The William Monk Mysteries

by Anne Perry

  “Of himself?” Monk was surprised. “I’ve been to his family, naturally, and I can understand a certain resentment. But in what way of himself?”

  “Oh, because he had no property, being a third son; and after his being wounded he limped, you know. So of course there was no career for him in the army. He appeared to feel he was of little—little standing—that no one accounted him much. Which was quite untrue, of course. He was a hero—and much liked by all manner of people!”

  “I see.” Monk was thinking of Rosamond Shelburne, obliged by her mother to marry the son with the title and the prospects. Had Joscelin loved her, or was it more an insult than a wound, a reminder that he was third best? Had he cared, it could only have hurt him that she had not the courage to follow her heart and marry as she wished. Or was the status more important to her, and she had used Joscelin to reach Lovel? That would perhaps have hurt differently, with a bitterness that would remain.

  Perhaps they would never know the answer to that.

  He changed the subject. “Did he at any time mention what his business interests were? He must have had some income beyond the allowance from his family.”

  “Oh yes,” she agreed. “He did discuss it with my husband, and he mentioned it to me, although not in any great detail.”

  “And what was it, Mrs. Dawlish?”

  “I believe it was some investment, quite a sizable one, in a company to trade with Egypt.” The memory of it was bright in her face for a moment, the enthusiasm and expectation of that time coming back.

  “Was Mr. Dawlish involved in this investment?”

  “He was considering it; he spoke highly of its possibilities.”

  “I see. May I call again later when Mr. Dawlish is at home, and learn more details of this company from him?”

  “Oh dear.” The lightness vanished. “I am afraid I have expressed myself badly. The company is not yet formed. I gathered it was merely a prospect that Joscelin intended to pursue.”

  Monk considered for a moment. If Grey were only forming a company, and perhaps persuading Dawlish to invest, then what had been his source of income up to that time?

  “Thank you.” He stood up slowly. “I understand. All the same, I should like to speak to Mr. Dawlish. He may well know something about Mr. Grey’s finances. If he were contemplating entering business with him, it would be natural he should inquire.”

  “Yes, yes of course.” She poked ineffectually at her hair. “Perhaps about six o’clock.”

  Evan’s questioning of the half-dozen or so domestic servants yielded nothing except the picture of a very ordinary household, well run by a quiet, sad woman stricken with a grief she bore as bravely as she could, but of which they were all only too aware and each in their own way shared. The butler had a nephew who served as a foot soldier and had returned a cripple. Evan was suddenly sobered by the remembrance of so many other losses, so many people who had to struggle on without the notoriety, or the sympathy, of Joscelin Grey’s family.

  The sixteen-year-old between-stairs maid had lost an elder brother at Inkermann. They all recalled Major Grey, how charming he was, and that Miss Amanda was very taken with him. They had hoped he would return, and were horrified that he could be so terribly murdered right here in his home. They had an obvious duality of thought that confounded Evan—it shocked them that a gentleman should be so killed, and yet they viewed their own losses as things merely to be borne with quiet dignity.

  He came away with an admiration for their stoicism, and an anger that they should accept the difference so easily. Then as he came through the green baize door back into the main hallway, the thought occurred to him that perhaps that was the only way of bearing it—anything else would be too destructive, and in the end only futile.

  And he had learned little of Joscelin Grey that he had not already deduced from the other calls.

  Dawlish was a stout, expensively dressed man with a high forehead and dark, clever eyes, but at present he was displeased at the prospect of speaking with the police, and appeared distinctly ill at ease. There was no reason to assume it was an unquiet conscience; to have the police at one’s house, for any reason, was socially highly undesirable, and judging from the newness of the furniture and the rather formal photographs of the family—Mrs. Dawlish seated in imitation of the Queen—Mr. Dawlish was an ambitious man.

