A Sunless Sea (39 page)

Monk was aware of how closely she was watching him. The slightest flicker in his face, an instant’s movement of his eyes, and she would see it. For a brief second he wondered what this woman had seen and done; what life had denied her that she had chosen this path. Then his attention returned to the present, to Joel Lambourn dead in disgrace and Dinah waiting to face the hangman.

“My horrors have all been commonplace,” he answered her, knowing that she would not continue until he had made some acknowledgment. “A woman raped and beaten to death, a man hacked up and left to rot, children tortured and starved. It’s all happened before, and it will happen again. The best I can do is try to prevent it as often as I can. What do you know that’s going to ruin anyone in London, now?”

Something inside her closed up tight and hard. “Murder,” she answered quietly. “It all comes down ter murder in the end, don’t it? Murder for money. Murder for silence. Murder for dreams, for peace instead o’ screamin’ pain, murder for a needle an’ a packet o’ white powder.”

He said nothing. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door, fast and light, someone hurrying, and beyond that the noises of pain. No creak of bedsprings, only the rustle of straw palliasses on the floor.

“Who?” he said at last. “Who did Lambourn find out about?”

“Dunno,” she answered without a second’s hesitation. “Don’t want ter, ’cos then I’d ’ave ter kill ’im.”

Monk had no doubt that she would. He was uncertain of his own morality, because he might feel the same, but he smiled.

She smiled back at him, showing huge, white teeth. “Ye’re an odd duck, aren’t yer?” she said with interest. “If yer find the bastard, put an extra twist in the noose fer me, will yer? He’s ruined two right good men, an’ there in’t enough o’ them ter waste one, Gawd knows. Lambourn, and the ’ooever ’ee’s got sellin’ for ’im.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she held back tears far too long and her throat ached from it.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “When I get him.”

“They said Lambourn slit ’is wrists?” she went on, staring at him steadily.

“Yes,” he agreed.

“But ’e didn’t,” she pressed. Her voice was firm now, no doubt in it.

“I don’t think so,” Monk said quietly. He would not pretend to be certain.

“Better off than some, but it shouldn’t ’ave ’appened.”

“What sort of person am I looking for?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”

She gave a little grunt of disgust. “If I knew that, I’d get ’im meself. Someone secret, ’oo don’t look like ’e’d know opium from corn flour. Someone ’oo’s clean an’ polite an’ never seen wot ’appens to them as sticks that stuff in their veins an’ takes a one-way visit to madness. But now an’ again the ones like me sees their faces lookin’ out between the bars at the rest of us.”

Monk was silent for several moments, then he stood up.

“Thank you,” he said, then turned and walked away.

He went back to Wapping, his mind teeming with what Agatha Nisbet had said. He was looking for the man who profited from selling not just opium, but the needles that made it possible to become lethally addicted to it within a matter of weeks, even days. It was nothing to do with ordinary doses anyone could buy in patent medicines, or even the Chinese habit of smoking it, bad enough in its slow destruction.

The problem was not only to find him, but even when he did, what would he do about it? To sell such damnation might be one of the vilest of sins, but it was not against the law. Unless, of course, the man was also involved in the murder of Lambourn and of Zenia Gadney.

But since it was not a crime to sell opium, and needles, even if Joel Lambourn found out, why kill him? What could he have done to harm such a man? What could he prove?

It was still a tangle too dense to penetrate.

In his office Monk reread all he had on the people concerned in the research for the Pharmacy Act, making a list of all of those who had come into contact with Joel Lambourn. He would have to compare this list with whatever Runcorn could find on Lambourn’s movements in the last week of his life.

But then, of course, it did not have to be direct contact. It might have been indirect, someone who mentioned a name, a fact to someone else.

Who was the person that Agatha Nisbet believed had been corrupted into selling opium and needles for the man behind the scheme? How would they find him, and if they did, would he tell them anything of use?

The other half of the problem was not yet answered, perhaps the easier half: Who knew what Lambourn had learned so that it reached the man behind the sales, the real profiteer, the one who had killed him, and then killed Zenia Gadney? What was the line of reasoning that connected them all?

