The oven warmed the room, which smelled of fresh bread, scrubbed wood, and clean linen.
Over tea and hot buttered toast Monk told them all what Agatha Nisbet had told him, emphasizing the need to find the other man she spoke of in particular. No one said anything. He looked up and saw Hester’s eyes on him, watching, trying to judge from his face just what he thought.
“Did she tell you anything else about this man?” she asked him quietly. “Anything at all-age, experience, skills, what he does now?”
“No,” he admitted. “I think she was protecting him on purpose. It grieved her badly that he had been so corrupted.”
“Opium does that to you.” Hester’s face was bleak. “I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard a bit, seen a bit. Sometimes you have to use it for terrible wounds, and then it’s too hard to give it up, particularly if the wounds never really heal.”
Monk looked at her. Her shoulders were tense, pulling the fabric of her dress, the muscles of her neck tight, her mouth closed delicately so the pity showed like an unhealed wound of her own. He wondered how much more she had seen than he had, horror that she could never share.
He reached across the table and touched her fingers on the wooden surface, just for a moment, then pulled back.
“Do you know where to look?” he asked her. He hated doing it, but she would know that he had to, and resent it if he did less than his job, in order to spare her.
“I think so,” she answered, looking at him and not any of the others around the table, all watching her, waiting.
“I’ll go with you,” Monk said immediately. “He could be dangerous.”
“No.” She shook her head. “We haven’t time to send two people to do one job. We’ve only a few days. I have an idea of who it might be. When I saw him before, I didn’t even think of him being addicted himself. I should have.” There was anger in her voice, bitter self-criticism.
“You’re not going alone,” Monk responded without hesitation. “If he is the person who killed Lambourn and hacked Zenia Gadney to pieces, he’d do the same to you without a second thought about it. Either I come with you, or you don’t go!”
She smiled very slightly, as though some tiny element of it amused her.
“Hester!” he said sharply.
“Think of what else there is to do,” she replied. “Agatha said he was a good man once. The remnants of that will be left, if I don’t offer any threat to him.” She leaned forward a little, as if to command their attention. “We have to know who is using him. That’s whoever killed Lambourn, and Zenia Gadney-or had them killed.”
Monk clenched his teeth and breathed out slowly. “What if it’s this man who killed them?” he asked, wishing he did not have to.
He saw the sudden awareness leap in her eyes.
It was actually Runcorn who said what she must have been thinking.
“That’ll be why there was no bottle or vial where Lambourn was found,” he said unhappily. “He didn’t drink the opium, it was put into him with one of those needles. And of course whoever killed him took that away with them. He wouldn’t want anyone to know of it. There can’t be so many people have them.”
“Still doesn’t change that we have to know who killed Zenia Gadney.” Orme spoke for the first time. “I’ve been back and forward around the Limehouse Pier. No one admits to seeing her there that evening, except with a woman. If she met a man, doctor or not, someone paid by Herne or Bawtry, then it was afterward.” He looked at Runcorn, then at Monk. “I suppose you’ve thought that it could be that Dinah Lambourn did kill them both, nothing to do with jealousy or rage, but because someone paid her to, because of the opium?”
No one answered. The thought was impossible to rule out, but neither did anyone want to accept it.
It was Runcorn who broke the silence in the end.
“I’ve talked to everyone in the Lambourn house,” he said. “I’ve got a fairly good list of where Dr. Lambourn went in his last week, but it’s only what we already expected.” He pulled two sheets of paper out of his pocket and laid them down in the middle of the table.
Monk glanced at them, but he could see in Runcorn’s face that there was more.
“I tried to piece together his last day,” Runcorn went on. “Whoever killed him planned it very carefully, very believably.”
One by one around the table they nodded agreement. No one mentioned Dinah, but the very absence of her name hung between them.
“Who did he see that day?” Monk asked. He knew before Runcorn spoke that the answer would not be so easy. It was written in the confusion in Runcorn’s eyes.
“Dr. Winfarthing,” Runcorn replied, “in the morning. Just tradesmen in Deptford in the afternoon. He came home for an early dinner, then worked in his study before going for a short walk with Mrs. Lambourn in the evening. They both went to bed at about ten. No one saw him alive again. He was found the next morning by the man walking his dog up on One Tree Hill.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Hester said unhappily. “There’s nothing in a day like that to make him kill himself that night. It wasn’t even the day he heard about the report being rejected, was it?” She looked from Monk to Runcorn, and then back again.
“No,” Runcorn replied. “They told him three days earlier. The idea was that it took him that long to steel himself to do it. Or perhaps he thought they would change their minds, or he’d find some other facts. Winfarthing said he was still determined to fight when he saw him that morning.”
“We’re back to Dinah Lambourn,” Orme pointed out.
“No one contacted him?” Monk asked Runcorn. “No one called, left a message, a letter? Could there have been something in the post?”
“I asked the butler that,” Runcorn replied. “He said Dr. Lambourn looked at the post when he came home at about five o’clock. There was nothing but the ordinary tradesmen’s bills. No personal letters.”
“He went to bed?” Hester asked, puzzled. “Are you sure? Could he have gone out again when Dinah went upstairs?” Her voice dropped a little.
“The butler said they both went up. He spoke to Lambourn and Lambourn answered him. But he could have read awhile, I suppose, and come down again,” Runcorn replied.
Taylor looked embarrassed. “Unless he really did take his own life?” He bit his lip. “Are we certain she isn’t innocent of killing him, but lying to restore some dignity to his name? Nobody wants to admit, even to themselves, that somebody they love did that. She’d want her daughters to think it was murder, wouldn’t she? Women’ll do most things to protect their children.”
Hester looked at Taylor, then at Monk. Monk could see in her face that she believed it possible.
Runcorn was stubborn. “Either someone came to see him, or he went out to see someone,” he said flatly.
“On One Tree Hill?” Monk asked. “It’s close to a mile from Lower Park Street, and uphill. Who would he meet in the middle of the night?”
“Someone he trusted,” Runcorn replied. “Someone he didn’t want to be seen with, or who didn’t want to be seen with him.”
“And he didn’t expect to go far,” Hester added. “You said he didn’t take a jacket, and it was October.”
“Someone he trusted,” Monk said gently. “Perhaps someone who could get close enough to him to put a needle in his vein and do whatever you have to do to get the opium in.”
“That’s like poor Mrs. Gadney,” Orme said. “She was killed by someone she trusted, or she wouldn’t have been standing out on the pier with them, alone in the dark.”
“Certainly not a prospective client,” Monk said with conviction. “Not out in the open like that.”
“No,” Orme cut in. “I asked more carefully this time. No one ever actually saw her with a man apart from Lambourn at any time. They assumed. The newspapers said she turned to prostitution, but there’s no proof.” He leaned forward across the table, his voice assured. “What if she was there with someone she knew, someone she didn’t fear at all-just like Lambourn?”
“The same person?” Monk said what he knew they were all thinking. “Who would Zenia know that Lambourn also knew?”
“Someone respectable,” Runcorn said slowly. “Someone Lambourn trusted, and someone she would never
