Anne Perry - The Twisted Root

"Of course they’re the same. What do you think she did? Give it to him to sell?" He was indignant, almost angry.

"If I were being blackmailed out of everything I earned except about two shillings a week, I’d be tempted to pay in kind," she answered him.

He looked chastened. His lips thinned into a hard line. "I’m glad somebody got that scheming sod," he said harshly. "I just wish we could prove it wasn’t poor Cleo. Or come to that, anyone else he was doing the same thing to. How are we going to do that?" He looked at her expectantly.

"Tell me exactly how much medicine went over the few months before his death, as nearly as you can."

"That won’t tell us who the other person is-or people!"

"My husband is trying to find out where Treadwell went that might lead us to them."

He looked at her narrowly. "Is he any good at that?"

"Very good indeed. He used to be the best detective in the police force," she said with pride.

"Oh? Who’s the best now?"

"I haven’t the slightest idea. He left." Then, in case Phillips should think him dishonest, she added, "He resented some of the discipline. He can’t abide pomposity either, especially when it is coupled with ignorance."

Phillips grinned, then the grin vanished and he was totally serious again.

"I’ll get you a list o’ those things. I could tell you pretty exact, if it helps."

"It’ll help."

She spent the rest of the day and into the early evening trudging from one house to the next with Monk’s list of Cleo’s patients and Phillips’s list of the missing medicines. She was accustomed to seeing people who were suffering illness or injury. Nursing had been her profession for several years, and she had seen the horror of the battlefield and the disease which had decimated the wounded afterwards. She had shared the exhaustion and the fear herself, and the cold and the hunger.

Nevertheless, to go into these homes, bare of comfort because everything had been sold to pay for food and warmth, to see the pain and too often the loneliness also, was more harrowing than she had expected. These men were older than the ones she had nursed in the Crimea; their wounds were not fresh. They had earned them in different battles, different wars; still, there was so much that was the same it hurled her back those short four years, and old emotions washed over her, almost to drowning.

Time and again she saw a dignity which made her have to swallow back tears as old men struggled to hide their poverty and force their bodies, disabled by age and injury, to rise and offer her some hospitality. She was walking in the footsteps of Cleo Anderson, trying to give some of the same comfort, and failing because she had not the means.

Rage burned inside her also. No one should have to beg for what he had more than earned.

She loathed asking for information about the medicine they had had. Nearly all of them knew that Cleo was being tried for her life. All Hester could do was tell the truth. Every last man was eager to give her any help he could, to open cupboards and show her powders, to give her day-by-day recounting of all he had had.

She would have given any price she could think of to be able to promise them it would save Cleo, but she could only offer hope, and little enough of that.

When she arrived home at quarter past ten, Monk was beginning to worry about her. He was standing up, unable to relax in spite of his own weariness. She did notice that he had taken his boots off.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

She walked straight to him and put her head on his shoulder. He closed his arms around her, holding her gently, laying his cheek to her brow. He did not need her to explain the emotion she felt; he saw it in her face, and understood.

"It’s wrong," she said after a few minutes, still holding on to him. "How can we do it? We turn to our bravest and best when we are in danger, we sacrifice so much-fathers and brothers, husbands and sons-and then a decade, a generation later, we only want to forget! What’s the matter with us?"

He did not bother to answer, to talk about guilt or debt, or the desire to be happy without remembering that others have purchased it at a terrible price-even resentment and simple blindness and failure of imagination. They had both said it all before.

"What did you find?" she said at last, straightening up and looking at him.

"I’m not sure," he replied. "Do you want a cup of tea?"

"Yes." She went towards the kitchen, but he moved ahead of her.

"I’ll bring it." He smiled. "I wasn’t asking you to fetch one for me-even though I’ve probably walked as far as you have, and to as little purpose."

She sat down and took off her boots as well. It was a particular luxury, something she would only do at home. And it was still very sweet to realize this was her home, she belonged there, and so did he.

When he returned with the tea and she had taken a few sips, she asked him again what he had learned.

"A lot of Treadwell’s time is unaccounted for," he replied, trying his own tea and finding it a trifle too hot. "He had a few unusual friends. One of his gambling partners was even an undertaker, and Treadwell did a few odd tasks for him."

"Enough to earn him the kind of money we’re looking for?" She did not know whether she wanted the answer to be yes or no.

"Not remotely," he replied. "Just driving a wagon, presumably because he was good with horses, and perhaps knew the roads. He probably did it as a favor because of their friendship. This young man seems to have given him entry to cock-fights and dog races when he wouldn’t have been allowed in otherwise. They even had a brothel or two in common."

Hester shrugged. "It doesn’t get us any further, does it?" She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

Monk frowned thoughtfully. "I was wondering how Treadwell ever discovered about Cleo and the medicines in the first place."

She was about to dismiss it as something that hardly mattered now when she realized what he meant.

"Well, not from Miriam," she said with conviction.

"From any of Cleo’s patients?" he asked. "How could Treadwell, coachman to Major Stourbridge in Bayswater, and gambler and womanizer in Kentish Town, come to know of thefts of morphine and other medicines from a hospital on Hampstead Heath?"

She stared at him steadily, a first, tiny stirring of excitement inside her. "Because somewhere along the chain of events he crossed it. It has to be-but where?" She held up her fingers, ticking off each step. "Patients fall ill and go to the hospital, where Cleo gets to know of them because she works there as a nurse."

"Which has nothing to do with Treadwell," he answered. "Unless one of them was related to him or to someone he knew well."

"They are all old and live within walking distance of the hospital," she pointed out. "Most of them are alone, the lucky few with a son or daughter, or grandchild, like old John Robb."

"Treadwell’s family was all in Kentish Town," Monk said. "That much I ascertained. His father is dead and his mother remarried a man from Hoxton."

"And none of them have anything to do with Miriam Gardiner," she went on. "So he didn’t meet them driving her." She held up the next finger. "Cleo visits them in their homes and knows what they need. She steals it from the hospital. By the way, I’m sure the apothecary knew but turned a blind eye. He’s a good man, and very fond of her." She smiled slightly. "Very fond indeed. He regards her as something of a saint. I think she is the only person who really impresses Phillips. Fermin Thorpe certainly doesn’t." She recalled the scene in the morgue. "He even teased the new young morgue attendant that Thorpe was buying his cadavers for the medical students from resurrectionists! Poor boy was horrified until he realized Phillips was teasing him."