Acceptable Loss (3 page)

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cardew.” She could not call him “sir”—and she did not think he wished it—although she was perfectly aware of his father’s title. Should she apologize for looking like a servant? Their friendship was recent, but she had liked him immediately, in
spite of being aware that his beneficence toward the clinic sprang at least in part from a professional familiarity with some of its patients. His father, Lord Cardew, had sufficient wealth and position to make work unnecessary for his only surviving son. Rupert wasted his time, means, and talents with both charm and generosity, although lately he had lost some of his usual ease.

“I wasn’t praying,” she added, looking ruefully at her wet, rather red hands. “Perhaps I should have had more faith. Thank you.” She took the considerable amount of money he held out. She did not count it, but there was clearly several hundred pounds in the bundle of Treasury notes he put in her hand.

“Debts of pleasure,” he said with a wide smile. “Do you really have to do that yourself?” He eyed the floor and the bucket.

“Actually, it’s quite satisfying,” she told him. “Especially if you’re in a temper. You can attack it, and then see the difference you have made.”

“Next time I am in a temper, perhaps I’ll try it,” he promised with a smile. “You were an army nurse, weren’t you?” he observed. “They should have set you at the enemy. You’d have frightened the wits out of them.” He said it good-naturedly, as if in approval. “Would you like a cup of tea? I should have brought some cake.”

“Bread and jam?” she offered. She could enjoy a few minutes’ break and the light, superficial conversation with him. He reminded her of the young cavalry officers she had known in the Crimea: charming, funny, seemingly careless on the surface, and yet underneath it trying desperately not to think of tomorrow, or yesterday, and the friends they had lost, and would yet lose. However, as far as she knew, Rupert had no war to fight, no battle worth winning or losing.

“What kind of jam?” he asked, as if it mattered.

“Black currant,” she replied. “Or possibly raspberry.”

“Right.” To her surprise he bent and picked up the bucket, carrying it away from himself a little so it did not soil his perfect trousers or splash his boots.

She was startled. She had never before seen him even acknowledge the necessity, never mind stoop to so lowly a task. She wondered
what had made him think of it today. Certainly not any vulnerability in her. It had made no difference before.

He put the pail down at the scullery door. Emptying it could wait for someone else.

In the kitchen Hester pushed the kettle over onto the cooktop and started to cut bread. She offered to toast it, and then passed the fork over to him to hold in front of the open door of the stove.

They spoke easily of the clinic and some of the cases that had come in. Rupert had a quick compassion for the street women’s pain, in spite of being one of those very willing to use their services.

With tea, toast, and jam on the table, conversation moved to other subjects with which there was no tension, no glaring contrasts: social gossip, places they had visited, exhibitions of art. He was interested in everything, and he listened as graciously as he spoke. Sometimes she forgot the great kitchen around her, the pots and pans, the stove, and in the next room the copper for boiling linen, and the laundry tubs, the scullery sinks, the racks of vegetables. She could have been at home as a young woman, fifteen years ago, before the war, before experience, passion, grief, or real happiness. There had been a kind of innocence to her life then; everything had been possible. Her parents had still been alive, and also her younger brother, who had been killed in the Crimea. The memories were both sweet and painful.

Deliberately she steered the subject back to the clinic. “We’re very grateful for your gift. I had asked Lady Rathbone to see if she could raise some more money, but it is always difficult. We keep on asking, because there is so much needed all the time, but people do get tired of us.” She smiled a trifle ruefully.

“Lady Rathbone. Is she the wife of Sir Oliver?” he asked with apparent interest, although it might merely have been the feigning required by good manners.

“Yes. Do you know them?”

“Only by repute.” The idea seemed to amuse him. “Our paths don’t cross, except perhaps at the theater, and I dare say he goes for reasons of business, and she, to be seen. I go because I enjoy it.”

“Isn’t that why you do most things?” she replied, and then wished she had not. It was too perceptive, too sharp.

He winced, but appeared unoffended. “You are about the only truly virtuous woman that I actually like,” he said, as if surprised at it himself. “You haven’t ever tried to redeem me, thank God.”

