Dark Assassin

by Anne Perry

  “Perhaps I should not deny her the chance to speak with you,” Argyll said at last. “If you will excuse me, I shall inform her alone, and then see what she wishes.” He took Monk’s acquiescence for granted and rose to his feet. He walked out of the room a little unsteadily, only saving himself from bumping into the doorjamb at the last moment, and leaving the door itself gaping open.

  “Poor man,” Orme said softly. “Wish we could tell ’im it were an accident.” He looked at Monk with a question in his eyes.

  “So do I,” Monk agreed. It began to look as if Mary Havilland had at least temporarily lost her mental balance, but he did not want to say so, even to Orme.

  The butler came in and stood like a black shadow just inside the door. “Mrs. Argyll asked me to see if there is anything I could bring for you gentlemen. Perhaps a glass of”—he considered—“ale?” He was not going to offer them a glass of good sherry they would not appreciate, and certainly not the best brandy.

  Monk realized how achingly hungry he was. Orme must be also. Perhaps that was at least in part why he was still cold.

  “Thank you,” he accepted. “We’ve come straight from the river. A sandwich and a glass of ale would be very gracious of you.”

  The butler looked faintly uncomfortable, as if realizing he should have thought of it himself. “Immediately, sir,” he acknowledged. “Would cold roast beef and a spot of mustard be right?”

  “It would be perfect,” Monk answered.

  Orme thanked him warmly as soon as the door was closed. “ ’Ope it comes afore Mr. Argyll gets back,” he added. “Wouldn’t be decent to eat it in front of ’im, specially if Mrs. Argyll comes too. Don’t reckon as she will, though. Most ladies take bad news ’ard.”

  The sandwiches arrived and were consumed ravenously, just before Argyll returned. But Orme was mistaken in his second guess: Jenny Argyll chose to see them. She came in ahead of her husband, a handsome woman with eyes and mouth startlingly like those of her dead sister, but darker hair and not the same high cheekbones. Now she too was bleached of color and her eyelids were puffy from weeping, but she was remarkably well composed, given the circumstances. She was wearing a dark red woollen dress with a wide skirt and her hair was elaborately coiffed in a style that must have taken her lady’s maid at least half an hour to accomplish. She regarded Monk with civility but no interest at all.

  Argyll closed the door behind them and waited until his wife was seated.

  Monk expressed his condolences again.

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Argyll said briefly. “My husband says that Mary fell off Westminster Bridge. Toby was with her. Perhaps he tried to stop her and failed. Poor Toby. I think he still loved her, in spite of everything.” The tears filled her eyes again but she ignored them and her face remained under control. It was impossible to tell what the effort cost her. She did not look at her husband, nor did she reach to touch him.

  Monk should have accepted the answer implicit in her words, and yet in spite of all sense he refused to. When Hester’s father had shot himself because of the unanswerable debt he had been cheated into, she had returned from the Crimea, where she had been serving as a military nurse, and redoubled her efforts to strengthen her family and to fight all the wrongs she encountered. It had been her resolve that had strengthened Monk to struggle against the burden that had seemed impossible to him. She was acid-tongued—at least he had thought so—opinionated and unwise in her expression of it, hasty to judge and quick-tempered, but even he, who had found her so irritating, had never doubted her courage or her iron will.

  Of course he had seen the passion, the laughter, and the vulnerability in her since then. Was he imagining in Mary Havilland something she had never possessed? Whatever the cost to Mrs. Argyll, he wanted to know.

  “I understand that your father met his death recently,” he said gravely. “And that Miss Havilland found it very difficult to come to terms with.”

  She looked at him wearily. “She never did,” she answered. “She couldn’t accept that he took his own life. She wouldn’t accept it, in spite of all the evidence. I’m afraid she became…obsessed.” She blinked. “Mary was very…strong-willed, to put it at its kindest. She was close to Papa, and she couldn’t believe that something could be so wrong and he would not confide in her. I’m afraid perhaps they were not as…as close as she imagined.”

