William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

“Mr. Pendreigh . . .”
    He recalled his attention and turned his eyes to her, but he did not speak.
    “Mr. Pendreigh, we must do what we can to help. You have said you do not believe Dr. Beck is guilty. Then someone else must be.”
    “Yes . . .” he said, then more abruptly, “Yes . . . of course.” He focused his attention with difficulty. “What about the artist, Allardyce? I should be loath to think it was he, but it has to be a possibility. Elissa was extremely beautiful . . .” For a moment his voice faltered, and he made an immense effort to bring it back into control. “Men were fascinated by her. It wasn’t just her face, it was a . . . a vitality, a love of life, an energy which I never saw in anyone else. Allardyce loved to paint her. Perhaps he wanted more than that, and she refused him. He might have . . .” He did not finish the thought, but the rest of it was obvious. It did not surprise her that he could not bear to put it into words.
    But Monk had told her that Allardyce could account for his time. He had spent the evening at the Bull and Half Moon in Southwark, miles from Acton Street, on the other side of the Thames.
    “It was not he,” she told Pendreigh. “The police can prove that.”
    A sharp frown creased his forehead, making two deep lines like cuts between his brows. “Then we are back to the only answer which makes sense . . . Sarah Mackeson was the intended victim. If the police do not pursue that to the very end, then we must employ Monk to do so. There is something in her life, in her past, which has driven a past lover, a rival, a creditor, to quarrel with her in a way which ended in murder. The reason is there! We must find it!”
    “I will speak to William, of course,” she agreed with a fervor which was meant to convince herself as much as Pendreigh. “He said that apparently she was a very handsome woman, and her life was a little . . . haphazard.” That was a euphemism she hoped he would understand. She did not wish to speak ill of her, and yet she hoped profoundly that the answer was as simple as that.
    Pendreigh sighed. There was an unhappiness in him so profound it filled the room with grief more effectively than hanging every picture with crepe had done, or turning all the mirrors face to the wall and stopping the clocks.
    “Rejection can make people behave irrationally,” she went on quietly. “Even far against anything they really wish for or believe. But remorse afterwards does not undo the act, nor bring back that which has been destroyed.”
    He dropped his head into his hands, hiding his emotion. “No, of course not,” he said, his voice muffled. “We must save what we can from the tragedy.”
    She was uncertain whether to rise to her feet now and excuse herself, or if it would be kinder to wait a few moments rather than force him to stand, as courtesy demanded, before he had had time to compose himself. She was actually hungry, and would like to have eaten more of the cucumber sandwiches, but it seemed an oddly heartless thing to do, and she left them. Instead she sat straight-backed, upright on the edge of the chair, waiting until he should be ready to bid her good-bye with the kind of dignity he could afterwards remember without embarrassment.
     
     
    Monk and Runcorn were together in Runcorn’s office the following day. They were both tired and irritable after spending a morning and early afternoon plowing through steady rain from one gambling establishment to another in the path of Elissa Beck, and people like her, both men and women. The addiction to the excitement of chance and the small element of skill involved made no discrimination for age or wealth, man or woman. There was something in certain characters that, once they had tasted the thrill of winning, could not let it go, even when part of them was perfectly aware of the destruction it was causing. They saw their winnings as larger than they were, their losses as smaller, and always there was the hope that the next turn of the card would redeem it all.
    “I don’t understand it,” Runcorn said desperately, staring at his sodden boots. He had been obliged to step in the gutter to pass a group of women talking to each other and oblivious of passersby. “It’s like a kind of madness. Why do people do it?”
    Monk could understand it, at least in part, enough to feel a brush of fear at how easily he might have become one of them if his path in life had been a little