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‘Have you heard anything?’ Monk asked as soon as Rathbone was inside the room. ‘Are they going to prosecute Rand for this?’
Rathbone walked over to the fireplace and stood looking from one to the other of them. ‘Do you think Rand killed her? Why?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Monk answered sharply. ‘But Runcorn tells me the local police do. The evidence seems to suggest she put up no fight, which doesn’t sound like a robber. She trusted whoever it was.’
‘Doesn’t mean it was Rand,’ Hester argued.
‘Are you working for him again?’ Rathbone said incredulously. How could she, after what he had done to her?
‘I’m working for the hospital,’ Hester told him, ‘for the patients who still need someone to care for them. Oddly enough, some of
the other nurses who might have done it have suddenly changed their minds.’ There was sadness in her voice, and quite definitely anger as well.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rathbone said. He meant it. The trail of pain this wretched case was leaving behind it was far wider and deeper than he had imagined when he began. Perhaps most cases were like that; he had simply forgotten that in the time he had been away. Sometimes you freed an innocent man, which meant the guilty one was still loose somewhere. If you convicted a guilty one, the story was seldom as simple as the charge made it seem.
‘I went to see her,’ Hester said suddenly. ‘Just before she was killed.’
‘Did you?’ Rathbone was startled. ‘Why?’
‘It started as duty, I suppose, because I thought she might be in danger. Not very effective, was I!’ There was bitterness in her voice now, and self-blame. ‘I didn’t like her, but I felt I might give her some kind of warning. I ended up by seeing it a great deal more from her view than I had before, and being no use at all. She was a good daughter, devoted, selfless really. Radnor made her so she thought she couldn’t live without him, even that she shouldn’t want to. People can do that to each other – suck them dry. I think he took people’s lifeblood more than just literally.’
‘Do you think Rand killed her to keep her from making any of his work public, before he was ready?’
Hester stared at him. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
‘To protect the secrets of his formula for storing blood. At the moment he’s the only one who knows the exact proportions, unless you do?’
‘I don’t think he killed Adrienne to stop her revealing how he did it. And yes, I do know what proportions he used to stop it from clotting so it was unusable. That isn’t the secret.’
‘What is?’
‘Why some people’s blood, which looks exactly like any other, cures people, and other blood kills. Some people’s blood always works, some seems never to, and others works some of the time and not at other times.’
‘And what is the answer?’
‘I have no idea, and neither has Hamilton Rand.’ She looked at Rathbone, then at Monk. ‘He isn’t wicked; he’s just oblivious to other people’s needs. He wants to find the way to transfuse blood from one living person to another, and he doesn’t care who pays the price for it. He doesn’t particularly want wealth, or fame. He wants the cure for white blood disease. His brother Edward died of it when he was a child. I think, to Hamilton, it would be like defeating death itself. Almost as if . . . as if he could bring Edward back and undo that loss he can’t forget.’
Monk thought about it for several moments before he replied. Rathbone waited. When Monk finally spoke it was to Hester.
‘So you don’t believe he would kill Adrienne to keep his process secret?’
‘If he wanted it secret, he would kill me first,’ she replied with a tiny shrug. ‘Adrienne didn’t know enough about it to understand. She was there only to help her father! I was there because I was taken, and then I was a prisoner both literally, because the door was locked, and morally, because I wouldn’t leave the children.’
‘And you understood his passion,’ Monk added, but there was no blame in his voice.
‘I came to,’ Hester agreed.
Monk looked at her, then at Rathbone. ‘She was found in the morning, fully clothed and lying in a ditch within a quarter-mile of her home. Her clothes were crumpled but not torn. She was half hidden by the long grass and undergrowth. Her body was cold, so she died some time quite early in the night, probably before midnight.’
Hester blinked rapidly and wiped her hand across her cheek.
Rathbone noticed the gesture. She had made him laugh, infuriated him, earned from him a fierce admiration, terrified and exasperated him at times during the years he had known her, but this was the side of her he cared for the most deeply. He had once thought he would never love anyone else so much. It gave him a deep feeling of peace to know that he had been wrong about that.
‘If they try to prosecute Rand for this, I won’t take part,’ he said with conviction. ‘It doesn’t look as if anything about this is going to end well!’
‘It’s not finished yet,’ Monk said grimly. ‘We won’t let it be!’
Chapter Fifteen