Was the damning information in Lambourn’s report, or was its destruction a red herring to justify his apparent suicide? Monk knew he must look harder for it, at the very least find out exactly who had ordered its destruction, and who had carried it out.

He would ask Runcorn to put someone good on to the task of looking yet again.

The report had been handed to Barclay Herne, who had apparently told Sinden Bawtry that it was so ill prepared as to be no use for the purpose of persuading Parliament to pass the Pharmacy Act.

Who else had seen it? If no one had, then the seller of opium had to be one of those two. But would Herne have killed his brother-in-law? Both Bawtry and Herne had alibis. They had been at the Atheneum the night Lambourn died, as attested to by a dozen or more people.

The seller of opium would surely have others in his employ, including
the man Agatha Nisbet said had once been good. How could Monk find him? And how soon?

Runcorn, Orme, and Taylor met at Paradise Place just before ten o’clock, all sitting around the kitchen table on the four hard-backed wooden chairs normally kept there for dining. One more chair had had to be brought along from Scuff’s bedroom, Hester creeping in to collect it without waking him.

The oven warmed the room, which smelled of fresh bread, scrubbed wood, and clean linen.

Over tea and hot buttered toast Monk told them all what Agatha Nisbet had told him, emphasizing the need to find the other man she spoke of in particular. No one said anything. He looked up and saw Hester’s eyes on him, watching, trying to judge from his face just what he thought.

“Did she tell you anything else about this man?” she asked him quietly. “Anything at all—age, experience, skills, what he does now?”

“No,” he admitted. “I think she was protecting him on purpose. It grieved her badly that he had been so corrupted.”

“Opium does that to you.” Hester’s face was bleak. “I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard a bit, seen a bit. Sometimes you have to use it for terrible wounds, and then it’s too hard to give it up, particularly if the wounds never really heal.”

Monk looked at her. Her shoulders were tense, pulling the fabric of her dress, the muscles of her neck tight, her mouth closed delicately so the pity showed like an unhealed wound of her own. He wondered how much more she had seen than he had, horror that she could never share.

He reached across the table and touched her fingers on the wooden surface, just for a moment, then pulled back.

“Do you know where to look?” he asked her. He hated doing it, but she would know that he had to, and resent it if he did less than his job, in order to spare her.

“I think so,” she answered, looking at him and not any of the others around the table, all watching her, waiting.

“I’ll go with you,” Monk said immediately. “He could be dangerous.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We haven’t time to send two people to do one job. We’ve only a few days. I have an idea of who it might be. When I saw him before, I didn’t even think of him being addicted himself. I should have.” There was anger in her voice, bitter self-criticism.

“You’re not going alone,” Monk responded without hesitation. “If he is the person who killed Lambourn and hacked Zenia Gadney to pieces, he’d do the same to you without a second thought about it. Either I come with you, or you don’t go!”

She smiled very slightly, as though some tiny element of it amused her.

“Hester!” he said sharply.

“Think of what else there is to do,” she replied. “Agatha said he was a good man once. The remnants of that will be left, if I don’t offer any threat to him.” She leaned forward a little, as if to command their attention. “We have to know who is using him. That’s whoever killed Lambourn, and Zenia Gadney—or had them killed.”

Monk clenched his teeth and breathed out slowly. “What if it’s this man who killed them?” he asked, wishing he did not have to.

He saw the sudden awareness leap in her eyes.

It was actually Runcorn who said what she must have been thinking.

“That’ll be why there was no bottle or vial where Lambourn was found,” he said unhappily. “He didn’t drink the opium, it was put into him with one of those needles. And of course whoever killed him took that away with them. He wouldn’t want anyone to know of it. There can’t be so many people have them.”

“Still doesn’t change that we have to know who killed Zenia Gadney.” Orme spoke for the first time. “I’ve been back and forward around the Limehouse Pier. No one admits to seeing her there that evening, except with a woman. If she met a man, doctor or not, someone paid by Herne or Bawtry, then it was afterward.” He looked at Runcorn, then at Monk. “I suppose you’ve thought that it could be that Dinah Lambourn did kill them both, nothing to do with jealousy or rage, but because someone paid her to, because of the opium?”

