Acceptable Loss wm-17 Read online

  Monk excused ’Orrie, for the time being, and went to find Crumble, who appeared to have no other name. He was in the cellar of the pub, moving kegs around with more ease than Monk would have expected from a man so small. He was less than five feet, with round eyes, and features so indistinct that they seemed about to blur into one another. His eyebrows were ragged, his nose shapeless-perhaps the bone had been broken too many times. He spoke with a soft, curiously high-pitched voice.

  “Needed a little ’elp,” he explained when they asked him about ’Orrie’s delay in returning for Parfitt the previous night. “Weren’t thinkin’ o’ the time. Can’t let people get away without payin’, or word’ll get about, an’ everyone’ll be tryin’ it. Mr. Parfitt’s money.”

  Monk made a mental note to find out whose money it would be now, and perhaps also roughly how much of it there was. Constable Coburn would be well qualified to do that.

  He went through the pattern of the evening once again, then thanked Crumble and left.

  It was after six by the time Monk and Orme finally found themselves upstream toward Mortlake. They had borrowed a police boat and now rowed across from the north bank to the south. Finally they were approaching the large vessel moored close to the trees in a quiet, easily overlooked place, sheltered from the wake of passing barges and unseen from the road.

  The north bank opposite was marshy and completely deserted-a place no one would be likely to wander. There were no paths in it, no place to tie a boat and no reason to.

  They rowed across the bright water. The early evening sun was low on the western horizon, already filling the sky with color. It was not yet a year since Monk had taken this job, but even in that time the strength of his arms and chest had increased enormously. He hardly felt the pull of the oars, and he was so accustomed to working with Orme that they fell into rhythm without a word.

  He knew that Parfitt had been murdered, most probably on this boat that lay motionless on the silent river ahead of them. Still, the movement, the creak of the oarlocks, the whisper of water passing, the faint drip from the oars, had a kind of timeless calm that eased the knots inside him. He found he was smiling.

  They pulled up alongside the boat and shipped their oars. Orme stood and caught the rope ladder that lay over the surprisingly high side. They tied their own ropes to it, and then climbed up.

  The boat was larger than it had looked from the shore. It was a good fifty feet long, and about twenty wide at its broadest point. Given the height of it, there would be two decks above the waterline, and perhaps another below, then the bilges. What did Mickey Parfitt use something this size for, moored away up here beyond the docks? Certainly not cargo. There were no masts for sails, and no towpaths on the shore.

  Monk glanced at Orme.

  Orme’s face was turned away, but Monk saw the hard lines of his jaw, the muscles knotted, his shoulders tight.

  “We’d better go below,” Monk said quietly. They had brought crowbars in case it proved necessary to break open the hatches.

  He wondered what had happened on this boat. Had someone crept aboard in the dark, rowing out just as they had, climbing on board silently, creeping soundlessly across the wooden planking and taking Mickey Parfitt by surprise? Or was it someone he had expected, someone he had assumed to be a friend, and then he had suddenly, horribly, found that he was wrong?

  Orme was bending over the hatch.

  “We’ll have to break it,” he said, frowning. “He must’ve been killed on deck.”

  “Or he never got this far,” Monk replied.

  Orme looked up at him. “You mean it could have nothing to do with this? Why would ’Orrie tell that story about bringing him here if he didn’t? If he’s got the guts to lie at all, surely he’d say he knew nothing about it?”

  Monk took one of the crowbars and levered it into the lock in the hatch. “Maybe other people know he took Parfitt out. He might have been seen on the dockside.”

  “At eleven at night?” Orme said skeptically. He slid his own crowbar into place and leaned hard on it, but the heavy metal hasp of the lock did not budge.

  Monk put his weight behind his crowbar too, working in unison with Orme.

  On the fourth attempt the wood splintered. On the fifth it gave, tearing the other end of the lock off and pulling the screws out.

