The Twisted Root Read online

  "Hello, Mrs. Monk. You’re looking a little peaked," Phillips said cheerfully. "What can I do for you?"

  "I’m glad I found you." She turned and regarded the young man, white-faced, who sat on the floor with his legs splayed out. "Are you all right?" she asked him.

  He nodded, embarrassed.

  "Just got a scare," Phillips said with a grin. "One o’ them corpses moved, and young Jake ’ere near fainted away. Nobody told ’im corpses sometimes passes wind. Gases don’t stop, son, just ’cos you’re dead."

  Jake scrambled to his feet, running his hands through his hair and trying to look as if he was ready for duty again.

  Hester looked at the tables. There were two bodies laid out under unbleached sheets.

  "Not as many lately," Phillips remarked, following her glance.

  "Good!" she said.

  "No—not died here, brought in for the students," he corrected. "Old Thorpe’s in a rare fury. Can’t get ’em."

  "Where do they come from?"

  "God knows! Resurrectionists!" he said with black humor.

  Jake was staring at him, openmouthed. He let out a sigh between his teeth.

  "D’yer mean it?" he said hoarsely. "Grave robbers, like?"

  "No, of course I don’t, you daft ha’porth!" Phillips said, shaking his head. "Get on with your work." He turned to Hester. "What is it, Mrs. Monk?" All the light vanished from his face. "Have you seen Cleo Anderson? Is there anything we can do for ’er, apart from hope for a miracle?"

  "Work for one," she said bleakly. She turned and led the way back up the stairs.

  He followed close behind, and when they were outside in the air he asked what she meant.

  "Someone else was being blackmailed as well, we are almost sure," she explained, stopping beside him. "Treadwell spent a lot more money than Cleo gave him or he earned..."

  Hope lit in his face. "You mean that person could have killed him? How do we find out who it was?" He looked at her confidently, as if he had every faith she would have an answer.

  "I don’t know. I’ll settle at the moment just for proving he has to exist." She looked at him very steadily. "If you had to ... no, if you wanted to, could you work out exactly how much medicine has gone missing in, say, the four months before Treadwell’s death?"

  "Perhaps ... if I had a really good reason to," he said guardedly. "I wouldn’t know that unless I understood the need."

  "Not knowing isn’t going to help," she told him miserably. "Not charging her with theft won’t matter if they hang her for murder."

  His face blanched as if she had slapped him, but he did not look away. "What good can you do?" he asked very quietly. "I really care about Cleo. She’s worth ten of that pompous swine in his oak-paneled office." He did not need to name Thorpe. She shared his feelings, and he knew it. He was watching her for an answer, hoping.

  "I don’t really know—maybe not a great deal," she admitted. "But if I know how much is missing, and how much reached the patients she treated, if they are pretty well the same, then he got money from someone else."

  "Of course they’re the same. What do you think she did? Give it to him to sell?" He was indignant, almost angry.

  "If I were being blackmailed out of everything I earned except about two shillings a week, I’d be tempted to pay in kind," she answered him.

  He looked chastened. His lips thinned into a hard line. "I’m glad somebody got that scheming sod," he said harshly. "I just wish we could prove it wasn’t poor Cleo. Or come to that, anyone else he was doing the same thing to. How are we going to do that?" He looked at her expectantly.

  "Tell me exactly how much medicine went over the few months before his death, as nearly as you can."

  "That won’t tell us who the other person is—or people!"

  "My husband is trying to find out where Treadwell went that might lead us to them."

  He looked at her narrowly. "Is he any good at that?"

  "Very good indeed. He used to be the best detective in the police force," she said with pride.

  "Oh? Who’s the best now?"

  "I haven’t the slightest idea. He left." Then, in case Phillips should think him dishonest, she added, "He resented some of the discipline. He can’t abide pomposity either, especially when it is coupled with ignorance."

  Phillips grinned, then the grin vanished and he was totally serious again.

