Stephen Gallagher - The Bedlam Detective

“I may as well,” Sebastian said. “My driver appears to have abandoned me.”

When the last comedy ended and the audience left, Sebastian stayed behind. All through the program of subjects, his heart had been hammering. Now he realized why. It had nothing to do with the show that he’d seen. It was for the show yet to come. Not an involuntary excitement, but an involuntary dread.

No one appeared for a while, and he wondered if they’d forgotten him. The lights on the show front were extinguished, one set after another.

But then Will arrived, carrying a heavy metal spool with not very much film on it. Sebastian followed him into the projection booth, where he watched as the young man loaded the spool onto the projector arm and threaded up the film. Sedgewick joined them before the operation was done, along with a couple of others, sideshow workers drawn by curiosity at the mention of the dead girls’ moving pictures.

“Close the doors,” Sedgewick said to them, “and put a chair across.”

The tent was secured and made private. According to Will, the Birtac was an amateur’s camera designed with a double function. With the addition of a suitable lamp housing, it could be converted into a projector to show the images it had taken.

But with no such accessory available to them, Will had made do with a carnival hand’s ingenuity. He had exposed the half-width camera negative onto normal-sized film stock to produce an oddly proportioned, but viewable, positive image. At least, this was how he told it to Sebastian. Who still failed to understand until he saw the first, running-up-to-speed, flickering image on the big screen.

One entire side of the screen was blank while on the other, two near-identical images appeared. One above, one below-until Will put his hand before the projecting lens in a crude mask, leaving just one bright image in a quarter of the screen.

It was a garden scene.

“Are those the girls?” Sedgewick said.

“I believe they are,” Sebastian said.

He could not easily relate the figures on the screen to the bodies that he’d seen the night before. Though made of nothing but light, these girls were life itself. Whereas those bodies, though flesh and blood, had borne the full weight of death.

Now here they were, in summer dresses and grown-ups’ hats, with a backdrop of lawn and rhododendron. One bright girl, one dark one. Their antics would never change. Nor would they age.

Nothing really happened. The girls were doing the kinds of things that people do when someone points a camera at them for no special reason. Just standing there in the garden, hesitant, smiling, uncertain.

Sebastian was disappointed. These scenes had been made earlier in the summer, probably by Florence’s father. They told nothing of the night the girls had died.

Then the scene changed. Though the film continued, the screen went dim.

Sedgewick turned to the open door of the projection booth and called out to Will, “What’s the neg like?”

“Very thin,” Will replied.

Satisfied, Sedgewick returned his attention to the screen.

Something was happening there. It was hard to make out what. Something seemed to move in the shadows, and then to rush toward the camera.

“My God!” one of the sideshow workers said.

The rest of the film was blank after that.

Around the same time, back in her old bedroom, Evangeline May Bancroft sat on her bed with the curtains thrown back, looking at the moon across the rooftops. The moonlight caused roof slates to shine like polished iron.

She had made it home with nothing to spare. When she’d climbed off the bicycle to walk it back into the shed, her legs had been unsteady. Through the anxiety or the exertion, it was impossible to say.

After her conversation with Grace, the hunger to know was fiercer than ever. Something had once happened to her. Something had shaped her, but she couldn’t say what. However awful, she needed to understand it. If she knew herself better, her life might be different.

This had been Evangeline’s first return to Arnmouth in some time. A year, at least, since her cousin’s wedding, where the local women had gathered at the church gate for a sight of the bride. She wrote to her mother every week, and received a letter in return, so she was reasonably au courant with local affairs-who’d left, who’d died, which of her contemporaries was now married and to whom. For her part, she wrote of exhibitions and concerts that she’d attended, of anything interesting that happened in her work, and the seesawing health of her landlady’s cat, which was a fighter.

One time, when Lydia had written at unusual length about cousins and weddings and children, she’d responded, Few men in London seem to care for a provincial girl with strong opinions about life. I rather fear, Mother, that you may have to resign yourself to having raised an old maid .

She hadn’t been entirely honest in writing it. She’d had no lack of suitors in London, despite her making no efforts to invite them. They appeared, they persisted for a while, and then eventually they gave up and looked elsewhere. She did nothing to drive them away. She actually preferred the company of men to women. But she did nothing to encourage them beyond a certain point.

In Evangeline, the prospect of intimacy raised complex emotions. Intimacy was like a ship to her. A picturesque thing on the horizon, but intimidating when it loomed overhead.

She’d indicated to her mother that a life alone-much like Lydia’s own, in fact-was more appealing to her than any alternative.

And in that, she supposed that she’d lied.

Where can I find detective Reed?” Sebastian asked when he finally reached the Sun Inn, late the next morning. “I have something for him.”

“He’s over at the assembly rooms,” Dolly the cook said. “He’s been looking for you, too. I had to tell him your bed wasn’t slept in.”

“I spent the night elsewhere. Though not by design.”

She looked him over.

“So I can see,” she said, and she reached across the bar counter and plucked a piece of straw from his lapel. She said, “You missed all the excitement.”

“What excitement?”

“Over the murderer, of course. They’ve caught him.”

That snapped him to full attention. Sebastian had been fighting the urge toward a hot bath and a shave, after sleeping in his clothes in one of the traveling fair’s spare wagons. Midmorning he’d transferred to a boneshaker of a bus that served the valleys. It had dropped him within half a mile of the town, and he’d walked the rest of the way. Sir Owain would be getting a strongly worded note about his driver’s behavior.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Some gypsy,” she said. “Just like everyone thought.”

THE INQUEST had taken place earlier that morning, in the main hall of the assembly rooms. At one point the jury had trooped through to the back room to view the bodies. Even as the coroner had been reviewing the events leading to the girls’ discovery, the detectives had been making their arrest. Now there was a police van outside the assembly rooms, and all of the doors had been thrown open to air the place. A caretaker was scrubbing down the corridors. Sebastian had to step around him to get to the back rooms, where Stephen Reed was labeling his evidence boxes for transfer to the waiting vehicle.

Sebastian said, “I’m told you’ve got your man.”

“An itinerant,” Stephen Reed said. “A rag-and-bone man with a puppet peep show. We’re pressing him for a confession, but he’s a simpleton.”

“You’re not happy.”

“Of course I’m happy,” Stephen Reed said with ill-concealed bitterness. “In my experience, a simpleton’s good for a confession to anything. In fact the same can be said of any man, if you go at him for long enough.”