Blood on the Water Page 6

  MONK ARRIVED HOME SHORTLY after sunset, tired and disappointed. He had passed newspaper shops on the way and even one running patterer—a man who made a living reciting the news in a kind of singsong narrative rhyme, easy to memorize and carrying the essence of breaking events. They all agreed on two things: The tragedy had been an unparalleled evil, and the police were close to finding the man responsible.

  “That true?” Scuff asked almost as soon as Monk was through the door. Now that he could read, he was devouring everything current and exciting, as if windows were flying open on all sides with amazing views he had never seen before. “They got someone?” He took Monk’s coat from him and hung it up, all but stepping on his heels as he went into the kitchen where Hester was carving cold roast beef for supper.

  She turned and smiled at him, and Monk felt some of his weariness slipping away, like a heavy garment discarded. He could smell hot mashed potatoes and onions frying in the pan, with fine-chopped cabbage stirred into them, a dish commonly known as “bubble and squeak.”

  “Looks as if they’re close to arresting someone” he said. He had already made up his mind on the way home that he should tell them. Not to tell them would only make it harder to accept when it was the Metropolitan Police, and not the River Police, who brought some kind of resolution, even justice, to the tragedy.

  Scuff tried to hide his sense of injustice, and failed. “That didn’t take long,” he said critically, his face clouded over. “Can’t ’ave been that ’ard, so why’d they make such a fuss?”

  Hester drew in her breath, then changed her mind and waited for Monk to answer.

  “They haven’t got him yet, but a sergeant near Westminster Bridge told me it’ll be soon. He says it was an Egyptian man, reckons it has something to do with the Suez Canal …”

  Hester looked startled, but it was Scuff who spoke.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever ’eard! How do they figure that?” he said hotly. “They’re goin’ to ’ang someone just so they can say they got ’im!” He was staring at Monk, and there was a tiny spark of panic in his eyes. Monk knew he must find an answer that was both honest and credible. It was hard enough lately to keep Scuff at school; believing in law and government—which were naturally alien to him—without seeing Monk do the same, would be impossible.

  What could Monk say? Scuff did not need a lecture in geography and economics, the fortunes made and lost, the men who had died as the price of great undertakings. He needed to believe that the government who ruled his country was largely competent, and almost entirely honest. They figured Scuff to be around sixteen—they would never be sure exactly how old he was—and Monk knew it was age that carried with it a vulnerable mixture of naïveté and worldly wisdom, of hope in the face of the bitterest of experience. It was frightening that Scuff would likely accept whatever Monk or Hester would tell him. The responsibility of it was, for a moment, overwhelming.

  Scuff was waiting for a reply. Monk had already taken too long.

  “Sometimes we arrest the wrong people.” He measured his words, watching Scuff’s face. “There’s often no solid proof, just bits of evidence. But they always have a trial and that’s when the truth comes out …”

  “They tried Sir Oliver,” Scuff said immediately. “He weren’t guilty! They still punished him. He can’t do the law anymore. It would’ve bin too late for ever if they’d ’ave hanged him, wouldn’t it!”

  “He was guilty, Scuff,” Monk said quietly.

  “That man in court was wrong!” Scuff said angrily, challenging Monk, believing he was mistaken now, yet needing him to be right.

  Monk was struck by how much of Scuff’s precious, fragile new world depended upon his belief in Monk and Hester: that they were right, and that they loved him. Those two things would never change, even if food, shelter, and acceptance by others were all destroyed.

  “I know he was wrong,” Monk said as calmly as he could. Scuff should not hear anger or uncertainty in his voice. “And he paid for that. The one who killed those people was hanged for it. But Sir Oliver was wrong too.”

  “He had to do that!” Scuff protested.

  “He thought so,” Monk agreed. “And perhaps that was the truth. But what he did was against the law, and he knew he would have to pay for it.”

  “But he isn’t doing law now.” Scuff clung to his point. “That in’t right. ’E was really, really good at it.” There was desperation in his voice. “They shouldn’t have put him out!”

  “He’s only out for a while,” Monk assured him. “He’s taking a holiday in Europe, going with his father, whom he loves very much.” He made himself smile. “He’ll come back. Then you can ask him if he thinks it was fair or not. I believe he’ll say it was.”

  Scuff stared at him levelly for several seconds. Then he turned to Hester, his eyes demanding, waiting.

  “Sometimes there isn’t any good choice,” she said gently, moving her shoulders a little in a gesture of acceptance. “You have to pick the one you think is least bad, and hope you’re right. I think he was. But not everything comes with an easy answer, or without a price.”

  Scuff turned that over in his mind for a few more moments, and then he seemed satisfied. He looked at Monk again. “So what are they going to do about the boat and all those people what drowned?”

  “Those people who drowned,” Hester corrected him automatically. Scuff’s grammar still tended to slip when he was upset.

  “They’re going to catch who did it, possibly this Egyptian man, and try him. And then if he’s guilty they’ll hang him,” Monk replied.

  “An’ if he isn’t?” Scuff persisted.

  “Then they’ll let him go, and start again,” Monk said firmly.

