Acceptable Loss wm-17 Page 13

  Or had there been some quarrel between Rupert and Parfitt that was deeper than blackmail money? Parfitt made his living from pornography and blackmail; he would know just how far to push before he drove any of his victims to despair. And after Jericho Phillips’s death, wouldn’t he have been even more careful, erring on the side of caution rather than ruthlessness? A blackmail victim driven to either murder or suicide is of no use.

  Monk was quiet and sunk in his own thoughts over their late supper. He mentioned only that he was still trying to examine the trade on the boat and see if there were any other witnesses who would be useful. Under Orme’s supervision, the Foundling Hospital matron had spoken to the boys from the boat, but they were too frightened and bewildered to say anything of use, and she had very quickly drawn the interviews to a close. The matron understood what was in the balance, but her first care was to the children she had there, not future victims. White-faced and holding a child in her arms, she had told Orme to leave.

  He had understood and had gone out silently, sick with grief.

  Now Hester cleared away the dishes and said nothing. Scuff looked from one to the other of them, troubled, but he asked no questions. He went upstairs to bed early.

  Monk had already gone the next morning by the time Hester served breakfast for Scuff and herself. She had made porridge because she knew he liked it, and it kept him from being hungry, well up to midday.

  “Did ’e do it, then?” he asked when his bowl was empty and he was ready for the toast, jam, and tea. His face was earnest. His eyes searched hers, trying to understand, looking for something to stop the fear growing inside him.

  She hung up the striped dish towel she had been drying the dishes with and came back to the table. She sat down and poured herself a cup of tea.

  “You know, I’m still not sure,” she said honestly. “It’s very difficult to be certain that you know all the things you need to in order to be right.”

  Scuff nodded slowly, as if he understood, but she could see from the trouble in his eyes that he didn’t.

  “Wot’s Mr. Monk doin’? Why’s ’e all angry?” His voice dropped. “Did I do summink?”

  “No,” Hester said, keeping her voice level with difficulty, trying to swallow back the emotion. “We’re all upset because we like Rupert, and we don’t want him to have done it, but we can’t help thinking that he did.”

  “Oh!” His face cleared only slightly. “Would yer still like ’im, even if it turns out ye’re right, an’ ’e did?”

  “Yes, of course we would. You don’t stop caring about people because they make mistakes. But that wouldn’t save him from the law.”

  “They’ll ’ang ’im?”

  “Probably.” The idea was so horrible, she found her throat tight and the tears stinging hard behind her eyes. She tried to force the picture out of her head, and failed.

  Scuff took a deep breath. “Then we’d better do summink, eh?” he said, his eyes steady on her face.

  “Yes. I’d intended to start this morning.”

  He stuffed the rest of his toast into his mouth and stood up.

  She started to say that he shouldn’t come because it could be dangerous, and because he really couldn’t help. Then she knew that both were wrong. Instead she took the last swallow of her tea and stood up as well. He needed to be part of this.

  She already knew all she could learn of Rupert, and none of it helped. Now she needed to know more of Mickey Parfitt, the business in general and his part in it in particular. Her first instinct was to protect Scuff from the details of such a trade. Then she remembered with misery that he was already more familiar with them than she was. The only question was how much reminding him of them might increase his nightmares.

  Or would he ever get over them if he always looked the other way? Might they even grow larger and larger, fed by her belief that they were too terrible to be faced?

  “Where are we gonna begin?” he asked, standing by the front door.

  “That’s the problem,” Hester admitted. “There are a lot of ‘maybes’ and not much certainty. It might be useful to speak to Rupert’s friends, but I doubt they would say anything to me if it made them look bad, which most of it would.”

  Scuff’s face was creased up with disgust.

  “We can try other prostitutes,” she suggested. “There may have been talk that we could follow up, but I think that could take a long time. Squeaky Robinson gave me a few names we can begin with.”

  Scuff looked at her guardedly. “Wot kind o’ people?”

