Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry

Author:Anne Perry [Perry, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Traditional British, Fiction, Historical, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780345530301
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

MONK WENT BACK TO Chiswick to learn more about the boat and its patrons. It was late October, more than a month since Mickey Parfitt’s body had been found floating at Corney Reach. The air was much colder. The last echoes of summer were completely gone, and the leaves were falling. It had stopped raining, but there was a smell of damp in the air, and occasionally a drift of wood smoke from bonfires. The late flowers were richly bronze and purple, heavier, darker than the blue and gold of spring. The few stubble fields he passed were brazen, almost barbaric in their beauty, vividly and unmistakably waning.

It had always been Monk’s favorite season. He had flashes of memory sometimes of the great barren hills of Northumberland, where he knew he’d been born, so different from the lush easiness of the south. The earth there seemed to be all bones, no flesh, the skies unending. He would go back one day soon and see if it was still as beautiful, or if it was only the familiarity then that had made it seem so.

Now he had to follow the dirt and violence of Mickey Parfitt’s life and all the people he had known, used, cheated, and betrayed.

It was time to face the details of what had happened on the boat. Monk had been putting it off, perhaps as much for himself as for them, but he must speak to the boys himself, gently, persistently, ruthlessly. He must have the hospital matron there as a witness, so nothing rested on him alone, but this time he could not allow her to intervene. He realized how deeply he had been dreading it, why he had sent Orme instead of going himself, telling himself that Orme had children and would be better at it.

It took him two days of gentle, endlessly repeated questions, and it hurt more profoundly than he had imagined. The matron looked at him as if he had been a criminal himself, but she did not stop him more than two or three times. His assumption about Crumble had been correct: cook, companion, laundryman, gang master for cleaning chores, and jailer. Sometimes, here and there, abuser as well. The boys’ pale, blurred, and frightened faces reflected more misery than anger. They were too young to understand that it could all have been wildly and beautifully different. They might well have known hunger, cold, and exhaustion, but without the added horror. They could have had safety in sleep, been touched only in tenderness, or in the occasional, well-earned chastening. They could have been spared all their lives from the obscenity of degraded human appetite, from the sight of men who despised others because they despised themselves.

Now, having questioned the boys, it was Monk who had dreams he could not bear. He woke in the night, his body aching and drenched in a sweat, tears on his face. He lay in the dark, staring up at the faint shadow patterns on the ceiling as the wind moved in the trees outside.

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