Funeral in Blue (13 page)

In spite of himself, Monk was struck with a stab of sorrow for a woman who thought her only worth was her beauty. Had she really no sense of her value for her laughter or her courage, her ideas, just her gift to love? Was that what life had taught her? That no man could simply like her, rather than want to look at her, touch her, use her?

A vision of fear opened up in front of him. He saw her constant anxiety each time she looked in the mirror, saw a line or a blemish on her skin, an extra pound or two on the rich lines of her body, a slackness real or imagined, that signaled the decline at the end of which lay hunger, loneliness and eventually despair.

Mrs. Clark went on talking, describing a life in which beauty was caught on canvas and made immortal for the pleasure of artists and viewers, yet was strangely disconnected from the woman, as if her face, her hair, her body, were not really her. She could walk away unnoticed, leaving the image of herself, the part they valued, still in their possession.

The loneliness of it appalled him. He pressed her for more stories, more details, names, places, times.

He felt subdued and deeply thoughtful when he arrived to meet Runcorn nearly an hour late. Runcorn was sitting in the corner of a tavern nursing a mug of ale and getting steadily angrier as the minutes passed.

“Mislaid your watch, have you?” he said from between his clenched teeth.

Monk sat down. He had drunk so much tea he had no desire for ale or cider, and the good-natured babble of the crowd around him made it impossible to speak quietly. “Do you want to know about her or not?” he replied, ignoring the remark. He refused to explain himself. He already knew Runcorn’s views on the virtues of women, which consisted mostly of being hardworking, obedient and chaste, the last being the necessity which framed all else. He had been too long away from the streets and the reality of most women’s lives, perhaps too afraid of his own frailties to look at other people’s.

Runcorn glared at him. “So what did you find, then?” he demanded.

Monk relayed the facts of Sarah’s parentage and career up to the point of Allardyce’s seeing her and then shortly afterwards employing her exclusively. He also gave him the name of her onetime lover, Arthur Cutter.

Runcorn listened in silence, his face heavy with conflicting emotions. “Better see him, I suppose,” he said at the end. “Could be him, if he thought she’d betrayed him somehow, but doesn’t seem likely. Women like that move from one man to another and nobody cares all that much. No doubt he expected it, and has had half a dozen different women since then.”

“Somebody cared enough to kill her,” Monk responded angrily. What Runcorn had said was probably true; it was not the fact that cut Monk raw, it was the contempt with which Runcorn said it, or perhaps even the fact that he said it at all. There were some truths that compassion covered over, like hiding the faces of the dead, a small decency when nothing greater was possible. He looked at Runcorn with intense dislike, and all his old memories returned with their ugliness, the narrowness of mind, the judgment, the willingness to hurt. “She’s just as dead as Elissa Beck,” he added.

Runcorn stood up. “Go and see Bella Holden,” he ordered. “You’ll probably find her at her lodgings, 23 Pentonville Road. She’s another artists’ model, and I daresay it’s a bawdy house. Unless you want to give up? But looks like you’re as keen to find out who killed Sarah Mackeson as you are about Beck’s wife.” He walked between the other drinkers without looking back or bothering to tell Monk where to meet him again. Monk watched Runcorn’s high, tight shoulders as he pushed his way out and lost sight of him just before the door.

The house at 23 Pentonville Road was indeed a brothel of sorts, and he found Bella Holden only after considerable argument and the payment of two shillings and sixpence, which he could ill afford. Callandra would willingly have replaced it, but both pride and the awareness of her vulnerability would prevent him from asking. This was friendship, not business.

Bella Holden was handsome, with a cloud of dark hair and remarkable pale blue eyes. She must have been a little over thirty, and he could see underneath the loose nightgown she wore that her body was losing its firmness and the shape an artist would admire. She was too lush, too overtly womanly. It would not be long before this house, and its like, were her main support, unless she learned a trade. No domestic employer would have her, even if she were capable of the tasks required. Without a character, a reference from a former employer, she would not be allowed over the step, let alone into the household.

