AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Bad news?” she asked quickly, anxiety shadowing her face.
He had learned not to lie to her, even to soften a blow.
“I’m beginning to think Mrs. Lambourn could be right, at least insofar as there being a government agreement not to allow Lambourn’s report to be given any credibility,” he answered. “I’ve tried to question his suicide, and the judge has cut me off every time. I think Coniston has also been briefed to head off any mention of it at all.”
“But you’ll not let him get away with that.” It was half a question; the doubt was still there in her voice, and in her eyes.
“We’re not beaten yet,” he said ruefully. “In a sense their possible agreement in keeping it out of the evidence suggests that there is something to hide. It certainly isn’t in order to spare anyone’s feelings, as they say it is.”
The maid came in with fresh tea and toast, and Rathbone thanked her for it. He poured for Hester without asking, and she took it with a smile, then reached also for toast and butter.
“Oliver, I’ve been doing a little asking around among people I know. I had a long talk with a prostitute near Copenhagen Place. She knew Zenia Gadney, possibly as well as anyone did.”
He heard the pity in her voice and found himself knotted inside. He wished he were more convinced of Dinah Lambourn’s innocence. But even if Joel Lambourn had been murdered, it did not prove that Dinah had not killed Zenia out of revenge for her betrayal during all the years before.
Except, of course, if anyone had betrayed Dinah, it was Joel himself. But he was already dead, and beyond her reach. The only things that made Rathbone question Dinah’s guilt at all were the senseless timing of Zenia’s death, and the fact that Pendock and Coniston both seemed so determined to block Rathbone from raising any doubt, however reasonable, about Joel’s suicide.
Hester knew she did not have his attention.
“Oliver?”
He concentrated again. “Yes? I’m sorry. What did you learn that you need to tell me before I go into court again?”
She spread marmalade on her toast. “That Zenia was a very quiet woman, kept very much to herself. She used to walk often, especially by the river. She stood and gazed southward, watching the water and the sky.”
“You mean toward Greenwich?” he asked curiously.
“Well, toward the south bank anyway. She had a past that she spoke of very seldom, once to Gladys, the girl I mentioned.”
Rathbone felt a little chilled. “What kind of a past? Is it one that could provide another motive for killing her with such violence?”
Hester shook her head. “Not as far as I can see. She said she was married once, but apparently she drank so hard she ruined her life, and possibly she left him, or he left her.”
“Who was he?” Rathbone asked quickly, feeling a lift of hope he hardly dared acknowledge. “Where can we find him? Could he have followed her to Limehouse and killed her? Perhaps he wanted to marry again, and she was standing in his way?” His mind was racing. At last there were other possibilities surfacing, which had nothing to do with Dinah Lambourn.
“Gladys guessed at it, based on something Zenia said once, when a woman was falling down drunk in the street,” Hester answered. “She didn’t even know if it was true, and no one has ever seen another man in Copenhagen Place, visiting her, or even looking for her. He could be dead by now, if he ever existed at all.”
Her voice dropped and she looked sad, and apologetic. “She could have invented him, to make herself sound more respectable, or even more interesting. It could have been daydreaming, a bit of wishing that it had been so.”
He felt the sadness inside him also, a sudden understanding of the woman’s wistful dreams that he would prefer not to have understood. “Then why did you come to tell it to me so urgently before I went into court?” The sharp edge of disappointment was raw in his voice.
“I’m sorry, that was misleading.” She brushed it away with a slender hand. “What I really came to tell you was that I also found a woman called Agatha Nisbet, who runs something of a makeshift hospital on the south bank of the river, near Greenland Dock. It is mainly for injured dockers, lightermen, and so on. She has a pretty steady supply of opium …”
“Opium?” Now he was listening, his attention quickened.
“Yes.” She smiled bleakly. “I made a deal with her to buy the best quality myself, for the clinic. She spoke to Joel Lambourn several times. He sought her out in his inquiries into opium. He wasn’t out to stop the trade, just to get it properly labeled so people knew what they were taking. Agnes Nisbet said it was the deaths of children that upset him especially.”
Rathbone nodded. He knew that already.
“But she warned me that a lot of people make money out of opium, ever since the Opium Wars,” Hester went on. “They are quite happy, some of the worst of them, to get people addicted so they will have a permanent market.” Her face was pinched with misery and anger as she said it. “A lot of very powerful families built their fortunes on opium, and they wouldn’t be at all happy with the exposure Lambourn’s report would inevitably have brought when it was argued in Parliament. All kinds of ghosts would’ve been dug up.”
“You can’t dig up a ghost,” he said irrelevantly. “Do you think Dinah is right, at least as far as Lambourn’s report is concerned?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “It makes sense, Oliver. We don’t even know whose fortune comes from opium, and what they could lose if it’s all brought out into the open, and regulated. Some companies are going to go out of business, simply because they wouldn’t make the same level of profit if they are forced to measure and label.”
He thought about it for a moment or two. It opened up new, alternative explanations for the death of both Joel Lambourn and Zenia Gadney-but they had no proof of anything. Great fortunes had always been made in appalling ways: through buccaneering-which was only another name for piracy-slaving, before the abolition half a century ago; and then in opium. Few wealthy families were free from one stain or another. With the fear and anger running rampant in the courtroom, and far beyond it, he did n
ot think that “reasonable doubt” was going to save Dinah Lambourn.
