William Monk 16 - Execution Dock

need it.”
    He felt a sudden wave of gratitude choke him too much to answer her. He bent and concentrated on finishing his own pie.
    Afterwards he fetched Durban's notes again, and side by side they spread them all over the table, the seats, and the floor of the parlor, and read every one of them again. For the first time Monk realized just how patchy they were. Some were full of description, seemingly no detail omitted. Others were so brief as to be little more than words jotted down as reminders of whole trains of thought never completed. In some the writing was done in such haste that it was barely legible, and from the jagged forms of the letters and the heaviness of the strokes, it had been in the heat of great emotion.
    “Do you know what this means?” Hester asked him, holding up a torn piece of paper with the words
Was it money? What else?
written across it with a different pen.
    “I don't know,” he admitted. He had found other notes, scribbled sentences, unanswered questions that he had assumed referred to Phillips, but perhaps did not. He had reread the notes on all other cases at the time, both of Durban's and those kept in the station by anyone else. He had checked all the prosecutions recorded in the station archives too.
    Hester was still watching him. He thought he knew what she was going to say, if not with this piece of paper then with the next, or the one after.
    “It could be something to do with his own life,” he said to her at last. “Personal. I hadn't realized how little I really know about him.” He remembered back to those few, hectic days together searching for the crew of the
Maude Idris
, believing they were ashore somewhere in the teeming docks, and knowing they were infected and dying. He and Durban had worked until they were so exhausted they slept where they collapsed. They woke again after an hour or two, and staggered on. He had never had a more desperate or terrible case, and yet there had been a feeling of companionship whose memory still made him smile. Durban had liked him, and he did not know anyone else who had done so with instant and unquestioning honesty.
    If he had had any other friend like that, it had been in that huge part of the past he could no longer remember. He had sudden moments of light on the shadow, so brief as to give him only an image, never a story Judging from what he had heard and deduced of who he was, the intelligence and the ruthlessness, the relentless energy that drove him, even Durban would not have liked him then. Certainly Runcorn had not, and neither Hester nor Oliver Rathbone had known him. Hester might have tamed him, but without that searing vulnerability of his confusion and the fear of his own guilt in Joscelyn Gray's death, why would she have bothered? He had little humanity to offer until he was forced to look within himself and examine the worst.
    He was glad Durban had known only the man he had become, and not the original.
    What lay in the spaces around his mental construction of Durban that Monk did not know? Was the compulsion to catch Jericho Phillips going to force him to intrude into the areas of Durban's life that Durban had chosen to keep private, perhaps because there was pain there, failure, old wounds he needed to forget?
    “I can remember his voice,” he said aloud, meeting her steady eyes. “His face, the way he walked, what made him laugh, what he liked to eat. He loved to see dawn on the river and watch the early ferries start out across the water. He used to walk alone and watch the play of light and shadow, the mist evaporating like silk gauze. He liked to see the forest of spars when we had a lot of tall ships in the Pool. He liked the sound and smells of the wharves, especially when the spice ships were unloading. He liked to listen to the cry of gulls, and men talking all the different foreign languages, as if the whole earth with its wealth and variety had come here to London. He never said so, but I think he was proud to be a Londoner.”
    He stopped, his emotion too strong for the moment. Then he drew in a deep breath.
    “I didn't want to talk about my past, and I didn't care about his. For any of us, it's who you are today that matters.”
    Hester smiled, looked away, then back again at him. “Durban wasa real person, William,” she said gently. “Good and bad, wise and stupid. Picking out bits to like isn't really liking at all. It isn't friendship, it's comfort for you. You're better than that,