Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [66]
“The time, Mr. Harkness,” Monk reminded him. “It would help a great deal if you could tell me enough for me to know precisely when Mr. Ballinger was on the river, both coming here and going home again.”
“Doesn’t the damn ferryman know?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I didn’t look at the clock,” he said brusquely. “We sat down to supper about ten, as I recall. Talked for an hour or so afterward. Dare say he left at midnight. Whatever he says, that’ll be the truth.” Harkness regarded Monk with disfavor. “Good sportsman, Ballinger. Always admire that, you know? No, I don’t suppose you do.” He looked Monk up and down. “Don’t look like a damn policeman, I’ll give you that.”
Monk swallowed his temper with considerable difficulty. “ ‘Good sportsman’?” he inquired.
“That’s what I said. Good God, man, isn’t that simple enough for you? Damn good at the oars. And wrestling. Strong, you see?”
“Yes, sir.” Monk breathed out slowly. There it was, the sudden gift in all the other irrelevant evidence. The idea burned hot and bright in his mind. “Thank you, Mr. Harkness.”
Harkness shrugged. “I like to be fair,” he replied, standing a little straighter.
Monk forbore from making any reply to that, although one rested on his tongue. He thanked Harkness again and allowed the butler to show him out into the blustery darkness of the street, with the damp smell of the river in the air.
He took nearly half an hour to find a ferryman willing to row him back from Mortlake to Chiswick, and he timed how long it took. While he was sitting in the boat he considered what Harkness had told him, and went over in his mind all the times and details that he had been able to confirm.
Of course none of the times was exact. The only way to check them was against what other people had said. ’Orrie had taken Parfitt over to the boat where it was moored upriver, just short of Corney Reach, and had left him there, after quarter past eleven. For what purpose, he had said he did not know.
’Orrie was supposed to have gone back for him within the hour, but had been held up, and when he had done so, at about ten to one, Parfitt had not been there.
Crumble had verified ’Orrie’s departure and return on both journeys. Tosh had backed him up, giving his own movements—not difficult since he and Crumble had been together most of the time.
Ballinger had boarded the ferry at approximately ten past nine, and had been rowed all the way up past the Eyot, along Corney Reach, right to Mortlake, where Harkness swore to his arrival, and later his departure. The ferryman affirmed having collected him again at half past midnight, and reached Chiswick at one in the morning, more or less.
Whereas Rupert Cardew had been drunk and unaccounted for for most of the evening after he had left Hattie Benson, who said she had stolen his cravat and given it to someone she refused to name. Fear? Or had she been paid to say this, and her fear was for the consequences of lying?
Parfitt’s body had been found almost halfway along Corney Reach, upriver from where his boat had been moored. The questions burned in Monk’s mind. How far had it drifted—or been dragged? Where had he actually been killed? Was it necessarily on the boat? Could he have had ’Orrie take him to the boat, and then left it again in some kind of dinghy from the boat itself? Or could someone else have come by water, and he had gone with them?
Monk needed answers to all of these questions.
Had Mickey’s murderer taken him away and dropped his body overboard higher up, for it to drift downstream, misleading them all? The more Monk thought of that, the more it seemed to make sense. He could have been approaching the whole crime from the wrong direction from the beginning. It had looked like a murder of desperation, committed by a man angry and afraid of exposure, or bled dry by blackmail and facing exposure. But perhaps it had been more carefully planned than that, and by a far