Hester looked at the girl again. Perhaps it would place her life in jeopardy. That was not difficult to believe. “It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “All that is important is that Rupert didn’t have it, so he couldn’t have been the one who knotted it and put it around Mickey Parfitt’s neck. Thank you. That makes all the difference.” She smiled back at Crow, and felt her smile grow wider and wider on her face. Of course she would have to press Hattie later as to whom she had given the cravat to, but it might be possible to find out through someone else. There would be others around who would have seen a stranger—or any visitor, for that matter. For the moment the relief that Rupert was not guilty was all she needed.

The identities of the murderer of Mickey Parfitt and the man behind the pornographic business on the boats were next, a piece at a time. She smiled across at Hattie and thanked her again.

Chapter 7

CHAPTER
7

MONK WENT ACROSS THE river on the early morning ferry. It was a cool, quiet day, barely a ripple on the water in the slack tide. Swathes of mist half veiled the ships at anchor. Strings of barges seemed to appear out of nowhere.

He had been collecting the evidence against Rupert Cardew to present when he came to trial. It was a miserable job, and in truth he had little more taste for it than Hester had. But the more he learned, the easier it became to see Rupert as a spoiled young man whose louche style of life and ungoverned temper had finally caught up with him. In Mickey Parfitt he had met the one problem his father could not solve for him. No amount of money would have been sufficient to stop the blackmail that had clearly worked so well.

The only inconsistency was that Parfitt was a professional at extortion. He had been thirty-seven years old, and had survived for the last ten of these by profiting one way or another from other men’s weaknesses. There had been at least one suicide among his victims, possibly more, but no one had ever attacked him before. It seemed he had judged very precisely where to draw the line in his bloodsucking, or his threats. A dead victim is bad for business, and he never forgot that—at least not until recently.

Was that a weakness in the case, or simply a fact yet to be explained? Rathbone had not merely beaten Monk in the trial of Jericho Phillips, he had humiliated him, and later—when she had testified—Hester as well. He had done it with the knowledge of how to hurt that only a friend possesses.