Execution Dock - Anne Perry [42]
He drew his breath in sharply to respond, then saw the honesty and gentleness in her eyes. “I know that. And we were so certain of convicting him for Figgis's murder we didn't even charge him with assaulting the ferryman. If we try that now it'll look as if we're only doing it because we failed. He'll say he slipped, it was an accident, he was fighting for his life. It'll make us look even more … incompetent.”
She bit her lip. “Then this time we need to know what it is we are trying to do—exactly. Seeing the truth is not enough—is it?” That was a challenge, an invitation to face something far beyond the bitterness of the day. How practical she was. But then to nurse she had to be. The treatment of the illnesses of the body was, above all, practical. There was no time, no room for mistakes or excuses. It demanded a very immediate kind of courage, a faith in the value of trying no matter what the result. Fail this time, you must still give everything you have next time, and the time after, and after that.
She had stopped eating her plum pie, waiting for an answer.
“If I learn enough about him I shall prove him guilty of something,” he replied. “Even if it doesn't hang him, a good stretch in the Coldbath Fields would save a score of boys from abuse, maybe a hundred. By the time he gets out a lot of things could be different. Maybe he would even die in there. People do.”
She smiled. “Then we'll start again, from the beginning.” She ate her last mouthful and rose to her feet. “But a cup of tea first. If we're going to sit up all night, we'll need it.”
He felt a sudden wave of gratitude choke him too much to answer her. He bent and concentrated on finishing his own pie.
Afterwards he fetched Durban's notes again, and side by side they spread them all over the table, the seats, and the floor of the parlor, and read every one of them again. For the first time Monk realized just how patchy they were. Some were full of description, seemingly no detail omitted. Others were so brief as to be little more than words jotted down as reminders of whole trains of thought never completed. In some the writing was done in such haste that it was barely legible, and from the jagged forms of the letters and the heaviness of the strokes, it had been in the heat of great emotion.
“Do you know what this means?” Hester asked him, holding up a torn piece of paper with the words Was it money? What else? written across it with a different pen.
“I don't know,” he admitted. He had found other notes, scribbled sentences, unanswered questions that he had assumed referred to Phillips, but perhaps did not. He had reread the notes on all other cases at the time, both of Durban's and those kept in the station by anyone else. He had checked all the prosecutions recorded in the station archives too.
Hester was still watching him. He thought he knew what she was going to say, if not with this piece of paper then with the next, or the one after.
“It could be something to do with his own life,” he said to her at last. “Personal. I hadn't realized how little I really know about him.” He remembered back to those few, hectic days together searching for the crew of the Maude Idris, believing they were ashore somewhere in the teeming docks, and knowing they were infected and dying. He and Durban had worked until they were so exhausted they slept where they collapsed. They woke again after an hour or two, and staggered on. He had never had a more desperate or terrible case, and yet there had been a feeling of companionship whose memory still made him smile. Durban had liked him, and he did not know anyone else who had done so with instant and unquestioning honesty.
If he had had any other friend like that, it had been in that huge part of the past he could no longer remember. He had sudden moments of light on the shadow, so brief as to give him only an image, never a story Judging from what he had heard and deduced of who he was, the intelligence and