No one answered. The thought was impossible to rule out, but neither did anyone want to accept it.

It was Runcorn who broke the silence in the end.

“I’ve talked to everyone in the Lambourn house,” he said. “I’ve got a fairly good list of where Dr. Lambourn went in his last week, but it’s only what we already expected.” He pulled two sheets of paper out of his pocket and laid them down in the middle of the table.

Monk glanced at them, but he could see in Runcorn’s face that there was more.

“I tried to piece together his last day,” Runcorn went on. “Whoever killed him planned it very carefully, very believably.”

One by one around the table they nodded agreement. No one mentioned Dinah, but the very absence of her name hung between them.

“Who did he see that day?” Monk asked. He knew before Runcorn spoke that the answer would not be so easy. It was written in the confusion in Runcorn’s eyes.

“Dr. Winfarthing,” Runcorn replied, “in the morning. Just tradesmen in Deptford in the afternoon. He came home for an early dinner, then worked in his study before going for a short walk with Mrs. Lambourn in the evening. They both went to bed at about ten. No one saw him alive again. He was found the next morning by the man walking his dog up on One Tree Hill.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Hester said unhappily. “There’s nothing in a day like that to make him kill himself that night. It wasn’t even the day he heard about the report being rejected, was it?” She looked from Monk to Runcorn, and then back again.

“No,” Runcorn replied. “They told him three days earlier. The idea was that it took him that long to steel himself to do it. Or perhaps he thought they would change their minds, or he’d find some other facts. Winfarthing said he was still determined to fight when he saw him that morning.”

“We’re back to Dinah Lambourn,” Orme pointed out.

“No one contacted him?” Monk asked Runcorn. “No one called, left a message, a letter? Could there have been something in the post?”

“I asked the butler that,” Runcorn replied. “He said Dr. Lambourn looked at the post when he came home at about five o’clock. There was nothing but the ordinary tradesmen’s bills. No personal letters.”

“He went to bed?” Hester asked, puzzled. “Are you sure? Could he
have gone out again when Dinah went upstairs?” Her voice dropped a little.

“The butler said they both went up. He spoke to Lambourn and Lambourn answered him. But he could have read awhile, I suppose, and come down again,” Runcorn replied.

Taylor looked embarrassed. “Unless he really did take his own life?” He bit his lip. “Are we certain she isn’t innocent of killing him, but lying to restore some dignity to his name? Nobody wants to admit, even to themselves, that somebody they love did that. She’d want her daughters to think it was murder, wouldn’t she? Women’ll do most things to protect their children.”

Hester looked at Taylor, then at Monk. Monk could see in her face that she believed it possible.

Runcorn was stubborn. “Either someone came to see him, or he went out to see someone,” he said flatly.

“On One Tree Hill?” Monk asked. “It’s close to a mile from Lower Park Street, and uphill. Who would he meet in the middle of the night?”

“Someone he trusted,” Runcorn replied. “Someone he didn’t want to be seen with, or who didn’t want to be seen with him.”

“And he didn’t expect to go far,” Hester added. “You said he didn’t take a jacket, and it was October.”

“Someone he trusted,” Monk said gently. “Perhaps someone who could get close enough to him to put a needle in his vein and do whatever you have to do to get the opium in.”

“That’s like poor Mrs. Gadney,” Orme said. “She was killed by someone she trusted, or she wouldn’t have been standing out on the pier with them, alone in the dark.”

“Certainly not a prospective client,” Monk said with conviction. “Not out in the open like that.”

“No,” Orme cut in. “I asked more carefully this time. No one ever actually saw her with a man apart from Lambourn at any time. They assumed. The newspapers said she turned to prostitution, but there’s no proof.” He leaned forward across the table, his voice assured. “What if she was there with someone she knew, someone she didn’t fear at all—just like Lambourn?”

“The same person?” Monk said what he knew they were all thinking. “Who would Zenia know that Lambourn also knew?”

“Someone respectable,” Runcorn said slowly. “Someone Lambourn trusted, and someone she would never suspect of hurting her. Maybe …” He thought for a moment. “Maybe someone who said they were Lambourn’s solicitor, or a friend.”