Dinah was regarding him with the outward calm of one who has already faced the worst she can think of and has no energy left to fear anything more.
There had been a passionate hatred in whoever had ripped open Zenia Gadney and left her on the pier like so much rubbish.
“Was Zenia Gadney the only woman your husband visited and paid, Mrs. Lambourn?” he asked. “Or were there others?”
She froze, as if he had slapped her. “She was the only one,” she replied with such certainty that he found it hard to disbelieve her. “I don’t know if she … dealt with others. But you say she didn’t.”
“Not while Dr. Lambourn was alive,” he agreed. “And after that there appeared to be no one regular.”
She looked down at her hands again.
“Why did Dr. Lambourn take his own life?” Monk asked, feeling like a torturer.
She sat still for so long that he was about to repeat the words when finally she looked up. “He didn’t, Mr. Monk. He was murdered.” She took a long, deep breath. “I told you he was engaged in a work of great importance. If he had succeeded it would have saved thousands of lives, but it would also have cost certain businesses a good portion of their profit. Joel could not be bought. He would not bend the facts to suit them, nor hide the truth. The only way they could silence him was to mock his work, deny its validity. Then, when he still would not be silent, they made it look as if he had realized he was wrong and, in despair and shame, killed himself.” She stared at him intently, her eyes brilliant, her face tense and passionately alive with the power of her feelings.
He did not believe her, and yet it was impossible not to accept that she believed it herself.
He cleared his throat, trying to steady his voice and keep his incredulity out of it. “What happened to his report?”
“They destroyed it, of course. They couldn’t afford for it to remain.”
Some vague mention of such a report stirred in his mind. It had been discredited, put down to one man’s mistaken crusade, a man whose grasp on reality had finally snapped. The whole situation had been regarded as a tragedy.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Dinah said quietly. “But it is the truth. Joel would never have killed himself, and certainly not over poor Zenia Gadney. Perhaps they killed her, too.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“Someone with a deep interest in the import and sale of opium,” she answered.
“And why would they have killed Mrs. Gadney?” It made no sense. Surely even through her grief she could see that?
Her face looked bruised, desperately vulnerable. “Perhaps to make sure of his disgrace, so no one can resurrect his work,” she answered.
“Did she have something to do with his work?”
She gave a helpless little gesture. “I don’t see how she could.”
Monk tried to imagine Joel Lambourn, disgraced in his profession because his colleagues thought his work worthless, coming home to a wife who believed in him so totally she had not even considered the possibility of his failure being real. Perhaps the one person who did not demand perfection from him was Zenia Gadney. Maybe that was what he saw in her: no standards to meet, nothing to live up to, simply accepted for who he was, both the strength and the weakness.
Maybe the pressure of it all had finally become unbearable, and he had taken the only escape he knew of.
It was possible, maybe even probable, that the murder of Zenia Gadney had nothing to do with Joel Lambourn, or even with opium. She was merely like hundreds of thousands of others who took the drug to relieve their pain. And perhaps Lambourn was wrong, and it did no true harm, apart from the occasional accidental overdose. But that wasn’t a crime; after all, one could overdose on almost anything, including alcohol, which was sold and consumed just as freely.
Monk asked about any other family, just to finalize his inquiries, and she gave him the address of Lambourn’s sister, Amity Herne.
He apologized again for disturbing her, and went out into the sun and the hard, cold wind. A sadness weighed heavily on him, as if he carried the fading light of the year within.
CHAPTER 5
Monk was fortunate to find Lambourn’s sister at home when he called in the early evening. The house was in highly fashionable Gordon Square. He had passed several carriages on his way here, some with crests on the doors, and liveried footmen, and all with perfectly matched horses.
The parlor maid asked him in and left him in an impressively furnished morning room while she went to see if Mrs. Herne would receive him.
Monk looked around the room. It was highly conventional. There was nothing individual here, nothing that would particularly please or offend. It was not only boring; it was, in an oblique way, deceitful. All traces of personality were concealed. Amity Herne’s husband must be totally unlike her brother. Some of the books were similar, for example the Shakespeare and the Gibbon. But it was the way they were all matching and totally level with each other, as if they had never been moved, which irritated Monk.
He had some time to wait, but looking around he saw nothing that engaged his interest or gave him any insight into the passion or the beliefs of the man who lived here, except that he exercised a certain caution in all he showed.
Amity Herne came in and closed the door behind her. She was a handsome woman, in a brittle, elegant way. Her fair hair was thick and perfectly dressed, her skin without a blemish. She was almost as tall as her sister-in-law, but far thinner. In her dark, elegantly cut gown, her shoulders looked a trifle bony.
“How can I help you, Mr. Monk?” she asked, without inviting him to sit down. “I am afraid I am due to attend an exhibition of Chinese silks with the lord chancellor’s wife this evening. You will appreciate that I cannot be late.”
“Of course not,” Monk agreed. “I will come immediately to the point. Forgive my bluntness. I am inquiring into the death of a woman named Zenia Gadney.”
Amity Herne frowned. “I don’t recall anyone by that name. I am sorry to hear that she died, but I cannot help you. I don’t know what led you to imagine I could.”
“Perhaps not,” he conceded, without answering her oblique question. “But your late brother knew Mrs. Gadney quite well …” He stopped as he saw her face tighten. It might have been out of grief, but it looked to him more like irritation.
“My brother did not move in the same social circles as my husband and I,” she said very quietly. It was plain she considered he was intruding, and-in view of her brother’s apparent suicide-perhaps she was right. “He was … eccentric … in some of his opinions,” she went on. “He became more so as he grew older. I’m sorry your time has been wasted.”
Monk did not move. “His widow says that Dr. Lambourn knew Mrs. Gadney quite well, and our evidence from local people where she lived bears that out.”
“That may be true,” she agreed, also not moving from her position a yard or two inside the door. “As I tried to explain to you, my brother was a little eccentric. When he was convinced of an idea, nothing would change his mind, certainly not common sense, or evidence.”
He caught the bitter tone in her voice. This was a different side to Joel Lambourn. It gave him no pleasure to hear it, but Monk could not let it go if there was even a possibility that it could somehow help lead to Zenia Gadney’s murderer. He forced himself to picture her corpse lying half doubled over, looking smaller in death than she would have been alive. He pictured the waxy white face and the gutted body, the blood and the pale, bulging entrails.