The Bedlam Detective (19 page)

The studio was airless and hot, due to the electric arcs that burned to supplement the autumn light. There was a crowd of shirtsleeved men around the camera, and a large Gramophone with an enormous brass horn beside it. Two young women, in costumes and heavy white makeup, were studying a song sheet. A man in a checked cap positioned the Gramophone’s needle arm over the record and played them a burst of song, to which they listened intently before exchanging a glance and nodding. One was dressed as some kind of dancer or chorus girl, the other as a suffragette.

Sebastian had spotted something of significant interest to him, and he tried to make his way through to speak to one of the young women; but a cry of “Close all doors!” and the sudden galvanization of all around him made him freeze to the spot. Everyone who’d been lounging, chatting, or arguing out a problem suddenly turned to some professional purpose. Sebastian alone was left without a role.

He eased his way to the back of the crowd as the two young women took up their positions before a music-hall backdrop. No one challenged him.

There was a further call for silence; the camera operator began to crank, the women struck a starting pose, and then, as the Gramophone music began, they went into a dance and mime to the song they’d been studying. The silence was far from perfect, but it allowed the performers to hear and follow their words.

Sebastian recognized the song; it was called “I Do Like to Be Where the Girls Are” and it was strange to hear the far-off, voices-from-the-ether sound of the Gramophone apparently issuing from the lips of the all-too-solid young women before him.

So the people on the screen in those novelty Vivaphone subjects weren’t speaking or singing at all. It was an illusion of living sound, not a record of life itself.

The song ended without applause. A man by the camera called out, “That’s a good one, let’s check it,” and then all stood around doing nothing until, at some secret signal, everyone sprang into movement again. The studio doors were thrown open and the two young women headed for the outside air.

Sebastian stepped forward to catch the attention of the one wearing the high-waisted jacket, hobble skirt, and
Votes for Women
sash of the music-hall suffragette. She had brown wavy hair and arresting gray-blue eyes, and a face that was a perfect oval. Seen this close, she was a girl of no more than sixteen or seventeen years.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “That pin you’re wearing. What exactly does it signify?”

She looked down. It was as if he’d drawn her attention to something that she hadn’t even been aware of.

“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you. It came with the wardrobe.”

T
HE SCREENING
took place in the inspection room, above a wooden garage on the front of the property. It was a new building, replacing one taken by fire a couple of years before. Heavy drapes blocked out the light from a square bay window, and the young man in the cricket jersey operated the projector. Only he, Sebastian, and the studio’s owner were present.

Sebastian said, “Do we see anything more?”

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “I haven’t looked at it myself yet.”

He’d somehow dealt with the new copy so that a single picture appeared on the screen before them. No twinned image, no large area of dazzling blank screen. With the room’s short throw, the picture was no more than three feet across and its edges were unusually crisp and bright.

Here were the girls, happy in their garden again. The screen was so washed with new light that in this section they were now without substance, like ghosts.

Sebastian leaned closer as the critical scene approached. At first he didn’t realize it had come; where it had been black-on-black the first time that he’d seen it, now the screen was filled with a swirling gray fog like filings in a jar. But in the fog, something moved. There, and there. It was all over too soon.

Cecil Hepworth said, “That doesn’t look like a man to me. Perhaps they were trying to make a trick film. Wouldn’t you say?”

“A what?” Sebastian said.

“Run it back and let’s see it again.”

Sebastian turned to the young man at the projector. “It went by too quickly,” he said. “Can you make it go more slowly?”

“If I run it too slow, the lamp will burn the film and blow a frame.”

He shut off the lamp and backed the roll up a few feet, then ran it again as slowly as he dared.

It was slow enough for the illusion of motion to be replaced by a sequence of frozen flicker-images, as if time had been sliced and laid open before them. A smoke-figure that was almost certainly one of the children seemed to turn in the fog and dash toward the camera. As she passed from the picture, something else burst out of the fog behind her and rushed at the lens. It took much less than a second.

They ran it back and looked again. Even more slowly, this time. Five, six frames at the most, and then it was gone.

Hepworth said, “Are you in focus?”

“I’m as sharp as it’ll go,” the young man said. “That’s motion blur.”

“Can’t be a puppet, then.”

“A puppet?” Sebastian said.

Hepworth said, “For a trick film you photograph a puppet one frame at a time. Nothing’s actually moving so everything’s sharp. But when you run all the frames together, the puppet seems to move.”

“That doesn’t look like a puppet to me,” Sebastian said.

“It doesn’t look like
anything
to me,” the young man said from behind the projector. “Shall I run it again?”

He ran it again. Even more slowly, this time. The shadow-child ran from sight again. The shadow-thing burst from the bushes behind her and enveloped the world. Fire burst from its heart and the screen blistered like skin.

The heat of the projector was burning the film. It bubbled and foamed and the young man quickly shut down the lamp, before the highly flammable nitrate stock took flame.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sebastian said.

T
HE TYPEWRITERS’ WORKPLACE WAS IN THE BASEMENT OF THE
South Chambers, and Evangeline’s machine was under a barred window in a lightwell that ran along the front of the buildings. If inclined, she could look up through its railings and glimpse the feet of passing benchers, as the senior lawyers were called, and the occasional clerk pushing a trolley of beribboned documents from one part of New Square to another. But in the interests of her employment, she resisted the inclination. Noticed at the wrong moment, it might be taken for idling.

