"Not intentionally, no, only unintentionally, if she thought it was Sabella." Monk took a long pull from his cider.
Evan frowned. "We thought it was Sabella to begin with," he conceded. "Mrs. Carlyon only confessed when it must have seemed to her we were going to arrest Sabella."
"Or Maxim Furnival," Monk went on. "Perhaps he was jealous. It looks as if he had more cause. It was Louisa who was doing the flirting, setting the pace. General Carlyon was merely responding."
Evan continued with his sandwich, and spoke with his mouth full again. "Mrs. Furnival is the sort of woman who always flirts. It's her manner with most men. She even flirted with me, in a sort of way." He blushed very slightly, not at the memory - he was a most personable young man, and he had been flirted with before - but at reciting it to Monk. It sounded so unbecomingly immodest. "This can't have been the first time she made a public spectacle of exercising her powers. Why, if he put up with it all these years - the son is thirteen so they have been married fourteen years at least, and actually I gather quite a lot longer - why would Maxim Furnival suddenly lose his head so completely as to murder the general? From what I gather of him, General Carlyon was hardly a romantic threat to him. He was a highly respectable, rather pompous soldier well past his prime, stiff, not much sense of humor and not especially handsome. He had money, but so has Furnival."
Monk said nothing, and began to wish he had ordered a sandwich as well.
"Sorry," Evan said sincerely. "I really don't think there is anything you can do for Mrs. Carlyon. Society will not see any excuses for murdering a husband out of jealousy because he flirted. In feet, even if he had a full-blown affair and flaunted it publicly, she would still be expected to turn the other way, affect not to have seen anything amiss, and behave with dignity." He looked apologetic and his eyes were full of regret. "As long as she was provided for financially, and had the protection of his name, she would be considered to have a quite satisfactory portion in life, and must do her duty to keep the sanctity and stability of the home - whether he wished to return to it or not."
Monk knew he was right, and whatever his private thoughts of the morality of it, that was how she would be judged. And of course any jury would be entirely composed of men, and men of property at that. They would identify with the general. After all, what would happen to them if women were given the idea that if their husbands flirted they could get away with killing them? She would find very short shrift there.
"I can tell you the evidence as we found it if you like, but it won't do any good," Evan said ruefully. "There's nothing interesting in it; in fact nothing you couldn't have deduced for yourself."
"Tell me anyway," Monk said without hope.
Evan obliged, and as he had said, there was nothing of any use at all, nothing that offered even a thread to follow.
Monk went back to the bar and ordered a sandwich and two more pints of cider, then after a few more minutes of conversation about other things, bade Evan farewell and left the public house. He went out into the busy street with a sense of the warmth of friendship which was still a flavor to be relished with a lingering surprise, but even less hope for Alexandra Carlyon than before.
* * * * *
Monk would not go back to Rathbone and admit defeat. It was not proved. Really he had no more than Rathbone had told him in the beginning. A crime had three principal elements, and he cited them in his mind as he walked along the street between costermongers' barrows, young children of no more than six or seven years selling ribbons and matches. Sad-faced women held bags of old clothes; indigent and disabled men offered toys, small handmade articles, some carved of bone or wood, bottles of this and that, patent medicines. He passed by news vendors, singing patterers and every other inhabitant of the London streets. And he knew beneath them in the sewers there would be others hunting and scavenging a living, and along the river shore seeking the refuse and the lost treasures of