William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

they have no reason to lie. That is not your decision anyway.”
    He was right. There was nothing to argue about.
    “Then I’ll take it to Runcorn,” Evan went on. He smiled with a downward turn of his lips. “He won’t be amused that you solved the case.”
    A curious look crossed Monk’s face, a mixture of irony and something which could have been regret, or even a form of guilt. Evan was aware of uncertainty in him, a hesitation, as if there was something else he wanted to talk about, but was unsure how to begin. He was making no move to rise from his comfortable chair.
    “I know he refused to pursue the rapes,” Evan started. “But with this it’s different. No one will bother prosecuting that when there is the murder. That’s what we’ll charge them with. We will only prove the rapes to establish motive. The ones in Seven Dials will be by implication.”
    “I know.”
    Evan was puzzled. Why did Monk’s contempt for Runcorn run so deep? Runcorn was pompous at times, but it was hismanner of defending himself from the triviality he felt in his life, perhaps the loneliness. He was a man who seemed to know little else but the concern of his work, the value it gave him, even his relationships with others. Evan realized he knew nothing whatever of the man Runcorn was when he left the police station, except that he never spoke of family or other friends, other pastimes. Had Monk ever considered such things?
    “Do you still think he should have pressed the cases of rape alone?” he asked, hearing the criticism in his voice.
    Monk shrugged. “No.” He sounded reluctant. “He was right. It would have put the victims through more of an ordeal than the offenders … presuming they would even have testified … which they probably wouldn’t. I would not ask any woman I cared for to do that. We would be pursuing it far more for our own sense of vengeance than anything to do with the well-being of the women, or even justice. They would suffer and the men would go free. We wouldn’t even be able to try them again, even if we eventually found proof, because they would have been vindicated by the law.” There was anger in his face, but it was for the situation, not for Runcorn.
    “Rape is not a crime for which we have any answer even remotely just or compassionate,” he went on. “It strikes at a part of the emotions which we don’t exercise honestly, let alone govern with rationality. It is even more primitive than murder. Why is that, Evan? We deny it, excuse it, torture logic and twist facts to pretend it did not happen, that somehow it was the victim’s fault and therefore not the crime we named it.”
    “I don’t know,” Evan said, even as he was thinking. “It is something to do with violation—”
    “For God’s sake! It is the woman who is violated!” Monk exploded, his face dark.
    “Yes, it is,” Evan agreed wryly. “But the violation we get so upset about is our own. Our property has been spoiled. Someone has taken something to which only we have the right. The rape of any woman is a reminder that our own women can also be spoiled that way. It is a very intimate thing.”
    “So is murder,” Monk retorted.
    “Murder is only your own life.” Evan was still thinking aloud. “Rape is the contamination of your posterity, the fountainhead of your immortality, if you look at it that way.”
    Monk’s eyebrows rose. “Do you look at it that way?”
    “No. But then I believe in a resurrection of the body.” Evan had thought he would apologize to Monk for his faith, but he found himself speaking with a perfectly calm and untroubled voice, as his own father would have done to a parishioner. “I believe in an individual soul which travels through eternity. This life is far from all there is—in fact, it is a minute part, simply an antechamber, a deciding place where we choose the light from the dark, where we come to know what we truly value.”
    “It’s a place of bloody injustice, inequity and waste,” Monk said hoarsely. “How can you possibly walk around St. Giles, as you have been doing, and even imagine a God that is worthy of anything but fear or hate? Better for your sanity to think injustice is random and simply do what you can to redress the worst monstrosities.”
    Evan leaned forward, all the energy of his spirit in his words, fragments half remembered returning to his tongue. “Do you want a just world, where sin is punished immediately and virtue