Anne Perry - Blood on the Water

“They tried Sir Oliver,” Scuff said immediately. “He weren’t guilty! They still punished him. He can’t do the law anymore. It would’ve bin too late for ever if they’d ’ave hanged him, wouldn’t it!”

“He was guilty, Scuff,” Monk said quietly.

“That man in court was wrong!” Scuff said angrily, challenging Monk, believing he was mistaken now, yet needing him to be right.

Monk was struck by how much of Scuff’s precious, fragile new world depended upon his belief in Monk and Hester: that they were right, and that they loved him. Those two things would never change, even if food, shelter, and acceptance by others were all destroyed.

“I know he was wrong,” Monk said as calmly as he could. Scuff should not hear anger or uncertainty in his voice. “And he paid for that. The one who killed those people was hanged for it. But Sir Oliver was wrong too.”

“He had to do that!” Scuff protested.

“He thought so,” Monk agreed. “And perhaps that was the truth. But what he did was against the law, and he knew he would have to pay for it.”

“But he isn’t doing law now.” Scuff clung to his point. “That in’t right. ’E was really, really good at it.” There was desperation in his voice. “They shouldn’t have put him out!”

“He’s only out for a while,” Monk assured him. “He’s taking a holiday in Europe, going with his father, whom he loves very much.” He made himself smile. “He’ll come back. Then you can ask him if he thinks it was fair or not. I believe he’ll say it was.”

Scuff stared at him levelly for several seconds. Then he turned to Hester, his eyes demanding, waiting.

“Sometimes there isn’t any good choice,” she said gently, moving her shoulders a little in a gesture of acceptance. “You have to pick the one you think is least bad, and hope you’re right. I think he was. But not everything comes with an easy answer, or without a price.”

Scuff turned that over in his mind for a few more moments, and then he seemed satisfied. He looked at Monk again. “So what are they going to do about the boat and all those people what drowned?”

“Those people who drowned,” Hester corrected him automatically. Scuff’s grammar still tended to slip when he was upset.

“They’re going to catch who did it, possibly this Egyptian man, and try him. And then if he’s guilty they’ll hang him,” Monk replied.

“An’ if he isn’t?” Scuff persisted.

“Then they’ll let him go, and start again,” Monk said firmly.

Scuff looked a little doubtful. “They’ll look stupid then, as they got it wrong. You think they’ll own up to it? People’ll be red-hot angry. They’re bad enough now, ’cos it’s taking weeks to catch him. If I was them, I’d be scared, and I wouldn’t want to own up I got it wrong.”

Monk drew in a quick breath, and then let it out again.

“Of course you would be scared,” Hester said before he could find the words. “But I hope you’d be a lot more scared of how you would feel if you deliberately hanged the wrong person, and let the real one go free.”

“ ’Course I would!” Scuff said angrily, his skin flushed.

Hester took a step closer and put her hand on his arm. It was not a caress, but it might as well have been, given the tenderness in it.

His face brightened immediately.

Hester kept on walking over to the stove without glancing back to see Monk’s smile. She knew it would be there.

It was still over another week and well into June before the police arrested Habib Beshara, an Egyptian currently living in London. They charged him with the murder of one hundred and seventy-nine people by laying and detonating the explosive that blew up and sank the pleasure boat the Princess Mary .

There was jubilation throughout the city. Newspapers praised the police and looked forward to a speedy trial. Justice would be served. Order and faith in the rule of law returned. Many people even held parties.

Monk felt a wave of relief, and yet it was not absolute. No formality of a trial, no certainty or pain or fear of an execution could drive out of his mind the memories of the night of the drownings, or the corpses floating inside the hollow of the sunken ship.

As the days passed leading up to the opening of the trial of Habib Beshara, Monk busied himself even more diligently on the river. He continued stretching his imagination and will to make his force excel, in order to keep up the reputation and morale of his men. The Thames River Police was the oldest force in the country, possibly in the world. It was even older than the “Peelers,” and it deserved every word of praise it had gained over the years. The government’s choice to take the Princess Mary case from them might have been politically expedient, but it was still an insult that was deeply felt.

There was plenty to do. There had been a major robbery from one of the waterside warehouses along the Blackwall Reach, and several minor thefts from docksides, lighters, and other vulnerable places. There was always smuggling, often of brandy, especially farther down by Bugsby’s Marshes, beyond Greenwich, where small boats came and went under cover of darkness.

There were drunken fights, most of which inflicted little injury and were easily settled, but there were bad ones as well. A knife could make it lethal. One moment a fight could be wild, but with only a punch here and there landing; the next someone was bleeding to death and it was murder.

Added to that, every few days a piece of wreckage from the Princess Mary washed up, bits of wood carved and elegant, made for pleasure, not utility.

Monk stood in the sun beside the water now, hearing it slurp on the steps below him as the tide rose slowly, each ripple a little higher. He held a carved leg and part of a strut in his hand. It had been turned on a router, making it smooth, showing off the grain. It had once been part of something useful.

There was no reason to stand here holding it. It was not evidence of anything. Everyone already knew what had happened. He just felt that if he threw it back into the water he was abandoning it, clogging up the river with more detritus. It was too small to salvage, good only to burn in someone’s fire. And yet it had been beautifully made. Somebody had taken time and care with it.

He put it down on the dockside. Someone would find and make use it. He did not want to burn it on his own fire. Right at this moment, as the trial was starting, he was glad the government had given the case to someone else. It would be Lydiate, and not he, who would have to give evidence and relive the whole thing, witness by witness. Lydiate had not seen the disaster and Monk had, but the salvage crew would be the ones testifying. No one had sent for Monk, probably because they would then have to explain why the case had been taken from him-a fact that would undoubtedly be exploited by Beshara’s defense.

He turned and walked with his back to the sun, feeling its midsummer heat on his shoulders.

If Rathbone were here, and still able to practice, would he have taken the case for the defense? Or would he have wanted to prosecute? It was all irrelevant; they were none of them involved. Maybe that was not entirely bad. Rathbone had been promising his father for years that they would spend some time traveling together. One case or another had always intruded. He might have gone on delaying until it was too late. Then his grief would be with him always.

And, in an oblique way, Monk was feeling a new sense of loyalty to his own men. They had served in the River Police long before he came to it. They were as good as any police in the world, better than most, and they deserved recognition of that, not this cavalier bypassing as if they were less than the regular police. Few of them had said anything, but he saw it in their eyes and heard it in the silences. There was an edge of bitterness to the usual jokes. Everyone worked even harder, most of all Monk himself, as if to prove something.