A Sunless Sea

by Anne Perry

  “Because if he was murdered, then that makes more sense of Zenia Gadney’s murder on Limehouse Pier,” Hester explained.

  Agatha shivered. “Since when did bloody lunatics make sense? What’s the matter wi’ you?”

  “Mrs. Lambourn’s on trial for the murder of Zenia Gadney because the doctor visited Zenia every month and paid her rent and all her other expenses,” Hester replied with some heat.

  “Stupid bitch,” Agatha said bitterly. “What the hell good did that do ’er?”

  “None at all.”

  “So why’d she do it then?” Agatha said, frowning, her eyes full of anger.

  “Maybe she didn’t. She says the doctor didn’t kill himself, either.”

  Agatha stared at her, a new comprehension in her face. “An’ you reckon as it was something to do with him asking about the opium?”

  “Don’t you? There’s a lot of money in opium,” Hester pointed out.

  “Bleedin’ right there is,” Agatha said with scathing savagery, as if some memory had returned to her with the thought. “Fortunes made in it, an’ reputations lost. Nobody wants to think o’ the Opium Wars now. Lot o’ secrets, most of ’em bloody an’ full o’ death an’ money.” She leaned forward a little. “You be careful,” she warned. “You’d be surprised what big families got rich on that an’ don’t say nothing about it now.”

  “Did Dr. Lambourn know that?”

  “Didn’t say, but he weren’t nobody’s fool—an’ neither am I. Don’t go messin’ around with opium sellers, lady, or you’ll maybe end up somewhere cut up in an alley, or floatin’ down the river, belly up. I’ll get yer what yer need. An’ I ain’t sayin’ that fer profit. Those bastards will ’ave yer for breakfast, but they won’t cross me.”

  “Did Zenia know about all this?” Hester said quickly.

  Agatha’s eyes widened. “How the ’ell do I know?”

  “I’d wager good money you know a great deal about anything that interests you,” Hester retorted instantly.

  Agatha laughed very quietly, almost under her breath.

  “So I do, but madmen wot butcher women in’t my concern, less they’re after me. An’ if they do that …” She lifted up her big hands and deliberately cracked her knuckles. “An’ I got a big carving knife o’ me own, if I ’ave to use it! Mind your own business, lady. I’ll get yer opium for yer, best in the world. Fair price.”

  “And the needle?” Hester asked tentatively.

  Agatha blinked. “An’ the needle. But yer got ter be real careful with it!”

  “I will.” Hester stood up. She was glad the weight of her skirt hid the fact that her knees were trembling a little. She kept her voice very steady. “Thank you.”

  Agatha sighed and rolled her eyes, then suddenly she smiled, showing her big white teeth.

  CHAPTER

  14

  OLIVER RATHBONE WAS EATING his breakfast when the maid interrupted him to announce that Mrs. Monk had called to see him regarding a matter she said was urgent.

  Rathbone put down his knife and fork and rose to his feet. “Ask her to come in.” He gestured toward his half-finished food. He had no taste for it anyway. He ate it at all simply because he knew he required the nourishment. “Thank you, I don’t need any more, but please bring fresh toast and tea for Mrs. Monk,” he requested.

  “Yes, Sir Oliver,” the maid said obediently, and left, taking the plate with her.

  A moment later Hester came in, her cheeks flushed from the wind.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized, her eyes taking in the table and the obvious fact that she had interrupted. “I had to catch you before you left for court.”

  “Sit down. More tea is coming.” He gestured toward the chair where Margaret used to sit, then, as she took it, he sat also. “You must have left home very early. Has something happened? I’m afraid I have no good news to tell you.”

  “Bad news?” she asked quickly, anxiety shadowing her face.

  He had learned not to lie to her, even to soften a blow.

  “I’m beginning to think Mrs. Lambourn could be right, at least insofar as there being a government agreement not to allow Lambourn’s report to be given any credibility,” he answered. “I’ve tried to question his suicide, and the judge has cut me off every time. I think Coniston has also been briefed to head off any mention of it at all.”

