“I know that,” Monk conceded. “But his revulsion when he learned the real nature of the business, but was still bled dry, will earn him some sympathy. That is your job, not protecting the reputations of others like him. I know no evidence that his story on that account is anything but the truth.”

Rathbone put his elbows on the desk, and his fingertips very gently together. “You are offering me life in prison in exchange for full admission, with details you can prove, of his visit to the boat, the nature of what went on there, and his payment of blackmail money to Parfitt? And all this is in the hope that it will somehow lead you to the man behind it?”

There was no point in arguing the shadings of meaning. “Yes.”

“I’ll ask him, but I’m not sure if I can recommend it is in his interest. God, what a mess!”

Monk did not answer him.

MONK WORKED ON THE river the rest of the day. There had been a large theft of spices from an East Indiaman in the Pool of London, and it took him until nearly midnight to trace the goods and arrest at least half the men involved in the crime. By quarter to one, a new moon in a mackerel sky made the river ghostly. Ships were riding at anchor, sails furled, like a gently stirring lace fretwork against the light, beautiful and totally without color. There was only a faint murmur of water and the sharp smell of salt in the air.

Monk stepped off the ferry at Princes Stairs and walked slowly up the hill to home.

Hester had left the light on in the parlor, but it was only when he stepped in to turn the gas off that he saw she was curled up in the large armchair, sound asleep.

His first thought was clear. She’d been waiting for him, or she would have been in bed. Was Scuff ill? No, of course not. If he were, she would have been with him. He remembered how many nights she had spent in the chair beside Scuff’s bed when he had been injured hunting the assassin in the sewers.

He bent down and spoke her name softly, not to startle her.

“Hester.”

She opened her eyes and sat up, smiling, pushing her hair back off her face where it had fallen out of its pins. “He didn’t do it,” she said with intense pleasure.

Monk was confused and too tired to think. “Who didn’t?”

“Rupert Cardew.” She stood up, so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her and smell her skin and her hair, clean cotton and, very faintly, soap. “I’m sorry,” she went on. “I know that leaves the case open and you have to go back and start again. But I’m just so glad it wasn’t Rupert.”