Stephen Reed entered the Sun inn’s ill-lit and deserted snug about half an hour later.
He’d left papers and his briefcase on the map table. No one had been in to light the gas, and the only illumination came from the passageway behind the bar.
He started to gather his few effects together, and then he seemed to lose heart. He kicked out the chair and sat, heavily.
Sebastian said, startling the officer a little, “Is this your first murder?”
Reed recovered himself. “No,” he said.
“But your first with children.”
He peered at Sebastian in the gloom. Sebastian moved forward, the better to be seen.
“Sebastian Becker. I’m the special investigator for the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy.”
“Oh?”
“You had me arrested for trying to protect your evidence. What happened to the camera I was holding? Please tell me you didn’t let those boys interfere with it.”
“That was a camera?” the detective said.
“I believe so.”
“It was like none I’ve ever seen.”
“Where is it now?”
“Over in the assembly rooms, along with the bodies. Everything’s there.”
“It’s a slim chance,” Sebastian suggested, “but the plate may carry an image from those girls’ last hour. Has anyone been stupid enough to open it?”
Stephen Reed’s distraction fell away, and his sense of purpose seemed to return.
“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I hope not.”
He went out onto the street. A reasonably bright-looking child in a cadet’s uniform was passing, and Stephen Reed collared him. He sent him at a run with a message for the man on the door at the hall. Then he came back inside.
“You’re not a policeman?” Stephen Reed said.
“I used to be.”
“But you work for the Lord Chancellor now.”
“For his Visitor in Lunacy. Sir James Crichton-Browne.”
“What does that mean?”
Sebastian took out the letters of authority that he always carried with him.
“When the sanity of a man of property is questioned,” he said, handing the letters over, “it’s the Visitor’s duty to determine whether such a man is competent to manage his own affairs. Sometimes the mad can be devious in concealing their madness. I investigate those cases.”
Stephen Reed looked at the papers.
He said, “Insanity in our town? I’d say your investigation has implications for mine.”
“If there is evidence to support such a notion, trust me to share it. There’s a telephone across the way. Call the Bethlem Hospital. They keep an office for me there. If you’re in any doubt as to my character, they will confirm what I’m telling you.”
Stephen Reed handed the papers back to Sebastian.
“I jumped to a hasty conclusion,” he said, while managing not to seem too unhappy about it.
“No apology required,” Sebastian said, aware that none had been offered. He returned the papers to the inside of his coat. “Are they definitely the girls you were looking for?”
“I believe so. But I can’t say for certain until we reach Mister Bell to arrange a formal identification. It’s not a thing I can ask of a mother.”
“I heard say that Bell’s a judge in town.”
“A barrister. Florence was his daughter and Molly her best friend. Molly’s parents are abroad. Bell won’t be here until morning and I can tell you, that will not be an easy hour of any man’s life. Their faces have been disfigured.”
“Do you have children of your own?”
“Not even married. Which does not make it any less hard to look upon.”
Sebastian said, “It’ll go well with your superintendent if you can offer a theory.”
“I know,” Stephen Reed said. “Some clothing is missing. I’m thinking this may be a crime of child-stripping gone too far. These were well-dressed girls. Except …”
“What?”
Stephen Reed shook his head, fully aware that his theory was not a good one. He seemed about to say as much when his young messenger reappeared in the doorway. The boy seemed reluctant to cross the threshold into licensed premises.
“Well?” Stephen Reed said.
“Your man on the door says to tell you that someone’s in there looking at the girls.”
Stephen Reed was shocked. “He was to open the room to no one,” he said, and the boy could do no more than look helpless.
“He says it’s Sir Owain, sir.”
Stephen Reed set off for the hall, with Sebastian following close behind.
SEVEN
There was now a motor vehicle on the street outside the hall, a landaulet tourer with a silent chauffeur seated in the open behind its wheel. The chauffeur was gloved and muffled against the elements. There was no one in the passenger cab behind him. Stephen Reed went past the vehicle and bore down on his man at the door.
“I said to let nobody in,” Stephen Reed said.
“I know,” the man said, “but it’s Sir Owain, sir. How was I supposed to stop him?”
“Nobody means nobody!”
Sebastian followed Stephen Reed inside.
The construction of the public assembly rooms was honest and un-fussy. The floors were of scrubbed bare planks, the walls of painted boards. A large public chamber with seats and a stage and open rafters stood dark and empty. They passed along a corridor beside it to a suite of rooms behind the stage.
A second volunteer watchman sat on a chair in the corridor. He rose as Stephen Reed was approaching and began to give a halting explanation of his conduct.
But before the man could say much of anything, the detective said, “I’ll be speaking to you later,” and swept on by. Following a few paces behind, Sebastian was able to see the special constable’s unhappy expression as he sank back to his seat.
One of the rooms was a scullery. It had tiled walls and a sloping floor with a drain at its center. Its windows were small and high with frosted glass and metal bars. It was into this room that the two girls had been brought to spend their first night as objects of mourning and evidence of murder.
They lay much as they’d lain in the woods, side by side, only now on folding tables, and covered by shrouds. Someone had placed a single flower on each.
Two men were in the room with them.
One man stood back and played no part. In the soft, unsteady glow of gaslight the older of the two had raised a corner of one of the shrouds and was looking on the face beneath. In the time since the bodies had been brought in, a small amount of blood had risen through the fine linen and now marked the positions of the features and the girls’ extremities.
“Sir,” Stephen Reed said, “this is a criminal investigation. I have to ask you to leave.”
Without dropping the material, the man looked up. He was somewhere past his sixtieth year. His eyes were almost without color, his hair sparse and white. Sebastian could see that, at least until recent years, he’d been a man of some vigor. He still had the frame of one, but now an older man’s flesh hung on it. The same slight air of