  "I’ll get you a list o’ those things. I could tell you pretty exact, if it helps."

  "It’ll help."

  She spent the rest of the day and into the early evening trudging from one house to the next with Monk’s list of Cleo’s patients and Phillips’s list of the missing medicines. She was accustomed to seeing people who were suffering illness or injury. Nursing had been her profession for several years, and she had seen the horror of the battlefield and the disease which had decimated the wounded afterwards. She had shared the exhaustion and the fear herself, and the cold and the hunger.

  Nevertheless, to go into these homes, bare of comfort because everything had been sold to pay for food and warmth, to see the pain and too often the loneliness also, was more harrowing than she had expected. These men were older than the ones she had nursed in the Crimea; their wounds were not fresh. They had earned them in different battles, different wars; still, there was so much that was the same it hurled her back those short four years, and old emotions washed over her, almost to drowning.

  Time and again she saw a dignity which made her have to swallow back tears as old men struggled to hide their poverty and force their bodies, disabled by age and injury, to rise and offer her some hospitality. She was walking in the footsteps of Cleo Anderson, trying to give some of the same comfort, and failing because she had not the means.

  Rage burned inside her also. No one should have to beg for what he had more than earned.

  She loathed asking for information about the medicine they had had. Nearly all of them knew that Cleo was being tried for her life. All Hester could do was tell the truth. Every last man was eager to give her any help he could, to open cupboards and show her powders, to give her day-by-day recounting of all he had had.

  She would have given any price she could think of to be able to promise them it would save Cleo, but she could only offer hope, and little enough of that.

  When she arrived home at quarter past ten, Monk was beginning to worry about her. He was standing up, unable to relax in spite of his own weariness. She did notice that he had taken his boots off.

  "Where have you been?" he demanded.

  She walked straight to him and put her head on his shoulder. He closed his arms around her, holding her gently, laying his cheek to her brow. He did not need her to explain the emotion she felt; he saw it in her face, and understood.

  "It’s wrong," she said after a few minutes, still holding on to him. "How can we do it? We turn to our bravest and best when we are in danger, we sacrifice so much—fathers and brothers, husbands and sons—and then a decade, a generation later, we only want to forget! What’s the matter with us?"

  He did not bother to answer, to talk about guilt or debt, or the desire to be happy without remembering that others have purchased it at a terrible price—even resentment and simple blindness and failure of imagination. They had both said it all before.

  "What did you find?" she said at last, straightening up and looking at him.

  "I’m not sure," he replied. "Do you want a cup of tea?"

  "Yes." She went towards the kitchen, but he moved ahead of her.

  "I’ll bring it." He smiled. "I wasn’t asking you to fetch one for me—even though I’ve probably walked as far as you have, and to as little purpose."

  She sat down and took off her boots as well. It was a particular luxury, something she would only do at home. And it was still very sweet to realize this was her home, she belonged there, and so did he.

  When he returned with the tea and she had taken a few sips, she asked him again what he had learned.

&n
bsp; "A lot of Treadwell’s time is unaccounted for," he replied, trying his own tea and finding it a trifle too hot. "He had a few unusual friends. One of his gambling partners was even an undertaker, and Treadwell did a few odd tasks for him."

  "Enough to earn him the kind of money we’re looking for?" She did not know whether she wanted the answer to be yes or no.

  "Not remotely," he replied. "Just driving a wagon, presumably because he was good with horses, and perhaps knew the roads. He probably did it as a favor because of their friendship. This young man seems to have given him entry to cock-fights and dog races when he wouldn’t have been allowed in otherwise. They even had a brothel or two in common."

  Hester shrugged. "It doesn’t get us any further, does it?" She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  Monk frowned thoughtfully. "I was wondering how Treadwell ever discovered about Cleo and the medicines in the first place."

  She was about to dismiss it as something that hardly mattered now when she realized what he meant.

  "Well, not from Miriam," she said with conviction.

