Twisted Root by Anne Perry

Author:Anne Perry [Perry, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-02T20:00:00+00:00

8

IT TOOK MONK nearly a quarter of an hour to find a hansom, first striding down Fitzroy Street to the Tottenham Court Road, then walking south towards Oxford Street.

He had left Hester furious at being excluded, but it would be in every way inappropriate for him to have taken her. She could serve no purpose except to satisfy her own curiosity, and she would quite obviously be intrusive. She had not argued, just seethed inside because she felt helpless and as confused as he was.

It was a fine night. A thin film of cloud scudded over a bright moon. The air was warm, the pavements still holding the heat of the day. His footsteps were loud in the near silence. A carriage rumbled by out of Percy Street and crossed towards Bedford Square, the moonlight shining for a moment on gleaming doors and the horses’ polished flanks. Whoever had murdered Verona Stourbridge, it had not been Cleo Anderson. She was safely locked up in the Hampstead police station.

What could this new and terrible event have to do with the death of James Treadwell?

He could see pedestrians on the footpath at the corner of Oxford Street, two men and a woman, laughing.

He tried to picture Mrs. Stourbridge on the one occasion he had met her. He could not bring back her features, or even the color of her eyes, only the overriding impression he had had of a kind of vulnerability. Underneath the poised manner and the lovely clothes was a woman who was acquainted with fear. Or perhaps that was only hindsight, now that she was dead... murdered.

It had to be one of her own family, or a servant—or Miriam. But why would Miriam kill her, unless she truly was insane?

He turned the corner and walked along the edge of the footpath on Oxford Street, watching the road all the time for sight of a cab. He could recall Miriam only too easily, the wide eyes, the sweep of her hair, the strength in her mouth. She had behaved without any apparent reason, but he had never met anyone who had given him more of a sense of inner sanity, of a wholeness no outside force could destroy.

Maybe that was what madness was ... something inside you which the reality of the world did not touch?

A hansom slowed down and he hailed it, giving the Stourbridge address in Cleveland Square. The driver grumbled about going so far, and Monk ignored him, climbing inside and sitting down, engulfed in silence and thought again.

He reached the Stourbridge house, paid the driver and went up the steps. It was after one o’clock in the morning. All the surrounding houses were in darkness, but here the hall and at least four other rooms blazed with light between the edges of imperfectly drawn curtains. There was another carriage outside, waiting. Presumably, it was the doctor’s.

The butler answered the door the moment after Monk knocked, and invited him in with a voice rasping with tension. The man was white-faced, and his body beneath his black suit was rigid and very slightly shaking.

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