mind, the one he did not want ever to look at. But Orme’s own honesty was too all-inclusive for Monk to say anything less now without it being a deliberate evasion. It cost Monk an effort. He had never worked with others before whom he trusted. He had commanded, but not led. He was only lately beginning to appreciate the difference. “Or his backer needing to silence him?”
“Could be,” Orme replied quietly. “Don’t know how we’ll find that out, let alone get evidence.”
“No,” Monk agreed. “Neither do I, yet.”
When Monk finally reached home, it had long been dark. The glare of the city lights was reflected back from a low overcast sky, making the blackness of the river look like a tunnel through the sparks and gleams and the glittering smear of brightness all around.
He walked up the hill from the ferry landing at Princes Stairs, turned right on Union Road, then left into Paradise Place. He could hear the wind in the leaves of the trees over on Southwark Park, and somewhere a dog was barking.
He let himself in with his own key. Too often he was home long after Hester needed to be asleep, although she almost always waited up for him. This time she was sitting in the big chair in the front room, the gas lamp still burning. Her sewing had slipped from her hands and was in a heap on the floor. She was sound asleep.
He smiled and walked quietly over to her. How could he avoid startling her? He went back and closed the door with a loud snap of the latch.
She woke sharply, pulling herself upright. Then she saw him and smiled.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I must have drifted off.” She was still blinking sleepily, but trying through the remnant of dreams to study his face.
“I’ll get us a cup of tea,” he said gently. This was home: comfortable, familiar, where he had been happier than he had thought possible. Here he was freer than anywhere else in the world, and yet also more bound, because it mattered so much; to lose it would be unbearable. It would have been easier to care less, to believe there was something else that could nourish his heart, if need be. But there wasn’t, and he knew it.
“How’s Scuff?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Fine,” Hester answered, bending to pick up the fallen sewing and put it away. “I didn’t tell him you found another boat. If he has to know, I’ll tell him later.” She came up behind him. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.” Suddenly he realized that he was. “Bread will do.”
“Cold game pie?” she offered.
“Ah! Yes.”
It was not until he was sitting down with pie and vegetables and a cup of tea that he realized she intended to draw from him all that he had learned so far.
“Not as much as the pie is worth,” he said.
“What isn’t?” She tried to look as if she did not know what he meant, but ended with a brief laugh at herself. “Is it another one like Phillips’s?” she said softly.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Between mouthfuls Monk told her what he knew so far, keeping his voice so low that he would hear any creak of Scuff’s footsteps on the stairs.
She was very grave. “Could it be Arthur Ballinger?” she asked when he came to a stop. She knew of Sullivan’s charge.
“Yes,” he answered. “Not to have killed him, of course, but he could be the one backing the enterprise financially, and taking a share of the profits.”
“Could you prove it?”
“Perhaps. I’ll put Orme on to the accounts tomorrow, and see if he can trace the ownership of the boat back to someone. Although I’ll be surprised if it’s that easy.”
She was sitting upright, her back stiff. The lamplight made her hair look fairer than it was, almost like a halo. “So why would Ballinger kill him, or have him killed? Do you think Phillips’s death scared him and he was afraid you would pursue the issue until you found who was behind it?”
Monk considered the idea for several moments. Would he have taken Sullivan’s word, unverified as it was, and continued to hunt for whoever had conceived the original idea, found the rich men ripe for the danger and the titillation of child pornography? Perhaps the threat of the double disgrace of child abuse and homosexuality was part of the excitement. These men had not considered the possibility that the very hand that tempted them, and then fed them, would in the end also administer the wounds that would bleed them dry. For that Monk had a shard of pity.
What he did not forgive was that they had not considered the wretched children who paid for men’s entertainment with humiliation and pain, sometimes with their lives.
Yes, he knew now, here in the place of his own precious safety, that he did not want to catch whoever had killed Mickey Parfitt. The law would not recognize self-defense, because this murder had obviously not been done in hot blood. The knotted rope embedded in Parfitt’s throat alone proved that. But morally that is what it was: getting rid of a predator who destroyed the young and the weak.
“William?” Hester prompted.
He looked up. “Yes, I suppose Ballinger might have been frightened by Phillips’s death. Sooner or later I would have gone after whoever was behind Phillips. But if Parfitt hadn’t been murdered, it might have been later.”
The shadow of a smile touched her mouth. “How much later? A month? Two?”
He shrugged slightly.
She was very serious now. “Do you suppose Parfitt knew that, and got greedy, put on a little pressure, took advantage of what he thought was a vulnerability?”
It was possible. If Parfitt were the opportunist he seemed, then he might well have seized the chance to try to take over a far larger part of the business. It was something Monk could not evade, wherever it led him.
As if reading his thoughts, Hester asked the question he did not want to answer. “Could Sullivan have been telling the truth?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking up and meeting her eyes. “I’d give a lot for it not to be, for Margaret’s sake, and even more for Rathbone’s.”
“And Scuff?”
He frowned. “Is it better for him to let it all go, hoping he’ll forget it, or to drag it out into the open and get rid of it, if we can? That means exposing it like a great new wound, for him to see and feel all over again.”
“And all the other boys?” Her voice was measured.
“We can’t heal the world,” he replied. “There will always be those we can’t do anything about. What we can touch is so small as to be almost invisible, compared with what we can’t.”
“It isn’t how much you do; it’s the question of whether doing anything or nothing is better for him.”
“Is that what matters? What’s right for Scuff?” he asked.
“Yes!” She breathed in and out, and looked away from his eyes. “No! Of course that’s not all. But it’s where I start. You didn’t answer me. Which is better for Scuff?”
“I know he still has nightmares. I hear you get up in the night. I know he’s probably about nine or ten, for all that he says he’s eleven, and has been saying for nearly a year. In some ways he’s far older than that. Fairy tales won’t do for him. The only thing he’ll believe is something close to the truth.” He lowered his voice. “He doesn’t have a very high opinion of my knowledge, or my common sense. He takes great pride in looking after me. But at least he thinks I don’t ever lie to him. It’s the only thing he knows for certain. I can’t break that.”
“I know.” Hester was still chewing her lip. “You’re right; to try to protect him from it is ridiculous. It’s a sort of denial of his experience, as if we didn’t believe him. That’s the last thing he needs. I don’t know how much he’s a child and how much a man.” She smiled, and he saw the hurt behind it. “And I don’t think I really know very much about children anyway. I think he’s afraid of being touched, in case he loses the independence he needs to keep in order to survive. Maybe one day …”
“You’ll do it right,” Monk said gently. “You’re good with the difficult ones.”
He looked at her sitting across the table from him in the lamp-lit kitchen, with its gleaming pans and familiar china on the dresser. Her eyelids were heavy, her hair falling out of its pins from her sleep in the chair, her plain blue dress vaguely reminiscent of her nursing days. But she was ready now to fight anyone and everyone to defend