  Scuff looked a little doubtful. “They’ll look stupid then, as they got it wrong. You think they’ll own up to it? People’ll be red-hot angry. They’re bad enough now, ’cos it’s taking weeks to catch him. If I was them, I’d be scared, and I wouldn’t want to own up I got it wrong.”

  Monk drew in a quick breath, and then let it out again.

  “Of course you would be scared,” Hester said before he could find the words. “But I hope you’d be a lot more scared of how you would feel if you deliberately hanged the wrong person, and let the real one go free.”

  “ ’Course I would!” Scuff said angrily, his skin flushed.

  Hester took a step closer and put her hand on his arm. It was not a caress, but it might as well have been, given the tenderness in it.

  His face brightened immediately.

  Hester kept on walking over to the stove without glancing back to see Monk’s smile. She knew it would be there.

  IT WAS STILL OVER another week and well into June before the police arrested Habib Beshara, an Egyptian currently living in London. They charged him with the murder of one hundred and seventy-nine people by laying and detonating the explosive that blew up and sank the pleasure boat the Princess Mary.

  There was jubilation throughout the city. Newspapers praised the police and looked forward to a speedy trial. Justice would be served. Order and faith in the rule of law returned. Many people even held parties.

  Monk felt a wave of relief, and yet it was not absolute. No formality of a trial, no certainty or pain or fear of an execution could drive out of his mind the memories of the night of the drownings, or the corpses floating inside the hollow of the sunken ship.

  CHAPTER

  4

  AS THE DAYS PASSED leading up to the opening of the trial of Habib Beshara, Monk busied himself even more diligently on the river. He continued stretching his imagination and will to make his force excel, in order to keep up the reputation and morale of his men. The Thames River Police was the oldest force in the country, possibly in the world. It was even older than the “Peelers,” and it deserved every word of praise it had gained over the years. The government’s choice to take the Princess Mary case from them might have been politically expedient, but it was still an insult that was
deeply felt.

  There was plenty to do. There had been a major robbery from one of the waterside warehouses along the Blackwall Reach, and several minor thefts from docksides, lighters, and other vulnerable places. There was always smuggling, often of brandy, especially farther down by Bugsby’s Marshes, beyond Greenwich, where small boats came and went under cover of darkness.

  There were drunken fights, most of which inflicted little injury and were easily settled, but there were bad ones as well. A knife could make it lethal. One moment a fight could be wild, but with only a punch here and there landing; the next someone was bleeding to death and it was murder.

  Added to that, every few days a piece of wreckage from the Princess Mary washed up, bits of wood carved and elegant, made for pleasure, not utility.

  Monk stood in the sun beside the water now, hearing it slurp on the steps below him as the tide rose slowly, each ripple a little higher. He held a carved leg and part of a strut in his hand. It had been turned on a router, making it smooth, showing off the grain. It had once been part of something useful.

  There was no reason to stand here holding it. It was not evidence of anything. Everyone already knew what had happened. He just felt that if he threw it back into the water he was abandoning it, clogging up the river with more detritus. It was too small to salvage, good only to burn in someone’s fire. And yet it had been beautifully made. Somebody had taken time and care with it.

  He put it down on the dockside. Someone would find and make use it. He did not want to burn it on his own fire. Right at this moment, as the trial was starting, he was glad the government had given the case to someone else. It would be Lydiate, and not he, who would have to give evidence and relive the whole thing, witness by witness. Lydiate had not seen the disaster and Monk had, but the salvage crew would be the ones testifying. No one had sent for Monk, probably because they would then have to explain why the case had been taken from him—a fact that would undoubtedly be exploited by Beshara’s defense.

  He turned and walked with his back to the sun, feeling its midsummer heat on his shoulders.

  If Rathbone were here, and still able to practice, would he have taken the case for the defense? Or would he have wanted to prosecute? It was all irrelevant; they were none of them involved. Maybe that was not entirely bad. Rathbone had been promising his father for years that they would spend some time traveling together. One case or another had always intruded. He might have gone on delaying until it was too late. Then his grief would be with him always.

  And, in an oblique way, Monk was feeling a new sense of loyalty to his own men. They had served in the River Police long before he came to it. They were as good as any police in the world, better than most, and they deserved recognition of that, not this cavalier bypassing as if they were less than the regular police. Few of them had said anything, but he saw it in their eyes and heard it in the silences. There was an edge of bitterness to the usual jokes. Everyone worked even harder, most of all Monk himself, as if to prove something.

  He increased his pace across to the warehouse entrance, his attention fully returned to this present robbery.

  HESTER DID NOT FIND it easy to gain a seat in the gallery for the trial of Habib Beshara. After several failed attempts through the normal routes, she called on Rufus Brancaster, who had so ably defended Rathbone when he needed it. In pleading for volunteers or money to support the clinic in Portpool Lane, she was no longer abashed to state a case; but when asking a favor for herself she found it much harder. However, as it happened, Brancaster was both able and very willing to assist. He asked after Rathbone’s well-being with respect and some degree of feeling.

  “He’ll hate missing this,” she said honestly. “That’s really why I’m here, so I can write and tell him what I see. But on the other hand, for years he has been wanting to travel with his father, and always changed his mind at the last moment, or had it changed for him. Do you know Mr. Henry Rathbone?”

