William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

’er!” she repeated. “I’m not lookin’ at that thing again. I’m gonna see it the rest o’ me life!”
    He did not argue with her.
    “Did you just come down here, or were you waiting here for a while, maybe calling out for your man?”
    “I were lookin’ fer ’im when I saw that. ’Ow long d’yer think I’m gonna stand ’ere, wi’ that beside me, eh?”
    “Not very long,” he agreed. “Will you be all right to find your way home, Mrs. Jones?”
    “Yeah.” She jerked her arm sharply out of his grip. “Yeah.” She took a deep breath, then looked toward the body, the horror in her face replaced by pity for a moment. “Poor cow,” she repeated under her breath.
    Monk let her go and turned to Orme. Together they went back to the corpse. Monk touched her face gently. The flesh was cold. He put ahand down to one of her shoulders, a little under the edge of her dress, feeling for any warmth at all. There was nothing. She had probably been dead all night.
    Orme helped him turn her fully onto her back, completely exposing her ripped-open belly with its pale entrails bulging out, slimy with blood.
    Orme let out a gasp of horror and for a moment he swayed, even though he was used to corpses. He was familiar with the destruction that time and predators could cause to a body, but this was a barbarity inflicted by man, and it clearly shook him to a point where he could not hide his shock. He coughed, and seemed to choke on his own breath. “We’d better call the police surgeon, and the local station,” he said hoarsely.
    Monk nodded, swallowing hard. For a moment he had felt paralyzed with horror and pity. The river he was so used to seemed suddenly cold and strange. Familiar shapes of wharves and wooden piles jutting out of the water closed in on them, seeming threatening as the sharp dawn light distorted their proportions.
    Orme’s face was grim. “Found her on the pier, means she’s our case, sir,” he said miserably. “But of course land police may know who she is, poor creature. Could be this is domestic. Or, if she’s a local prostitute, then perhaps we’ve got a lunatic on our hands.”
    “Either way we have a lunatic on our hands. Even if it was domestic, no sane man could do this to his wife,” Monk said incredulously.
    “Who knows? Sometimes I think hate’s worse than madness.” Orme shook his head. “The local station’s up the street that way.” He indicated with his arm. “If you like, I’ll stay here with her while you go get them, sir.”
    It was the sensible thing to do, since Monk was by far the senior of the two. Still, he was grateful, and said so. He had no wish to remain standing on the pier with the chill of the wind seeping into his bones, keeping watch over that dreadful corpse.
    “Thank you. I’ll be as quick as I can.” He turned and walked rapidly across the pier itself, onto the bank and up toward the street. The sky was pale, the early sun silhouetting the wharves and warehouses. He passed half a dozen stevedores on their way to work. A lamplighter,little more than a gray shadow himself, reached his pole up and snuffed out the last lamp on the street.
    A N HOUR LATER , M ONK and Orme were standing in the local police station, still shivering. There was a chill inside that even hot tea with whisky could not shift. Overstone, the police surgeon, came in, closing the door behind him. He was in his sixties, his gray hair thinning but his face keen. He looked from the local sergeant to Orme, then to Monk. He shook his head.
    “It’s a bad one,” he said very quietly. “Most of the mutilation was almost certainly inflicted after death, perhaps all of it. Hard to be absolutely sure. If she wasn’t dead already, that would have killed her. But there was still quite a lot of bleeding. She’s been ripped open practically from navel to groin.”
    Monk looked at the man’s strained face and saw the pity in his eyes. “If she was dead when that happened, what killed her?” he asked.
    “The blow to the back of the head,” Overstone replied. “Single one. Hard enough to break her skull. Piece of lead pipe, I’d say, or something like that.”
    He was standing by a wooden desk piled with papers of varying sizes, handwritten by many different people. There were neat bookshelves all around, the contents not stuffed back in place untidily like Monk’s own. There were no pictures tacked up on the wall.
    “Nothing else you can tell us?” Monk asked without