The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  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.

  THIRTY

  Three or four hurtling bodies seemed to hit the Carter all at once, bearing him backward onto the bed. Striding in after, the superintendent ordered, “Get the snaps on him.”

  “Fetch him a doctor,” Sebastian said. The blood was coming out of Hewlett like wine from a bladder.

  “Snaps first,” the superintendent said, and they turned Hewlett over on the mattress to cuff his hands behind his back.

  The sniper sergeant said, “This doctor. How fast do you want me to walk?”

  Sebastian grabbed a folded cloth from one of the bedside tables and moved in. He half-knelt on the mattress and jammed the cloth against Hewlett’s neck to stem the spray. The superintendent considered his options for a moment and then, with some reluctance, chose a path of decency.

  “Better run,” he said.

  Hewlett slid from the bed to the floor and Sebastian went with him, holding the cloth in place. He feared that he was doing little good.

  Hewlett looked sideways at Sebastian and said, “Is this madness enough for you?”

  When he spoke the wound moved like a second mouth, mimicking his speech with the imperfection of a ventriloquist’s doll. Sebastian struggled to reposition the cloth and close the wound, but the cloth was already sodden and his efforts seemed pointless.

  Hewlett then said, “I apologize for the trouble I’ve been causing to all,” and slipped out of consciousness.

  The doctors came then, and Sebastian stepped back. One or two of the policemen gave him comradely slaps on the shoulder, and he remembered his manners and nodded in acknowledgment. On the inside, he felt only confusion. He’d been ready to take Hewlett’s life, but when the moment came he had fought hard to save it. Here was the self-pitying beast who had carved into Sebastian’s wife. Yet at the core he was a man like any other.

  He walked away through the empty ward and found the children’s bathroom. There he tried to clean himself up. But he realized with a sinking heart that his one good suit was ruined. No amount of sponging would ever take out the blood. It had clotted into the fabric and he was spoiling the hospital’s towels just by trying.

  He heard noise outside the bathroom. When he emerged it was to find that Hewlett had been taken out of the ward. Most of th
e police had gone with him. The mess that Hewlett had left behind had not yet been cleaned up, but the ward sister was in charge again and normality could soon return.

  Sebastian descended the main stairs. When he reached the entrance hall, the superintendent spotted him and came over. His look was far from congratulatory.

  “You’re the husband of the wounded woman,” he said, making an accusation out of it.

  “I am,” Sebastian said.

  “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “I thought I identified myself well enough.”

  “Not well enough for me. I’d never have let you near him if I’d known.”

  “The child is safe. What other outcome would you have?”

  “I like to know what risks I’m taking when I take them,” the superintendent said. “I’ll be having words with your employer.”

  “Do that,” Sebastian said.

  They’d moved Elisabeth. Once the needlework on her was completed, her surgeon had sent for a cab and moved her to Guy’s. The hospital was less than a quarter mile away and Sebastian walked the short distance, entering through the St. Thomas Street gates. He felt weary and light, at the same time. In the tiled and colonnaded passageway that ran under the main building, he met the surgeon coming toward him. No longer in shirtsleeves, no longer alone, the man was dressed for authority and trailed by assistants. But as soon as he spotted Sebastian, he stopped.

  Sebastian said, “Sir Edward. Thank you for your attentions.”

  “And we can all thank you for yours,” the now visibly eminent Sir Edward said. “I heard of what happened.”

  “I fear the police are not so impressed with me.”

  “Ignore the police. Your wife will be very proud.”

  “How is she?” Sebastian said. The younger assistants were eyeing him, and he was again made aware of his shabby state. “Can I take her home now?”

  “I want to keep her in,” the surgeon said. “Until we know she’s over the shock and there’s no risk of infection.”

  “Ours is a tight ship, sir,” Sebastian said, though it pained him to admit it before strangers. “We’ve nothing spare for a hospital stay.”

  “I know about your situation. You needn’t worry. Your wife is one of our own. I’ll see she’s taken care of.”

  He found Elisabeth in a room off the women’s ward, where he had to seek the permission of the ward sister for an outside-of-hours visit. Unlike the Evelina, Guy’s had an air of security … though its original purpose as a “lock” hospital for incurables meant that the measures designed into its construction had been intended to keep its patients in, rather than intruders out.

  The side room was light, with a large window and a shiny linoleum floor. Elisabeth lay with a mountain of pillows elevating her tightly bound arm. She was drowsy but aware. Her heavy-lidded gaze followed Sebastian as he set a chair by the bed and sat upon it. He took her uninjured hand and looked into her eyes.

  “Well,” he said.

  Elisabeth managed a smile.

  Sebastian tried the same, and hoped it would show him as he wanted to seem, rather than betray the truth of his fragile feelings.

  She said, slurring her words a little, “Are you thinking the same thing as me?”

  He nodded. He didn’t need to say it aloud. Both were thinking of the Hotel Dieu, in New Orleans. The Louisiana hospital where she’d finally managed to locate him, days after a near-fatal wounding almost a decade before.

  She said, “This time I get the bed and the morphine.”

  “And I get to do the worrying. Please agree that you won’t go back there.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “The Evelina.”

  “Let’s not talk about it now, Sebastian,” she said, in a tone that suggested that if they should talk of it at all, it would only be to have his point of view discouraged.