  “People who owe Squeaky a favor or two. And I know some like that myself-a couple of brothel-keepers, an abortionist, an apothecary.”

  “I could go an’ ask Mr. Crow? If yer like?” he offered.

  “We could go and ask,” she corrected him. “I think that’s an excellent idea. But do you know where to find him?”

  “Course I do, but it in’t no decent place fer a lady ter come.” Now he looked worried.

  “Scuff,” she said seriously, “I’ll make a bargain with you …”

  He stared at her dubiously.

  “I’ll look out for you, but not look after you, if you do the same for me.” She held out her hand to shake on it.

  He considered for a moment or two, then gripped it in his small, thin fingers and shook. “Deal,” he confirmed.

  They went straight from Paradise Place to Princes Stairs and took the ferry across to Wapping, past the police station that Monk commanded. Then they turned west along the High Street, at Scuff’s direction, toward the Pool of London and the biggest docks.

  They did not talk. Scuff seemed to be watching and listening. His jacket was buttoned right up to his chin, and his cap was jammed hard onto his head. He had on new boots, his first that were actually a pair. Hester was sunk in her own contemplation of what she needed to learn and how much she could ask without endangering both of them. Pornography and prostitution were vast trades, and there was a great deal of money to be made in either of them. And of course there was a corresponding danger from the law. Not only profit but survival depended on knowing what not to say, and particularly who not to say it to.

  It took them most of the morning amid the noise and traffic, the wagons and cranes and piles of cargo and timber, before they eventually found Crow in a tenement building on Jacob Street. It was just inland from St. Saviour’s Wharf, on the south side of the river.

  Crow was a lanky man in his midthirties, with coal-black hair, which he wore thick, swept back off his high forehead, and long enough for it to sit on his collar at the back. He had a lugubrious face until he smiled-a broad, flashing grin showing excellent teeth.

  They had only just caught him. He was coming down the steps with his black gladstone bag in his hands. He was dressed in a shabby frock coat and black trousers barely adequate to cover his long legs. He was clearly delighted to see Scuff, and his eyes went to him first, before he greeted Hester.

  “Hello, Mrs. Monk! What are you doing in these parts? Trouble?”

  “Of course,” she replied, holding out her hand.

  He spread his own lean fingers and looked at them in distaste. “I’m filthy,” he said, shaking his head. His glance went to Scuff again, as if to reassure himself as to his well-being. Crow had dropped every other business to help search for Scuff when the boy had been kidnapped by Jericho Phillips.

  Hester dropped her hand, smiling back at him. “You heard about the murder of Mickey Parfitt?” she asked, falling in step beside him as they walked back along the narrow street toward the river, stepping carefully to avoid the gutter.

  “Of course,” Crow acknowledged. “No ill will, Mrs. Monk, but I hope you don’t find the poor sod that did for him. If you’ve come to ask me to help you, sorry but I’m too busy. You’d be surprised the number of sick people there are around here.” He looked up at the dense tenement buildings to the left and right of them, grimed with smoke and constantly dripping water from the eaves.

  S
he glanced at him. His face was set in hard lines, the easy smile vanished. She had known him off and on since Monk’s first case on the river, nearly a year ago now, but she realized she had seen only the thinnest surface of his character. He was a man who never spoke of his background, but he had had a good deal of medical training and used it to help those on the edge of the law-animal or human-or in the iron grip of poverty. He took his payment in whatever form was offered-a debt in hand, if necessary, and kindness in return when it was needed.

  She had no idea what had happened to prevent him from gaining his qualifications and practicing as a full doctor. His speech was not from the dockland area, but she could not place it. He cared for Scuff, and that was all that mattered. One knew far less about most people than one imagined. Parents, place and date of birth, education, all told less of the heart than a few actions under pressure when the cost was high.

  “I’m afraid we already have a very good idea who it was.” She answered his challenge while watching her step as she picked her way over broken cobbles. “I’m trying to find a reason to cast doubt on his guilt, or if not that, then at least to show that he doesn’t deserve the rope.”

