“Fine,” Hester answered, bending to pick up the fallen sewing and put it away. “I didn’t tell him you found another boat. If he has to know, I’ll tell him later.” She came up behind him. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.” Suddenly he realized that he was. “Bread will do.”

“Cold game pie?” she offered.

“Ah! Yes.”

It was not until he was sitting down with pie and vegetables and a cup of tea that he realized she intended to draw from him all that he had learned so far.

“Not as much as the pie is worth,” he said.

“What isn’t?” She tried to look as if she did not know what he meant, but ended with a brief laugh at herself. “Is it another one like Phillips’s?” she said softly.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

Between mouthfuls Monk told her what he knew so far, keeping his voice so low that he would hear any creak of Scuff’s footsteps on the stairs.

She was very grave. “Could it be Arthur Ballinger?” she asked when he came to a stop. She knew of Sullivan’s charge.

“Yes,” he answered. “Not to have killed him, of course, but he could be the one backing the enterprise financially, and taking a share of the profits.”

“Could you prove it?”

“Perhaps. I’ll put Orme on to the accounts tomorrow, and see if he can trace the ownership of the boat back to someone. Although I’ll be surprised if it’s that easy.”

She was sitting upright, her back stiff. The lamplight made her hair look fairer than it was, almost like a halo. “So why would Ballinger kill him, or have him killed? Do you think Phillips’s death scared him and he was afraid you would pursue the issue until you found who was behind it?”

Monk considered the idea for several moments. Would he have taken Sullivan’s word, unverified as it was, and continued to hunt for whoever had conceived the original idea, found the rich men ripe for the danger and the titillation of child pornography? Perhaps the threat of the double disgrace of child abuse and homosexuality was part of the excitement. These men had not considered the possibility that the very hand that tempted them, and then fed them, would in the end also administer the wounds that would bleed them dry. For that Monk had a shard of pity.

What he did not forgive was that they had not considered the wretched children who paid for men’s entertainment with humiliation and pain, sometimes with their lives.