William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

Lambourn?”
    She flinched. “Joel was found dead two months … two months before Mrs. Gadney was killed.” She swallowed as if there were something in her throat close to choking her. “He was sitting alone on One Tree Hill in Greenwich Park. He had taken quite a heavy dose of opium, and …” Again she found it difficult to force the words through her lips. “His wrists were cut so he had bled to death. They said it was suicide, because of his professional failure regarding the report, and the government’s rejection of it. They were very damning of his ability.”
    Now she was speaking more rapidly, as if to say it all and get it finished. “They said he was overemotional and incompetent. That he confused personal tragedies with genuine assessment of facts. They … they made him sound silly … amateurish.” She blinked away tears but they spilled over her cheeks. “It hurt him badly, but he was not suicidal! I know you will think I am saying that, believing it, because I loved him, but it is true. He had every intention of fighting them and proving that he was right. He cared about the issue so much he would never have given up.
    “In the last few days before his death I found him working in his study at three and four in the morning, white-faced with exhaustion. I told him to come to bed, I begged him, but he said that after what he had heard, his nightmares were worse than any weariness he could feel. Sir Oliver, he would never have killed himself. He would see it as a betrayal of those he was entrusted to help.”
    Rathbone hated having to ask her, but he could not defend herwithout knowing the truth—and, whatever the past, whatever the truth of the opium issue, defending her was what he was entrusted with. It would be better to hurt her now than in court, where the damage would be public and almost certainly irrecoverable.
    “If that is so, then I agree,” he said gently. “The whole issue of the report’s rejection was no reason for him to have taken his own life. Which forces me to ask: What was the reason? The prosecution is possibly going to agree with you that he was willing to fight the government, but that his affair with Zenia Gadney came to the surface in some way. Perhaps she threatened to expose him—”
    “That’s absurd,” she said sharply. “She hadn’t done so in fifteen years. Why on earth would she have suddenly chosen that time? If he were dead, she would have no income and be driven to seek money on the streets, which is both difficult for a woman her age, and—as has been made tragically clear—dangerous!”
    “They will argue that she did not realize that,” he said, watching her face.
    Her response was instant. “She was an ordinary woman, not a fool! She lived in Limehouse. She knew people there, shopped there, walked the streets to get wherever she was going,” she said derisively. “Do you think she had no idea how dangerous it was?”
    “Then she did not realize that Dr. Lambourn might later take his own life rather than pay her more money,” he responded.
    Dinah looked at him with contempt. “She had known him for over fifteen years, and she did not know that?” Before he could point out the inconsistency of her argument she hurried on. “Of course she didn’t know that—because it isn’t true. Joel never would have killed himself over money, and I don’t believe she was so greedy or so stupid as to have threatened him. She was in her mid-forties! Where on earth was she going to find another man to support her and ask nothing in return?”
    “Nothing?” he questioned, a little surprised at the assertion. Did she really believe that? Could she possibly?
    She flushed and lowered her eyes. “A visit once a month,” she said quietly. “I know the prosecution may not believe that but even if they don’t, the logic still holds. Whatever he asked, or she gave, it would stillbe easier than walking the streets of Limehouse looking for casual customers.”
    Rathbone thought for several moments. “They might suggest it was you who were blackmailing him to stop seeing Zenia?”
    “Or I would do what?” she said with a rare spark of humor. “Humiliate myself by making his affair public? Don’t be ridiculous.”
    He smiled back, reluctantly. He admired her courage. “Then why did he kill himself, Mrs. Lambourn?”
    “He didn’t.” All the light vanished from her face again and grief washed through it. “They killed him, because he was