“Good heavens!” She opened her eyes wide. “How remiss of me! Should I have, at least for appearances’ sake?”

“If you told me you cared about appearances, I should not believe you,” he answered, trying to be serious, and failing. “Although for some, there is nothing else.” He was suddenly tense, muscles pulling in his neck. “Wasn’t it Sir Oliver who defended Jericho Phillips and got him off?”

Hester felt a moment of chill, simply to be reminded of it. “Yes,” she said with as little expression as she could.

“Don’t look like that,” he said gently. “The miserable devil got his just deserts in the end. He drowned—slowly—feeling the water creep up his body inch by inch as the tide came in. And he was terrified of drowning, phobic about it. Much worse for him than being hanged, which is supposed to be all over in a matter of seconds, so they say.”

She stared at him, her mind racing.

He blushed, his fair skin coloring easily. “I’m sorry. I’m sure that’s more detail than you wanted to know. I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes I speak too frankly to you. I apologize.”

It was not the detail that had sent the icy chill creeping through her, for she knew all too well how Jericho Phillips had died. She had seen his dead face. It was the fact that Rupert Cardew knew of Phillips’s terror of water. That meant that he had known Phillips himself. Why should that surprise her? Rupert had made no secret of the fact that he knew prostitutes and was prepared to pay for his pleasure. Perhaps that was more honest than seducing women and then leaving them, possibly with child. But Jericho Phillips had been a different matter—a blackmailer, a pornographer of children, of little boys as young as six or seven years.

Perhaps Rupert had known Phillips only casually, without realizing that he did? Was that one of the many scrapes from which Rupert’s
father had bailed him out? It should not surprise her. How easy it is when you like someone to be blind to the possibilities of ugliness in them, of weaknesses too deep to be passed over with tolerance.

What horror might be ahead for Margaret, if Sullivan had been telling the truth about Arthur Ballinger, and one day Margaret was forced to realize it? Margaret’s loyalties would be torn apart, the whole fabric of love and belief threatened. Margaret was loyal to her father; of course she was, as Rupert was to his. And perhaps he had even more cause. His father had protected him, right or wrong. The cost to Lord Cardew must have been far more than money, and yet he had never failed.

Love does forgive, but can it forgive everything? Should it? Which loyalties came first—family, or belief in right and wrong?

What about her own father? That pain twisted deep into places she dared not look. Her father had died alone in England, betrayed and ashamed, while she had been out in the Crimea caring for strangers, ignorant to his plight. What loyalty was that?

“Hester?” Rupert’s voice broke through her thoughts.

She looked up. She was glad that Rupert was just a friend, someone she was deeply grateful to but not tied to by blood, or love.

“You’re right,” she agreed. “It sounds as if fate were harsher to Phillips than the law would have been.”

M
ONK WENT TO
O
LIVER
Rathbone’s office in the city late in the morning, and was informed courteously by his clerk that Sir Oliver had gone to luncheon. Monk duly returned at half past two, and was still obliged to wait. It might have been simpler to catch Rathbone with time to spare at his home in the evening, but Monk needed to speak with him when Margaret was not present.

At quarter to three Rathbone came back, entering with a smile on his face and the easy elegant manner he usually had when the taste of victory was still fresh on his tongue.

“Hello, Monk,” he said with surprise. “Got another case for me already?” He came in and closed the door quietly. His pale gray suit
was perfectly cut and fitted to his slender figure. The sunlight shone in through the long windows, catching the smoothness of his fair hair and the touches of gray at the temples.

“I hope I don’t,” Monk answered. “But I can’t let this go by default.”

“What are you talking about?” Rathbone sat down and crossed his legs. He appeared reasonably comfortable, even if in fact he was not. “You look as if you have just opened someone’s bedroom door by mistake.”

“I may have,” Monk said wryly. The reference was meant only as an illustration, but it was too close to the truth.

Rathbone regarded him levelly, his face serious now. “It’s not like you to be oblique. How bad is it?”