  “But you’ll not let him get away with that.” It was half a question; the doubt was still there in her voice, and in her eyes.

  “We’re not beaten yet,” he said ruefully. “In a sense their possible agreement in keeping it out of the evidence suggests that there is something to hide. It certainly isn’t in order to spare anyone’s feelings, as they say it is.”

  The maid came in with fresh tea and toast, and Rathbone thanked her for it. He poured for Hester without asking, and she took it with a smile, then reached also for toast and butter.

  “Oliver, I’ve been doing a little asking around among people I know. I had a long talk with a prostitute near Copenhagen Place. She knew Zenia Gadney, possibly as well as anyone did.”

  He heard the pity in her voice and found himself knotted inside. He wished he were more convinced of Dinah Lambourn’s innocence. But even if Joel Lambourn had been murdered, it did not prove that Dinah had not killed Zenia out of revenge for her betrayal during all the years before.

  Except, of course, if anyone had betrayed Dinah, it was Joel himself. But he was already dead, and beyond her reach. The only things that made Rathbone question Dinah’s guilt at all were the senseless timing of Zenia’s death, and the fact that Pendock and Coniston both seemed so determined to block Rathbone from raising any doubt, however reasonable, about Joel’s suicide.

  Hester knew she did not have his attention.

  “Oliver?”

  He concentrated again. “Yes? I’m sorry. What did you learn that you need to tell me before I go into court again?”

  She spread marmalade on her toast. “That Zenia was a very quiet woman, kept very much to herself. She used to walk often, especially by the river. She stood and gazed southward, watching the water and the sky.”

  “You mean toward Greenwich?” he asked curiously.

  “Well, toward the south bank anyway. She had a past that she spoke of very seldom, once to Gladys, the girl I mentioned.”

  Rathbone felt a little chilled. “What kind of a past? Is it one that could provide another motive for killing her with such violence?”

  Hester shook her head. “Not as far as I can see. She said she was married once, but apparently she drank so hard she ruined her life, and possibly she left him, or he left her.”

  “Who was he?” Rathbone asked quickly, feeling a lift of hope he hardly dared acknowledge. “Where can we find him? Could he have followed her to Limehouse and killed her? Perhaps he wanted to marry again, and she was standing in his way?” His mind was racing. At last there were other possibilities surfacing, which had nothing to do with Dinah Lambourn.

  “Gladys guessed at it, based on something Zenia said once, when a woman was falling down drunk in the street,” Hester answered. “She didn’t even know if it was true, and no one has ever seen another man in Copenhagen Place, visiting her, or even looking for her. He could be dead by now, if he ever existed at all.”

  Her voice dropped and she looked sad, and apologetic. “She could have invented him, to make herself sound more respectable, or even more interesting. It could have been daydreaming, a bit of wishing that it had been so.”

  He felt the sadness inside him also, a sudden understanding of the woman’s wistful dreams that he would prefer not to have understood. “Then why did you come to tell it to me so urgently before I went into court?” The sharp edge of disappointment was raw in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, that was misleading.” She brushed it away with a slender hand. “What I really came to tell you was that I also found a woman called Agatha Nisbet, who runs something of a makeshift hospital on the south bank of the
river, near Greenland Dock. It is mainly for injured dockers, lightermen, and so on. She has a pretty steady supply of opium …”

  “Opium?” Now he was listening, his attention quickened.

  “Yes.” She smiled bleakly. “I made a deal with her to buy the best quality myself, for the clinic. She spoke to Joel Lambourn several times. He sought her out in his inquiries into opium. He wasn’t out to stop the trade, just to get it properly labeled so people knew what they were taking. Agnes Nisbet said it was the deaths of children that upset him especially.”

  Rathbone nodded. He knew that already.

  “But she warned me that a lot of people make money out of opium, ever since the Opium Wars,” Hester went on. “They are quite happy, some of the worst of them, to get people addicted so they will have a permanent market.” Her face was pinched with misery and anger as she said it. “A lot of very powerful families built their fortunes on opium, and they wouldn’t be at all happy with the exposure Lambourn’s report would inevitably have brought when it was argued in Parliament. All kinds of ghosts would’ve been dug up.”