  “What the hell has he got in here that’s so valuable?” Orme said in amazement. “Smuggling? Brandy, tobacco? Must be a hell of a lot of it. Unless whoever killed him took it?”

  Monk did not reply. He hoped that was what it was. “I think ’Orrie’s afraid of Tosh, don’t you?”

  Orme straightened his back, pulling the hatch open. “You mean Tosh told him what to say? That would mean Tosh has a fair idea of what really happened.”

  The sky was darkening around them, the light draining out of the air. There was no sound but the faint ripple of the water.

  “Or else he’s protecting someone else,” Monk suggested. He moved closer to the black square of the hatch. Only the new wood where the screws were torn out showed pale. “We’d better get down there while we can still see. We’ll need a lantern below anyway.”

  They did not look at each other. They both knew what they were afraid of. The same memories crowded both their minds.

  Orme struck a match. In the still air he did not have to shelter it; carrying it carefully, he started down the wooden steps into the bowels of the boat.

  Monk followed. It was surprisingly easy, and he knew as he went down and his hand found the rail that this deck was designed for passengers, not cargo. A sense of foreboding closed in on him. Even the smell in the air was disturbingly familiar: the richness of cigar smoke, the overripe sweetness of good alcohol, but stale, mixed with the odor of human bodies.

  Orme held the lantern high and shed its light onto the smooth painted walls of a wide cabin. It looked something like a floating withdrawing room. There were cupboards at one end, and a bench with a polished mahogany surface, a gleaming brass rail around the edges.

  It brought back a memory of Jericho Phillips’s boat so sharply that for an instant Monk felt his gorge rise and was afraid he was going to be sick. He strode across the carpeted floor to the door into the next cabin and jerked it open so hard it crashed against the wall and swung back on him.

  Orme followed him with the light. Monk heard his breath expelled in a sigh. This cabin was similar, only larger, and at the far end there was a makeshift stage.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Orme said, then apologized instantly. The horror in his voice made his words scarcely a blasphemy, more a cry for help, as if God could change the truth of what the sergeant knew.

  Monk needed no explanation; it was his worst imagining come true again. This was another boat, just like Jericho Phillips’s, where pornographic shows of children entertained those with a perverted addiction to such things, and with an addiction to the danger of watching it live. This was what Phillips would have done with Scuff, and Monk and Hester would never have found him. Even if they had, what of his heart and mind would have remained whole, let alone his body?

  Were there boys here now, locked behind other doors, too afraid to make a sound?

  Orme moved forward, and Monk put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” he ordered. Orme was breathing hard, shaking a little. For all his years on the river, there were still times when the sight of pain tore through his control.

  They both stood motionless, ears straining. The boat was well made. Even the joints in the wood did not creak with the faint movement of the water. The tide had turned and was coming in again.

  “They must be here.” Monk dropped his voice to a whisper. “They can’t bring them out here for the show every time. Too many other boats-they’d be seen. And too many chances to escape. They’re here somewhere.” He could not even bring himself to say that they might all be dead.

  “A mutiny?” Orme suggested with a lift of hope. “Maybe they killed him? One hit him with something, two others strangled him?
That could be why the odd marks. Maybe it isn’t a rope at all? Could be boys’ shirts, all tied together.” He turned to face Monk, his features ghostly in the lantern light. “They’d have gone. We’ll never find them.” All the emotion of his unspoken meaning was in his face.

  “No point in even looking,” Monk agreed. “Murder by persons unknown.” He took a deep breath. “But we’d better make certain. There’ll be rooms for them below, and a galley of some sort. They have to feed them.”

  Orme said nothing.

  They found the ladder down and descended to the deck below. Immediately it was different. The heavier, more fetid air closed over them, and the lantern shone on darker walls only a couple of feet away. Monk felt the sweat break out on his skin, and then chill instantly. His heart was knocking in his chest.

