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“Do you think it was Shearer who actually killed Mr. Alberton?” she asked with a lift of hope in her voice.
They were sitting at the table over a meal of cold chicken pie and fresh vegetables. He noticed that she looked a little tired.
“Where have you been all day?” he asked.
“Do you?” she insisted.
“What?”
“Do you think Shearer killed Daniel Alberton?”
“Possibly. Where have you been?”
“At the Small Pox Hospital at Highgate. We’re still trying to improve the quality of staff caring for the patients there, but it’s difficult. I’ve been writing letters most of the time.”
It was on the edge of his tongue to make some remark about Florence Nightingale, who was inexhaustible in her letter writing in her efforts to bring about hospital reform, but he forbore. It explained Hester’s tiredness. He had promised months ago to employ a woman to keep house, and forgotten about it.
“It would mean Merrit was not guilty,” she said, watching him keenly. “It would explain how Breeland did it without her knowledge.”
He smiled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.” It was a statement.
She hesitated only a moment. “Yes,” she admitted. “I can’t see any way he is innocent, but I really want to believe she is.”
He relaxed a little. “You should start looking for someone to come in every day, even if it’s only for a few hours.”
She thought about it for several minutes, watching his face, trying to judge if he was being overgenerous.
He could read her thoughts as if they were written in front of him.
“Look for someone,” he repeated. “Maybe three days a week, long enough to clean and do some cooking.”
“Yes,” she accepted. “Yes, I will.” She looked at him very levelly, a smile beginning in her eyes.
He felt remarkably pleased, as if he had given her the best gift imaginable, and perhaps it was, because his real gift was time to devote to what she was good at, time to use the skills she possessed in abundance, instead of laboring to develop those she would never find natural. He smiled back, more and more broadly.
She knew his thoughts too. She bit her lip. “I can cook!” she said quickly. “Moderately.”
He did not argue; he just grinned.
In the morning he began on the river, speaking to dockers and bargees yet again, this time not about the movement of the guns but about Shearer. It took him till early afternoon to find anyone who knew Shearer and was willing to talk about him, but all he could say reinforced what Monk had already heard from the men at the warehouse. Shearer was hard, ambitious, competent, but to all outward appearances loyal to Daniel Alberton. He was not spoken of with liking, but there was a definite respect in the men’s faces and in the tone of their voices.
It left Monk further confused. The picture of Shearer that emerged did not sit easily with the facts. He walked along the street almost unconscious of the passing traffic, the heavily laden wagons, the men shouting to one another, the cranes rising and lowering, the jostling crowds of masts as the tide jiggled the boats, the occasional gull wheeling overhead.
Shearer had disappeared, that seemed unarguable. The guns had gone to America, as had Breeland and Merrit. Alberton and the two guards were dead, murdered.
The barge with the guns had gone down the river towards Bugsby’s Marshes, and was untraceable after that. Breeland and Merrit seemed to have traveled by train to Liverpool, but the only train in which they could have gone had left before the murders, and thus before the guns had left the warehouse.
It seemed Shearer’s involvement was the only fact which could link all three things together and make any kind of sense of them.
Someone must know more of Shearer, and might even know of the ship which had come up the Thames as far as Bugsby’s Marshes and loaded the guns and then weighed anchor and gone out to sea again. Was it a British ship or an American one?
Perhaps what he had already learned would be enough to raise reasonable doubt as to Merrit’s guilt, if there were no prejudice and jurors were able to disregard their emotions. But it would certainly not be sufficient to clear her name. There would always be those who would believe her guilty, simply that it had not been proved. She had got away with it. That was only a little better than hanging, a kind of life in limbo. Although if she returned to America with Breeland, perhaps England’s opinion of her would matter less.
But was it also enough to save Breeland from the rope, against the hatred there was for him, the conviction in the public’s mind that he was guilty? And would he inevitably drag her down with him?
Not that it made any difference to what Monk had to do. Probabilities of a verdict one way or the other were Rathbone’s business, although he was certain
Rathbone would want to know the truth as much as he did. Someone had bound up three men and shot them through the head. He needed to know who that someone was, beyond any doubt at all, reasonable or not.
