The William Monk Mysteries

by Anne Perry

  With Menard it was also anger, but a sharp awareness, too, of something he saw as injustice; past now in act, but the residue still affecting him. Had he tidied up too often after Joscelin, his mother’s favorite, protecting her from the truth that he was a cheat? Or was it himself he protected, and the family name?

  Only with Callandra did she feel relaxed, but it did on one occasion cross her mind to wonder whether Callandra’s comfort with herself was the result of many years’ happiness or the resolution within her nature of its warring elements, not a gift but an art. It was one evening when they had taken a light supper in Callandra’s sitting room instead of dinner in the main wing, and Callandra had made some remark about her husband, now long dead. Hester had always assumed the marriage to have been happy, not from anything she knew of it, or of Callandra Daviot, but from the peace within Callandra.

  Now she realized how blindly she had leaped to such a shortsighted conclusion.

  Callandra must have seen the idea waken in her eyes. She smiled with a touch of wryness, and a gentle humor in her face.

  “You have a great deal of courage, Hester, and a hunger for life which is a far richer blessing than you think now—but, my dear, you are sometimes very naive. There are many kinds of misery, and many kinds of fortitude, and you should not allow your awareness of one to build to the value of another. You have an intense desire, a passion, to make people’s lives better. Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say ‘If I were you, I would do this—or that.’ ‘I’ am never ‘you’—and my solutions may not be yours.”

  Hester remembered the wretched policeman who had told her she was domineering, overbearing and several other unpleasant things.

  Callandra smiled. “Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be. There will be a great many things you can achieve not by attacking them but with a little patience and a modicum of flattery. Stop to consider what it is you really want, rather than pursuing your anger or your vanity to charge in. So often we leap to passionate judgments—when if we but knew the one thing more, they would be so different.”

  Hester was tempted to laugh, in spite of having heard very clearly what Callandra had said, and perceiving the truth of it.

  “I know,” Callandra agreed quickly. “I preach much better than I practice. But believe me, when I want something enough, I have the patience to bide my time and think how I can bring it about.”

  “I’ll try,” Hester promised, and she did mean it. “That miserable policeman will not be right—I shall not allow him to be right.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I met him when I was out walking,” Hester explained. “He said I was overbearing and opinionated, or something like that.”

  Callandra’s eyebrows shot up and she did not even attempt to keep a straight face.

  “Did he really? What temerity! And what perception, on such a short acquaintance. And what did you think of him, may I ask?”

  “An incompetent and insufferable nincompoop!”

  “Which of course you told him?”

  Hester glared back at her. “Certainly!”

  “Quite so. I think he had more of the right of it than you did. I don’t think he is incompetent. He has been given an extremely difficult task. There were a great many people who might have hated Joscelin, and it will be exceedingly difficult for a policeman, with all his disadvantages, to discover which one it was—and even harder, I imagine, to prove it.”

  “You mean, you think—” Hester left it unsaid, hanging in the air.

  “I do,” Callandra replied. “Now come, we must settle what you are to do with yourself. I shall write to certain friends I have, and I have little doubt, if you hold a civil tongue in your head, refrain from expressing your opinion of men in general and of Her Majesty’s Army’s generals in particular, we may obtain for you a position in hospital administration which will not only be satisfying to you but also to those who are unfortunate enough to be ill.”

  “Thank you.” Hester smiled. “I am very grateful.” She looked down in her lap for a moment, then up at Callandra and her eyes sparkled. “I really do not mind walking two paces behind a man, you know—if only I can find one who can walk two paces faster than I! It is being tied at the knees by convention I hate—and having to pretend I am lame to suit someone else’s vanity.”

  Callandra shook her head very slowly, amusement and sadness sharp in her face. “I know. Perhaps you will have to fall a few times, and have someone else pick you up, before you will learn a more equable pace. But do not walk slowly simply for company—ever. Not even God would wish you to be unequally yoked and result in destroying both of you—in fact God least of all.”

  Hester sat back and smiled, lifting up her knees and hugging them in a most unladylike fashion. “I daresay I shall fall many times—and look excessively foolish—and give rise to a good deal of hilarity among those who dislike me—but that is still better than not trying.”

  “Indeed it is,” Callandra agreed. “But you would do it anyway.”

  8

  THE MOST PRODUCTIVE of Joscelin Grey’s acquaintances was one of the last that Monk and Evan visited, and not from Lady Fabia’s list, but from the letters in the flat. They had spent over a week in the area near Shelburne, discreetly questioning on the pretense of tracing a jewel thief who specialized in country houses. They had learned something of Joscelin Grey, of the kind of life he led, at least while home from London. And Monk had had the unnerving and extremely irritating experience one day while walking across the Shelburne parkland of coming upon the woman who had been with Mrs. Latterly in St. Marylebone Church. Perhaps he should not have been startled—after all, society was very small—but it had taken him aback completely. The whole episode in the church with its powerful emotion had returned in the windy, rain-spattered land with its huge trees, and Shelburne House in the distance.

