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Gavinton looked even paler. “Yes. The poor woman was distraught. I think that up until that time she had believed Taft innocent. Or if not innocent, at least she had convinced herself it was some slight error, a misjudgment, but not more than that. I imagine she wondered how on earth she would survive. His reputation would be ruined. He would be in prison, and I have no idea how she could have provided for herself. I might have wondered if she had taken her own life, but one cannot strangle oneself.”
“Many women can make their own way in life,” Monk answered, even though a degree of pity stirred within him. “Many widows do, and all women who don’t marry. They may have little to spare on luxuries, but they survive. That is the lot of most people in the world. She was still quite young, and very handsome. She could have married again.”
“It hardly matters,” Gavinton pointed out. “She is dead. Perhaps Taft thought she wouldn’t survive without him.”
“And his daughters as well?” Monk asked. “What damnable arrogance and stupidity.”
“Damnable indeed,” Gavinton said quietly. For the first time genuine humility touched him. “I’m sorry. I failed more than I could have imagined in this one.” He looked numbed by the magnitude of the disaster.
Monk was uncertain he had learned anything of value, but he thanked Gavinton for his time, rose to his feet, and left.
He also checked Drew’s whereabouts at the time of Taft’s death, not with Drew himself but with the police. According to their files Drew lived in a modest but very comfortable house two or three miles away from Taft’s home. He had two resident servants: a manservant and a woman to do the cleaning and laundry. They both lived on the premises. The door had bolts on the inside, which were not undone during the night.
Drew said he had slept uneasily; that was easy to believe. He had supposedly paced the floor of his study until close to midnight then gone to bed. Within a quarter of an hour of the shots being heard at Taft’s house, Drew had woken his manservant when he had accidentally dropped a bottle of whisky in his study and smashed it on the marble hearth.
It was convenient, but it was also unarguable. Were it Drew who was dead, Monk thought wryly, he might have more grounds for suspecting Taft of murder. Even had it been Drew who had committed suicide, it would have been easier to understand. But nothing the police had found involved Drew in Taft’s death.
There were at least fifty pictures, aside from Drew’s, in Rathbone’s possession. But did anyone else have copies of the pictures? Ballinger had run the club, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was the only one with photographs. There could be someone else involved, someone who might be protecting his own skin, or cutting himself a piece of the blackmailing profit.
But none of this speculation helped Rathbone. Rathbone needed evidence that proved to the law that he was within the bounds of his judicial behavior, and to the public that he was not responsible for the death of Taft, or his wife and daughters.
Monk had a deep, cold fear that no such thing would exist. Whatever Rathbone’s intentions, and he did not doubt them, his actions had been disastrous.
He decided he must find a way to search Taft’s house, see where he had killed himself, look at his belongings, and get inside the mind of the man who had done such a thing. And he must do it legally.
First he returned to the financial side of the crime, getting all the papers Dillon Warne could give him, but this time looking not for evidence of embezzlement but for an indication of the Taft family’s daily life: their tastes, their expenses, their pleasures.
He chose to do it at the Portpool Lane clinic with Squeaky Robinson, because Squeaky could interpret figures into evidence.
Squeaky complained all evening about the time it was taking, and how many better things he had to do, and that this was not what he was paid for. But at the same time there was a deep satisfaction in him that he still might help Rathbone and that Monk had recognized his value and had asked for his assistance. Behind the scrape of his voice there was a distinct pleasure, and he worked with both speed and skill. It was a matter of double-entry bookkeeping; there were payments to companies for shipments that had appeared to take place, but had not done so. Occasionally there were complicated calculations that took very careful repeating to see where the figures had disappeared. Monk found it difficult to follow, but when Squeaky explained it, finally he understood. A little after midnight he leaned back in his chair and looked across at Squeaky.
“I see,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”
Squeaky inclined his head in acknowledgment. “He was a bad bastard,” he said quietly. “He stole thousands, drove some of them poor souls into beggary ’cos they swallowed his lies. Still don’t know what he did with it. It’s somewhere he can reach it. I’ll bet the house on that! Just got to find it. Everything that poor devil Sawley said about him were true, an’ they made him look like an idiot. That was wrong.”
Monk looked at Squeaky’s thin face with its angular features and stringy hair. For all his oddity, his sense of the wrong in humiliating another person gave him a kind of dignity.
“You’re right,” Monk agreed. “And Robertson Drew deserved to be pilloried for it too. He lied about the money, about people, and probably about everything else. If he were to get blackmailed over his personal indulgences, I would think that a very appropriate fate.”
“What are we going to do about all this?” Squeaky said, thinking practically.
Monk noticed that Squeaky still considered himself part of the battle.
“I’m not certain,” he replied thoughtfully. “Taft is the only one charged with a crime directly, and he is dead. I imagine Drew will remain very quiet for some time and then probably disappear off to another city and start again-new name, new congregation. Anywhere as large as Manchester or Liverpool and he’d probably never be recognized.” He realized as he said it just how much that angered him.
Squeaky regarded him with quiet disgust. “An’ you’re going to let that happen?”
“First thing is to do something to vindicate Rathbone,” Monk answered him. “Once he’s in prison we’ll not get him out again.”
“He won’t bloody survive it!” Squeaky agreed, his anger hot again. “Bad bastards he’s put away, somebody’ll stick a knife in his guts in t
he first month … or sooner. You’d better think sharpish.” He stared at Monk as if expecting something immediate in return, a plan of battle.
Monk was stung by the unreasonableness of it, and yet also flattered, which was ridiculous. Why did he care what Squeaky Robinson, of all people, thought of him?
“I can only keep returning to one question: Why did Taft kill himself and his family?” Monk said slowly. “What purpose did it serve?”
“Personally, I’d have wanted to kill Taft. I think he got off easy,” Squeaky responded reasonably. “There’s something big as we don’t know here, if you ask me.”
