Stephen Gallagher - The Bedlam Detective

“I know,” she said. “And believe me, I am ashamed to be intruding on your grief. But I’ve located the other survivor of the expedition. He’s close to London.”

“And?”

“I can get no further.”

“If you can do such detective work, you clearly don’t need me.”

“But I do,” she persisted. “He’s in the Broadmoor Asylum. They’ve refused me a visit. That’s why I’ve had to seek you out. I don’t imagine they can turn away a Lord Chancellor’s man.”

“What’s the patient’s name?”

“Somerville. Doctor Bernard Somerville. Not Summerfield. Our master’s mate had it close, but not quite right.”

“I’ll give you a letter.”

“A letter’s no use. He won’t correspond and he won’t agree to a visit. But he’s the only man who knows what really happened in the jungle. He’s our only chance of a window into Lancaster’s madness. Aren’t you even curious to know why the man’s in a hospital for the criminally insane?”

“In all honesty? I feel very little of anything. And you’re proposing that we use one madman to explain another? That’ll wash, I’m sure.”

But he was interested despite himself. She could see it.

“They say his behavior is unpredictable but his thinking is lucid,” she said.

“Much like Sir Owain’s.”

“Can I walk with you? I’ll tell you as we go.”

Sebastian could offer no objection. They started toward the river, through the wide iron passage under the railway lines. The racket of trams and carriage wheels and overhead trains forced her to raise her voice.

She said, “After his return to England, Somerville set up house with his sister. At some point-and from what I read in the newspaper, he swears to this day that he doesn’t know why-he beat her almost senseless against his bedroom wall and then chased her naked down a public street to finish her off. He claims that his violent acts and his inability to remember them are a product of his experience on the Lancaster expedition. He is judged to be dangerous to others. And that’s why he’s where he is now.”

So when Bedlam was full, they built Broadmoor.

Sebastian telephoned to make the appointment, and on Friday morning he and Evangeline traveled out into Berkshire on the train together. At a little station built to serve nearby Wellington College they disembarked, and from there took the carriage that was waiting to convey them to the world’s first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane.

During the ride, which took them past the village of Crowthorne and on a steady climb up the wooded hill that overlooked it, Sebastian said, “Here’s an irony for you. You remember Joseph Hewlett? The man who slashed Elisabeth and then cut his own throat? He survives. The knife he used on her was filthy, and poisoned her blood. The one he turned on himself was the hospital’s own, and clean. The attention he received saved his life. And on the advice I gave him, he now pleads an unsound mind. So he won’t even hang.”

“Surely they won’t let him go free.”

He looked out into the autumn woodland, where the passing trees stood like lonely soldiers. “We’ll see how far he makes it if they do,” he said.

She seemed startled by his tone. “Would you hunt him down?”

“I don’t know. I know it would be wrong. But would it be unjust? Because hunting down men for justice used to be my living.”

“You won’t do it, Sebastian,” she said, as their landau swung into the approach to the asylum’s main gate.

“You don’t know me that well.”

But it was empty talk, and Sebastian knew it. His thoughts of revenge were a consolation, but nothing more than that. Most likely Joseph Hewlett would be committed to some institution very like this one, if his plea of insanity were to be accepted. Those who killed, and were judged mad, might be spared a hanging; but they were neither forgiven nor set free.

Broadmoor Asylum’s main entrance had the look of some grim railway terminus, with brick towers and a big clock above the gateway arch between them. The gates opened at their approach, and the carriage passed inside and stopped. Thirty feet beyond this entrance was a second gate; the inner gate would not open until the outer had been secured. The asylum had been designed by a military architect, and built like a fortress.

For an hour the previous evening Sebastian had studied the case notes of Bernard Somerville, Ph.D. After his return from the expedition, unable to work and with his health broken, Somerville had been obliged to lodge with his sister. He slept badly, and as a consequence was hard to rouse in the mornings.

One day, following a particularly bad night, his sister had entered his bedroom with his morning tea, to find him hidden in a swirl of blankets and covers with only his big toe sticking out and visible. His sister, who sounded like a jolly sort, had taken hold of the toe and tugged on it to wake him. Whereupon he’d flown out of bed in an instant and pinned her to the wall, fixing her there with a forearm and seizing her head with the other hand to smash it into the plaster.

She managed to escape and ran from the house. Somerville pursued her, caught her in the street, and tried to finish her off with a rock. He would have killed her for certain, had he not been restrained by passersby. He’d raged in the Black Maria, and only achieved calm in his police cell some hours later.

His explanation to the custody sergeant had been that in the state between sleep and waking, he had not recognized his sister. He had mistaken her for something inhuman and malevolent. He had acted violently out of fear, and to protect himself.

“I am not,” he had pleaded, “and have never been, a knowingly dangerous man.”

Somerville was confined on the second floor, in a single room on an L-shaped corridor. Somerville had offered no threat to anyone since his arrival, saying that for the first time since the voyage home, he’d felt safe. The superintendent’s deputy was to remain with them throughout the interview.

Though unmistakably a cell, with bars at the windows and an inspection slit in the door, the room was not without its comforts. It had an armchair, a writing table, and a bookcase filled with botanical and other learned texts. In the armchair sat Somerville, enormous, a walrus of a man. He did not rise as they entered, but he did close the book that he’d been reading.

In the doctored photograph at the front of Sir Owain Lancaster’s book he’d been represented as a tall, spare member of the party with white hair and a long goatee. In life, his beard was a dirty gray. Combed out, it reached to his chest. He wore a smoking jacket, a waistcoat that was almost bursting its buttons across his girth, and checked trousers. One leg was extended and supported by a padded stool, recalling the infection for which he’d been treated on the voyage home. He wore a carpet slipper on the elevated foot, slashed open to relieve any pressure.

Sebastian introduced himself and Evangeline and said, “Thank you for consenting to see us.”

“I don’t recall consenting,” Somerville said. “What I recall is the suggestion that I might be returned to the disturbed ward if I refused.”

“Who suggested that?”

“Who indeed.”

“If this goes well, then perhaps I can intercede for you. See if I can’t persuade the superintendent to let you hold on to your privileges.”

“Can we drop the charade?” Somerville said. “It’s been made very plain to me. I tell you my tale or they take my books away.”

“As you wish,” Sebastian said, and there was a pause in proceedings as extra chairs were brought in.

When all were seated, Sebastian said, “You were in the jungle with Sir Owain Lancaster.”