He took a quick look about, escaped patients had a way of taking blunt instruments with inhuman force to the back of the heads of orderlies when their attention was turned. But there was no one else in the corridor. Then he heard a shuffling muffling sound coming from the storeroom. He opened the door and inside was the missing guard, gagged and trussed up like a rag dolly stolen by some little thing’s mean older brother. Now, Henry had no particular enjoyment of this fellow, that was the truth, he confessed. The fact of the matter was the man had got Henry cautioned for drinking on the premises not a month earlier, so he thought on it a while and decided he was best left bound a moment until he extinguished the fire and investigated the situation further, least that would be his story if asked at a later date, which he was now being. Henry winked at the policemen then, comfortable within his own yarn, knowing the tale of his imperfection and incompetence was winning them all over. He did, however, slip down the man’s gag to find out who had gotten to him. Two of them, one big, one smaller, faces covered like bandits, he was told. They had taken the keys to the cells, so surely it was a bust out, said the man, he should secure the main gate.
Quickly Henry checked the doors of the rooms, but all were tight, there appeared to be bodies in every one of them. He took a fire blanket and threw it over the metal bin. Curiously, there was a metal fire iron sitting up against the side of the cylinder that he had not noticed for the leaping flames before. It was only later that night this object took on any significance, turning the stomachs of the cops as they bagged it up for evidence. The other orderlies were called, doctors were summoned, and the usual protocol for lockdown began. They opened up the doors on level two one by one to check the patients and see who, if anyone, had been liberated and replaced with a phoney made of rolled-up bedding. In the ninth cell was Malcolm Sedak, there was a strong smell of smoke in his quarters, and, yessir, in a way an exchange of bodies had been made. He had not been belted in to sleep since his arrival at the hospital, it was not compulsory procedure, and he had never struggled against the nurses to truly warrant it. In fact the man had been one of the calmer crooks in the hospital. He’d maintained an air of accomplishment, dignity and satisfaction, which had truly offended Henry, particularly as his crime was brutal and against a lady, he had heard. But when they pulled the sheets back off him they found the buckles and straps were tight across him. Dear Lord, sweet Jesus, but it was not the same man that had been put to bed a little after sundown. There was a stained pillowcase over his head — not tied so Henry did not think there had been an attempt at suffocation, just slack on him like a redneck hunting hood. His nightgown had been slit off with a knife or scissors around his body and it was lying on the floor next to the bed. Had they known of the extent of his facial injuries they might not have brought the pillowcase off him quite so quickly as they did for he began to moan hellishly as it took patches of wet yellow skin away with it He had been burned severely around the cheeks. Worse stilt when the cover was fully removed from his head, they saw that the man’s eyes had been put out by some kind of branding device, and he was blind.
Having finished his tale with drama and emphasis, Henry pulled out his almost empty bottle and took a swill and he held it out to the nearest policeman. Oh and the cell keys, incidentally, he said, were hanging tidily back up on a hook by the gate, as if someone had only been fixing to borrow them all along. Nobody had even thought to look for them where they belonged.
Charles Henry Beausang the Third spent four hours lying to the police about possible suspects and mapping his whereabouts in the hospital all evening for them. The elevator’s switch had been thrown between floors and the hatch opened and the cops had a hard time believing that this had not been brought to the attention of anyone earlier. One or two other points did not add up. Nobody had been roused by the smoke in the corridor. And, given the time the fire began, and when the injuries were perpetrated, there should have been more smoke. None of the doors on the lower level had been forced and the night watchman, well acquainted with the sauce as he was too, had seen nobody entering or leaving by the reception door. Yeah it was fishy, said the inspector, fishy, fishy, fishy. Then again if the hospital was run by drunks and half-wits, what could you expect. There followed some severe lectures about the inappropriate imbibing of alcohol on duty and the fact that this establishment housed some of the region’s rankest criminals, put there by the hard work of the city’s police department. All this Henry took with credible humility and shame, the bloodless blush of a professional flim-flam man. He did not know how long it would take the police to find Malcolm Sedak’s records in order to piece together the puzzle of who might have been involved with the crime. The man himself was incomprehensible when he spoke. He babbled like a child with night-terrors and kept trying to touch his missing eyes behind the bandages.
What Henry Beausang omitted to tell the authorities was that he had left the back door of the hospital specifically unlocked, he had presented the watchman with a bottle of rum, and he had loitered up on the third floor an hour longer than necessary. Nor did he mention that he had left open a window on the second floor so that the smoke might billow out evasively, just as he had been instructed to do.
By the time the police detectives had reached the booth on Oceanic Walk, The Electric Michelangelo had dismantled his place of work for the winter. By the time they reached Den Jones’s barbershop, via the eventual cooperation of some remarkably tight-lipped and unhelpful Coney informers, several dead-ends, one or two obvious decoys, Cyril Parks was no longer anywhere to be found in the country. Nor was Sedak’s original victim around to throw light upon a very dark matter. In fact there was no record of this woman in existence at all other than her recent medical file. The city was becoming ever more a place where ghosts and demons could live their half-lives unknown and uncharted by the authorities, it seemed. The investigation was perhaps more abbreviated than it needed to be, but nobody felt truly torn up for the victim. This was after all a vague quid pro quo affair, and the file was permanently closed, or at least relegated to a spot at the back of a very full cabinet, by January of 1941. Yes, Den Jones finally confirmed, there had been an Englishman tattooing in the back room for a couple of years — but he had gone up to Montreal or Toronto as far as he knew. Something about the Canadian Air Force and doing his duty in these troubled times. To the best of Den’s knowledge he had never so much as stepped out with a girl to the movies or the music hall, let alone revenged a lady made of tattooed eyes.