Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [63]
There was no point in arguing the shadings of meaning. “Yes.”
“I’ll ask him, but I’m not sure if I can recommend it is in his interest. God, what a mess!”
Monk did not answer him.
MONK WORKED ON THE river the rest of the day. There had been a large theft of spices from an East Indiaman in the Pool of London, and it took him until nearly midnight to trace the goods and arrest at least half the men involved in the crime. By quarter to one, a new moon in a mackerel sky made the river ghostly. Ships were riding at anchor, sails furled, like a gently stirring lace fretwork against the light, beautiful and totally without color. There was only a faint murmur of water and the sharp smell of salt in the air.
Monk stepped off the ferry at Princes Stairs and walked slowly up the hill to home.
Hester had left the light on in the parlor, but it was only when he stepped in to turn the gas off that he saw she was curled up in the large armchair, sound asleep.
His first thought was clear. She’d been waiting for him, or she would have been in bed. Was Scuff ill? No, of course not. If he were, she would have been with him. He remembered how many nights she had spent in the chair beside Scuff’s bed when he had been injured hunting the assassin in the sewers.
He bent down and spoke her name softly, not to startle her.
“Hester.”
She opened her eyes and sat up, smiling, pushing her hair back off her face where it had fallen out of its pins. “He didn’t do it,” she said with intense pleasure.
Monk was confused and too tired to think. “Who didn’t?”
“Rupert Cardew.” She stood up, so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her and smell her skin and her hair, clean cotton and, very faintly, soap. “I’m sorry,” she went on. “I know that leaves the case open and you have to go back and start again. But I’m just so glad it wasn’t Rupert.”
“He told you that?” he asked. “I’m surprised they let you in to see him. Did his father take you?”
A look of disgust flickered across her face. “William, for heaven’s sake! I’m not a complete simpleton. No, I haven’t been to see him, nor would I expect him to say anything different.” She smoothed her skirts without much effect; they were creased beyond any help but a flat iron. “With help from Crow, I found a prostitute Rupert visited earlier that day, and she admits that she stole his cravat and gave it to someone else, but she’s terrified to say who. But if Rupert didn’t have it, then he couldn’t have used it to strangle Mickey Parfitt, and that’s the only real evidence against him. All the rest just bears that up. He never denied having been on the boat, or having been blackmailed for it. But so have many other people.”
She had just broken his case against Cardew. He should have been disconcerted, even angry, but instead he felt an absurd sense of relief.
She saw it in his eyes and put her arms around his neck, pulling his head down gently and kissing him.
MONK WOKE LATE, AND Hester was already up. It was a moment or two before he remembered what Hester had told him about the cravat. When it came back, he leaped out of bed, washed, shaved, and dressed as fast as he could. He had a new idea forming in his mind, and he had to draw the pieces of it together, prove them one by one.
He ate the most perfunctory breakfast, and left the house with only a brief word to Scuff and a quick moment of meeting Hester’s eyes, touching her cheek, and then going out of the door.
As he crossed the river again, in the rhythmic movement of the ferry, his mind was absorbed in what this new revelation meant. He had no doubt of what Hester had said, but later he would go and see this young woman and make certain that she had not been influenced to swear she’d taken the cravat. Her testimony might have to stand up in court. Was it conceivable