William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

the two protagonists faced each other. Pendreigh was magnificent merely in his presence, even before he needed to speak. He was a most striking figure with his height and his elegance of movement. His mane of shining hair was largely concealed by his wig, but the light still caught the golden edges of it. To those who knew he was the victim’s father, and thus the father-in-law of the accused, his presence was like the charge of electricity in the air before a storm.
    Up in the dock, which was set at a height and quite separate from the body of the court, Kristian was white-faced, his eyes hollow, looking dark and very un-English. Would that tell against him? She looked again at the jury. To a man they were concentrating on the counsel for the prosecution, a diminutive man with a quite ordinary face of intense sincerity. When he spoke briefly his voice was gentle, well-modulated, the kind that almost immediately sounds familiar, as if you must know him but simply have forgotten where and how.
    The indictment was read. Callandra had been to trials before, but there was a reality about this one that was almost physical in its impact. When she heard the word
murder
, not once but twice, she could feel the sweat break out on her body, and the packed room seemed to swim in her vision as if she were going to faint. Dimly, she felt Hester’s fingers grasp her arm and the strength of it steadied her.
    The witnesses were brought on one by one, starting with the police constable who had first found the bodies. The shock and sense of tragedy were still clear in him, and Callandra could feel the response to it in the room.
    There was nothing Pendreigh or anyone else could have done to alter either the facts or the compassion. At least he was wise enough not to try.
    The constable was followed by Runcorn, looking unhappy but perfectly certain of himself, and suitably respectful both of the court and of the subjects of passion and death. Callandra was startled at the anger in him when he spoke of Sarah Mackeson, as if in some way he did not understand himself and it outraged him. There was a gulf of every kind of difference between her and this relatively uneducated, certainly unpolished, policeman with his prejudices and ambitions. He had been an enemy to Monk all the time she had known him, and long before that, and she thought him pompous, self-absorbed and thoroughly tiresome.
    And yet looking at him now, she could see that his anger was honest, and cleaner than any of the ritual words of the legal procedure being played out. He would have hated anyone to know it, but he cared.
    The jury heard it, and Callandra saw with cold fear how an answering anger was born in them. Because Sarah was real to Runcorn, with a life that mattered, she became more real to them also, and their determination to punish someone for her death the greater.
    She knew it would go on like this, day after day. For all his sharpness of intellect, the legion of words at his command, and his understanding of the law, there was nothing Fuller Pendreigh could do against the facts which would be displayed one by one. Where was Monk? What had he learned in Vienna? There must be some other explanation, and please heaven he would find it. Please heaven it would be soon enough.
    She sat sick and shivering as the trial went on around her as relentlessly as if it were a play being acted from a script already written and there was no avoiding the climax at the end, or the tragedy.
     
     
    Monk went to see Father Geissner in his home as Magda Beck had suggested. The first time, the housekeeper told him that the Father was occupied, but he made an appointment for the following day. Fretting at the time lost, he spent the remaining hours of daylight wandering around the city looking at the areas which had featured most heavily in the uprising, trying to picture it in his mind, event by event, as he had been told it.
    Nothing in the calm, prosperous streets told him that the cafés and shops, the comfortable houses, had witnessed desperation and violence, nor was there anything reflected in the faces of people hurrying about their business, buying and selling, gossiping, calling out greetings in the sharp, cold air.
    In the evening, Monk did as everyone had been so keen to suggest to him, and went to hear the young Johann Strauss conduct his orchestra. The gay, lyrical music had caught Europe by storm, delighting even the rather staid and unimaginative Queen Victoria,