The Shifting Tide - Anne Perry [93]
“A shilling,” the boatman replied instantly.
Monk fished a shilling and threepence out of his pocket, and as soon as they pulled in to the steps he passed it over and stood up. Scuff stood up also. “No!” Monk swung around, all but losing his balance. “I’ll be all right now.”
“Yer might need me!” Scuff argued. “I can do things.”
There was no time to explain, or be gentle. “I know. I’ll find you when I have something for you to do. For now, keep out of the rozzers’ way!”
Scuff sank back reluctantly and Monk leapt for the step and went on up without looking back.
Durban turned around just as Monk reached the top. He was about to speak when he saw Monk’s face. Instead, he looked at the other man, a sullen, weary creature with one shoulder higher than the other. “Do it again an’ I’ll have you. Now get gone.”
The man obeyed with alacrity, leaving Monk and Durban alone at the top of the steps in the wind.
“What is it?” Durban asked. “You look like you’ve seen hell.”
“Not yet, but that could be truer than you think,” Monk said with bitter humor. How could he laugh at anything now? Except, insane as it seemed, perhaps it was the only sanity left. “I need to talk to you alone, and it’s more important than anything else at all.”
Durban drew in his breath, possibly to tell him not to exaggerate, and then let it out again. “What is it? If you’re going to tell me you were lying about the ivory, and that Gould’s innocent of the murder of Hodge, I already know the first, and I might believe the second, with proof. Do you have any?”
Maybe telling the truth was going to be less difficult than Monk had thought, and facing Durban’s contempt was going to be more. Already, guilt was eating him inside. “It might be proof, but that isn’t what matters,” he replied. “It’s not quick, or easy to tell.”
Durban stood motionless, waiting, his hands in his pockets. He did not ask or prompt. Somehow that made it harder. “There were fourteen tusks originally,” Monk began. “I found all of them on Jacob’s Island, and hid one as proof.”
“An’ gave the rest to Louvain, which I presume is what you were hired for.” Durban nodded.
Monk had no time to indulge in excuses. He was conscious of the other police in the boat a few yards away, and that any moment Orme might come up to see what was the matter.
“I saw Hodge’s body when Louvain first told me about the robbery,” Monk answered. “It was my condition for doing the job that I found whoever killed him and handed them to you. I only looked at the back of his head, nothing else.”
Durban’s eyebrows rose, questioning what any of this mattered. There was no open contempt in his face, but it lay only just beneath the surface. “Does this matter, Mr. Monk? His head was beaten in. What did you see that proves Gould’s innocence, or anyone else’s?”
Monk was losing control of the story. Orme was out of the boat and on the steps, and any patience Durban might have had was slipping away. For the first time since he had resigned from the police in fury, he felt grubby for treating crime as a way of earning a living rather than a matter of the law. That was unfair; he solved the crimes other law officers did not, and he wanted to show Durban that, but there was no time, and no reason except pride.
“My wife nursed in the Crimea,” he said roughly. “Now she runs a clinic for sick and injured prostitutes in Portpool Lane.” He saw Durban’s contempt deepening. It was difficult not to reach out a hand and physically hold him from turning away. “A few days ago Clement Louvain brought a woman to her who was very ill. It looked like pneumonia. Yesterday afternoon she died.”
Durban was watching him closely now, but his face was still full of skepticism. He did not interrupt.
“When Hester came to wash her body for the undertaker”—Monk found his breath rasping in his throat; please, God, Orme stay out of earshot—“she found what she had really died of.” He swallowed hard and nearly choked. Would Durban realize the shattering enormity of what