AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If Rathbone were honest, what did he believe of this? Phillips was an evil man. Even Rathbone had not said that he was innocent, only that they had failed to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense was based on a legality, not a weighing of the facts, and certainly not a moral judgment. If Rathbone really loved the law above all else, then Monk had misjudged him the entire time they had known each other, and that was not only an ugly thought, but a sad one.
Surely Rathbone's motivation had to be something better than money. Monk refused to believe it was as simple and as grubby as that.
The food was ready and they sat down to eat it in silence. It was not uncompanionable; they were each lost in their own thoughts, but they concerned the same subject. He looked at her eyes momentarily, and knew that, as she knew it of him. Neither of them was ready yet to find the words.
They had not obtained justice. No matter what Rathbone had claimed, the use of the law had enabled a deeply guilty man to go free, and to repeat his offenses as often as he chose. The message to the people was that skill wins, not honor. And Monk himself was as much to blame as Rathbone for that. If he had done his job more completely, if he had been as clever as Rathbone, then Phillips would be on his way to the gallows. In taking it for granted that because he was right he had some kind of invulnerability against defeat, he had been careless, and he had let down Orme, who had worked so hard, and who had trusted him. And he had let down Durban as well. This was to have been an act of gratitude, the one thing he could give him, even beyond the grave—to do his job honorably.
And by bringing Phillips to face trial, and then be acquitted, he had freed him from ever being charged with that crime again, which was worse than not having caught him. All the River Police were betrayed in that.
The confidence, the inner peace that he had won so hard and treasured so dearly, was slipping out of his grasp like water through his fingers. One day it was there, and then he looked, and it was draining away while he was helpless to stop it. It was the cold truth; he was not the man he had begun to hope and believe he was. He had failed. Jericho Phillips was guilty at the very least of child abuse and pornography, and—Monk had no doubt—also of murder. It was Monk's carelessness, his incompetence to make sure of every single detail, to check and check again, to prove everything, that had allowed Rathbone to paint him as driven more by emotion than reason, so Phillips slipped through the blurring of doubts, and escaped.
He looked up at Hester. “I can't leave it like this,” he said aloud. “I can't for myself, I can't for the River Police.”
She put her spoon down and looked at him steadily, almost unblinking. “What can you do? You can't try him again.”
He drew his breath in sharply to respond, then saw the honesty and gentleness in her eyes. “I know that. And we were so certain of convicting him for Figgis's murder we didn't even charge him with assaulting the ferryman. If we try that now it'll look as if we're only doing it because we failed. He'll say he slipped, it was an accident, he was fighting for his life. It'll make us look even more … incompetent.”
She bit her lip. “Then this time we need to know what it is we are trying to do—exactly. Seeing the truth is not enough—is it?” That was a challenge, an invitation to face something far beyond the bitterness of the day. How practical she was. But then to nurse she had to be. The treatment of the illnesses of the body was, above all, practical. There was no time, no room for mistakes or excuses. It demanded a very immediate kind of courage, a faith in the value of trying no matter what the result. Fail this time, you must still give everything you have next time, and the time after, and after that.
She had stopped eating her plum pie, waiting for an answer.
“If I learn enough about him I shall prove him guilty of something,” he replied. “Even if it doesn't hang him, a good stretch in the Coldbath Fields would save a score of boys from abuse, maybe a hundred. By the time he gets out a lot of things could be different. Maybe he would even die in there. People do.”
She smiled. “Then we'll start again, from the beginning.” She ate her last mouthful and rose to her feet. “But a cup of tea first. If we're going to sit up all night, we'll need it.”
He felt a sudden wave of gratitude choke him too much to answer her. He bent and concentrated on finishing his own pie.
