Execution Dock

by Anne Perry

  Hester began to talk casually, as if merely to take Mina's mind from what she was doing. It was a rule of the clinic never to ask patients for details they were unwilling to give, unless it was necessary for the treatment of whatever was wrong with them. Sometimes the conditions of where they lived mattered very much, especially if it was mainly on the streets with no bed, no shelter, no water, and only such food as they could beg. Then they would keep them in until they were considerably better. One or two had even remained here as permanent help, paid with lodging and food. Often the sudden new and respectable occupation was a benefit beyond price.

  After the usual account of her circumstances, in answer to a question from Hester, Mina went on to describe certain aspects of her daily life, including some dangerous clients past and present.

  “And you really know Jericho Phillips?” Hester said in awe.

  “Yeah, I know ‘im,” Mina replied with a smile. It was oddly attractive, in spite of a chipped front tooth, no doubt also sustained in a fight. “‘E weren't that bad, at least for business.”

  “Your business, or his?” Hester asked with a smile.

  “Mine!” Mina said indignantly. “I in't got nothin’ ter do wif ‘is.”

  Hester refused to allow her imagination to picture it. She concentrated on examining the wound. Most of the bleeding had stopped; it only seeped through the stitches, but it looked raw and painful. She kept talking, both to probe for information, and to keep Mina's mind off the pain as she cleaned away the dried blood and closed the edges of the flesh a little more, cutting away bloodied gauze. “I suppose you've seen a side of him nobody else has,” she remarked.

  “Oh, I in't the only one.” Mina found that amusing. “I just mebbe know'd ‘im longer. But I got more sense'n ter say so. Don't like bein’ reminded o’ the past, ‘e don't. Rotten poor, ‘e were. Always cold an ‘ungry, an’ knocked about summink wicked. ‘Is ma were a bad one. Temper like one o’ them rats wot comes out o’ the sewers sometimes. Fight anyone.”

  “What about his father?” Hester asked.

  Mina laughed. “Came off some ship, an’ then got right back on it,” she answered drily, keeping her eyes tightly closed in case she accidentally caught sight of the wound. “Lived down by the river, almost in the water, ‘e did. Always cold, poor little sod. Now ‘e goes barmy if ‘e ‘ears anythin’ drippin’.”

  “But he lives in a boat!” Hester protested.

  “Yeah. Daft, in't it?” Mina agreed. “I knew a feller once ‘oo were scared stiff o’ rats. Dreamed about ‘em, ‘e did. Woke up sweatin’ like a pig. ‘Ear ‘im screamin’ sometimes. Send yer blood cold, it would. Made ‘isself keep a rat in a cage, right there in ‘is room. Could ‘ear the bleedin’ thing scrapin’ its silly little feet an’ squeakin’.” She shivered convulsively without realizing it, moving her arm so that Hester momentarily held the scissors away.

  “Do you think that's what Jericho Phillips does, with the water?” she asked curiously. She imagined a man forcing himself to live with his haunting fears until he had inured himself to them and no longer panicked. It was the ultimate control. In some ways that might be the most frightening thing about him.

  She started to rebandage the wound as gently as she could, while thinking of the bullied child, afraid of the cold, afraid of dripping water, who had grown into a cruel man steeled against every weakness, above all his own. She was not sure if she could pity him or not.

  “Are you frightened of him?” she asked Mina when she was nearly finished.

  Mina kept her eyes closed. “Nah! Keep me mouf shut, do wot ‘e wants, an’ ‘e pays good. In't me ‘e ‘ates.”

  Hester put a few stitches in to keep the bandage from unraveling. “Who does he hate?” she asked.

  “Durban,” Mina replied.

  “He was only doing his job, like all the River Police,” Hester pointed out. “You can open your eyes now. I've finished.”

  Mina looked at it with admiration. “Yer make shirts an’ all?” she asked.

  “No. I only stitch skin, and bandages. I'm not very good at anything more than mending.”

  “Yer talk like yer ‘ad servants ter do it for yer,” Mina remarked.

  “I used to.”

  “On ‘ard times, are yer?” There was sympathy in Mina's voice. “Yer want money fer that?” She indicated her arm. “I in't got none. But I'll pay yer when I ‘ave.”

