William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

of property at that. They would identify with the general. After all, what would happen to them if women were given the idea that if their husbands flirted they could get away with killing them? She would find very short shrift there.
    “I can tell you the evidence as we found it if you like, but it won’t do any good,” Evan said ruefully. “There’s nothing interesting in it; in fact nothing you couldn’t have deduced for yourself.”
    “Tell me anyway,” Monk said without hope.
    Evan obliged, and as he had said, there was nothing of any use at all, nothing that offered even a thread to follow.
    Monk went back to the bar and ordered a sandwich and two more pints of cider, then after a few more minutes of conversation about other things, bade Evan farewell and left the public house. He went out into the busy street with a sense of the warmth of friendship which was still a flavor to be relished with a lingering surprise, but even less hope for Alexandra Carlyon than before.
        Monk would not go back to Rathbone and admit defeat. It was not proved. Really he had no more than Rathbone had told him in the beginning. A crime had three principal elements, and he cited them in his mind as he walked along the street between costermongers’ barrows, young children of no more than six or seven years selling ribbons and matches. Sad-faced women held bags of old clothes; indigent and disabled men offered toys, small handmade articles, some carved of bone or wood, bottles of this and that, patent medicines. He passed by news vendors, singing patterers and every other inhabitant of the London streets. And he knew beneath them in the sewers there would be others hunting and scavenging a living, and along the river shore seeking the refuse and the lost treasures of the wealthier denizens of the great city.
    Motive had failed him. Alexandra had a motive, even if it was a self-defeating and short-sighted one. She had notlooked like a woman torn by a murderously jealous rage. But that might be because it had been satisfied by his death, and now she could see the folly, and the price of it.
    Sabella had motive, but it was equally self-defeating, and she had not confessed. Indeed she seemed genuinely concerned for her mother. Could it be she had committed the crime, in a fit of madness, and did not even remember it? From her husband’s anxiety, it seemed not impossible he thought so.
    Maxim Furnival? Not out of jealousy over Louisa, unless the affair were a great deal deeper than anyone had so far discovered. Or was Louisa so in love with the general she would have caused a public scandal and left her husband for him? On the evidence so far that was absurd.
    Louisa herself? Because the general had flirted with her and then rejected her? There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest he had rejected her at all. On the contrary, there was every indication he was still quite definitely interested—although to what degree it was impossible to say.
    Means. They all had the means. All it required was a simple push when the general was standing at the turn of the stairs with his back to the banister, as he might if he had stopped to speak to someone. He would naturally face them. And the halberd was there for anyone to use. It did not require strength or skill. Any person of adult height could have used his or her body’s weight to force that blade through a man’s chest, although it might take an overtowering passion to sink it to the floor.
    Opportunity. That was his only course left. If the events of the dinner party had been retold accurately (and to imagine them all lying was too remote and forced an idea to entertain), then there were four people who could have done it, the four he had already considered: Alexandra, Sabella, Louisa and Maxim.
    Who else was in the house and not at the party? All the servants—and young Valentine Furnival. But Valentine was little more than a child, and by all accounts very fond of the general. That left the servants. He must make one last effortto account for their whereabouts that evening. If nothing else, it might establish beyond question whether Sabella Pole could have come downstairs and killed her father.
    He took a hansom—after all, Rathbone was paying for it—and presented himself at the Furnivals’ front door. Although he wanted to speak to the servants, he must obtain permission first.
    Maxim, home early, was startled to see him, and even more to hear his request, but with