Blind Justice: A William Monk Novel (32 page)

“Many women can make their own way in life,” Monk answered, even though a degree of pity stirred within him. “Many widows do, and
all women who don’t marry. They may have little to spare on luxuries, but they survive. That is the lot of most people in the world. She was still quite young, and very handsome. She could have married again.”

“It hardly matters,” Gavinton pointed out. “She is dead. Perhaps Taft thought she wouldn’t survive without him.”

“And his daughters as well?” Monk asked. “What damnable arrogance and stupidity.”

“Damnable indeed,” Gavinton said quietly. For the first time genuine humility touched him. “I’m sorry. I failed more than I could have imagined in this one.” He looked numbed by the magnitude of the disaster.

Monk was uncertain he had learned anything of value, but he thanked Gavinton for his time, rose to his feet, and left.

He also checked Drew’s whereabouts at the time of Taft’s death, not with Drew himself but with the police. According to their files Drew lived in a modest but very comfortable house two or three miles away from Taft’s home. He had two resident servants: a manservant and a woman to do the cleaning and laundry. They both lived on the premises. The door had bolts on the inside, which were not undone during the night.

Drew said he had slept uneasily; that was easy to believe. He had supposedly paced the floor of his study until close to midnight then gone to bed. Within a quarter of an hour of the shots being heard at Taft’s house, Drew had woken his manservant when he had accidentally dropped a bottle of whisky in his study and smashed it on the marble hearth.

It was convenient, but it was also unarguable. Were it Drew who was dead, Monk thought wryly, he might have more grounds for suspecting Taft of murder. Even had it been Drew who had committed suicide, it would have been easier to understand. But nothing the police had found involved Drew in Taft’s death.

There were at least fifty pictures, aside from Drew’s, in Rathbone’s possession. But did anyone else have copies of the pictures? Ballinger had run the club, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was the only one
with photographs. There could be someone else involved, someone who might be protecting his own skin, or cutting himself a piece of the blackmailing profit.

But none of this speculation helped Rathbone. Rathbone needed evidence that proved to the law that he was within the bounds of his judicial behavior, and to the public that he was not responsible for the death of Taft, or his wife and daughters.

Monk had a deep, cold fear that no such thing would exist. Whatever Rathbone’s intentions, and he did not doubt them, his actions had been disastrous.

He decided he must find a way to search Taft’s house, see where he had killed himself, look at his belongings, and get inside the mind of the man who had done such a thing. And he must do it legally.

F
IRST HE RETURNED TO
the financial side of the crime, getting all the papers Dillon Warne could give him, but this time looking not for evidence of embezzlement but for an indication of the Taft family’s daily life: their tastes, their expenses, their pleasures.

He chose to do it at the Portpool Lane clinic with Squeaky Robinson, because Squeaky could interpret figures into evidence.

Squeaky complained all evening about the time it was taking, and how many better things he had to do, and that this was not what he was paid for. But at the same time there was a deep satisfaction in him that he still might help Rathbone and that Monk had recognized his value and had asked for his assistance. Behind the scrape of his voice there was a distinct pleasure, and he worked with both speed and skill. It was a matter of double-entry bookkeeping; there were payments to companies for shipments that had appeared to take place, but had not done so. Occasionally there were complicated calculations that took very careful repeating to see where the figures had disappeared. Monk found it difficult to follow, but when Squeaky explained it, finally he understood. A little after midnight he leaned back in his chair and looked across at Squeaky.

“I see,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

Squeaky inclined his head in acknowledgment. “He was a bad bastard,” he said quietly. “He stole thousands, drove some of them poor souls into beggary ’cos they swallowed his lies. Still don’t know what he did with it. It’s somewhere he can reach it. I’ll bet the house on that! Just got to find it. Everything that poor devil Sawley said about him were true, an’ they made him look like an idiot. That was wrong.”

Monk looked at Squeaky’s thin face with its angular features and stringy hair. For all his oddity, his sense of the wrong in humiliating another person gave him a kind of dignity.

