A Sunless Sea (9 page)

“Did she have something to do with his work?”

She gave a helpless little gesture. “I don’t see how she could.”

Monk tried to imagine Joel Lambourn, disgraced in his profession because his colleagues thought his work worthless, coming home to a wife who believed in him so totally she had not even considered the possibility of his failure being real. Perhaps the one person who did not demand perfection from him was Zenia Gadney. Maybe that was what he saw in her: no standards to meet, nothing to live up to, simply accepted for who he was, both the strength and the weakness.

Maybe the pressure of it all had finally become unbearable, and he had taken the only escape he knew of.

It was possible, maybe even probable, that the murder of Zenia Gadney had nothing to do with Joel Lambourn, or even with opium. She was merely like hundreds of thousands of others who took the drug to relieve their pain. And perhaps Lambourn was wrong, and it did no true harm, apart from the occasional accidental overdose. But that
wasn’t a crime; after all, one could overdose on almost anything, including alcohol, which was sold and consumed just as freely.

Monk asked about any other family, just to finalize his inquiries, and she gave him the address of Lambourn’s sister, Amity Herne.

He apologized again for disturbing her, and went out into the sun and the hard, cold wind. A sadness weighed heavily on him, as if he carried the fading light of the year within.

M
ONK WAS FORTUNATE TO
find Lambourn’s sister at home when he called in the early evening. The house was in highly fashionable Gordon Square. He had passed several carriages on his way here, some with crests on the doors, and liveried footmen, and all with perfectly matched horses.

The parlor maid asked him in and left him in an impressively furnished morning room while she went to see if Mrs. Herne would receive him.

Monk looked around the room. It was highly conventional. There was nothing individual here, nothing that would particularly please or offend. It was not only boring; it was, in an oblique way, deceitful. All traces of personality were concealed. Amity Herne’s husband must be totally unlike her brother. Some of the books were similar, for example the Shakespeare and the Gibbon. But it was the way they were all matching and totally level with each other, as if they had never been moved, which irritated Monk.

He had some time to wait, but looking around he saw nothing that engaged his interest or gave him any insight into the passion or the beliefs of the man who lived here, except that he exercised a certain caution in all he showed.

Amity Herne came in and closed the door behind her. She was a handsome woman, in a brittle, elegant way. Her fair hair was thick and perfectly dressed, her skin without a blemish. She was almost as tall as her sister-in-law, but far thinner. In her dark, elegantly cut gown, her shoulders looked a trifle bony.

“How can I help you, Mr. Monk?” she asked, without inviting him to sit down. “I am afraid I am due to attend an exhibition of Chinese silks with the lord chancellor’s wife this evening. You will appreciate that I cannot be late.”

“Of course not,” Monk agreed. “I will come immediately to the point. Forgive my bluntness. I am inquiring into the death of a woman named Zenia Gadney.”

Amity Herne frowned. “I don’t recall anyone by that name. I am sorry to hear that she died, but I cannot help you. I don’t know what led you to imagine I could.”

“Perhaps not,” he conceded, without answering her oblique question. “But your late brother knew Mrs. Gadney quite well …” He stopped as he saw her face tighten. It might have been out of grief, but it looked to him more like irritation.

“My brother did not move in the same social circles as my husband and I,” she said very quietly. It was plain she considered he was intruding, and—in view of her brother’s apparent suicide—perhaps she was right. “He was … eccentric … in some of his opinions,” she went on. “He became more so as he grew older. I’m sorry your time has been wasted.”

Monk did not move. “His widow says that Dr. Lambourn knew Mrs. Gadney quite well, and our evidence from local people where she lived bears that out.”

“That may be true,” she agreed, also not moving from her position a yard or two inside the door. “As I tried to explain to you, my brother was a little eccentric. When he was convinced of an idea, nothing would change his mind, certainly not common sense, or evidence.”

He caught the bitter tone in her voice. This was a different side to Joel Lambourn. It gave him no pleasure to hear it, but Monk could not let it go if there was even a possibility that it could somehow help lead to Zenia Gadney’s murderer. He forced himself to picture her corpse
lying half doubled over, looking smaller in death than she would have been alive. He pictured the waxy white face and the gutted body, the blood and the pale, bulging entrails.

“Mrs. Gadney was murdered,” he said quietly, deliberately choosing the cruelest words. “Her stomach was slit open and her intestines pulled out. She was dumped on Limehouse Pier, like a sack of rubbish that had broken open. Dr. Lambourn knew her well enough to visit her every month,” he went on more gently. “His widow says she was aware of that; indeed, that she had been for years. So far Dr. Lambourn is the only person with whom Mrs. Gadney appears to have had a relationship with, of any kind. Others knew her only well enough to exchange a word in the street.”

A succession of emotions crossed Amity’s face so swiftly, Monk could not identify them, except as forms of anger. If grief or pity were there, or fear, he did not see them long enough to know. But then, why should she display her vulnerability in front of him when he had been so brutal? Anger was most people’s defense for that which hurt intolerably.

“You had better sit down, Mr.… Mr. Monk,” she said icily. “I shall be as clear as I can, and as brief. There is obviously a great deal that you do not know, and I suppose in the wretched woman’s memory, you need to. God knows, that sort of death should not happen to anyone.”

