the younger. Happens. Easy mistake. Now he’s going to pay for it up to the hilt. Both sons gone. Family name ruined. Damned grief, children. I’d have the bastard horse-whipped, if they weren’t going to hang him anyway.”
“The time, Mr. Harkness,” Monk reminded him. “It would help a great deal if you could tell me enough for me to know precisely when Mr. Ballinger was on the river, both coming here and going home again.”
“Doesn’t the damn ferryman know?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I didn’t look at the clock,” he said brusquely. “We sat down to supper about ten, as I recall. Talked for an hour or so afterward. Dare say he left at midnight. Whatever he says, that’ll be the truth.” Harkness regarded Monk with disfavor. “Good sportsman, Ballinger. Always admire that, you know? No, I don’t suppose you do.” He looked Monk up and down. “Don’t look like a damn policeman, I’ll give you that.”
Monk swallowed his temper with considerable difficulty. “ ‘Good sportsman’?” he inquired.
“That’s what I said. Good God, man, isn’t that simple enough for you? Damn good at the oars. And wrestling. Strong, you see?”
“Yes, sir.” Monk breathed out slowly. There it was, the sudden gift in all the other irrelevant evidence. The idea burned hot and bright in his mind. “Thank you, Mr. Harkness.”
Harkness shrugged. “I like to be fair,” he replied, standing a little straighter.
Monk forbore from making any reply to that, although one rested on his tongue. He thanked Harkness again and allowed the butler to show him out into the blustery darkness of the street, with the damp smell of the river in the air.
He took nearly half an hour to find a ferryman willing to row him back from Mortlake to Chiswick, and he timed how long it took. While he was sitting in the boat he considered what Harkness had told him, and went over in his mind all the times and details that he had been able to confirm.
Of course none of the times was exact. The only way to check them was against what other people had said. ’Orrie had taken Parfitt over to the boat where it was moored upriver, just short of Corney Reach, and had left him there, after quarter past eleven. For what purpose, he had said he did not know.
’Orrie was supposed to have gone back for him within the hour, but had been held up, and when he had done so, at about ten to one, Parfitt had not been there.
Crumble had verified ’Orrie’s departure and return on both journeys. Tosh had backed him up, giving his own movements-not difficult since he and Crumble had been together most of the time.
Ballinger had boarded the ferry at approximately ten past nine, and had been rowed all the way up past the Eyot, along Corney Reach, right to Mortlake, where Harkness swore to his arrival, and later his departure. The ferryman affirmed having collected him again at half past midnight, and reached Chiswick at one in the morning, more or less.
Whereas Rupert Cardew had been drunk and unaccounted for for most of the evening after he had left Hattie Benson, who said she had stolen his cravat and given it to someone she refused to name. Fear? Or had she been paid to say this, and her fear was for the consequences of lying?
Parfitt’s body had been found almost halfway along Corney Reach, upriver from where his boat had been moored. The questions burned in Monk’s mind. How far had it drifted-or been dragged? Where had he actually been killed? Was it necessarily on the boat? Could he have had ’Orrie take him to the boat, and then left it again in some kind of dinghy from the boat itself? Or could someone else have come by water, and he had gone with them?
Monk needed answers to all of these questions.
Had Mickey’s murderer taken him away and dropped his body overboard higher up, for it to drift downstream, misleading them all? The more Monk thought of that, the more it seemed to make sense. He could have been approaching the whole crime from the wrong direction from the beginning. It had looked like a murder of desperation, committed by a man angry and afraid of exposure, or bled dry by blackmail and facing exposure. But perhaps it had been more carefully planned than that, and by a far cooler head-not a crime of passion but a business decision.
Could Parfitt have been rebelling against his backer, his greed jeopardizing the whole project? Or had he been skimming to keep a higher percentage of the profit for himself?
Which brought Monk back to the question he both dreaded and most wanted to answer-could Ballinger himself have killed Parfitt? Or was that thought ridiculous?
He went over the times of every movement again, carefully. If everyone were telling the truth-Tosh, ’Orrie Jones, Crumble, the ferryman, Harkness, Hattie Benson, even Rupert Cardew-then it would have been possible for Ballinger, a strong rower, according to Harkness, to have taken Harkness’s own boat from its moorings and met Parfitt somewhere along the river out of sight. He could have killed him and put his body in the water, then rowed back to moor the boat again, and taken the ferry back to Chiswick, exactly as he had said. It was tight, but still possible. The thought churned in his stomach-heavy, sick, and impossible to get rid of.
How honest was his own thinking in this? Did he want the answer so desperately that he would settle for anything except defeat?
What he needed was proof that Ballinger had known Parfitt, and, if possible, Jericho Phillips as well. That would take a long and very careful retracing of all the evidence, examining it, looking for a completely different pattern from before. He must start straightaway, as soon as he had seen this Hattie Benson and had verified for himself her evidence regarding the cravat.
He found her by the middle of the following morning, sitting in the kitchen of her small, shared house in Chiswick. She looked tired and puffy-eyed, but even with a torn wrap around her nightgown and her hair tousled and falling out of its pins, there was a beauty in her flawless skin and the naivete of her face.
“I in’t done nothin’,” she said before Monk even sat down on the rickety-backed chair at the other side of the table from her.
He smiled bleakly. “I don’t want to prosecute you, Miss Benson. I believe you can help me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? This time o’ the mornin’, an’ all. Yer should be ashamed o’ yerself. Wot’d yer wife say, then, eh?”
“You can ask her, if you meet her again,” he replied with a rueful smile. “I would like you to tell me what you told her about taking Rupert Cardew’s dark blue cravat with the leopards on it.”
Hattie stared at him, her mouth open.
“She came here with a man called Crow, I believe,” Monk continued. “You told them what happened the afternoon before Mickey Parfitt’s body was discovered in the river. I need you to tell me again, with rather more detail.”
She froze. “I can’t!”
“Yes, you can,” he insisted. “Unless, of course, you were lying.” How could he persuade her to tell him, and be sure it was the truth? Perhaps she had been merely a witness at the time she had spoken to Hester and Crow, but now she realized what danger she would be in if she told the police that Cardew was innocent. She might only now be grasping the fact that they would begin to investigate the case all over again, going back to people she knew, and who knew her.
“Hattie.” He leaned forward a little across the table, forcing himself to speak gently. “I don’t want to charge you with stealing the cravat, whether it was to keep for yourself, to sell, or to give it to someone else. I certainly don’t think it likely that you strangled Mickey Parfitt with it, although it isn’t impossible.” He let the suggestion hang in the air.
“Yer mad, you are!” she said in horror. “ ’Ow in Gawd’s name d’yer think I could strangle a man like Mickey? ’E may a bin skinny as a broomstick, but ’e were strong! ’E’d a bashed me ’ead in.”
“He was violent?” he asked.
“O’ course ’e were violent, yer stupid sod!” she shouted at him. “Beat the shit out o’ anyone wot crossed ’im.”
“Like who?”
“Yer thinkin’ they killed ’im? I tell you, an’ yer don’t think they’re gonna come arter me?”
“You could have killed Mickey,” he went on thoughtfully. “Someone hit him hard on the back of the head, probably with a piece of fallen branch from a tree. Then, when he was unconscious, they strangled him. It doesn’t take a lot of strength to do that.”
