The Bedlam Detective

THREE

I am. Who are you?”

The man who’d spoken up was sitting behind a map table in the snug, a Bartholomew sheet for the area opened out before him. Another man, the parish constable in the hand-me-down uniform, stood looking over his shoulder. The rest of the company, and the source of most of the noise, were local men who appeared to feel that wetting their whistles in the bar was an essential prerequisite for a successful search. A door stood open to the inn yard outside, and more of them stood out there.

Sebastian said, “My name is Sebastian Becker. I just arrived. I’m staying in this hotel.”

“What of it? You can see we’re busy here, Mister Becker.”

“I heard about the children. I want to join the search.”

The seated man was around thirty, perhaps even younger. The detective from the county force. The parents of the girls must be people of some influence.

He said, “Do you know the area?”

“I can read a map,” Sebastian said.

“This is the only map we have.”

“Then put me with someone who knows the land,” Sebastian said, his irritation rising. “Preferably one not doing his looking in the bottom of a pint glass.”

As a couple of the whistle-wetters made indignant noises, the parish constable moved toward the yard and beckoned for him to follow.

“I’ll send him out with Endell’s men,” the constable said. “This way, Mister Becker.”

Sebastian followed the man out. He would later learn that the parish constable was also the Sun Inn’s landlord, and that when required the snug became a makeshift police headquarters. The cellar had served as a lockup until a seafront cardsharper had spilled an entire barrel of ale in a bungled attempt to get a drink out of it.

They joined a waiting company of searchers around the back of the inn, just as a horse-drawn farm wagon with a twelve-year-old boy at the reins came clattering into the yard.

“One more for you, Ralph,” the constable said.

Ralph Endell was a middle-aged man who moved like an old one, dressed for outdoor work. His fair hair was mostly sheared close and he had a mustache that Lord Kitchener might have envied.

“Aye?” he said.

“Aye. Don’t lose him.”

All climbed on, and Endell offered Sebastian a hand to scramble up.

“Where are we going?” Sebastian said.

“We’re taking the woods and quarries,” Endell said. “There’s a few wrong places up there where two kiddies might come to grief.”

As their wagon climbed a cobbled street that turned into a dirt lane behind some houses, Sebastian said, “Who’s the detective giving the orders back there?”

“Stephen Reed?” one of the others said. “He’s a county copper, but he grew up local. He was the harbor master’s son.”

Another man said, “It was a mistake to send him. People who knew him as a lad can’t take him serious now.”

Ralph Endell said, “You’re never a prophet in your own land,” and the others all made a knowing chorus of agreement.

They were an assorted bunch. Most were obviously outdoor workers, dressed in layers of their oldest clothing. One man was an oyster-catcher, and a couple worked on boats. Endell had been the local blacksmith; he still shod horses, but now he also sold petrol in gallon cans along with parts and tires for motor vehicles.

They’d have about four useful hours of daylight. The first volunteers had ignored police orders and set out to concentrate their efforts along the shoreline. These were the people that Sebastian had seen from his window.

“Why waste time looking on the beach?” one of the men said. “It’s live bodies we’re needing to find.”

His companion was right. It made far less sense to search in the obvious place for drowned girls than in the less likely places for live ones. Sad to say it, but a drowned girl would come to no further harm. The boy soldiers, he learned, had been called in from a local barracks. Some of them had received less than three weeks’ training. They’d been sent farther up, to comb through the open heath above the woodland.

After a bumpy quarter of a mile, their cart came to a stop by an overgrown gateway. The wall here had been pushed over long ago, and greenery had forced its way up through the stones.

When the oldest member of the party began to climb down, Ralph Endell said to Sebastian, “You go with Arthur. His eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

“Nothing wrong with these eyes,” Arthur said without looking back.

“Nor with your ears, when it suits you,” Ralph Endell called after him.

Arthur was like a rangy old whippet. Not fast, but once he’d set the pace, he didn’t flag. They climbed to the ruins of a farm that had been abandoned for so long that a tree had grown right through one of its broken walls. This gave the building an air that was both commonplace and magical. It was exactly the kind of fairy-tale setting that might attract children of some imagination.