  There was no reason why she should not have visited the family, precisely as he later discovered. She was a Miss Hester Latterly, who had nursed in the Crimea, and was a friend of Lady Callandra Daviot. As she had told him, she had known Joscelin Grey briefly at the time of his injury. It was most natural that once she was home she should give her condolences in person. And also certainly within her nature that she should be outstandingly rude to a policeman.

  And give the devil her due, he had been rude back—and gained considerable satisfaction from it. It would all have been of no possible consequence were she not obviously related to the woman in the church whose face so haunted him.

  What had they learned? Joscelin Grey was liked, even envied for his ease of manner, his quick smile and a gift for making people laugh; and perhaps even more rather than less, because the amusement had frequently an underlying caustic quality. What had surprised Monk was that he was also, if not pitied, then sympathized with because he was a younger son. The usual careers open to younger sons such as the church and the army were either totally unsuitable to him or else denied him now because of his injury, gained in the service of his country. The heiress he had courted had married his elder brother, and he had not yet found another to replace her, at least not one whose family considered him a suitable match. He was, after all, invalided out of the army, without a merchandisable skill and without financial expectations.

  Evan had acquired a rapid education in the manners and morals of his financial betters, and now was feeling both bemused and disillusioned. He sat in the train staring out of the window, and Monk regarded him with a compassion not unmixed with humor. He knew the feeling, although he could not recall experiencing it himself. Was it possible he had never been so young? It was an unpleasant thought that he might always have been cynical, without that particular kind of innocence, even as a child.

  Discovering himself step by step, as one might a stranger, was stretching his nerves further than he had been a
ware of until now. Sometimes he woke in the night, afraid of knowledge, feeling himself full of unknown shames and disappointments. The shapelessness of his doubt was worse than certainty would have been; even certainty of arrogance, indifference, or of having overridden justice for the sake of ambition.

  But the more he pulled and struggled with it, the more stubbornly it resisted; it would come only thread by thread, without cohesion, a fragment at a time. Where had he learned his careful, precise diction? Who had taught him to move and to dress like a gentleman, to be so easy in his manners? Had he merely aped his betters over the years? Something very vague stirred in his mind, a feeling rather than a thought, that there had been someone he admired, someone who had taken time and trouble, a mentor—but no voice, nothing but an impression of working, practicing—and an ideal.

  The people from whom they learned more about Joscelin Grey were the Dawlishes. Their house was in Primrose Hill, not far from the Zoological Gardens, and Monk and Evan went to visit them the day after returning from Shelburne. They were admitted by a butler too well trained to show surprise, even at the sight of policemen on the front doorstep. Mrs. Dawlish received them in the morning room. She was a small, mild-featured woman with faded hazel eyes and brown hair which escaped its pins.

  “Mr. Monk?” She queried his name because it obviously meant nothing to her.

  Monk bowed very slightly.

  “Yes ma’am; and Mr. Evan. If Mr. Evan might have your permission to speak to the servants and see if they can be of assistance?”

  “I think it unlikely, Mr. Monk.” The idea was obviously futile in her estimation. “But as long as he does not distract them from their duties, of course he may.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Evan departed with alacrity, leaving Monk still standing.

  “About poor Joscelin Grey?” Mrs. Dawlish was puzzled and a little nervous, but apparently not unwilling to help. “What can we tell you? It was a most terrible tragedy. We had not known him very long, you know.”

  “How long, Mrs. Dawlish?”

  “About five weeks before he … died.” She sat down and he was glad to follow suit. “I believe it cannot have been more.”

  “But you invited him to stay with you? Do you often do that, on such short acquaintance?”

  She shook her head, another strand of hair came undone and she ignored it.

  “No, no hardly ever. But of course he was Menard Grey’s brother—” Her face was suddenly hurt, as if something had betrayed her inexplicably and without warning, wounding where she had believed herself safe. “And Joscelin was so charming, so very natural,” she went on. “And of course he also knew Edward, my eldest son, who was killed at Inkermann.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her face was very stiff, and for a moment he was afraid she would not be able to control herself. He spoke to cover the silence and her embarrassment.

  “You said ‘also.’ Did Menard Grey know your son?”

  “Oh yes,” she said quietly. “They were close friends—for years.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Since school.”

  “So you invited Joscelin Grey to stay with you?” He did not wait for her to reply; she was beyond speech. “That’s very natural.” Then quite a new idea occurred to him with sudden, violent hope. Perhaps the murder was nothing to do with any current scandal, but a legacy from the war, something that had happened on the batdefield? It was possible. He should have thought of it before—they all should.

  “Yes,” she said very quietly, mastering herself again. “If he knew Edward in the war, we wanted to talk with him, listen to him. You see—here at home, we know so little of what really happened.” She took a deep breath. “I am not sure if it helps, indeed in some ways it is harder, but we feel … less cut off. I know Edward is dead and it cannot matter to him anymore; it isn’t reasonable, but I feel closer to him, however it hurts.”

  She looked at him with a curious need to be understood. Perhaps she had explained precisely this to other people, and they had tried to dissuade her, not realizing that for her, being excluded from her son’s suffering was not a kindness but an added loss.

