the town and the people, like a ready-made flock.
He said, “Did he admit to anything? Or is he still insisting that dinosaurs followed him home?”
“Father.”
“The man’s as mad as a box of bats.”
“Knowing that’s one thing. Proving murder’s another.”
“Then what about your tinker?”
“He’s never guilty.”
“Everybody’s guilty of
Stephen Reed stared into the fire. The fire had been made with wood from the beach, and a little coal. After decades of public responsibility, his father’s life was simple and his needs enviably few. Add to that his dog, and the rum and tobacco and his meals brought over by a woman from the Mermaid Inn, and you had it all.
Stephen Reed’s own life seemed anything but simple, right now. These matters ate at him from within. He’d checked with the local grocer and learned that the coarse flour bags that had covered the two girls’ faces were of the same brand as those supplied to Arnside Hall. But the same could be said of half the hotels and larger private houses in the parish. And the bags turned up everywhere, reused for everything from onions to oyster shells.
When the kettle started to boil and his father came back with the pot, Stephen Reed said, “No tea for me, Dad. I’ll have to be getting back.”
“Good idea.”
“Why, thank you, Father. It’s always nice to know I’m welcome.”
“You should know what I mean. Get back to your proper police work and leave it, Stephen. Don’t go sticking your neck out. If it goes wrong, you’ll be made to suffer. And even if you’re proved right, you’ll only make enemies.”
So Stephen Reed returned to his lodgings and his county duties. He signed in the next morning and by midday was out in the marshes with two uniformed men, hunting a thief named Little Billy. Little Billy stole from boats, stripping their brass fittings when he could find nothing of portable value. The three spent a fruitless afternoon among the barges and marsh cottages, where they were met with silence and hostility. When Stephen Reed trudged home that evening, he was wet and mud-soaked and short of temper.
During the long walk back under a wide and empty sky, his thoughts inevitably strayed from Little Billy to the murdered children, and to the mystery surrounding Grace Eccles and Evangeline Bancroft.
He hadn’t known Grace Eccles well. In fact, because of her father’s reputation, he’d been discouraged from having much to do with her at all. But he remembered her utter and abject poverty, and wished that he’d been kinder. She’d been open and cheerful then, as if no one had yet pointed out her disadvantages to her.
And Evangeline. Sad Evangeline. The librarian’s daughter. A childhood friend in more innocent times, a distant island now.
His lodging was in a house of single men, and because of the hour this was one of the few occasions when he didn’t have to queue for the bathroom. Mrs. Williams had the downstairs fire lit, so there was hot water from the back boiler. He left his topcoat and other clothes out for his landlady to do with what she could, lay in the bath, and let the day’s aches and chills soak away.
He grew drowsy. Later, he might read. Though his married colleagues reckoned they had it harder and their expenses were greater, the things that they always complained about were the things that many single men could envy. Home, companionship, family, and an outlet for desire. The married men, in their turn, envied the single man his freedom.
It would ever be thus, he imagined. It was one’s lot to achieve one state, only to yearn for its opposite. Nothing was ever so dear as that which had been lost.
On returning to his room, he found that a note had been slipped under his door. He’d barely opened the note when Mrs. Williams came knocking to ensure that he’d seen it.
He dressed in haste and went to find a telephone. It took the operator several minutes to get the connection to Arnmouth, and a while longer for Lydia Bancroft to be fetched to the receiver.
“Stephen?” he eventually heard the librarian say. “Is that you?”
“Mrs. Bancroft,” he said, “what is it? Has something happened to Evangeline?”
“It’s Grace Eccles,” she said.
“What about her?”
“I hardly know how to say it.”
But she went on to explain. A horse had been found wandering loose on Arnmouth’s main street that morning. It was a large and handsome animal, and it shied away from every approach and panicked at any attempt to get a rope onto it. No one could say where it might have come from, until someone spotted that it was missing an eye. Shy of people, and confused at its surroundings, the animal had taken some time to corner in a yard behind the Schooner Hotel; along the way it had kicked in a shop window, which had increased its agitation, and it had trampled several gardens, which had done nothing for local tempers.
Someone remembered that Grace Eccles had been treating a one-eyed animal, and she was sent for. Word came back; she could not be found, but the gates to her fields were open, her animals had scattered to the moors, and her cottage had been ransacked. The doors had been thrown wide, her few pieces of furniture upset, and there was blood on the floor. In an incongruous detail, two measured glasses of clean drinking water stood untouched amid the chaos.
Parish Constable Bill Turnbull had found her, lying in heather just a few hundred yards from her home. She was dead, and, as Lydia Bancroft put it, she had been “cruelly used.”
“Stephen,” Lydia Bancroft said. “Please. It’s as if there’s a an awful shadow that has never left this town. If Grace was not safe after all these years, then I fear for Evangeline. They keep telling us it’s over. But it isn’t. What can we do?”
Were it told in a romance that a female of delicate habit, accustomed to all the comforts of life, had been precipitated into a river; that, after being withdrawn when on the point of drowning, this female, the eighth of a party, had penetrated into unknown and pathless woods, and travelled in them for weeks, not knowing whither she directed her steps; that, enduring hunger, thirst, and fatigue to very exhaustion, she should have seen her two brothers, far more robust than her, a nephew yet a youth, three young women her servants, and a young man, the domestic left by the physician who had gone on before, all expire by her side, and she yet survive; that, after remaining by their corpses two whole days and nights, in a country abounding in tigers and numbers of dangerous serpents, without once seeing any of these animals or reptiles, she should afterwards have strength to rise, and continue her way, covered with tatters, through the same pathless wood for eight days together till she reached the banks of the Bobonasa, the author would be charged with inconsistency; but the historian should paint facts to his reader, and this is nothing but the truth.
THIRTY-NINE
When Evangeline went looking for Sebastian Becker at his home, she got no farther than the funeral wreath on the door. She knocked and waited, then knocked again, but no one answered. The wreath was a striking weave of laurel, lilies, and black feathers, but in the week since the funeral the petals had fallen and the leaves were beginning to curl. This was her third attempt to reach him. Perhaps Sebastian had taken his son and sister-in-law and gone away? She made inquiries at the wardrobe maker’s, but no one there could help.
Then, in a moment of inspiration, she made her way through the borough’s streets to the pie stand under the