  Crow was surprised. “You want him to get off?”

  Hester would not have put it quite so bluntly, and she drew in her breath to deny it. Then she saw Scuff looking at her and realized that perhaps Crow was right, that that was what she wanted. It was difficult to answer the question honestly with Scuff between them, grasping every word.

  “I want the trade finished, wiped out,” she said. “To do that I need to break the man behind it-the one with the money. I’d rather not sacrifice Rupert Cardew in the process.”

  Crow’s eyes widened incredulously. “Would you like the crown jewels at the same time, maybe, just as a nice finish?” He skirted around a pile of refuse, and a rat scuttled away.

  “Not particularly,” Hester answered, keeping her face perfectly straight. “I haven’t sufficient use for them. One would have to walk terribly upright to keep a crown from falling off. I don’t think I could do that.”

  Scuff was puzzled.

  “She’s joking,” Crow told him, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “At least I hope she is.”

  “Half,” Hester conceded. Then she smiled. “I might be able to, but if I dropped anything, somebody else would have to pick it up for me.”

  “If you were wearing a crown, I expect they’d feel obliged,” Crow answered.

  Scuff laughed, but the fear of being lost again, separated from her, was tight underneath, as sharp as a knife point.

  They all walked in silence for a couple of hundred yards past more boxes, barrels, and piles of wood. Finally they reached the steps to the ferry to the north bank. The tide was turning and the water was choppy. Strings of lighters were making their way upriver laden with coal, timber, and round wooden barrels lashed together. A coastal barge passed by, sails full-set, billowing out. The light was bright on the water, and the wind caught the edges of the waves, whipping up a fine spray.

  “I want to know the details the police won’t be able to find,” Hester told Crow after they were ashore on the north bank. “Any whispers.” She did not really know what she was asking for. The facts said that Rupert was guilty. But might a jury be persuaded to ask for leniency? Or when they heard what bestiality Parfitt sold, might they believe that any man who’d become involved, no matter how ignorant he’d been initially, was little better than Parfitt himself?

  Or was it just that she liked Rupert, and for Scuff’s sake she was desperate to find the man behind Parfitt’s business, so she could prevent him from starting up again with someone new? Scuff needed to see them succeed, to believe it really could happen, and that he was a part of it.

  “Crow …”, she began. “Do you think it could be something as simple as a business rivalry? Parfitt must have earned a lot of money from that boat. If someone else took over his trade and his clients, they’d make just as much, wouldn’t they? Perhaps what I really need to know is how the business was run. Who profits from his death, in a business way? Never mind the blackmail or the moral side of it. Let’s look at the money.”

  He nodded very slowly, his smile widening. “Give me a couple of days.” He tilted his head a little to one side. “I suppose you want the details, rather than just my conclusions?”

  “Yes, please. My conclusions might be different.”

  He did not answer that, but a brief flash of amusement lit his eyes. “It’ll be ugly,” he warned.

  “Of course it will. Thank you.”

  There was really nothing more to be added now, and she thanked Crow and left.

  “Where we goin’ now?” Scuff asked, keeping up with her by adding an extra skip into his step now and then. “We in’t just leavin’ it to ’im, are we?”

  “No,” Hester answered decisively. “We are going to see if someone else with an interest in the boat’s profits might have been there the night Parfitt was killed.”

  “ ’Ow’re we gonna do that?”

  “Well, if it is one of the people I think it might be, he will have to have come up the river from his home. If I can find someone who saw him, it would be a start.”

  She had not told Scuff anything about what Sullivan had said of Arthur Ballinger, and she assumed Monk hadn’t either. If there was really anything behind it, ignorance would be the safest shield for him.

  “Like a cabby?”

  “I think I’ll begin with the ferryman. Cabbies don’t see a lot of people’s faces, especially after dark.”

  “Course!” Scuff said eagerly. “Yer sittin’ in a boat, an’ the ferryman’s gotta see yer, eh? So if ’e don’t wanna be seen an’ ’ave folks remember ’im, ’e’d row up the river ’isself. Or if ’e couldn’t, then ’e’d cross where ’e’d least likely be noticed a ’ole lot.”

