by Anne Perry
“There are three possibilities,” he said in a hard, level voice.
“Obviously,” Monk snapped back, “she might have taken an overdose herself, by accident….”
“No she didn’t.” Rathbone contradicted him with satisfaction. “She did not take it herself at all. The only accident could be if someone else filled the vial wrongly before it left the Farraline house in Edinburgh. If she took anything herself then it was deliberate, and must have been suicide, which is physically the second possibility, but from the circumstances, and her personality as Hester described her, quite out of the question.”
“And the third is murder,” Monk finished. “By someone other than Hester. Presumably someone in Edinburgh who filled the medicine vial with a lethal dose and left Hester to administer it.”
“Precisely.”
“Accident or murder. Who prepared the dose? The doctor? An apothecary?” Monk asked.
“I don’t know. That is one of a number of questions to be answered.”
“What about the daughter, Griselda Murdoch?” Monk moved impatiently about the office as if he could not bear to remain still. “What do you know of her?”
“Only that she is recently married and is expecting her first child, and is apparently anxious about her health. Mrs. Farraline was coming south to reassure her.”
“Reassure her? What do you mean? How could she reassure her? What could she know that Mrs. Murdoch didn’t know herself?” Monk looked irritated, as if the nonsense of the answer were stupidity on Rathbone’s part.
“For heaven’s sake, man, I’m not a midwife. I don’t know,” Rathbone said waspishly, sitting down in his chair again. “Perhaps it was some childhood complaint she was worried about.”
Monk ignored his reply. “I assume there is money in the family?” he said, turning back to face Rathbone.
“It appears so, but they may be mortgaged to the hilt, for all I know. It is one of the many things to find out.”
“Well, what are you doing about it? Aren’t there lawyers in Scotland? There must be a man of affairs. A will?”
“I shall attend to it,” Rathbone said between his teeth. “But it takes time. And whatever the answer, it will not tell us what happened in the railway carriage, nor who tampered with the medicine cabinet before they even boarded the train. The best we can hope for is some light on family affairs and the motives of the Farraline household. It may be money, but we cannot sit here waiting with our arms folded in the hope that it will be.”
Monk’s eyebrows shot up, and he regarded Rathbone’s elegant figure, seated with his legs crossed, with intense dislike.
Curiously, Rathbone found it did not anger him. Complacency would have. Any kind of calm would have incensed him, because it would have meant Monk was not afraid, that it did not matter to him enough to reach his emotions and cut them raw. Lack of fear in Monk would not have comforted him. The danger was real; only a fool would not see it
“I want you to go to Edinburgh,” Rathbone said with a tiny smile. “I shall provide funds, of course. You are to learn everything you can about the Farraline family, all of them.”
“And what are you going to do?” Monk demanded again, standing in front of the desk, feet slightly apart, hands clenched at his sides.
Rathbone looked at him icily, in part because there was so very little that was of use yet. His real skill was in the courtroom, faced with witnesses and a jury. He knew how to smell a lie, how to twist and turn words until they trapped the liar, how to uncover truth beneath the layers of deceit, the fog of ignorance and forgetfulness, how to probe like a surgeon until he extracted the damning fact. But he had no witnesses yet, except Hester herself, and she knew so desperately little.
“I am going to learn more of the medical facts,” he replied. “And the legal ones you pointed out earlier. And I shall prepare for trial.”
The word trial seemed to sober Monk out of his anger as sharply as a dash of cold water in the face. He stood still, staring at Rathbone. He made as if to say something, then changed his mind. Perhaps there was nothing that was not already known.
“I’ll go and see Hester first,” he said quietly. “Arrange it.” His face tightened. “I have to know all she can tell me about them. We need everything we can find, even impressions, things half heard, thoughts, memories … anything at all. God knows how I am going to get them to admit me, let alone speak to me.”
“Lie to them,” Rathbone said with a twisted smile. “Don’t tell me that offends you!”
Monk gave him a filthy look, but did not answer. He stood stiffly for a moment, then turned on his heel and went to the door.
“You said something about funds,” he said with acute dislike. It occurred to Rathbone with a sudden flash of insight that Monk loathed having to ask. He would like to have done it without assistance, for Hester’s sake.
Monk saw the understanding in Rathbone’s eyes, and it infuriated him, both to be read so easily and that Rathbone should know his financial state, and perhaps even more, his care for Hester. He had not wished to know that himself. The color burned up his cheeks and his mouth tightened.
“Clements has it ready for you,” Rathbone answered. “And a ticket for tonight’s train to Edinburgh. It leaves at quarter past nine.” He glanced at the gold watch at his waistcoat, a beautiful piece with an engraved case. “Go to your lodgings and pack whatever you will need, and I will make arrangements for you to visit the prison. Write from Edinburgh with whatever progress you make.”
“Of course,” Monk agreed. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the door and went out.
Monk went back to his lodgings with his mind in a daze. Hester charged with murder. It had the horrible quality of a nightmare; the brain would not accept it, and yet the gut knew it was violently and dreadfully real. It had an air of familiarity, as if he had known it all before.
