I gazed across the office at “P,” tempted to read about Miss Powers’ acid attack, but I really had no right, nor even an excuse. Hers was no longer a criminal case, it was a psychological one, and no mere investigator could help her find a way through the labyrinth. In any event, it was getting late—according to the clock on the wall, in less than two hours the sky would begin to grow bright.
I replaced the file-cabinet key in its drawer, then put my ear to the door. I’d heard people moving about while I was pillaging the records, but they’d never come too close. I imagined that the wards for the more troubled patients would have been active around the clock, but this one seemed fairly quiet. I heard no one, and eased the door open to look: yes, the long gallery was empty.
Now came the tricky bit.
This central section of offices and meeting rooms made for the asylum’s common grounds: the wings and wards all joined here—male and female, regular and violent—to make use of the visitors’ entrance, the kitchen and laundry facilities, and the rooms that contained things all nurses would need close to hand. No doubt there were longer-term storage rooms at a distance, but with luck, the possessions of new patients would find a temporary resting-place somewhere here, on their way to being parcelled up and tidied away until discharge.
I avoided the hall beneath the dome—the palm-bedecked room used for chapel and holiday events—since I remembered that off that lay the porters’ rooms. If there were night guards, they would be there. Instead, I opened various doors until I found one lined with shelves holding everything from fresh bedding and hospital clothing to bed-pans, hair-combs, packages of tea-biscuits, and one solitary strait-jacket. And a set of shelves holding various things that were clearly intended for more permanent storage, including a brown-paper-wrapped parcel with the label:
Female, mid-twenties, blonde—blue. NB: dress and men’s trousers.
I did not need the confirmation of yesterday’s date to know that here was my clothing.
I plucked off the twine and hunted through the garments until I found my spectacles—to which, I was pleased to see, some thoughtful nurse had restored the lens that she’d found in my pocket. I put them on, then exchanged my hospital wear for my own undergarments, trousers, and cardigan. As I threaded my belt through the trouser’s loops, I paused. That was why all the inmates looked frumpy: in Bedlam, only the nurses were permitted belts.
Which explained why Vivian had such a collection of them in her wardrobe at Selwick.
I put the dress and hat back in the paper, along with the hospital’s night clothes, tying the twine around it again before replacing it on the shelf—thinner now, but it might take them a while to notice.
By which time, I would be gone.
(I hoped.)
A glance at the window warned me that the brief summer’s night was fast ebbing. I put on a motoring cap someone had left on a hook, dropped a packet of tea-biscuits into my pocket, then performed the ritual of the stealthy sticking out of head into the dim hallway again…only this time, the gallery was occupied. Very fortunately, she was walking in the opposite direction, and hadn’t heard the faint click of the mechanism under my hand. I kept very still, and cursed to myself when she reached the far end and turned.
My head was back inside the storage room before her reverse-face was complete. With exquisite care, I inched the door all the way closed, turning the knob to permit the tongue to slide into the plate. I could not risk the noise of the lock itself, but fortunately, the night-watchwoman did not perform the constabulary act of rattling door-knobs to check the locks. Her heels thumped along the worn carpet, approaching, then fading up the side-corridor. I held my breath: would she continue through the baths and into the wing for the “noisy” (i.e., uncontrollable) patients, or would she return?
I pulled the door open a bare centimetre, ear to the crack…and heard her footsteps cut off with a clank from the bath-room door.
Again, I peered down the gallery: empty. I shut the door behind me and scurried along to the laundry—the stolen key did work there—and from there into welcome, blessed, open air.
I sat on the stoop to lace up my shoes, then looked down at the key beside me. Did I intend to come back? If so, a pass-key would save me time. On the other hand, I imagined that if hospital regulations called for the counting of patients and forks, so much more so a missing key. It had not yet been discovered, but surely a misplaced key would make for less trouble than a missing one? No reason to get the poor nurse fired. I stepped back into the laundry, laid the key next to a bundle of uniforms waiting for cleaning, and left Bedlam to its slumber.
