like the stifling closeness of Washington-and London, for all its tens of thousands, its poverty and grime, its magnificence, opulence and hypocrisy, was at peace.
“Yes, of course we have,” Lanyon replied. “Not a whisper.”
“Don’t you think that requires an explanation?”
Lanyon grinned. “Well, the first one that comes to mind is that he was in league with Breeland, but had the good sense to disappear completely, instead of going openly somewhere. But then he didn’t have six thousand guns to ship.”
“Presumably he just had the money,” Monk said dryly.
Lanyon walked in silence for a hundred yards or so.
“You did look into the money?” Monk asked him.
“Of course,” Lanyon answered, stepping off onto the cross street, Monk keeping pace with him. “It’s clear enough in Casbolt and Alberton’s books. He had the half down that Trace paid him. He never received a penny from Breeland.”
“Breeland says he paid the full amount to Shearer when the guns were handed over at the Euston Square station.”
“Well, he would!” Lanyon skirted around two elderly gentlemen in dark coats and striped trousers, heads bent in earnest conversation. “And if he received the guns in time for the night train to Liverpool, what was it we followed down the river to Bugsby’s Marshes?”
Monk thought for several minutes while they walked.
“Perhaps Merrit was his witness,” he said at last, the idea forming in his mind as he spoke. “Maybe the guns went from Bugsby’s Marshes, and he simply told Merrit they went through Liverpool, but he went that way himself so she would swear to it?”
“On the assumption you would go to America, find him, and bring him back to stand trial …” Lanyon finished for him. “You work hard for your money, Monk, I’ll give you that! I’d hire you on my case, if I were in trouble.”
“Not on the assumption I’d bring him back!” Monk snapped, feeling the color wash up his face. “In order to deceive Merrit, because he didn’t want her to know the truth, couldn’t afford for her to know. He may well believe that anything he does, including triple murder, is justified by the cause, but he knows damned well that Merrit wouldn’t. Especially when one of the victims was her father.”
Lanyon’s eyes widened, and he slowed his stride considerably. “I suppose that’s not impossible. You mean Shearer and Breeland were accomplices, Breeland got the guns, and Shearer got the money? Poor Alberton was killed. Which way did the guns go?”
“Down the river to Bugsby’s Marshes, and across the Atlantic from there,” Monk answered as they crossed a busy street. “Breeland went to Liverpool and sailed separately, taking Merrit with him. That may have been his original intention, and he might have had to change his mind because of Merrit’s obsession with him. Either way, she is innocent of her father’s death.”
“So Shearer killed Alberton in order to steal the guns and sell them to Breeland?”
“Why not?” Monk’s spirits rose. “Doesn’t it fit with everything we know?”
“Apart from Breeland’s watch at the warehouse yard, yes.” Lanyon looked sideways at him, stepping up onto the curb. “How do you explain that?”
“I don’t … yet. Maybe she dropped it there earlier?”
“Doing what?” Lanyon asked incredulously. “Why would Merrit Alberton be at the warehouse in Tooley Street? Not a usual place for a young lady in the normal course of her summer social round.”
Even as he was denying it, Monk realized how desperately he was reaching for an escape for Merrit. “Perhaps she and Breeland went there to make some agreement with Shearer earlier in the evening?”
“Why there?”
“To verify the merchandise. Breeland wouldn’t pay for guns unless he knew what he was getting.”
Lanyon squinted at him. “Didn’t trust him to sell the right guns, even though he was Alberton’s agent, but did trust him enough to hand over the whole amount of the money to him and sail off to America in the absolute faith that the guns would be shipped to him, and not either kept or sold to someone else?” He pursed his lips. “What was to stop Shearer from pocketing the money and selling the guns again, or even simply leaving them where they were? Not a lot Breeland could do about it from New York!”
Another idea flashed into Monk’s mind. “Maybe that was why he took Merrit with him? Insurance against being cheated.”
“By Alberton, maybe … but why would Shearer care what happened to Merrit? He killed Alberton anyway.”
Monk remembered Breeland’s face when he had been told about the murders. “I don’t believe Breeland knew about that. He believed Shearer was acting out of principle, that he believed just as passionately as he did himself in the fight against slavery.” He saw Lanyon’s look of comical incredulity. “Talk to Breeland,” he said quickly. “Listen to him. He’s a fanatic. In his view, all right-minded people believe as he does.”
Lanyon took the point. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said cautiously. “So Shearer is the villain, Breeland the fanatic, guilty of buying stolen guns and using Merrit’s love for him, but not of murder. And Merrit herself is guilty only of being led by her heart and ignoring her head? I suppose at sixteen that’s half to be expected.” He shrugged. “If a woman wouldn’t do all she could to help her betrothed, we’d be just as quick to criticize her.”
“Probably,” Monk agreed, although privately he wondered just how much blind adoration he could take- perhaps at thirty a lot more than he could now. And would he have used it with the same disregard as Lyman Breeland did? Probably. What was given so freely was often valued too little. But the fact that he himself might have been no better did not soften his dislike for Breeland; if anything it deepened it.
“Are you going to pursue that?” Lanyon asked curiously.
“I’m going to pursue everything,” Monk replied. “Unless, of course, I find something so conclusive it isn’t necessary.” He grinned broadly at Lanyon, but it was ironic, and they both knew it.
Lanyon shrugged. “Good luck.” He sounded as if he meant it.
Monk started again at the very beginning, at the warehouse yard, following the trail of the wagons leaving. He remembered vividly going into the closed space in the pale, summer morning and seeing the dead bodies in their grotesque positions. He remembered Casbolt’s face in the light, the smell of blood, the wheel tracks over the stones.
He also remembered Manassas and the strange reality of war. The whole of it was like a dream, all smaller than it should have been, the dust and the heat ridiculously commonplace. Gunshots were not like thunder; they were crackling, like dozens of sticks being snapped as a bonfire took hold. Only the cannons roared.
But the blood and the fear had been more real than anyone could imagine, so stark they still came back to him every time he closed his eyes and forgot to guard against them. It was the smell that stayed in his memory.
What were three deaths compared with so many? Some of the soldiers had been shot down without even a fight, just wasted, as thoughtlessly as a man mows down grass.
Was that how Breeland looked at it? Did he see it not as murder but as war? Did he feel a few individual deaths were a small price to pay to secure the end of slavery for a whole race? And perhaps the end of the sin of enslaving for another race, his own? An argument could be made for it. Monk could make one himself.
He knew what Hester would say. At least he thought he did. You did not save a people from sin by committing another sin yourself. But was she a realist? Or did she think of individuals, one man’s injuries or pain, one man’s grief, because it was what she could help, and refuse to see a wider whole?
Certainly, Lyman Breeland ignored the individual and saw the thousands, the tens of thousands. And Monk found something in Breeland repellent. Did that make Breeland wrong, or only morally braver, more of a visionary and less of an ordinary, limited human being?
Monk stood in the sun in Tooley Street and weighed the possibilities. The wagons had left through the gates and must have turned either left or right. The guns were too heavy to have been transported other than by horse- drawn vehicles or on barges along the river. The river was by far the closer. It was the way Alberton normally moved all heavy goods. It was the way everyone did.
But Breeland was American. Perhaps he did not know that? Could he have gone by road to the Euston Square station? Well over a month had gone by. It would be hard to find witnesses who remembered anything, let alone were willing to testify to it.
