A Sunless Sea

by Anne Perry

  “No,” Blakelock answered.

  Coniston shrugged and made a wide, helpless gesture with his hands. “Then who is Dinah Lambourn, the mother of his children, and with whom he has lived for the last fifteen years, until his death?”

  “I presume ‘his mistress’ would be the most appropriate term,” Blakelock replied.

  “Then when Lambourn died, Zenia … Lambourn would be his widow, not the accused?” Coniston went on.

  “Yes.”

  “And so heir to his estate?” Coniston added.

  Rathbone rose to his feet. “My lord, that is an assumption that Mr. Blakelock is not qualified to make, and indeed it is an error. If you wish it, I can call Dr. Lambourn’s solicitor, who will tell you that his estate is left to his daughters, Adah and Marianne. There was a small bequest, an annuity, to Zenia Gadney. It would amount to approximately the same amount as he gave her when he was alive.”

  Pendock glared at him. “You were aware of this, Sir Oliver?”

  “I was aware of the provisions of the will, my lord. It seemed a fairly obvious inquiry to make,” Rathbone answered.

  Pendock drew in his breath to add something further, and then changed his mind. It would have been improper to ask what Dinah had confided in Rathbone, and the jury would draw their own conclusions anyway.

  Coniston realized as much; he certainly had no need to win such minor skirmishes as this. “I apologize, my lord,” he said with a slight smile. “It was an assumption, and as my learned friend has pointed out, in this case, unjustified. Perhaps for the defense, he will call someone to prove that the accused was aware that her children would inherit? Then her very natural fear of being left destitute by her husband’s suicide would be set aside, leaving only the motive of an equally natural jealousy.”

  Rathbone allowed a look of incredulity to cross his face.

  “Is the prosecution suggesting that the accused was jealous of the woman she so obviously supplanted in Dr. Lambourn’s affections?” he asked. “Or perhaps that Zenia Gadney was so jealous, after all these years, that she attacked Dinah Lambourn? In which case the mutilation is repellent and unnecessary, but the blow that caused Mrs. Gadney’s death may very well be considered self-defense!”

  “This is preposterous!” Coniston said with disbelief, but no apparent ill humor. “My lord—”

  Pendock held up his hand. “Enough, Mr. Coniston. I can see for myself the absurdity of it.” He glared at Rathbone. “Sir Oliver, I will not have this grave and very terrible trial turned into a farce. The accused went to seek the victim where she lived. Whatever happened after she found her ended in the victim’s death by violence, and then her hideous mutilation. These facts are beyond dispute. Is that the end of your case for the prosecution, Mr. Coniston?”

  “Yes, my lord, it is.”

  “Have you any questions for Mr. Blakelock?” Pendock turned to Rathbone.

  “No, thank you, my lord.”

  “Then we shall adjourn for luncheon. After that you may call your first witness for the defense.” Pendock turned to Blakelock. “Thank you. You may leave the stand.”

  RATHBONE STOOD IN THE center of the floor feeling as if he were in an arena waiting for lions, naked of armor and without a sword to attack. He had never felt so vulnerable before, even in cases where he knew his client was guilty. He realized with a shock that it was not his faith in Dinah that was wounded, perhaps critically, but his belief in himself. His confidence, and some of his hope, had bled away.

  Now he must lay very careful suggestions of a powerful figure bent on protecting himself. And all the time, in everything, he must believe that Dinah was innocent, no matter how far against reason that seemed to be. It must be in his mind always that Lambourn discovered something in his research that imperiled a man of power, and he was murdered to silence him. It was made to look like suicide to discredit him. Zenia Gadney was murdered to destroy Dinah and her crusade to save Lambourn’s reputation, and therefore his cause.

  He made himself smile, feeling as if it were ghastly on his face.

  “I call Mrs. Helena Moulton.”

  Helena Moulton was called by the usher. A moment later, she appeared and rather hesitantly climbed the steps up to the witness stand. She was clearly nervous. Her voice shook as she swore to tell the truth.

