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Rathbone bowed very slightly. “Thank you, my lord. Mr. Monk, did you follow Durban's notes to retrace his original detection, or did you accept his observations and deductions as sufficient?”
“I followed them again and questioned the same people again, as far as I could,” Monk answered with a tone suggesting that the answer was obvious.
“But in each case you already knew what evidence you were looking for,” Rathbone pointed out. “For example, Mr. Durban began with an unidentified corpse and had to do whatever he could to learn who the boy was. You began knowing that Mr. Durban believed it to be Walter Figgis. You had only to prove that he was right. Those are not the same courses of action at all.”
Several jurors fidgeted unhappily. They could see the plain difference.
“Are you sure you were not merely confirming what you already wished to believe?” Rathbone hammered the point home.
“Yes, I am sure,” Monk said decisively.
Rathbone smiled, his head high, the light gleaming on his fair hair.
“How do you identify the body of a boy who has been in the water for some days, Mr. Monk?” he challenged. “Surely it is … severely changed? The flesh …” He did not continue.
The mood of the court altered. The reality of death had entered again, and the battle of words seemed faintly irrelevant.
“Of course it is changed,” Monk said softly. “What had once been a bruised, burned, and underfed boy, but very much alive, had become so much cold meat, like something the butcher discarded. But that is what we had to work with. It still mattered that we learn who he was.” He leaned forward a little over the railings of the stand. “He still had hair, and height, shape of face, possibly some clothes left, and quite a bit of skin, enough to guess his coloring, and of course his teeth. People's teeth are different.”
There were gasps of breath drawn in sharply. More than one woman stifled a sob.
Monk did not hesitate to be graphic. “In this case, Durban had written down that the boy had the marks of burns old and new on the inside of his arms and thighs.” The full obscenity of it should be known. “No one burns themselves in those places by accident.”
Rathbone's face was pale, his body awkward where he stood. “That is vile, Mr. Monk,” he said softly. “But it is not proof of identity.”
“It is a beginning,” Monk contradicted him. “An undernourished child who has been tortured, and has begun to change from a boy into a man, and no one has complained of his disappearance? That narrows down the places to look very much indeed, thank God. Durban made several drawings of what the boy probably looked like. He was good at it. He showed them up and down the riverbank, particularly to people who might have seen a beggar, a petty thief, or a mudlark.”
“He assumed he was one of such a group?”
“I don't know, but it was the obvious place to begin, and as it turned out, the right place.”
“Ah, yes,” Rathbone nodded. “Somebody recognized one of these drawings that Durban did from what was left of the boy. You mentioned hair, skin coloring to some extent, shape of skull, and so on. Correct me if I am mistaken, Mr. Monk, but could not such bare characteristics produce at least a thousand different sets of features?”
Monk kept his temper, knowing that Rathbone was trying to bait him. “Of course. But desperate as the state of many children is, there are not a thousand boys of that age missing at one time along the bank of the river, and unreported.”
“So you fitted this tragic corpse to the face of one boy that a mudlark said was missing, and you identified the body as that of Walter Figgis?” Rathbone's eyes were wide, a very slight smile on his lips.
Monk swallowed his sarcasm. He knew he was playing to an audience who was watching the shadows on his face, hearing the slightest inflection of his voice. “No, Sir Oliver, Commander Durban thought it very likely that the corpse was that of Figgis. When we found obscene photographs of Figgis, taken when he was alive, they were identified by those who knew him, and Commander Durban then matched them to the corpse. He had unusual ears, and one of them had not been destroyed by the water, and the creatures in it who feed on the dead.”
Rathbone was forced to accept it.
Tremayne smiled, his body relaxing a little in relief.
Sullivan sat forward a little at his high bench, turning first to Rathbone, then to Tremayne, then back again.
Rathbone moved on. “Did you see these—obscene—photo graphs?”
“Yes. They were in Durban's papers.” Monk could not prevent the violence of his disgust from showing. He tried to; he knew he should keep control. This was evidence. Only facts should matter, but still his body was shaking, and he felt sweat break out on his skin. “The faces were perfectly clear, even three of the burns. We found two of them on the same places.”
“And the third?” Rathbone asked very gently.
“That part of him had been eaten away.” Monk's voice trembled, thick with the horror and misery of Durban's words on the page in jagged writing, creating a picture of disintegration and loss.
“The vision of tragedy, of bestiality, that you call up, is almost beyond bearing,” Rathbone acknowledged. “I do not wonder that you find it hard to speak of, or that Mr. Durban put in endless hours of his own time, and indeed also his own money, to bring to justice whoever did this. Would it be true to say that you felt just as deeply as he did?” He shrugged very slightly. “Or perhaps you did not?”
There was only one answer possible. Rathbone had chosen his words with an artist's precision. Every eye in the court was on Monk.
“Of course I felt as deeply,” he said.
