An Echo of Murder by Anne Perry

Author:Anne Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

9

IT HAD BEEN A long day, and one in which very little progress was apparent. Monk left the police station at Wapping and walked along the open dock toward the stairs, where the ferry would pick him up to take him across the river and home.

He and Hooper had spent most of their time inquiring into the purchase of large numbers of candles, and especially of varied colors. They were a very usual form of lighting, and everyone bought them pretty regularly. At one point Monk and Hooper discovered a shipment of purple-violet candles, but they had gone to many different hardware shops and chandlers, and no one could recall to whom they had been sold. They were not a different price from the usual yellowish color, so receipts were of no help.

Monk himself spent some time in the library looking up all the rituals he could find. They were many and varied, but none of the books had any reference to the number seventeen. He even consulted the regular police regarding graffiti, unusual symbols and religious sects.

Of course, the newspapers only made it worse. But about the only thing more damaging than gossip and unreasonable speculation was a press censored by a panicking government, no better informed than the public, and no better in its moral intentions.

There were one or two cases of violence, brawls that escalated into knife fights, but although they were attributed to the general terror, there was no proof that they were a result of the murders.

It was another mild late-summer evening. It should have been a peaceful end to a long day. The sound of the rising tide lapping against the piles that held up the wharf was so soft it could have lulled a tired man to sleep. The sharp smell of the incoming flood from the estuary was not pleasant to everyone, with its salt, mud and occasional refuse, but Monk had grown used to it, and there is an element of pleasure in what is familiar.

To his irritation, he heard footsteps behind him. He would have liked to spend the journey home alone. Then he turned and saw that it was Will, whose new, smarter boots had a louder sound than he was used to. Monk had thought it was a man coming. He looked at Will’s height, and his fast-broadening shoulders. Perhaps he was not wrong?

“Going home?” he asked, hoping now that he was.

Will smiled. “Don’t need me tonight. I can have a real sleep. The man with tetanus—that was awful.” He winced as he said it. “Just the smell of it…”

“Tetanus smells?” Monk was surprised.

Will gave a brief laugh. “Not the tetanus, the flesh of the wound when you put the white-hot iron on to cauterize it.”

Monk let go of his own day, and his frustration at its futility. Will’s eyes held a very definite satisfaction, and not only at the fact that the man had survived the ordeal; he was also obviously pleased at the look on Monk’s face.

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