William Monk 06 - Cain His Brother

every pile of wood or canvas, every hulk, every shadowed stretch of water, lifted every drifting piece of flotsam. They scoured carefully through the pier stakeswhere long ago those convicted of piracy on the high seas were tied until the morning tide drowned them.
    Monk was frozen. His feet and trousers were wet from where he had jumped ashore onto the shingle. His body ached, his knuckles were skinned, as were his palms from the wet ropes, and he was hungry.
    As dusk drew over a clear sky, the air began to prickle the skin with cold and on shore the rime of moisture on the cobbles was turning to ice. The tide was rising again. They were beyond Woolwich and the Royal Arsenal, down as far as the end of Gallion’s Reach. Ahead of them was Barking Reach.
    “Nothing,” the sergeant said with a shake of his head. “We’re wasting our time. If ’e went in at all, ’e’s long gone now. Poor devil.” He waved his arm, rocking the boat slightly. “Right, men. Might as well go ’ome. Gawd knows, it’s going ter freeze as ’ard as the ’obs o’ ’ell tonight. Pass ’round that tot o’ rum. It’s far enough ’ome, dammit.”
    “We’ll find ’im somew’ere,” one of the others said laconically. “Sea gives up its dead, sooner or later.”
    “Mebbe,” the sergeant agreed. “But not tonight, lads.”
    They turned in a wide circle and leaned their weight into the oars, too tired to bother talking. The shore was only a greater density in the night, lit by yellow lamps, carriage lights moving slowly. Sounds were faint across the water, a rattle of wheels, a shout, the creak of spars in midstream.
    It was a good hour later when they bumped into the mass in the water and the man in the bow called out. It took them another twenty minutes, working by lamplight, awkward with the small boat tipping and the sodden heaviness of it, to haul the body into the bottom and examine it.
    Monk felt his stomach knot, and then churn with revulsion and he thought for a moment he was going to be sick.
    It was the remains of a man in his late thirties or early forties, as much as one could tell. He had been dead for some time, in Monk’s judgment well over a week. His features were badly decomposed by the river and its natural inhabitants.What was left of his clothes were beyond recognition except that they must once have been a shirt and some form of trousers, but of what quality or color it was impossible to say.
    “Well?” the sergeant asked, looking at Monk. “This ’im?” There was a dry smile on his mouth, and hopelessness in his eyes. “Geez! Poor devil. No ’uman bein’ should come ter this.”
    Monk steeled himself and looked at the body more closely. He was surprised his stomach had settled again although he was shuddering with cold. He must have done such things before, perhaps often. The man was tall, strongly built. His hair was thick and dark. There was nothing to disprove it was Angus Stonefield.
    “I don’t know. It could be,” he said with a sense of sadness which all but overwhelmed him, as if up to that moment he had in some way still believed Angus might have been alive.
    The sergeant sighed. “I suppose we’ll ’ave ter ask the wife, although Gawd ’isself knows ’ow yer could expec’ any woman ter look at that … the more so if it’s ’im.”
    “Take him to the morgue,” Monk said quietly, loathing what he was doing even as he heard his own voice. Suddenly it seemed easy to hang Caleb. The anger was not enough even for that. “I’ll bring her. It has to be done. There may be some mark on the body where the clothes have protected it, something she can recognize … or which makes it possible.”
    The sergeant searched his face in the moon of the lamplight, then nodded slowly. “Right y’are, sir. We’ll do that. C’mon now, boys, put yer back inter them oars. D’yer wanter be stuck ’ere in the middle o’ the damn’ river till yer freezes solid?”
    “Yes, Mr. Monk?” Genevieve looked at him, her face creased with anxiety, fear already at the back of her eyes. He had been admitted to the parlor. She was not using thelarger, more formal rooms, probably to save the cost of heating them. She looked exhausted. He knew she had been in the courtroom all day, and in the witness-box a great deal of it, testifying in an attempt to prove her husband’s death. Watching Caleb, so physically like him, must have been the worst ordeal of her life. And now he was possibly going to