William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

don’t know what!”
    “How about the Lord’s Prayer?”
    Claudine nodded. Together they pronounced the familiar words slowly, a little huskily. Then Claudine folded the dead woman’s hands, and Hester went to fetch Sutton and ask for his help.
    He was in the laundry, rewarding Snoot for having found a rat’s nest. He looked up as Hester came in. His face was grave, expectant. He saw her expression. “She go?” he asked. “Poor soul. ’Oo knows?”
    “Just Claudine and I,” she replied.
    “Good. We better get ’er out before light.” He straightened up. “Go ter bed, Snoot. Good boy. You stay there like yer told.” He turned back to Hester. “I’ll get the fellers ter take ’er. Sorry but we’ll ’ave ter wind ’er in a sheet. I know yer can’t afford ter lose no more, but there in’t no better way. ’Ceptin’ a blanket, mebbe, if yer got a dark one? Less easy seen.”
    “I’ll find you a dark gray blanket,” she promised. “But what will they do with her? She can’t just be . . . I mean, she has to be buried too.” She thought of the silent, miserable business of taking Ruth Clark’s body out and leaving it on the cobbles in the rain for the men to take to an unknown grave. She had not asked where then; it was more than she wanted to know.
    No doctor had seen Ruth, nor could they see Martha, not even an undertaker: he would see the throat and think she had been murdered. There was an irony in that she had not, not morally anyway. Ruth had, but there were hours at a time when Hester forgot that, and she had barely turned her mind to the question of who had done it, or why. Now it was poor, stupid, terrified Martha who mattered. That hysteria lay close under the surface in all of them. She licked her lips. They were so dry they hurt. “In hallowed ground?” she asked tentatively. “Is that impossible? I just can’t bear to think of her being pushed away somewhere in a drain or something.”
    “Don’ worry,” Sutton said gently. “I got friends as can do all sorts o’ things. There’s graves in corners o’ proper places as got more bodies in ’em than they ’ave names on the stones. The dead don’ care if they share a bit. She won’t be left unblessed or unprayed for. Nor Ruth Clark neither.”
    She felt the tears prickle in her eyes, and the sheer weight of exhaustion, loneliness, pity, and fear overwhelmed her. His kindness sharpened it almost beyond bearing. She wanted to thank him, but her throat was choked.
    He nodded, his face hollow in the candlelight. “Go find the blanket,” he told her.
    Claudine helped her roll the body and very quickly stitch the makeshift shroud around her, catching it in places so it would not fall undone if she were carried hastily, and perhaps with little skill. They did not speak, but every few moments their eyes met, and a kind of understanding made them move in unison, each reaching to help the other.
    Squeaky came upstairs again. The three of them took her with stumbling steps, awkwardly, their backs aching, along the passage and to the back door, then outside into the yard. Hester raised her arm in signal to the men. In the faint light of street lamps twenty yards away they looked huge and untidy, coats flapping in the rising wind, bareheaded, hair plastered down. The rain made their skins shiny, almost masklike in the unnatural shadows. They acknowledged Hester and Claudine, but waited until they had gone back inside before they approached.
    Sutton went out alone and spoke to the men.
    The larger of the two nodded and beckoned his companion. Carefully they picked up the corpse, and without speaking they turned and walked slowly in the rain. They stood very upright with the weight balanced between them as if they were used to such a thing.
    Hester and Claudine stood side by side at the doorway, so close their bodies touched, watching as the men passed under the street lamp. For a moment the rain was lit above them in bright streams. Then it glimmered pale on their backs as they retreated into the darkness. The van at the end of the street was little more than a greater denseness in the shadows.
    No one spoke. It was quite unnecessary, and there was nothing to say. In a few hours another day would begin.

TWELVE
    Rathbone had been to visit Gould in prison because he had promised Monk that he would. He had expected to find a man he was morally obliged to defend, not for the man’s sake, or because he was moved by any conviction that