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Jeavis looked up in surprise, at first suspecting a governor from Monk’s dress, then recognizing his face, and his own expression darkening in suspicion.
“Hello—what are you doing here, Monk?” He smiled bleakly. “Not sick, are you?” He looked at Monk’s rain-darkened coat and wet footprints, but added nothing.
Monk hesitated, considering a lie, but the thought of excusing himself to Jeavis, even obliquely, was intolerable.
“I have been retained by Lady Callandra Daviot, as I daresay you know,” he answered. “Is that the chute down to the laundry room?”
Evan looked acutely uncomfortable. Monk was tearing his loyalties and he knew it. Jeavis’s face was hard. Monk had driven him onto the defensive. Perhaps that was clumsy. On the other hand, it might only have precipitated the inevitable.
“Of course it is,” he said coldly. He raised his pale brows. “Is this the first time you’ve seen it? A bit slow for you, Monk.”
“Don’t see what I can learn from it,” Monk replied edgily. “If there were much, you would have made an arrest already.”
“If I’d found any evidence anywhere, I’d have made
an arrest,” Jeavis said with an odd flash of humor. “But I don’t suppose that’ll stop you padding around behind me, all the same!”
“Or the occasional place before you,” Monk added.
Jeavis shot him a glance. “That’s as may be. But you’re welcome to peer down that chute all you wish. You’ll see nothing but a laundry basket at the bottom. And at the top, there’s a long corridor with few lights and half a dozen doors, but none along this stretch except Dr. Beck’s office, and the treasurer’s office over there. Make what you like out of that.”
Monk looked around, gazing up and down the length of the corridor. The only definite thing he concluded was that if Prudence had been strangled here beside the chute, then she could not have cried out without being heard had there been anyone in Beck’s office or the treasurer’s. The other doors seemed to be far enough away to be out of earshot. Similarly, if she had been killed in one of the other rooms, then she must have been carried some distance along the open corridor, which might have posed a risk. Hospital corridors were never entirely deserted, as those in a house or an office might be. However, he was not going to say so to Jeavis.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Jeavis said dryly, and Monk knew his thoughts were precisely the same. “Looks unpleasantly like the good Dr. Beck, don’t you think?”
“Or the treasurer,” Monk agreed. “Or someone who acted on the spur of the moment, right here, and so swiftly and with such surprise she had no time to cry out.”
Jeavis pulled a face and smiled.
“Seems to me like a woman who would have fought,” he said with a little shake of his head. “Tall, too. Not weakly, by all accounts. Mind, some of the other nurses are built like cart horses.” He looked at Monk with bland, challenging amusement. “Seems she had a tongue as sharp as one o’ the surgeon’s knives and didn’t spare them if she thought they slacked in their duty. A very different sort of woman, Nurse Barrymore.” Then he added under his breath, “Thank God.”
“But good enough at her job to be justified in her comments,” Monk said thoughtfully. “Or they’d have got rid of her, don’t you think?” He avoided looking at Evan.
“Oh yes,” Jeavis agreed without hesitation. “She seems to have been that, all right. Don’t think anyone would have put up with her otherwise. At least, not those that disliked her. And to be fair, that wasn’t everyone. Seems she was something of a heroine to some. And Sir Herbert speaks well enough of her.”
A nurse with a pile of clean sheets approached and they moved aside for her.
“What about Beck?” Monk asked when she had gone.
“Oh, him too. But then, if he killed her, he’s hardly going to tell us that he couldn’t abide her, is he?”
“What do other people say?”
“Well now, Mr. Monk, I wouldn’t want to rob you of your livelihood by doing your work for you, now would I?” Jeavis said, looking Monk straight in the eyes. “If I did that, how could you go to Lady Callandra and expect to be paid?” And with a smile he glanced meaningfully at Evan and walked away down the corridor.
Evan looked at Monk and shrugged, then followed dutifully. Jeavis had already stopped a dozen yards away and was waiting for him.
Monk had little else to do here. He had no authority to question anyone, and he resisted the temptation to find Hester. Any unnecessary association with him might lessen her ability to question people without arousing suspicion and destroy her usefulness.
He had the geography of the place firmly in his mind. There was nothing more to learn standing here.
He was on his way out again, irritated and short-tempered, when he saw Callandra crossing the foyer. She looked tired and her hair was even more unruly than usual. The characteristic humor had left her face and there was an air of anxiety about her quite out of her customary spirit.
She was almost up to Monk before she looked at him clearly enough to recognize him, then her expression changed, but he could see the deliberate effort it cost her.
Was it simply the death of a nurse, one as outstanding as Prudence Barrymore, which grieved her so deeply? Was it the haste with which it had followed on the heels of the tragedy of Julia Penrose and her sister? Again he had that appallingly helpless feeling of caring for someone, admiring her and being truly grateful, and totally unable to help her pain. It was like the past all over again, his mentor who had helped him on his first arrival in London, and the tragedy that had struck him down and begun Monk’s career in the police. And now, as then, he could do nothing. It was another emotion from the past crowding the present and tearing at him with all its old power.
“Hello William.” Callandra greeted him politely enough, but there was no pleasure in her voice, no lift at all. “Are you looking for me?” There was a flicker of anxiety as she said it, as if she feared his answer.
