Blind Justice: A William Monk Novel (41 page)

Had Felicia Taft loved her husband? If so, was she then completely unaware of his abuse of the parishioners who trusted him? Surely the realization of that would have wounded her almost beyond bearing.

She was still in the withdrawing room looking at the bookcase when she heard Monk’s footsteps in the hall and his voice, sharp and excited, calling out to her.

She closed the glass-paned door of the bookcase and went out immediately.

“I’ve found something!” he said urgently. “One of the bedrooms upstairs has been turned into a study, and I’ve found a safe behind a large painting. Come and see.” Without waiting for her acknowledgment he turned and led the way, going up the wide, curved stairs two at a time.

She picked up her skirts to avoid tripping and ran after him. He strode across the landing and in through the door of a middle bedroom, now turned into a workroom, which contained two tables covered with papers and pamphlets, at a glance all apparently of a religious nature.

Monk stopped in front of a full-length portrait of a middle-aged clergyman, the portrait being little short of life-sized. He pressed his hand on the right side of the ornate frame, which seemed to release a catch, and then pulled the same edge of the frame forward. The whole picture swung outward on a hinge, revealing a flat wooden board. Very gently Monk leaned his back against it, balancing his weight one way,
then another. At last he found exactly the right adjustment of pressure, and the whole panel moved inward. The cavity beyond it was about three feet deep and four feet wide. There was nothing in it whatever.

Hester felt a rush of disappointment.

Monk stopped also. He too had clearly been expecting much more. He looked to one side, then the other. Then he glanced upward inside the cupboard and drew in his breath sharply.

“What is it?” Hester stepped forward to stand almost at his shoulder. “What’s there?” she said more urgently.

“A ladder,” he replied, his voice husky. “It goes up into …” He stopped and raised his arm to grasp the bottom rung and pull it down. It came easily, all the way to the floor.

“We’ll need a light,” Hester said frantically. “I’ve seen an oil lamp somewhere. I’ll go and fetch it. There must be matches still. Wait for me!” She turned back to him as she said the last, to be certain he would not go without her. “William!”

“I’ll wait,” he promised. “Not much point if I can’t see, although it doesn’t look pitch-dark up there.”

“Wait for me!” she said fiercely, then turned on her heel and hurried to look for a lamp.

When she returned more than five minutes later, carrying a lit oil lamp, he was still at the bottom of the ladder. She gave him a dazzling smile, then passed him the lamp.

He took it and began to climb very carefully, testing each rung before he put his weight on it and carrying the lamp in his left hand. When he got to the top he set the lamp down and reached out his hand to help her.

She went up rather more cautiously. Not for the first time in her life she found her skirts awkward: the fuller they were, the more they got in the way. No wonder men did not encumber themselves thusly.

She kept hold of Monk’s hand until she straightened up at the top and stepped away from the ladder. They were in a large attic that stretched at least twenty feet in length to a doorway at the far end; the roof sloped down on two sides. Various boxes were piled up along the
edges of the room, presumably from when the Tafts had first moved into the house. Near the hatch and the ladder down were a couple of very old cabin trunks, which, to judge from the dust on them, had not been used in a decade or more. There seemed to be nothing of interest, let alone of relevance to Taft’s death or the murder of his family.

With a slight shrug, Monk carried the lantern to the far end and tried the door. It swung open easily, shedding a little light, as if the new room had led toward daylight.

Hester went after him. There was nothing on the floor to trip over.

Monk stood in the middle of the room, the lantern untended on the floor. He was motionless, as if transfixed by what he saw.

Hester reached him and understood. The room was entirely empty except for a small table on which rested an extraordinary contraption. And yet as soon as she saw it she understood exactly what it was. A gun was wedged between two weights on the table, and above it, joined by a wire around the trigger, was a tin can with a hole in the bottom. Underneath the can was a container, now dry, but with a very slight rime around the edges, as if the hard, local water had left its imprint.

Her eye followed the path a bullet would have taken, but she saw no mark on the wall.

Monk looked toward the window. It was open several inches.

