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‘You are quite right,’ Monk agreed. ‘Which is why I will take Hooper.’
‘Hooper’s still hurt,’ Scuff argued.
‘Have you thought about how Hester feels?’ Monk said gently. ‘She was locked up there for days. She saw pretty well everything he did.’
Scuff felt a hurt tighten inside him. He wished he were bigger and stronger, so he could personally hit Hamilton Rand, beat him till he bled, and make him really sorry for what he had done.
‘Then we’ve got to see that they put him in prison,’ he said with intense feeling. ‘We must! However long we have to look. Why aren’t we going straight away? What are we waiting for?’
‘Lunch,’ Monk answered.
‘What does lunch matter?’ Scuff said incredulously.
Monk stared at him. It was the first time since he had known him that Scuff had been uninterested in any kind of food.
Scuff blushed, but he was still annoyed.
‘Actually,’ Monk said gently. ‘I want you to stay here and look after Hester. She’s having some pretty bad nightmares about being captive in that house, about being tied down and bleeding to death herself. I don’t want to leave
her alone – in fact I can’t. I could ask someone from the clinic, perhaps—’
‘I’ll do it,’ Scuff interrupted. It made him almost sick, the thought of using a stranger for this, compared with him. ‘You shouldn’t get someone else. That’d be bad. She’d think we didn’t care. What’s wrong with you?’
Monk tried to hide his smile but Scuff saw it. ‘You did that on purpose!’ he accused Monk, feeling the colour burn up his face. It was a mixture of anger, fear, awareness of terrible responsibility, and also of at last being almost grown up . . . and still belonging.
‘Be gentle with her,’ Monk continued. ‘She saw some pretty bad things. She knew he’d kill her and the children if Radnor died, and it looked once or twice as if he would. But make her eat. Don’t listen to her if she says she’s not hungry. Cups of tea, bread and butter, but cut it thin. Have you ever watched her butter the cut end of the loaf, and then slice it afterwards, so the butter holds it together and you can do it really thin?’
Scuff nodded. ‘Yes. Is that what I should do?’
‘Yes, if you can. If you can’t, then get her to do it herself, even if you pretend it’s for you. Just get her to eat, and talk to her. Don’t leave her alone. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Depends on what we find. It could take all night, even the next day. Don’t worry, just sit up with her, if I’m not back. Don’t let her have nightmares and wake up in the dark alone.’
‘I won’t,’ Scuff promised. ‘I’ll sit in the chair all night, I promise.’
‘Thank you.’
Scuff took his new responsibility very seriously. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that Monk not only trusted him, but he had offered him an opportunity to repay a small part of all that Hester had done for him.
Even now he occasionally dreamed again of being locked into the bulges of Jericho Phillips’ boat.
Did Hester feel like that? She was so strong and so clever it was hard to believe she could ever have felt as small and vulnerable as he had, or so easily beaten. Maybe he could even be more help to her than Monk himself? He knew what it felt like. He would always know, whatever else happened to him. Even if he grew to be as tall as Monk, learned how to fight, how to get a proper job and earn money, that memory would always be there somewhere inside him, behind a door he wouldn’t open, unless he had to.
As soon as Monk was gone he stoked up the fire and put the kettle on. Hester was folding laundry in the back of the laundry room and where the deep tubs were that you could wash sheets in. He knew there was cake in the pantry. He fetched it out and put it on the table, then went to find her.
As soon as he opened the laundry room door he saw her. She was standing with a clean sheet in one hand, thinking, as if she were miles away, or had forgotten how to fold it.
He took it from her and gave her back one end. She smiled and took it. Together they folded all of them and put them in a pile. He loved the smell of clean cotton. It was warm and safe. It was sweet – not like sugar, but like the wind in the country that blows in off fields. He had only smelled that recently, just the other day, but it wasn’t something you forgot.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a slight smile. She still looked very pale.
‘I made some tea,’ he told her. ‘And I got the cake out. Maybe if we eat all that then we could make some more.’
‘We?’ She smiled, shaking her head, following him into the kitchen. She saw the cake and the teapot and cups on the table. Suddenly she blinked very hard and looked away, as if there were something interesting beyond the window.
He pretended not to have noticed. But that told him Hester was in a bad way. Other women cried quite often, but not Hester. Whatever happened, she dealt with it. She never cried.
He sat down at the table and poured the tea, one cup for her, one for himself. Then he cut the cake in half and put a piece on each of the plates. She would argue about eating so much, but Monk had said she needed to eat.
Scuff took a deep breath. He did not know what he should do, and he tried to remember what she had done when he had nightmares about Phillips’ boat. She had made him talk about it, little by little, not keep it all locked up inside him, too dreadful for words.