  “Could she have been distressed over the breaking of her betrothal to Mr. Argyll?” Monk asked, trying to grasp on to some reason why a healthy young woman should do something so desperate as plunge over the bridge. And had she meant to take Argyll with her, or was he trying, even at the risk of his own life, to save her? Did he still love her so much? Or was it out of guilt because he had abandoned her, possibly for someone else? They really did need the surgeon to ascertain if she had been with child. That might explain a great deal. It was a hideous thought, but if he would not marry her, perhaps she had felt suicide the only answer, and had determined to take him with her. He was, in a sense, the cause of her sin. But that would be true only if she were with child and certain of it.

  “No,” Mrs. Argyll said flatly. “She was the one who broke it. If anything, it was Toby who was distressed. She…she became very strange, Mr. Monk. She seemed to take against us all. She became fixed upon the idea of a dreadful disaster that was going to happen in the new sewer tunnels that my husband’s company is constructing.” She looked very tired, as if revisiting an old and much-battled pain. “My father had a morbid fear of enclosed spaces, and he was rather reactionary. He was afraid of the new machines that made the work far faster. I imagine you are aware of the urgency of building a new system for the city?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Argyll, I think we all are,” he answered. He did not like the picture that was emerging, and yet he could not deny it. It was only his own emotion that drove him to fight it, a completely irrational link in his mind between Mary Havilland and Hester. It was not even anything so definite as a thought, just words used to describe her by a landlady who barely knew her, and the protective grief over the suicide of a father.

  “My father allowed it to become an obsession with him,” she went on. “He spent his time gathering information, campaigning to have the company alter its methods. My husband did everything to help him see reason and appreciate that deaths in construction are unavoidable from time to time. Men can be careless. Landslips happen; the London clay is dangerous by its nature. The Argyll Company has fewer incidents than most others. That is a fact he could have checked with ease, and he did. He could point to no mishaps at all on this job, in fact, but it did not calm his fears.”

  “Reason does not calm irrational fears,” Argyll said quietly, his voice hoarse with his own emotion, unable to reach towards hers. Perhaps he feared that if he did, they might both lose what control they had. “Don’t harrow yourself up anymore,” he went on. “There was nothing you could have done then, or now. His terrors finally overtook him. Who knows what another man sees in the dark hours of the night?”

  “He took his life at night?” Monk asked.

  It was Argyll who answered, his voice cold. “Yes, but I would be obliged if you did not press the matter further. It was thoroughly investigated at the time. No one else was in the least at fault. How could anyone have realized that his madness had progressed so far? Now it appears that poor Mary was also far more unstable than we knew, and it had preyed upon her to the point where she herself could not exercise her human or Christian judgment anymore.”

  Jenny turned to look at him, frowning. “Christian?” she challenged him. “If anyone is so sunk in despair that they feel death is the only answer for them, can’t we have a little…pity?” There was anger in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry!” Argyll said quickly, but without looking at her. “I did not mean to imply blasphemy against your father. We shall never know what demons drove him to such a resort. Even Mary I could forgive, if she had not taken Toby with her! That…that is…” He was unable to continue.
The tears spilled over his cheeks and he turned away, shadowing his face.

  Jenny stood up, stiff and unsteady. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Monk. I think there is little of any use that we can tell you. Perhaps you would excuse us. Pendle will see you to the door.” She went to the bell rope and pulled it. The butler appeared almost immediately and Monk and Orme took their leave, after having given Mr. Argyll a card and requested that he formally identify the bodies the following day, when he was a little more recovered.

  “Poor devil,” Orme said with feeling when they were outside on the icy footpath again. Mist was veiling the streetlamps as if in gauze. A frail sickle-shaped moon sailed between the stars, high above the rooftops. “Both of ’em lost family in the one night. Funny ’ow an instant can change everything. D’you think she meant to?”

