by Anne Perry
It was still light out when she finally arrived at the Portpool Lane clinic, though she was far later than she had wished.
She went straight to Squeaky’s office where she knew he would be, whether he was actually working on anything or not. It was his domain, his kingdom.
He looked up at her with indignation the moment she was in the room and had closed the door.
“What do you mean by sending me that dreadful little urchin?” he demanded, his eyes flashing. “What in hell’s name am I supposed to do with him? Are we an orphanage now, as well as a refuge for every tart in London who has a disease?”
“Are you referring to Worm?” Hester said innocently.
He collapsed melodramatically into his seat—slightly crookedly, having misjudged the distance. “God in heaven! Is there more than one?”
She was too tired to laugh at him, although she wanted to. “Not so far as I know. Why? Do you want two? I’m sure I could find …”
He raised his eyebrows and glared at her. “No I do not!” he snarled.
“Good. I think one is better.” She sat down opposite him.
“Better than what? None is better. What on earth am I supposed to do with him?” He hitched himself upright again. “Tell me that, then?”
“Use him, of course,” she said reasonably. “He’s an obliging child. He can clear up, run errands, and do whatever you want. All that matters is that you give him breakfast and supper, and a place to sleep. A blanket on the kitchen floor, if all the beds are full.”
“If all the beds are full?” he said incredulously. “What’s the matter with you? Is one urchin child not enough for you?”
“Yes. That’s precisely why I brought him here. I dare say Claudine can find a job for him, if you can’t.”
“I can!” he said instantly, still glaring at her. “You—you can leave him with me. If you’ve got the wits you were born with, you won’t give him to that woman. She’ll—she’ll spoil him till he’s no use to man or beast.”
“That’s what I thought,” Hester said complacently, looking at his outrage with a smile. “Now I need your help getting some documents for Crow to be temporarily employed as a prison doctor. I’ve taken the liberty of telling certain people that he is properly qualified, but unfortunately I cannot provide any documentary support for that.”
“You what?” he squawked. “Not that prison isn’t where he probably belongs,” he added smugly.
“If you can’t do it, just say so.” She gave a shrug. “Don’t make a song and dance out of it.”
“ ’Course I can do it! Give it here.” He reached over and snatched the piece of paper she was holding in her hand. “Do you want to wait here for it, or you got something useful to do while I work, eh?”
She rose to her feet. “I’ll go and see Claudine. Thank you, Squeaky. I appreciate your discretion.” She did not mention that she also wanted to make sure that Worm was all right, and had had breakfast that morning.
Squeaky grunted his assent.
She need not have worried. Worm was well fed and occupied sufficiently to justify lunch and even dinner as well. He gave her an enormous grin, and then ran off to his duties, full of importance.
HESTER ARRIVED HOME IN Paradise Place after ten o’clock that night. She found Monk sitting in the parlor with a cup of tea, but looking tired and extremely uncomfortable. Scuff, sitting opposite him and watching anxiously, shot to his feet the moment he heard Hester’s footsteps.
He took a look at her face and must have seen the exhaustion in the droop of her shoulders, but relief at seeing her at all overwhelmed everything else.
“You all right? I’ll get yer a cup o’ tea. Can I …” He gulped at his own temerity. “Can I get yer something to eat? There’s still pie an’ …” He could not think what else.
She sat down, leaning back into the chair, ease washing through her. “Yes, please, that would be very good. Pie and a cup of tea would be perfect.”
Scuff glanced at Monk. “ ’E’s all right … I think,” he assured her.
“Thank you,” she nodded. She waited for him to go so she could look more closely at Monk, and see whether he was feverish or just sore and frustrated with being a prisoner of his own debility.
Scuff disappeared and Monk stared at her, speaking in a low, urgent voice. “I need to get back into the case.” He leaned forward a little and winced. “The more I think about it, the more certain I am that that boat rammed us on purpose. Ferries go across at that point all the time. Anyone on the river would know that and keep a watch. He wasn’t even in the usual lane for the tide. It was only dusk, and we had riding lights. I’m close to something.”
