William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue Read Online Free PDF

something that would urge him to accept. Then she saw that he was going to, and was ashamed of herself for having doubted him.
    “I’ll go to the station concerned,” he agreed. “Where were they found?”
    “Acton Street,” Callandra replied, relief quick in her voice. “Number twelve. It’s a house with an artist’s studio on the top floor.”
    “Acton Street?” Monk frowned, trying to place it.
    “Off the Gray’s Inn Road,” Callandra told him. “Just beyond the Royal Free Hospital.”
    Hester felt her mouth go dry. She tried to swallow, and it caught in her throat.
    Monk was looking at Callandra. His face was blank, but the muscles in his neck were pulled tight. Hester knew that the studio must be in Runcorn’s area, and that Monk would have to approach him if he were to involve himself. It was an old enmity going back to Monk’s first days on the force. But whatever he felt about that now, he masked it well. He was already bending his mind to the task.
    “How did you hear about it so soon?” he asked Callandra.
    “Kristian told me,” she replied. “We had a hospital meeting this afternoon, and he had to cancel it. He asked me to make his excuses.” She swallowed, her tea ignored.
    “She can’t have been home all night,” he went on. “Wasn’t he concerned for her?”
    She avoided his eyes very slightly. “I didn’t ask him. I . . . I believe they led separate lives.”
    As a friend, he might not have pressed the matter—it was delicate—but when he was in pursuit of truth neither his mind nor his tongue accepted boundaries. He might hate probing an area he knew would cause pain, but that had never stopped him. He could be as ruthless with the dark mists of the memory within himself, and he knew with bone-deep familiarity just how that hurt. He had had to piece together the shards of his own past before the accident. Some of them were full of color, others were dark, and to look at them cost all the courage he had.
    “Where was he yesterday evening?” he continued, looking at Callandra.
    Her eyes opened wide, and Hester saw the fear in them. Monk must have seen it also. She looked as if she were about to say one thing, then cleared her throat and said something else. “Please protect his reputation, William,” she pleaded. “He is Bohemian, and although his English is perfect, he is still a foreigner. And . . . they did not have the happiest of marriages. Don’t allow them to harass him or suggest some kind of guilt by innuendo.”
    He did not offer her any false assurances. “Tell me something about Mrs. Beck,” he said instead. “What kind of woman was she?”
    Callandra hesitated; a flicker of surprise was in her eyes, then gone again. “I’m not certain that I know a great deal,” she confessed uncomfortably. “I never met her. She didn’t involve herself with the hospital at all, and . . .” She blushed. “I don’t really know Dr. Beck socially.”
    Hester looked at Monk. If he found anything odd in Callandra’s answer there was no sign of it in his expression. His face was tense, eyes concentrated upon hers. “What about her circle of friends?” he asked. “Did she entertain? What were her interests? What did she do with her time?”
    Now Callandra was definitely uncomfortable. The color deepened in her face. “I’m afraid I don’t know. He speaks of her hardly at all. I . . . I gathered from something he said that she was away from home a great deal, but he did not say where. He mentioned once that she had considerable political knowledge and spoke German. But then, Kristian himself spent many years in Vienna, so perhaps that is not very surprising.”
    “Was she Bohemian, too?” Monk asked quickly.
    “No . . . at least I don’t think so.”
    Monk stood up. “I’ll go to the police station and see what I can learn.” His voice softened. “Don’t worry yet. It may be that the artists’ model was the intended victim, and only a tragic mischance that