Afterwards he fetched Durban's notes again, and side by side they spread them all over the table, the seats, and the floor of the parlor, and read every one of them again. For the first time Monk realized just how patchy they were. Some were full of description, seemingly no detail omitted. Others were so brief as to be little more than words jotted down as reminders of whole trains of thought never completed. In some the writing was done in such haste that it was barely legible, and from the jagged forms of the letters and the heaviness of the strokes, it had been in the heat of great emotion.
“Do you know what this means?” Hester asked him, holding up a torn piece of paper with the words Was it money? What else? written across it with a different pen.
“I don't know,” he admitted. He had found other notes, scribbled sentences, unanswered questions that he had assumed referred to Phillips, but perhaps did not. He had reread the notes on all other cases at the time, both of Durban's and those kept in the station by anyone else. He had checked all the prosecutions recorded in the station archives too.
Hester was still watching him. He thought he knew what she was going to say, if not with this piece of paper then with the next, or the one after.
“It could be something to do with his own life,” he said to her at last. “Personal. I hadn't realized how little I really know about him.” He remembered back to those few, hectic days together searching for the crew of the Maude Idris, believing they were ashore somewhere in the teeming docks, and knowing they were infected and dying. He and Durban had worked until they were so exhausted they slept where they collapsed. They woke again after an hour or two, and staggered on. He had never had a more desperate or terrible case, and yet there had been a feeling of companionship whose memory still made him smile. Durban
had liked him, and he did not know anyone else who had done so with instant and unquestioning honesty.
If he had had any other friend like that, it had been in that huge part of the past he could no longer remember. He had sudden moments of light on the shadow, so brief as to give him only an image, never a story Judging from what he had heard and deduced of who he was, the intelligence and the ruthlessness, the relentless energy that drove him, even Durban would not have liked him then. Certainly Runcorn had not, and neither Hester nor Oliver Rathbone had known him. Hester might have tamed him, but without that searing vulnerability of his confusion and the fear of his own guilt in Joscelyn Gray's death, why would she have bothered? He had little humanity to offer until he was forced to look within himself and examine the worst.
He was glad Durban had known only the man he had become, and not the original.
What lay in the spaces around his mental construction of Durban that Monk did not know? Was the compulsion to catch Jericho Phillips going to force him to intrude into the areas of Durban's life that Durban had chosen to keep private, perhaps because there was pain there, failure, old wounds he needed to forget?
“I can remember his voice,” he said aloud, meeting her steady eyes. “His face, the way he walked, what made him laugh, what he liked to eat. He loved to see dawn on the river and watch the early ferries start out across the water. He used to walk alone and watch the play of light and shadow, the mist evaporating like silk gauze. He liked to see the forest of spars when we had a lot of tall ships in the Pool. He liked the sound and smells of the wharves, especially when the spice ships were unloading. He liked to listen to the cry of gulls, and men talking all the different foreign languages, as if the whole earth with its wealth and variety had come here to London. He never said so, but I think he was proud to be a Londoner.”
He stopped, his emotion too strong for the moment. Then he drew in a deep breath.
“I didn't want to talk about my past, and I didn't care about his. For any of us, it's who you are today that matters.”
Hester smiled, looked away, then back again at him. “Durban was a real person, William,” she said gently. “Good and bad, wise and stupid. Picking out bits to like isn't really liking at all. It isn't friendship, it's comfort for you. You're better than that, whether he was or not. Are your dreams, or Durban's memory, worth more than the lives of other boys like Fig?” She bit her lip. “Or Scuff?”
He winced. He had been lulled into forgetting how honest she could be, even if her words were harsh.
“I know it's intrusive to examine the whole man,” she said. “Even indecent, when he's dead and cannot defend himself, or explain, or even repent. But the alternative is to let it go, and isn't that worse?”
It was a bitter choice, but if Durban had been careless, or even dishonest, that had to be faced. “Yes,” he conceded. “Pass me the papers. We'll sort them into those we understand, those we don't, and those I expect we never will. I'll get that bastard Phillips, however long or hard the trail. I made the mistake, and I'll undo it.”