  It transpired that he knew remarkably little about the business he had half committed himself to support. His involvement was with Joscelin Grey personally, and it was this which had caused him to promise funds, and the use of his good name. “Charming fellow,” he said, half facing Monk as he stood by the parlor fire. “Hard when you’re brought up in a family, part of it and all that, then the eldest brother marries and suddenly you’re nobody.” He shook his head grimly. “Dashed hard to make your way if you’re not suited to the church, and invalided out of the army. Only thing really is to marry decently.” He looked at Monk to see if he understood. “Don’t know why young Joscelin didn’t, certainly a handsome enough chap, and pleasing with women. Had all the charm, right words to say, and so on. Amanda thought the world of him.” He coughed. “My daughter, you know. Poor girl was very distressed over his death. Dreadful thing! Quite appalling.” He stared down at the embers and a sharp sadness filled his eyes and softened the lines around his mouth. “Such a decent man. Expect it in the Crimea, die for your country, and so on; but not this. Lost her first suitor at Sebastopol, poor girl; and of course her brother at Balaclava. That’s where he met young Grey.” He swallowed hard and looked up at Monk, as if to defy his emotions. “Damned good to him.” He took a deep breath and fought to control a conflict of emotions that were obviously acutely painful. “Actually spoke to each other night before the battle. Like to think of that, someone we’ve met, with Edward the night before he was killed. Been a great source of—” He coughed again and was forced to look away, his eyes brimming. “Comfort to us, my wife and I. Taken it hard, poor woman; only son, you know. Five daughters. And now this.”

  “I understand Menard Grey was also a close friend of your son’s,” Monk said, as much to fill the silence as that it might have mattered.

  Dawlish stared at the coals. “Prefer not to speak of it,” he replied with difficulty, his voice husky. “Thought a lot of him—but he led Edward into bad ways—no doubt about it. It was Joscelin who paid his debts—so he did not die with dishonor.”

  He swallowed convulsively. “We became fond of Joscelin, even on the few weekends he stayed with us.” He lifted the poker out of its rest and jabbed at the fire fiercely. “I hope to heaven you catch the madman who did it.”

  “We’ll do everything we can, sir.” Monk wanted to say all sorts of other things to express the pity he felt for so much loss. Thousands of men and horses had died, frozen, starved, or been massacred or wasted by disease on the bitter hillsides of a country they neither knew nor loved. If he had ever known the purpose of the war in the Crimea he had forgotten it now. It could hardly have been a war of defense. Crimea was a thousand miles from England. Presumably from the newspapers it was something to do with the political ramifications of Turkey and its disintegrating empire. It hardly seemed a reason for the wretched, pitiful deaths of so many, and the grief they left behind.

  Dawlish was staring at him, waiting for him to say something, expecting a platitude.

  “I am sorry your son had to die in such a way.” Monk held out his hand automatically. “And so young. But at least Joscelin Grey was able to assure you it was with courage and dignity, and that his suffering was brief.”

  Dawlish took his hand before he had time to think.

  “Thank you.” There was a faint flush on his skin and he was obviously moved. He did not even realize until after Monk had gone that he had shaken hands with a policeman as frankly as if he had been a gentleman.

  That evening Monk found himself for the first time caring about Grey personally. He sat in his own quiet room with nothing but the faint noises from
the street in the distance below. In the small kindnesses to the Dawlishes, in paying a dead man’s debts, Grey had developed a solidity far more than in the grief of his mother or the pleasant but rather insubstantial memories of his neighbors. He had become a man with a past of something more than a resentment that his talent was wasted while the lesser gifts of his elder brother were overrewarded, more than the rejected suitor of a weak young woman who preferred the ease of doing as she was told and the comfort of status to the relative struggle of following her own desires. Or perhaps she had not really wanted anything enough to fight for it?

  Shelburne was comfortable, physically everything was provided; one did not have to work, morally there were no decisions—if something was unpleasant one did not have to look at it. If there were beggars in the street, mutilated or diseased, one could pass to the other side. There was the government to make the social decisions, and the church to make the moral ones.