A low wall enclosed a jungle of riotous weeds that had once been a kitchen garden. Here Arthur lowered himself stiffly and sat, lips compressed and breathing loudly through his nose, while Sebastian went ahead and did the exploring.

The farmhouse itself was only a partial shell. The most complete of the outbuildings was a low stone structure built around a wellspring. He pushed in the rotten door to look inside. The small building was windowless, its walls thick with moss and mold. Water spouted from a lion’s-head carving in the back wall to fill an overflowing stone trough beneath. The ground for yards around the doorway was spongy and soft.

Otherwise, the site was a ruin. The main building’s roof had collapsed and taken the floors with it, right down into the cellars. In the shelter of its walls, Sebastian found evidence of several campfires; but these were old, and the carbonized bones in them were rabbit bones. He looked around for clothing, for marks of any kind.

When he found an opening to a part of the cellar, a wide mouth into complete darkness, he crouched before it and called the girls’ names.

“Molly? Florence?”

He’d learned them on the cart. Molly Button and Florence Bell; best friends, spending their summer in a villa rented by Florence’s parents.

His voice echoed in the space under the old house. But he expected no reply. The dirt that he could see around the opening had been smoothed by heavy rain and hadn’t been disturbed by anything other than birds’ feet in some time. Their fine toes had patterned the mud, imprinting a thousand tiny trident shapes without ever sinking in.

“No one’s been here,” he told Arthur when he rejoined him in front of the site.

“No one?”

“Not for some time,” Sebastian said. “Tell me something. Do people often go missing in these parts?”

“Things happen that you don’t always hear about,” Arthur said.

“What does that mean?”

“Folk come here to spend their money,” Arthur said. “Bad news hurts trade.”

And so they moved on to the next place.

A proper search over a wide area was a hard thing to organize. Taking a map and squaring off the landscape for methodical investigation guaranteed a kind of military thoroughness but could take days or longer when speed was essential. Much better to start with the places that children frequented, where mishaps might occur. Check every barn, well, quarry, and gully. Stop and question every suspicious character. And if you could get them, use dogs. Nothing could beat a well-trained dog.

Meanwhile, in a place like this, there would always be the sea to consider; close to hand, not to be overlooked, but offering little in the way of a hopeful outcome.

They crossed a field and entered a copse. The two men separated and spent the best part of an hour going through it. Some of the trees here had been marked for felling, but there was no sign of the woodsmen. Sebastian scared off a fox.

After making certain of the copse, they moved on. A track from the wood led to a disused set of rails, which in turn led to a mine shaft about a quarter of a mile farther on.

“How far is it to Sir Owain Lancaster’s estate?” Sebastian said.

“You’re on it,” said his garrulous partner, and that was that for a while.

This place was more menacing than magical. The shaft was a vertical hole in the ground capped with wooden railway sleepers. The middle beams of the cover had collapsed in, and when Sebastian looked through the rotted hole he could see black water fifteen feet down. He cast all around looking for signs, but saw none.

He stepped back. Arthur was plucking at his lips, thoughtfully. He saw that Sebastian was watching him, and stopped doing it.

“Anywhere else we can look?” Sebastian said.

“There’s not a lot more we can do before nightfall,” Arthur said, and then, sadly and unexpectedly, added, “God bless them.”

Suddenly he was no longer a surly old local, but some child’s grandfather. And the places they were visiting might well have been his own remembered playgrounds, from a life spent on this land.

As they crossed a field to join a lane that looked very like the one that they’d left, they saw someone running down the hill. A lad, by the looks of him. He saw them at the same time, and diverted to meet them.

As he drew close, Sebastian could see that it was the youngest-looking of the boy soldiers. He was white-faced and flustered.

He said to Sebastian, “Are you the detective?”

“No,” Sebastian said. “He’s down at the inn. What’s the matter?”

“We found them,” the boy said.

Then was violently sick.