Anne Perry - A Sunless Sea

What else would destroy pictures? Acid? But why bother? Fire was easy enough. There was a fire in the grate now. All he needed to do was pile more coal on it, get it really hot, and he had the perfect method. By morning there would be nothing left.

He bent down and took the key, put it in the lock, and turned it. It moved easily, as if it were well cared for and often used.

The contents were not only paper as he had expected, but photographic plates, with paper prints beside, presumably duplicates used to prove their existence. He should have foreseen that. These were the originals from which Ballinger had printed the copies he had used to blackmail people. He had nearly said “the victims” in his own mind, but these men were not the victims. The true victims were the children, the mudlarks, orphans, street urchins taken and kept prisoner on the boats.

He looked at the pictures one by one. They were horrific, but obscenely fascinating. He barely looked at the children-he could not bear it-but the faces of the men held him totally, however much against his will. They were men whose features he knew, men of power in government, in law, in the Church, in life. That the sickness ran through them with such power that they would stoop to this shook him till his stomach clenched and his hand holding the plates trembled.

If they had paid prostitutes, or even done such things with adult men, or other men’s wives, it would have been a private matter that he could perhaps shut out of his mind. But this was entirely different. This was the rape and torture of children, and-even to the most tolerant-it was a bestial crime. To the society in which they moved, which respected them and over which they had power, it was a sin beyond forgiveness.

The plates were glass. They would not burn. The fire in the hearth, however hot, would not be enough.

Acid? A hammer and blows violent enough to smash them to rubble? But should he? If he destroyed this evidence, then he was complicit in the crimes they had committed.

Should he take them to the police?

But some of those men were police. Some were judges, some advocates in the courts. He would overturn half of society. And if word of his possession got out, perhaps he would not even survive. Men had killed for infinitely less.

He was too tired to make any irrevocable decisions tonight.

He closed the box and locked it again. He must find a safe place to keep it until he could decide. It must be somewhere that no one else could find it, or ever think to look.

Where had Ballinger kept it? A bank vault or something of that nature?

He would deal with it tomorrow. Tonight he was too weighed down with grief.

It was a bright, cold morning as Monk turned onto Copenhagen Place to continue knocking on the doors of Zenia Gadney’s neighbors to see what he could learn about her. Orme was working the area closer to the river, searching for anyone who had seen her there, not only on the night of her death, but possibly at any other time. Why had she been on Limehouse Pier on a winter evening? It must have been cold, open to the wind off the water. Was she there as a prostitute, earning a quick shilling or two with someone who turned out to be a madman? The thought of it knotted Monk’s stomach with revulsion, as well as anger for the desperation of both the man and the woman.

A group of men passed him, trudging along the road toward the docks. A vegetable cart passed the other way, piled with carrots and greens of one sort and another, and a few ripe apples.

Monk knocked on the door of number twelve, next to Zenia Gadney’s house, and no one answered. He tried the next over and was sent briskly on his way by a woman in a long apron, already soiled and wet at the edges from the scrubbing of a floor. Now she was about to get busy with the front step, and told him smartly to take his great feet off it and let her get on with her job. No, she had never heard of Zenia Gadney and did not want to.

He retraced his steps and tried number sixteen, on the other side of where Zenia had lived, and found an old woman sitting in a room crowded with ornaments and mementos. She had been looking out the window at the street, and he had noticed her curious glance. Her name was Betsy Scalford; she seemed lonely, happy to have a much younger man wanting to talk to her, and-even better-to listen when she reminisced about the past.

She offered him a cup of tea, which he accepted because it gave him the excuse to stay at least half an hour. The longer they spent together, the more at ease she would feel.

“Thank you,” he said appreciatively as she set the tray down and poured the steaming tea for him.

“Welcome, I’m sure,” she answered, nodding vigorously. She was a gaunt woman, her bony shoulders making her look taller than she was. “In’t seen you before.” She looked him up and down, her eyes examining his face, the clean white collar of his shirt, the cut of his suit.

He had always spent too much on his clothes. When he had first woken from the accident a decade ago, robbed of all his memory, he had had to learn everything about himself from the start, including his character in the eyes of others. He had been appalled at the evidence of his vanity presented by his tailor’s bills. At that time, necessity had made him trim them drastically. Now that he was head of the Thames River Police in Wapping, he indulged himself again. He smiled as he saw in the old woman’s eyes approval of his well-polished boots.

“I haven’t been here before,” he said in answer to her question. “I’m River Police, not regular.”

“River don’t flood this far,” she said with amusement in her eyes.

“Sometimes its events do,” he countered. “And the currents of disaster it carries. You look to me like a very observant woman. I need information.”

“An’ you think I got nothing to do but sit here an’ look out me window?” she retorted. She sat down opposite him. “You’re right. Used not to be that way, mind. Time was I did all kinds o’ business. Not now. Ask away, young man. But I’ll be careful wot I tell you, all the same. Don’t want a name fer tittle-tattle.”

“Do you know the woman who lives next door at number fourteen?”

“I know where number fourteen is,” she said a trifle sharply. “I ’aven’t lost me wits yet. That’d be Mrs. Gadney. Nice enough woman. Widow, I think. What about ’er?”

Monk considered telling her immediately and decided against it. It might shock her too much to get any further help from her.

“Do you know her?” he began. “Can you tell me what she is like?”

“Why don’t you go an’ ask ’er yerself?” she asked. There was no criticism in her voice, just incomprehension and a sharpening curiosity.

He was prepared for that. “We can’t find her. She seems to be missing.”

“Missing?” Her white eyebrows rose. “She in’t been anywhere else since she come ’ere, fifteen year ago. Where would she go? She in’t got no one.”

Monk felt the tension mounting. “How does she live, Mrs. Scalford? What does she do? Does she work at a shop, or a factory?”

“No. I know that ’cos she’s at ’ome most days. I dunno wot she does, but she don’t beg, an’ she don’t ask no favors.” She said that with a slight lift of her chin, as if she identified with the pride of it. “An’ far as I know, she don’t owe no one,” she added, nodding her head.

Monk looked at the old lady more carefully, meeting the washed-out blue eyes without flinching. Could this old woman possibly be ignorant of the fact if Zenia Gadney had been a prostitute? It was far more likely she was protecting the reputation of a neighbor, possibly a younger woman who reminded her in some way of herself, thirty years ago.