  Of course society demanded a certain, very rigid code of conduct, of taste, and a very small circle of friends and suitable ways to pass one’s time, but for those who had been brought up from childhood to observe it, it was little extra effort.

  Small wonder if Joscelin Grey was angry with it, even contemptuous after he had seen the frozen bodies on the heights before Sebastopol, the carnage at Balaclava, the filth, the disease and the agony of Scutari.

  In the street below a carriage clattered by and someone shouted and there was a roar of laughter.

  Suddenly Monk found himself feeling this same strange, almost impersonal disgust Grey must have suffered coming back to England afterwards, to a family who were strangers insofar as their petty, artificial little world was concerned; who knew only the patriotic placebos they read in the newspapers, and had no wish to look behind them for uglier truths.

  He had felt the same himself after visiting the “rookeries,” the hell-like, rotting tenements crawling with vermin and disease, sometimes only a few dozen yards from the lighted streets where gentlemen rode in carriages from one sumptuous house to another. He had seen fifteen or twenty people in one room, all ages and sexes together, without heating or sanitation. He had seen child prostitutes of eight or ten years old with eyes tired and old as sin, and bodies riddled with venereal disease; children of five or even less frozen to death in the gutters because they could not beg a night’s shelter. Small wonder they stole, or sold for a few pence the only things they possessed, their own bodies.

  How did he remember that, when his own father’s face was still a blank to him? He must have cared very much, been so shocked by it that it left a scar he could not forget, even now. Was that, at least in part, the fire behind his ambition, the fire behind his relentless drive to improve himself, to copy the mentor whose features he could not recall, whose name, whose station, eluded him? Please God that was so. It made a more tolerable man of him, even one he could begin to accept.

  Had Joscelin Grey cared?

  Monk intended to avenge him; he would not be merely another unsolved mystery, a man remembered for his death rather than his life.

  And he must pursue the Latterly case. He could hardly go back to Mrs. Latterly without knowing at least the outline of the matter he had promised her to solve, however painful the truth. And he did intend to go back to her. Now that he thought about it, he realized he had always intended to visit her again, speak with her, see her face, listen to her voice, watch the way she moved; command her attention, even for so short a time.

  There was no use looking among his files again; he had already done that almost page by page. Instead he went directly to Runcorn.

  “Morning, Monk.” Runcorn was not at his desk but over by the window, and he sounded positively cheerful; his rather sallow face was touched with color as if he had walked briskly in the sun, and his eyes were bright. “How’s the Grey case coming along? Got something to tell the newspapers yet? They’re still pressing, you know.” He sniffed faintly and reached in his pocket for a cigar. “They’ll be calling for our blood soon; resignations, and that sort of thing!”

  Monk could see his satisfaction in the way he stood, shoulders a little high, chin up, the shine on his shoes gleaming in the light.

  “Yes sir, I imagine they will,” he conceded. “But as you said over a week ago, it’s one of those investigations that is bound to rake up something extremely unpleasant, possibly several things. It would be very rash to say anything before we can prove it.”

  “Have you got anything at all, Monk?” Runcorn’s face hardened, but his sense of anticipation was still there, his scent of blood. “Or are you as lost as Lamb was?”

  “It looks at the moment as if it could be in the family, sir,” Monk replied as levelly as he could. He had a sickening awareness that Runcorn was controlling this, and enjoying it. “There was considerable feeling between the brothers,” he went on. “The present Lady Shelburne was courted by Joscelin before she married Lord Shelburne—”

  “Hardly a reason to murder him,” Runcorn said with contempt. “Would only make sense if it had been Shelburne who was murdered. Doesn’t sound as if you have anything there!”

