“I do believe I’ve been searched,” he said.

“Not by me,” Stephen Reed said.

The bedcovers didn’t appear to have been touched, and when Sebastian tipped over the bolster, his book and the papers were still there. “Do you know what this is?” he said, holding the volume up.

Stephen Reed shook his head.

“It’s Sir Owain’s account of his Amazonian adventure. Though it purports to be a factual account, it’s actually a fantasy of the most extreme order. He leads an expedition party into an unknown land. They find that they’ve ventured into a territory where monsters roam. The party is cut off from civilization and attacked from all sides. His men are carried off, one by one. At first the creatures move by night but then openly, by day. In the end, Sir Owain barely escapes with his life.”

“And he presents all that as truth?”

“He offers photographs and documents as proof of his story, all manufactured. The truth of it seems to be that these are the facts as he believes them.”

“Hence your interest.”

“He’s been of interest to my employers since the book was first published. You heard nothing of this? It caused quite a stir at the time.”

“All I know is that he lost his wife and child under tragic circumstances in South America. I can imagine that being enough to damage any man’s reason.”

“Not just his wife and son. His entire party, from the mapmakers and surveyors right down to the cook. There’s no true account. The inquest took place in a town where the British consul appeared to spend his nights in local whorehouses and his days sleeping off the drink, and his reports were useless.

“Questions from the bereaved families were met with offers of generous settlements. But the families have never been satisfied. There’s a thirdhand rumor of a Portuguese bearer. He’s supposed to have walked out of the jungle with a tale of the mad white captain who turned on his own crew when the river took his mind.”

“More storybook stuff.”

“That’s how it’s been dismissed,” Sebastian said, taking the papers from out of the book. “Your police commissioner’s response was a robust exoneration based on his personal knowledge of Sir Owain’s character. I have a copy of his letter here.”

“Let me understand this,” Stephen Reed said, with no more than a glance at the letterhead. “You’re telling me that Sir Owain is no mere eccentric. He’s known to be mad.”

“There are degrees of lunacy.”

“But you’ve known this for some time and he’s allowed to go free.”

“One needs a good reason in law to deprive a man of his liberty.”

“Especially a prominent man.”

“Prominence should have nothing to do with it,” Sebastian said. “But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. This list was compiled by my predecessor. A more meticulous man than I.” He gave the handwritten sheet to Stephen Reed.

As the young policeman scanned it, Sebastian went on, “My predecessor toured every parish with a border adjoining Sir Owain’s estate and noted every death or disappearance in recent years. Suspicious or accidental, report or rumor, they all went in. A woman drowned in a pool. A girl who set off for school and neither arrived nor returned. The disappearances were always at a time when Sir Owain was at home.”

Stephen Reed looked up from the list. “I know two of these names,” he said.

“You do?”

“Grace Eccles and Evangeline May Bancroft. Local girls. They’re my age. I knew them growing up. We went to the same school.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

“I remember some concern when they were lost on the moors one night. But it turned out they’d each misled their parents and gone camping together. They were found the next morning, miles from anywhere.”

“Where are they now?”

“Evangeline’s gone. She went away to London. And Grace is not an easy woman for anyone to speak to.”

“Easy or not, this is no time for reticence. What if today’s crime has a precedent?”

“It’s not a matter of reticence,” Stephen Reed said. “Believe me. If you were to meet Grace, you’d understand. May I hold on to this?”

At that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Dolly, to say that Sebastian’s supper was waiting for him in the dining room.

“Keep it,” Sebastian said. “And do with it what you can.”

EXTRACT FROM

The Empire of Beasts

BY SIR OWAIN LANCASTER, FRS

IT WAS the morning after the night attack on our camp. The dead and the injured lay where they had fallen. Everyone came down out of the trees and out of their hiding places and began to share their stories of what they had seen. One of the camaradas told, in his halting English sprinkled with phrases from his native Portuguese, of seeing four of our fellows carried off alive.

I had witnessed no such thing myself. I am ashamed to say that the attack had been too sudden, and too overwhelming, for any response other than hasty self-preservation. One moment we had been sitting by our separate campfires, doing our best to raise each other’s spirits for the further trials ahead; the next, it was as if a combined landslide, whirlwind, and stampede descended upon us, all at once.

You might say that, after our earlier experience upon the river, we should have been more prepared for something like it on dry land. In our defense, I should say that even the most fertile and apprehensive imagination could never have anticipated what came to befall us. First had come the sound, like the thunder of an approaching wave, to which had quickly been added the crashing of falling trees. We had barely time to rise to our feet and then the herd was upon us, charging through the camp, scattering bodies and trampling our fires.

What little I saw, I saw by firelight. I could make no estimate of their number. Each of those beasts was a giant, of a species hitherto unknown to science. They seemed to move as easily on two legs as on all fours, their long tails providing balance and their forelimbs as well adapted for gripping as running. At the time their attack appeared to have no purpose other than to terrify and destroy.

But now, as we counted our number that morning and found no less than three of our fellows and one of the camaradas missing, it seemed that the simple peon’s story was true. There was a purpose to the attack after all; we had been harvested. There was much grieving and wailing, and a great sense of gloom and despair settled upon the camp, and I resolved that if I did not act to dispel it, our adventure might end there, and all the struggles we had endured and the losses we had borne would be for nothing. I gathered everyone together and addressed them thus:

“We have already lost many of our number and most of our supplies in that terrible incident upon the river. Last night, we suffered losses again. But for those of us who have survived, let us remember that a certain providence has brought us this far. We live because it is clearly God’s purpose that we should, and to give up now would be to go against his plan.”

I saw hope in their faces as I spoke. Truth to tell, we had all been through a dreadful ordeal. To see one’s comrades torn by beasts is a terrible thing. The river serpents that had upset our boats and taken our companions had left many in a state of shock, and I knew that from now on a few among us would need to have courage for the many. And with that in mind I set out the following plan.

Those injured in the night’s attack would be moved to a new camp on higher ground. Dr S———— would supervise their care and set about the gathering of certain plants and herbs that would alleviate their injuries. I, meanwhile, would take my buffalo gun and follow the clear trail left by the night’s attackers, in the hope that I might find and rescue some, or even all, of our fellows.