She turned to meet his eyes, waiting, puzzled.

“For the noise,” he said quietly. “It was rigged up to go off at about five in the morning. With the silence of the night and that window open, the sound would carry so the neighbors would be bound to hear it. It fixes the time of death. The bodies downstairs would still be warm, even if they died a bit earlier. When the police came, they found a triple murder and a suicide—a woman, her children, and her husband. They wouldn’t be looking for hidden doors into attics. Why would they?”

“They wouldn’t,” she agreed. She looked toward the gun and its extraordinary mechanism. “It would have taken quite a lot of trouble to rig this up, and whoever did it hasn’t been able to come back to get rid of it. That must mean it’s Drew, mustn’t it? This is what he wanted to come for—to get rid of it before anyone found it.”

“Yes,” he said. “But we can’t prove it. He could affect to be just as surprised as we are. All he has to do is say that he wanted the rest of the church papers, in order to pay the bills outstanding, and carry on. And he can,” he added bitterly.

“No. All London must know about the embezzlement now,” Hester argued. “And if they didn’t with Taft’s trial and then his death, they will with Oliver’s.”

“Then Drew can go to Manchester, or Liverpool, or Newcastle,” he pointed out. “There are plenty of other cities.” He bent to look at the contraption again. “So simple,” he said, tightening his lips into a thin line. “I wonder why no one heard the real shot. Pillow, I suppose. It explains why the daughters and the wife were killed as well. They must have known who else was in the house. He couldn’t afford to leave them alive.”

Hester shuddered. She tried to block out of her imagination the scene as it must have been, the fear and the tragedy. Had Drew shot Taft first, and then gotten rid of the witnesses? Or had he killed them first, separately, keeping them all silent? How loud would you have to scream in the silence of the night to be heard by the neighbors? Someone tired and sound asleep might not hear even a stranger in the room, let alone a woman fighting for her life in the house next door, across fifty feet of garden with trees and bushes. The thought of it chilled her through.

Monk had finished searching. He had found the bullet, lower down in the wall than he had expected. The recoil must have jerked the gun out of alignment. He left it where it was. It would be evidence. He was standing back at the trapdoor again, waiting for her.

She pulled her attention back to the present, glad to be taken away from her imaginings. She walked over to him. “What are we going to do now?” she asked.

“See what else we can find,” he replied, holding her hand while she moved across to grasp the rungs and climb down.

They searched the rest of the house for anything else of significance
and found nothing beyond a few goose feathers under one of the chairs in the morning room, which was where Taft had been found. It might indicate that a pillow had been used to muffle the sound of the shot, but it certainly did not prove it.

“I wonder what time Taft was actually shot,” Monk said, chewing his lip a little. “It can’t have been all that long before he was found, or the body would have been too cold.”

“About three,” Hester suggested. “Drew was back home at five, we know, because he woke his valet. But he could well have been here at three.”

“It doesn’t have to have been Drew,” Monk argued.

She looked at him witheringly. “Who else? It wasn’t a burglar. This was prepared very carefully by someone who was here often enough to know about the ladder into the attic and who could set up that contraption feeling confident that he would be able to come back here, without raising suspicion, to take it down again.”

Monk went on playing devil’s advocate. She understood what he was doing.

“Why?” he asked. “Murdering four people is pretty extreme.”

“Maybe in his mind it was only one,” she reasoned. “Just Taft himself, because he knew how deeply Drew was implicated. He couldn’t be trusted, especially once the case turned against him. Mrs. Taft and the daughters were just necessary tidying up.”

He thought for a moment. “But wasn’t there always the risk that Taft would turn against him to free himself?”

“It seemed that he trusted not,” she replied. “But then he was exposed in the photograph and was forced to change his evidence entirely. So if Taft really didn’t know about Drew’s perversions, that might well have been the end of any loyalty Taft felt toward Drew, and certainly the end of any belief that Drew could, or would, help him stay out of prison.” She knew she was right even before his face broke into a smile and he straightened up.

