William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

thought.
    “Did she tell you anything else about this man?” she asked him quietly. “Anything at all—age, experience, skills, what he does now?”
    “No,” he admitted. “I think she was protecting him on purpose. It grieved her badly that he had been so corrupted.”
    “Opium does that to you.” Hester’s face was bleak. “I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard a bit, seen a bit. Sometimes you have to use it for terrible wounds, and then it’s too hard to give it up, particularly if the wounds never really heal.”
    Monk looked at her. Her shoulders were tense, pulling the fabric of her dress, the muscles of her neck tight, her mouth closed delicately so the pity showed like an unhealed wound of her own. He wondered how much more she had seen than he had, horror that she could never share.
    He reached across the table and touched her fingers on the wooden surface, just for a moment, then pulled back.
    “Do you know where to look?” he asked her. He hated doing it, but she would know that he had to, and resent it if he did less than his job, in order to spare her.
    “I think so,” she answered, looking at him and not any of the others around the table, all watching her, waiting.
    “I’ll go with you,” Monk said immediately. “He could be dangerous.”
    “No.” She shook her head. “We haven’t time to send two people to do one job. We’ve only a few days. I have an idea of who it might be. When I saw him before, I didn’t even think of him being addicted himself. I should have.” There was anger in her voice, bitter self-criticism.
    “You’re not going alone,” Monk responded without hesitation. “If he is the person who killed Lambourn and hacked Zenia Gadney to pieces, he’d do the same to you without a second thought about it. Either I come with you, or you don’t go!”
    She smiled very slightly, as though some tiny element of it amused her.
    “Hester!” he said sharply.
    “Think of what else there is to do,” she replied. “Agatha said he was a good man once. The remnants of that will be left, if I don’t offer any threat to him.” She leaned forward a little, as if to command their attention. “We have to know who is using him. That’s whoever killed Lambourn, and Zenia Gadney—or had them killed.”
    Monk clenched his teeth and breathed out slowly. “What if it’s this man who killed them?” he asked, wishing he did not have to.
    He saw the sudden awareness leap in her eyes.
    It was actually Runcorn who said what she must have been thinking.
    “That’ll be why there was no bottle or vial where Lambourn was found,” he said unhappily. “He didn’t drink the opium, it was put into him with one of those needles. And of course whoever killed him took that away with them. He wouldn’t want anyone to know of it. There can’t be so many people have them.”
    “Still doesn’t change that we have to know who killed Zenia Gadney.” Orme spoke for the first time. “I’ve been back and forward around the Limehouse Pier. No one admits to seeing her there that evening, except with a woman. If she met a man, doctor or not, someone paid by Herne or Bawtry, then it was afterward.” He looked at Runcorn, then at Monk. “I suppose you’ve thought that it could be that Dinah Lambourn did kill them both, nothing to do with jealousy or rage, but because someone paid her to, because of the opium?”
    No one answered. The thought was impossible to rule out, but neither did anyone want to accept it.
    It was Runcorn who broke the silence in the end.
    “I’ve talked to everyone in the Lambourn house,” he said. “I’ve got a fairly good list of where Dr. Lambourn went in his last week, but it’s only what we already expected.” He pulled two sheets of paper out of his pocket and laid them down in the middle of the table.
    Monk glanced at them, but he could see in Runcorn’s face that there was more.
    “I tried to piece together his last day,” Runcorn went on. “Whoever killed him planned it very carefully, very believably.”
    One by one around the table they nodded agreement. No one mentioned Dinah, but the very absence of her name hung between them.
    “Who did he see that day?” Monk asked. He knew before Runcorn spoke that the answer would not be so easy. It was written in the confusion in Runcorn’s eyes.
    “Dr. Winfarthing,” Runcorn replied, “in the morning. Just tradesmen in Deptford in the afternoon. He came home for an early dinner, then