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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 for 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.
* * * * *
