A Dangerous Mourning Read online

“Thank you,” Monk said. “Mr. Evan in?”

  “No sir. He came in, and then he went out again. Didn’t say where.”

  Monk acknowledged the reply and went up the stairs to Runcorn’s office. He knocked on the door and at the command went in. Runcorn was sitting behind his large, highly polished desk, two elegant envelopes and half a dozen sheets of fine notepaper written on and half folded lying next to them. The other surfaces were covered with four or five newspapers, some open, some folded.

  He looked up, his face dark with anger and his eyes narrow and bright.

  “Well. Have you seen the newspapers, eh? Have you seen what they are saying about us?” He held one up and Monk saw the black headlines halfway down the page: QUEEN ANNE STREET MURDERER STILL LOOSE. POLICE BAFFLED. And then the writer went on to question the usefulness of the new police force, and was it money well spent or now an unworkable idea.

  “Well?” Runcorn demanded.

  “I hadn’t seen that one,” Monk answered. “I haven’t spent much time reading newspapers.”

  “I don’t want you reading the newspapers, damn it,” Runcorn exploded. “I want you doing something so they don’t write rubbish like this. Or this.” He snatched up the next one. “Or this.” He threw them away, disregarding the mess as they slid on the polished surface and fell onto the floor in a rattling heap. He grasped one of the letters. “From the Home Office.” His fingers closed on it, knuckles white. “I’m getting asked some very embarrassing questions, Monk, and I can’t answer them. I’m not prepared to defend you indefinitely—I can’t. What in hell’s name are you doing, man? If someone in that house killed the wretched woman, then you haven’t far to look, have you? Why can’t you get this thing settled? For heaven’s sake, how many suspects can you have? Four or five at the most. What’s the matter with you that you can’t finish it up?”

  “Because four or five suspects is three or four too many—sir. Unless, of course, you can prove a conspiracy?” Monk said sarcastically.

  Runcorn slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t be impertinent, damn you! A smart tongue won’t get you out of this. Who are your suspects? This footman, what’s his name—Percival. Who else? As far as I can see, that’s it. Why can’t you settle it, Monk? You’re beginning to look incompetent.” His anger turned to a sneer. “You used to be the best detective we had, but you’ve certainly lost your touch lately. Why can’t you arrest this damned footman?”

  “Because I have no proof he did anything,” Monk replied succinctly.

  “Well who else could it be? Think clearly. You used to be the sharpest and most rational man we had.” His lip curled. “Before that accident you were as logical as a piece of algebra—and about as charming—but you knew your job. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

  Monk kept his temper with difficulty. “As well as Percival, sir,” he said heavily, “it could be one of the laundry maids—”

  “What?” Runcorn’s mouth opened in disbelief close to derision. “Did you say one of the laundrymaids? Don’t be absurd. Whatever for? If that’s the best you can do, I’d better put someone else on the case. Laundrymaid. What in heaven’s name would make a laundrymaid get out of her bed in the middle of the night and creep down to her mistress’s bedroom and stab her to death? Unless the girl is raving mad. Is she raving mad, Monk? Don’t say you couldn’t recognize a lunatic if you saw one.”

  “No, she is not raving mad; she is extremely jealous,” Monk answered him.

  “Jealous? Of her mistress? That’s ludicrous. How can a laundrymaid compare herself with her mistress? That needs some explaining, Monk. You are reaching for straws.”

  “The laundrymaid is in love with the footman—not a particularly difficult circumstance to understand,” Monk said with elaborate, hard-edged patience. “The footman has airs above his station and imagines the mistress admired him—which may or may not be true. Certainly he had allowed the laundrymaid to suppose so.”

  Runcorn frowned. “Then it was the laundrymaid? Can’t you arrest her?”

  “For what?”

  Runcorn glared at him. “All right, who are your other suspects? You said four or five. So far you have only mentioned two.”

  “Myles Kellard, the other daughter’s husband—”

  “What for?” Runcorn was worried now. “You haven’t made any accusations, have you?” The blood was pink in his narrow cheeks. “This is a very delicate situation. We can’t go around charging people like Sir Basil Moidore and his family. For God’s sake, where’s your judgment?”

