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“If there’s that much money involved, it’s already nasty,” Monk answered. “And we damned well better be involved.”
Hooper still did not move.
Monk stared at him. “Well?”
Hooper spoke very quietly. “One of us is in this, sir. None of us knows who we can trust, and who we can’t. You should be asking that, sir, not out in the water where you can meet with an accident.”
“I can meet with an accident in any dark alley, just as we all could,” Monk replied between his teeth. “Or are you afraid for yourself on the water with me?”
Surprise, then anger, took the smile from Hooper’s face. “No, sir. I reckon I’d be a match for you, if it came to that. And you don’t like that dark water and the currents any more than I do.”
Monk was too startled to reply for several seconds, and then he laughed. The black, bitter humor he felt was too close to pain, but it broke a certain tension inside him. “I’m coming at it from the other end,” he said. “I don’t know who the hell it is, from here. Maybe if we catch some of the kidnappers, they will show us who’s the inside man, God help him. Come on.” He moved away from the desk and this time Hooper followed him.
Out on the water they were busy with movement and surrounded by the sound of the river. Silence was easier, but the unanswered question was still there between them. Monk had trusted Hooper without ever having to think about it. He was straight about everything, even to the point of awkwardness. When he needed to be tactful, he resorted to silence. And yet he could be extremely gentle when he saw injury. He could convey understanding in the simplest language. What was it now that he could not trust Monk to know? The thought of how ugly it must be frightened Monk. A part of what he so liked in Hooper was his lack of complexity, of the kind of secrets that haunted Monk himself. He was not pleased to see himself so shallow.
They moved swiftly, still catching the low tide, but it was already past slack water and it became harder as they went down past Limehouse, along the stretch toward the Isle of Dogs.
Monk’s thoughts grew darker as the morning light showed the wharfs and docksides more clearly. Some of them stretched far out into the river, the water swirling around the broken stakes and half timbers where the boards had rotted away in places. The mud-banks were clearly visible now, but at full tide they disappeared. A conjuring trick twice a day. Now you see them, now you don’t. At high tide the dockside vista looked peaceful, even rich, while men were busy unloading the treasures of the earth, come in from every place you could think of, and many you couldn’t.
If Hooper had betrayed them, what conceivable thing had made him do it? Perhaps someone he loved was a hostage as well? Yet he had never spoken of anyone at all. He seemed a man utterly alone. All his friendships were with the men he worked beside—Monk himself, most of all. Was that a sham?
Monk thought of himself before the accident, the self he saw only from the outside. He had apparently had no real friends; allies, colleagues—yes, but not anyone to whom anything of his dreams and his fears could be shown. Perhaps his accident had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, even with all the confusion that had followed it, and the overwhelming tension that he himself had committed the crime that he was sent to solve.
Monk and Hooper landed at King’s Arms Stairs along Limehouse Reach and went ashore. They were both casually dressed, as if they were seamen paid off from some ship and ready to find another, but not in any great hurry. Monk altered the upright way he walked and mimicked Hooper’s easy roll, as if on a gently pitching deck. He pulled his cap further forward on his head to shade his eyes, which were steady, steel-gray, with an intelligence most people remembered. They found several groups of men, and Monk let Hooper do the talking. As inconspicuously as possible, he watched the ones who were idling, overhearing, and also watching.
They spent quite a while in a busy public house with beer and sandwiches, talking, apparently casually. After they had finished and lingered a bit, Hooper stood up.
“Outside the Dancing Bear in twenty minutes,” he said. “Better not be early. Looks too keen. And it’s pretty obvious. Sitting ducks, if anyone’s that way minded.”
They arrived accordingly a few minutes before the time. Five minutes later, they saw a shadow move across the open space and disappear close beside them, in the darkness against the wall. They heard nothing.
“Got some news, Patch?” Hooper asked in a perfectly normal voice.
Patch squawked loudly and demanded to know if Hooper was trying to kill him. “Could’ve scared the life out of me!” he accused.
“Money?” Hooper replied.
“I ain’t got no money. Leastways, none that I’m gonna give you. What do you want to know? I dunno who cut that woman up. Bloody barbarian, if you ask me.”
“You know about spending money,” Hooper replied. “Maybe you know where it came from? You know the fences around here. You know the pawn shops. And most of the time you know who’s done a good job recently, and got a bit to spend. Now you tell me who’s got money you don’t know where it came from.”
“What’s it worth?”
It was Monk who replied. “It’s worth a blind eye, next time you need me not to see something. This man’s nasty, cut up a helpless woman and took the money anyway.” The minute the words were out of his mouth, he knew it was a tactical error. Now Patch would be more afraid of the man than of Monk. How could he repair it? He deliberately softened his voice. “Someone paid him. That’s the man we want.”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You know someone’s got a lot of money, and you don’t know where from,” Monk replied. “That’ll do for a start.”
“No, I don’t! I just told Mr. Hooper I do ’cos I’m scared of him. And I owe him one, for letting me go sometime.”
“That’s right,” Monk agreed. “It’s comfortable to have Mr. Hooper on your side, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…right! He’s straight, Mr. Hooper is.”
“It will be even nicer to have me on your side and to have me owe you one, believe me. And it would be very nasty at times to have the shoe on the other foot. I’m good at remembering. And I’m good at forgetting, when it suits me.”
Patch hesitated.
