William Monk 19 - Blind Justice

he’d ask someone who knew things about them, things the family didn’t realize they’d given away. Who would know such things?
    He thought about that for quite a long time, even after getting to the other side, paying the ferryman, and walking all the way to the main road and the omnibus stop. The street was busy. There were peddlers, men loading brewers’ drays, costermongers, shoppers at the vegetable carts, butchers’ boys, newspaper sellers. That was the answer: the invisible people saw things because no one noticed them. Delivery boys, scullery maids, postmen, street sweepers, lamplighters, the people you saw every day and didn’t remember. You realized they mattered only when they weren’t there and you went without something you were used to having.
    The omnibus drew up and stopped. Scuff jumped on eagerly. He knew exactly where he was going, and what for. He knew how to be charming, how to ask questions without seeming to and make people think he liked them and wanted to hear what they had to say. He had watched both Hester and Monk do it often. And girls always liked to talk about other girls, and clothes, and romance. He might not find out much about Mrs. Taft, but he would hear all sorts of things about her daughters. He was going to detect. He would learn something valuable first, and then he would tell Monk and Hester how he had done it. He would help them save Sir Oliver.
    F ROM TIME TO TIME Monk had done certain favors for men from police forces other than those under his own jurisdiction. Perhaps in the distant past, before his accident and resulting amnesia, that might not have been true. Evidence he found suggested he had been grudging toshare back then if he could avoid it. Now he thought such an attitude not only mean-spirited but also tactically shortsighted. He saw the wisdom in not only doing favors now and then, but also in being seen to return a favor done for him.
    He was grateful to be owed a few that he could now collect. He chose them very carefully. Inspector Courtland was a lean, middle-aged man who had worked his way up the ranks to a position of some power, but he never forgot the great, decent family that had nurtured him. Monk knew that his mother was a churchgoing woman who had raised five children after her husband was killed in an industrial accident. Courtland spoke of her in such a way that Monk had envied him a family childhood, which, if he had had such a thing himself, he could remember nothing of now.
    He did not insult Courtland by pretending he was doing anything other than collecting a favor. He would not have appreciated such condescension himself.
    “Not my case personally,” Courtland explained as they shared a couple of pints of ale and remarkably good pork pies in a public house half a mile from Courtland’s police station. “But of course I know about it. What do you need?”
    Monk smiled and took another bite of his pork pie. “They do a very good baked apple here.”
    Courtland nodded. “Good. It’ll take that long for me to tell you all I can about Mr. Taft and his unfortunate ending. Mind, you didn’t hear it from me.”
    “Of course not,” Monk agreed. “I observed it all myself, or deduced it. I don’t know that it’s going to be any damned use anyway. But there’s something in all this that we don’t understand.”
    “Something?” Courtland raised his eyebrows. “There’s everything. Starting with, where is the money? Going on to, where did Rathbone get the picture of Drew? Why did Taft kill himself because Drew was a child abuser and pornographer? And why the devil did he kill his wife and daughters? But the facts say that that is what happened.” He took another mouthful of his pie. “And you know as well as I do that if wecan prove a thing happened we don’t have to find a sane reason for it—or any reason at all.”
    “Just tell me as much as you know of what are absolute facts,” Monk asked. “The sort of thing the best defense in the world couldn’t shake.”
    Courtland stopped halfway through his pie and took another long draft of his ale. He put his tankard down again and met Monk’s eyes.
    “Taft and his wife came home from court after the revelation about Drew and the photograph,” he began. “They got there a little after five o’clock. Both daughters were at home, but there were no servants in the house.”
    “At five in the afternoon? Why not?” Monk asked, his mouth full.
    “Apparently they all gave