Anne Perry - Funeral in Blue

He raised his eyes to look at her fully, intensely. “Bring back something that will make them understand how a man could lose his senses over her so that he never forgot her, even thirteen years later, when she was married to his friend, and how he could still feel for her so overwhelmingly that he lost all judgment and morality, so that her rejection of him made him feel as if his whole life were slipping out of his grasp. She was unique, irreplaceable by anyone else.” He stopped abruptly, recalling himself to the present only with the severest effort of will. His hands were trembling. He took a deep breath and steadied his voice. “I wish I could go myself, see the places, speak to the people, but I must stay here and prepare the case. I have been advised that it will be very soon. The Crown believe that they have all the evidence they require to proceed.”

He lifted one shoulder very slightly, barely a shrug. “I. . I hardly know where to begin. Kristian is a fine man, but opinionated. He has made many enemies among those in power in the hospital authorities, and very few friends. Those he has served are the poor and the sick, and in many cases, I’m afraid, those already dead. No doubt they would swear he had the patience of a saint and limitless compassion, but they are beyond our reach.”

He stared at her steadily. “Impress upon Monk the utmost importance of his errand, Lady Callandra. And please permit me to assist in the cost of it.” He returned to the desk and opened one of the drawers. He produced several gold coins and a treasury note. He held them all out. “I shall transfer to your bank a hundred pounds, but in the meantime, take this for his immediate needs, with my deepest gratitude.”

She did not require it-her own funds were ample, and she would have given everything she possessed to defend Kristian-but she sensed his need to give as well, and she accepted it.

He returned to the desk and sat down, pulling pen and paper towards him to begin to write in a large, generous scrawl.

She waited, with the first lift of hope she had felt in days. Perhaps in Vienna, Monk would find the truth and prove Kristian’s innocence. Afterwards, when Kristian was free, she would bear the confusion of discovering Elissa Beck was a heroine, brave and beautiful, funny and kind.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the letter when it was finished. “Thank you very much.”

Monk went to see Kristian in prison to learn from him any information at all which might help, no matter how painful or how irrelevant it might seem.

He was not surprised to see him looking haggard, almost shrunken, as if the shock of Elissa’s murder and his own arrest had drained the heart out of him, and even something of the physical substance. Monk had seen it before in other men.

“I’m going to Vienna,” he said quickly, knowing they had only minutes. “I need all the help you can give me.”

Kristian shook his head. “I can’t believe Max would have killed her,” he said quietly. “Quarreled, perhaps, lost his temper with her for what she was doing, that she was. . wasting herself.” The pain in his voice was like a razor edge. “And even what she was costing me, and the work I believe in. But he wouldn’t have hurt her!”

It was brutal to discuss it, but neither of them could afford to be gentle at the expense of reality.

“He came over here to see Elissa. . not you,” Monk said. “Several times.” He saw Kristian wince, and noted the confusion in his face.

Kristian shook his head. “He wouldn’t have hurt her,” he repeated, his voice hoarse.

“Her neck was broken in one movement,” Monk reminded him. “It was probably like this.” He put his arm in front of him, as if he were holding one hand over someone’s mouth, and crushing that person’s body to his chest with the other. He made a swift movement. “As if they had struggled and he had tried to hold her, wrenching around, perhaps one foot on hers.”

Kristian shuddered, and his mouth pulled strangely twisted.

“He probably didn’t mean to kill her,” Monk went on. “Perhaps only to stop her from crying out.”

Kristian closed his eyes. “And Sarah Mackeson?” he said in a whisper. “Whoever killed her meant to!” He shuddered convulsively. Imagination, or a memory too hideous to bear? Or the realization that Max Niemann could be guilty after all?

“Tell me about him,” Monk demanded tensely. “Kristian, for God’s sake, give me all you can! I need to find the truth. If it isn’t Niemann, then I need to know that. But someone killed them. . both!”

Kristian made an effort to regain his composure and appeared to concentrate, but still he said nothing, as if the past enclosed him in its reality and the present ceased to be.

“Somebody’s going to the rope for it!” Monk said brutally. “If you didn’t kill them, don’t let it be you! Are you protecting someone?” He had no idea who. Why should Kristian die to save Max Niemann? Or to hide something that had happened in Vienna thirteen years ago? He couldn’t possibly think Callandra had any part in it. Did he even know how much she loved him? Monk doubted it.

“I’m not defending anyone!” Kristian said with startling force, almost anger. “I just don’t know what to tell you. I haven’t any idea who killed them, or why. Do you think I want to hang-or that I don’t realize that I almost certainly will?” He managed to say the words with superb control, but looking at his eyes, Monk saw the fear in them, black and bottomless, without faith to build a bridge over the void, nothing but courage. And when at the very last he was utterly alone, with his pain, and oblivion in front of him, all love and friendship and pity left behind, there would be nothing to hold on to.

“Tell me where to look,” Monk said, horrified by the vision himself, aware that the similarity between them was far more profound than any difference. “Where did you live? Who were your friends? Who do I look for to ask?”

Reluctantly, each one an effort, Kristian gave him half a dozen names and addresses in three different streets. There was no lift of hope in his voice, no belief. “She was beautiful,” he said softly. “They’ll all say that. I don’t mean her face.” He dismissed it as trivial, but Monk could not. He saw in his mind the haunting loveliness of the woman on Allardyce’s canvas. That face was full of passion, dreaming just beyond the grasp, inviting the onlooker to dare anything, imagine the impossible and love it, need it enough to follow her to the ends of the earth.

“I mean the heart of her,” Kristian went on. “The will to live, the courage to meet anything. She lit the fire that warmed us all.”

Was it memory speaking, or wish, or the kind of emotion that gilds the recollection of people who are loved and lost? Or was it guilt trying to make up for the gulf that had grown between them since then? Would Monk find in Vienna the truth about Kristian as well?

He wrote down what Kristian gave him, then tried to think of something to say in parting which would convey what he wanted to. It was impossible. Frustration. The hunger to believe that Kristian was innocent, not only for his sake but for Callandra’s, because she was in love with him, and Monk knew what it was to be in love. He had not wished to be; it laid one open to pain far out of any control.

He wanted Kristian’s innocence for Hester, because she believed in him, and would be so hurt for them all. Even for Pendreigh, because he would not be able to contain the disillusion about his daughter if it had been a tragic domestic crime after all. Perhaps also for the woman who stared out of Allardyce’s canvas, and surely deserved better than to end a crumpled heap on a studio floor, killed by accident or on purpose by a husband she had destroyed in her crazy compulsion, throwing away everything on the turn of a card or the roll of dice-not after she had fought for everything that mattered infinitely, known freedom and dignity, the right of strangers to govern their own destiny.