“We’ll see how you are tomorrow—” she began.
“You don’t understand!” he cut across her. “I must have—”
“Yes, I do,” she assured him with as much calm as she could, but she heard the fear in her own voice. “Someone rammed you on purpose, which means they want you out of the way. Maybe they even think you’re stupid enough to come after them when you’re wounded and at less than half your usual strength. Fortunately they’re wrong. You aren’t.”
Giving her a twisted smile, he moved slightly, winced, and decided it was a bad idea. “Hester, it won’t work! Where have you been all day, anyway?”
“Getting Crow into the prison to see Beshara,” she replied.
He stiffened. “What? You went to the prison? Hester, I told you …” He stopped, crippled by his own helplessness.
She saw the pain, the emotional momentarily deeper than the physical, in his face.
“No, I didn’t,” she said levelly. “Just sit back and let me look at how that wound is coming on.”
“It hurts. It’ll get better,” he retorted. “Did you tell Scuff where you were going?”
“No, I didn’t. If I’d told anyone, it would have been you. Now sit still!”
“Do you realize what could have happened to you?” he demanded.
“Of course,” she assured him with a touch of sarcasm. “I could have been rammed in a ferry, and nearly drowned. But fortunately I wasn’t. Now will you please sit still?” That last came out sounding like an order.
“Hester—”
“And be quiet! I need to concentrate on binding your ribs again. And I want to be finished by the time Scuff gets back with my tea.”
He started to speak again, but he was too tired and too sore to argue.
She smiled at him gently, hiding her own anxiety. “It’ll get better,” she promised.
His eyes searched hers for a long moment, and then he relaxed and smiled back.
TWO DAYS LATER SHE received a letter from Crow, asking her to meet him at his new surgery the following morning.
Monk was considerably better by then, although still in some pain. He was expecting Orme to come to see him, as he had the day before. Hester made sure she told him her own plans while he was busy deliberating what he would ask the men at Wapping to do in furtherance of the case.
It was another hot, still morning and the river was full of traffic. It took her longer than she expected to reach the surgery off Wharf Road, and Crow was waiting for her impatiently. He looked eager, his face alive with anticipation of her reaction, and his own increasing interest in the case. He did not even offer her tea but plunged straight into his report.
“Poor devil is genuinely ill,” he said, sitting opposite her in his private room, leaning forward in his chair. “It’s what’s called myasthenia gravis. Gets the muscles all through the body. Comes and goes. One day he’ll be pretty good, the next thoroughly weak and ill and looks like hell. That’s why they think he’s putting it on half the time.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Hester replied. “Not often. How far on is he?”
“Long way, I’d judge. But he’s good for a few years yet, if no one kills him,” he said wryly. “And that’s not something I’d bet on.”
“Did you get a chance to speak to him?”
�
��Briefly. Surly bastard. But I think he’s scared. Knows he’s not likely to get out, and even if he does, he’ll be lucky to last long. Someone’s out to get him.”
“Does he know who?”
“I think he does, but he certainly isn’t saying so. They’ve got him sorted, as far as telling anyone is concerned.”
“Is anybody else trying to find out who attacked him?”
“That’s the funny thing; it doesn’t seem as if anyone is.” He screwed up his face. “The governor doesn’t seem to care. In fact I’d say he would definitely prefer not to know. Which makes me wonder if actually he does, and values his ignorance all the more for that reason. Sometimes it isn’t what you know that matters so much as what other people think you know. Keeps his nose down, does Mr. Fortridge-Smith, and his eyes closed.”
“Cowardice?” she asked grimly. “Or well-rewarded self-interest?”
