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“Judge’s widow,” Beata corrected him smartly.
Squeaky glared at her. She held his gaze until he finally nodded and pursed his lips. From his look she deduced that he knew something of Ingram, and for a moment she felt her face flame. What madness had brought her here? This was dreadful!
“Then I guess you know a thing or two,” Squeaky said at last. “You won’t have your head in the clouds, with a Bible in one hand and a feather duster in the other.”
She found herself laughing a little hysterically at the vision. It was uneven laughter, too close to losing control. She stopped abruptly.
“I’m sorry,” Hester said. “You can see how much we need someone who can exercise good manners, regardless of their own thoughts and feelings. I can do it now and then but, like Squeaky, I slip up.” She held out her hand, as a man would have. “I was an army nurse, and at times my experience of reality shows rather too much.”
Her smile and her direct, unjudging gaze eased Beata’s self-consciousness away like a warm iron over silk. She smiled back. “I imagine only practicality is any use to the sick,” she replied, taking Hester’s hand and gripping it warmly. As she did so, she understood what Oliver had loved in this woman, and she was not afraid of it anymore. Hester’s virtues were real, hard won, and she would like to emulate them. She could! She had the battles to win and the fields in which to do so. Tomorrow she would not bother with black at the clinic; gray was more practical.
“DROWNED,” HYDE SAID WITH a grimace. He and Monk were standing in his small office in the morgue. “But I can’t say how much your blow contributed to it. Sorry. Like to be able to say it didn’t, but I couldn’t swear to that on the stand. You definitely stunned him. It may have been sufficient to stop him from functioning enough to breathe. All I can say, if it’s any comfort to you, is that if you hadn’t hit him, I’d most certainly be giving this report to whoever would take over from you.”
“Thank you,” Monk said bleakly. “I assume that’s what you also told McNab?”
“It’s the truth,” Hyde answered. “He was none too pleased, but there’s nothing he can do.”
Monk did not reply to that. He left the morgue and went out into the street, much less certain than Hyde that there was nothing McNab could do. He took a cab back toward Wapping, the subject still heavy in his mind. Had he really done all he could to save Pettifer? Or, believing that he was the person they were after, had he been willing enough to let him die, if the rescue would have been a real risk to his own life?
He weighed it in his mind as he rode through the gray, busy streets. Was it an excusable decision any man might have made? Even should have made? Or was it an error of judgment that had cost another man his life?
He had thought Owen was McNab’s man, and Pettifer was the prisoner. Was that because of something in the way they had attacked each other? Owen had seemed to be behind Pettifer, when actually he had simply come from the other side. Pettifer was big, heavily bearded, and had used some pretty ripe language, so had Monk simply assumed he was the prisoner through personal prejudice, a judgment based on superficialities?
But then, if he were a customs officer who had just lost a prisoner, the second one in a week, might he not be expected to be in a fury? Anyone judging Monk would point that out.
Anyone? Who, for example?
McNab, of course.
Monk got out of the hansom, paid the driver, and walked along the dockside in the wind. There were gulls circling above him and the incoming tide was choppy, here and there white-crested. It was a day when a water patrol would be hard work. Not only strength would be required but endurance, and seamanship.
He thought of Orme with a recurring emptiness of loss. In spite of the fact that he had been well into his sixties, he could keep going all day, hoarding his strength, using the water’s current, the boat’s weight, its impetus. Monk had learned to appreciate him at the time, but even more since his death. He realized only now how much he had asked his opinion, relied on his judgment of a situation, his word of warning now and then, his example dealing with men.
It had not been just his knowledge, it was his wisdom, his rare laughter, his love of the wild birds in the sky across the Estuary. He knew them all by their flight patterns. It added to Monk’s pleasure to know such things.
And it was his ability to tell a man the harshest truths without making them seem like criticism. He had learned his craft through years—and took pleasure in passing it on. He had had no sons, only a daughter, and it was his legacy that he had taught two generations of River Police what he knew. That very much included Monk.
Now Monk wished intensely that Orme were here to help him make a judgment of McNab. How much was it simply personal dislike that McNab was using on Monk, as a skilled man learns to use his attacker’s own weight and impetus against him?
He stopped and stared across the gray water, trying to think of every operation he had carried out that could have had any effect on the customs men, or on McNab in particular. Nothing came to mind. Usually they both benefited. Was there one where McNab felt he had done the work, and Monk had taken the credit? Could it be something as petty as that? It sounded like the sort of thing schoolboys do in the playground.
Or was it interservice rather than personal? Customs against police? Orme would have known. Monk tried to think back if Orme had ever said anything, given any warning, however discreet.
There was none he could think of.
He wondered about asking Hooper but felt reluctant to do so. Maybe he cared more what Hooper thought of him. Or was he more afraid of his judgment because in some way he trusted him less? Hooper was roughly his own age, whereas Orme had been almost a generation older and had known Monk’s weaknesses right from the beginning, when Monk was still only temporarily assisting the River Police. He recalled the horror of plague and the nightmare ship going down the river with Devon at the wheel, sailing into oblivion, giving his life to save everyone else.
A man who had shared that with you forged both a bond that was not like any other, and a unique kind of grief at his loss.
Had McNab in effect murdered Orme, by betraying the raid to the gunrunners, or was Monk trying to blame McNab for something that was essentially his own fault?
It was past time he found out for certain whether the battle on deck had been a piece of bad luck, which strikes anyone now and then, or if his suspicions about McNab’s betrayal were in any part correct.
&nb
sp; Why had he not faced it and pursued it to the end before? It was months since Orme’s death now, and yet he had not looked at the evidence regarding the ambush of the gunrunning ship by river pirates at exactly the same hour as the River Police raid.
Monk and his men had come from upriver, just at daylight. They had come out of the west and the darkness, catching the gunrunners completely by surprise. The battle had been raging on deck in the broadening light. This had been very definitely to the police’s advantage, when the river pirates had boarded from the downriver side, climbing up onto the deck and very nearly carrying the battle.