“You’re right,” Monk agreed. “And Robertson Drew deserved to be pilloried for it too. He lied about the money, about people, and probably about everything else. If he were to get blackmailed over his personal indulgences, I would think that a very appropriate fate.”

“What are we going to do about all this?” Squeaky said, thinking practically.

Monk noticed that Squeaky still considered himself part of the battle.

“I’m not certain,” he replied thoughtfully. “Taft is the only one charged with a crime directly, and he is dead. I imagine Drew will remain very quiet for some time and then probably disappear off to another city and start again—new name, new congregation. Anywhere as large as Manchester or Liverpool and he’d probably never be recognized.” He realized as he said it just how much that angered him.

Squeaky regarded him with quiet disgust. “An’ you’re going to let that happen?”

“First thing is to do something to vindicate Rathbone,” Monk answered him. “Once he’s in prison we’ll not get him out again.”

“He won’t bloody survive it!” Squeaky agreed, his anger hot again. “Bad bastards he’s put away, somebody’ll stick a knife in his guts in the first month … or sooner. You’d better think sharpish.” He stared at Monk as if expecting something immediate in return, a plan of battle.

Monk was stung by the unreasonableness of it, and yet also flattered,
which was ridiculous. Why did he care what Squeaky Robinson, of all people, thought of him?

“I can only keep returning to one question: Why did Taft kill himself and his family?” Monk said slowly. “What purpose did it serve?”

“Personally, I’d have wanted to kill Taft. I think he got off easy,” Squeaky responded reasonably. “There’s something big as we don’t know here, if you ask me.”

Monk stood up slowly, his back stiff. “I agree. But I don’t know how on earth we’re supposed to find it.” He indicated the papers on the table between them. “All this says to me is that Taft stole a very great deal of money over a long period of time. It would be interesting to know who else got a cut, and in what proportion. But right now I’m too tired to think. I’ll start again in the morning. Thank you for your help.”

“Ain’t finished yet,” Squeaky said grimly. “There’s something more here. But I s’pose that’s enough for tonight.”

Monk did not argue. He was so tired his body ached, and he knew that if there was any better answer to Rathbone’s guilt, he had not found it.

M
ONK WAS HOME AND
in bed by three in the morning. He slept far later than he had intended to and woke with a start, the room full of sunlight. He sat up sharply, saw the clock, and scrambled out of bed.

Fifteen minutes later he was sitting at the kitchen table sipping hot tea. He was well aware that his hair was untidy and that he was less than perfectly shaved. Many urgent things gnawed at his mind. He was too late to have caught Scuff, who was presumably already off to school, for once perhaps needing no persuasion.

Hester was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell her what he had learned, and he was embarrassed that it was of so little use.

“I’ve got to find the money,” he repeated. “Even Squeaky doesn’t have much of an idea where it actually is. Taft lived well, but not well enough to account for all that’s missing.” He sipped his tea, which was
still too hot to drink easily. “If we don’t find it, then the court will point out that it could certainly have gone to a different charity, that it just wasn’t properly documented.”

“If Taft has it somewhere, then it must be where he could have reached it,” Hester reasoned.

“Or he gave it to Drew,” he added.

She frowned. “Would Taft really have trusted anybody else with it?”

He sat silently for a few moments. “I doubt it,” he conceded at last.

“Do you really think it’s possible, what you said—that they gave it to another charity and just didn’t record it?” she asked skeptically.

This time he did not hesitate. “No. It’s somewhere.”

“Do you think Drew at least knows where it is?” she asked.

“Yes, probably,” he agreed. “I think that when he was testifying it was as much to save himself as to save Taft.”

Hester looked at him pensively. “If I had been in Taft’s place, I think I’d have wanted to kill Drew, if I killed anyone at all!”

“Of course you would.” He bit his lip but still failed to hide a smile. “But then you are about as like Taft as I am like Cleopatra.”

She looked him up and down, smiling herself. “I don’t see it,” she said drily. “Perhaps a slightly better shave?” Then her amusement vanished. “Even if he did want to kill himself … his poor family …”

“I know that if I were in that kind of trouble I’d want you and Scuff to go and take everything you could with you,” Monk admitted. “My one comfort would be that you would survive.”