  “Go over herself, or take him?” Monk asked, beginning to walk down towards the Westminster Bridge, where they would be more likely to find a hansom. He was still hoping it had been an accident.

  “Not sure as I know,” Orme replied, keeping step with him. “Din’t look to me as if she were trying to jump. Facing the wrong way, for a start. Jumpers usually face the water.”

  Monk felt a rush of warmth even though the slick of moisture on the footpath was turning to ice under his feet. He was not going to let go of hope, not yet.

  Monk reached home before nine o’clock. His return was far later than it would have been on a more usual day, but there was little that was routine in his new job. Even his best effort might not be enough; second best certainly would not. Every day he learned more of the skills, the knowledge, and the respect that Durban had had. He admired the qualities that had earned that respect, and they awed him. He felt continually a step behind Durban. No, that was absurd. He was yards behind him.

  He knew people and crime; he knew how to smell fear, how to probe lies, when to be confronting, and when to be oblique. However, he had never known how to inspire the love and loyalty of men under his command. They’d admired his intelligence, his knowledge, and his strength, and they’d been frightened of his tongue, but they did not like him. There’d been none of the fierce honor and friendship he had sensed from the beginning between Durban and his men.

  He had crossed the river by ferry—there were no bridges this far down—and he was on the south bank now, where he and Hester had moved after accepting the new job. They could hardly live in Grafton Street anymore. It was miles from police headquarters in Wapping.

  He walked up Paradise Street. The lamps misted and he could smell the river and hear the occasional foghorn as the mist drifted across the water. There was ice on the thin puddles in the street. It was still strange to him, nothing familiar.

  He put his key into the lock in the door and pushed it open.

  “Hester!”

  She appeared immediately, apron tied around her waist, her hair pinned hastily and crookedly. She was carrying a broom in her hand but she dropped it as soon as she saw him, and rushed forward. She drew in breath, perhaps to say that he was late, then changed her mind. She studied his face and read the emotion in it.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He knew what she was afraid of. She had understood why he had to accept the job in Durban’s place, both morally and financially. With Callandra gone to Vienna they could not afford the freedom or the uncertainty of taking on only private cases. Sometimes the rewards were excellent, but too often they were meager. Some cases could not be solved, or if they were, then the clients had the means to reward him only modestly. They could never plan ahead, and there was no one to whom they could turn to in a bad month, as they had before. Nor, it must be said honestly, at their ages should they need to. It was time to provide, not be provided for.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked when he did not answer.

  “A suicide off Waterloo Bridge,” he replied. “In fact, two, in a way. A young man and woman went off together, but we don’t know if it was partly accidental or not.”

  Relief flashed across her face, then instantly pity. “I’m sorry. Were you called to it?”

  “No, we were actually there. Saw it happen.”

  She smiled gently and touched his face with the back of her fingers, perhaps aware her hands were dusty. Had she been still occupied with housework this late in the evening to keep her mind from worrying about him?

  “That’s horrible,” she said bleakly. “They must have been very desperate to jump into the river at this time of the year.”

  “They’d die whatever time it was,” he replied. “The tide is very strong, and the river’s filthy.” To another woman he would have moderated his answer, avoided the facts of death, but she had seen more people dying and dead than he had. Police work, no matter how grim at times, hardly compared with the battlefield or the losses afterwards to gangrene and fever.

  “Yes, I know that,” she answered him. “But do you suppose they knew before they jumped?”

  Suddenly it was immediate and painfully, agonizingly real. Mary Havilland had been a woman like Hester, warm and full of emotions, capable of laughter and pain; now she was just an empty shell with the soul fled. Nobody anymore. He put his hands on Hester’s shoulders and pulled her towards him, holding her tightly, feeling her slender body yield almost as if she could soften the awkward bones and shape herself to him.

  “I don’t know if she meant to jump and he tried to stop her,” he whispered into her hair, “or if he pushed her over and she clung on to him and took him with her, or even if she meant to. I don’t know how I’m going to find out, but I will.”

