shouting at each other,” Orme replied. “Then before you could do anything about it, Phillips had a knife out-great long thing it was, with a curved blade. He was swinging it wide…” He gestured with his own arm. “Like he meant to kill Mr. Durban. But Mr. Durban saw it coming an’ moved aside.” He swerved with his body, mimicking the action. There was both strength and grace in it. What he was describing became more real.
“Go on,” Monk urged.
Orme was unhappy.
“Go on!” Monk ordered. “Obviously he didn't kill Durban. What happened? Why did he want to? Was Durban accusing him of something? Another boy killed? Who stopped Phillips? You?”
“No, sir. Mr. Durban stopped him himself.”
“Right. How? How did Durban stop a man like Phillips coming at him with a knife? Did he apologize? Back off?”
“No!” Orme was offended at the thought.
“Did he fight back?”
“Yes.”
“With a knife?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He was carrying a knife, and he was good enough with it to hold off a man like Jericho Phillips?” Monk's surprise showed in his voice. He could not have done that himself At least he thought he could not have. Possibly in the closed-up past, further back than his memory, he had learned such things. “Orme!”
“Yes, sir! Yes, he was. Phillips was good, but Mr. Durban was better. He fought him right back to the edge of the water, sir, then he drove him into it. Half drowned, Phillips was, and in a rage fit to kill us all, if he could have.”
Monk remembered what Hester had told him about Phillips and the water, and about being cold. Had Durban known that? Had Orme? He looked across at Orme's face and tried to read it. He was startled to see not only reluctance, but also a certain kind of stubbornness he knew he could not break, and he realized he did not want to. Something innate in the man would be damaged. He also saw a kind of pity, and knew without any doubt that he was not only protecting Durban 's memory, he was protecting Monk as well. He knew Monk's vulnerability, his need to believe in Durban. Orme was trying to keep a truth from him because he would be hurt by it.
They stood facing each other in the sun and the wind, the smell of the tide and the swirl and slap of the water.
“Why did that make you think they knew each other?” Monk asked. It was only part of the question, allowing Orme to avoid the answer if he wanted to.
Orme cleared his throat. He relaxed so very slightly it was almost invisible. “What they said, sir. Don't remember the words exactly. Something about what they knew, and remembered, that sort of thing.”
Monk thought about asking if they had known each other long, since youth, maybe, and then he decided against it. Orme would only say that he did not hear anything like that. Monk understood. The water was the answer, the cold, and Phillips's hatred. Hester's prostitute was not lying.
“Thank you, Mr. Orme,” he said quietly. “I appreciate your honesty.”
“Yes, sir.” Orme totally relaxed at last.
Together they turned and walked back towards Wapping.
For the next two days Monk called into the station only to keep track of the regular work of the police. Reluctantly he took Scuff with him. Scuff himself was delighted. He was quite aware that some of the earlier errands had been to keep him safe rather than because they needed doing. Monk had imagined himself tactful, and was somewhat taken aback to find that Scuff had read him so easily. He certainly could not apologize, at least not openly, but he would be less clumsy in the future, at least in part because Scuff was so determined to prove his value, and his ability to take care not only of himself but of Monk also.
Their paths crossed Durban 's several times. He had learned the names of almost a dozen boys of various ages who had ended up in Phillips's care. Surely among them there must have been at least two or three willing to testify against him.
They followed one trail after another, up and down both banks of the river, questioning people, searching for others.
At one point Monk found himself in a fine old building at the Legal Quay. He stood with Scuff in a wooden- paneled room with polished tables and floorboards worn uneven with the tread of feet over a century and a half. It smelled of tobacco and rum, and he almost felt as if he could hear age-old arguments from the history of the river echoing in the tight, closed air.
Scuff stared around him, eyes wide. “I in't never been in ‘ere before,” he said softly. “Wot der they do ‘ere, then?”
“Argue the law,” Monk answered.
“In ‘ere? I thought they did that in courts.”
Maritime law, Monk explained. To do with who can ship things, laws of import and export, weights and measures, salvage at sea, that sort of thing. Who unloads, and what duty is owed to the revenue.”
Scuff pulled a face of disgust, dragging his mouth down at the corners. “ Lot o’ thieves,” he replied. “Shouldn't believe a thing they tell yer.”
“We're looking for a man whose daughter died and whose grandson disappeared. He's a clerk here.”
They found the clerk, a sad, pinch-faced man in his fifties.
“How would I know?” he said miserably when Monk began his questions. “Mr. Durban asked me the same things, an’ I gave ‘im the same answers. Moll's ‘usband got killed on the docks when Billy were about two year old. She married again to a great brute wot treated ‘er real ‘ard. Beat Billy till ‘e broke ‘is bones, poor little beggar.” His face was white, and his eyes were wretched at the memory, and his own helplessness to alter it. “Weren't nothin’ I could do. Broke my arm when I tried. Off work for two months, I were. Damn near starved. Billy ran off when ‘e were about five. I ‘eard Phillips took ‘im in an’ fed ‘im reg'lar, kept ‘im warm, gave ‘im a bed, an’ far as I know, ‘e never beat ‘im. I let it be. Like I told Mr. Durban, it were better than ‘e'd ‘ad before. Better than nothin’.”
“What happened to Moll?” Monk asked, then instantly wished he had not.
“Took ter the streets, o’ course,” the clerk answered. “Wot else could she do? Kept movin’, so ‘e wouldn't find ‘er. But ‘e did. Killed ‘er wi’ a knife. Mr. Durban got ‘im for that. ‘Anged, ‘e were.” He blinked away tears. “I went an’ watched. Gave the ‘angman sixpence to ‘ave a drink on me. But I never found Billy.”
Monk did not reply. There hardly seemed anything to say that was not trite, and in the end, meaningless. There must be many boys like Billy, and Phillips used them. But would their lives without him have been any better, or longer?
Monk and Scuff ate hot meat pies, sitting by the dockside in the noise of unloading, watching the lightermen coming and going across the water. There was a long apprenticeship to the craft of steering them, and Monk watched them with a certain admiration. There was not only skill but also a peculiar grace in the way they balanced, leaned, pushed, realigned their weight, and did it again.
There was steady noise around them as they ate their pies and drank from tin mugs of tea. Winches ground up and down with the clang of chains, dockers shouted at one another, lumpers carried kegs and boxes and bales. There was the occasional jingle of harness and clatter of hooves as horses backed up with heavily loaded drays, and then the rattle of wheels on the stone. The rich, exotic aroma of spices and the gagging smell of raw sugar drifted across from another wharf, mixed with the stinging salt and fish and weed of the tide, and now and then the stench of hides.
Once or twice Scuff looked at Monk as if he were going to say something, then changed his mind. Monk wondered if he were trying to find a way to tell him that boys like Billy were better off with Phillips than frozen or starved to death in some warehouse yard.
“I know,” he said abruptly.
“Eh?” Scuff was caught by surprise.
“It isn't all one way. We aren't going to get boys like Billy to tell us anything.”
Scuff sighed, and took another huge bite of his pie.
