The Bedlam Detective

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.

FOUR

The two bodies had been pulled feet-first from a scrub-filled gully, and now lay side by side. They were like white china dolls in a woodland clearing. Their cotton dresses had been dragged upward to cover their faces as they were pulled out of the gorse. One still wore underthings, the other none. Their feet were bare. Half a dozen of the boy soldiers were picking around the site to no convincing purpose, and a couple were staring at the exposed parts of the unclad child.

“Hey,” Sebastian called out across the clearing. “Who’s in charge, here? Has someone moved those bodies?”

Most of their faces turned his way, but none of them responded. There they stood, all pale and slack in their ill-fitting khaki. As Sebastian drew closer he could see that a soldier near the bodies had emptied a wicker picnic basket onto the ground at his feet and was stirring through the contents with the toe of his army boot, nosing them around like the muzzle of a clumsy dog.

“Stop that!” Sebastian said. “Put everything down!”

He was breathless from his dash to the scene, but not too breathless to shout. The soldier looked up and the others continued to stare, as if Sebastian were some madman who’d come crashing into a private function to blurt out obscenities.

Good God, was there nothing they hadn’t disturbed? One was down among the gorse bushes in the gully and had lifted a bloodied cotton bag of some kind on the end of a stick. He appeared to have been poking around in the undergrowth and passing up anything he could find. This included a wooden box that one of the others had paused in the act of trying to open.

“For God’s sake!” Sebastian said, turning here and there to address them all, his voice so sharp and loud that it scared a bird or two out of the trees above their heads. “Am I talking to myself? Stop trampling the ground and handling all the evidence! This could well be the scene of a crime! You have two dead children here! How do you expect anyone to account for them?”

Not one of the young men showed any sign of having understood, and he was beginning to wonder if he’d come upon some regiment of mutes or simpletons. He took three long strides and grabbed the wooden box from the soldier’s hands, and he called down to the boy with the bloodied sack on a stick.

“Put that back wherever it was,” he said. “As close as you can manage it. Step out of there and don’t touch anything else.”

At that moment he heard the engine of a motor truck, laboring hard, and turned to see the vehicle coming into sight at the other end of the clearing. It was the same truck that he’d seen collecting the boys from the station. At the wheel was its operator and beside him was the youngest soldier, the one who’d been sent down the hill, now returning to act as guide.

The truck pulled into the clearing and stopped, and from around the back there was a crash as the tailgate dropped. A second later a figure swung into view, followed by another. One was the gray-headed sergeant, and the other, in a rather sharp tan overcoat, was the detective from the Sun Inn’s snug.

Stephen Reed looked first at the bodies, and stopped. Some of the will seemed to go out of him, just for a