She moved across to one of the large armchairs and sat down carefully. “My sister-in-law, Dinah, is a highly emotional woman and a complete idealist. If you have met her, as you say you have, then you are probably already aware of that. Her view of Joel was unrealistic, to put it at its kindest.” She shook her head a little. “She was devoted to him and of course to their two daughters, Adah and Marianne. She cannot yet face the truth about him. I dare say she never will. I know it will certainly not help to try to force her. We all need something in which to believe, and she believes in Joel and his memory. It would be not only cruel, but also completely pointless, to say this to her now. I know, because I am guilty of having tried myself.”

Monk could imagine it: Amity and Dinah with wildly opposing views of the same man, whom presumably they had both loved, but in such different ways. Did Dinah believe in him so consumingly, not because
of who he had been, but because of who she had needed him to be, to fill her hunger and her dreams?

Amity was impatient. “Joel was a charming man,” she went on, looking at Monk earnestly. “He was my elder brother, by seven years, and I always looked up to him. But clever as he was, he was also a man lost in his own ideas, a little …” A flicker of a smile touched her mouth and then vanished. “Otherworldly,” she finished. “He would become obsessed with a cause, and then refuse to see the evidence against it. Perhaps that is good for a man of faith. It is not good for a scientist. He should have been a painter, or a dramatist, or something where realities and facts are not as important.”

Monk did not interrupt her.

She sighed. “He used to be far more in touch with things, when he was younger. I suppose it’s only in the last five or six years that he’d really lost his way.”

Monk stared at her. Was she the wise one, the brave one, willing to look at the truth, rather than Dinah, who saw only what she wished to? There was a chill about Amity, but might it be only the armor she wrapped around herself as a shield from the pain of the situation, the fact that there was nothing she could do to help him now that he was gone, and maybe there never had been?

Amity lowered her gaze. “Most of his life he was very good at his job,” she went on. “He was meticulous. He had a rare kind of integrity. Dinah will have told you that, and she was right. But he became fixed on this idea about opium and he got some of his original facts wrong, and from then on it all went bad. He just piled one error on top of another until there was no way out for him.”

Her face was bleak, her concentration total, as if she were forcing herself to override all her inner misery and pain to a place where she could hide it, and continue only with the truth that had to be told. That way she could make Monk understand, and then he would leave. She could pick up the remnants of her life again and pretend normality, allow time to heal at least the surface of the wound.

Still, somehow, Monk did not like her.

“Errors?” he asked.

“His last report was a total failure, and the government rejected it,”
she answered. “They had no choice. He was just completely mistaken. He took it very hard. He couldn’t believe he was wrong, in spite of the evidence against him. That was why he killed himself. He couldn’t face his colleagues knowing. Poor Joel …”

“And Mrs. Gadney?” Monk asked more gently.

Amity shrugged. “I really don’t know for certain, but it isn’t hard to guess. Dinah is a beautiful woman, but demanding in … in her requirements.” She said the word delicately, implying a deeper, more personal meaning. “She left him no room to fail. Perhaps he wished for someone who could be a friend, simply listen to him, and share his interests without the incessant need.”

Monk thought about what it would be like to feel an unendurable loneliness, an emotional exhaustion, as the threat of being a disappointment, of having deceived others and let them down, became bigger, more suffocating with every slip, every error retrieved, and each new lie.

An ordinary, pleasant-faced prostitute, just as lonely, just as familiar with the taste of failure, would seem like a godsend. It would at last be someone to laugh and cry with, for once without judgment, without expectation of anything except fair payment.

Would Dinah have even begun to understand that? Probably not. And could she have required other things from him as well, of a physical nature, that he was too tired, anxious, or otherwise unable to provide? Love was a good deal more than a supply of constant praise and belief. Sometimes it was the ease of no expectations, of allowing a person to fail and still loving them the same way.

He thought back to the times he had failed. He had allowed his resentment of Runcorn, his old superior, to distract his attention from the truth more than once. And there had been other slips. Perhaps the worst was the arrogance that had ultimately led to Jericho Phillips being acquitted the previous year. But Hester had not blamed him or reminded him of it since.

When he had been most afraid of his own past, the ghosts that his amnesia had concealed but that had haunted him so badly in the early years, she had not called him a coward for fearing them. She had granted the possibility of his guilt in the murder of Joscelyn Gray, but
not of surrender without a fight to the very last stand. Certainly it was the kind of love everyone needed in their darkest moments.

Had Dinah been unable to support Joel Lambourn when the possibility of failure loomed? Was that the reason he had given up?

Monk rose to his feet and thanked Amity Herne, even though what she had told him was so far from what he had wanted to hear.

A
S HE RETURNED HOME
Monk thought about what Amity had said. Her view of Lambourn was so different from Dinah’s that he needed some other opinion to balance them in his mind.

Dinah loved Lambourn profoundly, with a wife’s love, perhaps distorted by a passion she still clearly felt. She was ravaged by the grief of his death and refused to believe it could have been self-inflicted. That was not difficult to understand, particularly since there seemed to have been no anger or despair leading up to his suicide; rather a determination to continue fighting for a cause he believed in deeply.

Or was that just what Dinah wished to believe—even needed to—in order to keep her own faith in all she cared about, and her ability to continue living and looking after her daughters? That would not be hard to understand.

Amity Herne had said that Lambourn was older than her. Seven years was a big gap between children. They would have led rather separate lives. He would’ve been caught up in his education and then his professional life. According to Amity, at that time they had lived sufficiently far apart geographically to have no more communication than letters, and therefore had not developed a friendship even then. Only recently had she learned much of his nature as a man.

Or was that also an emotionally tainted judgment rather than an impartial observation? Did she need to excuse herself from all blame in his suicide by painting him as a fatally flawed man whom she could never have believed in and was never close to?