Looking at her now as she stared back at him, holding the money in her hand, he saw anger and the need to please struggling against each other in her face, and a certain heaviness about her eyelids, a lethargy as if he had woken her from a dream far more pleasant than any reality. It was three o’clock. He might be her first customer. The indifference in her face was a lifetime’s tragedy.

He thought of Hester, and of how she would loathe having a stranger’s hand on her clothes, let alone on her naked skin. This woman had to endure intimacy from whoever chose to walk through the door with two shillings and sixpence to spend. Where did the ignorance and the desperation come from that she would not prefer to work, even in a sweatshop, rather than this?

And the answer was there before the thought was whole. Sweatshops required a skill in sewing she might not possess, and paid less for a fourteen-hour day than she could make in her room in an hour. Both would probably break her health by the time she was forty.

“I don’t want to lie with you, I want to ask you about Sarah Mackeson,” he said, sitting down on the one wooden chair. He was trying to place the faint smell in the room. It was not any of the usual body odors he would have expected, and not pleasing enough to have been a deliberate perfume, even if such a thing had been likely.

“You a rozzer?” she asked. “Don’t look like one.” There was little expression in her voice. “Well, yer can’t get ’er fer nothin’ now, poor bitch. She’s dead. Some bastard did ’er in a few days ago, up Acton Street. Don’t yer swine never tell each other nothin’? Even the patterers is talkin’ about it. Yer should listen!”

Monk ignored her resentment. He even saw the reason for it. She probably saw herself in Sarah Mackeson. It could as easily have been she, and she would expect as little protection before, or care afterwards.

“I know,” he replied. “That’s why I want to learn what I can about her. I want to catch who did it.”

It took a moment or two for her to grasp what he had said and consider whether she believed it. Then she began to talk.

He asked questions and she rambled on, a mixture of memories and observations, thoughts, all charged with so much emotion he was not certain when she was referring to Sarah and when to herself, but perhaps at times they were interchangeable. A painfully clear picture emerged of a woman who was careless, openhearted, loyal to her friends, feckless with money, and yet deeply frightened of a future in which she saw no safety. She was untidy, generous, quick to laugh—and to cry. If any man had loved her enough to feel jealousy, let alone to kill, she certainly had not known it. In her own eyes, her sole value was as an object of beauty for as long as it lasted. Both time and fashion were already eroding it, and she felt the cold breath of rejection.

Bella Holden was walking the same path, and she could offer no clue as to who might have killed Sarah. Reluctantly, she named a few other people who had known her moderately well, but he doubted they could help. Bella would not compromise her own future for the sake of finding justice for Sarah. Sarah was dead, and past help. Bella had too little on her side to risk any of it.

Monk thanked her and left. This time he returned to the police station, and found Runcorn in his office looking tired and unhappy, his brows drawn down.

“Opium,” he said, almost as if he were challenging Monk.

Suddenly, Monk placed the smell in Bella Holden’s room. He was annoyed with himself for not having known at the time. That was another gap in his memory. He hated Runcorn’s seeing it, especially now. “Sarah Mackeson was taking opium?” he asked with something close to a snarl.

Runcorn misread his expression for contempt. His face flushed with anger almost beyond his control. His voice shook when he spoke. “So might you, if you had nothing to offer but your looks, and they were fading!” He gulped air. His knuckles shone white where his hands were pressed on the desk in front of him. “With nothing ahead of you but doss-houses and selling your body to strangers for less and less every year, you might not stand there in your handmade boots looking down your damn nose at someone who escaped into a dream every now and then, because reality was too hard to bear! It’s your job to find out who killed her, not decide whether she was right or wrong.” He stopped abruptly and sniffed hard, looking away from Monk now, as if his anger embarrassed him. “Did you go and see Bella What’s-her-name as I told you? Have you done anything useful at all?”