Through the drying grounds, up onto the coal shed, over the wall into the gardens beyond. The drive ran past the lodge, which was sure to be occupied, but was there any reason for me to risk a set of noisy iron gates?
Instead, I trotted across the dark lawn, praying that there were no abandoned croquet hoops. The light from the street beyond showed me the large, ill-trimmed trees I had seen from the day room. I clambered up, then out onto a branch—only to freeze, as the bounce beneath me warned that the tree was considerably less mature than it had appeared.
Thinking very light and airy thoughts, I edged out, closer to the wall…
And stepped onto its top without breaking any bones.
A horse cart was coming along St George’s Road as I dropped out of the heights. I peered closely at the rag-and-bone man, but when the startled old face did not turn out to belong to Sherlock Holmes, I tugged at my cap and strolled off towards the River and the city beyond.
Chapter Fifteen
THE ACTUAL SHERLOCK HOLMES AND I did not meet up until later that afternoon, when I came blinking upright in Mycroft’s guest room, dragged from slumber by the sound of the front door. I fumbled for the clock—then squinted more closely to see if it was still ticking. The curtains suggested dusk, but from the clock’s hands and the sounds outside, it was merely a rainy Sunday afternoon. I donned my glasses and dressing-gown to walk into the flat, to be greeted by the aroma of coffee.
The eagerness with which I took the cup made Holmes’ eyebrow rise. “Bedlam had a surprising number of positive features,” I informed him, “but its cuisine was not among them.” Without remark, he reached for a skillet and conjured up a meal more appropriate to a morning hour and a family of five, turning the whole mess onto a single plate and handing me a fork.
“Your lady does not appear to have pawned the necklace here in London,” he said as I began to fling the plate’s contents down my throat. “However, I suspect that she may have visited her bank and withdrawn funds.”
My own eyebrows went up in a question, although since his back was to me as he ran water into the pan, my silence alone communicated a request for more. Or perhaps he simply kept talking.
“The manager seemed disinclined to provide any details without the approval of some higher power, although his facial expressions as he examined various pages handed him by an assistant suggested that he had not been aware of the Lady Vivian’s visit. I expect your Marquess down in Surrey will have had a telephone call to inform him that his half-sister made inroads into her own money, under her own power.”
I paused with laden fork long enough to ask, “Have you any idea how much money we’re talking about?”
“Enough to cause a forty-year-old bank manager to break out in a light sweat and suddenly recall an appointment that required my immediate departure.”
So: enough for a solitary woman to live in relative comfort for a few years, though perhaps not enough to keep her in luxury. For that, she would need to sell the diamonds.
When the plate was bare, we filled our cups again and adjourned to the voluminous chairs of the sitting room. (Mycroft, once an enormous man, since his heart attack had become simply very large; his furniture reflected his former person.) While Holmes got his pipe going, I thanked h
im for his help, apologised for the interruption to his study of motets, then gave him a review of the previous days, from my visit to his bolt-hole and my evening’s “arrest” to my eventual delivery to Bedlam, with all I had seen and heard inside its walls.
In all, I kept to precise detail rather than conjecture, there being little point in giving Holmes pre-digested data. As I went on, he retreated into his chair, sitting with his legs drawn up and his eyelids down, looking as if he had fallen asleep.
He had not. I came to a halt with the rag-and-bone man who was not Sherlock Holmes, and he remained silent. After a time, I stood and went back into the guest room, coming out twenty minutes later both clean and dressed.
He stirred, and reached for his long-cold pipe and a long-cold topic, one we had covered on Thursday. “A lesbian, you said?”
“Lady Vivian? I believe so. Miss Bailey confirmed it, more or less. And it would explain not only why an attractive young Hon managed to get through her coming-out Season without a ring, but also why some of her asylum doctors were so vehement about her fantasies that needed to be cured.”
