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Monk sat opposite him. There was no time to waste in niceties, even a habitual “How are you?”
“You did give Warne the photograph?” Monk said immediately. “Under some sort of privilege, I presume?”
“Yes, of course. I took it to him and told him where I got it and how. I left it up to him whether to use it or not.” Did that sound like an excuse? “I didn’t know he was going to call Hester.”
Monk dismissed that with a slight movement of his hand. “It was the best thing to do,” he replied. “And it gave him a chance to show the jury, and anyone else, that she wasn’t the emotionally fragile woman Drew had painted her to be. It was the perfect tactic. Calling me might have been practically difficult at short notice and would have looked as if I were defending Hester. Not nearly so effective.”
“You make it sound cold-blooded,” Rathbone said quietly. He was ashamed that Hester had been used, even though he had not done it himself.
Monk’s face darkened with impatience. “For God’s sake, Rathbone, you know Hester better than that! She doesn’t need protecting, by you or anyone else, and she wouldn’t thank you for it. We need to find out who laid the charge against you, and why. Who else even knew about the photographs, and that you have them?”
“I don’t know,” Rathbone replied, chastened. He was too desperate to be angry. There was no time for emotional self-indulgence. “I’ve been trying to work that out myself.” He smiled bitterly. “I’ve made a great many enemies in my career, but I didn’t realize any of them would stoop to this. Every case is won by someone and necessarily lost by someone else. It’s the nature of law, at least in the adversarial system. Sometimes it’s the skill of the lawyer; quite often it’s simply the evidence.”
“Is that how you feel when you lose? That it was the evidence?” Monk asked, amusement flickering for an instant in his eyes then disappearing.
“Not at the time,” Rathbone admitted. “But after a day or two, yes, it is.” His mind raced; he tried to think of any case he had won that was so bitter his opponent could carry a grudge of this magnitude. Had he ever done anything worthy of such resentment, such patient hunger for revenge?
Monk was not prepared to wait for him. “Why did you give the photograph to Warne?” he asked grimly. “The real reason, not the superficial one. We haven’t time for excuses.”
Rathbone was startled. “To stop Taft, of course. He was ruining the reputations, and in a way the lives of simple, gullible people who had trusted him-in the name of God-because that was what he asked of them. They weren’t doing it for any hope of profit. If it were that sort of confidence trick I’d have less pity for them.” He heard his voice grating with anger, his own situation momentarily forgotten. “I know a great deal of the money found its way into Taft’s pockets. Very little of it ever went to the charities he named, despite the way he talked his way through the account books. And those who gave so generously ended up cheated and desperate-their faith and their dreams taken from them, and their dignity. And then he mocked them in open court.” He leaned forward across the battered wooden table. “Damn it, Monk, Taft and Drew both deserve to be shown up for what they are. I’m sorry Taft killed himself, but surely the fact that he killed his wife and daughters as well says something of what kind of a man he was.”
Monk sighed. “The question has passed beyond whether Taft was a cheat, or Drew an abuser of children. It’s become whether you, as a judge in our legal system, and therefore in a place of unique trust, used secret knowledge to twist the outcome of a trial over which you presided, and did it for some personal reason of your own. They can call it perversion of justice because you should have recused yourself, and you know that, but there’s a bigger picture beneath that, and that is what concerns me.”
Rathbone heard the words with a surge of anger then, looking into Monk’s eyes, a sudden horrifying clarity. Monk was right. He had seen what the legal system was going to see: their desperate need to protect themselves by cutting off the gangrenous limb-himself.
Monk was watching him quietly, as if he could see past all the protective masks into the desperately vulnerable heart inside.
“What motive would they ascribe to me, do you think?” Rathbone said, his voice shaking for the first time.
“Arrogance to think yourself above the law and to retrieve what you lost in the Jericho Phillips trial,” Monk answered him. “To give Hester the chance to show people that she has a
ll the courage and judgment that she failed to show then. To turn back the clock.”
Rathbone sat silently. Had he wanted to do that? Was exposing Drew only the excuse? He had not thought so at the time. The hot anger in the front of his mind had surfaced on behalf of the same victims Hester had wished to save. But would he have done it if the person involved had been somebody else, somebody he did not know? Or over whom he had not still felt such corrosive guilt?
“I’ll find out all I can,” Monk was saying. “I think there may be a lot about this that we don’t know yet.”
Rathbone jerked his attention back to the moment. There was no time to waste-perhaps only minutes left for this meeting. He was a prisoner. He stood up and sat down when other people commanded him to. He ate what he was given, and only at their pleasure. In time perhaps he would wear only their clothes. He would look like any other convict. Would the time come when he would feel like that-seem like that, to others?
His father would never abandon him, no matter how bitterly disappointed he might be.
The thought of his disappointment was so painful it tightened around Rathbone’s heart like a closing fist. He could hardly draw in his breath.
Monk was talking again. There was a sudden, intense compassion in his face, burning a moment and then vanishing.
“You must get someone to represent you, as soon as possible.”
Rathbone started.
“Don’t even imagine you can speak for yourself,” Monk said sharply. “You can’t do it any more than a surgeon can remove a bullet out of his own back. You must find someone you trust and, more to the point, who trusts you.”
Rathbone was shaken. The second of Monk’s conditions was something he had not even thought of. Who would trust him? Who would be prepared to jeopardize his own career by speaking up for Rathbone, in these circumstances?
“But I don’t even know who to trust because I have no idea who started this prosecution,” he said wearily. “I’m as blind as a bat stumbling about at the bottom of a hole.”
“I’ll do what I can to find out who is behind this,” Monk replied without even the flicker of a smile at the absurdity of the picture evoked. “But I think, then, your father is the man to find you a lawyer. With the respect he’s earned he’ll be able to employ the best person, someone to trust no matter what he thinks of this issue.” He smiled now, with both pity and friendly jest. “And whatever he thinks of you in general.”
Rathbone wished to protest, but he felt too vulnerable to fight.
