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A smile flickered over her face and vanished. "It would make no difference whatever. It is the truth itself that wounds, Mr. Monk, not what you may do with it. Thank you for coming. I am sure your intention was generous, but you cannot help. Please leave me to myself." She turned away again, dismissing him.
He had no alternative but to accept. He stood up, hesitated a moment longer, without purpose, then called the jailer to let him out.
Just outside the gates he encountered Michael Robb. Robb looked tired, and it was obscurely pleasing to Monk that there was no air of triumph in him.
They stood facing each other on the hot, dusty footpath.
"You’ve been to see her," Robb said, stating what was obvious between them.
"She won’t tell you anything," Monk said, not in answer but as a statement of fact. "She won’t speak to anyone. She won’t even see Stourbridge."
Robb looked him up and down, from his neat cravat and the shoulders of the well-cut jacket to the tips of his polished boots. "Do you know what happened?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.
"No," Monk replied.
Robb put his hands in his pockets, deliberately casual, even sloppy by contrast. "I shall find out," he promised. "No matter how long it takes me, I will know what happened to Treadwell-or enough to make a prosecution. There’s something in his past, or hers, that made this happen." He was watching Monk’s face as he spoke, weighing his reaction, trying to read what he knew.
"You will have to," Monk agreed wryly. "All you have at the moment is suspicion-not enough to hang anyone on."
Robb winced almost imperceptibly, just a stiffening of his body. It was an ugly word, an ugly reality. "I will." His voice was very soft. "Treadwell may have been an evil man, for all I know deserving some kind of retribution, but the day we allow the man in the street to decide that for himself, without trial, without answering to anyone, then we lose the right to call ourselves civilized. Then law belongs to the quickest and the strongest, not to justice. We aren’t a society anymore." He was self-conscious as he said it, daring Monk to laugh at him, but he was proud of it also.
Monk hoped he had never done anything in the past which made Robb imagine he would mock that decision. He would probably never know. A dray rumbled noisily past them.
"I won’t stand in your way," he answered levelly. "None of us could afford private vengeance." He wondered if Robb had any idea how true that was.
"She’d be better if she told us." Robb frowned. "Can’t you persuade her of that? Otherwise I’ll have to dig for it, go through all her life, all her friends, her first husband ... everything."
"That’s one of the things about murder." Monk nodded and lifted his shoulders very slightly. "You have to learn more about everybody than you want to know, all the secrets that have nothing to do with the crime, as well as those that do. Innocent people are stripped of their masks of pretense, sometimes of decently covered mistakes they’ve long since mended. You have to know everything the victim ever did that could make someone take the last, terrible step of killing him, creep as close as his skin till you see every blemish and can read the hatred that destroyed him. Of course, you’ll know Treadwell ... and you’ll come to pity him-and probably hate him as well."
People passed by, and they ignored them.
"Have you solved a lot of murders?" Robb asked. It was not a challenge; there was respect and curiosity in his face.
"Yes," Monk answered him. "Some I understood, and might have done the same myself. Others were so cold-blooded, so consumed in self, it frightened me that another human being I had talked with, stood beside, could have hidden that evil behind a face which looked to me like any other."
Robb stared at him. For several seconds neither of them moved, oblivious of th
e noisy street around them.
"I think this is going to be one of the first," Robb said at last. "I wish it weren’t. I wish I weren’t going to find some private shame in Mrs. Gardiner’s life that Treadwell was blackmailing her about, threatening to ruin the happiness she’d found. But I have to look. And if find it, I have to bring it to evidence." That was a challenge.
Monk thought how young he was. And he wondered what evidence he had found—or lost—when he was that age. And for that matter, what he would do now if he were in Robb’s place.
But he was not. He had no further interest in the case. His task was over, not very satisfactorily.
"Of course you do," he answered. "There are hundreds of judgments to make. You have to check which are yours and which aren’t. Good day, Sergeant Robb."
Robb stood facing him in the sun. "Good day, Mr. Monk. It’s been an interesting experience to meet you." He looked as if he was about to add something more, then changed his mind and went on past Monk towards the prison gate.
Monk had no duties in the case now. Even moral obligation took him no further. Miriam had refused to explain anything, either of her flight from Cleveland Square or what had happened in Hampstead. There was nothing more he could do.
Hester was still at the hospital, although it was now late.
Monk sat at his desk writing letters, his mind only half on them, and was delighted when the doorbell rang. Only when he answered it, and saw Lucius Stourbridge, did his heart sink. Should he express some condolence for the situation? Lucius had hired him to find Miriam, and he had done so. The result had been catastrophic, even though it was none of his doing.
Lucius looked haggard, his eyes dark-ringed, his cheeks pale beneath his olive skin, giving him a sallow, almost gray appearance. He was a man walking through a nightmare. "I know you have already done all that I asked of you, Mr. Monk," he began even before Monk could invite him inside. "And that you endeavored to help Mrs. Gardiner, even concealing her whereabouts from the police, but they found her nevertheless, and arrested her ..." The words were so hard for him to say that his voice cracked, and he was obliged to clear his throat before he could continue. "For the murder of Treadwell." He swallowed. "I know she cannot have done such a thing. Please, Mr. Monk, at any cost at all, up to everything I have, please help me prove that!" He stood still on the front doorstep, his body rigid, hands clenched, eyes filled with his inner agony.
"It is not the cost, Mr. Stourbridge," Monk answered slowly, fighting his common sense and everything his intelligence told him. "Please come in.
