The Bedlam Detective Read Free

for the maneuvers?”
    “A little local emergency they’re helping us out with,” the railwayman said. Sebastian felt his senses sharpen. But the young man was already walking away.
    The final leg of Sebastian’s journey took about twenty minutes through country lanes. Arnmouth was a onetime fishing village that had grown for the summer crowds as far as its situation would allow. His first sight was of a clock tower and municipal welcome garden at the top of the main street. A dense bed of roadside flowers spelled out the town’s name on a sloping bank.
    Their wagon made its way down the street, which wasn’t long. An observer could feasibly stand at one end of it and hail to a friend at the other. The street was lined with fancy shops, fine hotels, and tall houses made of the local stone.
    Something was definitely amiss. Shopkeepers were outside their doors, exchanging words while their shops stood empty. A group of women had gathered on a corner. None of them paid the station wagon any attention as it went by.
    The Sun Inn was at the end of the main street, where the street made a sharp turn down to the harbor. It was an old coaching inn, with an archway to its stables and a view out over dunes and the estuary strand.
    Sebastian tipped the driver sixpence and climbed down with his bag. Then he glanced back up the street. The local women were too far off for him to do more than read their attitudes. Some stood with their arms folded. They glanced around as they talked.
    The driver inspected the sixpence, sniffed wetly, and then pocketed the coin as he flicked the reins to move on.
    T HE TWO STEPS up from the pavement into the inn were edged with heavy iron. Once off the street, Sebastian found himself in a low-ceilinged and gloomy interior. Except for a few stuffed sea birds on a shelf above the mantel, he was alone. There was a mahogany bar counter with a backdrop of bottles, mirrors, and crystal. On one paneled wall was an engraved print of the barquentine Waterwitch , and on another a picture frame with samples of sailors’ knots behind glass.
    He’d found solitude, but not silence. At the far end of the saloon bar was a partition. Beyond the partition was the snug, where the floor would be bare wood and the beer a halfpenny cheaper, and from which came the noise of a crowd of men. Sebastian paused for a moment to listen in case he could make out what was being discussed with so much enthusiasm, but he could not.
    He reached over the bar to where a brass ship’s bell hung, and tweaked the clapper so it rang once.
    All went quiet. Then a head popped around the bar side of the partition. It belonged to a large, unshaven man wearing—from what Sebastian could see—a parish constable’s uniform with a touch of the rummage-box in its fit and condition.
    His expression was of one poised for abuse, but that changed at the sight of a gent.
    “Just hold on,” he said, and disappeared again. A few moments later Sebastian heard the muffled shout of a name somewhere in the back of the inn. Moments after that, the noise in the snug returned to its previous level.
    A woman in cook’s whites appeared, bringing with her a waft of warm kitchen air. She was short and broad and homely.
    “Good afternoon, sir,” she said.
    “Sebastian Becker,” he said. “I’ve a reservation.”
    “A reservation?”
    “Sorry. A booking. I sent a telegram.”
    She went behind the bar counter and reached down for a visitors’ book. “A reservation,” she said, as if it was a word that she didn’t hear too often. “You speak a little like an American gentleman, Mister Becker.”
    “My wife’s American. I spent some years there. I often slip.”
    He scratched his name in the book with the pen that she gave him.
    As he was writing she said, with due apology, “I’m afraid there’s no one to take your bag upstairs.”
    “I can manage that for myself,” Sebastian said. “What’s going on?”
    “Two children are missing,” the