  “No, I don't want money, thank you. You're welcome to a little help,” Hester replied. “Did Phillips hate Durban in particular? I think Durban hunted him pretty hard.”

  “‘Course ‘e did,” Mina agreed. “‘Ated each other, dint they?”

  Hester felt the chill back inside her.

  “Why?”

  “Natural, I s'pose.” Mina gave a slight shrug on her uninjured side. “Grew up together, dint they? Durban done good, an’ Phillips done bad. Gotter ‘ate each other, don't they?”

  Hester said nothing. Her mind was whirling, crowded with lies and truths, dishonor and light, fear, and gaping, unanswered questions.

  Gently she finished the rebandaging, putting the old gauze and linen aside to be washed.

  SEVEN

  onk sat quietly in the parlor and went through all Durban's notes yet again, and found nothing in them that he had not seen before. So many pages held just a word or two, reminders in a train of thought that was gone forever now The only man who might be able to make sense of it was Orme, and so far his loyalty had kept him silent about all except the most obvious.

  Hesitantly and with deep unhappiness, Hester had told Monk what the prostitute, Mina, had said about Jericho Phillips, and finally, white-faced, she had added that Durban had grown up in the same area. The whole story of the schoolmaster and the happy family living in a village on the Estuary was a dream, something he created out of his own hungers for things he had never known. Hester had knotted her hands and blinked back sudden tears as she had told him.

  Monk had wanted to disbelieve it. What was a blank school registry, a parish record, the word of an injured prostitute, compared with his own knowledge of a man like Durban, who had served the River Police for a quarter of a century? He had earned the love and loyalty of his men, the respect of his superiors, and the healthy fear of criminals great and small the length of the river.

  And yet Monk did believe it. He felt guilty, as if it were a kind of betrayal. He was turning his back on a friend when there was no one else to defend him. What did that say of Monk? That he was weak in faith and loyalty, placing himself first? Or a realist who knew that even the best of men have their flaws, their times of temptation and vulnerability?

  He could argue with himself forever and resolve nothing. It was time to look harder for the truth, to stop using loyalty to justify evading it. He put the papers away and found Orme.

  But it was late in the morning before they were alone where there would be no interruption. They had very satisfactorily solved a warehouse robbery and the thieves had been arrested. Orme stood on the dock near the King Edward Stairs as Monk finished congratulating him on the arrest.

  “Thank you, sir,” Orme acknowledged. “The men did a good job.”

  “Your men,” Monk pointed out.

  Orme stood a trifle straighter. “Our men, sir.”

  Monk smiled, feeling worse about what he had to do. There was no time to delay it. He liked Orme and he needed his loyalty. More than that, he admitted, he wanted his respect, but leadership was not about what you wanted. There would not be a better time to ask; maybe not another time at all today.

  “How well did Durban know Phillips, Mr. Orme?”

  Orme drew in his breath, then studied Monk's face, and hesitated.

  “I have a good idea already,” Monk told him. “I want your view of it. Was Fig's death the beginning?”

  “No, sir.” Orme stood more stiffly. The gesture was not one of insolence—there was nothing defiant in his face—just a stiffening against an awaited pain.

  �
��When was the beginning?”

  “I don't know, sir. That's the truth.” Orme's eyes were clear.

  “So far back, then?”

  Orme flushed. He had given himself away without meaning to. It was obvious in his tightened lips and squared shoulders that he also saw that Monk knew, and that evasions were no longer possible. It would have to be the truth, or a deliberate, planned lie. But Orme was not a man who could lie, unless it were to save life, and even then it would not come lightly.

  Monk hated everything that had put him in the position of having to do this. He still did not wish to give away Durban's own lies about his youth. Orme might guess; that was different from knowing.

  “When was the first time you knew it was personal?” Monk asked. He phrased it carefully.

  Orme took a deep breath. The sounds and movement of the river were all around them: the ships, swaying in the fast-running tide; the water lapping on the stones; light in ever-shifting patterns, reflected again and again; birds wheeling and crying overhead; the clank of chains; the grind of winches; men shouting in the distance.

  “About four years ago, sir,” Orme replied. “Or maybe five.”

  “What happened? How was it different from what you'd seen before?”