Monk stood totally still, an incredible reality dawning on him. Runcorn was abashed because he felt defensive of Sarah and had developed a pity for her he had not expected, and it totally confused him. He was not idly defending her, but was instead defending himself and his own nakedness in front of Monk, who he imagined could not share his understanding or his pain.

The fact that he did share it made Monk angry, too. He admired Runcorn for it. It must have required an inner courage to admit an openness to hurt and to change Monk had not thought Runcorn capable of. Now it meant Monk, too, had to alter his judgments—and of Runcorn, of all people.

He was aware that Runcorn was watching him now. “Opium?” he said, forcing his voice to convey interest. “Any idea where she got it from?”

Runcorn grunted. “Could be Allardyce,” he said noncommittally. “That could be what all this is about—opium sale gone wrong. Perhaps Mrs. Beck came in on it and they were afraid she would cause a scandal.”

“Worth killing her for?” Monk said dubiously. Selling opium was not a crime.

“Might have been a lot of money,” Runcorn reasoned. “Or other people involved. Don’t know who else Allardyce painted, perhaps society ladies. Maybe they were taking the stuff and wouldn’t want their husbands to know?”

It was possible; in fact, the more he thought of it the better it looked. It would mean the murders had nothing to do with Kristian, or with Elissa Beck. “A quarrel perhaps, or a little blackmail?” he added to the idea. “Allardyce was the supplier?”

Runcorn looked at him with something almost like approval. “Well, he probably gave it to Sarah Mackeson, to keep her docile, if nothing else—poor creature. He wouldn’t care what it did to her over time. He’s only interested in the way she looks now, not what happens to her once he’s tired of her and picked someone else.” His mouth closed in a bitter line, as if he were angry not only with Allardyce but with everyone else who failed to see what he did or was indifferent to it.

Monk said nothing. There were too many changes whirling through his mind. His fury against Runcorn dissolved, and then was confused with a new one, because he did not want to have to change his opinion of this man, especially so quickly and so violently. It was his own fault for leaping to a cruel conclusion before he knew the truth, but he still blamed Runcorn for not being what he had supposed. Even as he was doing it he knew it was unfair, and that made it worse.

Runcorn flicked through the papers on his desk and found what he was looking for. He held it out to Monk. “That’s the drawing Allardyce spoke about. Feller who drew it said it was the night of the murders, and the pub landlord said he was there right enough, and drawing people.”

Monk took it from him. He needed only a glance to see an unmistakable portrait of Allardyce. It had not Allardyce’s skill at catching the passion of a moment. There was no tension in it, no drama. It was simply a group of friends around a table at a tavern, but the atmosphere was pervasive; even in such a hasty sketch one could imagine the laughter, the hum of conversation, the clink of glasses, and music in the background, a theater poster on the wall behind them.

“They were there all evening,” Runcorn said flatly. “We can forget Allardyce.”

Monk said nothing; the ugly, choking misery inside him closed his throat.

CHAPTER SIX

Hester went to the hospital again to see Mary Ellsworth. She found her sitting up in bed, her wound healing nicely and the pain definitely less than even a day ago.

“I’m going to be all right!” she said the moment Hester was in the door. “Aren’t I?” Her eyes were anxious, and she held the bedclothes so tightly her hands were balled into fists. Her hair was straggling out of the braids she had put it in for the night, as if already she had started to pull at it again.

Hester felt her heart sink. What could she say to this woman that would even begin to heal her real illness? The bezoar had been the symptom, not the cause.

“You are recovering very well,” she replied. She reached out her hand and put it over Mary’s. It was as rigid as it looked.

“And I’ll . . . I’ll go home?” Mary said, watching Hester intently. “And will Dr. Beck tell me what to do? I mean . . . he’s a doctor; he’d know better than anyone, wouldn’t he?” That was a challenge, almost a plea.

Kristian could tell her not to eat her hair, but that was not what she meant. She was looking for some other kind of instruction, reassurance.

