The Bedlam Detective Read Online Free

girl would come to no further harm. The boy soldiers, he learned, had been called in from a local barracks. Some of them had received less than three weeks’ training. They’d been sent farther up, to comb through the open heath above the woodland.
    After a bumpy quarter of a mile, their cart came to a stop by an overgrown gateway. The wall here had been pushed over long ago, and greenery had forced its way up through the stones.
    When the oldest member of the party began to climb down, Ralph Endell said to Sebastian, “You go with Arthur. His eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
    “Nothing wrong with these eyes,” Arthur said without looking back.
    “Nor with your ears, when it suits you,” Ralph Endell called after him.
    Arthur was like a rangy old whippet. Not fast, but once he’d set the pace, he didn’t flag. They climbed to the ruins of a farm that had been abandoned for so long that a tree had grown right through one of its broken walls. This gave the building an air that was both commonplace and magical. It was exactly the kind of fairy-tale setting that might attract children of some imagination.
    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