Acceptable Loss (23 page)

Rupert blushed. “I don’t know about his side of it.”

“I didn’t expect you to. I can deduce a good deal of that. I need to know his clients, how the blackmail was paid, the sort of amounts, and exactly what the performances were like and who attended.”

Rupert went white.

Monk ignored that also. “And I need to know about the suicide a few months ago. What led up to it?”

“I can’t tell you that!” Rupert was appalled. “That would be a … betrayal.”

“I knew you would see it that way,” Monk said quietly. “Yes. You would, in a sense, be betraying the other men who used the abuse of children for their entertainment.”

He saw Rupert wince, the shame filling his face. He had expected it. It hurt Monk to have to be so blunt, but it changed nothing. “Whereas if you don’t tell me, you will be betraying the children on that boat—and all those like them. And if you think carefully and with absolute honesty, you’ll realize you will be betraying your father, and perhaps the better part of yourself.”

Rupert shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what you’re asking …”

“Really?” Monk raised his eyebrows. “Do you think your social class are the only people who feel loyalty toward their friends, or to those to whom they are bound by promises of conspiracy, and hiding their shame? You are ashamed of it, aren’t you?”

A flame of anger lit Rupert’s eyes. “Yes, of course I am! You …” He struggled for words, and could not find them.

“And you think embarrassment and an apology are enough to make the balance even again?”

“No, I don’t! I’ll regret it the rest of my life!” Rupert was shouting now. “But I can’t undo it.”

“Remorse is excellent,” Monk said levelly. “But it isn’t enough. Nor is money. If you want any kind of redemption, then you must help me stop at least some of it from happening again.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know who killed Parfitt!” Rupert said desperately. “It may well have been Ballinger, but I don’t know anything to help you prove it. I didn’t see him, and I wouldn’t recognize him if I had. I don’t even remember half that evening, except as a nightmare. Telling you the names of my friends who went there isn’t going to do anything except embarrass them and make me a social outcast.”

“That’s the price,” Monk replied. “And is their friendship worth that much to you?”

“Don’t be such a damn fool!” Rupert’s voice was high and angry
again, touched with fear. “Everyone will despise me for ratting on friends, not just the men concerned, and their families, and their friends.”

Monk felt the resolve harden in him, like a cold, gray stone in his gut. “Then, tell me about the ‘performances.’ ” He accentuated the word. “Where did you meet? Did you all go to Chiswick separately, or together? Shared a hansom, perhaps? You wouldn’t go in your own carriages—they might be recognized—or want your coachman to know, for that matter.”

“Separately, mostly,” Rupert answered grimly. “What has that to do with Ballinger, or anything else?”

Monk ignored the question. “How do you get from the shore to Parfitt’s boat?”

“Someone rowed us. Either that revolting little man with the walleye—”

“ ’Orrible Jones?”

“If you say so. Or the other. Why?”

Monk ignored that question too. “By agreement? How did you know he wasn’t just a ferryman? How did he know who you were, and that you wanted to go to that boat and not just to the other shore? How did he know you were one of Parfitt’s clients? You could even have been police.”

“It’s not illegal,” Rupert said miserably.

“Just immoral?” Monk asked sarcastically. “That’s why you do it up there in Chiswick, miles from home, and at night on the river?”

Rupert glared at him. “I didn’t say I was proud of it, just that it isn’t anything to do with the police.”

“Actually, torturing and imprisoning children is illegal,” Monk told him.

“We didn’t do … that … to anyone!”

“You just watched other people do it!” Monk’s disgust made his voice shake, his throat straining with the force of his emotions. “And homosexuality is illegal too.”

Rupert’s face was scarlet.

“Apart from the question of legality, Mr. Cardew,” Monk went on ruthlessly, “would you like to be forced to have anal intercourse with
another man, for the entertainment of a crowd of drunken lechers? Did that happen to you when you were six or seven years old, and you screamed, and bled, and that’s why—”

“Stop it!” Rupert shouted, his voice cracking. “All right! I understand. It was bestial, and I shall pay for it in shame for the rest of my life!”

