The William Monk Mysteries_ The First Three Novels - Anne Perry [17]
Whoever had murdered Grey had obviously either used one of the other visitors as a decoy or else had already been in the building in some guise in which he had so far been overlooked. So much was logic.
Monk put the paper down. They would have to question Grimwade more closely, explore even the minutest possibilities; there might be something.
Evan sat down on the window ledge.
Mrs. Huggins’s statement was exactly as Evan had said, if a good deal more verbose. Monk read it only because he wanted time to think.
Afterwards he picked up the last one, the medical report. It was the one he found most unpleasant, but maybe also the most necessary. It was written in a small, precise hand, very round. It made him imagine a small doctor with round spectacles and very clean fingers. It did not occur to him until afterwards to wonder if he had ever known such a person, and if it was the first wisp of memory returning.
The account was clinical in the extreme, discussing the corpse as if Joscelin Grey were a species rather than an individual, a human being full of passions and cares, hopes and humors who had been suddenly and violently cut off from life, and who must have experienced terror and extreme pain in the few minutes that were being examined so unemotionally.
The body had been looked at a little after nine thirty A.M. It was that of a man in his early thirties, of slender build but well nourished, and not apparently suffering from any illness or disability apart from a fairly recent wound in the upper part of the right leg, which might have caused him to limp. The doctor judged it to be a shallow wound, such as he had seen in many ex-soldiers, and to be five or six months old. The body had been dead between eight and twelve hours; he could not be more precise than that.
The cause of death was obvious for anyone to see: a succession of violent and powerful blows about the head and shoulders with some long, thin instrument. A heavy cane or stick seemed the most likely.
Monk put down the report, sobered by the details of death. The bare language, shorn of all emotion, perversely brought the very feeling of it closer. His imagination saw it sharply, even smelled it, conjuring up the sour odor and the buzz of flies. Had he dealt with many murders? He could hardly ask.
“Very unpleasant,” he said without looking up at Evan.
“Very,” Evan agreed, nodding. “Newspapers made rather a lot of it at the time. Been going on at us for not having found the murderer. Apart from the fact that it’s made a lot of people nervous, Mecklenburg Square is a pretty good area, and if one isn’t safe there, where is one safe? Added to that, Joscelin Grey was a well-liked, pretty harmless young ex-officer, and of extremely good family. He served in the Crimea and was invalided out. He had rather a good record, saw the Charge of the Light Brigade, badly wounded at Sebastopol.” Evan’s face pinched a little with a mixture of embarrassment and perhaps pity. “A lot of people feel his country has let him down, so to speak, first by allowing this to happen to him, and then by not even catching the man who did it.” He looked across at Monk, apologizing for the injustice, and because he understood it. “I know that’s unfair, but a spot of crusading sells newspapers; always helps to have a cause, you know! And of course the running patterers have composed a lot of songs about it—returning hero and all that!”
Monk’s mouth turned down at the corners.
“Have they been hitting hard?”
“Rather,” Evan admitted with a little shrug. “And we haven’t a blind thing to go on. We’ve been over and over every bit of evidence there is, and there’s simply nothing to connect him to anyone. Any ruffian could have