  Orme shifted his balance. He was very clearly uncomfortable.

  Monk waited him out.

  “One minute it was just Mr. Durban asking questions, the next minute the whole air of it changed an’ they were shouting at each other,” Orme replied. “Then before you could do anything about it, Phillips had a knife out—great long thing it was, with a curved blade. He was swinging it wide …” He gestured with his own arm. “Like he meant to kill Mr. Durban. But Mr. Durban saw it coming an’ moved aside.” He swerved with his body, mimicking the action. There was both strength and grace in it. What he was describing became more real.

  “Go on,” Monk urged.

  Orme was unhappy.

  “Go on!” Monk ordered. “Obviously he didn't kill Durban. What happened? Why did he want to? Was Durban accusing him of something? Another boy killed? Who stopped Phillips? You?”

  “No, sir. Mr. Durban stopped him himself.”

  “Right. How? How did Durban stop a man like Phillips coming at him with a knife? Did he apologize? Back off?”

  “No!” Orme was offended at the thought.

  “Did he fight back?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a knife?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He was carrying a knife, and he was good enough with it to hold off a man like Jericho Phillips?” Monk's surprise showed in his voice. He could not have done that himself At least he thought he could not have. Possibly in the closed-up past, further back than his memory, he had learned such things. “Orme!”

  “Yes, sir! Yes, he was. Phillips was good, but Mr. Durban was better. He fought him right back to the edge of the water, sir, then he drove him into it. Half drowned, Phillips was, and in a rage fit to kill us all, if he could have.”

  Monk remembered what Hester had told him about Phillips and the water, and about being cold. Had Durban known that? Had Orme? He looked across at Orme's face and tried to read it. He was startled to see not only reluctance, but also a certain kind of stubbornness he knew he could not break, and he realized he did not want to. Something innate in the man would be damaged. He also saw a kind of pity, and knew without any doubt that he was not only protecting Durban's memory, he was protecting Monk as well. He knew Monk's vulnerability, his need to believe in Durban. Orme was trying to keep a truth from him because he would be hurt by it.

  They stood facing each other in the sun and the wind, the smell of the tide and the swirl and slap of the water.

  “Why did that make you think they knew each other?” Monk asked. It was only part of the question, allowing Orme to avoid the answer if he wanted to.

  Orme cleared his throat. He relaxed so very slightly it was almost invisible. “What they said, sir. Don't remember the words exactly. Something about what they knew, and remembered, that sort of thing.”

  Monk thought about asking if they had known each other long, since youth, maybe, and then he decided against it. Orme would only say that he did not hear anything like that. Monk understood. The water was the answer, the cold, and Phillips's hatred. Hester's prostitute was not lying.

  “Thank you, Mr. Orme,” he said quietly. “I appreciate your honesty.”

  “Yes, sir.” Orme totally relaxed at last.

  Together they turned and walked back towards Wapping.

  For the next two days Monk called into the station only to keep track of the regular work of the police. Reluctantly he took Scuff with him. Scuff himself was delighted. He was quite aware that some of the earlier errands had been to keep him safe rather than because they needed doing. Monk had imagined himself tactful, and was somewhat taken aback to find that Scuff had read him so easily. He certainly could not apologize, at least not openly, but he would be less clumsy in the future, at least in part because Scuff was so determined to prove his value, and his ability to take care not only of himself but of Monk also.

  Their paths crossed Durban's several times. He had learned the names of almost a dozen boys of various ages who had ended up in Phillips's care. Surely among them there must have been at least two or three willing to testify against him.

  They followed one trail after another, up and down both banks of the river, questioning people, searching for others.

  At one point Monk found himself in a fine old building at the Legal Quay. He stood with Scuff in a wooden-paneled room with polished tables and floorboards worn uneven with the tread of feet over a century and a half. It smelled of tobacco and rum, and he almost felt as if he could hear age-old arguments from the history of the river echoing in the tight, closed air.

  Scuff stared around him, eyes wide. “I in't never been in ‘ere before,” he said softly. “Wot der they do ‘ere, then?”

  “Argue the law,” Monk answered.

  “In ‘ere? I thought they did that in courts.”

