Funeral in Blue (3 page)

“Thank you,” Hester said sincerely. “I wish I hadn’t allowed preoccupation with other things to keep me away so long. None of them were really important, compared with family.” As she said it she was thinking of Imogen, but more intensely of Charles. He was the only blood relative she had left, and suddenly she had been forced to see that he was far more fragile than she had realized. She thought of Monk, and how alone he was. He said nothing, but she knew he ached to have ties to a past he understood, roots and a belonging. Family gave you bearings, an anchorage in who you were.

Imogen turned away and started to speak in a rush. “You must tell me about America . . . on another visit. I’ve never been to sea. Was it exciting, or terrible? Or both?”

Hester drew in breath to begin describing the extraordinary mixture of fear, hardship, boredom and wonder, but before she could say anything, Imogen flashed her another brilliant smile and then began rearranging the loose cushions on the sofa. “I feel dreadful not asking you to stay to tea,” she went on. “After you’ve come so far. But I’m due to call on a friend, and I really can’t let her down.” She raised her eyes. “I’m sure you understand. But I’ll call on you next time, if I may? And we’ll exchange news properly. I know you’re terribly busy, so I’ll send you a note.” Almost unconsciously, she was urging Hester towards the door.

There was no possible civil answer except to comply.

“Of course,” Hester said with forced warmth. The opportunity to learn anything was slipping away from her, and she could think of nothing to keep it. One moment, as she held the trinket box, she had felt as if the old friendship was there, and the next they were strangers being polite and trying to escape each other. “Thank you for the box,” she added. “Perhaps I could come back for it at a more convenient time?”

“Oh!” Imogen was startled. “Yes . . . of course. I hadn’t thought of you carrying it. I’ll bring it one day.”

Hester smiled. “Come soon.” She opened the withdrawing room door, and giving Imogen a light kiss on the cheek, she walked across the hall just as the maid opened the front door for her, bobbing a half curtsy.

The following morning Hester went into the City to report on her visit, and at shortly after ten o’clock she was in Charles’s offices in Fenchurch Street. Within minutes he sent for her and she was shown to his room. He looked as stiff and immaculate as he had when he visited her, and his face was just as pale and shadowed by lack of sleep. He stood up as she came in, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, inviting her to take the chair opposite the desk. He remained standing, his eyes fixed on her face.

“How are you?” he asked. “Would you like tea?”

She wanted to reach across the gulf between them and say something like “For heaven’s sake, ask me what you want to! Don’t fidget! Don’t pretend!” But she knew it would only make it more difficult for him. If she tried to express any of her feelings, or break his own concentration of effort, it would delay the moment rather than bring it closer.

“Thank you,” she accepted. “That’s most thoughtful.”

It was another ten minutes of polite trivia before the tray was brought and the clerk left, closing the door behind him. Charles invited Hester to pour, then at last he sat back and looked at her.

“Did you visit Imogen?” he asked.

“Yes, but not for very long.” She was acutely aware that his eyes were studying her face as if he were trying to read something deeper than her words. She wished she could tell him what he so desperately wanted to hear. “She was about to go out, and of course I had not told her I was coming.”

“I see.” He looked down at his cup as if the liquid in it were of profound interest.

Hester wondered if Imogen found him as difficult to talk to as she did. Had he always been this stilted about anything that touched his emotions, or had Imogen made him this way? What had he been like five or six years ago? She tried to remember. “Charles, I don’t know what else to do,” she said helplessly. “I can’t suddenly start visiting her every day, when I haven’t done so for months. She has no reason to confide in me, not only because we are no longer close, but I am your sister. She must know my first loyalty is to you.”

He was staring out of the window. Neither of them had touched their tea. “Just as I arrived home yesterday, I saw her leaving. She didn’t notice me. I . . . I stayed in the cab and told the driver to follow her.”

Hester was too startled to speak. And yet even as she was rejecting the thought, she knew that in his place she might have done the same thing, even if she had hated herself for it afterwards. “Where did she go?” she asked, gulping and struggling to keep her voice level.

“All over the place,” he answered, still looking out of the window, away from her. “First she went through a string of back streets to somewhere near Covent Garden. I thought at first she was shopping, although I can’t think what she would find there. But she went into a small building and came out without anything.” He seemed to be about to add something, then changed his mind, as if he thought better of saying it aloud.

“Was that all?” Hester asked.