He shook his head, dropping the spent match into the tray. “One might as well condemn a cat for not being a dog, or a telephone’s mouth-piece for not containing the speaker.”
“But it isn’t just that, Holmes.”
“It’s about the Marquess and his sister’s money.”
“Yes.”
“The bank manager was remarkably chary of giving me details. As I said, he seemed unaware that she had been by—and I believe he was unaware of anything untoward in the handling of her account. But once I drew his attention to the records, he appeared to notice some, shall we say, irregularities? Hence his nervousness, and his need to dismiss me then and there. I intend to go back in the morning. Perhaps a night’s uneasiness about the situation may have loosened his tongue.”
“Holmes, surely asylums don’t lock away women anymore just because their family aren’t happy with them?”
“You don’t think so?”
“It sounds positively Dickensian.”
“There is a reason why Dickens remains popular amongst the lending libraries.”
The possibility that the fragile, gifted woman I had met was locked behind bars because of a greedy and disapproving brother-in-law was bad enough. But now that she was out?
“Holmes, when I met Lady Vivian three years ago, she told Ronnie that she wished to remain in Bedlam. Her very words were, ‘I’m safe here.’ Do you think…?”
“That she may have been speaking the simple truth?”
“That we should find her before the Marquess does?”
“I do. And you also need to ask your friend about her aunt’s will. To see who inherits the money were she to die.”
I listened to the word’s bleak echo, and wondered what the odds were to her being alive.
Chapter Sixteen
IT WAS A RELIEF WHEN Mycroft arrived home. Not that I was fully reconciled to my brother-in-law and his outsized rôle in the world of dark politics—I would probably never regain my early, naïve fondness for him—but time grants perspective, if not forgiveness. I had no trouble being cordial.
Holmes had told him about Lady Vivian’s disappearance, and I filled in some of the details about my trips to Surrey and Bedlam.
But not over dinner: food was sacrosanct to Mycroft Holmes. He ate with gusto, Holmes and I less so, while we spoke of Percy Fawcett’s Amazon expedition and the Scopes arrest, as well as a rumour Mycroft had heard of an invention called “radiovision” in America, which both men agreed sounded like a pipe dream.
Afterwards, Mycroft lit a small fire while Holmes filled glasses with our preferred varieties of digestif. Our host settled into the largest of his chairs, and began to talk about a recent problem that had come across his desk.
“Actually, it concerns a woman who made me think of you, Mary. Not that you’re anything like her—mannish sort of thing, drove an ambulance during the War and never wanted to take off the uniform afterwards. No, what amused me was that when the woman was, oh, fourteen or fifteen, she signed up for the Scouts using just her initials so they’d think she was a boy. And when they found out and objected, she refused to be put off.”
“She sounds like my type, all right. Did the Scouts let her in?”
“Her mother ended up forming the Girl Guides for her to play soldier in.”
“Too bad, it would have improved Baden-Powell’s boys no end.”
“You may be right. But now the woman—Lintorn-Orman is her name, Rotha Beryl Lintorn-Orman, which sounds like a rather strained anagram for…what? A northernly tribal moron? Not a nonthermal lorry rib? Rent a labyrinth or—”
Holmes broke in. “Mycroft, was there a point to this?”
“Yes, namely, that the Lintorn-Orman woman has a bee in her bonnet—not that she wears a bonnet—about Reds and foreigners. That they’re overrunning Britain, ruining the place, undermining the values of Empire, and we have to get rid of them. To a certain point she’s right—none of us want to see the Bolshevik flag over Buckingham Palace—but having an entire policy of ‘Us Good, Them Bad’ does little more than create a magnet for trouble-makers. Most of my colleagues consider her just another flash-in-the-pan crackpot, and Labour openly laughs at the idea, but in two years, she’s got thousands signed up as British Fascists, all of them eager to raise Cain about something.”