  Maritime law, Monk explained. To do with who can ship things, laws of import and export, weights and measures, salvage at sea, that sort of thing. Who unloads, and what duty is owed to the revenue.”

  Scuff pulled a face of disgust, dragging his mouth down at the corners. “Lot o’ thieves,” he replied. “Shouldn't believe a thing they tell yer.”

  “We're looking for a man whose daughter died and whose grandson disappeared. He's a clerk here.”

  They found the clerk, a sad, pinch-faced man in his fifties.

  “How would I know?” he said miserably when Monk began his questions. “Mr. Durban asked me the same things, an’ I gave ‘im the same answers. Moll's ‘usband got killed on the docks when Billy were about two year old. She married again to a great brute wot treated ‘er real ‘ard. Beat Billy till ‘e broke ‘is bones, poor little beggar.” His face was white, and his eyes were wretched at the memory, and his own helplessness to alter it. “Weren't nothin’ I could do. Broke my arm when I tried. Off work for two months, I were. Damn near starved. Billy ran off when ‘e were about five. I ‘eard Phillips took ‘im in an’ fed ‘im reg'lar, kept ‘im warm, gave ‘im a bed, an’ far as I know, ‘e never beat ‘im. I let it be. Like I told Mr. Durban, it were better than ‘e'd ‘ad before. Better than nothin’.”

  “What happened to Moll?” Monk asked, then instantly wished he had not.

  “Took ter the streets, o’ course,” the clerk answered. “Wot else could she do? Kept movin’, so ‘e wouldn't find ‘er. But ‘e did. Killed ‘er wi’ a knife. Mr. Durban got ‘im for that. ‘Anged, ‘e were.” He blinked away tears. “I went an’ watched. Gave the ‘angman sixpence to ‘ave a drink on me. But I never found Billy.”

  Monk did not reply. There hardly seemed anything to say that was not trite, and in the end, meaningless. There must be many boys like Billy, and Phillips used them. But would their lives without him have been any better, or longer?


  Monk and Scuff ate hot meat pies, sitting by the dockside in the noise of unloading, watching the lightermen coming and going across the water. There was a long apprenticeship to the craft of steering them, and Monk watched them with a certain admiration. There was not only skill but also a peculiar grace in the way they balanced, leaned, pushed, realigned their weight, and did it again.

  There was steady noise around them as they ate their pies and drank from tin mugs of tea. Winches ground up and down with the clang of chains, dockers shouted at one another, lumpers carried kegs and boxes and bales. There was the occasional jingle of harness and clatter of hooves as horses backed up with heavily loaded drays, and then the rattle of wheels on the stone. The rich, exotic aroma of spices and the gagging smell of raw sugar drifted across from another wharf, mixed with the stinging salt and fish and weed of the tide, and now and then the stench of hides.

  Once or twice Scuff looked at Monk as if he were going to say something, then changed his mind. Monk wondered if he were trying to find a way to tell him that boys like Billy were better off with Phillips than frozen or starved to death in some warehouse yard.

  “I know,” he said abruptly.

  “Eh?” Scuff was caught by surprise.

  “It isn't all one way. We aren't going to get boys like Billy to tell us anything.”

  Scuff sighed, and took another huge bite of his pie.

  “Would you like another one?” Monk asked him.

  Scuff hesitated, unused to generosity and not willing to chance his luck.

  Monk was not hungry, but he lied. “I do. If you fetch one for me, you might as well get one for yourself.”

  “Oh. Well.” Scuff considered for about a second, then stood up. “Don't mind if I do.” He held out his hand for the money. “D'yer want another cup o’ tea, an’ all?”

  “Thank you,” Monk replied. “I don't mind if I do.”

  It took them quite a while to find a boy willing to speak to them, and it was Orme who finally succeeded. It was in one of the alleys close to the water. The passageway was so narrow a tall man could stretch his arms and touch both sides at the same time, and the buildings almost met at the roof edges, creating the claustrophobic feeling of a series of tunnels. It was crowded with shops: bakers, chandlers, ships’ outfitters, ropemakers, tobacconists, pawnbrokers, brothels, cheap lodging houses, and taverns. There were openings into workshops and yards for the making, mending, or fitting of every piece of wood, metal, canvas, rope, or fabric that had to do with the sea and its cargo or its trade.