“No.” He kept his back to her. She saw the rigid line of taut muscles pulling his coat tight. “No, she went to two other places, similar, and came out again within twenty minutes. Lastly she went to a street off the Gray’s Inn Road and paid her cabbie off.” At last he turned to face her, his eyes challenging. “It was a butcher’s shop. She looked . . . excited. Her cheeks were flushed and she ran across the pavement clutching her reticule . . . as if she were going to buy something terribly important. Hester, what could it mean? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. She would like to think Imogen was simply visiting a friend and had perhaps looked for an unusual gift to take to her, but Charles had said she appeared to carry nothing except her reticule. And why go in the evening just as Charles came home, albeit a trifle early, but without telling him?

“I’m . . . I’m afraid for her,” he said at last. “Not just for my own sake, but for what scandal she could bring upon herself if she is . . .” He could not say the words.

She did not leave him floundering. “I’ll call on her again,” she said gently. “We used to be friends. I shall see if I can gain her confidence sufficiently to find out something more.”

“Will you . . . will you please keep me . . .” He did not want to say “advised.” Sometimes he was aware of being pompous. At his best he could laugh at himself. This time he was afraid of being ridiculous, and of alienating her as well.

“Of course I will,” she said firmly. “I would rather be able to tell you simply that she had made a rather unlikely friend of whom she thought you might disapprove, and so she did not tell you.”

“Am I so . . .”

She made herself smile. “Well, I haven’t seen the friend. Perhaps she’s very eccentric, or has fearfully common manners.”

He blinked suddenly. “Yes . . . perhaps . . .”

The clerk came to the door and said apologetically that Mr. Latterly’s next client was still waiting. Hester excused herself, walking out into the street and the busy traffic, the errand boys, the bankers in their dark suits, the carriages with harnesses gleaming in the sun, a sense of oppression closing in on her.

CHAPTER TWO

Hester was clearing away the dishes after luncheon and had just put the last one into the sink when the front doorbell rang. She allowed Monk to answer it, hoping it might be a new client. Also, she was wet up to the elbows and disliked doing dishes quite enough not to have to make two attempts at it.

She heard Monk’s step across the floor and the door open, then several moments of silence. She had dried the first plate and was reaching for the second when she was aware of Monk standing in the kitchen doorway. She looked around at him.

His face was so grave it startled her. The clean, hard lines of it were bleak. The light shone on his cheekbones and brow; his eyes were shadowed.

“What is it?” she said with a gulp of fear. It was more than a new case, however tragic. It was something that touched them in the heart. “William?”

He came a step further in. “Kristian Beck’s wife has been murdered,” he answered so quietly that whoever was waiting in the sitting room would not have heard him.

She was stunned. It hardly seemed believable. She had a picture in her mind of a thin, middle-aged woman, lonely and angry, perhaps attacked by a thief in the street.

“Does Callandra know?” She asked the thing that was of most importance to her, even before Kristian himself.

“Yes. She’s come to tell us.”

“Oh.” She put down the towel, her thoughts whirling. She was sorry anyone should be dead, but no matter how ashamed she was of it, her imagination leaped ahead to a time when Kristian would feel free to marry Callandra. It was indecent . . . but it was there.

“She’d like to see you,” Monk said quietly.

“Yes, of course.” She went past him into the sitting room and immediately saw Callandra in the center of the floor, still standing. She appeared bereaved, as if something had happened which she could not begin to understand. She smiled when she saw Hester, but it was a matter of friendship and without any pleasure at all. Her eyes were bright and frightened.

“Hester, my dear,” she said shakily. “I’m so sorry to call at such a silly time of the afternoon, but I have just heard dreadful news, as I expect William has told you.”

Hester went to her and took both Callandra’s hands in her own, holding them gently. “Yes, he did. Kristian’s wife has been killed. How did it happen?”

Callandra’s fingers tightened over hers and held her surprisingly hard. “No one really knows yet. She was found this morning in the studio of the artist Argo Allardyce. He was painting a portrait of her.” Her brow puckered faintly, as if she found it difficult to believe. “The cleaning woman came and found them . . . both . . .”

“Both?” Hester said with a catch in her breath. “You mean the artist as well?” It seemed incredible.

“No . . . no,” Callandra said quickly. “Mrs. Beck and the artists’ model Sarah Mackeson.”

“You mean Allardyce killed them both?” Hester was struggling to make sense of it. “Yesterday afternoon? Why?”

Callandra looked totally confused. “No one knows. There was nobody there from midday until this morning. It could have happened at any time.”

“She would not have a sitting in the evening,” Hester replied. “He wouldn’t paint after the light was gone.”

Callandra colored faintly. “Oh no, of course not. I’m sorry. It’s ridiculous how deeply it shocks one when it is someone connected, however . . .”

