What he needed was proof that Ballinger had known Parfitt, and, if possible, Jericho Phillips as well. That would take a long and very careful retracing of all the evidence, examining it, looking for a completely different pattern from before. He must start straightaway, as soon as he had seen this Hattie Benson and had verified for himself her evidence regarding the cravat.

HE FOUND HER BY the middle of the following morning, sitting in the kitchen of her small, shared house in Chiswick. She looked tired and puffy-eyed, but even with a torn wrap around her nightgown and her hair tousled and falling out of its pins, there was a beauty in her flawless skin and the naïveté of her face.

“I in’t done nothin’,” she said before Monk even sat down on the rickety-backed chair at the other side of the table from her.

He smiled bleakly. “I don’t want to prosecute you, Miss Benson. I believe you can help me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? This time o’ the mornin’, an’ all. Yer should be ashamed o’ yerself. Wot’d yer wife say, then, eh?”

“You can ask her, if you meet her again,” he replied with a rueful smile. “I would like you to tell me what you told her about taking Rupert Cardew’s dark blue cravat with the leopards on it.”

Hattie stared at him, her mouth open.

“She came here with a man called Crow, I believe,” Monk continued. “You told them what happened the afternoon before Mickey Parfitt’s body was discovered in the river. I need you to tell me again, with rather more detail.”

She froze. “I can’t!”

“Yes, you can,” he insisted. “Unless, of course, you were lying.” How could he persuade her to tell him, and be sure it was the truth? Perhaps she had been merely a witness at the time she had spoken to Hester and Crow, but now she realized what danger she would be in if she told the police that Cardew was innocent. She might only now be grasping the fact that they would begin to investigate the case all over again, going back to people she knew, and who knew her.

“Hattie.” He leaned forward a little across the table, forcing himself to speak gently. “I don’t want to charge you with stealing the cravat, whether it was to keep for yourself, to sell, or to give it to someone else. I certainly don’t think it likely that you strangled Mickey Parfitt with it, although it isn’t impossible.” He let the suggestion hang in the air.

“Yer mad, you are!” she said in horror. “ ’Ow in Gawd’s name d’yer think I could strangle a man like Mickey? ’E may a bin skinny as a broomstick, but ’e were strong! ’E’d a bashed me ’ead in.”

“He was violent?” he asked.