CHAPTER 7
Hester stood at the kitchen bench chopping onions to fry with the leftover potatoes from yesterday, and quite a large portion of cabbage. It would make bubble and squeak, one of Scuff’s favorite meals, and-with sausages-one even Monk seemed never to grow tired of.
She had come home early enough to prepare a pudding as well, for the first time in several days. She ran a clinic for street women, in Portpool Lane, and she had been extremely busy. Lately there seemed to have been even more than usual to attend to.
The clinic was funded by charity, and Margaret Rathbone had been by far the best volunteer at raising money. But since the trial and death of her father, she had not been to the clinic at all. She regarded Hester as having betrayed her as much as Oliver had, and their friendship was broken-it seemed irredeemably.
Hester could not change her views. She had thought about it long and painfully, wanting to salvage a friendship that mattered to her. But what Arthur Ballinger had done was not possible for her to overlook just because he was Margaret’s father. Especially the second murder he had committed, a young woman Hester had tried so hard to help. The grief of it still haunted her.
Finances for medicine, food, and fuel had all been more difficult to find since Margaret had withdrawn her help. Asking for money was not a gift Hester possessed. It required not only charm, but tact, and she had never mastered that art. She had no tolerance of hypocrisy or genteel excuses, and there always came the moment when she spoke too much of the truth. However, Claudine Burroughs had just the other day found the clinic a new patron, so the emergency had passed.
Scuff was upstairs struggling his way through a book, with a complex mixture of pride and frustration that Hester was sensitive enough to allow him privacy to deal with.
Maybe this evening Monk would be home in time to eat with them.
She had just finished chopping the onions when she heard his footsteps in the passage to the kitchen. There was heaviness in them, as if he was tired, and perhaps disappointed.
She put the knife down and washed her hands quickly to get rid of the onion smell. She was drying them on the towel hung over the rail of the oven door when he came in. He smiled when he saw her, but this could not disguise the weariness in his face. He walked over and kissed her gently.
“What is it?” she asked when he let her go. “What’s happened?”
“Where’s Scuff?” He evaded the question, glancing around.
“Upstairs reading,” she replied. “He’s not as good as he’s pretending to be, but he’s improving. Would you like a cup of tea before supper’s ready?”
He nodded and sat down on the chair at the head of the table, leaning forward a little to ease his back, and resting his elbows on the scrubbed wood.
“Nothing on the case?” she asked as she pulled the kettle into the center of the stovetop and took out the tea caddy from the cupboard. There was no need to stoke the oven. It was already full and burning well, ready to cook in.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “The only person Zenia seems to have had any real connection with is a very respectable doctor who was preparing a report for the government on opium use and sales.”
“Opium?” Hester stopped what she was doing and sat down at the table opposite him, her attention entirely caught. As a nurse, she knew a lot about the vast uses of opium. If one took it for a long time it could become addictive, only seriously so when taken as the Chinese did-not by eating it, but smoking it in clay pipes.
Briefly Monk explained Joel Lambourn’s connection with the proposed pharmaceutical bill.
“What has that to do with Zenia Gadney’s death?” she asked, not yet following his line of thought. “You don’t suspect him, do you?”
He smiled bleakly. “He committed suicide a couple of months ago.”
She was stunned. “That’s terrible. Poor man. Why did he take his own life? And if he was dead when she was killed, why are you concerned with him at all? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” he admitted. “I’m not even sure if there is a connection, except that he knew her and seems to have provided for her financially.”
Hester got up and made the tea and left it to sit for a moment or two to brew.
“Why did he kill himself?” she asked again. “You are sure it was suicide?”
“The official verdict is that he did it when the government rejected his report on the damage that unlabeled sales of opium can do. His reputation was destroyed and he couldn’t face it.”
“Was he so … fragile?” she said doubtfully. “If he really did kill himself, there must have been a better reason for it than that. Was he smoking opium himself? Or did Zenia Gadney end the affair, or threaten to make it public? Would she tell his wife-that he had very odd tastes, or something?” She leaned forward a little, frowning, the bubble and squeak temporarily forgotten. “William, I don’t feel it makes sense, whether it has anything to do with Zenia Gadney’s murder or not.”
“I know.”
“Did you see this report Joel Lambourn wrote?”
“No. All the copies have been destroyed,” he replied. “And his wife, Dinah Lambourn, says she knew of his affair anyway.”
Hester was puzzled. “Do you believe her?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is she like?” she asked curiously, trying to picture a woman who had lost so much and was trying desperately to hold on to some kind of meaning in her life.
“Very emotional,” he said quietly. “But she has a kind of dignity you have to admire. She believed in him passionately, and still does. She thinks he was murdered.”
Hester was startled, and yet perhaps it was the obvious straw to grasp for.
“Could he have been?” she asked doubtfully.
She saw the frown cross his face before he answered.
“I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” he said slowly. “He is said to have taken a fairly heavy dose of opium and then cut his wrists.” He gestured slightly with one hand. “Up on One Tree Hill, in Greenwich Park.”
“Said to have?”
Monk shook his head a little. “The evidence seems unclear. The doctor who examined him saw nothing containing opium, no powder wrappers, no bottle for a liquid or to drink water from. No knife or razor. And one of Lambourn’s assistants said he wasn’t distressed about his report being refused, that he intended to fight. But the other one says he was completely broken by it.”
Hester stood up and fetched the teapot off the stove. She poured a cup for each of them. Its fragrant steam filled the air as she passed one cup across the table to him.
“His wife says he was strong, and his sister says he was weak,” he said. “And even if he was murdered, I don’t know what it can have had to do with Zenia Gadney’s murder, except that his wife says there could be a connection.”
“Why does she think that?” Again Hester was confused.
“I feel it’s because she’s desperate,” he confessed. “I can’t think of anything worse than for the person you love most in the world to take their own life, without warning you, and without explaining anything at all as to why, or giving you any chance to help or understand.”
Hester felt an ache of pity for this woman she knew nothing else about. How could happiness be so impossibly fragile? One day you have a home, a place in society, and the only thing that really matters, a companion of heart and mind. Then the next day everything is gone, hideously and without reason. Everything you thought you knew swept away and what’s left only looks like what you had, but it’s empty.
“Hester …?” His voice cut across her thoughts.
“Nor can I. Everything that matters-gone.”
“Yes. Loving is always dangerous.” He gave a bleak smile and touched her hand gently across the table. “As you have told me more than once, the only thing worse is not loving at all.”
At that moment Scuff appeared at the door, looking pleased with himself and holding a book in his