Monk came in from the kitchen. “The kettle is boiling,” he told Hester.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Callandra said with a tight little laugh. “You can make a cup of tea, William!”

He stopped, perhaps realizing for the first time how close to hysteria she was.

Hester turned to him to see if he understood. She saw the flash of comprehension in his eyes, and left him to attend to tea. She looked at Callandra. “Sit down,” she directed, almost guiding her to the other chair. “Have you any idea why this Allardyce did such a thing?” Now that she was met with the necessity of thinking about it more rationally, she realized she knew nothing at all about Mrs. Beck.

Callandra made a profound effort at self-control. “I don’t know for certain that it was Allardyce,” she answered. “They were both found in his studio. Allardyce himself was gone.” Her eyes met Hester’s, pleading for some answer that would make it no more than a sadness far removed from them, like an accident in the street, tragic but not personal. But it was not possible. Whatever had happened, this would change their lives irrevocably simply by the violence of it.

Hester tried to think of something to say, but before she could, Monk came back into the room with tea on a tray. He poured, and they all sat in silence for a few moments, sipping the hot liquid and feeling it ease the clenched-up knots inside.

Callandra set her cup down and faced Monk with more composure. “William, she and this other woman were murdered. It is sure to be very ugly and distressing, no matter how it happened. Dr. Beck will be involved because he is . . . was her husband.” She picked up her tea once more, but her hand wobbled a trifle and she set the cup down again before she spilled it. “There are bound to be a lot of questions, and not all of them will be kind.” Her face looked extraordinarily vulnerable, almost bruised. “Please . . . will you do what you can to protect him?”

Hester turned to look at Monk also. He had left the police force with extreme ill feeling between himself and his superior. One could debate whether he had resigned or been dismissed. Asking him to involve himself in a police matter was requiring of him a great deal. Yet both he and Hester owed Callandra more than was measurable in purely practical terms, regardless of loyalty and affection, which would in themselves have been sufficient. She had given them unquestioning friendship regardless of her own reputation. In lean times she had discreetly supported them financially, never referring to it or asking anything in return but to be included.

Hester saw the hesitation in Monk’s face. She drew breath in to say something that would urge him to accept. Then she saw that he was going to, and was ashamed of herself for having doubted him.

“I’ll go to the station concerned,” he agreed. “Where were they found?”

“Acton Street,” Callandra replied, relief quick in her voice. “Number twelve. It’s a house with an artist’s studio on the top floor.”

“Acton Street?” Monk frowned, trying to place it.

“Off the Gray’s Inn Road,” Callandra told him. “Just beyond the Royal Free Hospital.”

Hester felt her mouth go dry. She tried to swallow, and it caught in her throat.

Monk was looking at Callandra. His face was blank, but the muscles in his neck were pulled tight. Hester knew that the studio must be in Runcorn’s area, and that Monk would have to approach him if he were to involve himself. It was an old enmity going back to Monk’s first days on the force. But whatever he felt about that now, he masked it well. He was already bending his mind to the task.

“How did you hear about it so soon?” he asked Callandra.

“Kristian told me,” she replied. “We had a hospital meeting this afternoon, and he had to cancel it. He asked me to make his excuses.” She swallowed, her tea ignored.

“She can’t have been home all night,” he went on. “Wasn’t he concerned for her?”

She avoided his eyes very slightly. “I didn’t ask him. I . . . I believe they led separate lives.”

As a friend, he might not have pressed the matter—it was delicate—but when he was in pursuit of truth neither his mind nor his tongue accepted boundaries. He might hate probing an area he knew would cause pain, but that had never stopped him. He could be as ruthless with the dark mists of the memory within himself, and he knew with bone-deep familiarity just how that hurt. He had had to piece together the shards of his own past before the accident. Some of them were full of color, others were dark, and to look at them cost all the courage he had.

“Where was he yesterday evening?” he continued, looking at Callandra.

Her eyes opened wide, and Hester saw the fear in them. Monk must have seen it also. She looked as if she were about to say one thing, then cleared her throat and said something else. “Please protect his reputation, William,” she pleaded. “He is Bohemian, and although his English is perfect, he is still a foreigner. And . . . they did not have the happiest of marriages. Don’t allow them to harass him or suggest some kind of guilt by innuendo.”

He did not offer her any false assurances. “Tell me something about Mrs. Beck,” he said instead. “What kind of woman was she?”

Callandra hesitated; a flicker of surprise was in her eyes, then gone again. “I’m not certain that I know a great deal,” she confessed uncomfortably. “I never met her. She didn’t involve herself with the hospital at all, and . . .” She blushed. “I don’t really know Dr. Beck socially.”

