Anne Perry - A Breach of Promise

"I agree," she said immediately.

She must have been thinking about it. She would never be so amenable otherwise. Why was he faintly disappointed?

He stood back for her to go first up the path.

She saw the brass plate saying "Hector Loomis, M.D." beside the bell pull. She glanced around at Monk, then reached out and yanked the brass knob, a little too hard. They heard it ringing with a clatter inside.

It was answered by an elderly housekeeper with a crisp white apron and cap.

"Good morning," Monk said straightaway.

"Good… morning, sir, ma'am," she replied, hesitating momentarily because it was now well into the afternoon. "May I help you?"

"If you please," Monk responded. "We have come a very long way to see Dr. Loomis on the matter of a tragedy which happened some time ago and which we have just learned may involve a very serious crime… the crime of murder. It is essential we are certain of our facts beyond any reasonable doubt. Many people may be irreparably hurt if we are not."

"We are sorry to trouble you without warning or proper appointment," Hester added. "If there had been another way, we should have taken it."

"Oh! Bless my soul! Well… you had better come in." The housekeeper stepped back and invited them to enter. "Dr. Loomis is busy with a patient this minute, but I'll tell him as you're here and it's important. I'm sure he'll see you."

"Thank you very much," Monk accepted, following Hester to where the housekeeper led them to wait and then left them. It was a most agreeable room, but very small, and looked onto the back garden of what was apparently a family home. Children's toys lay neatly stacked against the wall of a potting shed. A hoop and a tiny horse's head on a stick were plainly discernible.

Hester looked at Monk, the question in her eyes.

"Grandchildren?" he suggested with a sinking feeling of disappointment.

She bit her lip and said nothing. She was too restless to sit down, and he felt the same, but there was not room for them both to pace back and forth, and even though she wore petticoats without hoops, her skirts still took up what little space there was.

When Dr. Loomis appeared he was a mild-faced young man with fast receding hair cut very short and a friendly look of enquiry in his very ordinary face.

"Mrs. Selkirk says you have come a great distance to ask about a crime?" he said, closing the door behind him and looking from one to the other of them with a frown. "How can I help you? I don't think I know anything at all."

"It happened twenty-one years ago," Monk answered, rising to his feet.

"Oh…" Loomis looked disappointed. "That would be my father. I'm so sorry."

Monk felt a ridiculous disappointment. It was so strong it was physical, as if his throat had suddenly tightened and he could barely catch his breath.

"Perhaps you have his records?" Hester refused to give up. "It was about a Samuel Jackson, who died of bleeding. He had two small daughters, both of them disfigured."

"Samuel Jackson!" Loomis obviously recognized the name. "Yes, I remember him speaking of that."

Monk's hope surged up wildly. Why else would a man speak of a case many years afterwards, except that it worried him, was somehow incomplete?

"What did he say?" he demanded.

Loomis screwed up his face in concentration.

Monk waited. He looked at Hester. She was so tense she seemed scarcely to be breathing.

Loomis cleared his throat. "He was troubled by it…" he said tentatively. "He never really knew what caused him to bleed the way he did. He couldn't connect it with any illness he knew." He looked at Monk earnestly. "But of course we know so little, really. A lot of the time we are only making our best guess. We can't say that." He shrugged and gave a nervous laugh. His pale, blue-gray eyes were very direct. "I think, to be honest, his greatest concern was because he couldn't help, and Samuel was so desperate to stay alive because of his children. And as it turned out, Mrs. Jackson did lose them. She couldn't care for them, poor woman. She was left with almost nothing. She was obliged to make her own way, and she couldn't do that with two small children… especially not ones that weren't… normal." He looked as if he hated saying it. There was a tightness in him, and his hands moved uneasily.

"She did very well for herself," Hester assured him acidly. "Could Samuel Jackson have died of any sort of poison?"

Loomis regarded her curiously. "Not that I know of. What makes you ask that? Look… Mrs. Selkirk mentioned a crime. I think she actually said murder. Perhaps you had better explain to me what you are seeking, and why." He waved to them to sit down, and then sat on the chair opposite, upright, leaning forward, listening.

Monk outlined to him all that he knew about Samuel Jackson, but he began with a brief history of the case of Keelin Melville and her death from belladonna poisoning. It took them nearly three quarters of an hour, and neither Hester nor Loomis interrupted him until he had finished.

"What you are saying"-he looked at Monk grimly-"is that you think Dolly Jackson-Delphine Lambert, as she is known now-murdered Samuel in order to escape her situation because he insisted on keeping the children, and she couldn't bear to have them. She wanted perfection and wouldn't settle for anything less."

"Yes," Monk agreed. "That is what I'm saying. Is it true?"

"I don't know," Loomis admitted. "But I'm prepared to do everything in my power to find out." He stood up. "We can begin with my father's records. He never destroyed them. They are all in the cellar. Do you know exactly when he died?"

"Yes!" Hester said straightaway. "September twenty-seventh, 1839. It's on his gravestone."

"Excellent! Then it will be a simple matter." Loomis led the way out into the hall, calling his intentions to Mrs. Selkirk and instructing her that he was not to be interrupted for anything less than an emergency. "I'm glad you came today," he went on, going to the cellar door and opening it. "We'll need a light. There's no gas down here. I have very few patients today, and my wife has taken the children for a day or two to see her father. He is not very well and does not travel, but he is very fond of my daughters." He smiled as he said it, and his own affection was clear in his eyes. Perhaps that was some of his feeling for Samuel Jackson.

He found a lantern and lit it, then led the way down the narrow stone steps to the cellar where rows of boxes filled with papers lay neatly stacked.

It took them only ten minutes to find the right box for the month of September in the year 1839, most of the work moving the boxes above it.

"Here it is!" Loomis exclaimed, lifting out a handful of papers. "Samuel Jackson…" He held it closer to the light, and Hester and Monk both peered over his shoulder while he read the generous, sprawling hand.

"You are right-he didn't know," Hester said the moment she came to the end. She stared at Loomis. "He wasn't satisfied. He just couldn't prove there was anything wrong. Can we get an order for an exhumation?"

Loomis chewed his lip. "Difficult…"

"But possible?" she insisted.

"I don't know."

"Where do we begin?" Monk asked urgently. "We can't just let this go!"

"With the police," Loomis answered, meeting his eyes. "We'll go up to the station and speak to Sergeant Byrne. He'll remember Sam Jackson-and Dolly. I won't let this go, I promise you. But it'll be very hard…"

Hester straightened up. "We'll find Sergeant Byrne, then we'll find the judge."

Monk looked dubious. "The question is, if it was poison, will it still be there to find, even if we can dig him up?"

"Depends what it is," Loomis answered, putting away the rest of the papers and closing the box. He handed all the papers on Samuel Jackson to Hester. "Depends on the quality of his coffin, if it's all dry inside, and what's in the surrounding earth. I don't know what chance we have of proving anything this long after. Arsenic remains, I know that. But this doesn't sound like arsenic. I think my father would have seen that. This was bleeding… more like an internal ulcer burst, or an artery, or something of that sort. I don't know why he wasn't satisfied, but from his accounts here, he wasn't."