The Bedlam Detective

TWENTY-THREE

Sebastian had returned the moving-picture camera and its developed roll of negative to Stephen Reed, but he’d retained the positive copy. He now had the film roll in his pocket, wound tight in its wrapping of stiff paper, and a number of questions about its content that the fairground people hadn’t been able to answer.

Kelly’s London directory listed several film companies. Most of them were out in the suburbs, but there was a cluster of office addresses in Warwick Court. This was a stone’s throw from the records department of King’s College Hospital, where he intended to begin his inquiries about the medical training of the disagreeable Dr. Sibley, and from the Inns of Court where Evangeline Bancroft had let slip that she had employment.

As it turned out, the King’s College records had all been boxed up and sent across the river, ahead of the hospital’s relocation to Denmark Hill. That would have to be a job for another day. The shortest way to Warwick Court from here would be through Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

The morning was cold and dry. Lincoln’s Inn was a walled enclave of legal offices and chambers made up of town houses, alleyways, and green spaces. The grander chambers had large ground-floor rooms with chandeliers. The others packed in their lawyers from ground to gables, like warehouses of litigation. The adjoining fields were actually a fashionable square with a public garden, like a parade ground to the barracks of a lawyers’ army.

A high wall and a gatehouse separated Lincoln’s Inn from the actual fields. He stopped by the gatehouse and spoke to the porters and other servants of the inn, but none recognized Evangeline by name. As he cut through, looking this way and that on the off chance that he might spot her, black-robed “benchers” flitted through the gardens in their twos and threes like carrion birds, crossing on their way to the Courts of Justice; strollers moved more slowly, and sometimes got in their way.

Like the hospital, Warwick Court was a disappointment, but also a lead onto more promising things. The court itself was little more than a glorified alleyway on the north side of High Holborn, ending in a tall cast-iron gateway with yet more lawyers beyond it. The alley’s buildings were wedding-cake heavy with carved stone features and fancy Victorian brickwork.

In a second-floor film sales agency office that he picked at random, he explained his needs and was given an address and a note of introduction. The address was for the Walton Film Studios, the note of introduction to a Mr. Cecil Hepworth.

He was urged to “tell Cecil that Joe sent you, and sends his regards.”

“I’mlooking for Mister Hepworth?” Sebastian said.

Cecil Hepworth’s Walton Film Studio was so close to the Walton High Street that a two-minute walk out of the center had taken Sebastian some way past it. Walton on Thames, just a twenty-five-minute train ride out of Waterloo, was part riverside boating village, part office workers’ suburb. Along the river were inns, moorings, and great rafts of empty rowboats herded up against the banks awaiting weekend rental. Beyond the main street of shops and public houses spread a semirural outskirts of villas and smallholdings.

The film studio had grown up around one modest dwelling in an outer cul-de-sac, absorbing the other houses in the row and then expanding into the gaps between them and onto the land behind. Now the original buildings contained offices, cutting rooms, and workshops. Blocking out the sky behind these, risen from the suburban clay like airship hangars, were Hepworth’s number one and two covered studio buildings.

A young man in flannels and a cricket jersey led Sebastian from one place to another until they finally located the boss. They found him in an automated film-processing laboratory on the ground floor of one of the studio buildings. The long room was an elaborate and noxious-smelling laundrylike plant of racks and tanks and spindles, with exposed and processed film zigzagging through it in an endless flow. Hepworth was discussing some critical adjustment with one of the women operating it. He proved to be a tall and bookish-looking man, quietly spoken and with a pale gaze.

Sebastian introduced himself, took the small roll of film from his pocket, and explained its significance.

“There’s barely a minute’s worth of activity there,” he said, raising his voice over the clatter of the machinery. “But I need an expert’s opinion on the last picture. There’s a chance that the girls may have photographed their attacker before they were murdered.”

The young man let out a whistle.

Hepworth opened up the roll and drew it out to arm’s length. The young man in the cricket jersey scooted around behind him to look as he held it up to the light.

“What do you reckon, Geoff?” Hepworth said.

“It looks like someone printed a seventeen-point-five neg onto thirty-five mil stock,” the young man said.

Sebastian said, “A lad copied it for me in a show van on a fairground. He said it was unusual. The camera was called a Birtac.”

“That’s Birt Acres’ old camera,” Hepworth said, still studying the images against the light. “He made it for the amateur market about ten years back. Cost about ten guineas and it never took off.” He looked at Sebastian. “You don’t have the negative?”

“It was evidence. I had to give it back. This is all I could keep.”

Hepworth studied the strip again, pulling out several more feet of it until he reached the scene in question. “Is it all like this? It’s very dense.”

The young man said, “We could try making a copy and printing it up a bit.”

Hepworth nodded and Sebastian said, “What does that mean?”

“It means putting more light through it to bring out any detail that’s hiding,” Hepworth said. “But it’s not guaranteed. If it’s not there in the image, then there’s nothing to find. But we can try it for you, if you like.”

Hepworth sent the young man off with the roll, and gave Sebastian leave to wander for the hour or so needed to make and process the copy.

Sebastian went upstairs to look into the studio, hoping to see a scene or two being made, but the doors were wide open and carpenters were at work inside. The interior light on the stage was soft and gray, diffused by the clouded glass of the skylight roof. But there was nothing of great interest to see.