  “Mrs. Moulton,” Rathbone began gently, “are you acquainted with the accused, Dinah Lambourn?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Moulton avoided looking up at the dock. She stared straight ahead of her at Rathbone as if her neck were fixed in a brace.

  “Were you friends?” he pursued.

  “I … yes. Yes, we were friends.” She gulped. She was very pale and her hands were locked together on the rail of the stand. The light glinted on the gems in her rings.

  “Think back to your feelings during that friendship,” Rathbone began. He was painfully aware that Helena Moulton was embarrassed now about owning to having been Dinah’s friend, afraid the society in which she lived would then associate her with Dinah, as if testifying were somehow condoning what Dinah was accused of having done.

  Rathbone did not believe her testimony would sway the case in Dinah’s favor, even that it would necessarily make any difference at all, but he needed every extra hour he could to stretch out the testimony of the few witnesses he had to create the outline of someone else to suspect. Perhaps even now Monk would find something that would prove this person’s existence. And curiously enough, Rathbone had almost as much faith in Runcorn as he did in Monk. There was stubbornness in the man that would cling on to the very end, especially because he was angry at having been used and misled in the first place.

  Mrs. Moulton was waiting for the question, as was Pendock, who was beginning to be irritated.

  “You spent time together?” Rathbone continued. “You went to afternoon parties, exhibitions of art and photographs of travel and exploration, soirées, dinner parties at times, even the theater, and of course garden parties in the summer?”

  “I did with many people,” she replied guardedly.

  “Of course. Without lots of people, it is hardly a party, is it?” he said smoothly. “You enjoyed each other’s company?”

  It was a question to which she could hardly say no. That would be to suggest some ulterior motive.

  “Yes, yes, I … did,” she agreed a shade reluctantly.

  “You must have spoken of many things?”

  Coniston rose to his feet. “My lord, this is wasting the court’s time. The prosecution concedes that Mrs. Moulton was friends with the accused.”

  Rathbone wanted to object, but he had no grounds on which to argue the point. If he lost, it would be only one more defeat for him in the minds of the jury.

  Pendock looked at Rathbone with annoyance. “You have some point, Sir Oliver? If so, please proceed to make it. The social comings and goings of Mrs. Moulton and the accused seem totally irrelevant.”

  “I am trying to establish, my lord, Mrs. Moulton’s standing in her ability to comment on the accused’s state of mind.”

  “Then please consider it established and ask your question,” Pendock said tartly.

  “Yes, my lord.” Rathbone had hoped for more time, but there was nothing with which to argue. “Mrs. Moulton was the accused anxious or worried in the week or so before Dr. Lambourn’s death?”

  She hesitated. She looked up for an instant, as if to meet Dinah’s eyes in the dock above the courtroom gallery, then changed her mind and stared fixedly at Rathbone.

  “As I recall, she was just as usual. She … she did mention that he was working very hard and seemed rather tired.”

  “And after his death?” he asked.

  Her face filled with compassion, the tension vanishing as all consciousness of herself and the courtroom was swallowed up by her pity. “She was like a woman walking in her sleep,” she said huskily. “I have never seen anyone more numbed with grief. I knew they were close. He was a very gentle man, a good man …” She gulped and c
omposed herself again with difficulty. “I felt for her deeply, but there was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone could do.”

  “Indeed not,” he agreed softly. “Even the very closest of friends cannot reach out far enough to touch such a loss. Death is terrible in itself, but that a person should have taken his own life is so very much worse.”

  “She never believed that!” Mrs. Moulton said urgently, leaning forward over the rail as if three or four inches less between them would lend power to her words. “She always said that he had been killed to … to keep his work from being accepted. I am sure she believed that.”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Moulton, so do I,” Rathbone agreed. “In fact I intend to make that clear to the jury.”

  A flicker of displeasure crossed Coniston’s face.

  Pendock was irritated but he did not interrupt.

  Rathbone hurried on, gaining a lick of confidence, which was like a flame in the wind, any moment to be extinguished.