  Monk looked at him with contempt.

  “That is exactly why I am not charging anyone, sir,” he said coldly. “Myles Kellard apparently was strongly attracted by his sister-in-law, which his wife knew about—”

  “That’s no reason for him to kill her,” Runcorn protested. “If he’d killed his wife, maybe. For heaven’s sake, think clearly, Monk!”

  Monk refrained from telling him about Martha Rivett until he should find the girl, if he could, and hear her side of the story and make some judgment himself as to whom he could believe.

  “If he forced his attentions on her,” Monk said with continued patience, “and she defended herself, then there may have been a struggle, in which she was knifed—”

  “With a carving knife?” Runcorn’s eyebrows went up. “Which she just conveniently chanced to have in her bedroom?”

  “I don’t imagine it was chance,” Monk bit back savagely. “If she had reason to think he was coming she probably took it there on purpose.”

  Runcorn grunted.

  “Or it may have been Mrs. Kellard,” Monk continued. “She would have good reason to hate her sister.”

  “Something of an immoral woman, this Mrs. Haslett.” Runcorn’s lips curled in distaste. “First the footman, now her sister’s husband.”

  “There is no proof she encouraged the footman,” Monk said crossly. “And she certainly did not encourage Kellard. Unless you think it’s immoral to be beautiful, I don’t see how you can find fault with her for either case.”

  “You always did have some strange ideas of right.” Runcorn was disgusted—and confused. The ugly headlines in the newspapers threatened public opinion. The letters from the Home Office lay stiff and white on his desk, polite but cold, warning that it would be little appreciated if he did not find a way to end this case soon, and satisfactorily.

  “Well don’t stand there,” he said to Monk. “Get about finding out which of your suspects is guilty. For heaven’s sake, you’ve only got five; you know it has to be one of them. It’s a matter of exclusion. You can stop thinking about Mrs. Kellard, to begin with. She might have a quarrel, but I doubt she’d knife her sister in the night. That’s cold-blooded. She couldn’t expect to get away with it.”

  “She couldn’t know about Chinese Paddy in the street,” Monk pointed out.

  “What? Oh—well, neither could the footman. I’d look for a man in this—or the laundrymaid, I suppose. Either way, get on with it. Don’t stand here in front of my fire talking.”

  “You sent for me.”

  “Yes—well now I’m sending you out again. Close the door as you go—it’s cold in the passage.”

  Monk spent the next two and a half days searching the workhouses, riding in endless cabs through narrow streets, pavements gleaming in the lamplight and the rain, amid the rattle of carts and the noise of street cries, carriage wheels, and the clatter of hooves on the cobbles. He began to the east of Queen Anne Street with the Clerkenwell Workhouse in Farringdon Road, then Holborn Workhouse on the Grey’s Inn Road. The second day he moved westward and tried the St. George’s Workhouse on Mount Street, then the St. Marylebone Workhouse on Northumberland Street. On the third morning he came to the Westminster Workhouse on Poland Street, and he was beginning to get discouraged. The atmosphere depressed him more than any other place he knew. There was some deeply ingrained fear that touched him at the very name, and when he saw the flat, drab sides of the building rearing up he
felt its misery enter into him, and a coldness that had nothing to do with the sharp November wind that whined along the street and rattled an old newspaper in the gutter.

  He knocked at the door, and when it was opened by a thin man with lank dark hair and a lugubrious expression, he stated immediately who he was and his profession, so there should be no mistaking his purpose in being here. He would not allow them even for an instant to suppose he was seeking shelter, or the poor relief such places were built and maintained to give.

  “You’d better come in. I’ll ask if the master’ll see yer,” the man said without interest. “But if yer want ’elp, yer’d best not lie,” he added as an afterthought.

