Stephen Gallagher - The Bedlam Detective

It would ever be thus, he imagined. It was one’s lot to achieve one state, only to yearn for its opposite. Nothing was ever so dear as that which had been lost.

On returning to his room, he found that a note had been slipped under his door. He’d barely opened the note when Mrs. Williams came knocking to ensure that he’d seen it.

He dressed in haste and went to find a telephone. It took the operator several minutes to get the connection to Arnmouth, and a while longer for Lydia Bancroft to be fetched to the receiver.

“Stephen?” he eventually heard the librarian say. “Is that you?”

“Mrs. Bancroft,” he said, “what is it? Has something happened to Evangeline?”

“It’s Grace Eccles,” she said.

“What about her?”

“I hardly know how to say it.”

But she went on to explain. A horse had been found wandering loose on Arnmouth’s main street that morning. It was a large and handsome animal, and it shied away from every approach and panicked at any attempt to get a rope onto it. No one could say where it might have come from, until someone spotted that it was missing an eye. Shy of people, and confused at its surroundings, the animal had taken some time to corner in a yard behind the Schooner Hotel; along the way it had kicked in a shop window, which had increased its agitation, and it had trampled several gardens, which had done nothing for local tempers.

Someone remembered that Grace Eccles had been treating a one-eyed animal, and she was sent for. Word came back; she could not be found, but the gates to her fields were open, her animals had scattered to the moors, and her cottage had been ransacked. The doors had been thrown wide, her few pieces of furniture upset, and there was blood on the floor. In an incongruous detail, two measured glasses of clean drinking water stood untouched amid the chaos.

Parish Constable Bill Turnbull had found her, lying in heather just a few hundred yards from her home. She was dead, and, as Lydia Bancroft put it, she had been “cruelly used.”

“Stephen,” Lydia Bancroft said. “Please. It’s as if there’s a an awful shadow that has never left this town. If Grace was not safe after all these years, then I fear for Evangeline. They keep telling us it’s over. But it isn’t. What can we do?”

When Evangeline went looking for Sebastian Becker at his home, she got no farther than the funeral wreath on the door. She knocked and waited, then knocked again, but no one answered. The wreath was a striking weave of laurel, lilies, and black feathers, but in the week since the funeral the petals had fallen and the leaves were beginning to curl. This was her third attempt to reach him. Perhaps Sebastian had taken his son and sister-in-law and gone away? She made inquiries at the wardrobe maker’s, but no one there could help.

Then, in a moment of inspiration, she made her way through the borough’s streets to the pie stand under the railway bridge and there he was, at the stand’s folding side counter. He was a figure apart from the cabbies, looking through his work messages while taking sips of hot tea from a tin mug.

He was unaware of her approach. She was almost at his shoulder when she spoke.

“Sebastian,” she said, and he looked around in surprise.

Her heart lurched at the sight of him. He bore all the signs of the blow that he’d sustained. The sleep-deprived pallor of his face, the dazed look in his eyes. As if they gazed on a reality other than this one, seeing a fading version of the world that he was reluctant to leave.

He started to speak, hesitated, turned and set down his tin mug, and then said, “Miss Bancroft.”

“Sebastian-” She had been pursuing him. With reluctance, but knowing that she must. But speaking to him now for the first time since the day of their return from Greenwich to find tragedy in his home, all that she could say was, “I am so sorry.”

“Please,” he said, raising a hand before she could go on. “I never had a chance to thank you.”

“Thank me? What is there to thank me for?”

“The care you took of Robert that afternoon. He speaks of you often.”

“How is he?”

“Confused. I know the loss has touched him. And before too long I’m sure it will show. Until then … he goes on exactly as before. Are you well? I’d have been in touch to ask, but I didn’t know where to find you.”

“I came to the funeral,” she said.

“I didn’t see you there.”

“I stayed back. I wasn’t properly dressed. But so many people!”

Elisabeth Becker’s funeral service had been conducted by the hospital’s chaplain in the Evelina’s own small chapel. Evangeline had hurried over in the middle of the day and slipped into the nave behind some nurses standing at the back. Even greater in number than those crowded into the chapel had been the families and children that filled the passageway outside it, joining in with the hymns, bowing their heads in silence for the prayers.

Sebastian said, “Elisabeth was a good friend to many. Had it been my funeral and not hers … I think it would have been a much quieter affair.”

“I do wish I could have spoken to you on the day. How are you, Sebastian?”

He gathered and placed the half-dozen message slips-hers among them, she noticed-inside his notebook, closed it, and put it away inside his jacket. “I get along,” he said. “I follow Sir James’s advice. He has the same answer to all of life’s ills. ‘Work, and plenty of it.’ Of course, for him it’s a choice. For the rest of us, a necessity.”

She said, “I hesitate to raise this. But I can see no other way. Have you had any news from Arnmouth?”

“Arnmouth has not been very close to my thoughts, I’m sorry to say.”

“So you don’t know that Grace is dead.”

“Grace Eccles?”

“You didn’t know.”

He shook his head. Evangeline went on, “Cruelly murdered. Close to her cottage. How much more there is to it, I don’t know yet. Mother put it in a letter, but she spared me the details.”

“Does it relate to the other murders?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

She’d hoped to ignite him with this news, and he tried to respond; but it was like an invalid’s brief effort to rise, quickly abandoned.

He said, “I can’t pursue this with you, Evangeline. Look at me. I don’t sleep. I drag myself through the days. And if that weren’t enough, I have to support three of us on half the income.”