  "From any of Cleo’s patients?" he asked. "How could Treadwell, coachman to Major Stourbridge in Bayswater, and gambler and womanizer in Kentish Town, come to know of thefts of morphine and other medicines from a hospital on Hampstead Heath?"

  She stared at him steadily, a first, tiny stirring of excitement inside her. "Because somewhere along the chain of events he crossed it. It has to be—but where?" She held up her fingers, ticking off each step. "Patients fall ill and go to the hospital, where Cleo gets to know of them because she works there as a nurse."

  "Which has nothing to do with Treadwell," he answered. "Unless one of them was related to him or to someone he knew well."

  "They are all old and live within walking distance of the hospital," she pointed out. "Most of them are alone, the lucky few with a son or daughter, or grandchild, like old John Robb."

  "Treadwell’s family was all in Kentish Town," Monk said. "That much I ascertained. His father is dead and his mother remarried a man from Hoxton."

  "And none of them have anything to do with Miriam Gardiner," she went on. "So he didn’t meet them driving her." She held up the next finger. "Cleo visits them in their homes and knows what they need. She steals it from the hospital. By the way, I’m sure the apothecary knew but turned a blind eye. He’s a good man, and very fond of her." She smiled slightly. "Very fond indeed. He regards her as something of a saint. I think she is the only person who really impresses Phillips. Fermin Thorpe certainly doesn’t." She recalled the scene in the morgue. "He even teased the new young morgue attendant that Thorpe was buying his cadavers for the medical students from resurrectionists! Poor boy was horrified until he realized Phillips was teasing him."

  "Resurrectionists?" Monk said slowly.

  "Yes—grave robbers who dig up corpses and sell them to medical establishments for..."

  "I know what resurrectionists are," he said quickly, leaning forward, his eyes bright. "Are you sure it was a joke?"

  "Well, it’s not very funny," she agreed with a frown. "But Phillips is like that—a bit... wry. I like him—actually, I like him very much. He’s one of the few people in the hospital I would trust—" Then suddenly she realized what Monk was thinking. "You mean... Oh, William! You think he really was buying them from resurrectionists? He was the other person Treadwell was blackmailing. But how could Treadwell know that?"

  "Not necessarily that he was blackmailing him," he said, grasping her hand in his urgency. "Treadwell was friendly with this undertaker. What could be simpler than to sell a few bodies? That could have been the extra driving he was doing: delivering corpses for Fermin Thorpe—at a very nice profit to himself!"

  "Wonderful!" She breathed out with exquisite relief. It was only a chink of light in the darkness, but it was the very first one. "At least it might be enough for Oliver to raise doubt." She smiled with a twist. "And even if he isn’t guilty, I wouldn’t mind seeing Thorpe thoroughly frightened and embarrassed—I wouldn’t mind in the slightest."

  "I’m sure you wouldn’t," he agreed with a nod. "Although we mustn’t leap too quickly..."

  "Why not? There’s hardly time to waste."

  "I know. But Treadwell may not have blackmailed Thorpe. The money may all have come from selling the bodies."

  "Then let Thorpe prove it. That should be interesting to watch."

  His eyes widened very slightly. "You really do loathe him, don’t you?"

  "I despise him," she said fiercely. "He puts his own vanity before relieving the pain of those who trust him to help them." She made it almost a challenge, as if Monk had been defending him.

  He smiled at her. "I’m not trying to spare him anything, I just want to use it to the best effect. I don’t know what that is yet, but we will only get one chance. I want to save my fire for the target that will do the most good for Cleo—or Miriam— not just the one that does the most harm to Thorpe... or the one that gives us the most satisfaction."

  "I see." She did. She had been indulging in the luxury of anger and she recognized it. "Yes, of course. Just don’t leave it too long."

  "I won’t," he promised. "Believe me—we will use it."

  On Sunday, Monk returned to the undertaker to pursue the details of Treadwell’s work for him and to find proof if indeed he had taken bodies to the Hampstead hospital and been handsomely paid for it. If he were to use it, either in court or to pressure Thorpe for any other reason, then he must have evidence that could not be denied or explained away.

