He looked at Monk intently, willing him to understand. "Or she stays single, dependent upon her father, while all her friends gain husbands, houses, status-in time, children. Would you want that for your daughter? Wouldn't you fight any battle, any justified battle at all, rather than let that happen? Especially when you know she has done nothing to warrant it."
"I should probably do it whether she had warranted it or not," Monk said frankly. He disliked what he was going to do. Only there was the remembrance that Keelin Melville had been a young woman too, also denied what she wanted most because of the beliefs and conventions of others. There had been no one to feel for her, now not even herself. "What about Hugh Gibbons?"
Lambert's face showed nothing. No man could be so complete a master of himself as to have hidden guilt behind such a bland exterior.
"Who is Hugh Gibbons?"
"A young man who was in love with Zillah some three years ago," Monk replied. "He was unsuitable and the romance had gone too far. Mrs. Lambert took Zillah away, very suddenly, on a prolonged trip to the seaside-in North Wales. Crickieth, to be precise."
Lambert's face paled suddenly. He remained motionless where he was by the window, the light behind him.
"You remember now," Monk said unnecessarily.
The blood rushed back to Lambert's cheeks. He came forward to the desk, leaning over it. "Are you saying my daughter has lost her virtue, sir?"
"I have no idea," Monk replied. "I am agreeing with you that malicious supposition, whether true or not, can ruin a young person, and it would be natural for those who care for them to go to great lengths to prevent that."
Lambert drew in a long, slow breath. "You are accusing me of murdering Melville to hide some damned indiscretion which was caught before it was anything! God Almighty, what kind of a man do you think I am?"
Monk glanced down and saw that Lambert's hands on the desk were shaking and his knuckles were white. He would have swom that the idea genuinely horrified him.
"I am not accusing you, Mr. Lambert," Monk answered quietly. "I am trying to find out why Keelin Melville chose such an extraordinary time to kill herself, and how. She did not eat or drink anything during the time when the police surgeon says the poison entered her body... yet he says it was swallowed. It does not make sense, does it?"
Lambert frowned. He sat down again, this time behind the desk. "No... not that I can see," he agreed. "But if she did not eat or drink anything, then how did anyone else poison her?"
"I don't know that either," Monk confessed. "I'm looking for a lot of things. I've seen Keelin Melville's buildings, her dreams, something of what was in her soul. I can't let this go without doing everything I can to understand what happened to her."
Lambert swallowed, his throat convulsing. "Dammit! So am I! I'll retain you if necessary. Nothing we do can bring her back. Nothing I do can alter my part in it. But I can find out what finally broke her, and learn to live with it... or if it was someone else, then I'll see they pay." He bent his head and put his hands over his face. "Listen to me! Am I going to find the man I want to punish is myself?"
Monk was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of empathy with him. They were as different as possible, physically, in pattern of life and fortune, in turn of mind and personality, and yet Monk had stood in exactly the same place: pursuing what he believed to be a monster and terrified that when he found him, it would prove to be his own face he saw.
"Are you not going to punish yourself anyway?" He did not move his eyes from Lambert, and slowly Lambert looked up.
"Yes. But either way I have to know the truth, if you can find it."
"What happened to Hugh Gibbons?"
"What? I've no idea. Can it matter now?"
"I don't know. Can you think of any other incident in Zillah's life which anyone might fear my looking into?"
"I don't fear that." Some of the indignation came back into Lambert's voice. "It could have been tragic, but it wasn't. My wife dealt with it before it went too far. Took Zillah away." There was no shadow in his face, not the slightest duplicity. If there had been anything more to it Monk