  Orme pushed at the first door, but it held fast. He lifted his foot and kicked it with all his weight. It burst in, and there was a cry from behind it. He held the lantern higher and the yellow light showed four small boys, thin, narrow-chested, half-naked, and cowering together in the corner.

  Monk wiped his hand over his face, forcing himself to focus.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Parfitt is dead. We’re going to take you away from here.” He stepped forward.

  They all shrank farther back, flinching, though his hand was several feet away from the closest of them.

  He stopped. What could he tell them that they could believe? They probably didn’t know anything but this. Where was he going to send them, anyway? Back into the streets? Some orphanage, where they would be looked after? By whom? Perhaps Hester would know.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated, feeling useless. They wouldn’t believe him; they shouldn’t. Perhaps they shouldn’t believe anyone. “Are there more of you?”

  One nodded slowly.

  “We’ll get you all, and then take you ashore.” Where to? How many boats would they need? It was night already; what was he going to do with them? A dozen or more small boys: frightened, hungry, possibly ill, certainly hideously abused. Then he thought of Durban, his predecessor, and remembered his work with the Foundling Hospital. “We’ll go where they’ll look after you,” he said more firmly. “Give you warm clothes, food, a clean bed to sleep in.”

  They looked at him as if they had no idea what he was saying.

  It took Monk and Orme the rest of the night to find all of the fourteen boys and take them ashore, a boatload at a time, persuade them they were safe, and then get them to the nearest hospital that would accept them. Later the hospital would send them on to a proper institution specifically for foundlings. Technically, of course, they were too old for that, but Monk trusted in the charity of the matrons in charge.

  Dawn was coming up, pale over the east and lighting the water, clean and chill, soft colors half bleached away, when Monk stood with Orme on the dock outside the Wapping station of the River Police. He was so tired, his bones ached. He realized that in the three weeks since Jericho Phillips’s death he had slowly let go of at least part of the horror of it. Now it was back as though it had been only yesterday. It was the sweat and alcohol in the air, the claustrophobia belowdecks. But sharper and more real than anything else, filling his nose and throat, it was the smell of fear and death.

  Mickey Parfitt was another Jericho Phillips, one that catered to an upriver clientele, away from the teeming closeness of the docks. Instead it was the quiet reaches of the river where deserted banks were marshy, mist-laden at morning and evening, and stretches of silver water were tree-lined. But in the night the same twisted brutality was enacted upon children. Probably the same blackmail of men addicted to their appetites, to the danger of illegal indulgence, the adrenaline pumping through their blood at the fear of being caught. It was the same obliviousness to what they were doing to others, perhaps because the others were children of the streets and docksides, already abandoned by circumstance.

  Did Monk want to know who had killed Mickey Parfitt? Not really. It was a case in which he would be happier to fail. But could he simply not try? That was a different thing. Then he would be acting as both judge and jury. About Parfitt he was sure, but what about the murderer’s next victim, and the one after that? Could Monk really set himself up to decide whose murder was acceptable and whose deserved trial and probably punishment? He had made too many mistakes in the past for such certainty. Or was that the coward’s fear of responsibility? Leave it to someone else; then it can’t be your fault.

  “Where do we begin?” Orme said quietly as the light broadened in the sky.

  A string of barges was coming slowly up the river, their wash barely disturbing the surface.

  Monk glanced sideways once, seeing the anger and the grief in Orme’s blunt face. They faced a long, slow journey barely begun, and Orme’s trust mattered to Monk intensely.

  “Find out more about him,” he replied slowly, searching for the words. “Perhaps his death was justified, perhaps not. It could have been a rival. Who was behind him? Who put in the money-or took it out? Was he blackmailing people too?”

  Orme nodded slowly. He looked quickly at Monk, then back again at the river.

  “Have some breakfast first, and a little sleep. Get warm,” Monk added with a slight smile.

  CHAPTER 3

  Oliver Rathbone waited in the withdrawing room for Margaret to come downstairs. They were going to dine with her parents, and as usual, it was a somewhat formal affair. Her two sisters and their husbands would also be present.