  Monk kept his temper. He felt Runcorn trying to irritate him, provoke him into betraying all the pent-up past that lay between them; victory would be sweeter if it were acknowledged, and could be savored in the other’s presence. Monk wondered how he could have been so insensitive, so stupid as not to have known it before. Why had he not forestalled it, even avoided it altogether? How had he been so blind then when now it was so glaring? Was it really no more than that he was rediscovering himself, fact by fact, from the outside?

  “Not that in itself.” He went back to the question, keeping his voice light and calm. “But I think the lady still preferred Joscelin, and her one child, conceived just before Joscelin went to the Crimea, looks a good deal more like him than like his lordship.”

  Runcorn’s face fell, then slowly widened again in a smile, showing all his teeth; the cigar was still unlit in his hand.

  “Indeed. Yes. Well, I warned you it would be nasty, didn’t I? You’ll have to be careful, Monk; make any allegations you can’t prove, and the Shelburnes will have you dismissed before you’ve time to get back to London.”

  Which is just what you want, Monk thought.

  “Precisely sir,” he said aloud. “That is why as far as the newspapers are concerned, we are still in the dark. I came because I wanted to ask you about the Latterly case—”

  “Latterly! What the hell does that matter? Some poor devil committed suicide.” He walked around and sat down at his desk and began fishing for matches. “It’s a crime for the church, not for us. Have you got any matches, Monk? We wouldn’t have taken any notice of it at all if that wretched woman hadn’t raised it. Ah—don’t bother, here they are. Let them bury their own dead quietly, no fuss.” He struck a light and held it to his cigar, puffing gently. “Man got in over his head with a business deal that went sour. All his friends invested in it on his recommendation, and he couldn’t take the shame of it. Took that way out; some say coward’s way, some say it’s the honorable way.” He blew out smoke and stared up at Monk. “Damn silly, I call it. But that class is very jealous of what it thinks is its good name. Some of them will keep servants they can’t afford for the sake of appearance, serve six-course meals to guests, and live on bread and dripping the rest of the time. Light a fire when there’s company, and perish with cold the rest of the time. Pride is a wicked master, most especially social pride.” His eyes flickered with malicious pleasure. “Remember that, Monk.”

  He looked down at the papers in front of him. “Why on earth are you bothering with Latterly? Get on with Grey; we need to solve it, however painful it may prove. The public won’t wait much longer; they’re even asking questions in the House of Lords. Did you know that?”

  “No sir, but considering how Lady Shelburne feels, I’m not surprised. Do you have a file on the Latterly case, sir?”

  “You are a stubborn man, M
onk. It’s a very dubious quality. I’ve got your written report that it was a suicide, and nothing to concern us. You don’t want that again, do you?”

  “Yes sir, I do.” Monk took it without looking at it and walked out.

  He had to visit the Latterlys’ house in the evening, in his own time, since he was not officially working on any case that involved them. He must have been here before; he could not have met with Mrs. Latterly casually, nor expected her to report to the police station. He looked up and down the street, but there was nothing familiar in it.

  The only streets he could remember were the cold cobbles of Northumberland, small houses whipped clean by the wind, gray seas and the harbor below and the high moors rising to the sky. He could remember vaguely, once, a visit to Newcastle in the train, the enormous furnaces towering over the rooftops, the plumes of smoke, the excitement running through him in their immense, thrumming power, the knowledge of coal-fired blast furnaces inside; steel hammered and beaten into engines to draw trains over the mountains and plains of the whole Empire. He could still capture just an echo of the thrill that had been high in his throat then, tingling his arms and legs, the awe, the beginning of adventure. He must have been very young.

  It had been quite different when he had first come to London. He had been so much older, more than the ten or so years the calendar had turned. His mother was dead; Beth was with an aunt. His father had been lost at sea when Beth was still in arms. Coming to London had been the beginning of something new, and the end of all that belonged to childhood. Beth had seen him off at the station, crying, screwing up her pinafore in her hand, refusing to be comforted. She could not have been more than nine, and he about fifteen. But he could read and write, and the world was his for the labor.