The Bedlam Detective

TWENTY-NINE

No big room had ever sounded quite so empty as the Evelina children’s ward when Sebastian was making his way down it. The floors were of scrubbed board with a central linoleum walk. The ceiling was a full fourteen feet high. In that great space, the hard leather of his boot heels made a sound like pegs being driven into wood.

Joseph Hewlett watched him approaching, sharp-eyed as a squirrel and tense as a watch spring.

“And who’ve they sent me now?” he said as Sebastian drew near.

Sebastian stopped, not so close as to offer a threat. He could see the scalpel better from here. Not so long an instrument as the tannery blade the man had used on Elisabeth, but at least as sharp. And the girl under his control was a much smaller subject. Around five or six years old, she was big-eyed and as thin as a sparrow.

Keeping his voice even, Sebastian said, “Are you prepared to hurt that child?”

“The child is on my knee and this butcher’s knife is in my hand,” Hewlett said, “so I suppose the proposition is on the table.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sebastian said. “From a father of children.”

“Am I? The father of a child like this one? Then have those doctors bring her to me.”

Sebastian risked moving to another of the beds and lowered himself to sit. There was one complete bed’s width between the two of them, and by seating himself he immediately reduced the tension just a little. At this distance, Sebastian would be unlikely to spring for the knife.

He could smell the gin on the carter, hours old and leaking from his pores, sweet and pungent like a cheap perfume. In response to the man’s attempt at irony, Sebastian said, “You know they can’t bring her to you. You know she died.”

“Ay,” Hewlett said. “And I know who to blame.”

“Who would that be?”

“Doctors.” He spat the word with contempt.

“No doctor killed your daughter. They fought for her life and lost the battle.”

“I would have fought harder than any of them. But for my want of a rich man’s learning.”

“We can all say what we’d do in another’s shoes. When we’ve no fear of ever being tested.”

You could of said something abt. the sky and then taken the gun off the shooter when he was looking up and turned it onto him. That is surely what I would of done in yr place.

Sebastian looked at the floor for a moment.

Then he said, “I can help you.”

“No one can help me.”

“You don’t even know who I am.”

“I know a bobby when I see one. Come to charm me out so they can hang me.”

“I’m not a policeman. I’m an investigator attached to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitors in Lunacy. And listen to this, Hewlett. We do not hang those we find to be of unsound mind.”

“You’d have me play the madman? I will not. I’ll keep what dignity I have.”

“I can tell you there’s no dignity at the end of a rope. The bowels empty. And in death the male parts become aroused for all to see.”

This was something that Hewlett did not like to hear. It seemed to dismay him more than the prospect of death itself. Death was an experience for which his imagination had no precedent; whereas humiliation had a reality for him, being something that he probably experienced daily.

“You’ve seen this?”

“I have.”

He said, “Then what am I to do?”

“The child is afraid,” Sebastian said. “Will you let her go?”

“She’s not afraid,” Hewlett said, and he looked down at the girl. “We’re friends, you and I,” he said. “Are we not?” And he clumsily chucked her under the chin with the same hand that held the surgeon’s knife. His nails were black with grime and chewed ragged.

Sebastian said, “If you speak of hanging, then you must know the nurse is dead.”

“They tried to tell me she was not. So I said, produce her, then. Because I know what’s what. And the other? The receiving officer I cut?”

“You cut the receiving officer’s clerk.”

Hewlett gave a shrug.

“ ’Tis all the same to me,” he said, and Sebastian fought with the urge to reach for his pistol and end their conversation there and then.

In a tight voice he said, “You have scarred her badly. But she lives.”

“No matter. They can only hang me once.”

Sebastian rose to his feet and let his hand fall by his side. His coat was pushed back and would not foul his move. He kept his face composed. Let the child move away, and let Hewlett give him the slightest cause to act, and he would drop the man where he sat. His success would be a small gift of apology from an inattentive God.

“No matter, you say. Do you really care for no one’s pain but your own?”

Hewlett said, “It is the only thing I have, that gentlefolk do not seem eager to take for themselves.”

Sebastian said, “You have killed a woman today. But I am willing to argue that you killed her in a frenzy. Harm that child for any reason and you will have no such defense. Let her go.”

“No.”

Sebastian looked at the girl.

“What is your name, child?” he said. “Tell this man.”

“Dora,” the girl said, trying to speak normally but managing little more than a whisper.

“Do you miss your brothers and sisters?”

Hewlett said, “Stop it.” He spoke sharply and the girl flinched. But then he grew more calm. He looked up at Sebastian.

“I only wanted to hold her for a while,” he said. “As they would not allow me to hold my own.”

Then with a gentle shove, he pushed little Dora from his knee. She slid to the floor and landed on her feet. There she stood, uncertain; with a movement of his head, Sebastian indicated for her to go.

She did not run. She walked, straight-legged, with her hands balled into fists by her sides.

As soon as the child had passed by him, Sebastian moved out around the end of the empty bed that separated Hewlett from him and said, “What’s it to be, Joe? Will you lay down the surgeon’s knife and walk out with me?”

He heard doors bursting open at both ends of the ward as the child hostage was judged to have reached a safe distance, but he kept his eyes on his man.

“No need,” Hewlett said.

Sebastian could not move quickly enough. If Hewlett had intended to pass the blade across his own throat, he misjudged the stroke; he planted it in and hacked it deep, causing a sudden sideways fountain.