She’d hoped to complete her work early so that she could square everything away and leave on time, but extra papers had come in and kept her late. Now she drew out the last typewritten page and its two carbons and pulled the cover over her everyday dancing partner, the Remington Standard.

She was by no means the last to leave. As she hastened her way up the basement stairs, young Barnes, one of the articled clerks, called after her, “Don’t keep that young man waiting, Miss Bancroft!”

She did not reply, or even acknowledge him. Barnes was, in essence, a solicitor’s apprentice, and many of his remarks to the women employees were in poor taste. But reprimand had no effect on him. His uncle had a partnership and so, one day, would he.

Evangeline’s lodgings were in Holborn, no more than ten minutes’ walk away, but she had plans for the evening. The pavement outside was wet and slick and the New Square gaslights had been lit, each one bearing a halo like a hovering angel in the damp September air. As she walked along, she doubled her scarf and pinned it in place.

She boarded a Central Line tube train at Chancery Lane, and changed at Oxford Circus for Baker Street. The second train was crowded, but a man gave up his seat.

The Great Room and hall of the Portman Rooms had once housed Tussaud’s exhibition of waxworks and Napoleonic relics. Now the waxworks had moved across the road, and these rooms were a spacious venue for dancing, concerts, and public gatherings. As she hurried up the ballroom-wide stairway, she could hear that the Women’s Freedom League meeting was already in progress. She cracked open the door to the hall as gently as she could; it made a sound like a gunshot to her own ears, but no more than one or two people sitting close by seemed to notice.

The seating was around two-thirds full. Attendance always varied. The WFL was a breakaway movement from the Women’s Social and Political Union, its members dissatisfied with the growing autocracy of the Pankhurst leadership and dismayed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s advocacy of violent protest. Though she supported the principle of democratic equality, Evangeline had found herself ill at ease with a leadership that resisted democracy within its own ranks and saw consultation as “interference”; while to her mind, the use of violence in a cause dishonored it.

Tonight’s speaker was making a case for a program of social disobedience that defied the law, but stopped short of vandalism and arson. The building’s steam heat was fired up and the big room was warm and stuffy, in contrast to the nipping air of the street.

“I ask you,” the speaker on the stage was saying, “what is the good of the constitutional policy to those who have no constitutional weapon?”

She was a tall, strong-boned woman, and no stranger to public debate. Her references were impeccable: twice arrested, and once sent to prison where she’d been pinioned and photographed, with her picture being distributed to police forces and institutions across the land.

Evangeline slid along into one of the empty seats in the back row as the speaker went on, “When someone does not listen, you can request their attention. But when they
will
not listen, then their attention has to be compelled. They say they will not deal with us unless they have to. So we must make it that they have to. When the subject of the forced feeding of women in prison is met with laughter in Parliament, we know that we can expect neither grace nor courtesy from those we address. It is the government alone that we regard as our enemy, and the whole of our agitation should be directed to bring just as much pressure as necessary upon those people who can deal with our grievance.”

A woman farther along the row caught Evangeline’s eye.

“Thought you weren’t coming,” she mouthed.

“Sorry,” Evangeline whispered back. “I’ll stay after and help clear up.”

The address went on for about another twenty minutes. Evangeline listened intently for the first ten, struggled to keep her attention in focus for the next five, and fought against drowsiness for the remainder. It was too hot in here, and her day had been a long one. But the talk ended with some spirited questions, most of them from the first three rows of the audience, and the change in tone helped to rouse her.

“We
have
to agitate,” the speaker concluded in response to an earnest young telegraphist in the second row. “We can organize a peaceful demonstration as well as anyone. But when we fill Hyde Park with ten thousand voices and our own prime minister affects not to hear, what then are we to do?”

After the talk, tea was served. Some women left early. Many of those who stayed behind were young and single and fired up by what they’d heard. Usually Evangeline would have been an eager contributor to their conversations. But tonight, it was as if she hadn’t the heart or the energy to join in. Instead, she offered to help with the refreshments.

At one point she set an empty cup on a table, forgot that it was there, and knocked it to the floor with her sleeve only a moment later.

“What’s the matter?” said her earlier companion from the back row. She was a Yorkshirewoman, and her name was Lillian. She worked in the drapery department of Derry and Toms department store, over on Kensington High Street.

“Just tired,” Evangeline said.

Lillian cocked her head in the direction of the doors. “Go on, then,” she said. “I can manage here.”

“No,” Evangeline said with a half-serious smile. “This is all the fun I ever have.”

At nine o’clock they set about collecting and stacking chairs; most of those remaining began a halfhearted effort to help and then discovered the time with surprise.

Emptied, the big room took on a more melancholy character. It was said that when Tussaud’s had vacated these rooms for its new premises, the entire move had been carried off in a single weekend. Sheeted figures on the floor, when prodded, had proved not to be the mannequins they appeared, but exhausted members of the staff.

“
Now
go,” Lillian urged her when the stacking was done. “I’ll stay and find the caretaker to lock up.”

So Evangeline went, thinking wistfully of her rooms and her bed and a novel from the Boots circulating library. Out into Baker Street, past the studios of Elliot and Fry, the Court photographers next door, imagining as she always did the great and the good who daily crossed the pavement she was passing over now. Usually she’d have a companion for her journey back to Holborn, Lillian or a lady whose husband worked in the advertising office at the
Daily Mirror
building and supported their cause. But in the lady’s absence, tonight Evangeline walked out alone.