“Of course he will, but I expect most of it you know for yourself,” Hester answered.

An extraordinary look came into Mary’s eyes: hope, terror, and a kind of desperate anger as if she were newly aware of something which was monstrously unjust. “No, I don’t. And Mama won’t know! She won’t know this!”

“Would it help if we tell her?” Hester suggested.

Now, Mary was quite clearly frightened. She seemed to be faced with a dilemma beyond her courage to solve.

“Is your mother not very good at looking after things?” Hester said gently. She knew Mary’s father had been a country parson, a younger son of a well-to-do family.

“She’s good at everything!” Mary asserted angrily, pulling the bedclothes more tightly up to her chest. “She always knows what to do.” That came out like a charge. Resentment and fear smoldered in her eyes. Then she looked away, down at her hands.

“I see.” Hester thought that perhaps she did, just a glimpse. “Well, it doesn’t need to be decided now,” she said firmly. “But I’m sure Dr. Beck would be happy to tell you what you need to do, and I will also. Will that make you feel better?”

Mary’s hands relaxed a fraction. “Will you write it for me, in case . . .”

“Of course. You will have something to refer to,” Hester agreed. “And you can practice before you go home.”

“Practice?”

“Practice being certain what is the right thing to do.”

“Oh! Yes. Thank you.”

Hester stayed a few minutes longer, then went to look for Kristian.

Later, she passed Fermin Thorpe in the corridor. He looked impatient as always, and was affecting not to see her, because she made him feel uncomfortable. He had once lost his temper with her, and he hated being out of control of anything, most of all his own behavior. His color was high, and he had a glitter in his eyes as if his last encounter had displeased him.

She found Callandra in the apothecary’s room, and the moment she saw Hester she concluded her discussion and came out. “Have you heard anything?” she said as soon as the door was closed. “What has William found?”

Hester had not seen Callandra since the funeral and the terrible evening afterwards. She had lain awake arguing with herself over whether she would tell Callandra about Elissa and the gambling, and then, when she realized she had to, she tortured herself as to how she would do it and still leave Kristian some privacy, particularly from Callandra’s knowledge of his pain.

But there was a chill of fear inside her that they could not afford the luxury of protecting embarrassment, even pride. At the very best, Callandra would have to know one day. It would be easier to tell her in Kristian’s own time—his words, and his decision. But at the worst, it might be a matter of survival, and all knowledge was necessary to protect against betrayal by error.

“What is it?” Callandra said quietly.

“Elissa Beck gambled,” Hester replied, then, seeing the look of incomprehension in Callandra’s face, she went on. “Compulsively. She lost everything she had, so that Kristian had to sell their belongings, even the furniture.” Callandra seemed able to take in the meaning of what was said only slowly, as if it were a complicated story. “It’s an addiction,” Hester went on. “Like drinking, or taking opium. Some people can’t stop, no matter what it does to them, even if they lose their money, their jewelry, pictures, ornaments, the furniture out of their houses . . . everything. Elissa was like that.”

The real horror of it was dawning on Callandra. Perhaps she realized now why she had never been asked to Kristian’s house. She must also realize how vast a part of his life she knew nothing of, the pain, the embarrassment, the fears of discovery and ruin. These were at the heart of his existence, every day, and she had had no knowledge of them, shared nothing because he had never allowed her to know.

“I’m sorry,” Hester said gently. “If we are to help Kristian we can’t afford ignorance.”

“Could it have been someone to whom she owed money?” Callandra began.

“Of course,” Hester agreed too quickly.

Callandra’s face tightened into blank misery. “Kristian would have paid. You said everything was gone, at least you implied it. Ruined gamblers commit suicide. I’ve known soldiers to do that. Do creditors really murder them? And what about the other poor woman?” She shivered convulsively. “Surely she didn’t gamble, too?”

“She was possibly the one they intended to kill.” Hester was trying to convince herself as much as Callandra. “They are trying to find out as much as they can about her.”