  “Definitely,” she agreed. “Let’s try the ferrymen in Chiswick first.”

  It took them well into the afternoon to get from the eastern end, nearer the sea and the great wharfs and docks, right across the city by omnibus to the statelier, greener western edge, and then beyond that again into the lush countryside, and over the river to the southern bank. There was no omnibus across Barn Elms Park to the little township of Barnes itself and finally to the High Street right on the water’s edge. They were both tired and thirsty, and had sore feet, by the time they stopped at the White Hart Inn, but Scuff never complained.

  Hester wondered if his silence was in any way because he was thinking about this utterly different place-green, well kept, almost sparkling in the bright, hard light off the water. On the surface, it seemed a world away from the dark river edge where Jericho Phillips had kept his boat. There the tide carried in and out the detritus of the port, the broken pieces of driftwood, some half-submerged, bits of cloth and rope, food refuse and sewage. There was the noise of the city even at night, the clip of hooves on the cobbles, shouts, laughter, the rattle of wheels, and of course always the lights-streetlamps, carriage lamps-unless the mist rolled in and blotted them out. Then there were the mournful booms of the foghorns.

  Here the river was narrower. There were shipbuilding yards on the northern bank farther down. The shops were open, busy; occasional carts went by; people called out; but it was all smaller, and there was no smell of industrial chimney smoke, salt and fish, no cry of gulls. A single barge drifted upriver, sails barely arced in the breeze.

  Scuff could not help staring around him at the women in clean, pale dresses, walking and laughing as if they had nothing else to do.

  Hester and Scuff ate first, a very late luncheon of cold game pie, vegetables, and-as a special treat-a very light shandy.

  Scuff finished his glass and put it down, licking his lips and looking at her hopefully.

  “When you’re older,” she replied.

  “ ’Ow long do I ’ave ter get older?” he asked.

  “You’ll be doing it all the time.”

  “Afore I can �
��ave another one o’ these?” He was not about to let it go.

  “About three months.” She had difficulty not smiling. “But you may have another piece of pie, if you wish? Or plum pie, if you prefer?”

  He decided to press his luck. He frowned at her. “ ’Ow about both?”

  She thought of the errand they were on, and what had driven them to it. “Good idea,” she agreed. “I might do the same.”

  When there was nothing at all left on either plate, she paid the bill. Scuff thanked her gravely, and then hiccuped. They walked down to the river and started looking for ferries, fishermen, anybody who hung around the water’s edge talking, pottering with boats or tackle, generally observing the afternoon slip by.

  It was more than two hours, pleasant but unprofitable, before they found the bowlegged ferryman who said he had carried a gentleman from the city over late on the night before the morning Mickey Parfitt’s body was found in Corney Reach.

  “Aw, I dunno ’is name, lady,” the ferryman said dubiously. “Never ask folks’s names-got no reason ter, ’ave I? Don’ ask where they’re goin’ neither. ’Tain’t none o’ my business. Jus’ be civil, talk a little ter pass the time, like, an’ get ’im ter the other side safe an’ dry. I recall, though, as this gent were a real toff, knowed all kinds o’ things.”

  Hester felt the grip tighten in the pit of her stomach, and suddenly the possibility of profound tragedy was real. “Truly? How old would you say he was?”

  The man bent his head a little to one side and looked at her, then at Scuff, then back at her again. “Why yer wanna know, missus? ’E done yer wrong some’ow?”

  She knew what he was thinking, and she played on it without a moment’s shame. “I don’t know, unless I know if it was he,” she answered, keeping the amusement out of her eyes deliberately. She wanted to laugh. Then she thought of all the women of whom it would be true, and the amusement vanished. A knot of shame pulled tight inside her for her callousness.

  “Don’t think so, love,” he said sadly, biting his lower lip. “This feller’d be a bit too old fer you.”