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“But there’s no point in your asking me who ‘they’ are, because Lambourn didn’t tell me. Said I was safer not to know it. But I’m certain he knew.”
“But it’s someone here in London?” Hester persisted.
Doulting nodded, his face haunted by other people’s pain. “Killing Lambourn, gutting poor Zenia Gadney and seeing Dinah Lambourn hang for it would not add more weight to their souls. Perhaps there is nothing left that would.”
She believed that he was telling the truth as he had heard it. The fear was written in his face, and the meager instruments and few medicines in the room testified to it. But would Lambourn have had proof of someone creating an addiction in order to feed it? And was that even a crime? A sin, of course-but a crime punishable by law? And how would Lambourn have used that proof, even if he did have it? It would not have furthered his cause of regulating sales.
Was it not a completely separate issue, to be faced at another time, if at all? Who would listen? People did not want to hear that those they trusted were capable of such brutality and greed, such utter disregard for human destruction. Would they even believe it, or would they say that if a man chose to go to hell, he had the right to do it in his own fashion? It was so much easier, and safer, to condemn the bringer of such news, destroy the words rather than the fearful, indelible acts.
“If he was collecting information on illness and death from ignorance of dosage, how would he learn of the deeper addiction caused by using the needle?” Hester asked. “He was looking at harassed mothers who’d lost children: ordinary people, who’d never been more than a few miles from their homes.”
Doulting looked tired. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he went or who else he spoke to. He probably found it by accident from old soldiers. He didn’t say.”
“Old soldiers?” she said quickly.
He smiled very bitterly. “From the Crimean War, and the Opium Wars: men with injuries that will always pain them. They take opium to ease the ache of old wounds, to sleep through the nightmares of memory. For some it is to take the edge off the fevers and cramps of returning malaria and ague, and other things they don’t even know the names of.”
She felt stupid for not having realized. Her mind had been fixed on Lambourn’s concern for infant mortality.
“You won’t get it into evidence to save Dinah Lambourn,” Doulting said quietly, no hope at all in his eyes. “We won’t admit its evils because we sold it to an entire nation. We robbed, plundered, we murdered civilians, poisoned the men, women, and children of a nation too militarily backward to resist us, and we are barbarians: all of us, those who did it, and those who let them, and we who choose not to admit it now.” He let out a quiet sigh. “If we admit it, then we have to make reparation, and we have to give back the profits. Can you see anyone doing that?”
Hester could think of no answer. “There’s still time to find out who is behind this!” she said, not as a reply but as an admission.
“But who will we help if we die trying to prove it?” he asked.
“All I want at the moment is to save Dinah from being hanged,” she told him.
“And you think knowing what Lambourn found out will help?” He smiled, but there was no belief of it in his eyes.
“Yes! It’s possible,” she insisted. “It will at least make the jury realize that there is a very great deal more to this than domestic jealousy. Tell me where I can find the soldiers Dr. Lambourn saw?” she asked. “I could look for them myself, but I haven’t any time to waste.”
“I’ll write down for you what I know,” Doulting offered. “Then I need to get back to work.”
She finished her tea and set the mug down in one of the few clear spaces. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER 18
Rathbone knew that the case was slipping out of his grasp. He could not help his conviction that Dinah was innocent, yet he wondered if he felt that way because he was drawn to her loyalty to Lambourn by his own inner need to believe in the existence of such a love: deeper than her need for her own survival, deeper even than the evidence. Even Lambourn’s betrayal of her with another woman and his own apparent suicide had not shaken Dinah’s devotion.
He lay awake, alone in his silent bedroom, and came no closer to an answer. The sky was paling in the east, and the light came through the crack in the curtains where he had not closed them properly. It was going to be one of those bright winter days that made the coming of Christmas even more charming, more festive. Soon it would be the shortest day. People were collecting wreaths of holly and ivy and garlanding doors with ribbons. There would be carol singers in the street.
Out in the garden, the very last chrysanthemums were shaggy and drooping, some touched with frost. There was a smell of damp leaves and blue woodsmoke, all the beauty that awoke an awareness of the passing of time and the inability to hold on to even the most precious of things.
This Christmas he would be alone.
Could he even save Dinah? His professional brilliance was the one thing he had believed he could cling to: safe, beyond the ability of even Margaret to take away. Now that too seemed less certain.
If Dinah was innocent, then who was guilty?
Who on earth could he turn to as a witness?
Was it even conceivable that Lambourn’s death and the murder of Zenia were not connected, just two terrible events that afflicted the same family within the space of two months? Was he looking for a pattern that was not there?
If that was true, then Dinah was innocent and Zenia Gadney was the victim of some random lunatic they might never find. Certainly he would not find even the proof of his existence in the next few days. Today was Sunday. He knew that Pendock would want to put the case to the jury before Christmas, which was at the weekend. Otherwise it would have to be carried over to the following week. The jury would hate that, and blame him for it.
He felt the weight of despair as if he were drowning, sinking as the water closed over his head and he could not draw breath. It was absurd. He was lying rigid in his own bed, staring up at the broadening light across the ceiling. His health was exactly the same as always. It was disillusion that weighed him down. He wanted Dinah to be innocent, to be sane, brave, and loyal, and to love Joel Lambourn-even though he was dead-more than she loved herself.
It was at that moment that he made up his mind to go and see Amity Herne, and somehow gain from her a stronger understanding of Lambourn, and his complicated relationships. He might learn things he did not want to, but it was too late
