Acceptable Loss wm-17 Page 14

  “Too old?” she said with surprise. She gulped. It could not be Rupert. He was not much more than thirty, younger than she. “Are you sure?” She was fishing for time, trying to think of an excuse for asking him to describe the man in more detail.

  The ferryman sucked in his cheeks and then blew them out again. “Mebbe I shouldn’t a said that. Still an ’andsome enough figure of a man.”

  “Fair hair?” Hester asked, thinking of Rupert standing in the sun in the doorway of the clinic. “Slender, but quite tall?”

  “No,” the ferryman said decisively. “Sorry, love. ’E’d a bin sixty, like as not, dark ’air, near black, close as I could tell in the lamplight, like. But a big man, ’e were, an’ not tall, as yer might say. More like most.”

  Considering that the ferryman was unusually short, Hester wondered what he considered was average. However, it might only insult him to ask, and apart from anything else, she needed his help.

  “Did he come back again later?” she asked, changing the subject. She felt awkward, now that she had established that it was not the mythical deserting husband she had suggested. Then a new idea occurred to her. “You see, I’m afraid it could have been my father. He has a terrible temper, and …” She left the rest unsaid, a suggestion in the air. “He wasn’t … hurt, was he?”

  “Yer do pick ’em, don’t yer?” The ferryman shrugged. “But ’e were fine. Bit scruffed up, like ’e ’ad a bit of a tussle, but right as rain in ’isself. Walked down the bank an’ leaped inter his boat. Don’t you worry about ’im. Don’t know about the young feller with the fair ’air. I never see’d ’im.”

  “Perhaps he wasn’t here.” She said it with an upsurge of relief. She knew it was foolish even as she welcomed it. It meant nothing, only one difficulty avoided of a hundred.

  “Wot does it mean?” Scuff asked as they thanked the man and walked away along the path. “Is it good?”

  “I’m not sure,” Hester replied. That at least was true. “It certainly wasn’t Rupert. Even in the pitch dark you couldn’t mistake him for sixty. And if this man were scruffed up, he would have been in a fight, which, from the sound of it, he won.”

  “Like chokin’ Mickey Parfitt and sending ’im over the side?”

  “Yes, something like that,” she agreed.

  He shivered. “Was there other people in the boat?”

  “Not that evening, apparently, except for the boys, locked in belowdecks.”

  He hesitated. “Where are they now?”

  Hester heard the strain in his voice, saw the memory bright and terrible in his eyes.

  “They’re all safe,” she told him unwaveringly. “Looked after and clean and fed.”

  It was a moment or two before he was satisfied enough to believe her. Gradually the stiffness eased out of his back and shoulders. “So ’oo were it, then? Were it the man ’oo killed Mickey Parfitt?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “ ’Ow do we find out ’oo ’e is?”

  “I have an idea about that. Right now we are going home.”

  “We in’t gonna look fer ’im?” He was shivering very slightly, trying to stand so straight that it didn’t show. He pulled his coat tighter deliberately, although it was not any colder.

  “I need to ask William a few questions before that. I don’t think I will get two chances to speak to him about this, so I need to do it properly the first time.”

  “ ’E in’t gonna let yer,” Scuff warned. “I wouldn’t, if I was ’im.”

  “I dare say not.” She did not bother to hide her smile. “Which is why I won’t ask him, and neither will you.”

  “I might.”

  She looked at him. It wasn’t a threat. He was afraid for her. She saw it in his eyes, like a hard, twisting pain. He had found some kind of safety for the first time in his life, and it was threatened already. He was used to loss. Although this was too deep for him to handle alone, he was too used to loneliness to be able to share, too vulnerable even to acknowledge it.

  “I’ll come wif yer,” he said, watching her face, waiting for her to refuse him.

  “Thank you,” she accepted. It was rash. Perhaps it would cost them both. “If William is angry later, I’ll tell him you came only to make sure I was safe.”

  He smiled and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. “Right,” he agreed, overwhelmed with relief.