Monk hated what he had to say. Even now he was wondering if there were some last, desperate way to avoid it. “That night on Phillips’s ship, after we found Scuff, and the rest of the boys, you told me that Margaret’s father was behind it—”

“I told you that Sullivan said so. He told me while you were occupied with Phillips.” Rathbone cut across him quickly. “Sullivan had no proof, and he’s dead by his own hand now. Whatever he knew, or believed, is gone with him.”

“The proof may be dead”—Monk did not move his eyes from Rathbone’s—“but the question isn’t. Someone is behind it. Phillips hadn’t the money or the connections in society to run the boat and find the clients who were vulnerable, let alone blackmail them afterward.”

“Could it have been Sullivan himself?” Rathbone suggested, and then looked away. Monk did not bother to answer—they both knew Sullivan had not had the nerve nor the intelligence it would have required. He’d been a man ruined by his appetite, and eventually killed by it. In the end, he’d been one more victim.

Rathbone looked up again. “All right, not Sullivan. But he could have implicated anyone, as long as it wasn’t himself. There’s nothing to act on, Monk. The man was desperate and pathetic. Now he’s very horribly dead, and he took Phillips with him, which no man more richly deserved. There’s nothing more I can do, or would. The boat
has been broken up, the boys are free. Let the other victims nurse their wounds in peace.” His face tightened in revulsion too deep to hide. “Pornography is cruel and obscene, but there’s no way to prevent men looking at whatever they wish to, in their own homes. If you want a crusade, there are more fruitful causes.”

“I want to stop Scuff’s unhappiness,” Monk replied. “And to do that I have to stop it from happening to other boys, the friends he’s left behind.”

“I’ll help you—but within the law.”

Monk rose to his feet. “I want whoever’s behind it.”

“Give me evidence, and I’ll prosecute,” Rathbone promised. “But I’m not indulging in a witch hunt. Don’t you … or you’ll regret it. Witch hunts get out of hand, and innocent people suffer. Leave it, Monk.”

Monk said nothing. He shook Rathbone’s hand and left.

I
T WAS EARLY MORNING
, and Corney Reach was deserted. The heavy mist lent the river an eerie quality, as if the smooth, sullen face of it could have stretched to the horizon. It touched the skin and filled the nose with its clinging odor.

Here on this southern bank, the trees overhung the water, sometimes dipping so low they all but touched its surface. Within fifty yards they were shrouded, indistinct; a hundred yards, and they were no more than vague shapes, suggestions of outlines against the haze. The silence consumed everything except for the occasional whisper of the incoming tide over the stones, or through the tangled weeds close under the bank.

The corpse was motionless, facedown. Its coat and hair floated, wide, making it look bigger than it was. But even partly submerged, the blow to the back of the skull was visible. The current bumped the body gently against Monk’s legs. He moved his weight slightly to avoid sinking in the mud.

“Want me to turn ’im over, sir?” Constable Coburn asked helpfully.

Monk shivered. The cold was inside him, not in the damp early autumn air. He hated looking at dead faces, even though this man might have been the victim of an accident. If it was an accident, he would resent having been called all the way up here, beyond the western outskirts of the city. It would have been a waste of his time, and that of Orme, his sergeant, who was standing five or six yards away, also up to his knees in the river.

“Yes, please,” Monk answered.

“Right, sir.” Constable Coburn obediently leaned forward, ignoring the water soaking his uniform sleeves, and hauled the corpse over until it was floating on its back.

“Thank you,” Monk acknowledged.

Orme moved closer, stirring up mud. He looked at Monk, then down at the body.

Monk studied the dead man’s face. He seemed to be in his early thirties. He could not have been in the river long, because his features were barely distorted. There was just a slight bloating in the softer flesh, no damage from fish or other scavengers. His nose was sharp, a little bony, his mouth thin-lipped and wide, and his eyebrows pale. There seemed little color in his hair, but it would be easier to tell when it was dry.

Monk put out his hand and lifted one eyelid. The iris was blue, and the white was speckled with blood. He let it close again. “Any idea who he is?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.” Coburn’s face was shadowed with distaste. “ ’E’s Mickey Parfitt, sir, small-time piece o’ dirt around ’ere. Inter fencin’, pimpin’, generally makin’ a profit out of other folks’ misery.”

“You’re certain?”