William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

throat ached from it.
    “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “When I get him.”
    “They said Lambourn slit ’is wrists?” she went on, staring at him steadily.
    “Yes,” he agreed.
    “But ’e didn’t,” she pressed. Her voice was firm now, no doubt in it.
    “I don’t think so,” Monk said quietly. He would not pretend to be certain.
    “Better off than some, but it shouldn’t ’ave ’appened.”
    “What sort of person am I looking for?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”
    She gave a little grunt of disgust. “If I knew that, I’d get ’im meself. Someone secret, ’oo don’t look like ’e’d know opium from corn flour. Someone ’oo’s clean an’ polite an’ never seen wot ’appens to them as sticks that stuff in their veins an’ takes a one-way visit to madness. But now an’ again the ones like me sees their faces lookin’ out between the bars at the rest of us.”
    Monk was silent for several moments, then he stood up.
    “Thank you,” he said, then turned and walked away.
    He went back to Wapping, his mind teeming with what Agatha Nisbet had said. He was looking for the man who profited from selling not just opium, but the needles that made it possible to become lethally addicted to it within a matter of weeks, even days. It was nothing to do with ordinary doses anyone could buy in patent medicines, or even the Chinese habit of smoking it, bad enough in its slow destruction.
    The problem was not only to find him, but even when he did, what would he do about it? To sell such damnation might be one of the vilest of sins, but it was not against the law. Unless, of course, the man was also involved in the murder of Lambourn and of Zenia Gadney.
    But since it was not a crime to sell opium, and needles, even if Joel Lambourn found out, why kill him? What could he have done to harm such a man? What could he prove?
    It was still a tangle too dense to penetrate.
    In his office Monk reread all he had on the people concerned in the research for the Pharmacy Act, making a list of all of those who had come into contact with Joel Lambourn. He would have to compare this list with whatever Runcorn could find on Lambourn’s movements in the last week of his life.
    But then, of course, it did not have to be direct contact. It might have been indirect, someone who mentioned a name, a fact to someone else.
    Who was the person that Agatha Nisbet believed had been corrupted into selling opium and needles for the man behind the scheme? How would they find him, and if they did, would he tell them anything of use?
    The other half of the problem was not yet answered, perhaps the easier half: Who knew what Lambourn had learned so that it reached the man behind the sales, the real profiteer, the one who had killed him, and then killed Zenia Gadney? What was the line of reasoning that connected them all?
    Was the damning information in Lambourn’s report, or was its destruction a red herring to justify his apparent suicide? Monk knew he must look harder for it, at the very least find out exactly who had ordered its destruction, and who had carried it out.
    He would ask Runcorn to put someone good on to the task of looking yet again.
    The report had been handed to Barclay Herne, who had apparently told Sinden Bawtry that it was so ill prepared as to be no use for the purpose of persuading Parliament to pass the Pharmacy Act.
    Who else had seen it? If no one had, then the seller of opium had to be one of those two. But would Herne have killed his brother-in-law? Both Bawtry and Herne had alibis. They had been at the Atheneum the night Lambourn died, as attested to by a dozen or more people.
    The seller of opium would surely have others in his employ, includingthe man Agatha Nisbet said had once been good. How could Monk find him? And how soon?
    Runcorn, Orme, and Taylor met at Paradise Place just before ten o’clock, all sitting around the kitchen table on the four hard-backed wooden chairs normally kept there for dining. One more chair had had to be brought along from Scuff’s bedroom, Hester creeping in to collect it without waking him.
    The oven warmed the room, which smelled of fresh bread, scrubbed wood, and clean linen.
    Over tea and hot buttered toast Monk told them all what Agatha Nisbet had told him, emphasizing the need to find the other man she spoke of in particular. No one said anything. He looked up and saw Hester’s eyes on him, watching, trying to judge from his face just what he