  “When the police arrested her and accused her of murdering Zenia Gadney, she told them that she had been with you at the time she was said to have been seen in Copenhagen Place, searching for Mrs. Gadney. Is that correct?”

  Helena Moulton looked uncomfortable. “Yes.” She said it so quietly that Pendock had to ask her to repeat her answer so the jury could hear her. “Yes,” she said with a sudden jolt.

  Rathbone smiled at her, very slightly, in reassurance. “And was she with you at that time, Mrs. Moulton?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Pendock leaned forward.

  “No,” she said more clearly. “She … she said that she was with me at a soirée. I don’t know why on earth she said that. I couldn’t support her. I was at an art exhibition, and dozens of people saw me. There wasn’t a soirée anywhere near us that day.”

  “So it was quite impossible that she was telling the truth,” Rathbone concluded.

  “Yes, it was.”

  Coniston rose to his feet again. “My lord, my learned friend is wasting time again. We have already established that the accused was lying! That is not an issue.”

  “My lord.” Rathbone faced Pendock. “That is not the point I am trying to make. What Mr. Coniston has apparently missed is the fact that Dinah Lambourn could never have expected to be believed in that statement.”

  Coniston spread his hands. It was a gesture of helplessness, inviting the court in general, and the jury in particular, to conclude that Rathbone was indeed doing no more than using up time in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.

  “Sir Oliver.” Pendock was exasperated. “This seems to be a completely pointless exercise. If you have some conclusion to all this … farrago, please let the court know what it is.”

  Rathbone was being hurried far more than he wished, but he could see in Pendock’s face that he was going to get no more latitude. Now was the moment to tell them Dinah’s brave and desperate gamble.

  “My lord, I am trying to show the jury that Dinah Lambourn believed that her husband had been defamed by having his report refused, and his professional ability slandered. Then when he would not accept that and go away quietly, denying what he knew to be true, he was murdered, and his death made to appear as suicide.”

  There was a burst of noise from the gallery. Someone shouted out abuse. Another cheered. The jury swung round in their seats, looking one way and then another.

  Pendock demanded order.

  Coniston appeared impatient and then disgusted.

  As soon as he could be heard, Rathbone continued, raising his voice above the rustle of movement and mutter of voices. “She was willing to face trial for a murder she did not commit,” he said loudly. “In order to gain a public hearing for her husband’s contrived disgrace and to oblige at least someone to investigate his death again.” He turned to face the astonished jury. “She is willing to risk her own life so that you, as representatives of the people of England, can hear the truth of what Joel Lambourn discovered, and judge for yourselves whether he was a good man, honest and capable, trying to serve the people of this country, or whether he was deluded, vain, and in the end suicidal.”

  He pointed up toward the dock. “That is how much she loved him—still loves him. She killed no one—nor does she know who did—either Joel Lambourn, or the unfortunate Zenia Gadney. And, by the grace of God, and the laws of England, I will prove that to you.”

  There was uproar in the gallery and this time Pendock’s calls for order were useless. He cleared the court, ordering an early adjournment for the day. Then he rose to his feet and strode out, his great red gown flying out behind him like broken scarlet wings.

  THE NEXT DAY, RATHBONE was prepared to call both Adah and Marianne Lambourn if necessary, simply to stretch out the time and give Monk every chance to find at least some element of truth that would raise doubt. Originally, Rathbone had hoped to learn who had killed Zenia, and be able to prove it. If he could even prove Lambourn did not commit suicide, it would make Dinah look rational, sympathetic, but so far he had been blocked in that at every step. Now there was only the suggestion of a manipulative figure behind the murder that he must give flesh to.

  Perhaps he should not have been surprised. If Dinah was right then someone with power had a great deal to hide, and both Coniston and Pendock had been advised of it. There must also have been the threat that his exposure would damage someone’s reputation irrevocably, and with it, perhaps, the honor of the government.

  He admitted to himself he was depending on proving reasonable doubt: the possibility of there being any other answers, no matter how vague, whose existence he could prove. He just had to last today and tomorrow, then the courts were closed for Christmas, which would give them a brief reprieve, until Tuesday. But he also knew that darkening Christmas with the necessity to return immediately after would not endear him to anyone. He would not have done it had he any other choice.

