William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

imagine it: Amity and Dinah with wildly opposing views of the same man, whom presumably they had both loved, but in such different ways. Did Dinah believe in him so consumingly, not becauseof who he had been, but because of who she had needed him to be, to fill her hunger and her dreams?
    Amity was impatient. “Joel was a charming man,” she went on, looking at Monk earnestly. “He was my elder brother, by seven years, and I always looked up to him. But clever as he was, he was also a man lost in his own ideas, a little …” A flicker of a smile touched her mouth and then vanished. “Otherworldly,” she finished. “He would become obsessed with a cause, and then refuse to see the evidence against it. Perhaps that is good for a man of faith. It is not good for a scientist. He should have been a painter, or a dramatist, or something where realities and facts are not as important.”
    Monk did not interrupt her.
    She sighed. “He used to be far more in touch with things, when he was younger. I suppose it’s only in the last five or six years that he’d really lost his way.”
    Monk stared at her. Was she the wise one, the brave one, willing to look at the truth, rather than Dinah, who saw only what she wished to? There was a chill about Amity, but might it be only the armor she wrapped around herself as a shield from the pain of the situation, the fact that there was nothing she could do to help him now that he was gone, and maybe there never had been?
    Amity lowered her gaze. “Most of his life he was very good at his job,” she went on. “He was meticulous. He had a rare kind of integrity. Dinah will have told you that, and she was right. But he became fixed on this idea about opium and he got some of his original facts wrong, and from then on it all went bad. He just piled one error on top of another until there was no way out for him.”
    Her face was bleak, her concentration total, as if she were forcing herself to override all her inner misery and pain to a place where she could hide it, and continue only with the truth that had to be told. That way she could make Monk understand, and then he would leave. She could pick up the remnants of her life again and pretend normality, allow time to heal at least the surface of the wound.
    Still, somehow, Monk did not like her.
    “Errors?” he asked.
    “His last report was a total failure, and the government rejected it,”she answered. “They had no choice. He was just completely mistaken. He took it very hard. He couldn’t believe he was wrong, in spite of the evidence against him. That was why he killed himself. He couldn’t face his colleagues knowing. Poor Joel …”
    “And Mrs. Gadney?” Monk asked more gently.
    Amity shrugged. “I really don’t know for certain, but it isn’t hard to guess. Dinah is a beautiful woman, but demanding in … in her requirements.” She said the word delicately, implying a deeper, more personal meaning. “She left him no room to fail. Perhaps he wished for someone who could be a friend, simply listen to him, and share his interests without the incessant need.”
    Monk thought about what it would be like to feel an unendurable loneliness, an emotional exhaustion, as the threat of being a disappointment, of having deceived others and let them down, became bigger, more suffocating with every slip, every error retrieved, and each new lie.
    An ordinary, pleasant-faced prostitute, just as lonely, just as familiar with the taste of failure, would seem like a godsend. It would at last be someone to laugh and cry with, for once without judgment, without expectation of anything except fair payment.
    Would Dinah have even begun to understand that? Probably not. And could she have required other things from him as well, of a physical nature, that he was too tired, anxious, or otherwise unable to provide? Love was a good deal more than a supply of constant praise and belief. Sometimes it was the ease of no expectations, of allowing a person to fail and still loving them the same way.
    He thought back to the times he had failed. He had allowed his resentment of Runcorn, his old superior, to distract his attention from the truth more than once. And there had been other slips. Perhaps the worst was the arrogance that had ultimately led to Jericho Phillips being acquitted the previous year. But Hester had not blamed him or reminded him of it since.
    When he had been most afraid of his own past, the ghosts that his amnesia