The Sins of the Wolf (57 page)

Monk swore with breathless venom and skidded to a halt at the crossroads, looking to the left and right for any kind of a vehicle.

Hester caught up with him, and then Hector.

“God damn them!” Monk choked with rage. “God damn her above all!”

“Where can they go?” Hector coughed, gasping to regain his breath. “The police will catch them….”

“We’ve got to get back and find the police.” Monk’s voice was rising in an anguish of rage. “And by the time we’ve explained Quinlan’s death, and persuaded them we didn’t do it … and shown them the room with the forgery equipment, Oonagh and Alastair will have got to the docks, and could even have set sail across towards Holland.”

“Can’t we get them back?” Hester demanded, even as she said it realizing how hard that would be; with the whole of Europe beyond, and perhaps friends to help them, they might succeed in disappearing.

“Brewery!” Hector said suddenly, jerking his arm to point across the road.

Monk fixed him with a glare that should have withered him to dry bones.

“Horses!” Hector began to shamble across the street.

“We can’t chase that in a dray!” Monk bellowed after him, but he began to follow him all the same.

But Hector emerged only a few moments later with not a brewer’s dray but a very handsome single-horse gig, and pulled up only long enough for Monk to heave Hester up and then follow after her at a clumsy swing, almost landing on top of her.

“Whose gig have you stolen?” he yelled, not that he cared in the slightest.

“Brewmaster, I expect,” Hector yelled back, and then bent his attention to controlling the startled horse and urging it at an unnerving speed along the road after the vanished! carriage.

Monk crouched forward, clinging to the side, white-faced.
Hester sat back, trying to wedge herself into the seat, while the gig lurched and bucketed all over the road, going faster and faster. Hector was oblivious of everything except his son and daughter ahead.

Hester knew why Monk was so ashen. She imagined the chaos of memories which must be knotting his body and bringing the sweat to his skin, even if his mind only half recalled a haze of sensation, that other carriage careering through the night to end in a heap of splintered wood and spinning wheels, the driver killed and himself lying injured and senseless beneath it, all his life to that moment blotted out and lost forever.

But there was nothing she could do except cling on for dear life. She could not let him know she understood.

Another crossroads loomed ahead and the carriage was already out of sight. It could have gone any of three ways. Presumably straight ahead?

But the gig horse was at a gallop now, and Hector reined it in, almost throwing the beast to the ground, and then urged it to the right, the gig riding on two wheels. Monk was hurled against Hester and the two of them all but fell out. Only Monk’s weight, bringing Hester to the floor, saved them.

Monk swore luridly and furiously as the gig righted itself and plunged along Great Junction Street, and then almost immediately turned again towards the sea, sending them pell-mell to the other side.

“What the hell are you doing, you damned lunatic?” Monk made a lunge to grab at Hector, and missed.

Hector was oblivious of him. The carriage was ahead of them again. They could see Alastair’s fair hair flying and Oonagh close to him, almost as if he were holding her with his other arm.

The street veered again, and they were beside the narrow, deep river leading to the sea. There were barges moored in it, and fishing smacks. A man leaped out of the way, shouting abuse. A child let out a wail and fled.

A fishwife screamed a string of curses and threw her empty basket at the carriage. One horse reared up and overbalanced onto the other, and in almost dreamlike motion they skewed crazily over to the harbor wall and the sheer drop to the water. The carriage swung around and the shafts snapped. The carriage balanced for a split second, then toppled over into the river, taking Oonagh and Alastair with it. The horses were left shivering on the edge, eyes rolling, squealing with terror, held by the chains and harness.

Hector reined in, throwing his considerable weight backwards to check his own horse, and slamming on the brake with his other hand.

Monk leaped onto the ground and ran to the edge.

Hester scrambled behind him, ripping her skirt where it caught, and almost spraining her ankle on the rough cobbles.

The carriage was already sinking, exquisitely slowly, sucked and held fast in centuries-deep mud beneath the surge of incoming tide. Oonagh and Alastair were both in the water, clear of all tackle and harness, struggling to stay afloat.

The next few moments were imprinted on Hester’s heart forever. Alastair gained his breath and swam strongly over to Oonagh, a mere stroke or two away, and for an instant they were face-to-face in filthy water, then slowly and with great care he reached out and grasped her heavy hair and pushed her head under. He held it while she flailed and thrashed. The tide caught him and he ignored it, allowing it to take him rather than let go of his dreadful burden.

Monk looked on in paralyzed horror.

Hester let out a scream. It was the only time she could remember screaming in her life.

“God help you!” Hector said thickly.

There was no more commotion in the water. Oonagh’s hair floated pale on the surface and her skirts billowed around her. She did not move at all.

“Sweet Mary, mother of God!” the fishwife said from behind Monk, crossing herself again and again.

At last Alastair looked up, his face smeared with mud and his own hair. He was exhausted; the tide had him and he knew it.

As if woken from a dream, Monk turned to the fishwife. “Have you got a rope?” he demanded.

“Holy Virgin!” she said in horrified awe. “You’re never going to hang ’im!”

“Of course not, you fool! I’m going to get him out!”

And with that he lashed the rope to the stanchion, the other end around his waist, and leaped into the water and was immediately carried by the current away from the wall and the still-visible floating roof of the carriage.

Others had gathered around. A man in a heavy knitted sweater and sea boots took the weight of the rope, and another went to the edge with a rope ladder.

It was ten minutes before Monk was hauled back and helped in. The fishermen took the bodies from him, and lastly eased him, shivering, streaming water, onto the quayside. He clambered to his feet slowly, his clothes weighing him down.

A little bunch of people stood around, pale-faced, fascinated and flustered as they laid Oonagh on the stones, her skin marble gray, her eyes wide open, and then Alastair beside her, calmer, ice-cold and beyond her reach.

Monk looked down at her, then at Hester, instinctively as he always did, and in that moment he realized the enormity of what lay between them now. He would never seek to put from his mind the night in the secret room, even if he could, nor would he have undone it, but it created new emotions in him he did not want. It opened up vulnerabilities, left him wide open to wounds he could not cope with.

He saw in her face that she understood, that she too was uncertain and afraid; but she was also in that instant certain beyond anything and everything else that there was a trust between them older and stronger than could be broken,
something that was not love, although it encompassed it and anger, and differences: true friendship.

He was afraid that she had already seen that it was the most precious thing in the world to him. He looked away quickly, down at the dead face of Oonagh. He reached out a hand and closed her eyes, not out of pity, just a sense of decency.

“The sins of the wolf have come home,” he said quietly. “Corruption, deceit, and last of all, betrayal.”