Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [9]
“What are you talking about?” Rathbone sat down and crossed his legs. He appeared reasonably comfortable, even if in fact he was not. “You look as if you have just opened someone’s bedroom door by mistake.”
“I may have,” Monk said wryly. The reference was meant only as an illustration, but it was too close to the truth.
Rathbone regarded him levelly, his face serious now. “It’s not like you to be oblique. How bad is it?”
Monk hated what he had to say. Even now he was wondering if there were some last, desperate way to avoid it. “That night on Phillips’s ship, after we found Scuff, and the rest of the boys, you told me that Margaret’s father was behind it—”
“I told you that Sullivan said so. He told me while you were occupied with Phillips.” Rathbone cut across him quickly. “Sullivan had no proof, and he’s dead by his own hand now. Whatever he knew, or believed, is gone with him.”
“The proof may be dead”—Monk did not move his eyes from Rathbone’s—“but the question isn’t. Someone is behind it. Phillips hadn’t the money or the connections in society to run the boat and find the clients who were vulnerable, let alone blackmail them afterward.”
“Could it have been Sullivan himself?” Rathbone suggested, and then looked away. Monk did not bother to answer—they both knew Sullivan had not had the nerve nor the intelligence it would have required. He’d been a man ruined by his appetite, and eventually killed by it. In the end, he’d been one more victim.
Rathbone looked up again. “All right, not Sullivan. But he could have implicated anyone, as long as it wasn’t himself. There’s nothing to act on, Monk. The man was desperate and pathetic. Now he’s very horribly dead, and he took Phillips with him, which no man more richly deserved. There’s nothing more I can do, or would. The boat has been broken up, the boys are free. Let the other victims nurse their wounds in peace.” His face tightened in revulsion too deep to hide. “Pornography is cruel and obscene, but there’s no way to prevent men looking at whatever they wish to, in their own homes. If you want a crusade, there are more fruitful causes.”
“I want to stop Scuff’s unhappiness,” Monk replied. “And to do that I have to stop it from happening to other boys, the friends he’s left behind.”
“I’ll help you—but within the law.”
Monk rose to his feet. “I want whoever’s behind it.”
“Give me evidence, and I’ll prosecute,” Rathbone promised. “But I’m not indulging in a witch hunt. Don’t you … or you’ll regret it. Witch hunts get out of hand, and innocent people suffer. Leave it, Monk.”
Monk said nothing. He shook Rathbone’s hand and left.
CHAPTER
2
IT WAS EARLY MORNING, and Corney Reach was deserted. The heavy mist lent the river an eerie quality, as if the smooth, sullen face of it could have stretched to the horizon. It touched the skin and filled the nose with its clinging odor.
Here on this southern bank, the trees overhung the water, sometimes dipping so low they all but touched its surface. Within fifty yards they were shrouded, indistinct; a hundred yards, and they were no more than vague shapes, suggestions of outlines against the haze. The silence consumed everything except for the occasional whisper of the incoming tide over the stones, or through the tangled weeds close under the bank.
The corpse was motionless, facedown. Its coat and hair floated, wide, making it look bigger than it was. But even partly submerged, the blow to the back of the skull was visible. The current bumped the body gently against Monk’s legs. He moved his weight slightly to avoid sinking in the mud.
“Want me to turn ’im over, sir?” Constable Coburn asked helpfully.
Monk shivered. The cold was inside him, not in the damp early autumn air. He hated looking at dead faces, even though this man might have been the victim of an accident. If it was an accident, he would resent having been called all the way up here, beyond the western outskirts of the city. It would have been a waste of his time, and that of Orme, his sergeant, who was standing five or six yards