  What Hester actually wanted to know from Monk was what he had been told about where Arthur Ballinger had been on the night of Parfitt’s death. The ferryman’s description fitted him extraordinarily well-although, of course, it also fitted several thousand other men closely enough. She hated even thinking that it might’ve been Ballinger, because of how it would hurt Rathbone, and of course Margaret, but for Scuff’s sake, whoever was behind the boats run by men like Phillips and Parfitt, he had to be stopped, and to be hanged for murder was as good as being imprisoned for the kidnapping and abuse of children. Blackmail she doubted could ever be proved, because no one would admit to being a victim. That was part of the blackmailer’s skill.

  “Why?” Monk said immediately.

  They were standing side by side with the French doors ajar in the calm late evening, the smell of earth and damp leaves in the air. Dusk had fallen, and there was little sound outside in the small garden except for the wind through the leaves, and once or twice the hoot of an owl flying low. The sky was totally clear, the last light on the river below like the sheen on a pewter plate. Up here the noise of boats was inaudible, no shouts, no foghorns. A single barge with a lateen sail moved upriver as silently as a ghost.

  “Why?” Monk repeated, watching her.

  Hester had never intended to deceive him, just to keep her own counsel a little. “Because I was speaking to Crow this morning, in case he can help.”

  “Help whom?” he asked softly. “Rupert Cardew? I can’t blame him for killing Mickey Parfitt, but the law won’t excuse him, Hester, no matter how vile Parfitt was. Not unless it was self-defense. And honestly, that’s unbelievable. Can you imagine a man like Parfitt standing by while Cardew took off his cravat and put half a dozen knots in it, then looped it around Parfitt’s throat and pulled it tight?”

  “Didn’t he hit him over the head first?” she argued. “If Parfitt were unconscious, he wouldn’t be able to stop him. Rupert might …” She stopped. It was exactly the argument Monk was making. “Yes, I see,” she admitted. “If he was unconscious, then he was no danger to Rupert, or anyone else.”

  “Precisely. You can’t help him, Hester.” There was sorrow in his voice, and defeat, and in his eyes a bitter humor. She knew he was remembering with irony their crossing swords with Rathbone when he had defended Jericho Phillips in court, and they had been so sure of victory, taking it for granted because they’d been convinced of his total moral guilt.

  She wanted to argue, but every reason that struggled to the surface of her mind was pointless when she tried to put it into words. It all ended the same way: She didn’t want Rupert to be guilty. She liked him, and was grateful for his support of the clinic. She was desperately sorry for his father. She knew perfectly well that Rupert was not the power nor the money behind Parfitt’s business, and she wanted to destroy the man who was. She was trying to force the evidence to fit her own needs, which was not only dishonest, it was in the end also pointless.

  “No, I suppose not,” she conceded.

  He reached out his hand and took hers gently. There was nothing to add.

  Since Scuff’s rescue from Phillips’s boat-hurt, frightened, and very weak-he had made a point of going out during most days, as soon as he was well enough, just to prove that he was still independent and quite able to look after himself. Both Monk and Hester were careful to make no remark on it.

  It was the evening of the third day after Hester had met with Crow that Scuff came in well before supper, sniffing appreciatively at the kitchen door as the aroma of a hot pie baking greeted him and he saw Hester take down the skillet and set it on
the top of the stove.

  “Crow got summink for yer,” he said cheerfully. “Said ter tell yer ’e’ll meet yer at the riverside opposite the Chiswick Eyot termorrer at midday, wi’ wot yer asked fer. Cheapest’d be if we got the train ter ’Ammersmith, an’ then an ’ansom ter the ’Ammersmith Bridge, an’ along that way. I know where it is.” He inhaled deeply. “ ’S that apple pie?”

  Hester and Scuff were at the appointed place a quarter of an hour early the following day, standing watching the boats on the river. There was a movement Hester caught almost at the corner of her vision, and she turned to see Crow’s lanky figure striding along the quayside, his coat flapping, his black hair flying in the wind.

  She started toward him.

  He glanced at Scuff as she reached him, but he was still standing a few paces away, staring upriver.

  “Is it something he shouldn’t know?” Hester asked quickly. “I can send him off on an errand. He insisted on coming. He’s … looking after me.” Surely she did not need to explain that to Crow?

