Execution Dock Page 0,40

if he had been as clever as Rathbone, then Phillips would be on his way to the gallows. In taking it for granted that because he was right he had some kind of invulnerability against defeat, he had been careless, and he had let down Orme, who had worked so hard, and who had trusted him. And he had let down Durban as well. This was to have been an act of gratitude, the one thing he could give him, even beyond the grave-to do his job honorably.

And by bringing Phillips to face trial, and then be acquitted, he had freed him from ever being charged with that crime again, which was worse than not having caught him. All the River Police were betrayed in that.

The confidence, the inner peace that he had won so hard and treasured so dearly, was slipping out of his grasp like water through his fingers. One day it was there, and then he looked, and it was draining away while he was helpless to stop it. It was the cold truth; he was not the man he had begun to hope and believe he was. He had failed. Jericho Phillips was guilty at the very least of child abuse and pornography, and-Monk had no doubt-also of murder. It was Monk's carelessness, his incompetence to make sure of every single detail, to check and check again, to prove everything, that had allowed Rathbone to paint him as driven more by emotion than reason, so Phillips slipped through the blurring of doubts, and escaped.

He looked up at Hester. "I can't leave it like this," he said aloud. "I can't for myself, I can't for the River Police."

She put her spoon down and looked at him steadily, almost unblinking. "What can you do? You can't try him again."

He drew his breath in sharply to respond, then saw the honesty and gentleness in her eyes. "I know that. And we were so certain of convicting him for Figgis's murder we didn't even charge him with assaulting the ferryman. If we try that now it'll look as if we're only doing it because we failed. He'll say he slipped, it was an accident, he was fighting for his life. It'll make us look even more... incompetent."

She bit her lip. "Then this time we need to know what it is we are trying to do-exactly. Seeing the truth is not enough-is it?" That was a challenge, an invitation to face something far beyond the bitterness of the day. How practical she was. But then to nurse she had to be. The treatment of the illnesses of the body was, above all, practical. There was no time, no room for mistakes or excuses. It demanded a very immediate kind of courage, a faith in the value of trying no matter what the result. Fail this time, you must still give everything you have next time, and the time after, and after that.

She had stopped eating her plum pie, waiting for an answer.

"If I learn enough about him I shall prove him guilty of something," he replied. "Even if it doesn't hang him, a good stretch in the Coldbath Fields would save a score of boys from abuse, maybe a hundred. By the time he gets out a lot of things could be different. Maybe he would even die in there. People do."

She smiled. "Then we'll start again, from the beginning." She ate her last mouthful and rose to her feet. "But a cup of tea first. If we're going to sit up all night, we'll need it."

He felt a sudden wave of gratitude choke him too much to answer her. He bent and concentrated on finishing his own pie.

Afterwards he fetched Durban 's notes again, and side by side they spread them all over the table, the seats, and the floor of the parlor, and read every one of them again. For the first time Monk realized just how patchy they were. Some were full of description, seemingly no detail omitted. Others were so brief as to be little more than words jotted down as reminders of whole trains of thought never completed. In some the writing was done in such haste that it was barely legible, and from the jagged forms of the letters and the heaviness of the strokes, it had been in the heat of great emotion.

"Do you know what this means?" Hester asked him, holding up a torn piece of paper with the words Was it money?