“At eleven at night?” Orme said skeptically. He slid his own crowbar into place and leaned hard on it, but the heavy metal hasp of the lock did not budge.
Monk put his weight behind his crowbar too, working in unison with Orme.
On the fourth attempt the wood splintered. On the fifth it gave, tearing the other end of the lock off and pulling the screws out.
“What the hell has he got in here that’s so valuable?” Orme said in amazement. “Smuggling? Brandy, tobacco? Must be a hell of a lot of it. Unless whoever killed him took it?”
Monk did not reply. He hoped that was what it was. “I think ’Orrie’s afraid of Tosh, don’t you?”
Orme straightened his back, pulling the hatch open. “You mean Tosh told him what to say? That would mean Tosh has a fair idea of what really happened.”
The sky was darkening around them, the light draining out of the air. There was no sound but the faint ripple of the water.
“Or else he’s protecting someone else,” Monk suggested. He moved closer to the black square of the hatch. Only the new wood where the screws were torn out showed pale. “We’d better get down there while we can still see. We’ll need a lantern below anyway.”
They did not look at each other. They both knew what they were afraid of. The same memories crowded both their minds.
Orme struck a match. In the still air he did not have to shelter it; carrying it carefully, he started down the wooden steps into the bowels of the boat.
Monk followed. It was surprisingly easy, and he knew as he went down and his hand found the rail that this deck was designed for passengers, not cargo. A sense of foreboding closed in on him. Even the smell in the air was disturbingly familiar: the richness of cigar smoke, the overripe sweetness of good alcohol, but stale, mixed with the odor of human bodies.
Orme held the lantern high and shed its light onto the smooth painted walls of a wide cabin. It looked something like a floating withdrawing room. There were cupboards at one end, and a bench with a polished mahogany surface, a gleaming brass rail around the edges.
It brought back a memory of Jericho Phillips’s boat so sharply that for an instant Monk felt his gorge rise and was afraid he was going to be sick. He strode across the carpeted floor to the door into the next cabin and jerked it open so hard it crashed against the wall and swung back on him.
Orme followed him with the light. Monk heard his breath expelled in a sigh. This cabin was similar, only larger, and at the far end there was a makeshift stage.
“Oh, Jesus!” Orme said, then apologized instantly. The horror in his voice made his words scarcely a blasphemy, more a cry for help, as if God could change the truth of what the sergeant knew.
Monk needed no explanation; it was his worst imagining come true again. This was another boat, just like Jericho Phillips’s, where pornographic shows of children entertained those with a perverted addiction to such things, and with an addiction to the danger of watching it live. This was what Phillips would have done with Scuff, and Monk and Hester would never have found him. Even if they had, what of his heart and mind would have remained whole, let alone his body?
Were there boys here now, locked behind other doors, too afraid to make a sound?
Orme moved forward, and Monk put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” he ordered. Orme was breathing hard, shaking a little. For all his years on the river, there were still times when the sight of pain tore through his control.
They both stood motionless, ears straining. The boat was well made. Even the joints in the wood did not creak with the faint movement of the water. The tide had turned and was coming in again.
“They must be here.” Monk dropped his voice to a whisper. “They can’t bring them out here for the show every time. Too many other boats-they’d be seen. And too many chances to escape. They’re here somewhere.” He could not even bring himself to say that they might all be dead.
“A mutiny?” Orme suggested with a lift of hope. “Maybe they killed him? One hit him with something, two others strangled him? That could be why the odd marks. Maybe it isn’t a rope at all? Could be boys’ shirts, all tied together.” He turned to face Monk, his features ghostly in the lantern light. “They’d have gone. We’ll never find them.” All the emotion of his unspoken meaning was in his face.
“No point in even looking,” Monk agreed. “Murder by persons unknown.” He took a deep breath. “But we’d better make certain. There’ll be rooms for them below, and a galley of some sort. They have to feed them.”
Orme said nothing.
They found the ladder down and descended to the deck below. Immediately it was different. The heavier, more fetid air closed over them, and the lantern shone on darker walls only a couple of feet away. Monk felt the sweat break out on his skin, and then chill instantly. His heart was knocking in his chest.
Orme pushed at the first door, but it held fast. He lifted his foot and kicked it with all his weight. It burst in, and there was a cry from behind it. He held the lantern higher and the yellow light showed four small boys, thin, narrow-chested, half-naked, and cowering together in the corner.
Monk wiped his hand over his face, forcing himself to focus.
“It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Parfitt is dead. We’re going to take you away from here.” He stepped forward.
They all shrank farther back, flinching, though his hand was several feet away from the closest of them.
He stopped. What could he tell them that they could believe? They probably didn’t know anything but this. Where was he going to send them, anyway? Back into the streets? Some orphanage, where they would be looked after? By whom? Perhaps Hester would know.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated, feeling useless. They wouldn’t believe him; they shouldn’t. Perhaps they shouldn’t believe anyone. “Are there more of you?”
One nodded slowly.
“We’ll get you all, and then take you ashore.” Where to? How many boats would they need? It was night already; what was he going to do with them? A dozen or more small boys: frightened, hungry, possibly ill, certainly hideously abused. Then he thought of Durban, his predecessor, and remembered his work with the Foundling Hospital. “We’ll go where they’ll look after you,” he said more firmly. “Give you warm clothes, food, a clean bed to sleep in.”
They looked at him as if they had no idea what he was saying.
It took Monk and Orme the rest of the night to find all of the fourteen boys and take them ashore, a boatload at a time, persuade them they were safe, and then get them to the nearest hospital that would accept them. Later the hospital would send them on to a proper institution specifically for foundlings. Technically, of course, they were too old for that, but Monk trusted in the charity of the matrons in charge.
Dawn was coming up, pale over the east and lighting the water, clean and chill, soft colors half bleached away, when Monk stood with Orme on the dock outside the Wapping station of the River Police. He was so tired, his bones ached. He realized that in the three weeks since Jericho Phillips’s death he had slowly let go of at least part of the horror of it. Now it was back as though it had been only yesterday. It was the sweat and alcohol in the air, the claustrophobia belowdecks. But sharper and more real than anything else, filling his nose and throat, it was the smell of fear and death.
Mickey Parfitt was another Jericho Phillips, one that catered to an upriver clientele, away from the teeming closeness of the docks. Instead it was the quiet reaches of the river where deserted banks were marshy, mist-laden at morning and evening, and stretches of silver water were tree-lined. But in the night the same twisted brutality was enacted upon children. Probably the same blackmail of men addicted to their appetites, to the danger of illegal indulgence, the adrenaline pumping through their blood at the fear of being caught. It was the same obliviousness to what they were doing to others, perhaps because the others were children of the streets and docksides, already abandoned by circumstance.
Did Monk want to know who had killed Mickey Parfitt? Not really. It was a case in which he would be happier to fail. But could he simply not try? That was a different thing. Then he would be acting as both judge and jury. About Parfitt he was sure, but what about the murderer’s next victim, and the one after that? Could Monk really set himself up to decide whose murder was acceptable and whose deserved trial and probably punishment? He had made too many mistakes in the past for such certainty. Or was that the coward’s fear of responsibility? Leave it to
