The William Monk Mysteries_ The First Three Novels - Anne Perry [214]
But his interview with Myles had left him with a vague feeling of depression. Myles had a contempt for both Octavia and the footman Percival. His suggestions were bom of a kind of malice. There was no gentleness in him.
Monk pulled his coat collar a little higher against the cold rain blowing down the pavement as he turned into Leadenhall Street and walked up towards Cornhill. Was he anything like Myles Kellard? He had seen few signs of compassion in the records he had found of himself. His judgments were sharp. Were they equally cynical? It was a frightening thought. He would be an empty man inside if it were so. In the months since he had awoken in the hospital, he had found no one who cared for him deeply, no one who felt gratitude or love for him, except his sister, Beth, and her love was born of loyalty, memory rather than knowledge. Was there no one else? No woman? Where were his relationships, the debts and the dependencies, the trusts, the memories?
He hailed a hansom and told the driver to take him back to Queen Anne Street, then sat back and tried to put his own life out of his mind and think of the footman Percival—and the possibility of a stupid physical flirtation that had run out of control and ended in violence.
He arrived and entered by the kitchen door again, and asked to speak to Percival. He faced him in the housekeeper’s sitting room this time. The footman was pale-faced now, feeling the net closing around him, cold and a great deal tighter. He stood stiffly, his muscles shaking a little under his livery, his hands knotted in front of him, a fine beading of sweat on his brow and lip. He stared at Monk with fixed eyes, waiting for the attack so he could parry it.
The moment Monk spoke, he knew he would find no way to frame a question that would be subtle. Percival had already guessed the line of his thought and leaped ahead.
“There’s a great deal you don’t know about this house,” he said with a harsh, jittery voice. “Ask Mr. Kellard about his relationship with Mrs. Haslett.”
“What was it, Percival?” Monk asked quietly. “All I have heard suggests they were not particularly agreeable.”
“Not openly, no.” There was a slight sneer in Percival’s thin mouth. “She never did like him much, but he lusted after her-”
“Indeed?” Monk said with raised brows. “They seem to have hidden it remarkably well. Do you think Mr. Kellard tried to force his attentions on her, and when she refused, he became violent and killed her? There was no struggle.”
Percival looked at him with withering disgust.
“No I don’t. I think he lusted after her, and even if he never did anything about it at all, Mrs. Kellard still discovered it—and boiled with the kind of jealousy that only a spurned woman can. She hated her sister enough to kill her.” He saw the widening of Monk’s eyes and the tightening of his hands. He knew he had startled the policeman and at least for a time confused him.
A tiny smile touched the corner of Percival’s mouth.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Yes—yes it will,” Monk said after a hesitation. “For the moment.”
“Thank you, sir.” And Percival turned and walked out, a lift in his step now and a slight swing in his shoulders.
5
HEESTER DID NOT FIND the infirmary any easier to bear as days went by. The outcome of the trial had given her a sense of bitter struggle and achievement. She had been brought face-to-face again with a dramatic adversarial conflict, and for all its darkness and the pain she knew accompanied it, she had been on the side which had won. She had seen Fabia Grey’s terrible face as she left the courtroom, and she knew the hate that now shriveled her life. But she also had seen the new freedom in Lovel Grey, as if ghosts had faded forever, leaving a beginning of light. And she chose to believe that Menard would make a life for himself in Australia, a land about which she knew almost nothing, but insofar as it was not England, there would be hope