Hester looked at Monk. If he found anything odd in Callandra’s answer there was no sign of it in his expression. His face was tense, eyes concentrated upon hers. “What about her circle of friends?” he asked. “Did she entertain? What were her interests? What did she do with her time?”

Now Callandra was definitely uncomfortable. The color deepened in her face. “I’m afraid I don’t know. He speaks of her hardly at all. I . . . I gathered from something he said that she was away from home a great deal, but he did not say where. He mentioned once that she had considerable political knowledge and spoke German. But then, Kristian himself spent many years in Vienna, so perhaps that is not very surprising.”

“Was she Bohemian, too?” Monk asked quickly.

“No . . . at least I don’t think so.”

Monk stood up. “I’ll go to the police station and see what I can learn.” His voice softened. “Don’t worry yet. It may be that the artists’ model was the intended victim, and only a tragic mischance that Mrs. Beck was also there at that moment.”

She made an effort to smile. “Thank you. I . . . I know it is not easy for you to ask them.”

He shrugged very slightly, dismissing it, then put on his jacket, sliding it easily over his shoulders and pulling it straight. It was beautifully cut. Whatever his income, or lack of it, he had always dressed with elegance and a certain flair. He would pay his tailor even if he ate bread and drank water.

He turned in the doorway and gave Hester a glance from which she understood thoughts and feelings it would have taken minutes to explain, and then he was gone.

Hester bent her attention to Callandra and whatever comfort she could offer.

Monk disliked the thought of asking any favor of Runcorn even more than Callandra was aware. It was largely pride. It stung like a burn on the skin, but he could not possibly ignore either the duty, both moral and emotional, or the inner compulsion to learn the truth. The purity and the danger of knowledge had always fascinated him, even when it forced him to face things that hurt, stripped bare secrets and wounds. It was a challenge to his skill and his courage, and facing Runcorn was a price he never seriously thought too high.

He strode along Grafton Street down to Tottenham Court Road and caught a hansom for the mile or so to the police station.

During the ride he thought about what Callandra had told him. He knew Kristian Beck only slightly, but instinctively he liked him. He admired his courage and the single-mindedness of his crusade to improve medical treatment for the poor. He was gentler than Monk would have been, a man with patience and a broadness of spirit that seemed to be almost without personal ambition or hunger for praise. Monk could not have said as much for himself, and he knew it.

At the police station, he paid the driver and braced his shoulders, then walked up the steps and inside. The duty sergeant regarded him with interest. With a wave of relief for the present, Monk recalled how different walking into a station house had been the first time after the accident. Then it had been fear in the man’s face, an instant respect born of the experience of Monk’s lacerating tongue and his expectation that everyone should match his own standards, in precisely his way.

“Mornin’, Mr. Monk. What can we do for yer terday?” the sergeant said cheerfully. Perhaps with the passage of time he had grown in confidence. A good leader would have seen to that. But it was pointless regretting past inadequacies now.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” Monk replied. He had been thinking how to phrase his request so as to achieve what he wanted without having to beg. “I may possibly have some information about a crime which occurred late yesterday in Acton Street. May I speak with whoever is in charge of the investigation?” If he were fortunate it would be John Evan, one man of whose friendship he was certain.

“You mean the murders, o’ course.” The sergeant nodded sagely. “That’d be Mr. Runcorn ’isself, sir. Very serious, this is. Yer lucky as ’e’s in. I’ll tell ’im yer ’ere.”

Monk was surprised that Runcorn, the man in command of the station and who had not worked cases personally in several years, should concern himself with what seemed to be an ordinary domestic tragedy. Was he ambitious to solve something simple, and so be seen to succeed and take the credit? Or could the case be important in some way Monk could not foresee, and Runcorn dare not appear to be indifferent?

He sat down on the wooden bench, prepared for a long wait. Runcorn would do that simply to make very sure that Monk never forgot that he no longer had any status there.

However, it was less than five minutes before a constable came and took him up to Runcorn’s room, and that was disconcerting because it was not what he expected.

The room was exactly as it had always been, tidy, unimaginative, designed to impress with the importance of its occupant and yet failing, simply because it tried too hard. A man at ease with himself would have cared so much less.

Runcorn himself also was the same, tall with a long, narrow face, a little less florid than before, his hair grizzled and not quite so thick, but still handsome. He regarded Monk cautiously. It was as if they were catapulted back in time. All the old rivalries were just as sharp, the knowledge precisely where and how to hurt, the embarrassments, the doubts, the failures each wished forgotten and always saw reflected in the other’s eyes.