William Monk 06 - Cain His Brother

plague.” Her voice at last lost its steadiness and cracked with the effort of control. “He was a truly good man, Mr. Monk, a man who knew evil for the ugliness and the ruin it is. It had no disguise of charm for him.”
    His intelligence told him it was a bereaved woman speaking with the hindsight of love, and his instinct told him it was the truth. This is how he had always looked in her eyes, and although she admired it wholeheartedly, it also exasperated or oppressed her at times.
    “Now so many days have passed,” she said very quietly, “I fear it may be beyond anyone’s ability to prove what has happened to him.”
    He felt guilty, which was unreasonable. Even if he hadfollowed Angus on the very day he disappeared, he might still not have been able to prove murder against Caleb. There were enough ways of disposing of a body in Limehouse. The river was deep there, with its ebb tide to carry flotsam out and its cargo boats coming and going. At the moment there were also the common graves for the victims of typhoid, to name only a few.
    He put half a dozen more coals on the fire.
    “You do not always need a body to presume death,” he said carefully, watching her face. “Although it may be a good deal harder to prove murder—and Caleb’s guilt.”
    “I don’t care about Caleb’s guilt.” Her eyes did not deviate from his face. “God will take care of him.”
    “But not of you?” he asked. “I would have thought you a great deal more deserving … and more urgent.”
    “I cannot wait for charity, Mr. Monk,” she answered with some asperity.
    He smiled. “I apologize. Of course not. But I should like to deal with Caleb before waiting for God. I am doing all I can, and I am much closer than I was last time we spoke. I have found a witness who saw Angus in Limehouse, on the day of his disappearance, in a tavern where he might easily have met Caleb. I’ll find others. It takes time, but people will talk. It is just a matter of finding the right ones and persuading them to speak. I’ll get Caleb himself, in the end.”
    “Will you …” She was on the edge of hope, but not allowing herself to grasp it. “I really don’t care if you cannot prove it was Caleb.” The shadow of a smile touched her mouth. “I don’t even know what Angus would want. Isn’t that absurd? For all that they were so utterly different, and Caleb hated him, he still loved Caleb. It seemed as if he would not forget the child he had been and the good times they had spent together before they quarreled. It hurt him every time he went to Limehouse after Caleb, yet he would not give up.”
    She looked away. “Sometimes it would be weeks,especially after a particularly wretched visit, but then he would relent and go back again. On those times he’d be gone even longer, as if it were necessary to make up the difference. I suppose childhood bonds are very deep.”
    “Did he tell you much of his visits to Caleb?” Monk asked. “Did he give you any indication of where they met, or where they might have been? If you can think of any description at all, it might help.”
    “No,” she said with a slight frown, as though it puzzled her on recollection. “He never spoke of it at all. I think perhaps it was his silence which made me wonder if it was as much guilt as love which took him.”
    “Guilt?”
    There was a gentle pride in her face when she replied, a very slight, unconscious lift of her chin. “Angus had made a success of everything, his profession, his family and his place in society. Caleb had nothing. He was feared and hated where Angus was loved and respected. He lived from hand to mouth, never knowing where the next meal would come from. He had no home, no family, nothing in his whole life of which to be proud.”
    It was a grim picture. Suddenly, with a jolt as if he had opened a door into a different, icy world, Monk perceived the loneliness of Caleb Stone, the failure that ate at his soul every time he saw his brother, the happy, smooth, successful mirror image of what he might have been. And Angus’s pity and his guilt would only make it worse.
    And yet for Angus too, perhaps the memory of love and trust, the times when all things were equal for them and the divisions and griefs of the future still unknown, held a kind of sweetness that bound them together.
    Why should it boil over into violence now? What had happened to change it? He looked at Genevieve. The strain was clearly marked in her face