He’s of the opinion that my material success made me arrogant in all things. But I swear to you, I have never taken success in business to be the measure of a man’s worth. All the satisfaction that I have ever known lay in having the respect of my peers.

“That’s what I lost, that night. They even booed a slide of the Amazon, as if I’d fabricated that. I never got to finish my lecture. I was there to be shouted down, and that’s what they did. Their jeering followed me out of the building and into the street. I only have to close my eyes and I can hear it still.”

At that point he noticed something, took out a handkerchief, and wiped Sebastian’s chin.

Then he went on, “I rode home in a cab. At the time I had a town house just off Bedford Square. Imagine my feelings. Thanks to that one failed expedition I had lost my wife, my son, my position, and now my reputation. My fortune and my sanity would soon begin to follow.

“As we moved up St. Martins Lane, I grew convinced that my fellow scientists had pursued me on foot and that their cries were rising in the air. They became featherless leather-winged creatures that multiplied above me until they filled the sky. The cabbie heard nothing, and the horses were calm. But I saw the day grow darker and darker, as if in an eclipse.

“When we reached my door I sent the cabbie ahead to ring the bell, and then I ran inside as soon as the door was opened. I closed every shutter and drew every blind, and I forbade the staff to open them. I knew that the creatures were out there, covering my house with their wings. I understood that no one else could see them, but I never doubted their presence. If I listened, I could hear them scratching as they adjusted their grip on the walls. They did exist, I know it, and I know they still do. But not in this world.”

Sebastian turned his head an inch or two, just enough to see Sir Owain. His captor had rested his head back against the balustrade, and his eyes were closed as he continued to speak.

“I know how I sound,” he said. “Like every madman and opium-sniffer who mistakes his delusions for some important truth. But you will see for yourself, Mister Becker. I promise you will see.”

Sir Owain was not a young man. By his own account he had gone without sleep the previous night, spending the long hours watching over Sebastian.

He was fading, for sure, just as Sebastian was regaining the power of movement. Soon would come the opportunity to act.

STEPHEN REED returned to the inn, crossing the street from the customs house. He’d heard nothing of Sebastian since the night before, and his attempt to place a call to the house this morning had been met with a dead line. The customs man assured him that this was nothing unusual. The telephone wire to Arnside ran across the entire estate. Sir Owain had paid for the installation himself, but of late had lacked the means to keep the line inspected and maintained.

It was almost twelve. The town’s churches had now emptied, and the inns and hotel bars would soon be filling up. At the gates leading to the Sun Inn’s coaching yard, Stephen Reed saw landlord Bill Turnbull with two shamefaced young boys and a bicycle. One of the boys was wheeling the bicycle, which had a wicker pannier on its handlebars. Both were in their Sunday best, a state that hadn’t lasted the morning. Their neat socks had descended, their halfpenny collars gone awry.

Stephen followed them in. He was thinking that he’d ask Bill Turnbull to arrange transport out to Arnside. Though some kind of pretext would be useful, if his concerns turned out to be misplaced.

Turnbull was telling the boys to sit on the inn’s rear step, to wait there while their parents were sent for. Turnbull was being stern, but Stephen Reed knew an act when he saw one.

He said, “What’s going on?”

“Two young master criminals with a ladies’ bicycle,” Turnbull said. And then he lowered his voice and added, “I’m giving ’em a scare.”

One of the boys piped across the yard, “We found it.”

“Quiet, you.” Turnbull leaned the bicycle against an empty ale cask and looked in the basket for some clue to the owner.

Stephen Reed said, “I need an excuse to go out to Arnside.”

“You don’t need an excuse.”

“All right, then, I need a way to get there.”

“Fancy a bike ride? This one’s going spare.”

Stephen Reed was about to speak, but then he looked again at the bicycle.

“Haven’t I seen it before?” he said.

Turnbull had found a folded note in the pannier along with an old cotton-reel box. After a glance at it he looked up in surprise and held the note out.

“It’s addressed to you,” he said.

Stephen Reed took the note and read it, saw the signature, and went over to the boys.

“Stand up,” he said, “and tell me about this bicycle.”

The boys stood nervously. The ire of Big Bill Turnbull was bad enough. But this cold-eyed, well-dressed stranger was trouble of an unknown magnitude.

One of the boys said, “We thought it was thrown away.”

The other added, “It was buried right down in the hedge, honestly. We was taking it to the meadows to try riding it.”

“How did it get there?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

Stephen Reed pushed it, just to see. “I think you do,” he said.

The second boy admitted, “We thought he was throwing it away.”

“No such luck, my friend,” Stephen Reed said, and he leaned forward to put himself more on their level. “Now,” he said. “Do you want to be two boys who stole a bicycle, or the two young heroes who made sure it got back to Miss Bancroft?”

The two boys exchanged a glance. He’d offered them a way out of their trouble, and after only a moment’s hesitation they took it. Now he had to slow them down, to keep them from talking over each other and making no sense at all.

They’d seen a woman with a bicycle talking to a man with a big car. They didn’t know the woman. They knew the car, it was Sir Owain’s Daimler, and the man was Sir Owain’s driver. Sometimes, when he was out and about in the vehicle without his employer, he let the local children look at the engine, or stand on the running board to look through the glass at the luxury inside.

After a short conversation, the woman had climbed into the car. The driver had wheeled her bicycle around to the back of the vehicle and then, to the boys’ surprise and delight, had lifted it by the frame and pitched it wheels-first over the hedge. After the car had driven away they’d waited a decent interval—a whole ten minutes—and then retrieved the machine. They’d been caught wheeling it through town.

“Right,” Stephen Reed said. “Sit back down.”

He went back to Bill Turnbull. Turnbull had opened up the box and was looking through its contents. He said, “She says in the note, this box was hidden away in Grace’s cottage.”

“I know,” Stephen Reed said. “How did we miss it?”

“By the looks of it, we didn’t miss much,” Bill Turnbull said, poking critically through the litter in the box.

Stephen Reed said, “Do you know Sir Owain’s driver?”

“I do,” Bill Turnbull said. “His name’s Thomas Arnot. His father was the old coachman up at Arnside Hall. When the professor bought his first car he sent the son off to train as a mechanic. Why?”

“The boys reckon they saw him dump Evangeline’s bicycle. What else do we know about him?”

“Can’t really say. He’s one of those people who’s always around, but you never really notice.” He tilted the box toward Stephen Reed to show him the contents. “Can you see anything of use to us here?” he said. “I can’t.”

Stephen Reed looked.

“No,” he said, and then returned to the subject of his interest. “Where will I find him?”

“He lives on the estate,” Bill Turnbull said. “Over the garage where the stables used to be.”