She looked at him witheringly. “And you think either of us would go? I would never leave you, unless it would be to help somehow, and Scuff wouldn’t forgive me if I did.”

“I would want you to survive,” he repeated, refusing to think of it any more vividly. “It would be about the only thing that would salvage some honor—apart from the fact that I love you.”

Her smile was so sweet, so gentle that for a moment he felt a warmth rush up inside him and tears prickled his eyes. He felt absurd, overemotional. He was afraid to speak in case his voice betrayed him.

“But then, of course, you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into the kind of mess Taft was in,” she said, as if continuing her own thought.

He knew she was speaking to fill the silence and save him from the betrayal of his vulnerability.

“There is something we don’t know, there just has to be,” she continued. She looked a touch desperate suddenly.

“It’s not your fault, you know, just because you began the investigation.” He said the first thing that sprang to his mind, or perhaps it was there already.

“Yes it is,” she responded immediately. “There wouldn’t even have been a case if I hadn’t listened to Josephine Raleigh and started to look into it. And then I asked Squeaky’s help, and it was he who found the financial evidence. Without that, they wouldn’t have brought anything to court.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So we shouldn’t try to catch criminals or prosecute them in case the trial ends badly for some of the people involved? Punishment does slop over the sides sometimes and land on the bystanders as well. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes they don’t. Mrs. Taft certainly didn’t deserve to die, but she was quite willing to live very well indeed on the profits of Taft’s embezzlement.”

Hester stared at him, her brow furrowed in thought. “I wonder how many women bother to consider if the money they spend is honestly earned or not. I know what you do to provide for us, but then I don’t have half a dozen hungry children to clothe and feed, teach, nurse, and generally keep clean and happy. Maybe if I did, then I wouldn’t have time to wonder about much.”

“Mrs. Taft didn’t have half a dozen,” Monk pointed out. “Added to which, she knew perfectly well what Taft did for a living because he did it in front of her. And she must have seen the clothes of the congregation and been able to have a damn good guess as to their income.” He felt the anger rise inside him. “Couldn’t you place someone pretty well by their clothes, how many times a collar had been turned, socks darned, children’s clothes patched? Don’t you know the age of a dress by its cut and color?”

Her eyes flickered for an instant. “Yes,” she said gently. “But I care. Perhaps she didn’t want to.”

“Perhaps?” he said with a sharp edge of sarcasm.

She gave a slight, surprisingly elegant shrug. “It’s still not an offense worthy of death.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he agreed. “I’m sorry, that isn’t what I meant.” He reached forward and touched her hand. “The jury is going to say that this was Oliver’s fault, which may not be fair, but we have to deal with the fact. I don’t know where further to look for evidence of what really happened, or why. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone else killed him.”

“Then we need to find the reason why Taft killed himself,” she said intently. “Maybe if the trial had gone on, something more would’ve come out. What if he couldn’t face it?” Her voice dropped at the last few words, as if she were not sure if she believed it herself. “He was a very arbitrary, very domineering sort of man.”

He was startled. “Why do you think that? You said that in church he was charming, courteous …”

She rolled her eyes. “William! People are not always the same at home with their families as they are in public, especially men.” Her face softened, her eyes were suddenly very gentle. “If you could remember the past, going to church with your parents, you’d know that better.”

The hurt that might have caused was healed before it began by the look in her face. What did the past matter when the present held such sweetness?

He smiled, having no words for what he felt. “So what makes you say that of Taft, then?” he insisted.

“You asked Scuff to find out,” she replied. “I know it was mostly to give him something to do, to feel he was helping, but he discovered quite a lot about the family.”

Monk stiffened. “Who from? Was he—”

“No, he wasn’t in any danger,” she answered him with a slight smile. “Actually, he was very astute. You’d be proud of his detective work. He found the scullery maid who was dismissed, and a delivery boy who
spent rather more time in the Tafts’ kitchen than he should have. Apparently Taft was something of a martinet in his own house. Everything ran to his rules: what they ate and when; family prayers for everybody, like it or not; what they were allowed to read; even what color their dresses should be.”