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Monk bade them good-bye, and Hester took him to the withdrawing room, where the parlormaid served them with tea and hot buttered crumpets. Monk was surprised how much he enjoyed them. He had been too angry and disturbed to think of luncheon.
“So there’s really nothing more you can do for Keelin Melville, is there?” Hester asked, biting into her crumpet and trying very carefully not to drop butter down herself.
“No, it seems to be finished,” he agreed. “Gabriel is correct: there are some things we’ll never know, and we don’t have any right to.” He took a second crumpet.
“What are you going to tell Mr. Lambert?”
He looked at her across the tea tray. What did she expect of him? There was nothing to follow, nothing else to pursue.
She was waiting, as though his answer mattered.
“Nothing!” he said a little sharply.
“What other cases have you?” She looked interested, holding the crumpet up regardless of the butter dripping onto the plate.
“Nothing of any interest,” he said ruefully. “Trivial things which won’t mean anything, people looking for fault when there is only error or inarticulateness.” The prospect was tedious but unavoidable. It was part of the daily routine between the larger cases, and it paid his way so well that he relied very little on Callandra Daviot’s kindness now. Their original agreement—that he would include her in all the cases of complexity or unusual interest as reciprocation for her assistance in times of hardship—had worked extremely well, to both their advantage.
“Oh, good.” Hester smiled and put the rest of the crumpet into her mouth before it lost all its butter. “Then you will have time to look a little further for Martha’s nieces.”
He should have known she was leading to that. He should have foreseen it and avoided it. How naive of him.
The smile was still on her face, but less certain, and her eyes were very direct.
“Please?” She did not use his name or stretch out her hand to touch him. It would have been easier to refuse if she had. She presumed intolerably upon friendship by not presuming on it at all.
“There is hardly any chance of success,” he argued. “Do you realize what you are asking?”
“I think I do.” Now she looked apologetic without actually saying so. “It will be very difficult indeed. No one will blame you if you can’t find them. Please just look….”
“They’re probably dead!”
“If she knew that, then she could mourn them and stop worrying that they are alive somewhere, suffering and alone, and she was doing nothing to help.”
“Hester!” he said exasperatedly.
“What?” She regarde
d him as if she had no idea what he was going to say.
There was no point in arguing with her. She was not going to give up. He might as well agree now as in half an hour, or tomorrow, or the day after.
“I’ll try,” he said warningly. “It won’t do any good.”
“Thank you….” Her eyes were soft and bright, and she looked at him with a kind of trust he would never have believed could be so fiercely, uniquely precious.
Monk started out early the next morning without any hope of success. He might trace them from Putney if he was diligent—and lucky. He might even follow the first few years of their unfortunate lives. Would it really help Martha Jackson to know how they were treated, and when and where they died, from what cause? Perhaps it would. Perhaps Hester was right in that it would at least allow her to know there was nothing she could do, so she could begin to leave the worst of the distress behind her.
He packed a small, soft-sided bag with a change of clothes and paid a week’s rent in advance, then left Fitzroy Street to travel south and west. He no longer wore his usual smartly cut jacket and elegant trousers. In the places he knew he would be going they would mark him out as a stranger, a target for cut-purses and possibly even garroters. He loathed the feeling of being unshaven, but it helped him to blend less noticeably into the background of those who lived in the borders of the underworld. He wanted to seem a man who should not be crossed, a dangerous man who was too familiar with the territory to be lied to. He also armed himself with a small, sharp knife and as much money as he could spare for food and accommodation, and for such bribes as should prove necessary.
The beginning would be the hardest. It was going to be very difficult indeed to find anyone who knew what had happened to two ugly, slow-witted little girls fifteen years ago. He turned the problem over and over in his mind as he rode in the omnibus along the riverbank and then across the Putney Bridge. The only person who would know would be the landlord who had passed them on, sold them, or whatever arrangement it had been. It would be a waste of his time to bargain with anyone else. Please heaven he was still alive!
It took him all morning and into the early afternoon to track him. He had bought almost a dozen pints of beer or cider for the information.
Mr. Reilly turned out to be a huge man with white hair like a mop head, unkempt and falling over his ears. It also fell over his brow and eyes, but that did not matter because apparently he was completely blind. He welcomed Monk cheerfully. He was sitting in a tattered chair beside the hearth, a mug of ale at his hand where he could reach it without having to fumble. A small black-and-white dog of some terrier breed lay beside his feet and watched Monk carefully.
“What yer be wantin’ ter know, then?” Reilly asked cautiously. He was lonely these days, and companionship was precious.
Monk traded on it. “A few tales about the Coopers Arms, when it was yours,” he replied, settling into the rickety chair opposite, afraid to let his full weight fall on the back of it in case it collapsed. “What was it like?”