  He walked to the windows and stared out at the darkening garden. The September sun was warm on the last of the flowers in the herbaceous border: purples and golds, autumn colors. It was the richest season; soon even the leaves would flame. Berries would ripen. Blue wood smoke and early morning frosts were not far away. For him the glory of autumn always held an echo of sadness, a knowledge that beauty is a living thing, delicate, capable of injury, even of death.

  This would be the first time he would dine with Arthur Ballinger since the drownings at Execution Dock. Rathbone was dreading it, yet of course it was inevitable. Ballinger was his father-in-law, and Margaret was unusually close to her family.

  Sullivan had made it hideously clear that he blamed the man behind the child-abuse racket for his downfall, from beginning to end, but he had offered no proof that it was Ballinger, so legally and morally there was nothing Rathbone could do about it. Sullivan’s words had been no more than those of a desperate man, disgraced beyond recall.

  Outside, a flock of starlings swirled up into the evening sky, and clouds drifted in from the south.

  For Margaret’s sake, Rathbone knew he must pretend. It would be difficult. He did not find family gatherings easy anyway. He was very close to his own father, but their dinners together had the quiet comfort of old friends, conversation about art and philosophy, law and literature, gentle amusement at the oddities of life and human nature. There were companionable silences while they ate bread and cheese, good pate, drank a little red wine. Sometimes they had apple pie and cream by the fireside in the evening, and shared a joke or two.

  The door opened and Margaret came in. She saw Rathbone standing and immediately apologized, assuming she had kept him waiting. She looked lovely in a gown of rich, soft green, the huge crinoline skirt bordered with a pattern of Greek keys in gold.

  “I was early,” he replied, finding it easier to smile than he had expected. “But I would have been happy to wait. You look wonderful. Is the gown new? Surely I couldn’t have forgotten it?”

  The stiffness disappeared from her back and became the grace he had first seen in her when he had been drawn to her sense of humor, and the innate dignity that was her loveliest gift.

  Now he found his anxiety slipping away. They would negotiate the evening, whatever challenges it offered. It was a family occasion; the past and its unproved accusations should be left behind. To entertain them was unjust.

  “Come.” He of
fered her his arm. “The carriage will be at the door any moment.” He smiled at her and saw the answering pleasure in her eyes.

  They arrived just after Margaret’s elder sister, Gwen, and her husband, Wilbert, and followed them into the long oak-paneled withdrawing room. Wilbert was thin, fair-haired, and rather earnest. Rathbone had never discovered exactly what occupation he followed, but apparently he had inherited money and was interested in politics. Gwen was only a year or two older than Margaret, and not unlike her to look at. She had the same high, smooth brow and soft hair; her features were prettier, but lacked a little of Margaret’s individuality. Because of that, to him she was less attractive.

  The eldest sister, Celia, was already present, sitting on the couch opposite her husband, George. She was the handsomest of the three. She had beautiful dark hair and eyes, but Rathbone noticed that she was beginning to thicken a little in the waist and was already more buxom than he cared for. The diamonds at her ears must have cost as much as a good pair of carriage horses, if not more.

  Mrs. Ballinger let go the embrace of her middle daughter and came forward to welcome Margaret, the last of her daughters to achieve matrimony, but also the one who had done the best. Rathbone had not only money, but now a title, and he was very personable into the bargain.

  “How lovely to see you again, Oliver,” she said warmly. “I am so happy your commitments allowed you time for a little pleasure. Margaret, my dear, you look wonderful!” She kissed Margaret on both cheeks and offered her hand to Rathbone.

  A moment later Ballinger himself was shaking Rathbone’s hand with a firm grip. However, his eyes were guarded, offering no clues as to his inner thoughts. Had it always been like that, or was Rathbone noticing it now, because of Phillips’s death and Sullivan’s accusation?