“And you will also tell me who else was there,” Monk said. “Every man whose face you recognized. I can’t arrest them for it, but I can question them for information. I’m going to hang the creature behind this, and I’m going to use every perverted bastard I can find to do it.”

“You’re going to talk to them?” Rupert whispered, horrified.

“If I have to. And you are going to tell me step by step what happened, every filthy act, every scream, every injury and humiliation, every terrified and weeping child that was tortured for your amusement. I’ll have nightmares too, maybe for the rest of my life, but I’m going to paint such a picture that your friends will never doubt that I know what happened, as well as if I’d been there too.” He drew in his breath. He was shaking, and his body was covered with sweat.

“And the jury will know exactly what those men were paying to hide. Perhaps they’ll wake up terrified as well, and they’ll be as passionate as I am in helping to get rid of at least some of the obscene trade. You’ll help me willingly or unwillingly, Mr. Cardew. I imagine, for your father’s sake, if nothing else, you would prefer to do it here and now, in private, while it is still a voluntary thing, and perhaps partially redeem yourself. Believe me, if you don’t and I have to force you in front of a jury, it will be a lot worse.”

Rupert stared at him, defeat in his eyes and a depth of misery that for an instant almost weakened Monk’s resolve. Then Monk thought of Scuff, the trust that was just beginning between them, and the moment of indecision vanished.

“Now,” he prompted. “Detail by detail. Make me feel as if I am there.”

Rupert began haltingly, still standing motionless in the quiet morning room with its sun-faded carpet and old books. His voice was low and strained. Frequently he stopped, and Monk had to prompt him to go on. He hated doing it; he felt as if he were beating an animal. And he knew he would feel unclean afterward, tarnished with
cruelty. But he did not stop until Rupert had told him every detail of the entire hideous business. His face was mottled and stained with tears. Perhaps he would never forget this either, and not ever be the same as he had been before.

“And the man it broke?” Monk persisted. “The one who took his own life, shot himself alone in the small boat.”

“Tadley …” Rupert whispered. “He couldn’t pay.”

“Did Parfitt drive him that far on purpose? An example to others of what happens if you don’t honor your debts?”

“It wasn’t a debt!” Rupert snapped back at him. “It was extortion. I told you … I didn’t know about it until afterward. Not that I could have paid it for him if I had.”

“So, what was it, a misjudgment of Parfitt’s? Is suicide good for business, or bad?”

Rupert shot him a look of utter loathing. It stung Monk more than he would have expected, perhaps because he knew the loathing was fair.

“It is a salutary reminder to pay on time instead of letting the payments mount up,” Rupert replied coldly. “And it is bad for business. But, then, murder is worse.”

“Tell me about Tadley,” Monk instructed.

“He was a family man, but unhappy, lonely, I think. I don’t know that he particularly cared for boys. I had the feeling he wanted to experience some kind of excitement, some danger, a sense of being completely alive. I know that sounds—”

“No,” Monk cut across him. “It sounds like many people whose lives are suffocated by tedium, duty. Trying so hard to live up to what other people have expected of them that they become imprisoned inside it. Without dreams, you die.”

Rupert stared at him. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I misjudged you. I thought—”

“I know.” Monk smiled bleakly. “You thought I had no devils inside, no idea of what they are even. You’re wrong.”

Rupert nodded, almost close to a smile.

Monk bit his lip. “Now tell me the names of the other men who went to the boat.”

Rupert stared at him, but the anger had gone from his face.

“Please,” Monk added.

Rupert gave him a list, and Monk wrote it in his notebook.

“Thank you,” Monk said when it was finished. “I’ll get him this time.” Perhaps it was a dangerous thing to say, almost a promise, but he risked saying it, and committing himself. It felt good.

M
ONK DECIDED TO RETRACE
Ballinger’s footsteps on the night of Parfitt’s death. He should duplicate all the conditions as closely as possible.

The first part of his journey did not really matter. It was the return that counted. Nevertheless he went to the street outside Ballinger’s house, at the time in the evening when Ballinger said he had left.