“Perhaps it was a lover’s quarrel that went much too far?” Callandra’s voice hovered on the edge of conviction. “What about the artist?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, this won’t do any good standing here.” Callandra forced herself to smile. “How is the woman who had the hairball? I thought only cats got them. For them it’s understandable, but I can’t think of anything more revolting than eating hair.”

“The wound is healing well. I’m wondering what we can do to give her the belief in herself to heal the inside of her.”

“Work,” Callandra replied without hesitation. “If she stayed here we could find her enough to do so she would be too busy to sit and worry about herself.”

“I doubt her mother would allow her to,” Hester replied. “Hospitals don’t have a very good reputation for young ladies of genteel background.” She gave a twisted smile as she said it, but there was too much truth in it to ignore.

“I’ll speak to her,” Callandra promised.

“I think she would like it, but she’d never have the courage to defy . . .”

“The mother,” Callandra supplied. “I’m good with dragons, believe me. I know exactly where the soft spots are.”

This time Hester’s smile was wholehearted. “I’ll hold your shield for you,” she promised.

The following day was the funeral of Sarah Mackeson. Monk wondered if anyone but the priest and the gravediggers would attend. There would be no family to hold an elaborate reception afterwards, no one to pay for a hearse and four horses with black plumes or for professional mourners to carry feathers and stand in silence with faces like masks of tragedy.

Someone should be there. He would go. Whatever the need for truth, this was a need also. He would follow Kristian’s path on the evening of the murders and check every detail, speak to every peddler, shopkeeper and barrow boy he could, but he would check his watch regularly and make the time for Sarah’s funeral.

He left the house at seven. It was a heavy, still morning with a distinct coldness in the air, but the fog had cleared, at least for the meantime. It was easy to believe that winter was ahead, even if there were still leaves on the trees. Dusk was growing earlier and dawn later by a few minutes every day.

It was hardly worth looking for a cab for the short distance to Acton Street, and walking gave him the opportunity to think about what he was going to do. If he traced Kristian’s path precisely, there was a possibility that he could prove he could not have been in Allardyce’s studio. Then the question of his guilt would not arise. Runcorn’s men had already tried to establish this, and failed to do it conclusively.

He passed a newspaper seller shouting that the government in Washington was starting a crusade against antiCivil War journals, some of which had been seized at a post office in Philadelphia.

By the time he reached Acton Street and found the constable it was a quarter to eight. He rehearsed Kristian’s movements as he had recounted them, and found the first witness, a peddler who sold sandwiches and knew Kristian quite well, having often provided him with what served for luncheon or dinner when he was hard-pressed, hurrying from one patient to another.

“Oh, yeah,” he said with conviction. “Dr. Beck passed ’ere ’bout quarter past nine the other night. ’Ungry, ’e were, an’ rushed orff ’is feet, like most times. Sold ’im an ’am san’wich an’ ’e ate ’alf of it and went on wi’ the other ’alf in ’is ’and.”

Monk breathed a sigh of relief. If Kristian had been on his way to his patient in Clarendon Square at quarter past nine, then he could not have been in Acton Street at just after half past. “Are you sure it was quarter past nine?” he pressed.

“ ’Course I’m sure,” the peddler replied, pulling his wide mouth into a grimace.

“How do you know?” He had to be certain.

“ ’Cos Mr. ’Arreford come by an’ bought ’is usual. Quarter past nine on the dot, ’e is, reg’lar as Big Ben.”

“You can’t hear Big Ben from here,” Monk pointed out.

The peddler looked at him crookedly. “ ’Course yer can’t,” he said. “Figure o’ speech, like. If Big Ben ain’t reg’lar, the world’s comin’ ter a rare fix!”

“And this Mr. Harreford is never late—or early?”

“Never. If yer knew ’im, yer wouldn’t ask.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Don’t yer believe me, then?”

“Yes, I believe you, but the judge may not, if it comes to that.”

