It was common enough for a man to desert his wife and children. The possibilities were endless, without even considering his having come to harm-let alone anything so bizarre and tragic as having been murdered by his own brother. Mrs. Stonefield had clearly wanted to believe that. Monk observed to himself that it was the solution least harmful to her. Without entirely dismissing it out of hand, he was inclined to relegate it to the bottom of the list of possibilities. The most obvious answers were that he had simply found his responsibilities overweighing him and run off, or that he had fallen in love with another woman and decided to live with her. The next most probable was some financial disaster, either already occurred or pending in the near future. He might have gambled and finally lost more than he could meet, or borrowed from a usurer and been unable to repay the interest, which would grow day by day. Monk had seen more than a few victims of such practice and he hated moneylenders with a cold and unremitting passion.

Stonefield might have made some enemy he had good reason to fear, or be the victim of blackmail for an indiscretion or even a crime. He might be fleeing the law for some misappropriation not yet uncovered, or any other offense, an accident or a sudden violence not so far traced to him. He might have suffered an accident and be lying in hospital or in a workhouse somewhere, too ill to have sent his family word.

It was even conceivable that, like Monk himself, he had been struck on the head with a blow which had obliterated his memory. He broke out in a prickle of sweat which a moment after was cold on his skin as he remembered waking up two years before in what he had taken to be a workhouse without the slightest idea who or where he was. His past had been an utter blank to him. Even his face in the glass had been unrecognizable.

Slowly he had pieced together fragments here and there, scenes of his youth, his journey south from Northumberland to London, probably when he was nineteen or twentyroughly about the time of the accession of Queen Victoria, although he could not remember it. The coronation he knew only from pictures and other people's descriptions.

Even this much was deduced, because he supposed himself to be now in his early forties, and it was January 1859.

Of course, it was absurd to suppose Angus Stonefield was in a similar situation. Such things must happen exceedingly rarely. But then murder was fortunately not so common either. It was far more probably some sad but ordinary domestic circumstance or a financial disaster.