  Hester continued with her visits to the rest of Cleo’s patients, just to conclude the list of medicines. She was uncertain if it would be any use, but she felt compelled to do it, and regardless of anything else, she wanted to go and see John Robb again. It was over a week since she had last been, and she knew he would be almost out of morphine. He was failing, the pain growing worse, and there was little she could do to help him. She had some morphine left, taken with Phillips’s connivance, and she had bought a bottle of sherry herself. It was illogical to give it to him rather than anyone else, but logic had no effect on her feelings.

  She found him alone, slumped in his chair almost asleep, but he roused himself when he heard her footsteps. He looked paler than she had ever seen him before, and his eyes more deeply sunken. She had nursed too many dying men to delude herself that he had long left now, and she could guess how it must tear Michael Robb to have to leave him alone.

  She forced her voice to be cheerful, but she could not place the barrier between them of pretending that she could not see how ill he was.

  "Hello," she said quietly, sitting opposite him. "I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ve been trying to find some way of helping Cleo, and I think we may have succeeded." She was aware as she spoke that if she embroidered the truth a little he would probably not live long enough to know.

  He smiled and raised his head. "That’s the best news you could have brought me, girl. I worry about her. All the good she did, and now this has to happen. Wish I could do something to help—but I think maybe all I could do would make it worse." He was watching her, waiting for her to reply.

  "Don’t worry, nobody will ask you," she answered him. She was sure the last thing the prosecution would do willingly would be to draw in the men like John Robb who would indeed show that Cleo had handed on the medicines, because they would also show so very effectively why. The sympathies of every decent man in the jury would be with Cleo. Perhaps some of them had been in the army themselves, or had fathers or brothers or sons who had. Their outrage at what had happened to so many old soldiers would perhaps outweigh their sense of immediate justice against the killer of a blackmailing coachman. Tobias would not provoke that if he could help it.

  Hester herself would be delighted if it came out into the public hearing, but only if it could be managed other than at Cleo’s expense. So far she had thought of no way.

  He looked at her closely. "But I was one s
he took those medicines for—wasn’t I?"

  "She took them for a lot of people," Hester answered honestly. "Eighteen of you altogether, but you were one of her favorites." She smiled. "Just as you’re mine."

  He grinned as if she were flirting with him. His pleasure was only too easy to see, in spite of the tragedy of the subject they were discussing. His eyes were misty. "But some o’ those medicines she took were for me, weren’t they?" he pressed her.

  "Yes. You and others."

  "And where are you getting them now, girl? I’d sooner go without than have you in trouble, too."

  "I know you would, but there’s no need to worry. The apothecary gave me these." That was stretching the truth a little, but it hardly mattered. "I’ll make you a cup of tea and we’ll sit together for a while. I brought a little sherry—not from the hospital, I got it myself." She stood up as she said it. "Don’t need milk this time—we’ll give it a bit of heart."

  "That’d be good," he agreed. "Then we’ll talk a bit. You tell me some o’ those stories about Florence Nightingale and how she bested those generals and got her own way. You tell a good story, girl."

  "I’ll do that," she promised, going over to the corner which served as kitchen, pouring water into the kettle, then setting it on the hob. When it was boiled she made the tea, putting the sherry fairly liberally into one mug and leaving the morphine on the shelf so Michael would find it that evening. She returned with the tea and set one mug, the one with the sherry, for him, the one without for herself.

  He picked up his mug and began to sip slowly. "So, tell me about how you outwitted those generals then, girl. Tell me the things you’re doing better now because o’ the war an’ what you learned."

  She recounted to him all sorts of bits and pieces she could remember, tiny victories over bureaucracy, making it as funny as possible, definitely adding more color than there had been at the time.

  He drank the tea, then set down the empty mug. "Go on," he prompted. "I like the sound o’ your voice, girl. Takes me back..."