clenched-up knots inside.
Callandra set her cup down and faced Monk with more composure. “William, she and this other woman were murdered. It is sure to be very ugly and distressing, no matter how it happened. Dr. Beck will be involved because he is . . . was her husband.” She picked up her tea once more, but her hand wobbled a trifle and she set the cup down again before she spilled it. “There are bound to be a lot of questions, and not all of them will be kind.” Her face looked extraordinarily vulnerable, almost bruised. “Please . . . will you do what you can to protect him?”
Hester turned to look at Monk also. He had left the police force with extreme ill feeling between himself and his superior. One could debate whether he had resigned or been dismissed. Asking him to involve himself in a police matter was requiring of him a great deal. Yet both he and Hester owed Callandra more than was measurable in purely practical terms, regardless of loyalty and affection, which would in themselves have been sufficient. She had given them unquestioning friendship regardless of her own reputation. In lean times she had discreetly supported them financially, never referring to it or asking anything in return but to be included.
Hester saw the hesitation in Monk’s face. She drew breath in to say something that would urge him to accept. Then she saw that he was going to, and was ashamed of herself for having doubted him.
“I’ll go to the station concerned,” he agreed. “Where were they found?”
“Acton Street,” Callandra replied, relief quick in her voice. “Number twelve. It’s a house with an artist’s studio on the top floor.”
“Acton Street?” Monk frowned, trying to place it.
“Off the Gray’s Inn Road,” Callandra told him. “Just beyond the Royal Free Hospital.”
Hester felt her mouth go dry. She tried to swallow, and it caught in her throat.
Monk was looking at Callandra. His face was blank, but the muscles in his neck were pulled tight. Hester knew that the studio must be in Runcorn’s area, and that Monk would have to approach him if he were to involve himself. It was an old enmity going back to Monk’s first days on the force. But whatever he felt about that now, he masked it well. He was already bending his mind to the task.
“How did you hear about it so soon?” he asked Callandra.
“Kristian told me,” she replied. “We had a hospital meeting this afternoon, and he had to cancel it. He asked me to make his excuses.” She swallowed, her tea ignored.
“She can’t have been home all night,” he went on. “Wasn’t he concerned for her?”
She avoided his eyes very slightly. “I didn’t ask him. I . . . I believe they led separate lives.”
As a friend, he might not have pressed the matter—it was delicate—but when he was in pursuit of truth neither his mind nor his tongue accepted boundaries. He might hate probing an area he knew would cause pain, but that had never stopped him. He could be as ruthless with the dark mists of the memory within himself, and he knew with bone-deep familiarity just how that hurt. He had had to piece together the shards of his own past before the accident. Some of them were full of color, others were dark, and to look at them cost all the courage he had.
“Where was he yesterday evening?” he continued, looking at Callandra.
Her eyes opened wide, and Hester saw the fear in them. Monk must have seen it also. She looked as if she were about to say one thing, then cleared her throat and said something else. “Please protect his reputation, William,” she pleaded. “He is Bohemian, and although his English is perfect, he is still a foreigner. And . . . they did not have the happiest of marriages. Don’t allow them to harass him or suggest some kind of guilt by innuendo.”
He did not offer her any false assurances. “Tell me something about Mrs. Beck,” he said instead. “What kind of woman was she?”
Callandra hesitated; a flicker of surprise was in her eyes, then gone again. “I’m not certain that I know a great deal,” she confessed uncomfortably. “I never met her. She didn’t involve herself with the hospital at all, and . . .” She blushed. “I don’t really know Dr. Beck socially.”
Hester looked at Monk. If he found anything odd in Callandra’s answer there was no sign of it in his expression. His face was tense, eyes concentrated upon hers. “What about her circle of friends?” he asked. “Did she entertain? What were her interests? What did she do with her time?”
Now Callandra was definitely uncomfortable. The color deepened in her face. “I’m afraid I don’t know. He speaks of her hardly at all. I . . . I gathered from something he said that she was away from home a great deal, but he did not say where. He mentioned once that she had considerable political knowledge and spoke German. But then, Kristian himself spent many years in Vienna, so perhaps that is not very surprising.”
“Was she Bohemian, too?” Monk asked quickly.
“No . . . at least I don’t think so.”
Monk stood up. “I’ll go to the police station and see what I can learn.” His voice softened. “Don’t worry yet. It may be that the artists’ model was the intended victim, and only a tragic mischance that Mrs. Beck was also there at that moment.”
She made an effort to smile. “Thank you. I . . . I know it is not easy for you to ask them.”
He shrugged very slightly, dismissing it, then put on his jacket, sliding it easily over his shoulders and pulling it straight. It was beautifully cut. Whatever his income, or lack of it, he had always dressed with elegance and a certain flair. He would pay his tailor even if he ate bread and drank water.
He turned in the doorway and gave Hester a glance from which she understood thoughts and feelings it would have taken minutes to explain, and then he was gone.
Hester bent her attention to Callandra and whatever comfort she could offer.
Monk disliked the thought of asking any favor of Runcorn even more than Callandra was aware. It was largely pride. It stung like a burn on the skin, but he could not possibly ignore either the duty, both moral and emotional, or the inner compulsion to learn the truth. The purity and the danger of knowledge had always fascinated him, even when it forced him to face things that hurt, stripped bare secrets and wounds. It was a challenge to his skill and his courage, and facing Runcorn was a price he never seriously thought too high.
He strode along Grafton Street down to Tottenham Court Road and caught a hansom for the mile or so to the