“From the little I saw of him, I’d guess both,” Crow said with disgust. “But Beshara’s scared for his life, that’s pretty clear. You know he wasn’t the main person who sunk the Princess Mary, but I’ll bet he knows who was. And they know he knows … which is a death sentence a damn sight more certain than the official hangman’s noose. Poor sod just doesn’t know when, or by whom.”
“There’s no pity in your voice,” she observed.
“There wouldn’t be much in yours either, if you’d met him,” Crow said with a grimace. “He may not have been the one who put the dynamite in the Princess Mary, or lit the fuse, but he knew what was going to happen, and he chose to let it. If he’s scared to hell of someone silencing him on the chance he might testify to it, I, for one, have little grief for him.”
“Is it someone in the prison already, there with him?” It was a question to which he might have no answer, but she had to ask.
“I think so, although they may be getting their orders from outside.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because he’s locked away in the infirmary, but he’s still scared.”
“Was he frightened of you?”
He thought for a moment. “No,” he said with slight surprise.
“Then he knows who it is,” she deduced. “Or at least he knows something about them. How interesting.” She smiled. “Thank you very much.”
IT WAS ONLY FOUR days since the ramming of the ferry, but Monk was increasingly restless. His ribs still ached, but the wounds on his arms were practically healed. As long as he moved carefully, the pain was far more bearable than even the day before. It was time he went back to Wapping and started doing more himself than listening to reports from Orme and Hooper, and giving directions. They were closing in, but it seemed desperately slow.
He received Hester’s news from Crow with considerable interest. He drew in breath to tell her never to dare take such a risk again, but saw the foreboding in her eyes, and realized it would hurt her, without making any difference to what she would do. It would drive a wedge of distrust between them, not of lies but of lack of confidence. That was too high a price.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “It all points the way to the same answer. Beshara was not guilty, but he knows who was, or has a pretty good idea. And whoever it is will quite willingly kill him to keep his silence.”
“And ramming the ferry?” she pressed. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“No …”
“Be careful …” Her voice was hoarse, the words forced between her lips. This was real fear now, not for her own safety, but for the loss that she could not bear.
He stood up awkwardly, and, ignoring the stab of pain in his chest, took her in his arms. Neither of them noticed Scuff come into the room with the tea, then turn around and go out again, to wait for a better moment.
CHAPTER
13
FOUR DAYS LATER, ACHING and still wearing the strapping around his ribs that Hester had put on for him, Monk returned to work. After checking in at the Wapping station and speaking with Orme, and then with Hooper, to assess the latest information and relate it to all that they had so far gathered, he went to see Rogers, the ferryman who had so nearly been drowned. He felt guilty because he was now convinced the sinking of the ferry had been deliberate, and the poor man had suffered only because Monk had been his passenger.
Hooper had found the man’s address and visited him a couple of times, at Monk’s request, largely to see if he was safe, and recovering. His house was easy to find and, as Monk walked along the narrow road fronting on the water, he saw Rogers sitting in the tiny garden, his eyes closed in the sun. As Monk drew closer, he noticed the broken arm bound up in a splint and the dark bruises on the cheek and jaw of his pale face. It was apparently still too tender for him to shave and dark stubble dotted his chin.
The ferryman opened his eyes as he heard Monk’s footsteps crunching on the gravel.
“Good morning, Mr. Rogers,” Monk said, stopping in front of him. “How’s the arm?”
“Hurts like hell,” Rogers replied, looking up at him with a bleak smile. “But it’ll mend. Not the first bone I broke. Thing is, I feel so damn useless! Wife has to cut up my food for me, like a baby.”
“I’m sorry.” Monk sat on the bench opposite him.
“Not your fault,” Rogers said, shaking his head very slightly. Clearly the movement still caused him pain. He regarded Monk’s girth, increased by the strapping. “Not much better off, eh?”
“Some,” Monk agreed ruefully. “Got both my arms, with difficulty. And I don’t need to row, although I’d like to. I’m in command of the River Police at Wapping …”
Rogers nodded. “I know. Think I been on the river and didn’t know that?”
