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“Because I have no proof he did anything,” Monk replied succinctly.
“Well who else could it be? Think clearly. You used to be the sharpest and most rational man we had.” His lip curled. “Before that accident you were as logical as a piece of algebra—and about as charming—but you knew your job. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”
Monk kept his temper with difficulty. “As well as Percival, sir,” he said heavily, “it could be one of the laundry maids—”
“What?” Runcorn’s mouth opened in disbelief close to derision. “Did you say one of the laundrymaids? Don’t be absurd. Whatever for? If that’s the best you can do, I’d better put someone else on the case. Laundrymaid. What in heaven’s name would make a laundrymaid get out of her bed in the middle of the night and creep down to her mistress’s bedroom and stab her to death? Unless the girl is raving mad. Is she raving mad, Monk? Don’t say you couldn’t recognize a lunatic if you saw one.”
“No, she is not raving mad; she is extremely jealous,” Monk answered him.
“Jealous? Of her mistress? That’s ludicrous. How can a laundrymaid compare herself with her mistress? That needs some explaining, Monk. You are reaching for straws.”
“The laundrymaid is in love with the footman—not a particularly difficult circumstance to understand,” Monk said with elaborate, hard-edged patience. “The footman has airs above his station and imagines the mistress admired him—which may or may not be true. Certainly he had allowed the laundrymaid to suppose so.”
Runcorn frowned. “Then it was the laundrymaid? Can’t you arrest her?”
“For what?”
Runcorn glared at him. “All right, who are your other suspects? You said four or five. So far you have only mentioned two.”
“Myles Kellard, the other daughter’s husband—”
“What for?” Runcorn was worried now. “You haven’t made any accusations, have you?” The blood was pink in his narrow cheeks. “This is a very delicate situation. We can’t go around charging people like Sir Basil Moidore and his family. For God’s sake, where’s your judgment?”
Monk looked at him with contempt.
“That is exactly why I am not charging anyone, sir,” he said coldly. “Myles Kellard apparently was strongly attracted by his sister-in-law, which his wife knew about—”
“That’s no reason for him to kill her,” Runcorn protested. “If he’d killed his wife, maybe. For heaven’s sake, think clearly, Monk!”
Monk refrained from telling him about Martha Rivett until he should find the girl, if he could, and hear her side of the story and make some judgment himself as to whom he could believe.
“If he forced his attentions on her,” Monk said with continued patience, “and she defended herself, then there may have been a struggle, in which she was knifed—”
“With a carving knife?” Runcorn’s eyebrows went up. “Which she just conveniently chanced to have in her bedroom?”
“I don’t imagine it was chance,” Monk bit back savagely. “If she had reason to think he was coming she probably took it there on purpose.”
Runcorn grunted.
“Or it may have been Mrs. Kellard,” Monk continued. “She would have good reason to hate her sister.”
“Something of an immoral woman, this Mrs. Haslett.” Runcorn’s lips curled in distaste. “First the footman, now her sister’s husband.”
“There is no proof she encouraged the footman,” Monk said crossly. “And she certainly did not encourage Kellard. Unless you think it’s immoral to be beautiful, I don’t see how you can find fault with her for either case.”
“You always did have some strange ideas of right.” Runcorn was disgusted—and confused. The ugly headlines in the newspapers threatened public opinion. The letters from the Home Office lay stiff and white on his desk, polite but cold, warning that it would be little appreciated if he did not find a way to end this case soon, and satisfactorily.
“Well don’t stand there,” he said to Monk. “Get about finding out which of your suspects is guilty. For heaven’s sake, you’ve only got five; you know it has to be one of them. It’s a matter of exclusion. You can stop thinking about Mrs. Kellard, to begin with. She might have a quarrel, but I doubt she’d knife her sister in the night. That’s cold-blooded. She couldn’t expect to get away with it.”
“She couldn’t know about Chinese Paddy in the street,” Monk pointed out.
“What? Oh—well, neither could the footman. I’d look for a man in this—or the laundrymaid, I suppose. Either way, get on with it. Don’t stand here in front of my fire talking.”
“You sent for me.”
“Yes—well now I’m sending you out again. Close the door as you go—it’s cold in the passage.”
Monk spent the next two and a half days searching the workhouses, riding in endless cabs through narrow streets, pavements gleaming in the lamplight and the rain, amid the rattle of carts and the noise of street cries, carriage wheels, and the clatter of hooves on the cobbles. He began to the east of Queen Anne Street with the Clerkenwell Workhouse in Farringdon Road, then Holborn Workhouse on the Grey’s Inn Road. The second day he moved westward and tried the St. George’s Workhouse on Mount Street, then the St. Marylebone Workhouse on Northumberland Street. On the third morning he came to the Westminster Workhouse on Poland Street, and he was beginning to get discouraged. The atmosphere depressed him more than any other place he knew. There was some deeply ingrained fear that touched him at the very name, and when he saw the flat, drab sides of the building rearing up he
