The Bedlam Detective

TWENTY-EIGHT

Sebastian had intended to begin his search for Evangeline Bancroft as soon as his other duties allowed. But when he read the midmorning message waiting for him at the cabmen’s stand, he forgot all else and ran. There was a crowd on the street outside the Evelina, and half of it seemed to comprise policemen. One of them tried to direct him away, but he pushed by and ignored the angry shout that followed him into the building.

In the hospital’s chaotic entrance hall he stopped the first sergeant that he saw and said, “Where is she?”

“Who are you?”

“Sebastian Becker. I’m the husband.”

“Who of?”

“Elisabeth Becker! The receiving officer’s clerk! I had a message to say she was attacked.”

“Ah,” the sergeant said. “One of the doctors is stitching her up.”

The entire place seemed to be in turmoil. By contrast the dispensary wing was almost empty, and the outpatients’ waiting area had been completely cleared. It was in one of the adjoining treatment rooms that Sebastian found his wife receiving care from one of the senior medical men. Sebastian recognized him; he was one of the doctors from Guy’s.

For a moment, Sebastian stood in shock. Elisabeth sat with her dress cut away to her bodice and her arm raised; her arm was bared, but covered in so much dried blood and iodine that it might have belonged to a terra-cotta statue, freshly dug from the wet earth. By contrast, her face was deathly white. Her expression was calm and serious. A few flecks of blood had peppered her neck and chin. A blood-spattered nurse held her steady while the surgeon, in waistcoat and rolled-up shirtsleeves, made at her arm with a needle that looked as if it might belong to a sailmaker.

“Oh my Lord,” Sebastian said.

The nursing sister, whom he didn’t know, was about to speak, but Elisabeth saw him and said, “Sebastian. Don’t be too distressed. It looks much worse than it is.”

But a brief glance up from her surgeon seemed to suggest otherwise. He met Sebastian’s eyes for a moment and then returned his attention to the work.

The fresh wound spiraled all the way around the length of Elisabeth’s forearm, like apple peel. Her fingers were bent, her wrist cocked. The surgeon had sutured about three-quarters of the slash. The wound above the stitches gaped, like a shallow rip in a cushion.

Sebastian said, “Can I stay?”

“If you’re prepared to help,” the surgeon said without taking his eyes from his work.

“How can I do that?”

“Hold her other hand. She’s got my knee squeezed down to the bone.”

She hadn’t realized. “Sorry,” she said, and released her grip on him. She might have blushed, if she’d had the color to spare. The surgeon smiled briefly, to tell her he wasn’t serious. Then the smile was gone.

Sebastian pulled over a chair and sat beside them. She gripped his hand tightly, and squeezed it even tighter whenever the needle passed through her skin.

“Not much longer now,” the surgeon said.

Sebastian said, “What happened?”

Elisabeth said, “It was the father of the consumptive girl. He showed up drunk again and demanded his daughter. He evaded Mister Briggs and found me in the receiving office. I asked him to leave and he set off for the wards. I didn’t know his knife was out when I tried to stop him.”

“You should have called someone.”

“There wasn’t time. Who’d imagine a man would turn on a woman like that?”

The surgeon paused in his work and asked her to move her fingers. She managed to flex them just a little, at the cost of some considerable discomfort that she tried not to show. But Sebastian felt it in her grip. He could feel every transferred nuance of her pain as the procedure went on.

He said, “I don’t mean to question your treatment. But would this not be better carried out in the operating room?”

“It would,” said the surgeon without taking his eyes off his work, “if we had the use of it. But the man’s still in the building. They’ve got him trapped upstairs.”

Sebastian needed a moment or two to take that in.

“Trapped?”

“On one of the wards, I was told.”

Then Sebastian was on his feet, with Elisabeth still clutching his hand; and the Guy’s surgeon, who’d been about to pass his needle into the skin of her forearm where the line of the wound passed over the tendons of her wrist, drew back with an unintended oath.

“Forgive me,” Sebastian said, prizing himself free, “but I deal in madmen. I may be able to give advice to bring about a safe outcome.”

