Free William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry

whether he believed that she had not known Zenia Gadney. And was she still so numb with grief that she had no curiosity about the other woman who had held so much of her husband’s loyalty and attention—not to mention his money?
    She spoke quietly, as if remembering for herself rather than informing Monk. He had the sudden, complete conviction that she did not expect to be believed. She never once looked up at him in any attempt to persuade.
    “He was a gentle man,” she began, struggling to find the words at once large enough and precise enough to convey what she saw in her own mind. “He never lost his temper with me, or with our daughters, even when they were young, and noisy.” She smiled briefly, but it vanished as she controlled her emotions with an obvious effort. “He was patient with people who were genuinely not very clever. And compared with him, that was very many. But he couldn’t abide liars. He was quite stern with the girls if they lied to him.” She shook her head slightly. “It only happened about twice. They loved him very much.”
    Outside in the street a carriage passed, the sound of it barely penetrating the quiet room.
    Monk allowed a few moments before prompting her to continue.
    “I’m sorry,” she apologized again. “I still keep expecting to hear his step. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I know he’s dead. Every inch of my body knows it, every thought in my mind is filled with it. And yet when I go to sleep I forget, and in the morning I wake up, and for a second it is as if he hasn’t gone. Then I remember again.”
    Monk tried to imagine what his own house would be like if Hester never returned. It was unbearable, and he forced the idea out of his mind. His job was to learn who had killed Zenia Gadney. There was nothing he could do to change the fact of the suicide of Joel Lambourn. How did anyone deal with such a painful tragedy, find the answers that allowed them to continue on? Daily life must seem absurd and completely meaningless after such a thing. He supposed having children both hurt and helped. You would force yourself to keep going, for their sakes, even if the sight of them was a reminder of what you had lost.
    But what about at night when you lay alone in the bed you had shared, and the house was silent? What could you think of then that allowed you live with pain?
    “Mrs. Lambourn, please go on.”
    She sighed. “Joel was very clever; in fact, he was brilliant. He worked for the government on various kinds of medical research.”
    “What was his latest work?” Monk was not really interested; he just wanted to keep her talking.
    “Opium,” she replied without hesitation. “He was passionately angry about the harm it is doing, when it isn’t labeled properly. And he said that happens almost all of the time. He had an enormous amount of facts and figures on the number dead because of it. He used to sit in his study and go over and over them, weighing every story against the evidence, checking to make sure he was always correct and exact.”
    “To what purpose?” In spite of himself Monk was now curious.
    For the first time she looked up at him. “Thousands of people die of opium poisoning, Mr. Monk, among them many children. Do you know what a ‘penny twist’ is?”
    “Of course I do. A small dose of opium powder you can buy at a corner shop or apothecary.” He thought back to Mr. Clawson and his general hardware shop with all its remedies, and his fierce defense of Zenia Gadney.
    “How much is in a dose?” Dinah Lambourn asked.
    “I’ve no idea,” Monk admitted.
    “Neither has the man who sells it, or the woman who buys it to give to her child, or to take herself for her headache, or a stomachache, or because she can’t sleep.” She gave a little gesture of helplessness with her beautiful hands. “Neither have I, for that matter. That is what Joel was concerned about. He knew of thousands of cases over the whole country where this lack of