Anne Perry: Blood on the Water

“Hester, he’s in his mid-fifties!”

“The campaign medals, William. They’re from three years ago.”

“They can’t be! Are you sure?” He began to have an awful glimpse of what she meant.

“Yes. I still have military friends. They’re Egyptian, like the group in the background of the painting. And his eyes are not really the same color.”

“Artist’s mistake …” But he knew he was wrong. “You are sure about the campaign medals?”

“Yes. It has to be his son …” She took a deep, shaky breath. “What is his family name?”

“Family name?” He started to walk along the pavement, to be away from Ossett’s doorstep. “I don’t know …”

“He has a monogram on his cigar box on the table. RW. Are you certain he doesn’t look like a man who has looked into hell because Robert Wilbraham, who led the massacre at Shaluf et Terrabeh, and then paid Sabri to sink the Princess Mary and get rid of the only witness, is his son?”

Monk closed his eyes, as if refusing to look at the busy London street could somehow wipe away the knowledge, finally, of the truth.

It all made sense. The pieces fitted together.

Now the touch of her hand on his arm was gentle.

“We believe of people what we need to,” she said. “As long as we possibly can.”

“You believed I didn’t kill Joscelyn Grey,” he said, remembering back to when they had first met, soon after she had returned from the Crimea and the horror of that appalling war. “You didn’t even know me!”

“And I would believe you now,” she said firmly. “Perhaps I know you better than he knows his son. Sometimes sin is the hardest to accept when it is in someone we have known always, for whose birth and life we are responsible. Everyone is somebody’s child.”

“I know.” He put his hand over hers. “I know.”

She did not answer him. She was staring over his shoulder at something beyond, something on the pavement behind him.

“What is it?”

“No!” she said urgently. “Don’t turn yet. It’s Lord Ossett. He’s left his office and he’s going toward the main road. Do you suppose he knows where Wilbraham is?”

Monk did not bother to answer. There was no time to call anyone else. They were miles from Wapping and any of his own men. He could hardly stop a constable, even if he could see one, and order them to follow a government minister of Ossett’s standing. He would be more likely to find himself arrested.

He turned and started to walk along the footpath after Ossett, Hester at his side. He felt miserable, and yet compelled. Ossett was almost certainly going to try to save his son. Monk was going to arrest a man responsible for four hundred innocent deaths, men, women, and children who died by mischance, because they served his purpose.

A long hansom ride, two stops and an hour later, Monk finally knew where Ossett was going.

“Wilbraham must be at the wharf where the damaged Seahorse is kept,” he said. He and Hester were standing on the dockside, twenty yards behind Ossett and half sheltered by a stack of timber. The low sun was dazzling. A laborer with a loaded barrow traveled past them, sending up a cloud of dust.

“I’m going after him,” Monk said quietly. “I have to.”

“I know,” she agreed.

He nodded. “Go back to the main street. We passed a omnibus stop. There are plenty of people around. I have to go down to the mud flats and if Wilbraham is there I must stop him. Once he’s on the water he could escape on any seagoing freighter. He could be in France by tonight.”

She did not move. “You can’t go alone. There are two of them; Ossett will fight you.”

“I know that,” he admitted. “He can’t bear what his son is, but neither can he give him up. I don’t know what I would do, if it were someone I loved.” He stopped because the thought was too dark to give shape to. “Go back to the street, please, so I know you are safe.”

She hesitated, the decision to leave him, to walk away, too big to take.

“Hester … please …”

White-faced, tears on her cheeks, she turned to obey.

Monk watched her for barely a moment before he was aware of someone behind him. He swung around and thought for an instant that somehow Ossett had doubled back, and then he realized it was a younger man. He had the same features, the same fair hair falling forward a little, but there was an ugliness in his face, about his lips, that was different.

For one second, two, three, they stared at each other. Monk knew that there was no purpose whatever in trying to plead with this man. He had led a massacre, and then paid to have someone drown two hundred innocent people in order to be certain of killing the one witness against him.

Wilbraham lunged forward, knocking Monk aside, but he did not stop and strike at him with the knife in his hand. Instead he ran onward toward Hester, knife blade gleaming for an instant in the sun.

A gunshot rang out.

Wilbraham froze.

Monk turned to see Ossett standing with a pistol raised in his hands, pointing toward Monk’s chest. He had his back to the sun and the burnished river mud of slack tide. Wilbraham was balanced on the edge of the shingle, yards from Hester.

There was no sound but the faint ripple of the water.

Wilbraham took a step toward Hester, the knife blade raised again.

“Take him,” he said to his father. “I’ll take her.”

Very steadily, Ossett raised the barrel of the pistol as if it were of immense weight, and moved his aim from Monk to Wilbraham.

Wilbraham stood smiling. He barely had time to register surprise when the bullet hit him between the eyes. He crumpled into the slick, shining mud, which almost immediately, as if it had been waiting for him, began to suck him down.

Monk lurched forward and struck the gun from Ossett’s hands. Then he hesitated, filled with a scorching pity, not knowing what to do. How could he attack a man in such agony?

Hester was running toward him, tears of relief streaming down her face.

Ossett shook his head. “You don’t need to shackle me. I have a debt to pay. I shall not evade it. I have lied to myself far too long. It is the end.” He began to walk blindly up the shingle toward the edge of the road.

Monk stood on the shore in the waning light and held Hester so close, at any other time he might have feared hurting her. Now, at this moment, nothing could be close enough.