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“I’m sorry,” Evan said quietly, his face tight and bleak with regret. “It isn’t worth pressing. Even if we found them, there’d be nothing we could do. It’s sickening, but you know it as well as I do.”
Monk wanted to shout, to swear over and over until he ran out of words, but it would achieve nothing and only make his own weakness the more apparent.
Evan looked at him with understanding.
“I’ve got a miserable case myself.”
Monk was not interested, but friendship compelled him to pretend he was. Evan deserved at least that much of him, probably more.
“Have you? What is it?”
“Murder and assault in St. Giles. Poor devil might have been better if he’d been murdered too, instead of left beaten to within an inch of his life, and now so badly shocked or terrified he can’t speak … at all.”
“St. Giles?” Monk was surprised. It was another area no better than Seven Dials, and only a few thousand yards away, if that. “Why are you bothering with it?” he asked wryly. “What chance have you of solving that either?”
Evan shrugged. “I don’t know … probably not much. But I have to try, because the dead man was from Ebury Street, considerable money and social standing.”
Monk raised his eyebrows. “What the devil was he doing in St. Giles?”
“They,” Evan corrected. “So far I have very little idea. The widow doesn’t know … and probably doesn’t want to, poor woman. I have nothing to follow, except the obvious. He went to satisfy some appetite, either for women or other excitement, which he couldn’t at home.”
“And the one still alive?” Monk asked.
“His son. It appeared they had something of a quarrel, or at least a heated disagreement, before the son left, and th
en the father went after him.”
“Ugly,” Monk said succinctly. He stood up. “If I get any ideas, I’ll tell you. But I doubt I will.”
Evan smiled resignedly and picked up the pen again to resume what he had been writing when Monk came in.
Monk left without looking to right or left. He did not want to bump into Runcorn. He was feeling angry and frustrated enough. The last thing he desired was a past superior with a grudge, and now all the advantages. He must return to Seven Dials, and to Vida Hopgood and her women. There was going to be no help from outside. Whatever was to be done, it rested with him alone.
4
The evening after Corriden Wade had left, Hester went upstairs to see Rhys for the last time before settling him for the night. She found him lying half curled over on the bed, his face turned into the pillow, his eyes wide. If he had been anyone else she would have talked to him, tried to learn—if not directly, at least indirectly—what troubled him. But Rhys still had no way of communicating except by agreement or disagreement with whatever she asked him. She had to guess, to fumble with all the myriad possibilities, and try to frame her questions so he could answer yes or no. It was such a crude instrument to try to find so subtle and terrible a pain. It was like trying to operate on living flesh using an ax.
Yet sometimes words were too precise. She did not even know what it was that hurt him at this moment. It could be fear of what the future held, or simply fear of sleep that night and the dreams and memories it would bring. It could be grief for his father, guilt because he was alive and his father was dead—or, more deeply, because his father had followed him out of the house, and perhaps if he had not he would still be alive. Or it could be the mixture of anger and grief which afflicts someone who has parted with a loved one for the last time in a quarrel and it is too late for all the things that remain unsaid.
It might be no more than the weariness of physical pain and the fear of endless days stretching ahead when it would not ever stop. Would he spend the rest of his life there, locked in silence and this terrible isolation?
Or was memory returning with its terror and pain and helplessness relived?
She wanted to touch him. It was the most immediate form of communication. It did not need to say anything. There were no queries in it, no clumsiness of wrong guesses, simply a nearness.
But she remembered how he had snatched himself away from his mother. She did not know him well enough, and he might consider it an intrusion, a familiarity to which she had no right, an advantage she took only because he was ill and dependent upon her.
In the end she simply spoke her mind.
“Rhys …”
He did not move.
“Rhys … shall I stay for a while, or would you rather be alone?”
He turned very slowly and stared at her, his eyes wide and dark.
She tried to read them, to feel what emotion, what need, was filling his mind and tearing at him till he could neither bear it nor loose it in words. Forgetting her resolve, from her own need she reached out and touched him, laying her hand on his arm above the splints and bandaging.