“Sebastian, no!” Elisabeth said. “Stay with me!”

“Let me make the offer,” Sebastian said. “For the truth of it is, I know it’s a necessary pain, but I can’t watch you suffer like this.”

“Let him go,” the surgeon said to her, adding, without rancor, “because frankly, Mister Becker, you’re being neither use nor ornament here. If you can help the situation, please do. But be warned. Two minutes after he attacked your wife, the man killed a nurse.”

Firstly Sebastian had to find a way up to the wards, avoiding the pandemonium of the entrance hall. Because of his wife’s employment he had a better knowledge of the building than a casual visitor might, but he didn’t know it well. Making a turn out of the dispensary, within a few strides he found himself witness to a scene of exodus via the hospital’s back ways; all of the hospital’s sick children were being ushered down service stairs and through kitchen corridors by policemen, nurses, and some of the hospital’s civilian staff. They shuffled in near-silence, like a night-marching army. The children were mostly in nightshirts with blankets thrown around their shoulders. Some were carrying toys, while many of the smaller ones were being carried themselves.

There was Mister Briggs, big, stern Mister Briggs, craggy as a statue with a cracked heart full of well-hidden love, standing before a doorway with a hospital screen across it.

To those looking frightened by this strange experience he added to the strangeness by booming, “Go on, now, boys and girls. Go with the nurses. They will look after you. There’s nothing here to see.”

Then he glanced back at the folding screen, saw that its coverage of the opening behind it was not complete, and moved to make a careful adjustment.

“Mister Briggs, I need to pass,” Sebastian said to him.

“I wouldn’t,” the old soldier advised.

“I’m afraid I have to.”

“How is Mrs. Becker?”

“Bearing up better than I would in her place.”

Briggs nodded, and turned away.

“Do as your nurses tell you,” he called out in a ringing tone, overlooking the fact that the nurses were urging the children to conduct themselves quietly. “Obey them as you would your own mother.”

Beyond the opening was a wide corridor with offices along one side of it. Chairs stood against the opposite wall for those awaiting their turn with physicians and dressers. The chairs had been pushed askew and some personal items abandoned when the area had been cleared.

Toward the corridor’s far end lay the body of a nurse. Beyond it stood policemen and white-faced members of the Evelina senior staff and at least one member of the governing board. Someone was sobbing, and Sebastian couldn’t immediately see who. The body was uncovered and a police artist was making a sketch of its position with measurements, stepping over and around the blood to get them. It was life’s blood, an enormous static pool of it under and about the body like the satin lining of an outspread opera cloak.

Sebastian tilted his head to see the dead woman’s face. He could not say that he knew her. She looked around nineteen years of age, but was perhaps older.

His heart, already chilled, grew even more cold.

A magnesium flash lit up the corridor’s far end. They were photographing the knife that had been used on her, and presumably upon Elisabeth. A scaled measuring rod lay on the floor alongside it. No one gave Sebastian a glance. He went no closer, but returned through the screen.

The service stairway was empty of children now, and he ascended without obstruction. On the next floor was a passageway running beside a long, high-ceilinged ward. The ward had four fireplaces so that it could be divided up as needed, and there were further side rooms for the smallest infants and the isolation of whooping cough cases.

As he walked the empty length of the building, Sebastian became aware of some slight, small noises. Then as he approached the end of the passageway he saw that the children who could not rise or walk had been rolled to safety on their beds, all of which were now marshaled in the infants’ room like ships in a crowded harbor. Two nurses were among them, and a policeman with a pistol guarded the door. All their eyes were on Sebastian, like those of frightened creatures in a burrow.

The armed man on the door first gave a warning signal for Sebastian to make no sound, and then waved for him to go back. But instead of turning around, Sebastian held up his Lord Chancellor’s papers with their visible crest. He made a silent face of inquiry.

The officer decided against a challenge to this stranger’s authority-though in truth, Sebastian had none to exercise-and pointed the way.