“Probably not. The point is I think that we were rammed on purpose, to get me.” He watched Rogers’s face and saw no surprise in it at all. “You knew …” he said quietly.
Rogers pursed his lips. “Pretty sure. I seen nobody on the river that damn clumsy before. Get new people who are awkward sometimes, ain’t used to shiftin’ weight an’ ’ow the boat rocks. But them lot was pretty good at ’andling ’er. Turned fast once they’d rammed us.”
“You saw that?” Monk said curiously.
“Yeah. I remember, ’cos I ain’t never seen that boat before, as I can recall. Saw the stern of ’er. And a picture on it that I’d ’ave known if it were reg’lar.”
Something stirred faintly in Monk’s mind: a recollection of the stern of a boat with something unique painted on it. The whole image was blurry, streaked with the red light of flames in the air. It was the boat he had seen moving away just after the explosion on the Princess Mary, in the four minutes between the eruption of the fire and her final plunge beneath the water.
“What was it like—the picture on the boat?” he asked, his voice cracking as he stared at the ferryman’s eyes. “Describe it!”
Rogers sat motionless. Not even his fingers moved in his lap. “You seen it before?” he said huskily.
“Maybe. What was it like? Describe it as much as you can.”
Rogers concentrated.
“Like an ’orse’s ’ead, with bumps on it, not real. And its body weren’t really there, just neck going inter a sort o’ lump, with a long tail curled in a circle. Something were written inside the circle, numbers I think. Not sure about that. Just saw it for a moment, like.”
“What color was this horse without a body?”
“Pale. Maybe white. An’ … an’ there was something else … can’t bring back what it was …”
There had been a rope around the animal depicted on the side of the boat Monk had seen the night of the explosion, but he kept silent. He didn’t want to prompt Rogers into remembering it …
“It was a rope, I think!” Rogers said suddenly. “Yeah, there was a rope around it! You seen it?”
“Yes! I saw it the night of the sinking, just for a moment in the glare, between the time it exploded and the time she went down. In those minutes the boat was picking up survivors.”
Rogers’s eyes narrowed. “That were quick! Are you sure?”
They sat a couple of feet apart in the summer sun, two men who knew the river. Monk: its crime, its darkness, still learning; Rogers, all his life: its ways, its moods, its people.
There was silence between them. The distant sounds of the river, the shouts, the slurp of water only forty feet away. The crack and clang of machinery could have been in another world.
“That were them, weren’t it?” Rogers said at last. “That boat with the ’orse on it. They picked somebody up out o’ the river before the explosion, didn’t they? An’ then they tried ter kill you—an’ me—’cos you knew summink about them.”
There was no point insulting Rogers by pretending he was wrong. “Yes,” Monk agreed. “I think so. If I draw a rough picture of what I remember, will you tell me if it looks like what you saw?”
Rogers smiled. “Yer’d better. I can’t draw nothin’, one arm’s busted.”
“Your left arm,” Monk observed.
“Yeah. I’m left-’anded.”
Monk took out his notebook and pencil and made a pretty good sketch of the image he had seen for those few moments after the explosion. He turned it round for Rogers to look at.
Rogers’s face paled. “Yeah, that’s it, pretty exact. You get yer men ter find that boat, yer got ’oo sank the Princess Mary—an’ all them poor souls on board.”
WHEN HE RETURNED TO Wapping Monk told Orme and Hooper about his visit to Rogers, and showed them the sketch he had made. It was Hooper who identified it.
“It’s a seahorse,” he said with interest. “It’s real. Have ’em in the waters of the Caribbean.”
“You been there?” Orme asked skeptically. He liked Hooper, even respected him, but he did not pretend to understand his nature. He distrusted men who told tall stories about faraway places and seemed to have no family or roots that they spoke of. Never mind Hooper’s odd sense of humor.