  He said, “How can I ever feel at ease after what happened today? We’ll find you something else.”

  “And how will you support the four of us if nothing comes along? It’s not just about the money. They actually need me there, Sebastian. I know I wasn’t bred to be useful. But in that position, I am. What’s happened here isn’t a consequence of the job. This is misfortune. And misfortune strikes where it will.”

  “Why did that argument never work for me?”

  “Because in your case it wasn’t true. You went seeking misfortune out. Now go home. And change that shirt before Robert sees it. He’ll have nightmares.”

  Frances took the news badly. Though she set out an evening meal for Sebastian and Robert, she ate nothing herself. After a visit to the hospital, from where she came away with a list of Elisabeth’s housekeeping instructions, she did what she could to sponge the blood out of Sebastian’s suit and rescue his bloodstained shirt with soap and a bag of Dolly Blue bleach. In fact, for the rest of that evening she showed an unusual level of personal concern for Sebastian, as if near-tragedy had driven her usual shyness away.

  Robert did not go to the hospital, by mutual unspoken agreement. He had the situation explained to him, but seemed unaffected. This, they knew, could be misleading. Emotion tended to hit Robert like winter squalls; suddenly, at unexpected moments, and hard.

  For now, his main concern was for who would be taking him to his piano lesson while Mother was away.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Bethlem hospital, the third of its kind to carry the name and function, stood in St. George’s Fields with its main gates and gardens facing the Lambeth Road. Columns and a long Georgian frontage gave it the look of some enormous Quaker meeting hall. As “Bedlam” the old place had become synonymous with chaos and disorder; in art and in the public mind, it was nothing less than a living hell upon Earth.

  The present-day truth was not quite so dramatic. Wards for the dangerously insane had been closed after the building of a state criminal lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, and most patients in the Bethlem were now private admissions from among the educated middle classes. Standards were high. Some even believed that they were living in a hotel. The hospital’s governors were fighting a slow battle to separate Bethlem and Bedlam in the public mind.

  Sebastian’s avoidance of his basement office had little connection with the lunatics in residence. The “furious and mischievous, and those who have no regard to cleanliness” were now accommodated elsewhere. But the room made available to the Visitor’s man, as a favor to his employer, shook when trains passed under and stank when the heat came on. The blame lay with the Bakerloo Tube and the boxes containing unclaimed effects of long-dead patients, stacked floor-to-ceiling against the rear wall and filling almost half of the room. While the owners might be long gone, their odor survived them in their goods.

  For this reason, Sebastian called by only when required to, or when his employer was on the premises. Several of the Bethlem patients were on Sir James’s list, their estates taken under the control of the Lord Chancellor’s department. It was entirely possible that Sir Owain might end up here, or somewhere like it, if investigation showed his reason to be compromised and his affairs incompetently handled.

  They met between interviews in the doctors’ room, situated between the galleries for male and female patients. Sir James had co-opted the office as his own for the morning.

  “Sebastian!” he said. “Don’t dawdle in the doorway. Time’s a-wasting. What can you tell me?”

  Sir James Crichton-Browne had held the post of Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy for some thirty-six years, securing the job over fierce competition. Prior to that, he’d been the youngest-ever medical director of Wakefield’s West Riding Asylum. A broad-domed, silver-haired, bewhiskered Scot, he was something of a professional whirlwind. His intervention in any situation always guaranteed some form of action or change. But, like a whirlwind, he could leave considerable upset and disarray in his wake.

  Sebastian said, “On the face of it, Sir Owain seems coherent and well cared for. His affairs are properly managed. No o
ne that I spoke to gave anything but a good account of him.”

  “What about this companion of his? Doctor Ernest Hubert Sibley. Is he sound?”

  “He is a doctor,” Sebastian conceded. “After he qualified he spent a number of years in general practice in the provinces. His name disappears off the medical register for four years from 1888, but there’s no record of any disciplinary action.”

  “Nor need there be. A man can drop off the register for any number of reasons. Changing address and not informing the General Medical Council, for one.”

  “With that in mind, I checked to see if he might have spent those years in prison.”

  “And?”

  “You know I found nothing.”

  “Doctor Sibley has written to me,” Sir James said, “forwarding these.” He moved the typed pages of Sebastian’s report aside, uncovering an assortment of handwritten notes. He slid these forward to place them within Sebastian’s reach.

  “A letter from the parents of each dead child,” he said. “And one from the county’s chief constable. All thanking Sir Owain for his kindness and support in a difficult time.”

  Testimonials. Of a kind. Out of politeness Sebastian picked up one or two and scanned them, but the words passed before his eyes and he took nothing in.

  He said, “Are we to set these against our appeals from the families of his expedition’s members?”

  “I promised them a full investigation, Sebastian. I didn’t promise the result that they wanted.”

  “I should have made faster progress,” Sebastian said. “I fear I’ve been distracted.”

  “How is Elisabeth?”

  “Home, now,” Sebastian said, “and able to move around. She doesn’t complain but I can tell she’s still in discomfort.”

  “When she starts to carp about it,” Sir James said, “you’ll know she’s on the mend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We know that Sir Owain’s own wife and child accompanied him on his Amazonian jaunt and that neither returned. I’m in no doubt that what happened out there saw the beginning of his mental undoing.”