William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

killing her with such violence?”
    Hester shook her head. “Not as far as I can see. She said she was married once, but apparently she drank so hard she ruined her life, and possibly she left him, or he left her.”
    “Who was he?” Rathbone asked quickly, feeling a lift of hope he hardly dared acknowledge. “Where can we find him? Could he have followed her to Limehouse and killed her? Perhaps he wanted to marry again, and she was standing in his way?” His mind was racing. At last there were other possibilities surfacing, which had nothing to do with Dinah Lambourn.
    “Gladys guessed at it, based on something Zenia said once, when a woman was falling down drunk in the street,” Hester answered. “She didn’t even know if it was true, and no one has ever seen another man in Copenhagen Place, visiting her, or even looking for her. He could be dead by now, if he ever existed at all.”
    Her voice dropped and she looked sad, and apologetic. “She could have invented him, to make herself sound more respectable, or even more interesting. It could have been daydreaming, a bit of wishing that it had been so.”
    He felt the sadness inside him also, a sudden understanding of the woman’s wistful dreams that he would prefer not to have understood. “Then why did you come to tell it to me so urgently before I went into court?” The sharp edge of disappointment was raw in his voice.
    “I’m sorry, that was misleading.” She brushed it away with a slender hand. “What I really came to tell you was that I also found a woman called Agatha Nisbet, who runs something of a makeshift hospital on the south bank of the river, near Greenland Dock. It is mainly for injured dockers, lightermen, and so on. She has a pretty steady supply of opium …”
    “Opium?” Now he was listening, his attention quickened.
    “Yes.” She smiled bleakly. “I made a deal with her to buy the best quality myself, for the clinic. She spoke to Joel Lambourn several times.He sought her out in his inquiries into opium. He wasn’t out to stop the trade, just to get it properly labeled so people knew what they were taking. Agnes Nisbet said it was the deaths of children that upset him especially.”
    Rathbone nodded. He knew that already.
    “But she warned me that a lot of people make money out of opium, ever since the Opium Wars,” Hester went on. “They are quite happy, some of the worst of them, to get people addicted so they will have a permanent market.” Her face was pinched with misery and anger as she said it. “A lot of very powerful families built their fortunes on opium, and they wouldn’t be at all happy with the exposure Lambourn’s report would inevitably have brought when it was argued in Parliament. All kinds of ghosts would’ve been dug up.”
    “You can’t dig up a ghost,” he said irrelevantly. “Do you think Dinah is right, at least as far as Lambourn’s report is concerned?”
    “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “It makes sense, Oliver. We don’t even know whose fortune comes from opium, and what they could lose if it’s all brought out into the open, and regulated. Some companies are going to go out of business, simply because they wouldn’t make the same level of profit if they are forced to measure and label.”
    He thought about it for a moment or two. It opened up new, alternative explanations for the death of both Joel Lambourn and Zenia Gadney—but they had no proof of anything. Great fortunes had always been made in appalling ways: through buccaneering—which was only another name for piracy—slaving, before the abolition half a century ago; and then in opium. Few wealthy families were free from one stain or another. With the fear and anger running rampant in the courtroom, and far beyond it, he did not think that “reasonable doubt” was going to save Dinah Lambourn.
    “Do you know anything about the Opium Wars?” Hester interrupted his thoughts.
    “Not much,” he admitted. “It was all in China. Trade war of some sort, as far as I know. Our part in it has been justified by some, but it was pretty ugly. I believe we introduced opium into China and now hundreds of thousands of people are addicted to it. Not something to be proud of.”
    “Perhaps we should find out more, just in case it matters,” she said quietly.
    “Did you believe this woman, this Agatha?” he asked her. “Not her honesty, but her knowledge?”
    “Yes … I think so. It compared in ways to my own