William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

and butter and jam. I’ll waken him, and then I’m ready.”
    S QUEAKY LOOKED UP FROM his ledger as Hester came into his room and closed the door behind her.
    “You look as if you lost sixpence and found nothing,” he said dourly. “Her ladyship giving you difficulties?”
    “No, not at the moment,” she replied. She took the envelope out of her pocket, and then the list as well. She put them both on the table in front of him, but kept her finger on the list, leaning forward a little so her weight was on her hand.
    There was not a flicker in his face.
    “It’s torn,” he observed. “In’t no use like that. What’re you giving it to me for? Get Claudine ter make it out again.”
    “Is it Claudine’s hand?” she asked.
    “Course it is! You gone blind or summink?” He squinted up at her. “You look sick. What’s wrong?” Now he was anxious, even concerned for her.
    She turned the paper over.
    He frowned, looking at it, reading it. “What in hell’s that?” he demanded. “It means summink, or you wouldn’t be looking at it with a face on you like a burst boot. Who’s supposed to go … Oh, jeez!”
    The usual trace of color vanished from his sallow face. “It’s to do with that bleeding murder, isn’t it? You can’t think Claudine had anything to do with it? That’s just stupid. You’ve taken leave of your wits if you think she’d even know about things like that. You think she went up there and done in Mickey Parfitt? With Cardew’s necktie, and all? You think he left it behind here, and she—”
    “No, Squeaky, I don’t. But did you?” Even as she said it, she thought of Hattie Benson safe downstairs in the laundry, with Claudine apparently looking after her, and Squeaky supposed to keep everyone else from going down and seeing her.
    His face was full of conflicting emotions: anger, hurt, fear, and also a kind of gentleness. “No, I didn’t. I s’pose I had that coming, for my past life, and if I’d’ve known what Parfitt was, I might have. I’d also have more sense than to write him a note on paper from here!”
    “Is it from here?” Hester asked.
    He looked at it again. “No. We don’t spend that sort of money on paper. Even the ledger isn’t that good. But just ’cos it’s quality don’t mean Claudine had anything to do with it. She may be an odd old article, but when you get to know her, she’s solid. She’s got guts, and she don’t never tell no lies. You can’t think that of her. It’s wrong.”
    “I didn’t,” she admitted.
    He winced. “You thought I did it.” It was a statement. “Well, I could have. He needed doing, best at the end of a rope. And I wouldn’t help you catch whoever did do it. But it weren’t me.”
    She believed him.
    “Thank you,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow I’ll ask Claudine if she remembers writing this, and what she did with it.”
    “Don’t you let her feel you think as she done it!” he warned. “It’d hurt her something terrible, and she don’t deserve that.”
    In spite of herself, Hester smiled. She could remember very clearly how Claudine and Squeaky had hated each other in the beginning. She had thought him obscene, both physically and morally. He had seen her as arrogant, useless, and cold, a middle-aged woman sterile of mind and devoid of passions. It had been her crazy pursuit of Phillips’s pornographic photographs, at fearful risk to herself, that had finally changed his mind. And it was his effective, if rather quixotic, rescue of her that had changed her mind about him.
    “I won’t,” she promised.
    H ESTER WAS IN EARLY on Monday morning, but a brief and businesslike meeting with Margaret in the pantry delayed her meeting with Claudine.
    “We are rather short of laundry supplies,” Margaret warned. “I have just been down there and cautioned them to be a little less generous in their use. We cannot afford to replace them at this rate.”
    “Thank you,” Hester said briefly. “Is there anything else?”
    Margaret hesitated, seemingly on the edge of saying something more, then changed her mind and went out of the room. Hester heard her footsteps on the wooden floor, brisk and purposeful.
    She found Claudine in the medicine room and showed her the paper, holding out only the side with the list on it.
    Claudine frowned, then looked up and met Hester’s eyes. “What happened to it? I wrote it out for Margaret, and she got me all those things. That list is several weeks old.”
    Hester felt