pursue.
She was waiting, as though his answer mattered.
'Nothing!' he said a little sharply.
'What other cases have you?' She looked interested, holding the crumpet up regardless of the butter dripping onto the plate.
'Nothing of any interest,' he said ruefully. 'Trivial things which won't mean anything, people looking for fault when there is only error or inarticulateness.' The prospect was tedious but unavoidable. It was part of the daily routine between the larger cases, and it paid his way so well that he relied very little on Callandra Daviot's kindness now. Their original agreement-that he would include her in all the cases of complexity or unusual interest as reciprocation for her assistance in times of hardship-had worked extremely well, to both their advantage.
'Oh, good.' Hester smiled and put the rest of the crumpet into her mouth before it lost all its butter. 'Then you will have time to look a little further for Martha's nieces.'
He should have known she was leading to that. He should have foreseen it and avoided it. How naive of him.
The smile was still on her face, but less certain, and her eyes were very direct.
'Please?' She did not use his name or stretch out her hand to touch him. It would have been easier to refuse if she had. She presumed intolerably upon friendship by not presuming on it at all.
'There is hardly any chance of success,' he argued. 'Do you realize what you are asking?'
'I think I do.' Now she looked apologetic without actually saying so. 'It will be very difficult indeed. No one will blame you if you can't find them. Please just look…'
'They're probably dead!'
'If she knew that, then she could mourn them and stop worrying that they are alive somewhere, suffering and alone, and she was doing nothing to help.'
'Hester!' he said exasperatedly.
'What?' She regarded him as if she had no idea what he was going to say.
There was no point in arguing with her. She was not going to give up. He might as well agree now as in half an hour, or tomorrow, or the day after.
'I'll try,' he said warningly. 'It won't do any good.'
'Thank you…' Her eyes were soft and bright, and she looked at him with a kind of trust he would never have believed could be so fiercely, uniquely precious.
Monk started out early the next morning without any hope of success. He might trace them from Putney if he was diligent-and lucky. He might even follow the first few years of their unfortunate lives. Would it really help Martha Jackson to know how they were treated, and when and where they died, from what cause? Perhaps it would. Perhaps Hester was right in that it would at least allow her to know there was nothing she could do, so she could begin to leave the worst of the distress behind her.
He packed a small, soft-sided bag with a change of clothes and paid a week's rent in advance, then left Fitzroy Street to travel south and west. He no longer wore his usual smartly cut jacket and elegant trousers. In the places he knew he would be going they would mark him out as a stranger, a target for cut-purses and possibly even garroters. He loathed the feeling of being unshaven, but it helped him to blend less noticeably into the background of those who lived in the borders of the underworld. He wanted to seem a man who should not be crossed, a dangerous man who was too familiar with the territory to be lied to. He also armed himself with a small, sharp knife and as much money as he could spare for food and accommodation, and for such bribes as should prove necessary.
The beginning would be the hardest. It was going to be very difficult indeed to find anyone who knew what had happened to two ugly, slow-witted little girls fifteen years ago. He turned the problem over and over in his mind as he rode in the omnibus along the riverbank and then across the Putney Bridge. The only person who would know would be the landlord who had passed them on, sold them, or whatever arrangement it had been. It would be a waste of his time to bargain with anyone else. Please heaven he was still alive!
It took him all morning and into the early afternoon to track him. He had bought almost a dozen pints of beer or cider for the information.
Mr. Reilly turned out to be a huge man with white hair like a mop head, unkempt and falling over his ears. It also fell over his brow and eyes, but that did not matter because apparently he was completely blind. He welcomed Monk cheerfully. He was sitting in a tattered chair beside the hearth, a mug of ale at his hand where he could reach it without having to fumble. A small black-and-white dog of some terrier breed lay beside his feet and watched Monk carefully.
'What yer be wantin' ter know, then?' Reilly asked cautiously. He was lonely these days, and companionship was precious.
Monk traded on it. 'A few tales about the Coopers Arms, when it was yours,' he replied, settling into the rickety chair opposite, afraid to let his full weight fall on the back of it in case it collapsed. 'What was it like?'
Reilly did not need asking a second time. He launched into one tale after another, and it was the best part of three hours before Monk could steer him towards the two deformed kitchen maids he had sold to a man from Rotherhithe who kept a big public house down by the river and could use some rough help where it wouldn't be seen and no one would mind the twisted lips and the crooked eyes.
'Ugly little beggars, they were,' he said, staring sightlessly at Monk. 'An' slow with it. Could tell 'em 'alf a dozen times ter do summink, and they still wouldn't. Jus' ignore yer.'
'Deaf,' Monk said before he thought to stop himself. He was not supposed to know them, or care.
'What?' Reilly frowned at him, taking another long draft of his ale.
'Perhaps they were deaf?' Monk suggested, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice, not very successfully.
'Yeah, p'raps.' Reilly did not care. He set the mug down with a clunk. 'Anyway, I couldn't keep 'em. Upset me customers, and not much bloody use.'
'So you sold them to a man from Rotherhithe. That was clever of you.' Monk tried to force some appreciation into his tone. Reilly could not see the contempt on his face. 'Wonder what he thought when he got them home?'
'Never 'eard,' Reilly said, chuckling. ' 'E din't come back, that's all I know.'
'You never went after him to find out?' Monk barely made it a question.
'Me? Ter Rother'ithe? Not on yer life! Common place. Full o' all sorts. Dangerous too. Nah! I likes Putney. Nice an' respectable.' Reilly reached again for his ale mug, which Monk had refilled several times. 'What else'd yer like ter 'ear abaht?'
Monk listened another ten minutes, then excused himself after one more attempt to learn the name of the public house in Rotherhithe.
'Elephant an' summink… but you won't like it,' Reilly warned.
It was late afternoon and the mournful sound of ships' foghorns drifted up the Thames on the incoming tide as Monk got off the omnibus in Rotherhithe Street, right on the river's edge. He could not afford to ride in hansom cabs on a job like this. Martha Jackson's pocket would not stretch to meet his legitimate expenses, never mind his comfort.
It was a gray, late-spring day with the water slurping against the stones a few yards away and the smells of salt and fish and tar sharp in the air. He was many miles nearer the estuary here than in Putney. The Pool of London lay in front of him, Wapping on the farther side. To his left he could just make out the vast bulk of the Tower of London in the mist, gray and white. Beyond it lay Whitechapel, and ahead of him Mile End.
The pool itself stretched out silver in the light between the snips coming and going laden with cargoes from all over the earth. Every kind of thing that could be loaded on board a vessel came in and out of this port. It was the center of the seagoing world. A clipper from the China Seas, probably in the tea trade, rocked gently on the swell, its masts drawing circles against the sky. A few gulls rode the wind, crying harshly. Barges worked their way upstream, tied together in long queues like the carriages of a train, their decks laden with bales and boxes tied down and covered with canvas.
Downriver on the farther side lay the Surrey Docks, Lime-house and then the Isle of Dogs. He stirred with memories of that, and of the fever hospital where Hester had worked with Callandra during the typhoid outbreak.