  “Of course,” he agreed quietly. His own situation was utterly different, yet any knowledge would surely be better than this uncertainty. “The imagination conjures so many things, and one feels the pain of them all, until one knows.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. “You understand? So many friends have tried to persuade me into acceptance, but it gnaws away at the back of my mind, a sort of dreadful doubt. I read the newspapers sometimes”—she blushed—“when my husband is out of the house. But I don’t know what to believe of them. Their accounts are—” She sighed, crumpling her handkerchief in her lap, her fingers clinging around it. “Well, they are sometimes a little softened so as not to distress us, or make us feel critical of those in command. And they are sometimes at variance with each other.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” He felt an unreasonable anger for the confusion of this woman, and all the silent multitude like her, grieving for their dead and being told that the truth was too harsh for them. Perhaps it was, perhaps many could not have borne it, but they had not been consulted, simply told; as their sons had been told to fight. For what? He had no idea. He had looked at many newspapers in the last few weeks, trying to learn, and he still had only the dimmest notion—something to do with the Turkish Empire and the balance of power.

  “Joscelin used to speak to us so—so carefully,” she went on softly, watching his face. “He told us a great deal about how he felt, and Edward must have felt the same. I had had no idea it was so very dreadful. One just doesn’t know, sitting here in England—” She stared at him anxiously. “It wasn’t very glorious, you know—not really. So many men dead, not because the enemy killed them, but from the cold and the disease. He told us about the hospital at Scutari. He was there, you know; with a wound in his leg. He suffered quite appallingly. He told us about seeing men freezing to death in the winter. I had not known the Crimea was cold like that. I suppose it was because it was east from here, and I always think of the East as being hot. He said it was hot in the summer, and dry. Then with winter there was endless rain and snow, and winds that all but cut the flesh. And the disease.” Her face pinched. “I thanked God that if Edward had to die, at least it was quickly, of a bullet, or a sword, not cholera. Yes, Joscelin was a great comfort to me, even though I wept as I hadn’t done before; not only for Edward, but for all the others, and for the women like me, who lost sons and husbands. Do you understand, Mr. Monk?”

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “Yes I do. I’m very sorry I have to distress you now by speaking of Major Grey’s death. But we must find whoever killed him.”

  She shuddered.

  “How could anyone be so vile? What evil gets into a man that he could beat another to death like that? A fight I deplore, but I can understand it; but to go on, to mutilate a man after he is dead! The newspapers say it was dreadful. Of course my husband does not know I read them—having known the poor man, I felt I had to. Do you understand it, Mr. Monk?”

  “No, I don’t. In all the crimes I have investigated, I have not seen one like this.” He did not know if it was true, but he felt it. “He must have been hated with a passion hard to conceive.”

  “I cannot imagine it, such a violence of feeling.” She closed her eyes and shook her head fractionally. “Such a wish to destroy, to—to disfigure. Poor Joscelin, to have been the victim of such a—a creature. It would frighten me even to think someone could feel such an intensity of hatred for me, even if I were quite sure they could not touch me, and I were innocent of its cause. I wonder if poor Joscelin knew?”

  It was a thought that had not occurred to Monk before— had Joscelin Grey had any idea that his killer hated him? Had he known, but merely thought him impotent to act?

  “He cannot have feared him,” he said aloud. “Or he would hardly have allowed him into his rooms while he was alone.”

  “Poor man.�
� She hunched her shoulders involuntarily, as if chilled. “It is very frightening to think that someone with that madness in their hearts could walk around, looking like you or me. I wonder if anyone dislikes me intensely and I have no idea of it. I had never entertained such a thought before, but now I cannot help it. I shall be unable to look at people as I used to. Are people often killed by those they know quite well?”

  “Yes ma’am, I am afraid so; most often of all by relatives.”

  “How appalling.” Her voice was very soft, her eyes staring at some spot beyond him. “And how very tragic.”

  “Yes it is.” He did not want to seem crass, nor indifferent to her horror, but he had to pursue the business of it. “Did Major Grey ever say anything about threats, or anyone who might be afraid of him—”

  She lifted her eyes to look at him; her brow was puckered and another strand of hair escaped the inadequate pins. “Afraid of him? But it was he who was killed!”

  “People are like other animals,” he replied. “They most often kill when they are afraid themselves.”

  “I suppose so. I had not thought of that.” She shook her head a little, still puzzled. “But Joscelin was the most harmless of people! I never heard him speak as if he bore real ill will towards anyone. Of course he had a sharp wit, but one does not kill over a joke, even if it is a trifle barbed, and possibly even not in the kindest of taste.”

  “Even so,” he pressed, “against whom were these remarks directed?”

  She hesitated, not only in an effort to remember, but it seemed the memory was disturbing her.

  He waited.

  “Mostly against his own family,” she said slowly. “At least that was how it sounded to me—and I think to others. His comments on Menard were not always kind, although my husband knows more of that than I—I always liked Menard—but then that was no doubt because he and Edward were so close. Edward loved him dearly. They shared so much—” She blinked and screwed up her mild face even more. “But then Joscelin often spoke harshly of himself also—it is hard to understand.”