Free William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry Page B

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 thatwasn’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
    M ONK 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.