William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

“I won’t. Please wait here. I shall return in a few minutes.”
    He kept his word. Ten minutes later he was in a hansom, sitting silently between Monk and Orme.

CHAPTER
5
    R ATHBONE FELT A TOUCH of chill in the pit of his stomach when his clerk told him Monk was in the waiting room, looking tired and rather drawn.
    “Send him in,” Rathbone replied. He wanted to get it over with. He would find it hard to give his full attention to a client, with his imagination racing as to what it was that Monk had discovered. The fact that he had come to Rathbone at all made it inescapable that it had to do with Mickey Parfitt’s murder and the boat on which he’d practiced his particularly filthy trade.
    Rathbone had tried to put from his mind Sullivan’s words blaming Arthur Ballinger for his downfall—first the temptation, then the corruption. Had his mind been deranged, and he had blamed Ballinger because he could not accept his own responsibility for what he had become? There had never been anything but words, perhaps hysterical—no facts, not even any details Sullivan could not have invented himself.
    Monk came in through the door and closed it behind him. The clerk was right: he looked tired and miserable, almost defeated. The iron fist inside Rathbone’s stomach clenched tighter. He waited.
    “I found out who killed Mickey Parfitt,” Monk said quietly. “The proof seems pretty conclusive. I thought you’d like to know.”
    “I would!” Rathbone snapped. “So damned well tell me! Don’t stand there like an undertaker with toothache—tell me!”
    A smile flickered across Monk’s face and disappeared. “Rupert Cardew.”
    Rathbone was stunned. He had difficulty believing it. Certainly Rupert was a little dissolute, but surely not more than many young men with too much money and too many privileges. How on earth could he have become so degraded so young?
    And yet even as a kind of sorrow washed over Rathbone, so did a relief. It was ridiculous to think that Arthur Ballinger could really have been involved with pornography, blackmail, and murder. If Claudine Burroughs had been correct and it really was Ballinger she had seen in the alley outside the shop with the photographs, then Ballinger must have been helping a friend, acting in his capacity of solicitor for some poor devil in over his head. Possibly he had even been attempting to pay off the blackmail by stealing the photographs with which the friend was being coerced. Yes, of course. A simple explanation; as soon as Rathbone thought of it, he wondered why it had taken him so long.
    “I’m very sorry,” he said, meeting Monk’s eyes and seeing the sadness in them. For Hester, no doubt. Cardew had given much to the clinic, and she was not only grateful, but she liked him. How typical of Hester to befriend the troubled, someone others would shun when they knew.
    Until she knew also; then she too would shun him. Many things she would forgive, but she would never countenance a man who abused and murdered children—vulnerable children, cold, hungry, and alone, like Scuff.
    Monk stood very straight; he always did, with a kind of grace that was almost an arrogance. Except that, knowing him as well as he did, Rathbone understood that most of it was defense, his armor of beliefin himself, the more rigid since his loss of memory had left him uniquely vulnerable.
    Now it would be Hester whose pain Monk was preparing for. There would be no way he could comfort her, or ease the disillusion. Rupert Cardew must be like the young officers she had known in the Crimea, the ones she had seen wounded, dying, still struggling to keep some kind of dignity. She had been helpless then to save most of them, and she could do nothing for Rupert now.
    Monk gave a slight shrug. “I thought you would want to know.” He did not add anything about Ballinger, or Margaret, but it did not need to be said between them. Neither of them would ever forget that night on Jericho Phillips’s boat—the horror and the fear that Scuff was already dead and they were too late, the stench of the dead rats in the bilges as they pulled him out, small and very white, his body shaking. Nor would they forget the corpses at Execution Dock.
    “You are sure it was him?” Rathbone asked. He was surprised how normal his voice sounded.
    “The bastard was strangled with his cravat,” Monk told him. “The surgeon cut it out of Parfitt’s neck where the flesh had swollen over it. The design is