  “You can’t dig up a ghost,” he said irrelevantly. “Do you think Dinah is right, at least as far as Lambourn’s report is concerned?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “It makes sense, Oliver. We don’t even know whose fortune comes from opium, and what they could lose if it’s all brought out into the open, and regulated. Some companies are going to go out of business, simply because they wouldn’t make the same level of profit if they are forced to measure and label.”

  He thought about it for a moment or two. It opened up new, alternative explanations for the death of both Joel Lambourn and Zenia Gadney—but they had no proof of anything. Great fortunes had always been made in appalling ways: through buccaneering—which was only another name for piracy—slaving, before the abolition half a century ago; and then in opium. Few wealthy families were free from one stain or another. With the fear and anger running rampant in the courtroom, and far beyond it, he did not think that “reasonable doubt” was going to save Dinah Lambourn.

  “Do you know anything about the Opium Wars?” Hester interrupted his thoughts.

  “Not much,” he admitted. “It was all in China. Trade war of some sort, as far as I know. Our part in it has been justified by some, but it was pretty ugly. I believe we introduced opium into China and now hundreds of thousands of people are addicted to it. Not something to be proud of.”

  “Perhaps we should find out more, just in case it matters,” she said quietly.

  “Did you believe this woman, this Agatha?” he asked her. “Not her honesty, but her knowledge?”

  “Yes … I think so. It compared in ways to my own experience in the Crimea.”

  “Are there any wars that aren’t ugly?” He thought bitterly of all he knew and had heard of the Crimean War, its violence, futility, and loss. “This Civil War in America—God knows what those losses will be by the end—pretty good market for opium there, too. I hear the slaughter is appalling, and the injuries to those who survived. I don’t suppose they even know the extent of it themselves yet. And it’s not just the dead, it’s the ruin of the land, and the hatred left behind.”

  “I think there’s a good deal of hatred left behind the Opium Wars, too,” Hester replied. “And money, and guilt. A lot of secrets to bury.”

  “Secrets don’t stay buried,” Rathbone said quietly. He wanted to tell her about his own secret, those photographs still sitting in his home, waiting to be stored in a bank vault where only he could disinter them.

  She was staring at him. “Oliver?” she said with concern. “Do you know something about Dinah that we don’t? Something bad?”

  “No!” he said with a rush of relief. “It … it was … I was thinking about something else entirely.”

  She looked doubtful. “It?” she asked. “What are we talking about?”

  “It was … it …” He breathed in and out deeply. The weight of the knowledge he carried was almost unbearable alone. “Do you know what happened to Arthur Ballinger’s photographs after he was killed?”

  Her face paled a little, and there was pain in her eyes.

  “I have no idea. Why? Are you afraid someone has them?” She reached across the table and touched his hand gently. “There’s no point in worrying. They’re probably locked up somewhere where nobody will ever find them. But if they’re not, there’s still nothing you can do about it.” Her hand was warm on his. “If somebody has them they can only blackmail the guilty, and do you really have any sympathy for men who abused children like that? I know they may have been fools more than villains to begin with, but you still can’t protect them.”

  “I would have no sympathy if it were about money, Hester, but it isn’t. It’s about power,” he said simply.

  “Power?” There was sharper fear in her face now, and perhaps the beginning of understanding as to what he meant.

  “Power to make the men in those photographs do anything, which they would, out of fear of being exposed,” he elaborated.

  “Do you think there are other people in those pictures who are … judges and politicians, or …?” She saw it in his face. “You do! Did Ballinger say there were?”

  “No. He did far worse than that, Hester. He left them to me.” He looked at her intently, waiting for the horror in her eyes, even the revulsion.

