William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

threat that his exposure would damage someone’s reputation irrevocably, and with it, perhaps, the honor of the government.
    He admitted to himself he was depending on proving reasonable doubt: the possibility of there being any other answers, no matter how vague, whose existence he could prove. He just had to last today and tomorrow, then the courts were closed for Christmas, which would give them a brief reprieve, until Tuesday. But he also knew that darkening Christmas with the necessity to return immediately after would not endear him to anyone. He would not have done it had he any other choice.
    In the morning he called Dinah Lambourn’s servants, who had nothing to reveal of their mistress’s behavior on the nights her husband and Zenia Gadney died that would implicate her in any way.
    Rathbone’s first witness of the afternoon was the shopkeeper who had described Dinah’s visit to Copenhagen Place, and the extreme emotion she had exhibited, so much so that most of the shoppers in the street now felt as if they had seen her, and should have realized who and what she was.
    But Rathbone knew that the mind can deceive the eye. He hoped that his discussion with Mr. Jenkins had shown the man how much had been suggested by circumstance, and that what he was experiencing was not in fact memory but hindsight. It was something of a risk to put him on the stand where Coniston could question him immediately afterward, but he had nothing left to lose. Please God, Monk or Runcorn had learned something of value, however fragile.
    Mr. Jenkins took the stand looking very nervous to be out of the security of his own shop and the trade with which he was familiar. He gripped the rail as though he were at sea and the whole stand was tossing like the bridge of a ship. Was that the very understandable anxiety of a man in extraordinary surroundings, knowing that a woman’s life might rest on what he said? Or did he plan now to go back on what hehad told Rathbone, and he was afraid of Rathbone’s anger—or of Coniston’s anger, and the weight of the established law should he displease them?
    Rathbone must set him at his ease as much as he could. He walked forward to be close enough to the witness stand not to have to raise his voice to be heard.
    “Good afternoon, Mr. Jenkins,” he began. “Thank you for giving us your time. We appreciate that you have a business to run and that your customers require you every day but Sunday. I will not keep you long. You have a general grocery shop in Copenhagen Place, Limehouse, is that correct?”
    Jenkins cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, I do.”
    “Are most of your customers local people, living, say, within half a mile or so of your shop?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Because people need groceries of one sort or another almost every day and naturally would not wish to carry them farther than necessary?” Rathbone asked.
    Coniston shifted impatiently in his seat.
    Pendock looked annoyed.
    Only the jury were listening with attention, believing something pertinent and perhaps controversial was coming. Rathbone was famous, his reputation formidable. If they had not known that before the trial began, they knew it now.
    “Yes, sir,” Jenkins agreed. “I know ’em, like. I keep the things they need. They don’t ’ave ter ask.”
    “So you would notice a stranger in your shop?” Rathbone smiled as he said it. “Someone who did not live locally, perhaps whose needs you did not know.”
    Jenkins gulped. He knew the importance of the question. “I reckon so.” Already he was less sure, an equivocation in his words, not a certainty.
    “Say, a well-dressed woman who was not from Limehouse, who had never bought her groceries from you, and who carried no bag or basket in which to put whatever she bought,” Rathbone elaborated.
    Jenkins stared at him.
    Rathbone had to be as absolute as possible. There would be no going back and retracing his steps or he would sound desperate, and the jury would hear it.
    “I imagine you are friendly or at least comfortable with most of your customers, Mr. Jenkins? They are decent people going about their business?”
    “Yes … yes, course they are,” Jenkins agreed.
    “So a woman behaving wildly, hysterically, would be extraordinary in your shop?”
    Coniston rose to his feet.
    Rathbone turned to him, carefully assuming a look of amazement and questioning on his face and in the angle of his head.
    Coniston gave a sigh of exasperation, as if