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“Mostly defending, as well as I can judge, but it’s only a deduction made from their position, on forearms, as if he were putting up his arms to protect his head. He may have begun by attacking. He certainly landed a few blows, judging from his knuckles. Someone else is going to be badly marked, whether it is anywhere that shows or not.”
“There was blood on the outside of his clothes,” Evan told him. “Someone else’s blood.” He watched Riley’s face closely.
Riley shrugged. “Could be the younger man’s, could be someone else’s. I’ve no way of knowing.”
“What condition is he in now, the younger man? What are his injuries?”
Riley was distressed; he looked overwhelmed by his knowledge, as if it were something he would have gladly put down.
“Very bad,” he said almost under his breath. “He’s still senseless, but definitely alive. If he pulls through tonight he’ll need a lot of careful nursing, many weeks, maybe months. He’s badly injured internally, but it’s hard to tell exactly what. Can’t see insid
e a body without cutting it open. As much as I can tell, the major organs are terribly bruised but not ruptured. If they were, he’d be dead by now. Luckier than the other man where the blows landed. Both his hands are badly broken, but that hardly matters, compared.”
“Nothing in his clothes to say who he is, I suppose?” Evan asked without any real hope.
“Yes,” Riley said quickly, his eyes wide. “Apparently he had a receipt for socks with the name R. Duff on it. Must be his. Can’t think why you’d carry a receipt for another man’s socks. And he has the same tailor as the dead man. There’s a very slight physical resemblance about the shape of head, way the hair grows, and particularly the ears. Do you notice a man’s ears, Sergeant Evan? Some people don’t. You’d be surprised how many. Ears are very distinctive. I think you might find our two men are related.”
“Duff?” Evan could hardly believe his good fortune. “R. Duff?”
“That’s right. No idea what the R stands for, but maybe he’ll be able to tell us himself tomorrow. Anyway, you can try the tailor in the morning. A man often knows his own handiwork.”
“Yes—yes. I’ll take a piece of it to show him. Can I see the boy’s clothes?”
“They’re by his bed, over in the next ward. I’ll take you.” Riley turned and led the way along the wide, bare corridor and into a ward lined with beds, each gray blanketed, each showing the outline of a figure lying or propped up. At the farther end a potbellied stove gave off quite a good heat, and even as they walked up, a nurse staggered past them with a bucketful of fresh coals to keep it stoked.
Evan was reminded sharply of Hester Latterly, the young woman he had met so soon after his first encounter with Monk. She had gone out to the Crimea and nursed with Florence Nightingale. He could not even imagine the courage it must have taken to do that, to face that raging disease, the carnage of the battlefield, the constant pain and death, and to find within oneself the resources to keep on fighting to overcome, to offer help and to give some kind of comfort to those you were powerless even to ease, let alone to save.
No wonder such an anger still burned inside her at what she perceived to be incompetence in medical administration. How she and Monk had quarreled! Evan smiled even as he thought of it. And yet when Monk had faced the worst crisis in his life it had been she who had stood beside him, she who had refused to let him give in, had fought for him when it looked as if he could not win, and worst of all, did not deserve to.
She must have rebelled against rolling bandages, sweeping floors and carrying coals when she was capable of so much more, and had done it in the field surgeons’ tents when all the doctors were already doing all they could. She had wanted to reform so much, and the eagerness had got in her way.
They were at the end of the ward now, and Riley had stopped by a bed where lay a young man, white-faced, motionless. Only the clouding of his breath on a glass could have told if he was still alive. There was nothing for the eye to see.
Evan recognized him from the alley. The features were the same, the curve of eyelid, the almost-black hair, rather long nose, sensitive mouth. The bruising did not hide that, and the blood had been cleared away. Evan found himself willing the young man to live, aching with the tension in his own body, as if by strength of his feeling he could make it happen—and yet at the same time he was concerned about the pain the young man would feel when he woke.
Who was he—R. Duff? Was the older man related to him? And what had happened in that alley? Why had they been there? What appetite had taken them to such a place on a January night?
“Give me the trousers,” Evan whispered, a wave of horror and revulsion returning to him. “I’ll take them to the tailor.”
“You’d be better with the coat,” Riley replied. “It’s got the label on it, and there’s less blood.”
“Less blood? The other man’s coat was soaked in it.”
“I know.” Riley shrugged his thin shoulders. “With this one it’s the trousers. Maybe they all went down together in a scrum. But if you want the tailor to be fit for anything, take the jacket. No need to give the poor man a turn.”
Evan took the jacket after he had examined both pieces. Like the dead man’s clothes, they were torn in several places, filthy with mud and effluent from the gutter, and stained with blood on coat sleeves and tails, and the trousers were sodden.
Evan left the hospital horrified, exhausted in mind and spirit as well as body, and now so cold he could not stop shivering. He took a hansom home to his rooms. He would not get in an omnibus with that dreadful jacket, and he had no wish to sit among other people, decent people at the end of their day’s work, who had no idea of what he had seen and felt or of the young man in St. Thomas’s who might or might not awake again.
He found the tailor at nine o’clock. He spoke personally to Mr. Jiggs of Jiggs and Muldrew, a rotund man who needed all his own art to disguise his ample stomach and rather short legs.
“What may I do for you, sir?” he said with some distaste as he saw the parcel under Evan’s arm. He disapproved of gentlemen who bundled up clothes. It was no way to treat a highly crafted piece of workmanship.
Evan had no time or mood for catering to anyone’s sensitivities.
“Do you have a client by the name of R. Duff, Mr. Jiggs?” he asked bluntly.
“My client list is a matter of confidence, sir—”