The peddler shivered. “Don’ wanna tell no judge!”

“You won’t need to, if I find Mr. Harreford.”

“Works in the lawyer’s offices, number fourteen Amwell Street. That way,” he said instantly.

Monk smiled. “Thank you.”

An hour later Mr. Harreford, a dry, obsessively neat, little man, confirmed what the peddler had said, and Monk left with a feeling of growing relief. Perhaps his fears were unnecessary after all. Kristian had an excellent witness, one whom Runcorn would take sufficiently seriously that he would dismiss Kristian as a suspect. He walked back towards Tottenham Court Road with a light, swift step. After he had been to Sarah Mackeson’s funeral, he would be able to check again on the patient, Maude Oldenby, and that would account for Kristian’s time completely.

“Thank you,” Monk acknowledged to the peddler.

“Pleasure, Guv’nor,” the peddler said with a grin. “Yer owe me, mind!”

“I do,” Monk agreed.

“Still followin’ the doc’s path that night, are yer?”

“I will, when I come back.”

“Good, ’cos yer won’t find the chestnut seller on ’is patch till ’arter midday.”

“Chestnut seller?” Monk asked doubtfully.

“Yeah! Corner o’ Liverpool Street and the Euston Road. ’E must ’a seen ’im too, at twenty arter nine, or the like.”

“You mean ten past,” Monk corrected. Liverpool Street was in the opposite direction.

“No, I don’t!” The peddler stared at him, drawing his brows down.

“If he was going from Risinghill Street, beyond Pentonville Road, towards Clarendon Square, he would pass Liverpool Street before here,” Monk pointed out with weary patience.

“ ’Course ’e would,” the peddler agreed. “But as ’e were goin’ t’other way, ’e’d pass me first, wouldn’t ’e?”

“The other way?” Monk repeated slowly, the relief freezing inside him to a small, hard stone.

“Yeah. ’E weren’t goin’ ter Clarendon Square, ’e’d bin, an’ were comin’ back.”

“You’re sure?” He knew it was stupid to ask even as he said the words. He was fighting against a truth part of him already accepted.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” The peddler looked unhappy. “Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily,” Monk lied. “It’s good to get it right. No room for mistakes. He was going that way?” He pointed towards Gray’s Inn Road.

“Yeah!”

“Did he say where to?”

“No. Just took the sandwich and went. Didn’t stop an’ talk like ’e sometimes does. Reckon ’e ’ad someone real poorly.”

“Yes, I daresay he did. Thank you.” He walked away. Of course he would have to check with the chestnut seller, but he was already certain of what he would find.

The funeral of Sarah Mackeson was held in a small church in Pentonville. It was very quiet, and conducted so hastily as to be no more than a formality. It was an observance of the decencies for the sake of being able to say duty was done. There was a plain wooden coffin, but it was of pine, and Monk wondered if Argo Allardyce had paid for it, even though he was not present.

He glanced around the almost empty pews, and saw only one middle-aged woman in a plain black coat and drab hat, and he recognized Mrs. Clark, looking tearful. There was no one else present except Runcorn, standing at the back, angry and embarrassed when his eyes met Monk’s. He looked away quickly, as if they had not seen each other.

What was he doing there? Did he really imagine that whoever had killed her would be at the funeral? Whatever for? Some kind of remorse? Only if it were Allardyce, and his presence would prove nothing. He had employed her as his model for the last three or four years, painted her countless times. Until Elissa Beck, she was woven into his art as no one else.

In fact, why was he not there? Was he too overwrought with emotion, or did he not care? Was that why Runcorn was standing so quietly at the back, head bowed, face somber? Monk looked at him again, and as Runcorn became aware of him, he turned away and concentrated on the minister and the brief words of the service. He sounded as if he were simply rehearsing something learned by rote, fulfilling his duty in order to be released to something else. His eulogy was anonymous. He had not known her, and what he said could have applied to any young woman who had died unexpectedly.