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Only if he were then a completely different man.
But the fear plagued him, waking him in the night with a choking in the throat and a sudden coldness. Perhaps the fear was as bad as a reality?
On leaving the Old Bailey he went straight to find Evan. He must see the records for himself, even if he had to be smuggled into the police station after hours, as a witness or a suspect, so he could read the files of all his old cases which had ended in the ruin or death of anyone.
Again he had to wait for Evan. He paced back and forth, unable to sit down, his muscles jumping, his mind tormenting him with frustration.
The desk sergeant looked at him with a certain pity.
“Yer look right tore up, Mr. Monk,” he observed. “If it’s real urgent, like, I can tell yer w’ere Mr. Evan is.”
“I should be most grateful,” Monk added. He tried to smile at the man, but he knew it ended as a grimace, his lips pulled over his teeth.
“Twenty-five Great Coram Street, just orff Brunswick Square. Know where that is I ’spec’?”
“Oh, yes.” It was opposite Mecklenburg Square, where they had found the body of the man he had so nearly killed before the accident. He could not ever forget that. “Yes, I do, thank you.” The man’s name flashed into his mind. “Parsons.”
The sergeant’s face lit with a smile. He had not realized that Monk remembered him.
“Welcome, sir, I’m sure.”
Monk raced out and caught a hansom at the end of the street, swinging himself up and shouting the address at the driver as he threw himself into the seat.
He was then obliged to wait standing in the icy wind in Great Coram Street while Evan concluded his business, but when he emerged he saw Monk and recognized him instantly, perhaps because men dressed as he was seldom stood idly on pavements in late February.
“I found it!” he said triumphantly, striding across towards him, hunching his shoulders and pulling his greatcoat collar higher, shivering a little, but his face radiated success.
Monk felt a kind of breathlessness, a hope so painful it almost choked him. He swallowed before he could speak.
“Found it?” He dared not even make it plain he meant the reference to Drusilla, in case it was not. He might have meant merely something concerning his present investigation. It was hard for Monk to remember there were other matters, other crimes, other people’s lives.
“Well, I think it is,” Evan qualified it very slightly, moving smartly away from the curb as a brougham clattered by. “The name Buckingham is there.” He touched Monk on the arm and turned to walk against the wind along Great Coram Street towards the square with its bare trees outlined against the sky. “The reason it took me so long to find,” he went on, “was that it wasn’t a capital case at all, only an embezzlement, and not of very much.”
Monk said nothing. His footsteps rang on the cold stone. It made no sense, at least not so far.
“A Reginald Sallis embezzled some funds from the church,” Evan continued the tale. “A matter of about twenty pounds or so, but it was reported to the police and investigated. It was unpleasant, because the money was from an orphans’ fund, and suspicion fell on a lot of people before the case was proved.”
“But it was proved?” Monk said urgently. “We didn’t get the wrong man?”
“Oh no,” Evan assured him, keeping pace. “It was definitely the right man. Good family, but a bit of a rake. Apparently very handsome, or at least had a fine way with women.”
“What makes you say that?” Monk asked quickly. They had turned into the square and were walking across the grass towards Landsdowne Place and the Foundling Hospital, which lay ahead of them. They must skirt around it to Guildford Street.
“The evidence of his involvement was rather carefully concealed by two young ladies, both of them apparently in love with him,” Evan replied. “Or more accurately, one of them felt very deeply, the other, her sister, was merely flirting.”
“This doesn’t explain anything!” Monk said desperately, brushing past a Hussar in uniform. “A romantic rivalry between sisters, a petty embezzlement for which a young rake got … what? A year? Five years?”
“Two years,” Evan answered, his face suddenly tight and his eyes full of pity. “But he died of gaol fever in Coldbath Fields. He wasn’t a particularly pleasant young man, he robbed the charitable funds of the church, but he didn’t deserve to die alone in prison for it.”
“Was that my fault?” Monk felt the same wrench of pity. He had seen the Coldbath Fields prison and would not have wished it on any living thing. He could remember the cold that ate into the bones, the damp of the walls as if they were forever weeping, t
he smell of mold and sour places that are never open to the air. One could taste the despair in it. He could close his eyes and see the men, shaven-headed, in the backbreaking exercises of passing the shot, endlessly, pointlessly moving cannon balls from one place to another, around in a ring, or the treadmill, the cages graphically known as the “cockchafers.” The enforced silence beat in his ears, where all human exchange was forbidden.
“Was that my fault?” he demanded again with sudden violence, stopping Evan by grasping his arm so he winced and was forced to swing around to face him.
“It was your doing,” Evan said without deviating his gaze at all. “But the man was guilty. The sentence was the judge’s to give, not yours. What Drusilla Buckingham could not forgive you for, I should imagine, was that you used her to catch Sallis. You told her he was betraying her with her own sister, Julia. In rage and hurt she gave you what you wanted.”
Monk felt the cold bite into the core of his body. He was no longer aware of his feet on the pavement or the carriages coming and going along Guildford Street, the clink of harness.
