Dark Assassin - Anne Perry [6]
“Mr. Argyll? His father?” Monk asked.
“No, ’is brother. Quite a bit older, ’e is. Least I should say so.” She sniffed again and fished in her apron pocket for a handkerchief. “I only seen ’im five or six times, when ’e came ’ere fer Mr. Toby, like. Very wealthy gentleman, ’e is. Owns them big machines an’ things wot’s diggin’ the new sewers Mr. Bazalgette drew ter clean up London, so we don’t get no more typhoid an’ cholera an’ the like. Took poor Prince Albert ter die of it, an’ the poor Queen’s ’eart broke before they do it. Wicked, I say!”
Monk could remember the Great Stink of ’58 very clearly, when the overflow of effluent had been so serious the entire city of London became like a vast open sewer. The Thames had smelled so vile it choked the throat and caused nausea simply to come within a mile of it.
The new sewer system was to be the most advanced in Europe. It would cost a fortune and provide work, and wealth, for thousands, tens of thousands if one considered all the navvies, brick makers, and railwaymen involved, the builders, carpenters, and suppliers of one sort or another. Most of the sewers were to be built by the open cut-and-cover method, but a few were deep enough to require tunneling.
“So Mr. Argyll was a wealthy young man?”
“Oh, yes.” She straightened up a little. “This is a very nice class o’ place, Mr. Monk. Don’t live ’ere cheap, yer know.”
“And Miss Havilland?” he asked.
“Oh, she were quality, too, poor creature,” she responded immediately. “A real lady she were, even with ’er opinions. I never disagreed wi’ airin’ opinions, meself, fer all as some might say it weren’t proper for a young lady.”
Having married a woman with passionate opinions about a number of things, Monk could not argue. In fact, he suddenly saw not Mary Havilland as she was now, white-faced in death, but instead the slender, fierce, and vulnerable figure of Hester, with her shoulders a little too thin, her slight angularity, brown hair, and eyes of such passionate intelligence that he had never been able to forget them since the day they had met—and quarrelled.
He found his voice husky when he spoke again. “Do you know why she broke off the relationship, Mrs. Porter? Or was it perhaps a generous fiction Mr. Argyll allowed, and it was actually he who ended it?”
“No, it were ’er,” she said without hesitation. “ ’E were upset an’ ’e tried to change ’er mind.” She sniffed again. “I never thought as it’d come to this.”
“We don’t know what happened yet,” he said. “But thank you for your assistance. Can you give us Mr. Argyll’s brother’s address? We need to inform him of what has happened. I don’t suppose you know who Miss Havilland’s nearest relative would be? Her parents, I expect.”
“I wouldn’t know that, sir. But I can give you Mr. Argyll’s address all right, no bother. Poor man’s goin’ to be beside ’isself. Very close, they was.”
Alan Argyll lived a short distance away, on Westminster Bridge Road, and it took Monk and Orme only ten minutes or so to walk to the handsome house at the address Mrs. Porter had given them. The curtains were drawn against the early winter night, but the gas lamps in the street showed the elegant line of the windows and the stone steps up to a wide, carved doorway, where the faint gleam of brass indicated the lion-headed knocker.
Orme looked at Monk but said nothing. Breaking such news to family was immeasurably worse than to a landlady, however sympathetic. Monk nodded very slightly, but there was nothing to say. Orme worked on the river; he was used to death.
The door was answered by a short, portly butler, his white hair thinning across the top of his head. From his steady, unsurprised gaze, he clearly took them to be business acquaintances of his master.
“Mr. Argyll is at dinner, sir,” he said