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Or did Clive have something to do with it also? Clive a
nd McNab together? Why? What could he have done to Clive?
Or Miriam…Astley, as she was then? Had Monk had some part in Astley’s death that he could not remember? Was that why it seemed that everyone’s hand was against him? If he had killed Astley, then maybe he deserved it.
He had lacked pity, wisdom, patience, humility…but surely he had never been a gun for hire? To murder people, for someone else? There was no money on earth that could make that of him!
Damn, damn, damn that carriage accident that had robbed him of all his past…not the living of it, but the recall! How could you repent of or make good what you did not know about?
He straightened up. This was pointless self-pity and would gain him nothing except perhaps other people’s contempt—and his own. Wiping out the past was not all loss. It had given him a chance to begin again, to weigh and judge who he had been and to see more clearly, from the evidence, what was ugly in him and must be changed. How many people got an opportunity to do that? Habits locked them in, but he was free.
Hester believed in him. So did Scuff, rightly or not. And others. No matter what he owed himself, he owed it to them to fight to the very last breath.
If McNab were behind this accusation, there must still have been an element of collusion with someone else, or betrayal. Gillander, after all? Why? In justice for Piers Astley? Or did McNab have some hold on him, perhaps for a crime committed along the river? Smuggling? Maybe not a crime, just a carelessness? Or to protect Miriam Clive? He would probably do almost anything for her. Getting rid of Monk, if he were somehow in her way, would be a small thing.
Or of course to revenge herself on him if he had killed Astley. She said he had helped her to know who it was!
And she had said she didn’t care if the law could touch him or not. She did not need the law. She was going to find her own vengeance—intimate, not impersonal, like the gallows. So did this all have to do with San Francisco, and Astley’s death?
He did not ask them any further questions. They knew nothing, and it would only make him look more vulnerable. He sat in silence the rest of the way, and when they arrived at the police station, he said nothing more than to acknowledge his identity. In due course he was put into one of the cells.
He was familiar with such places. Even with more than half his life lost to amnesia, he had still worked enough years on ordinary police duties that he had seen a score of such cells. One wall was iron bars from floor to ceiling; the other three were whitewashed stone. One window, too high to see out of, gave the only daylight there was. There was one bunk bed with a straw mattress, and stale, sour-smelling blankets, like the odor of rancid butter. The sanitary facilities were of the most basic.
This, of course, was for a man still presumed innocent! What would follow for those found guilty was a different matter altogether.
But he was not guilty! Not of this, at least.
It must have been midmorning by the time Rathbone came. It seemed to Monk as if he had waited an eternity, but when he tried to be rational about it, he realized that Rathbone would find out at least the basics of the charge, the evidence and the reason for it, before he came.
Would he believe Monk was innocent? Yes, of course he would! This was nothing to do with the past, or the parts of it he did not know. This was totally in the present. And it was absurd. He had tried to rescue Pettifer, not drown him. He didn’t even know the man!
It was all McNab trying to take his obsessed revenge.
Monk turned from pacing the floor, five steps, back again, five steps…and there was Rathbone standing in front of the duty sergeant, the lamplight gleaming on the pale sweep of his hair. He looked slender, elegant as always, his clothes immaculate. But he knew what this was like. He too had been accused, robbed of his own clothes, his dignity, his right to decide anything at all, even when he would eat or sleep.
He walked over to the cell just a step ahead of the sergeant.
“If you please?” he said, indicating the lock.
The sergeant hesitated a moment. He glanced at Rathbone, and decided that any further delay would be extremely inadvisable. He turned the lock and motioned Monk out.
Monk stepped through the door. It gave an illusion of freedom. For a wild moment he wanted to run. But that was what guilty men did. He stood motionless, waiting. Or maybe that was really what guilty men did, knowing they were already beaten?
The sergeant led the way across the passage to the interview room, and showed them into the small room where lawyers could consult with their clients in something like privacy. As soon as Rathbone was inside, the guard slammed the door shut. Both Rathbone and Monk heard the teeth of the lock fall into place.
“Right.” Rathbone indicated one of the two chairs for Monk to sit down, and then sat in the other himself. The rickety wooden table between them was scarred with initials of long-dead prisoners written in ink, or carved with anything sharp enough to make a mark. It was stupid, damage just for the sake of stating your identity, your separateness from the anonymity of the system.
Suddenly Monk was lost for words. He shouldn’t waste the short time they had in such thoughts.
As it was, Rathbone did not wait for him to speak, but began immediately. “The charge is that you murdered Pettifer by striking him over the side of the head and neck so that he was too stunned to save himself from drowning. The evidence for this charge is the words you yourself spoke to two men who came on to the scene and helped you out of the water, and also Pettifer. The marks of your blow were on Pettifer’s head, and you told them that was what had happened.”
“It was,” Monk said, the fear solidifying inside him. “But Pettifer was a big man, and powerful. He panicked in the water and when I tried to get him to turn so I could pull him ashore, he started fighting with me. The only way I could get either of us out was to stun him enough that he didn’t drown both of us.” He could hear the edge of fear rising in his voice.
“I believe you,” Rathbone said. “It happens often that when people panic in the water they lash out. Unfortunately the only witness to that is Hooper, who is your own man….”
“He’s not a liar,” Monk said sharply. “And there are no witnesses that can say differently. The other police officers arrived far too late to have seen anything.”
“I know that, too,” Rathbone said calmly, his face very pale. “The only other witness, who might or might not have seen anything, is Owen, the person who escaped. And he’s long gone, probably across the Channel. Or Fin Gillander, the man on the schooner across the river. But unless he was looking through a telescope at the whole thing, he was much too far away to see what happened. There was a man in a boat of some sort who called for help, but he claims he saw nothing.”
