“Well, if it is one of the people I think it might be, he will have to have come up the river from his home. If I can find someone who saw him, it would be a start.”

She had not told Scuff anything about what Sullivan had said of Arthur Ballinger, and she assumed Monk hadn’t either. If there was really anything behind it, ignorance would be the safest shield for him.

“Like a cabby?”

“I think I’ll begin with the ferryman. Cabbies don’t see a lot of people’s faces, especially after dark.”

“Course!” Scuff said eagerly. “Yer sittin’ in a boat, an’ the ferryman’s gotta see yer, eh? So if ’e don’t wanna be seen an’ ’ave folks remember ’im, ’e’d row up the river ’isself. Or if ’e couldn’t, then ’e’d cross where ’e’d least likely be noticed a ’ole lot.”

“Definitely,” she agreed. “Let’s try the ferrymen in Chiswick first.”

It took them well into the afternoon to get from the eastern end, nearer the sea and the great wharfs and docks, right across the city by omnibus to the statelier, greener western edge, and then beyond that again into the lush countryside, and over the river to the southern bank. There was no omnibus across Barn Elms Park to the little township of Barnes itself and finally to the High Street right on the water’s edge. They were both tired and thirsty, and had sore feet, by the time they stopped at the White Hart Inn, but Scuff never complained.

Hester wondered if his silence was in any way because he was thinking about this utterly different place—green, well kept, almost sparkling in the bright, hard light off the water. On the surface, it seemed a world away from the dark river edge where Jericho Phillips had kept his boat. There the tide carried in and out the detritus of the port, the broken pieces of driftwood, some half-submerged, bits of cloth and rope, food refuse and sewage. There was the noise of the city even at night, the clip of hooves on the cobbles, shouts, laughter, the rattle of wheels, and of course always the lights—streetlamps, carriage lamps—unless the mist rolled in and blotted them out. Then there were the mournful booms of the foghorns.

Here the river was narrower. There were shipbuilding yards on the northern bank farther down. The shops were open, busy; occasional carts went by; people called out; but it was all smaller, and there was no smell of industrial chimney smoke, salt and fish, no cry of gulls. A single barge drifted upriver, sails barely arced in the breeze.

Scuff could not help staring around him at the women in clean, pale dresses, walking and laughing as if they had nothing else to do.