“Didn’t that group kidnap the Communist Pollitt?” Holmes asked.
“And marched on London during Empire Day.”
I had to interrupt. “And this woman made you think of me…why?”
“It was a tightly limited analogy, I assure you, resting on the single point of her childhood antic. I cannot imagine you espousing a cause that lacks a carefully thought-out platform. This woman has nothing but her passions. So taken with the Mussolini people in Italy that she starts up her own party of Fascists—without noticing that if she tried to do anything of the sort in Italy, the Blackshirts would slap her silly and shove her back in the kitchen.”
I nodded solemnly. “Alas, a lack of common sense is not an exclusively male prerogative.”
Holmes stepped in with some question about Italy’s Fascist lunacy, and I listened with half an ear as I thought about Rotha Lintorn-Orman. I had heard the name—it did rather stand out—and although I agreed that she sounded a bit maternally indulged, I also thought she was one of those who had tasted adventure and self-respect during the War, and fit poorly back into the status quo afterwards.
But, wasn’t this the second mention of the Italian leader in as many days? I stirred, and spoke up without thinking.
“Ronnie’s uncle the Marquess admires the Fascists, too. Oh, sorry—I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Mycroft did not seem to mind. “I have begun to think this may be the direction towards which much of the country, if not the world, is headed.”
Mycroft had been described, many years before, as a man who “audits the books in some of the government departments.” Strictly speaking, this was true—except that the auditing he did was less that of sums on a ledger than it was the trends, costs, and vulnerabilities of international politics. If Mycroft Holmes saw movement in a political realm, it was there—or it would be.
But, Britain? This rational, benevolent nation in the hands of men like Mussolini or the Marquess of Selwick? Inconceivable. If it came to that, I’d rather be inside Bedlam.
With the thought of that great grey institution, I retreated again from the conversation, letting it break and ebb in the room around me like waves on the shore.
Bedlam had not been at all what I expected. I had ventured in, anticipating a cold stone mausoleum seething with the violent, the unrestrained, and the suicidal, kept under control by brutal and uncaring attendants. No doubt some institutions were exactly that—the county a
sylums, I suspected, were given considerably less money and little say in which inmates they could hand back to their families.
But when it came to Bethlem Royal Hospital, the word asylum was not entirely spurious. I had seen its inmates treated with gentle skill, given medical care and warm food by people who were willing to talk, and to listen. They were kept occupied with labour, but not too harshly. They were urged to test their own limits, but only by degrees. I personally would be driven to lunacy by the place, but would not a fragile mind benefit from the warm cotton-wool of placid activities and regular hours?
The one thing I regretted was that I’d left without seeing Lady Vivian’s room. I had no doubt that, as a more or less permanent resident, she had accumulated both rights and possessions. None of her fellows had mentioned seeing her drawing or painting, although three years ago, she’d had both the materials and the dexterity to produce a charming Pierrot for young Simon. Perhaps she’d left a new row of sketch-books on a shelf. Perhaps the images mounted on her wall would have given me a hint as to where she’d gone.
That last sketch-book back in Selwick, the one with the missing pages from the year of her beloved brother’s death, had suggested that her art was going in some interesting directions. Mere dashes of the pencil to suggest an object emerging from the page, given substance in soft hints of colour…
I glanced at Holmes with a smile: straight-combed hair, perfectly knotted tie, deep maroon silk dressing-gown. Crisp lines down the front of his trousers; polish on his shoes. Mycroft was the same: there was nothing soft or uncertain in his entire apartment, apart from three chair-cushions and my own dressing-gown.
The two were going on about Mussolini again, the unexpected fervour with which his country had embraced him, how economic pressures and Great War losses could shape a country’s wishes and expectations, how a harsh message of patriotic destiny and racial superiority could get a nation to overlook a brutal murder and clumsily staged cover-up. How his seizing of power did not bode well for the Adriatic region.