The Twisted Root

body, sharpening his mind with a will to lash out, to hurt someone so this could be undone, so it would never happen again, not to Cleo and not to anyone. But he had no one to direct the anger towards. The only offender was dead already. Only the victim was still left to pay the price.
    "He was spending a lot more than that," he said quietly, his words coming between clenched teeth. "I need to know where it came from."
    She shook her head. "I don’t know. He just came to me regularly and I paid him. He never mentioned anyone else. But he wouldn’t..."
    It was on the edge of Monk’s tongue to ask her again if she had given him any morphine to sell, but he knew the answer would be the same. He rose to his feet and bade her good-bye, hating being able to make no promises, nor even speak any words of hope.
    At the door he hesitated, wondering if he should ask her about Miriam, but what was there to say?
    She looked up at him, waiting.
    In the end he had to ask. "Could it have been Miriam?"
    "No," she said immediately. "She never did anything he could have made her pay for!"
    "Not even to protect you?" he said quietly.
    She sat perfectly still. It was transparent in her face that she did not know the answer to that—believe, possibly, even certainly—but not know.
    Monk nodded. "I understand." He knocked for the jailer to let him out.
    He arrived home still turning the matter over and over in his mind.
    "There was another source," he said to Hester over the dinner table. "But it could have been Miriam, which won’t help at all."
    "And if it wasn’t?" she asked. "If we could show it was someone else? They’d have to consider it!"
    "No, they wouldn’t," he answered quietly, watching her face show her disappointment. "Not unless we could bring that person to court and prove that he or she was somewhere near the Heath that night, alone. We’ve got two days before Rathbone has to begin some defense."
    "What else have we?" Her voice rose a little in desperation.
    "Nothing," he admitted.
    "Then let’s try! I can’t bear to sit here not doing anything at all. What do we know?"
    They worked until long after midnight, noting every piece of information Monk had gathered about Treadwell’s comings and goings over the three months previous to his death. When it was written on paper it was easier to see what appeared to be gaps.
    "We need to know exactly what his time off was," Hester said, making further notes. "I’m sure there would be someone in the Stourbridge household who could tell you."
    Monk thought it was probably a waste of time, but he did not argue. He had nothing else more useful to do. He might as well follow through with the entire exercise.
    "Do you know how much medicine was taken?" he asked, then, before she could deny it, added, "Or could you work it out if you wanted to?"
    "No, but I expect Phillips could, if it would help. Do you think it really would?"
    "Probably not, but what better idea have we?"
    Neither of them answered with the obvious thing: acceptance that the charge was true. Perhaps it had not been with deliberate greed, or for the reasons Tobias was saying, but the end result was all that counted.
    "I’ll go tomorrow to the hospital and ask Phillips," Hester said briskly, as if it mattered. "And I’ll go as well and find all the people on your list and see what medicines they have. You see if you can account for that time of Treadwell’s." She stared at him very directly, defying him to tell her it was useless or to give up heart. He knew from the very brittleness of her stare, the anger in her, that she was doing it blindly, against hope, not with it.
    In the morning Monk left early to go out to Bayswater and get the precise times that Treadwell was off duty and see if he could find any indication of where else he might have been, who could have paid him the huge difference between what they could account for and what he had spent. He pursued it slowly and carefully, to the minutest detail, because he did not want to come to the end of it and have it proved to him what he already knew: that it would be of no use whatever in trying to save Cleo Anderson—or Miriam Gardiner either.
    Hester went straight to the hospital. Fortunately, even though it was a Saturday she knew Phillips would be there. Usually he took only Sundays off, and then quite often just the morning. Still, she had to search for over half an hour before she found him, and then it was only after having asked three