  “It’s an even worse business than I thought,” he said quietly. “But I don’t know what good that’ll do your friend. If I’d known what that bastard did to little boys, I’d have killed him myself, and not as nicely as a quick blow on the head.” His face was hard, lips tight. “I’d have practiced a spot of surgery he wouldn’t have approved of, and made damn sure he saw and felt every bit of it. He’d have watched himself bleed to death.” He looked at Scuff, and as Scuff turned and saw him, the rage was wiped from Crow’s eyes. He made himself smile back, the wide grin that was so characteristic of him.

  “You got summink for us?” Scuff asked expectantly, crossing over to them.

  “Of course,” Crow replied. “D’you think I’d come all the way up here to the end of the world if I hadn’t? It’s this way.” And without any further explanation he led them along the road, ships and taverns on one side, the steep drop to the river on the other.

  After about a hundred yards he crossed the street, dodging the few carts there were, and went into the narrow entrance of a lane running inland between shops and houses. Then he led them past a stretch of open green, and into a small alley off Chiswick Field. He knocked on the door of one of the houses, then, after a slight hesitation, knocked again with exactly the same pattern.

  It was opened immediately by a girl of about nineteen or twenty. She was plump with very fair skin, completely without blemishes, and hair so pale as to be almost white in the dark hallway. She saw Crow, and her face tightened with fear, but she made no attempt to close the door again.

  Crow gave his huge smile, all shining teeth, and pushed the door wider so it almost touched the wall behind it.

  “Hello, Hattie,” he said cheerfully. “Good time to call, is it? I brought someone to see you.” Without looking back he beckoned to Hester and Scuff to follow him in.

  Scuff closed the door and trailed behind, looking from one side to the other, almost treading on Hester’s heels.

  Hattie took them to a narrow kitchen, where a small fire kept a cooktop hot and a pump in the corner dripped water into a tin bowl.

  “Wot yer want?” she said, gulping with tension. She had wide, light blue eyes, and she kept them on Crow as if there were no one else in the room.

  “Tell Mrs. Monk what you told me about Rupert Cardew,” Crow replied. His voice was gentle, almost coaxing, but there was a quality of power in it that belied his easy expression.

  Hattie gulped. Hester saw that her hands were shaking. “I took it,” she said, not to Hester as directed, but still to Crow.

  “You took what, Hattie?” he pressed.

  She put her white hand up to her throat. “ ’Is tie. ’E ’ad it orff any’ow, an’ when ’e weren’t lookin’, I ’id it. ’E were stupid drunk, an’ ’e never noticed ’e’d gone wifout it.”

  “His cravat. What color was it, Hattie?”

  “Blue, wi’ little yeller animals on it.” She made a faint squiggle in the air with her finger.

  “Why did you take it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Yes, you do. Was it Mickey Parfitt who told you to?”

  “No! It …” She gulped again. “It were the night before ’e were found in the river.”

  “Who did you take it from, Hattie?”

  “Mr. Cardew. I told you.”

  “And who for? Who did you give it to?”

  She shook her head, and her body stiffened until her muscles seemed to lock. “No … I dunno who got it. I in’t sayin’ nothin’! It’s more ’n me life’s worth.”

  Crow turned to Hester. “I can’t get any more out of her than that. I’m sorry.”

  Hester looked at the girl again. Perhaps it would place her life in jeopardy. That was not difficult to believe. “It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “All that is important is that Rupert didn’t have it, so he couldn’t have been the one who knotted it and put it around Mickey Parfitt’s neck. Thank you. That makes all the difference.” She smiled back at Crow, and felt her smile grow wider and wider on her face. Of course she would have to press Hattie later as to whom she had given the cravat to, but it might be possible to find out through someone else. There would be others around who would have seen a stranger-or any visitor, for that matter. For the moment the relief that Rupert was not guilty was all she needed.

  The identities of the murderer of Mickey Parfitt and the man behind the pornographic business on the boats were next, a piece at a time. She smiled across at Hattie and thanked her again.