He saw a handcart load of costumes being taken off toward the river, but didn’t follow it. He had more luck in the other studio, where a boy had been posted at the doors to keep out visitors and signal for quiet; from inside the studio came the sound of Gramophone music. The music lasted no more than a couple of minutes and then the doors were thrown open. No one paid any attention to Sebastian as he wandered in and took in the scene.

The studio was airless and hot, due to the electric arcs that burned to supplement the autumn light. There was a crowd of shirtsleeved men around the camera, and a large Gramophone with an enormous brass horn beside it. Two young women, in costumes and heavy white makeup, were studying a song sheet. A man in a checked cap positioned the Gramophone’s needle arm over the record and played them a burst of song, to which they listened intently before exchanging a glance and nodding. One was dressed as some kind of dancer or chorus girl, the other as a suffragette.

Sebastian had spotted something of significant interest to him, and he tried to make his way through to speak to one of the young women; but a cry of “Close all doors!” and the sudden galvanization of all around him made him freeze to the spot. Everyone who’d been lounging, chatting, or arguing out a problem suddenly turned to some professional purpose. Sebastian alone was left without a role.

He eased his way to the back of the crowd as the two young women took up their positions before a music-hall backdrop. No one challenged him.

There was a further call for silence; the camera operator began to crank, the women struck a starting pose, and then, as the Gramophone music began, they went into a dance and mime to the song they’d been studying. The silence was far from perfect, but it allowed the performers to hear and follow their words.

Sebastian recognized the song; it was called “I Do Like to Be Where the Girls Are” and it was strange to hear the far-off, voices-from-the-ether sound of the Gramophone apparently issuing from the lips of the all-too-solid young women before him.

So the people on the screen in those novelty Vivaphone subjects weren’t speaking or singing at all. It was an illusion of living sound, not a record of life itself.

The song ended without applause. A man by the camera called out, “That’s a good one, let’s check it,” and then all stood around doing nothing until, at some secret signal, everyone sprang into movement again. The studio doors were thrown open and the two young women headed for the outside air.

Sebastian stepped forward to catch the attention of the one wearing the high-waisted jacket, hobble skirt, and Votes for Women sash of the music-hall suffragette. She had brown wavy hair and arresting gray-blue eyes, and a face that was a perfect oval. Seen this close, she was a girl of no more than sixteen or seventeen years.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “That pin you’re wearing. What exactly does it signify?”

She looked down. It was as if he’d drawn her attention to something that she hadn’t even been aware of.

“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you. It came with the wardrobe.”

The screening took place in the inspection room, above a wooden garage on the front of the property. It was a new building, replacing one taken by fire a couple of years before. Heavy drapes blocked out the light from a square bay window, and the young man in the cricket jersey operated the projector. Only he, Sebastian, and the studio’s owner were present.

Sebastian said, “Do we see anything more?”

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “I haven’t looked at it myself yet.”

He’d somehow dealt with the new copy so that a single picture appeared on the screen before them. No twinned image, no large area of dazzling blank screen. With the room’s short throw, the picture was no more than three feet across and its edges were unusually crisp and bright.

Here were the girls, happy in their garden again. The screen was so washed with new light that in this section they were now without substance, like ghosts.

Sebastian leaned closer as the critical scene approached. At first he didn’t realize it had come; where it had been black-on-black the first time that he’d seen it, now the screen was filled with a swirling gray fog like filings in a jar. But in the fog, something moved. There, and there. It was all over too soon.

Cecil Hepworth said, “That doesn’t look like a man to me. Perhaps they were trying to make a trick film. Wouldn’t you say?”

“A what?” Sebastian said.

“Run it back and let’s see it again.”

Sebastian turned to the young man at the projector. “It went by too quickly,” he said. “Can you make it go more slowly?”

“If I run it too slow, the lamp will burn the film and blow a frame.”

He shut off the lamp and backed the roll up a few feet, then ran it again as slowly as he dared.

It was slow enough for the illusion of motion to be replaced by a sequence of frozen flicker-images, as if time had been sliced and laid open before them. A smoke-figure that was almost certainly one of the children seemed to turn in the fog and dash toward the camera. As she passed from the picture, something else burst out of the fog behind her and rushed at the lens. It took much less than a second.

They ran it back and looked again. Even more slowly, this time. Five, six frames at the most, and then it was gone.

Hepworth said, “Are you in focus?”

“I’m as sharp as it’ll go,” the young man said. “That’s motion blur.”

“Can’t be a puppet, then.”

“A puppet?” Sebastian said.

Hepworth said, “For a trick film you photograph a puppet one frame at a time. Nothing’s actually moving so everything’s sharp. But when you run all the frames together, the puppet seems to move.”

“That doesn’t look like a puppet to me,” Sebastian said.

“It doesn’t look like anything to me,” the young man said from behind the projector. “Shall I run it again?”

He ran it again. Even more slowly, this time. The shadow-child ran from sight again. The shadow-thing burst from the bushes behind her and enveloped the world. Fire burst from its heart and the screen blistered like skin.

The heat of the projector was burning the film. It bubbled and foamed and the young man quickly shut down the lamp, before the highly flammable nitrate stock took flame.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sebastian said.