He packed all the clean linen he would be likely to need, and socks, shaving brush and razor, hairbrush, toiletries, and a spare pair of boots. He could not foresee how long he would be there. So far as he knew he had not been to Edinburgh before. He had no idea how cold it would be. Probably like Northumberland. But then he could remember that only in snatches, and in pictures, not sensation. Still, that hardly mattered now.
He knew why the sinking feeling was familiar, the fear and the mixture of disbelief and complete acceptance. It was like his own experience of being both hunter and the hunted when he had first awakened in the hospital after the accident. He had not even known his own name, discovering himself piece by piece as he pursued Joscelin Grey’s murderer. He still knew far from all of himself nearly two years later, and much of what he had learned, seeing it through the eyes of others, half remembered, half guessed at, was confusing to him, full of qualities he did not like.
But this was no time to think of himself. He must solve this absurd problem of the death of Mrs. Farraline, and Hester’s part in it.
He closed his case and took it with him as he informed his landlady briskly and without further explanation that he was off to Edinburgh on business and did not know when he would be back.
She was used to his manner and disregarded it.
“Oh yes,” she said absently. Then added, with a sharp eye to what was important to her, “And you’ll be sending the rent, no doubt, if you’re gone that long, Mr. Monk?”
“No doubt,” he agreed tersely. “You’ll keep my letters.”
“That I will. Everything will be exactly as it should be. When have you ever found it different, Mr. Monk?”
“Never,” he said grudgingly. “Good day to you.”
“Good day, sir.”
By the time he reached the prison where Hester was being held Rathbone had been as good as his word, and arrangements had been made for Monk to gain admittance, as Rathbone’s assistant, and therefore, in a sense, a legal adviser to Hester.
The wardress who took him along the gray, stone-floored passageway towards the cell was broad-backed,
heavily muscled and had an expression of intense dislike in her powerful face. It chilled Monk to see it and filled him with something as close to panic as he could remember in a long time. He knew why it was there. The woman knew the charge against Hester—that of having murdered an old lady who was her patient and who trusted her implicitly, for the chance to steal a piece of jewelry worth perhaps a few hundred pounds. That was enough to keep her in luxury for a year—but at the cost of a human life. She would have seen all sorts of tragedy, sin and despair pass through her cells, brutalized women who had murdered violent husbands, pimps or lovers; inadequate despairing women who had murdered their children; hungry and greedy women who had stolen; cunning women, crude or brazen women, ignorant, vicious, frightened, stupid—all manner of folly and vice. But there was little as despicable in her mind as an educated woman of good family who stooped to poison an old lady who was in her specific charge, and for gain of something she did not need.
There would be no forgiveness in her, not even the usual casual pity she showed for the thief and the prostitute caught in a sudden act of violence against a violent world. With the envy and frustration of the ignorant and oppressed, she would hate Hester for being a lady. And at the same time she would hate her also for not having lived up to the privilege with which she was born. To have been given it was bad enough, to have betrayed it was beyond excusing. Monk’s fear for Hester condensed into a cold, hard sickness inside him.
The wardress kept her back to him all the way along the corridor until she came to the cell door, where she inserted the heavy key into the lock and turned it. Even now she did not look at Monk. It was a mark of her utter contempt that it extended to him. Even curiosity did not alleviate it.
Inside the cell Hester was standing. She turned slowly as she heard the bolt draw back, a look of hope lighting her face. Then she saw Monk. The hope died, and was replaced by pain, wariness and a curious flicker between expectancy and distress.
For a moment Monk was torn with emotion, familiarity, a desire to protect her, and anger with events, with Rathbone, most of all with himself.
He turned to the wardress.
“I’ll call when I want you,” he said coldly.
She hesitated, for the first time her curiosity caught. She saw something in Monk’s face which disturbed her, an instinctive knowledge that he would fight with weapons she could not match, that he would never be afraid for his own safety.
“Yes sir,” the wardress said grimly, and slammed the door closed unnecessarily hard.
Monk looked at Hester slowly and with great care. She had nothing to do here from morning till night, and yet she looked tired. There were shadows around her eyes and no color at all in her skin. Her hair was straight and she had obviously made no effort to dress it flatteringly. Her clothes were plain. She looked as if she had given up already. She must have had her own clothes sent to her lodgings, by Callandra, probably. Why had she not chosen something less drab, more defiant? Then memory flooded back of his own despair during the Grey case, when worse horror had stared him in the face, the thought not only of prison, and hanging, but the nightmare of guilt itself. It was Hester’s courage and her stinging anger which had saved him then.
How dare she give up for herself.
“You look awful,” he said icily. “What in God’s name is that you’re wearing? You look as if you’re waiting to be hanged. They haven’t even tried you yet!”
Her expression darkened slowly from puzzlement to anger, but it was a quiet, cold emotion, no heat in it at all.
“It is a dress I used nursing,” she said calmly. “It is warm and serviceable. I don’t know why you bother to mention it. What on earth does it matter?”
He changed the subject abruptly. “I am going to Edinburgh on the train tonight Rathbone wants me to find out all I can about the Farralines. One assumes it was one of them who murdered her….”