  In the morning he called Dinah Lambourn’s servants, who had nothing to reveal of their mistress’s behavior on the nights her husband and Zenia Gadney died that would implicate her in any way.

  Rathbone’s first witness of the afternoon was the shopkeeper who had described Dinah’s visit to Copenhagen Place, and the extreme emotion she had exhibited, so much so that most of the shoppers in the street now felt as if they had seen her, and should have realized who and what she was.

  But Rathbone knew that the mind can deceive the eye. He hoped that his discussion with Mr. Jenkins had shown the man how much had been suggested by circumstance, and that what he was experiencing was not in fact memory but hindsight. It was something of a risk to put him on the stand where Coniston could question him immediately afterward, but he had nothing left to lose. Please God, Monk or Runcorn had learned something of value, however fragile.

  Mr. Jenkins took the stand looking very nervous to be out of the security of his own shop and the trade with which he was familiar. He gripped the rail as though he were at sea and the whole stand was tossing like the bridge of a ship. Was that the very understandable anxiety of a man in extraordinary surroundings, knowing that a woman’s life might rest on what he said? Or did he plan now to go back on what he had told Rathbone, and he was afraid of Rathbone’s anger—or of Coniston’s anger, and the weight of the established law should he displease them?

  Rathbone must set him at his ease as much as he could. He walked forward to be close enough to the witness stand not to have to raise his voice to be heard.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Jenkins,” he began. “Thank you for giving us your time. We appreciate that you have a business to run and that your customers require you every day but Sunday. I will not keep you long. You have a general grocery shop in Copenhagen Place, Limehouse, is that correct?”

  Jenkins cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Are most of your customers local people, living, say, within half a mile or so of your shop?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because people need groceries
of one sort or another almost every day and naturally would not wish to carry them farther than necessary?” Rathbone asked.

  Coniston shifted impatiently in his seat.

  Pendock looked annoyed.

  Only the jury were listening with attention, believing something pertinent and perhaps controversial was coming. Rathbone was famous, his reputation formidable. If they had not known that before the trial began, they knew it now.

  “Yes, sir,” Jenkins agreed. “I know ’em, like. I keep the things they need. They don’t ’ave ter ask.”

  “So you would notice a stranger in your shop?” Rathbone smiled as he said it. “Someone who did not live locally, perhaps whose needs you did not know.”

  Jenkins gulped. He knew the importance of the question. “I reckon so.” Already he was less sure, an equivocation in his words, not a certainty.

  “Say, a well-dressed woman who was not from Limehouse, who had never bought her groceries from you, and who carried no bag or basket in which to put whatever she bought,” Rathbone elaborated.

  Jenkins stared at him.

  Rathbone had to be as absolute as possible. There would be no going back and retracing his steps or he would sound desperate, and the jury would hear it.

  “I imagine you are friendly or at least comfortable with most of your customers, Mr. Jenkins? They are decent people going about their business?”

  “Yes … yes, course they are,” Jenkins agreed.

  “So a woman behaving wildly, hysterically, would be extraordinary in your shop?”

  Coniston rose to his feet.

  Rathbone turned to him, carefully assuming a look of amazement and questioning on his face and in the angle of his head.

  Coniston gave a sigh of exasperation, as if infinitely bored, and resumed his seat. None of this would be lost on the jury. But their concentration would have been momentarily broken, the emotion lessened.

  “My learned friend appears not to have perceived the importance of my question, Mr. Jenkins,” Rathbone said with a smile. “Perhaps it is unclear to others as well. I am trying to show that your shop is a local service. You know all the women in the area who use your establishment to purchase their daily needs of tea, sugar, flour, vegetables, and so on. They are decent and civil people, feeling that they are among friends. A woman you have never seen before, and nobody else appears to know, and whose manner is hysterical and demanding, is highly unusual, and you would be likely to remember her, in fact be almost certain to. Is that correct?”