Treading softly, he entered the main stairwell. The noise from the entrance hall below drifted up, like echoes from a different world. He saw no one until he reached the next landing.

The floor above was a close counterpart of the one below. At this end of the passageway, the police had set up their siege base. The corridor’s windows looked into the ward. About half a dozen detectives and two sergeants were dug in at this spot, crouched low or pressed up against the walls, watching anxiously and craning to hear, trying to observe without drawing any attention to themselves.

Sebastian stood at the back and craned along with them. Right down at the far end of the ward he could see two men and a child, just about. Of the three, he could see the nurse-killer most clearly. The man was sitting on a bed with the child beside him, a controlling arm across her shoulders. The other man, whose back was toward Sebastian, was speaking earnestly to him.

The man holding the child was sallow and unshaven. The other, a well-dressed man, was silver-haired and broad-shouldered. They were too far away for Sebastian to make out anything of what was being said.

In a low voice he whispered to the nearest detective, “Is that his own child?”

“His child died last night,” the detective whispered back.

At that moment, the unshaven man on the bed was making some point. He was emphasizing it by stabbing at the air with a surgical scalpel. The silver-haired man quickly held up his hands and rose to his feet. The hostage-taker was growing increasingly agitated, and only began to calm when the other backed off to a distance. Sebastian heard a snick of metal on metal, and looked to his side.

He saw that one of the sergeants held a Lee-Enfield army rifle and was sliding the bolt as slowly as he could, though slowing the action did nothing to make it more discreet.

The superintendent of M Division Southwark came striding out of the ward with his face set and grave. In contrast to his hair, his brows and mustache were mostly black.

Even as their commander rejoined them, the sniper sergeant with the Lee-Enfield was murmuring under his breath, “Just say the word, sir.” But the superintendent waved him down, and hardly needed to give his reasons why; not at this distance, and not with the child so close.

Keeping his voice low, he said, “I can’t bargain with him. With the nurse dead, he’s for the drop and he knows it. What can I offer a man in that position?”

“God’s mercy,” one of his detectives suggested, “if he spares the child.”

“I fear he’s given up on that. We’ll have to rush him.”

At which point, Sebastian spoke up.

“Sir,” he said, and the superintendent’s gaze swung to him.

“Who are you?”

“Sebastian Becker, sir. From the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor. May I speak to your man?”

“To what end?”

“I’m used to reasoning with lunatics. I don’t think your man’s so different. I can suggest a case for his survival if he’ll give up his hostage.”

“And if he won’t?”

“Then I have more experience with firearms than most. If he so much as lowers his guard to think it over, I can put a bullet between his eyes with no risk to the child. But for that I’ll need to be close.”

The superintendent was looking at him without warmth or, indeed, giving any sign of his feelings at all.

“A Visitor’s man?” he said.

“Sebastian Becker. Once of the Detectives Division where I served under Clive Turner-Smith. And later of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the United States of America, where I learned how to use a pistol.” He glanced over the superintendent’s shoulder, to see that the sallow man was looking down and explaining something to the child. The child was rigid with fear, a fact that the man seemed not to notice.

Sebastian said, “I wouldn’t wait, sir. I can see he’s growing maudlin.”

The superintendent considered his options.

“America,” he said. “They’re all gunslingers there.”

Sebastian said nothing.

Then the superintendent turned to one of his detectives and said, “Give him your pistol.”

They moved out of the sallow man’s sightline, and a fair detective with a wispy mustache handed Sebastian a Webley pocket revolver. Sebastian checked the load and then flipped back his coat to secure it in the back of his waistband.

He said, “Do we know the man’s name?”

“Hewlett,” the Superintendent said. “Joseph Hewlett. He carts waste from a tannery, when he works at all. He came drunk into the building, but this last hour has sobered him. You’d think sobriety would bring reason. But it’s merely allowed him to see how desperate his position is.”

Sebastian let his coat fall, swinging his arm a few times to see how easily he might reach for the gun at his back.

“One way or another,” he said, “the life he knows is over. He needs to understand that.”