William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

know that, girl. What are you saying?”
    “I met a woman in the docklands who runs a clinic for badly injured navvies and sailors. She showed me a syringe with a hollow needle that can put it straight into the blood, if you want to. That kills pain far more swiftly, and thoroughly. Less opium but more effect.”
    Winfarthing nodded slowly. “And more dependency,” he growled. “Of course. Be careful, Hester. Be very careful. Opium addiction’s a wicked thing. You’re right, it’s a sea in which a million men can drown at once, and still each one do it alone. Give it just for pain, then just to get to the next day, finally to stave off the madness. Good men use it on others to ease unbearable suffering, evil ones to create a passion from which few escape.”
    “Who has these needles?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. Do you?”
    “No. I don’t even know if there are many or few. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Dr. Lambourn’s death or not. No one seems to know what was in his report.”
    Winfarthing sat up, his huge body stiff, his eyes wide. “Is that what you think this is about? Not the Pharmacy Act, or the Opium Wars, but someone creating a sickness only they can treat?”
    “I don’t know,” she said again.
    “My dear, people will call you a liar, a traitor to your country for even suggesting such things,” he said gently. “They will defend the perpetrators because it is not easy for us to admit that we have been deceived. No one gives up his delusion of self-worth willingly. Some prefer even to die.”
    “Or to kill?” she said quickly. “Silence the voice that challenges their beliefs? It’s a very old thought, to punish a blasphemer, isn’t it? It could be an easy justification to make.”
    “If somebody had been stoned I might accept that.” He shook his head. “To slit a man’s wrists and make him look like a suicide is not an act of righteous anger, Hester. It is cold-blooded; the sort of thing a man does to protect his own interests, not anyone else’s.”
    She sat silently, picturing Joel Lambourn alone in the darkness on One Tree Hill.
    “To do what was done to Zenia Gadney is the act of a man without even humanity,” Winfarthing went on. “And to do it in order to condemn someone else is beyond even a lunatic to justify.”
    “I believe it was done out of self-interest to protect a fortune made, and still being made, in the opium business.” She refused to give up.
    “Protect it from what?” he asked
    “I already told you I don’t know!” She felt confused and defensive, as if a horrible truth were slipping out of her hands but leaving even uglier lies in its place. “But do you think Lambourn was a failure and a suicide?” she demanded. “Are you trying to prevent me stirring up something embarrassing—at the cost of Dinah Lambourn’s life?”
    A sharp unhappiness filled his face, and she knew she had hurt him.
    “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That wasn’t fair, and I wish I hadn’t said it. I feel helpless. I know there’s something terribly wrong, and I have too little time to make sense of it.”
    He made a small gesture with his hand, dismissing her accusation. “You haven’t changed, have you? Haven’t learned.” He dropped his voice a little and there was a great gentleness in his face. “I’m glad. Some people should never grow old—not inside. But be careful, girl. If there really is something to this, then it is very bad indeed, and very dangerous.” He leaned across to the desk and picked up a pen and a piece of paper. He scribbled a name and address and passed it to her.
    “This is a man who helped Lambourn. He asked a lot of questions about opium, its use and its dangers. He works among the poor, scraping a living the best he can. He may not be easy to find. He’s erratic,happy one day, wretched the next, but he’s a good man. Be careful who you ask for him.”
    She took the paper and glanced at it. Alvar Doulting. It was a name she did not know. “Thank you,” she said, putting it into her small reticule. “I’ll see if I can find him.”
    I T TOOK HER WELL into the next day before she at last found Alvar Doulting, working in a room next to a warehouse down by St. Saviour’s Dock. He had half a dozen patients, suffering mostly deep bruises and crushed or broken bones. With only the briefest of introductions, merely a mention of the Crimea, she began to help him.
    He was a young man, earnest and pale, perhaps