Of course one thing he could not duplicate was the daylight. In September it would have been dusk later, and the weather would have been milder. But he did not think that would substantially alter the time. If anything, Ballinger would have found it easier, and therefore faster.

Monk caught a hansom without more than a few minutes’ wait, and settled himself for the long journey to Chiswick. It was tedious, and his mind wandered over all he had learned so far, juggling the pieces to try to make a picture that would hold against the assaults of doubt and reason. It was still all too tenuous, too full of other possible explanations.

He reached Chiswick cold and irritable, his legs cramped from sitting still. He paid the cabby and walked down across the street onto the dockside. It was fully dark now, with a gusty wind blowing off the water. This far upriver it did not smell of salt, but rather of weed and mud.

The clouds raced past, and for a few moments the moon showed, about half full, gleaming briefly on the water. There was a ferry twenty yards away. A couple of young men were sitting in it, and the sound of their laughter, happy and more than a little drunk, drifted across the distance between them.

Monk waited until they docked, then walked down and asked the
ferryman to take him across. At the far side he thanked the man, paid, and walked up to the road to look for a hansom. That took rather longer, but even so he was in Mortlake by the time Ballinger had said he’d arrived at Harkness’s house.

Now he had more than two hours to wait until Harkness had said Ballinger had left. He spent it walking along the waterfront with a lantern, looking at the boats pulled up in slipways, at the moorings, judging how long it would take to get any of them waterborne, and how wet he might get doing it.

He looked ahead and saw the sign for the Bull’s Head swinging gently in the wind, creaking a little. He decided to go in and have a sandwich and a pint of ale.

Monk asked the landlord casually about hiring boats just to row a bit up and down the water, not really fishing, just being by himself and forgetting the city and its life and its noise. The man seemed to find that odd, but he told Monk of half a dozen different people who might be happy to oblige him.

Monk thanked him and left. He found one light, fast boat he could hire for a couple of shillings, and promised to return it before morning. If they thought he was eccentric, no one said so.

He walked back up toward Harkness’s house and reached it a few moments before the earliest he could leave and still be following Ballinger’s path. He stared around. There was no one in sight, but he had not expected anyone. A witness would have been a stroke of luck too far!

Some moments later he walked briskly back downriver toward the Bull’s Head. The wind was sharper from the west and carrying the smell of rain with it. He imagined the marshes and the fields beyond, damp earth turned by the plow. Past that, woods with heavy leaves falling, berries turning red, the pungency of wood smoke, crows in high nests for the winter.

He found the boat he had hired, and after only a few moments’ fumbling, he got it down the slip and into the water. He reached for the oars, fit them into the oarlocks, and pulled away from the shore out into the stream.

After a few more strokes he settled to row down the river to Corney
Reach. Tonight, the tide was against him. It had turned while he was in the Bull’s Head and was now coming in. He must check what it had been on the night of Parfitt’s death. It would make a difference, but perhaps little enough—unless high or low water had occurred during the time Ballinger had actually killed Parfitt, which was unlikely. But it was a detail to be sure of, so absolutely nothing caught him by surprise. Anyway, since he had to row back up to Mortlake, the tide would be with him one way, and against him the other.

It was a pleasant sensation to feel the power of the boat sliding through the water. It was silent here apart from the bow wave’s whisper, and the rattle of the oarlocks as the oars turned. Now and then a small night bird called from the trees along the shore. Once, far in the distance, a dog barked.

He saw the dark hull of Parfitt’s boat before he expected to. He had lost all sense of time. He pulled over to it and rested on his oars. He imagined himself going up on deck. How long would it take to climb the ropes up the sides? An estimate?

But Rathbone would ask him. It would destroy the validity of the whole experiment if he had to admit that he had not actually done it. Damn!

He bent to the oar again and pulled the boat closer. What if there were no ropes there anymore? Then he would have to do the whole thing over again, when the ropes had been replaced.

He was right up to the boat now. He could see almost nothing. There was one riding light, simply to avoid the boat being struck in the dark. ’Orrie must have been keeping it burning. It shed no more than a glimmer onto the deck, and nothing at all on the steep sides.