The Twisted Root Page 0,127

He looked at her confidently, as if he had every faith she would have an answer.

"I don't know. I'll settle at the moment just for proving he has to exist." She looked at him very steadily. "If you had to ... no, if you wanted to, could you work out exactly how much medicine has gone missing in, say, the four months before TreadwelPs death?"

"Perhaps ... if I had a really good reason to," he said guardedly. "I wouldn't know that unless I understood the need."

"Not knowing isn't going to help," she told him miserably. "Not charging her with theft won't matter if they hang her for murder."

His face blanched as if she had slapped him, but he did not look away. "What good can you do?" he asked very quietly. "I really care about Cleo. She's worth ten of that pompous swine in his oak-paneled office." He did not need to name Thorpe. She shared his feelings, and he knew it. He was watching her for an answer, hoping.

"I don't really know - maybe not a great deal," she admitted. "But if I know how much is missing, and how much reached the patients she treated, if they are pretty well the same, then he got money from someone else."

"Of course they're the same. Wfiaf do you think she did? Give it to him to sell?" He was indignant, almost angry.

"If I were being blackmailed out of everything I earned except about two shillings a week, I'd be tempted to pay in kind," she answered him.

He looked chastened. His lips thinned into a hard line. "I'm glad somebody got that scheming sod," he said harshly. "I just wish we could prove it wasn't poor Cleo. Or come to that, anyone else he was doing the same thing to. How are we going to do that?" He looked at her expectantly.

"Tell me exactly how much medicine went over the few months before his death, as nearly as you can."

"That won't tell us who the other person is - or people!"

"My husband is trying to find out where Treadwell went that might lead us to them."

He looked at her narrowly. "Is he any good at that?"

"Very good indeed. He used to be the best detective in the police force," she said with pride.

"Oh? Who's the best now?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. He left." Then, in case Phillips should think him dishonest, she added, "He resented some of the discipline. He can't abide pomposity either, especially when it is coupled with ignorance."

Phillips grinned, then the grin vanished and he was totally serious again.

"I'll get you a list o' those things. I could tell you pretty exact, if it helps."

"It'll help."

She spent the rest of the day and into the early evening trudging from one house to the next with Monk's list of Cleo's patients and Phillips's list of the missing medicines. She was accustomed to seeing people who were suffering illness or injury. Nursing had been her profession for several years, and she had seen the horror of the battlefield and the disease which had decimated the wounded afterwards. She had shared the exhaustion and the fear herself, and the cold and the hunger.

Nevertheless, to go into these homes, bare of comfort because everything had been sold to pay for food and warmth, to see the pain and too often the loneliness also, was more harrowing than she had expected. These men were older than the ones she had nursed in the Crimea; their wounds were not fresh. They had earned them in different battles, different wars; still, there was so much that was the same it hurled her back those short four years, and old emotions washed over her, almost to drowning.

Time and again she saw a dignity which made her have to swallow back tears as old men struggled to hide their poverty and force their bodies, disabled by age and injury, to rise and offer her some hospitality. She was walking in the footsteps of Cleo Anderson, trying to give some of the same comfort, and failing because she had not the means.

Rage burned inside her also. No one should have to beg for what he had more than earned.

She loathed asking for information about the medicine they had had. Nearly all of them knew that Cleo was being tried for her life. All Hester could do was tell the truth. Every last man was eager to give her any help he could, to open cupboards and show her