William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

course, thank you. Miss Latterly …”
    “Yes?”
    “Does Rhys remember what happened to him?”
    “I don’t know. Usually people do, but not always. I have a friend who had an accident and was struck on the head. He has only the vaguest flashes of his life before that day. At times a sight or a sound, a smell, will recall something to him, but only fragments. He has to piece it together as well as he can and leave the rest. He has re-created a good life for himself.” She abandoned the pretense of eating. “But Rhys was not struck on the head. He knows he’s home, he knows you. It is simply that night he may not recall, and perhaps that is best. There are some memories we cannot bear. To forget is nature’s way of helping us keep our sanity. It is a way for the mind to heal, when natural forgetting would be impossible.”
    Sylvestra stared at her plate. “The police are going to try to make him remember. They need to know who attacked him and who murdered my husband.” She looked up. “What if he can’t bear to remember, Miss Latterly? What if they force him, show him evidence, bring a witness or whatever, and make him relive it? Will it break his mind? Can’t you stop that? Isn’t there a way we can protect him? There has to be!”
    “Yes, of course,” Hester said before she really thought. Her mind was filled with memories of Rhys trying desperately to speak, of his eyes wide with horror, of his sweat-soaked bodyas he struggled in nightmare, rigid with terror, his throat contracted in a silent scream and pain ripping through him, and no one heard, no one came. “He is far too ill to be harassed, and I am sure Dr. Wade will tell them so. Anyway, since he cannot speak or write, there is little he can do except to indicate yes or no. They will have to solve this case by other means.”
    “I don’t know how!” Sylvestra’s voice rose in desperation. “I cannot help them. All they asked me were useless questions about what Leighton was wearing and when he went out. None of that is going to achieve anything.”
    “What would help?” Hester poured her cold tea into the slop basin and reached for the pot, politely offering it to Sylvestra as well. At Sylvestra’s nod, she refilled both cups.
    “I wish I knew,” Sylvestra said almost under her breath. “I’ve racked my brain to think what Leighton would have been doing in a place like that, and all I can imagine is that he went after Rhys. He was … he was very angry when he left home, far angrier than I told that young man from the police. It seems so disloyal to discuss family quarrels with strangers.”
    Hester knew she meant not so much strangers as people from a different social order, as she must consider Evan to be. She would not know his father was a minister of the church, and he had chosen police work from a sense of dedication to justice, not because it was his natural place in society.
    “Of course,” she agreed. “It is painful to admit, even to oneself, of a quarrel which cannot now be repaired. One has to set it amid the rest of the relationship and see it as merely a part, only by mischance the last part. It was probably far less important than it seems. Had Mr. Duff lived they would surely have made up their differences.” She did not leave it exactly a question.
    Sylvestra sipped her fresh tea. “They were quite unlike each other. Rhys is the youngest. Leighton said I indulged him. Perhaps I did. I … I felt I understood him so well.” Her face puckered with hurt. “Now it looks as if I didn’t understand him at all. And my failure may have cost my husband his life.…” Her fingers gripped the cup so tightly Hester was afraid shewould break it and spill the hot liquid over herself, even cut her hands on the shards.
    “Don’t torture yourself with that, when you don’t know if it is true,” she urged. “Perhaps you can think of something which may help the police learn why they went to St. Giles. It may stem from something that happened some time before that evening. It is a fearful place. They must have had a very compelling reason. Could it have been on someone else’s account? A friend in trouble?”
    Sylvestra looked up at her quickly, her eyes bright. “That would make some sense of it, wouldn’t it?”
    “Yes. Who are Rhys’s friends? Who might he care about sufficiently to go to such a place to help? Perhaps someone who had borrowed money. It can happen … a gambling debt a young man dared