William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

Parfitt had not been there.
    Crumble had verified ’Orrie’s departure and return on both journeys. Tosh had backed him up, giving his own movements—not difficult since he and Crumble had been together most of the time.
    Ballinger had boarded the ferry at approximately ten past nine, and had been rowed all the way up past the Eyot, along Corney Reach, right to Mortlake, where Harkness swore to his arrival, and later his departure. The ferryman affirmed having collected him again at half past midnight, and reached Chiswick at one in the morning, more or less.
    Whereas Rupert Cardew had been drunk and unaccounted for for most of the evening after he had left Hattie Benson, who said she had stolen his cravat and given it to someone she refused to name. Fear? Or had she been paid to say this, and her fear was for the consequences of lying?
    Parfitt’s body had been found almost halfway along Corney Reach, upriver from where his boat had been moored. The questions burned in Monk’s mind. How far had it drifted—or been dragged? Where had he actually been killed? Was it necessarily on the boat? Could he have had ’Orrie take him to the boat, and then left it again in some kind of dinghy from the boat itself? Or could someone else have come by water, and he had gone with them?
    Monk needed answers to all of these questions.
    Had Mickey’s murderer taken him away and dropped his body overboard higher up, for it to drift downstream, misleading them all? The more Monk thought of that, the more it seemed to make sense. He could have been approaching the whole crime from the wrong direction from the beginning. It had looked like a murder of desperation, committed by a man angry and afraid of exposure, or bled dry by blackmail and facing exposure. But perhaps it had been more carefully planned than that, and by a far cooler head—not a crime of passion but a business decision.
    Could Parfitt have been rebelling against his backer, his greed jeopardizing the whole project? Or had he been skimming to keep a higher percentage of the profit for himself?
    Which brought Monk back to the question he both dreaded and most wanted to answer—could Ballinger himself have killed Parfitt? Or was that thought ridiculous?
    He went over the times of every movement again, carefully. If everyone were telling the truth—Tosh, ’Orrie Jones, Crumble, the ferryman, Harkness, Hattie Benson, even Rupert Cardew—then it would have been possible for Ballinger, a strong rower, according to Harkness, to have taken Harkness’s own boat from its moorings and met Parfitt somewhere along the river out of sight. He could have killed him and put his body in the water, then rowed back to moor the boat again, and taken the ferry back to Chiswick, exactly as he had said. It was tight, but still possible. The thought churned in his stomach—heavy, sick, and impossible to get rid of.
    How honest was his own thinking in this? Did he want the answer so desperately that he would settle for anything except defeat?
    What he needed was proof that Ballinger had known Parfitt, and, if possible, Jericho Phillips as well. That would take a long and very careful retracing of all the evidence, examining it, looking for a completely different pattern from before. He must start straightaway, as soon as he had seen this Hattie Benson and had verified for himself her evidence regarding the cravat.
    H E FOUND HER BY the middle of the following morning, sitting in the kitchen of her small, shared house in Chiswick. She looked tired and puffy-eyed, but even with a torn wrap around her nightgown and her hair tousled and falling out of its pins, there was a beauty in her flawless skin and the naïveté of her face.
    “I in’t done nothin’,” she said before Monk even sat down on the rickety-backed chair at the other side of the table from her.
    He smiled bleakly. “I don’t want to prosecute you, Miss Benson. I believe you can help me.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? This time o’ the mornin’, an’ all. Yer should be ashamed o’ yerself. Wot’d yer wife say, then, eh?”
    “You can ask her, if you meet her again,” he replied with a ruefulsmile. “I would like you to tell me what you told her about taking Rupert Cardew’s dark blue cravat with the leopards on it.”
    Hattie stared at him, her mouth open.
    “She came here with a man called Crow, I believe,” Monk continued. “You told them what happened the afternoon before Mickey Parfitt’s body