“Right, I believe you,” he said with conviction in his voice. “Now
let’s find out how he got in. He wouldn’t have had a key, and he certainly wouldn’t have rung the doorbell at three in the morning.”

“How do you know he wouldn’t have a key?” she said, then saw the look in his eyes. “Oh—of course. If he had a key he wouldn’t be asking the police for permission to get in. He’d have been back ages ago to dismantle that contraption. In that case, why hasn’t he just broken in?”

“He’d be seen in the daytime,” Monk answered. “This place has some very curious neighbors now, whatever they were before. I saw one of them watching us when we came in. If we’d picked the lock instead of having a key, I’ll wager either they’d have been around here finding out who we were or they’d have sent for the police. At this time of the day it wouldn’t have taken them long to get here.”

“At night?” she persisted, smiling herself now.

“I can’t think of anything but the risk of getting caught. A silly chance to take, if he can come in here openly with a perfectly believable excuse.”

“What if the police had sent somebody with him?” Hester wasn’t going to give up so easily. “He couldn’t go up to the gun, or they’d have seen him.”

“He could have come into the study and gone up without anyone knowing. I doubt someone would’ve escorted him the whole way.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And carried down the gun and that contraption off the table?”

“No need. Just hide them in one of the boxes up in the attic,” he replied. “It would take only moments. Actually, even if anyone knew he had gone up to the attic, so long as they didn’t go up before he’d hidden it, it still wouldn’t matter.”

“Right, I believe you,” she mimicked his line exactly, with a wide smile.

“So—back to the question of how he got in that night when he killed Taft and his family,” he went on.

“A window?” she suggested. “One of the side or back doors, maybe?”

Together they went around every door and window in the house.
The doors were all fast and showed no signs of having been picked or otherwise tampered with, but one larder window had scratches that indicated a very carefully and quite skillfully picked catch, probably with a long narrow-bladed knife.

“I’ll find you a hansom,” he told her as they closed the door and walked out onto the sunlit street. “I need to talk to the police surgeon again, then I’ll go to speak to Dillon Warne. I don’t know when I’ll be home, but if I’m late, you and Scuff have supper without me. I can’t afford to wait with this.”

“I know,” she agreed. “And I’ll find my own cab.”

“No. I’ll take you …”

“William! I can find a hansom cab for myself! Go and see the police surgeon.”

He touched her cheek with a quick gesture, smiled back at her, then turned and walked away rapidly.

She walked in the sun toward the main road and hailed the first passing hansom cab, then settled down for the long ride home.

M
ONK DID NOT HAVE
to wait long for the police surgeon. The man came in, glad to be interrupted in his paperwork. He looked interested as soon as Monk told him which case he was referring to.

“What did you find?” the surgeon asked, waving at a hard-backed leather-seated chair as an invitation for Monk to sit down. He leaned against the table piled with papers and cocked his head slightly to one side, his eyes sharp.

“When you found the bodies of the Taft family, what was your estimate as to time of Abel’s death?” Monk inquired.

The surgeon pursed his lips. “Not a great deal of skill needed. The shot was heard and reported by neighbors, on both sides, actually. Just after five in the morning.”

Monk nodded. “I read that. But could it have been earlier, medically speaking?”

The surgeon frowned. “What are you getting at? He killed himself with the gun that was found at the scene, and the shot was heard at just after five.”

“Yes, but is there anything to prove that the gun at the scene was the same one that fired the shot that the neighbors heard?” Monk asked.

The surgeon narrowed his eyes and his body stiffened. “I presume you have more to do with your time than play silly games. What the devil are you driving at?”

“From the medical evidence,” Monk said patiently. “Could he actually have died as early as … say, three o’clock—never mind the shot?”

“Yes,” the surgeon agreed cautiously. “In fact, it would suit the medical evidence rather better. Now would you please explain yourself?”

Monk told him about the attic, the open window, and the contraption designed to fire a gun at a considerable delay. He saw the surgeon’s attention, saw his face light up with perception, and finally saw a smile, as the man nodded slowly several times.