  Monk was about to snap at him that he did not, when he caught sight of one of the “outdoor poor” who did, who were reduced by circumstance to seeking charity to survive from one of these grim institutions which robbed them of decision, dignity, individuality, even of dress or personal appearance; which fed them bread and potatoes, separated families, men from women, children from parents, housed them in dormitories, clothed them in uniforms and worked them from dawn until dusk. A man had to be reduced to despair before he begged to be admitted to such a place. But who would willingly let his wife or his children perish?

  Monk found the hot denial sticking in his throat. It would humiliate the man further, to no purpose. He contented himself with thanking the doorkeeper and following him obediently.

  The workhouse master took nearly a quarter of an hour to come to the small room overlooking the labor yard where rows of men sat on the ground with hammers, chisels and piles of rocks.

  He was a pallid man, his gray hair clipped close to his head, his eyes startlingly dark and ringed around with hollow circles as if he never slept.

  “What’s wrong, Inspector?” he said wearily. “Surely you don’t think we harbor criminals here? He’d have to be desperate indeed to seek this asylum—and a very unsuccessful scoundrel.”

  “I’m looking for a woman who may have been the victim of rape,” Monk replied, a dark, savage edge to his voice. “I want to hear her side of the story.”

  “You new to the job?” the workhouse master said doubtfully, looking him up and down, seeing the maturity in his face, the smooth lines and powerful nose, the confidence and the anger. “No.” He answered his own question. “Then what good do you imagine that will do? You’re not going to try and prosecute on the word of a pauper, are you?”

  “No—it’s just corroborative evidence.”

  “What?”

  “Just to confirm what we already know—or suspect.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Martha Rivett. Probably came about two years ago—with child. I daresay the child would be born about seven months later, if she didn’t lose it.”

  “Martha Rivett—Martha Rivett. Would she be a tall girl with fairish hair, about nineteen or twenty?”

  “Seventeen—and I’m afraid I don’t know what she looked like—except she was a parlormaid, so I expect she was handsome, and possibly tall.”

  “We’ve got a Martha about that age, with a baby. Can’t remember her other name, but I’ll send for her. You can ask her,” the master offered.

  “Couldn’t you take me to her?” Monk suggested. “Don’t want to make her feel—” He stopped, uncertain what word to choose.

  The workhouse master smiled wryly. “More likely she’ll feel like talking away from the other women. But whatever you like.”

  Monk was happy to concede. He had no desire to see more of the workhouse than he had to. Already the smell of the place—overboiled cabbage, dust and blocked drains—was clinging in his nose, and the misery choked him.

  “Yes—thank you. I don’t doubt you’re right.”

  The workhouse master disappeared and returned fifteen minutes later with a thin girl with stooped shoulders and a pale, waxen face. Her brown hair was thick but dull, and her wide blue eyes had no life in them. It was not hard to imagine that two years ago she might have been beautiful, but now she was apathetic and she stared at Monk with neither intelligence nor interest, her arms folded under the bib of her uniform apron, her gray stuff dress ill fitting and harsh.

  “Yes sir?” she said obediently.

  “Martha.” Monk spoke very gently. The pity he felt was like a pain in his stomach, churning and sick. “Martha, did you work for Sir Basil Moidore about two years ago?”

  “I didn’t take anything.” There was no protest in her voice, simply a statement of fact.

  “No, I know you didn’t,” he said quickly. “What I want to know is did Mr. Kellard pay you any attention that was more than you wished?” What a mealymouthed way of expressing himself, but he was afraid of being misunderstood, of having her think he was accusing her of lying, troublemaking, raking up old and useless accusations no one would believe, and perhaps being further punished for slander. He watched her face closely, but he saw no deep emotion in it, only a flicker, too slight for him to know what it meant. “Did he, Martha?”

  She was undecided, staring at him mutely. Misfortune and workhouse life had robbed her of any will to fight.

  “Martha,” he said very softly. “He may have forced himself on someone else, not a maid this time, but a lady. I need to know if you were willing or not—and I need to know if it was him or if it was really someone else?”

  She looked at him silently, but this time there was a spark in her eyes, a little life.

  He waited.

  “Does she say that?” she said at last. “Does she say she weren’t willing?”

