William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

Elissa Beck, she was woven into his art as no one else.
    In fact, why was he not there? Was he too overwrought with emotion, or did he not care? Was that why Runcorn was standing so quietly at the back, head bowed, face somber? Monk looked at him again, and as Runcorn became aware of him, he turned away and concentrated on the minister and the brief words of the service. He sounded as if he were simply rehearsing something learned by rote, fulfilling his duty in order to be released to something else. His eulogy was anonymous. He had not known her, and what he said could have applied to any young woman who had died unexpectedly.
    Monk resented it with a bitterness he could not explain. Then the thought occurred to him that if he had died in the coach crash which had robbed him of his memory, he might have been buried as coldly as this, with no one to mourn, the decencies carried out as a public duty by someone who did not take the time or trouble to learn anything more than his name, someone who had never known him and certainly never cared.
    He decided in that moment that he would go to the graveside as well. It was time in which he could have been looking for further evidence of Kristian’s movements. He might find something to prove that Kristian had been far enough away from Acton Street for it to be impossible for him to be guilty. But even as the thought passed through Monk’s mind, he followed the small procession out of the church and along the street towards the already crowded graveyard.
    In the narrow space between the gravestones it was impossible not to find himself next to Runcorn. Whatever had taken him to the church, it could only be some personal emotion which had brought him there. He stood staring at the open hollow in the ground, avoiding Monk’s eyes. He still looked angry to be caught there, yet too stubborn to be put off.
    Monk resisted the idea that Runcorn could possibly feel the same mixture of pity and resentment for Sarah that he did. He and Runcorn were nothing alike. Yet they were there side by side, avoiding each other’s eyes, aware of the chill of the wet ground under their feet and the dark hole gaping in front of them, the ritual words which should have held passion and comfort, if spoken with feeling, and the solitary figure of Mrs. Clark sniffing and dabbing a sodden handkerchief to her eyes.
    When it was over, Monk looked once at Runcorn, who nodded curtly as if they were acquaintances met by chance, then hurried away.
    Monk left a few minutes after him, headed towards the Gray’s Inn Road. He turned his mind back to the question of Kristian’s movements on the evening of the murders. He went to the patients Kristian had visited and asked them again for times as exactly as they could recall. The answers were unsatisfactory. Memories were hazy with pain and with the confusion of days which blurred one into another in a round of medicines, meals, naps, the occasional visit. Time meant very little. There was really no meaning in whether the doctor came at eight or at nine, or on Monday or Tuesday this week, or was it last?
    He left uncertain as to whether or not Kristian could prove himself elsewhere at the time of the murder. He began to fear more and more that he could not.
    What Hester had told him of Elissa’s gambling crowded his mind with ugly thoughts. Too easily, he could imagine the fear of ruin spiraling out of control, until one day the self-discipline snapped and violence broke through. The deed would be done before he had had time to realize what he meant. Then he would be faced with Sarah Mackeson, drunk, frightened, perhaps hysterical and beginning to scream. He would silence her in self-preservation, possibly his old fighting skills returning from the revolution in Vienna, where the cause had been great, and war and death in the air mixed with the hope, and then the despair.
    Did such events change a man’s core, the way he responded to a threat, the value he placed on life?
    He was walking more slowly now, turning south down Gray’s Inn Road. He passed a gingerbread man, very smartly dressed, smiling broadly. “Here’s your nice gingerbread, your spiced gingerbread!” he called out. “Melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat and rumble in your inside like Punch in a wheelbarrow!” He grinned at Monk. “You never heard o’ ’Tiddy Diddy Doll’?”
    Monk smiled back at him. “Yes I did. Bit before your time, though, wasn’t he?”
    “Hundred