Anne Perry - A Dangerous Mourning

She sighed and stared into the dregs of her cup.

"All the vested interests are ranged against us," he said grimly. "Everyone wants it over quickly, society's vengeance taken as thoroughly as possible, and then the whole matter forgotten so we can pick up our lives and try to continue them as much like before as we can.''

"Is there anything at all we can do?" she asked.

“I can't think of anything.'' He stood up and held her chair. "I shall go and see him."

She met his eyes with a quick pain, and admiration. There was no need either for her to ask or for him to answer. It was a duty, a last rite which failure did not excuse.

As soon as Monk stepped inside Newgate Prison and the doors clanged shut behind him he felt a sickening familiarity. It was the smell, the mixture of damp, mold, rank sewage and an all-pervading misery that hung in the stillness of the air. Too many men who entered here left only to go to the executioner's rope, and the terror and despair of their last days had soaked into the walls till he could feel it skin-crawling like ice as he followed the warder along the stone corridors to the appointed place where he could see Percival for the last time.

He had misrepresented himself only slightly. Apparently he had been here before, and as soon as the warder saw his face

he leaped to a false conclusion about his errand, and Monk did not explain.

Percival was standing in a small stone cell with one high window to an overcast sky. He turned as the door opened and Monk was let in, the gaoler with his keys looming huge behind.

For the first moment Percival looked surprised, then his face hardened into anger.

"Come to gloat?" he said bitterly.

"Nothing to gloat about," Monk replied almost casually. "I've lost my career, and you will lose your life. I just haven't worked out who's won."

"Lost your career?" For a moment doubt flickered across Percival's face, then suspicion. "Thought you'd have been made. Gone on to something better! You solved the case to everyone's satisfaction-except mine. No ugly skeletons dragged out, no mention of Myles Kellard raping Martha, poor little bitch, no saying Aunt Fenella is a whore-just a jumped-up footman filled with lust for a drunken widow. Hang him and let's get on with our lives. What more could they ask of a dutiful policeman?"

Monk did not blame him for his rage or his hate. They were justified-only, at least in part, misdirected. It would have been fairer to blame him for incompetence.

"I had the evidence," he said slowly. "But I didn't arrest you. I refused to do it, and they threw me out."

"What?" Percival was confused, disbelieving.

Monk repeated it.

"For God's sake why?" There was no softness in Percival, no relenting. Again Monk did not blame him. He was beyond the last hope now, perhaps there was no room in him for gentleness of any sort. If he once let go of the rage he might crumble and terror would win; the darkness of the night would be unbearable without the burning of hate.

"Because I don't think you killed her," Monk replied.

Percival laughed harshly, his eyes black and accusing. But he said nothing, just stared in helpless and terrible knowledge.

"But even if I were still on the case," Monk went on very quietly, "I don't know what I should do, because I have no idea who did." It was an overwhelming admission of failure,

and he was stunned as he heard himself make it to Percival of all people. But honesty was the very least of all he owed him.

"Very impressive," Percival said sarcastically, but there was a brief flicker of something in his face, rapid as the sunlight let through the trees by a turning leaf, then gone again. "But since you are not there, and everyone else is busy covering their own petty sins, serving their grievances, or else obliged to Sir Basil, we'll never know-will we?"

"Hester Latterly isn't." Instantly Monk regretted he had said it. Percival might take it for hope, which was an illusion and unspeakably cruel now.

"Hester Latterly?" For an instant Percival looked confused, then he remembered her. "Oh-the terribly efficient nurse. Daunting woman, but you're probably right. I expect she is so virtuous it is painful. I doubt she knows how to smile, let alone laugh, and I shouldn't think any man ever looked at her," he said viciously. "She's taken her vengeance on us by spending her time ministering to us when we are at our most vulnerable-and most ridiculous."

Monk felt a deep uprush of rage for the cruel and unthinking prejudice, then he looked at Percival's haggard face and remembered where he was, and why, and the rage vanished like a match flame in a sea of ice. What if Percival did need to hurt someone, however remotely? His was going to be the ultimate pain.

"She came to the house because I sent her," Monk explained. "She is a friend of mine. I hoped that someone inside the household in a position where no one would pay much regard to them might observe things I could not."

Percival's amazement was as profound as anything could be over the surface of the enormous center of him, which knew nothing but the slow, relentless clock ticking away his days to the last walk, the hood, the hangman's rope around his neck, and the sharp drop to tearing, breaking pain and oblivion.

"But she didn't learn anything, did she?" For the first time his voice cracked and he lost control of it.

Monk loathed himself for stupidly giving this knife thrust of hope, which was not hope at all.

"No," he said quickly. "Nothing that helps. All sorts of trivial and ugly little weaknesses and sins-and that Lady Moidore believes the murderer is still in the house, and almost certainly one of her family-but she has no idea who either."

Percival turned away, hiding his face.

"What did you come for?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps simply not to leave you alone, or to think no one believes you. I don't know if it helps, but you have the right to know. I hope it does."

Percival let out an explosion of curses, and swore over and over again until he was exhausted with repeating himself and the sheer, ugly futility of it. When he finished Monk had gone and the cell door was locked again, but through the tears and the bloodless skin, there was a very small light of gratitude, ease from one of the clenched and terrible knots inside him.

On the morning Percival was hanged Monk was working on the case of a stolen picture, more probably removed and sold by a member of the family in gambling debt. But at eight o'clock he stopped on the pavement in Cheapside and stood still in the cold wind amid the crowd of costers, street peddlers of bootlaces and matches and other fripperies, clerks on errands, a sweep, black-faced and carrying a ladder, and two women arguing over a length of cloth. The babble and clatter rolled on around him, oblivious of what was happening in Newgate Yard, but he stood motionless with a sense of finality and a wounding loss-not for Percival individually, although he felt the man's terror and rage and the snuffing out of his life. He had not liked him, but he had been acutely aware of his vitality, his intensity of feeling and thought, his identity. But his greatest loss was for justice which had failed. At the moment when the trapdoor opened and the noose jerked tight, another crime was being committed. He had been powerless to prevent it, for all the labor and thought he had put into it, but his was not the only loss, or even necessarily the main one. All London was diminished, perhaps all England, because the law which should protect had instead injured.

Hester was standing in the dining room. She had deliberately come to collect an apricot conserve from the table for Beatrice's tray at precisely this time. If she jeopardized her position, even if she lost it and were dismissed, she wanted to see the faces of the Moidores at the moment of hanging, and to be sure each one of them knew precisely what moment this was.