  “She doesn’t say anything—she’s dead.”

  Her eyes grew huge with horror—and dawning realization, as memory became sharp and focused again.

  “He killed her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “Was he rough with you?”

  She nodded, the memory of pain sharp in her face and fear rekindling as she thought of it again. “Yes.”

  “Did you tell anyone that?”

  “What’s the point? They didn’t even believe me I was unwilling. They said I was loose-tongued, a troublemaker and no better than I should be. They dismissed me without a character. I couldn’t get another position. No one would take me on with no character. An’ I was with child—” Her eyes hazed over with tears, and suddenly there was life there again, passion and tenderness.

  “Your child?” he asked, although he was afraid to know. He felt himself cringe inside as if waiting for the blow.

  “She’s here, with the other babes,” she said quietly. “I get to see her now and again, but she’s not strong. How could she be, born and raised here?”

  Monk determined to speak to Callandra Daviot. Surely she could use another servant for something? Martha Rivett was one among tens of thousands, but even one saved from this was better than nothing.

  “He was violent with you?” he repeated. “And you made it quite plain you didn’t want his attentions?”

  “He didn’t believe me—he didn’t think any woman meant it when she said no,” she replied with a faint, twisted smile. “Even Miss Araminta. He said she liked to be took—but I don’t believe that. I was there when she married him—an’ she really loved him then. You should have seen her face, all shining and soft. Then after her wedding night she changed. She looked like a sparkling fire the night before, all dressed in cherry pink and bright as you like. The morning after she looked like cold ashes in the grate. I never saw that softness back in her as long as I was there.”

  “I see,” Monk said very quietly. “Thank you, Martha. You have been a great help to me. I shall try to be as much help to you. Don’t give up hope.”

  A fraction of her old dignity returned, but there was no life in her smile.

  “There’s nothing to hope for, sir. Nobody’d marry me. I never see anyone except people that haven’t a farthing of their own, or they’d not be here. And nobody looks for servants in a workhouse, and I wouldn’t leave Emmie anyway. And even if she
doesn’t live, no one takes on a maid without a character, and my looks have gone too.”

  “They’ll come back. Just please—don’t give up,” he urged her.

  “Thank you, sir, but you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Yes I do.”

  She smiled patiently at his ignorance and took her leave, going back to the labor yard to scrub and mend.

  Monk thanked the workhouse master and left also, not to the police station to tell Runcorn he had a better suspect than Percival. That could wait. First he would go to Callandra Daviot.

  8

  MONK’S SENSE OF ELATION was short-lived. When he returned to Queen Anne Street the next day he was greeted in the kitchen by Mrs. Boden, looking grim and anxious, her face very pink and her hair poking in wild angles out of her white cap.

  “Good morning, Mr. Monk. I am glad you’ve come!”

  “What is it, Mrs. Boden?” His heart sank, although he could think of nothing specific he feared. “What has happened?”

  “One of my big kitchen carving knives is missing, Mr. Monk.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I could have sworn I had it last time we had a roast o’ beef, but Sal says she thinks as it was the other one I used, the old one, an’ now I reckon she must be right.” She poked her hair back under her cap and wiped her face agitatedly. “No one else can remember, and May gets sick at the thought. I admit it fair turns my stomach when I think it could’ve been the one that stabbed poor Miss Octavia.”

  Monk was cautious. “When did this thought come to you, Mrs. Boden?” he asked guardedly.

  “Yesterday, in the evening.” She sniffed. “Miss Araminta sent down for a little thin-cut beef for Sir Basil. He’d come in late and wanted a bite to eat.” Her voice was rising and there was a note of hysteria in it. “I went to get my best knife, an’ it weren’t there. That’s when I started to look for it, thinking as it had been misplaced. And it in’t here—not anywhere.”

  “And you haven’t seen it since Mrs. Haslett’s death?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Monk!” Her hands jerked up in the air. “I thought I ‘ad, but Sal and May tell me as they ’aven’t, and when I last cut beef I did it with the old one. I was so upset I can’t recall what I did, and that’s the truth.”