  CHAPTER 7

  Monk went across the river on the early morning ferry. It was a cool, quiet day, barely a ripple on the water in the slack tide. Swathes of mist half veiled the ships at anchor. Strings of barges seemed to appear out of nowhere.

  He had been collecting the evidence against Rupert Cardew to present when he came to trial. It was a miserable job, and in truth he had little more taste for it than Hester had. But the more he learned, the easier it became to see Rupert as a spoiled young man whose louche style of life and ungoverned temper had finally caught up with him. In Mickey Parfitt he had met the one problem his father could not solve for him. No amount of money would have been sufficient to stop the blackmail that had clearly worked so well.

  The only inconsistency was that Parfitt was a professional at extortion. He had been thirty-seven years old, and had survived for the last ten of these by profiting one way or another from other men’s weaknesses. There had been at least one suicide among his victims, possibly more, but no one had ever attacked him before. It seemed he had judged very precisely where to draw the line in his bloodsucking, or his threats. A dead victim is bad for business, and he never forgot that-at least not until recently.

  Was that a weakness in the case, or simply a fact yet to be explained? Rathbone had not merely beaten Monk in the trial of Jericho Phillips, he had humiliated him, and later-when she had testified-Hester as well. He had done it with the knowledge of how to hurt that only a friend possesses.

  Monk still felt a tide of anger burn up in him when he remembered it. Perhaps it hurt him more on her behalf than it had Hester herself. They had never spoken of it, as if it were a wound still too painful to touch.

  This time Monk would make sure that Rupert Cardew was guilty, and that he had proved it beyond any doubt, reasonable or not; or else Monk would find the man who was guilty, and prove that.

  Of course what he wanted, far more than the poor devil who’d killed Mickey Parfitt, was the man who had set him up in business, and had found his clientele among those whose weakness for the excitement of the forbidden, the illegal, and the obscene he had fed and exploited. Monk would find and prove that, whoever it was, even if it were Arthur Ballinger himself, as Sullivan had claimed. Indeed, even were it Lord Cardew-anyone, without exception.

  The ferry reached the far side. Monk paid the fare and climbed the slippery steps up to the dock.

  He was reluctant to prosecute Rupert Cardew, but there was n
o possible way to avoid it. What grieved him most was that the whole thing was so utterly pointless. He would never have taken off his distinctive silk cravat, deliberately knotted it, and then strangled an unconscious man. It seemed such an unnecessary thing to do-and, Monk realized, one that would give him no emotional satisfaction. There was no bodily contact, no release of the pent-up violence. There was something cold-blooded about it. But that was the only part he did not understand. The passion to destroy Parfitt he understood perfectly.

  He reached the top of the steps as the sun came through the haze and made the dew on the stone momentarily bright. He walked quickly toward the road.

  Had Rupert really been naive enough to think that would end the trade? Was he so spoiled, so cosseted from reality, that he believed a man like Parfitt was the power behind the business, the one who found the vulnerable patrons and then judged exactly how far to bleed each one?

  But it was the man behind Parfitt that Monk wanted, and that was what he had in mind an hour later when he called to see Oliver Rathbone. After a short wait, he was shown into Rathbone’s neat and elegant room.

  “Good morning, Monk,” Rathbone said with some surprise. “A new case?” He indicated the chair opposite his desk for Monk to sit down.

  “Thank you.” Monk accepted, leaning back as if he were relaxed, crossing his legs. “The same case.”

  Rathbone smiled, sitting also and hitching his trouser to stop it from creasing as he crossed his legs, and he too leaned back. “Since we are on opposite sides, this should prove interesting. What can I do for you?”

  “Perhaps save Cardew from the rope.”

  Rathbone’s smile vanished, a look of pain in his eyes. Monk saw it and understood. Monk was glad it was not his skill or judgment on which rested the weight of the saving or losing of a man’s life.

  “I’m sorry,” Monk apologized. It was probably inappropriate, but for a moment they were not adversaries. They felt the same pity, and revulsion, at the thought of hanging. “I have no wish to prosecute him at all,” he went on. “When I first found Parfitt’s body, I considered not even looking for whoever killed him, after I’d seen the boat and the boys kept there. But when the cravat turned up, I had no choice.”