“It is all I can think of,” she said quietly, but without conviction in her voice. “But before you ask me, I don’t know who or why. I can’t think of any reason, and I have had nothing to do here but try to think of it.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No.” There was no anger in her, only quiet, black resignation.
It infuriated him. He wanted to take her physically and shake her until she was as angry as he was, until she was enraged enough to fight and go on fighting until they knew the truth, and then force everyone else to look at it, acknowledge it and admit they had been wrong. He hated the change in her; the quietness was uncharacteristic. Not that he was so fond of the way she had been. She talked far too much, and with much too much opinion, whether she was informed or not. She was quite unlike the sort of woman that appealed to him; she had not the gentleness, the feminine warmth or the grace he admired and which quickened his pulses and awoke his desire. But still, to see her like this disturbed him profoundly.
“Then someone else did,” he said. “Unless you are telling me she committed suicide?”
“No of course she didn’t!” Now at last she was angry too. There was a faint touch of pink in her cheeks. “If you’d known her you would not even entertain such an idea.”
“Perhaps she was senile and incompetent?” he suggested. “And she killed herself by accident?”
“That’s ridiculous.” Her voice rose sharply. “She was no more senile than you are. If that is the best you can do, you are wasting my time! And Oliver’s, if he is employing you!”
He was delighted to see her spirit returning, even if it was only in the defense of Mary Farraline; and he was thoroughly piqued by the suggestion that he was here solely at Rathbone’s request, and because he was paid. He did not know why it stung so sharply, but it was a painful thought, and he reacted instantly.
“Don’t be childish, Hester. There isn’t time, and it’s most unbecoming in a woman of your age.”
Now she was really angry. He knew it was the reference to her age, which was idiotic, but then at times she was idiotic. Most women were.
Hester looked at him with intense dislike.
“If you are going to Edinburgh to see the Farralines, they are hardly likely to tell you anything other than that they employed me to accompany Mrs. Farraline to London, to give her her medicine night and morning, and see that she was comfortable. And I failed them most dismally. I don’t know what else you would expect them to say?”
“Self-pity doesn’t become you any better than it does most people,” he said sharply. “And we haven’t time.”
She glared at him with loathing.
He smiled back, a twisting of the lips, but still relieved that she was angry enough to fight—not that he wished her to perceive that. “Of course they will say that,” he agreed. “I will ask them a great many questions.” He was formulating his plan as he spoke. “Because I shall tell them that I have come on behalf of the prosecution and wish to make sure of everything in order to have an unanswerable case. I shall pursue every detail of your stay there.”
“I was only there a day,” she said.
He ignored her. “Then in the course of so doing, I shall learn everything else I can about them. One of them murdered her. In some way, however slight, they will betray themselves.” He said it with more certainty than he felt, but he must not allow her to know that. The least he could do was protect her from the bitterest of the truth, the odds against success. He wished desperately he could do more. It was appalling to be helpless when it mattered so intensely.
The anger drained out of her as suddenly as if someone had turned out a light. Fear overtook everything else.
“Will you?” Her voice shook.
Without thinking he reached forward and took her hand, holding it tightly.
“Yes I will. I doubt it will be easy, or quick, but I will do it.” He stopped. They knew each other too well. He saw in her eyes what she was thinking, remembering—that other case they had solved together, finding the truth at last, too late—when the wrong man had been tri
ed and hanged. “I will, Hester,” he said with passion. “I’ll find the truth, whatever it costs, and whoever I have to break to get it.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away suddenly. For a moment she was so frightened she could hardly control herself.
He gritted his teeth.
Why was she so stupidly independent? Why could she not weep like other women? Then he could have held her, offered some kind of comfort—which would have been meaningless. And he would have hated it. He could not bear the way she was, and yet for her to change would have been even worse.
And he hated the fact that he could not dismiss it and walk away. It was not simply another case. It was Hester—and the thought of failure was unendurable.
“Tell me about them,” he commanded gruffly. “Who are the Farralines? What did you think of them? What were your impressions?”
She turned and looked at him with surprise. Then slowly she mastered her emotions and replied.
“The eldest son is Alastair. He is the Procurator Fiscal—”
He cut across her. “I don’t want facts. I can find them for myself, woman. I want your feelings about the man. Was he happy or miserable? Was he worried? Did he love his mother or hate her? Was he afraid of her? Was she a possessive woman, overprotective, critical, domineering? Tell me something!”
She smiled wanly.
“She seemed generous and very normal to me….”
“She’s been murdered, Hester. People don’t commit murder without a reason even if it is a bad one. Somebody either hated her or was afraid of her. Why? Tell me more about her. And don’t tell me what a charming person she was. People sometimes murder young women because they are too charming, but not old ones.”
Hester’s smile grew a little wider.
“Don’t you think I’ve lain here trying to think why anyone would kill her? Alastair did seem a little anxious, but that could have been over anything. As I said, he is the Procurator Fiscal….”
“What is a Procurator Fiscal?” This was not a time to stand on his pride and blunder on in ignorance.