  She held on to him for a few minutes longer, silently, then she pulled back and looked at him. “You’re frozen,” she said, suddenly practical. “And I don’t suppose you’ve eaten. The kitchen is still not really finished, but I have hot soup and fresh bread, and apple pie, if you’d like it.”

  She was right: He was still cold from the long ride and the even colder river crossing afterwards. The butler’s sandwich seemed a long time ago. He accepted. Between mouthfuls, he asked her about her day, and her progress in redecorating the house. Then he sat back, realizing how warm he was in all the ways that mattered.

  “Who was she?” Hester asked.

  “Mary Havilland,” he replied. “Her father took his own life a couple of months ago.” He saw the shadow of grief in Hester’s eyes, and the tightening of her mouth. “Her sister believes that she did not recover from it,” he added. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked away. “It’s over,” she said quietly. She was referring to her own father, not Havilland’s. “Why did he do it?” she asked. “Was it debt, too?”

  “Apparently not,” he replied. “He believed there was some danger of an accident in the tunnels. They’re building some of the new sewers.”

  “And not before time!” she said fervently. “What sort of an accident?”

  “I don’t know.” He explained the family relationships briefly. “Argyll says his father-in-law had a terror of landslips, cave-ins and so on. He became obsessed, lost his senses a bit.”

  “And is that true?” she pressed, clearly still forcing herself to think only of the present case.

  “I don’t know.” He went on to tell her about Mary’s proposed engagement to Toby Argyll, and that she had broken it off, but no reason had been given, except her distress over her father’s death and that she refused to believe that he had caused it himself. She could not let the matter go.

  “What was it, then?” Hester asked. “Accident? Or murder?” She was being severely practical, but he saw the stiffness in her, the deliberate control, and the effort.

  “I don’t know. But the police investigated it. It was Runcorn’s patch.” He looked at her steadily with a bleak smile.

  She understood why that added irony and pain to the case. More than he wished, she had seen his ambition for authority, the way he had fought with, crushed, and infuriated Runcorn in the past. She did not know the flashes of memory and
shame that Monk had had since then, the realization of how he had used Runcorn in his own climb to success, before the accident that had taken his memory. There were things that it was kind for forgetfulness to cleanse from the mind.

  “But you’re going to find out,” she said, watching him.

  “Yes, I have to. She’ll be buried in unhallowed ground if she meant to do it.”

  “I know.” Tears filled Hester’s eyes.

  Instantly he wished he had not uttered this bit of truth. He should have lied if necessary.

  Hester saw that too. “There’s no such thing as unhallowed ground, really.” She swallowed. “All the earth is hallowed, isn’t it? It’s just what people think. But some people care very much about being buried with their own, belonging even in death. See what you can find. Her sister may need to know the truth, poor woman.”

  TWO

  The tide was high the next morning and the river, with its smells of mud and salt, dead fish and rotting wood, seemed to be lapping right at the door as Monk walked across the dockside. The wind had fallen and it was calm, the surface of the water barely rippled as it seeped higher around the pier stakes and up the stone steps that led to the quaysides and embankments. The rime of ice overnight had melted in places, but there were still patches as slippery as oiled glass.

  “Morning, sir,” Orme said briskly as Monk came into the station. The stove had been burning all night and the room was warm.

  “Good morning, Orme,” Monk replied, closing the door behind him. There were three other men there: Jones and Kelly, busily sorting through papers of one kind or another, and Clacton, standing by the stove, his clothes steaming gently.

  Monk greeted them and received dutiful acknowledgment, but no more. He was still a stranger, a usurper of Durban’s place. They all knew that it was in helping Monk that Durban had contracted the terrible disease that had brought about his death, and they blamed Monk for it. That Durban had gone on the mission both because he wished to, understanding the enormity of the danger, and because he considered it his duty, was irrelevant to their anger and the sense of unfairness that lay behind it. Monk had gone on the same mission, and he was alive. They could not excuse that. They would have chosen Monk to die, every man of them.