  She sat motionless and very slowly the full impact of it settled over her, like a shadow. She studied him. Perhaps she saw in him something of the burden he felt, and the bitterness of the irony. It was both Ballinger’s legacy and his revenge. He might not know what it would do to Rathbone, but he must have relished the possibilities.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “If you had destroyed them you would have told me differently, wouldn’t you.” It was not a question; she was letting him know that she understood.

  “Yes,” he confessed. “I would. I will hide them. If I die then they will be destroyed. I meant to do it at the time I saw them; then when I saw who was in them, I couldn’t. Maybe I still will. The power of it is … so very great. Ballinger began by using them only for good, you know? He told me. It was to force people to take action against injustice or abuse, when they wouldn’t do it any other way.” Was he making excuses for Ballinger? Or for himself, because he had not destroyed the pictures? He looked at Hester’s face and saw the confusion in her, and the comprehension. He waited for her to ask if he would use them, and she did not.

  “Do you think Dinah is innocent?” she asked instead.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “At first I thought it was possible, then after the beginning of the trial, I seriously doubted it. Now I don’t know whether she killed Zenia Gadney or not, but I’m beginning to have very serious doubts as to whether Lambourn committed suicide. And if he was murdered, then that opens up a lot of other doubts, and questions.”

  There was a sound of footsteps outside the door to the hall. A moment later Ardmore came in and very courteously reminded Rathbone that it was time for him to go.

  Hester smiled and rose to her feet. There was no need for further discussion, simply a quiet good-bye.

  LAMBOURN’S SUICIDE WAS STILL in Rathbone’s mind as the trial resumed an hour and a half later, when he met Sorley Coniston in the hall and they exchanged brief greetings.

  “Morning,” Coniston said with a slight smile. “Tough one for you, Rathbone. Whatever made you take it? I used to wonder if you accepted cases for notoriety sometimes, but I always decided you didn’t. Haven’t changed, have you?”

  “Not that much,” Rathbone replied drily. He did not know Coniston well, though they had been acquainted for years, but thought he might like the man if he did. He was unpredictable, and occasionally his opinions were startlingly honest. “This time I can’t make up my mind myself.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Coniston said, shaking his head. “The only question in this one is how far you can bring in the damn opium questi
on. Lambourn might have gone off the rails in his personal life, but he was a decent man, and honest. Don’t drag his private mistakes out in front of the world. His children don’t deserve that, even if you think he does.”

  Rathbone smiled back at him. “Cold feet?” he asked wryly.

  “Going to hold them to the fire,” Coniston replied. “Yours, I mean.”

  “Really?” Rathbone shrugged with confidence he did not feel, and they went into the courtroom.

  Twenty minutes later, Coniston rose to question his first witness of the day, Dinah’s sister-in-law, Amity Herne.

  Rathbone watched as she walked across the open space toward the witness box. With one hand delicately lifting her skirt so she did not trip, she climbed up the steps to the top and stood facing the body of the court.

  Rathbone would like to have looked across at Dinah to see her expression, but he did not want to draw the jury’s attention to her, when they were all watching Amity Herne so closely. He could not imagine the pain of seeing your own family testify against you. Did they blame her for Lambourn’s death? For any degree of the unhappiness that they believed had led to his suicide? He might soon know. He realized his hands were knotted in his lap beneath the table where they could not see them, his muscles aching already, at the very beginning of the morning.

  Amity Herne swore to her name, and to tell the truth, all of it, and nothing but. She acknowledged that she was the sister of the accused woman’s late husband, Joel Lambourn.

  “I offer my condolences for the recent loss of your brother, Mrs. Herne,” Coniston began. “And I apologize for being obliged to open up so publicly a subject that must be additionally painful to you in the recent tragedy that has afflicted your family.”

  “Thank you,” she said graciously. She was an attractive woman, although not beautiful, and now appeared a little too unemotional for Rathbone’s taste. Perhaps in the circumstances a certain stiffness was the only defense she had to preserve any composure at all, when all privacy was denied her. There was something in the dignity with which she stood waiting for Coniston to open up the wounds that reminded him of Margaret. He should have admired her more. How much was his own disillusion warping his views of the people around him?