Dark Assassin - Anne Perry [22]
“Police surgeon reckoned between midnight and about three, close as he could tell. Pretty cold in the stables, late autumn. The thirteenth of November, to be exact. Frost was sharpish that night. I remember it was still white all around the edges of the leaves on the garden bushes we passed going in.” Runcorn was hunched up, as if the memory chilled him.
“No one heard a shot?”
“No.” Runcorn gave a tiny, bleak smile. “Which was unusual. You’d think someone would’ve. Tried shooting the thing myself, and it was loud enough. Could hear it clear a hundred yards off, on a still night like that. I followed that one all the way, but if anyone heard, they wouldn’t admit to it.” There was long experience in his face, and fighting against it a very faint quickening of hope.
Monk realized with surprise that Runcorn wanted Mary Havilland to be right; he simply could not see the possibility.
“Muffled by something?” Monk asked.
Runcorn shook his head no more than an inch or two. “Nothing there. Powder burns on his skin. If he’d wrapped a towel or a cloth around it to deaden the sound, that’d account for why nobody heard it, or maybe didn’t recognize it for a shot, but then the cloth would still be there, and it wasn’t. Unless…somebody took it away!” He did not quite make it a question, but it was in his eyes.
“No sign of anyone else there?” Monk asked, seeking the same hope.
“Not a thing, and I looked myself.”
Monk believed him. Not only was Runcorn not easily a liar, there was a painful hunger in him to believe better of Havilland than the circumstances justified. Even now, two months later, it was still there.
Monk asked the next, obvious question. “Why? What was so wrong that he’d shoot himself in his own stables in the middle of the night?”
Runcorn pressed his lips together and hunched his shoulders a little more. “I looked.” There was an edge of defense in his voice. “As far as anyone knew, his health was excellent. He ate well, slept well enough, walked often. We checked into his affairs; he certainly was more than comfortably off. No unaccounted expenditure. He didn’t gamble. And if anyone was blackmailing him, it wasn’t for money. If he had a mistress, we never found her. If he had bad habits, we saw no sign of them, either. He drank very little. Never been seen the worse for it. Wife died seven years ago. Had two daughters. Jenny, the elder, is married to Alan Argyll, a very successful businessman.”
Runcorn took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Havilland worked for Argyll’s company as an engineer in the big rebuilding of the sewers. Well respected, well paid. Seemed to get on all right, at least until recently, when Havilland took it into his head that the tunnels were dangerous and there was going to be an accident one day. We couldn’t find any evidence for it. Argyll’s safety record is good, better than most. And we all know the new sewers are necessary, urgently so.”
“And Mary?” Monk asked. He wanted to fault Runcorn, to find something the superintendent had forgotten or done badly, but he couldn’t.
Runcorn’s face softened. “The poor girl was beside herself with grief,” he said defensively, as if he felt he needed to protect her memory from Monk’s intrusion.
Monk liked him the better for that.
“She couldn’t believe he would do such a thing,” Runcorn went on. “Said he was on a crusade, and people in crusades get killed sometimes, but they don’t shoot themselves. She said he was on the edge of finding out something about the tunnels, and someone killed him to stop him doing that. Lots of money at stake. Fortunes to be made, and I suppose lost, in all this. And reputations.”
“What do you believe?” Monk asked.
“Asked a few questions about him,” Runcorn said unhappily. “According to the men in the works, he’d gotten a bit eccentric. Scared stiff of tunnels and holes, so they said. Used to shake and go white as a ghost, break