Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [180]
M: What is the worst part of your job?
WM: Knowing that I am answerable to my superiors, and they can countermand me due to political pressures on them. It happens sometimes.
M: What has been your most frightening experience?
WM: Physically—being underground in the total darkness of the sewers, not knowing which way to go or if I could get out. Emotionally—not knowing myself or what I might have done during the time I can’t remember.
M: What is your favorite possession?
WM: I don’t know yet.
M: What do you do to relax?
WM: I walk with Hester in the park near my home, and look across at the river.
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WILLIAM MONK SERIES
Weighed in the Balance
PUBLISHED BY BALLANTINE BOOKS
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MONK RECEIVED THE LETTER from Oliver Rathbone with interest. It came with the first post when he had only just finished breakfast. He read it still standing by the table.
Rathbone’s cases were always serious ones, frequently involving violent crime, intense emotions, and they tested Monk’s abilities to the limit. He liked finding the outer limits of his skill, his imagination, and his mental and physical endurance. He needed to learn about himself far more than most men because a carriage accident three years before had robbed him of every shred of his memory. Except for the flickers, the remnants of light and shadow which danced across his mind, elusively, without warning every now and then, there was nothing. Occasionally those memories were pleasant, like the ones from childhood of his mother, his sister, Beth, and the wild Northumberland coast with its bare sands and infinite horizon. He heard the sound of gulls and saw in his mind’s eye the painted wood of fishing boats riding the gray-green water, and smelled the salt wind over the heather.
Other memories were less agreeable: his quarrels with Runcorn, his superior while he was on the police force. He had sudden moments of understanding that Runcorn’s resentment of him was in large part provoked by his own arrogance. He had been impatient with Runcorn’s slightly slower mind. He had mocked his boss’s social ambition, and had used his knowledge of the vulnerability which Runcorn had never been able to hide. Had their roles been reversed, Monk would have hated Runcorn just as much as Runcorn hated him. That was the painful part of it: he disliked so much of what he learned of himself. Of course, there had been good things as well. No one had ever denied he had courage and intelligence, or that he was honest. Sometimes he told the truth as he saw it when it would have been kinder, and certainly wiser, to have kept silence.
He had learned a little of his other relationships, particularly with women. None of them had been very fortunate. He seemed to have fallen in love with women who were softly beautiful, whose loveliness and gentle manners complemented his own strength and, in the end, whose lack of courage and passion for life had left him feeling lonelier than before, and disillusioned. Perhaps he had expected the things he valued from the wrong people. The truth was, he knew their relationships only from the cold evidence of facts, of which there were few, and the emotions of memory stirred by the women concerned. Not many of them were kind, and none explained.
With Hester Latterly it was different. He had met her after the accident. He knew every detail of their friendship, if that was the term for it. Sometimes it was almost enmity. He had loathed her to begin with. Even now she frequently angered him with her opinionated manner and her stubborn behavior. There was nothing romantic about her, nothing feminine or appealing. She made no concession to gentleness or to the art of pleasing.
No, that was not entirely true. When there was real pain, fear, grief or guilt, then no one on earth was stronger than Hester, no one braver or more