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Her face tightened. “I got me own ways o’ getting opium-pure. I give it for pain, not for some rich fool to escape ’is troubles. I told ’im that.”
“Then why would anyone bother to murder Dr. Lambourn? Come on, Miss Nisbet!” he urged. “He was a good man, a doctor trying to get medicine labeled properly so people didn’t kill themselves accidentally. They murdered him to keep him quiet, and then butchered his first wife to hang his second wife for it. Whatever it was he found out it was a damn sight worse than a petty trade war that I could hear about in common speech on the dockside.”
She nodded her head slowly. “There’s worse than thievin’,” she agreed. “There’s slow poison. There’s good men gone bad an’ a kind o’ living death that’s worse than a grave. Opium’s a powerful thing, like fire. Warm yer hearth, or burn yer ’ouse down.”
Monk was aware of how closely she was watching him. The slightest flicker in his face, an instant’s movement of his eyes, and she would see it. For a brief second he wondered what this woman had seen and done; what life had denied her that she had chosen this path. Then his attention returned to the present, to Joel Lambourn dead in disgrace and Dinah waiting to face the hangman.
“My horrors have all been commonplace,” he answered her, knowing that she would not continue until he had made some acknowledgment. “A woman raped and beaten to death, a man hacked up and left to rot, children tortured and starved. It’s all happened before, and it will happen again. The best I can do is try to prevent it as often as I can. What do you know that’s going to ruin anyone in London, now?”
Something inside her closed up tight and hard. “Murder,” she answered quietly. “It all comes down ter murder in the end, don’t it? Murder for money. Murder for silence. Murder for dreams, for peace instead o’ screamin’ pain, murder for a needle an’ a packet o’ white powder.”
He said nothing. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door, fast and light, someone hurrying, and beyond that the noises of pain. No creak of bedsprings, only the rustle of straw palliasses on the floor.
“Who?” he said at last. “Who did Lambourn find out about?”
“Dunno,” she answered without a second’s hesitation. “Don’t want ter, ’cos then I’d ’ave ter kill ’im.”
Monk had no doubt that she would. He was uncertain of his own morality, because he might feel the same, but he smiled.
She smiled back at him, showing huge, white teeth. “Ye’re an odd duck, aren’t yer?” she said with interest. “If yer find the bastard, put an
extra twist in the noose fer me, will yer? He’s ruined two right good men, an’ there in’t enough o’ them ter waste one, Gawd knows. Lambourn, and the ’ooever ’ee’s got sellin’ for ’im.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she held back tears far too long and her throat ached from it.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “When I get him.”
“They said Lambourn slit ’is wrists?” she went on, staring at him steadily.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But ’e didn’t,” she pressed. Her voice was firm now, no doubt in it.
“I don’t think so,” Monk said quietly. He would not pretend to be certain.
“Better off than some, but it shouldn’t ’ave ’appened.”
“What sort of person am I looking for?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”
She gave a little grunt of disgust. “If I knew that, I’d get ’im meself. Someone secret, ’oo don’t look like ’e’d know opium from corn flour. Someone ’oo’s clean an’ polite an’ never seen wot ’appens to them as sticks that stuff in their veins an’ takes a one-way visit to madness. But now an’ again the ones like me sees their faces lookin’ out between the bars at the rest of us.”
Monk was silent for several moments, then he stood up.
“Thank you,” he said, then turned and walked away.
He went back to Wapping, his mind teeming with what Agatha Nisbet had said. He was looking for the man who profited from selling not just opium, but the needles that made it possible to become lethally addicted to it within a matter of weeks, even days. It was nothing to do with ordinary doses anyone could buy in patent medicines, or even the Chinese habit of smoking it, bad enough in its slow destruction.
The problem was not only to find him, but even when he did, what would he do about it? To sell such damnation might be one of the vilest of sins, but it was not against the law. Unless, of course, the man was also involved in the murder of Lambourn and of Zenia Gadney.
But since it was not a crime to sell opium, and needles, even if Joel Lambourn found out, why kill him? What could he have done to harm such a man? What could he prove?
It was still a tangle too dense to penetrate.
In his office Monk reread all he had on the people concerned in the research for the Pharmacy Act, making a list of all of those who had come into contact with Joel Lambourn. He would have to compare this list with whatever Runcorn could find on Lambourn’s movements in the last week of his life.
But then, of course, it did not have to be direct contact. It might have been indirect, someone who mentioned a name, a fact to someone else.
Who was the person that Agatha Nisbet believed had been corrupted into selling opium and needles for the man behind the scheme? How would they find him, and if they did, would he tell them anything of use?
The other half of the problem was not yet answered, perhaps the easier half: Who knew what Lambourn had learned so that it reached the man behind the sales, the real profiteer, the one who had killed him, and then killed Zenia Gadney? What was the line of reasoning that connected them all?
