William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

shades of silver and gold edged the ruffles over the surface and marked the wakes of barges.
    Monk and Durban stopped at another public house for something to eat, and were glad of the warmth. Outside the wind was rising. Neither of them said anything about the necessity to keep looking. Even the thought of home and sleep had to be pushed from the mind. Every hour counted, and they had no lead yet.
    They ate in silence, glancing at one another every now and then, mostly listening, watching, trying to catch the odd snatch of conversation which might refer to a sailor by name, or to someone home from Africa and looking for another ship. They had been there three quarters of an hour and were getting ready to leave when Monk heard a man with a hacking cough, and realized that he had also been listening for word of anyone ill, or even of a death.
    “Where do sick men go?” he asked Durban abruptly, just as they rose to their feet.
    Durban swung around to face him, his eyes wide. “Sailors’ homes, the lucky ones. Doss-houses, the others—or worse than that, some pick a nethersken on the street.”
    Monk did not need to ask what a nethersken was; he knew the cant names for all the different sorts of cheap lodging, anything to be in out of the rain and share the warmth of other bodies. However dirty they were, or lice-ridden, their shelter might be the difference between survival and freezing to death.
    He made no comment, and neither did Durban. For these few hours, or days, they were both policemen with a single task. Their understanding and their unity of purpose formed a bond as deep as brotherhood.
    They moved into the backstreets of the dockside, going from one house to another, always asking discreetly, following any word about a man who might be sick or one who was free with his money. They did not mention names; they could not afford to alarm anyone. Lies came as easily and inventively as the need arose.
    By one in the morning they were cold and exhausted, and had pursued half a dozen dead ends. Durban stood in an alley where the wind moaned up the narrow crack between the buildings, his face half illuminated by the one lamp on the outside wall of a doss-house. His shoulders were hunched and he was shivering. He looked at Monk wordlessly.
    “One more?” Monk suggested. “Could be lucky? Someone must have seen them.”
    Durban’s eyes widened a little.
    “Or we could sleep on it?” Monk smiled.
    Durban’s face eased, his eyes softer for a moment. “Right.” He straightened up, stamping his feet to keep some kind of circulation going, and led the way.
    The doss-house keeper began to refuse them. She was a thin, angular woman with a tired face, and gray hair that was straggling out of an irregular knot. Then she saw the money Monk offered and she changed her mind.
    “Gotta share!” she warned. “But there’s clean straw on the floor, an’ yer out o’ the wind.” She took the few pence and put it away in a pocket well in the inside of her voluminous skirts, then she led them to a small room at the back of the house. It was as primitive as she had said, and already occupied by two other men, but it was tolerably warm.
    Monk found himself a place to lie down in the straw, bunching some of it together to form a pillow, and tried to sleep. He was tired enough, and his muscles ached from walking the endless alleys in the damp with the wind off the water cutting the flesh. But he was too cold, and thoughts of his own bed and Hester beside him—not only the warmth of her body but the deeper warmth of her thoughts, her dreams, her whole being—made this sour room with its restless and hopeless men a unique kind of hell.
    He drifted into a kind of sleep, but it did not last long. He was too cold and the floor was too hard for him to relax. He could not bear to imagine where she was now, how much worse it was for her than for him, how much greater the danger. He lay in the dark listening to the rustle of straw, the heavy breathing of the men, and forced his mind to think.
    He pieced together everything he knew and tried to make sense of it. Where would a sailor go ashore? They had already tried taverns, brothels, and doss-houses along this stretch of the river. They had found a score of men more or less like the ones from the
Maude Idris
, but never the right ones. Was it a hopeless task, one only a desperate man, or a fool, would even try?
    What were the alternatives? To alert the police forces