William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

personal touches. It was not something he would have associated with Monk, it was too restful. There were antimacassars on the chair backs and a palm tree of some sort in a large brass pot. The fire was hot, as if it had been lit for some time. He found he was relaxing, in spite of himself.
    “What is it?” he asked as soon as his coat was off and even before he sat in the chair opposite Monk’s. “What have you found out? Have you proof?”
    “I have witnesses,” Monk replied, crossing his legs and leaning back, his eyes on Evan’s face. “I have several people who saw Rhys Duff in St. Giles leading up to the murder, and a prostitute he used there on several occasions. It was definitely him. She identified him from the picture you gave me, and she knew him by name, also Arthur and Duke Kynaston. I even have the last victim of rape, attacked just before the murder, only a few yards from Water Lane.”
    “She identified Rhys Duff?” Evan said incredulously. It was almost too good to be true. How had he and Shotts missed that? Were they really so inferior to Monk? Was Monk’s skill, and his ruthlessness, so much greater? Evan looked across at where Monk sat, the firelight red on his lean cheeks and casting shadows across his eyes. It was a strong, clever face, but not insensitive, not without imagination or the possibility of compassion.There was a certain darkness in it now, as if this victory destroyed as well as created. There was so much in him Evan did not understand, but it did not stop him caring. He had never been afraid to commit his friendship.
    “No,” Monk answered. “She described three men, one tall and fairly slight, one shorter and leaner built, and one of average height and thin. She did not see or remember their faces.”
    “That could be Rhys Duff and Duke and Arthur Kynaston, but it’s not proof,” Evan argued. “A decent defense lawyer would tear that apart.”
    Monk linked his fingers together in a steeple and stared at Evan. “When this defense lawyer you have in mind asks why on earth Rhys Duff should murder his father,” he said, “we will be able to say that Rhys was a decent, well-bred young man who, like any other of his age and class, occasionally took his pleasures with a prostitute. Simply because his father was a trifle straitlaced about such things, even a little pompous perhaps, is not cause for anything beyond a quarrel, and perhaps a reduction in his allowance. This provides the answer: Leighton Duff interrupted his son and his friends raping and beating a young woman. He was horrified and appalled. He would not accept it as part of any young man’s natural appetites. Therefore he had to be silenced.”
    Evan followed the reasoning perfectly. A possible motive had been the one thing lacking before. A quarrel was easy to understand, even a few blows struck. But a fight to the death over the issue of using a prostitute was absurd. The issue of a series of rapes of increasing violence, by three of them together, and being caught red-handed, was another matter entirely. It was repellent, and it was criminal. It was also escalating to the degree that sooner or later it would become murder. To imagine three young men, fresh from the victory of violence against a terrified victim, beating to death the one man who threatened their exposure, was sickening but not difficult to believe.
    “Yes, I see,” he agreed with a sudden sadness. They were hideous crimes, so ugly he should have been overwhelmedwith revulsion and a towering anger against the young men who had committed them. Yet what filled his mind was the picture of Rhys as he had seen him on the cobbles, soaked with blood, insensible, and yet still breathing, still just barely alive.
    And then leaping to his mind came the sight of him in the hospital bed, his face swollen and blue with bruising as he opened his eyes and tried desperately to speak, choking in horror, gagging, drowning in pain.
    Evan felt no sense of victory, not even the usual loosening of tension inside himself that knowledge brought. There was no peace in this. “You had better take me to these witnesses,” he said flatly. “I presume they will tell me the same thing? Will they swear in court, do you suppose?” He did not know what he hoped. Even if they would not, nothing could alter the truth of it.
    “You can make them,” Monk answered with impatience in his voice. “The majesty of the law will persuade them. Once in the witness box