  “No,” Brancaster admitted. “But I have seen in Sir Oliver’s face how fond of him he is. And frankly, I think this case has become so political that it’s going to be something of a mess.”

  She smiled agreement, but refrained from adding her opinion. She had said nothing to Monk about her sense of betrayal at the case having been taken from the River Police but only because she knew that would make it even harder for him to deal with. And perhaps also she was a little wiser in political matters than he, having tried so hard when she had returned from the Crimean War to alter some of the worst habits in nursing. She had had high ideals then, like her mentor, Florence Nightingale. Both of them had largely failed, learning lessons as to the power and immovability of the Establishment, especially where its vested interests were concerned. It still raised her anger to explosive levels, if she allowed it to, but she had long discovered that loss of temper more often damaged oneself than anyone else.

  She thanked Brancaster warmly, and on the first day of the trial arrived in plenty of time to claim her seat.

  The very first shock of the morning came with the arrival of the judge, before the case was even introduced. Hester was watching without particular interest when they were asked to rise and the judge entered, robed in scarlet and wearing the customary full-bottomed wig. As he took his seat in the high, carved chair and faced the court, she felt a stab of recognition so sharp as to be almost physical. It was Ingram York, the senior judge who had first favored Rathbone, then sought to destroy him.

  He still had the same sheen of complacency on his broad face, but the lines of quick temper were deeper around his mouth than she remembered. To some he might look pleasantly avuncular, but to Hester he was a dangerous man, his loyalties ready to turn in an instant.

  Thank heaven Rathbone was not here—or worse, involved in the case!

  Who was? She turned to the defense table and saw a lean man. She realized he was of average height, although he looked taller at first glance, perhaps because of the elegance with which he rose to his feet, and gave a slight bow. It was impossible to tell the color of his hair beneath his obligatory barrister’s wig, but his skin and brows suggested it would be fair. His expression was unreadable. But then he was in an impossible situation. To satisfy the law, he must attempt to defend the indefensible. The court clerk addressed him as Mr. Juniver.

  The prosecution was led by Sir Oswald Camborne. He was a thickset man, powerful, heavy-shouldered. His bushy eyebrows and the shadow around his broad jawline suggested dark hair, beginning to gray. At the moment he looked satisfied, and he had good cause.

  Finally Hester made herself look up at the dock where the accused man sat, well guarded on either side by uniformed wardens. He was dark-skinned and his thick hair was black, gray at the temples. He appeared to be in his late forties, which she had not expected. Somehow she had imagined a younger, more fanatical-looking man. She could see no passion in his face, no fire at all. He looked more ill than frightened. It was hard to imagine that he had exacted such a terrible revenge on the people of a country he possibly hated. It seemed not to have brought him satisfaction. But then perhaps revenge never did.

  At last the jury were sworn in and the proceedings began in earnest. Both prosecution and defense gave powerful and lengthy statements of their respective cases before Camborne called his first witness, a ferryman who had been on the river the night of the atrocity.

  Hester found herself stiff, her hands clenched. This was where Monk should have testified. Would Juniver ask why he was not here? But then did any of this actually matter at all, or make any difference to the outcome? Or was it a charade to satisfy the law, so Beshara could be hanged and the public feel that justice had been accomplished?

  The ferryman’s name was Albert Hodge. He stood uncomfortably in the high witness box above the floor of the court. He was an ordinary-seeming man, tired-looking and clearly a little frightened. His face was weathered from spending day and night in the open air, in all seasons. He wore what was probably his best coat. E
ven so, it strained a little across the breadth of his shoulders, which had been made powerful by a lifetime’s drag of the oars through the water, battling the current and the tides.

  Camborne walked out into the middle of the floor, like an actor to center stage.

  “Mr. Hodge,” he began smoothly, even sympathetically, “I’m sorry to ask you to relive what was probably one of the worst nights of your life, but you speak for all the brave men on the river that night who witnessed what happened, and worked until daylight and beyond, trying to rescue the drowning and bring back the bodies of the dead.”

  Hester shivered. The emotion was already so highly charged in the room that she could feel it like a coming storm, heavy and churning with unspent electricity. In a few sentences Camborne had set the tone. Juniver must know that. If he tried to defuse it he would be guilty of seeming to diminish the tragedy, and that would be a fatal mistake.

  Hodge began almost awkwardly, repeating himself and apologizing for it. He need not have; his simple language and obvious distress were far more affecting than any ease of vocabulary would have been.

  In the gallery no one moved. There was just the occasional exhalation of breath and creak of a wooden seat.

  As Hester listened to him speak, she heard Monk’s voice in her mind, saw him at the oars, straining his back to get to the drowning in time, peering through the darkness to see the white of a desperate face, the drift of a woman’s gown beneath the filthy water. She felt the helplessness Hodge tried to express, forgetting the present and the lawyers in their wigs and gowns, even oblivious of Ingram York presiding above them.

  Hodge had worked all night, first receiving the desperate living, then hauling the tragic dead into his boat. Finally there were no more dead, only the shattered pieces of the boat.