A Breach Of Promise Part 25

But why murder? What threat was Keelin Melville to anyone, except possibly Wolff? If the case had continued as it was, only Keelin herself, and Wolff, would suffer.

Why hadn't Wolff simply told the court she was a woman? The most cursory medical examination would have proved him right, and he of all men knew that! Keelin would not have refused.

The fire was going out. He had neglected it. He bent down and with the tongs picked up half a dozen pieces of coal and put them on one by one. The fire looked like it was being smothered. d.a.m.n! It was getting cold and he was not ready to go to bed yet. Also he was angry with his own carelessness. He dropped the tongs and picked up the bellows, blowing gently, sending up a cloud of white ash. He swore again, and tried more gently still.

The reason had to be in what might happen if the case continued. Someone was frightened.

What would happen? Monk would continue to search in the past of Zillah Lambert and her family, but particularly her past romances. Perhaps they were not as very slight and natural as they appeared, no more than most pretty girls might experience. If he had continued, with his characteristic ruthlessness, what would he have uncovered? And who knew about it other than Zillah herself? Her father?

Hester seemed to think it would be her mother, the immaculate Delphine Lambert.

And, of course, the man involved ... and possibly his family.

But murder! Over a spoiled reputation! Surely Zillah herself could simply have told her father and asked that he settle out of court? He would have been willing enough, if he realized her happiness and the family honor depended on it. He might have been angry for a while, even punished her one way or another, but that hardly warranted murder-in a sane person.

Monk's labor with the fire was rewarded by a spurt of flame. It licked up around the coal and began to burn. He smiled in satisfaction. A small victory-very small indeed.

Tomorrow he would retrace his steps over Zillah Lambert's past. This time he would press harder, not accept any equivocations. He would treat it as if it were murder. The trivial matter of breach of promise was a thing of the past.

He sat by the fire until the coal was entirely consumed, going over the notes he had made on his first investigation. He knew where he would begin tomorrow.

Actually, it took him two days to find the incident he had overlooked the first time-or, more accurately, had considered too trivial and too normal in anyone's life to matter. He still thought it of no real importance. But then he was not of the same level of society as the Lamberts, and certainly not of that level into which they aspired to marry.

He had followed Hester's advice about tracing back the weekly life of the Lamberts to discover a sudden move, probably involving only Zillah and her mother, coming at a time which seemed unplanned, made in haste, and perhaps in other ways inconvenient.

This time he was far more ruthless, pressing people, sometimes with only part of the truth, sometimes frightening them into revealing a fact that with more time to consider they would have kept discreet. The incident had occurred when Zillah was nearly sixteen, a holiday taken without warning, all personal plans disrupted. A garden party-a ball which Delphine had been very eager to attend; indeed, for which she had gone to great trouble to acquire an invitation-had been abandoned. A marvelous gown had to be set aside, to be worn when it was no longer impressive, certainly no longer the forerunner of fashion but rather the trailer behind, seeming a copy instead of an original. Knowing a little about clothes and vanity himself, he appreciated what a sacrifice Delphine had made. There would have to have been a very compelling reason to leave at that time, and a very urgent one.

To begin with, the friendship between Zillah and young Hugh Gibbons had seemed innocent enough, but if Delphine had been prepared to make such a sacrifice, then there must have been more to it. If he pressed he could find it.

It was morning on the third day before he had gathered sufficient evidence to prove it beyond denial. Of course, there was no witness that the two had been lovers in any but a romantic sense. But they had spent much time alone together. Hugh was nineteen, an age when Monk knew the emotions were wild and the blood hot and disinclined to moderation and self-discipline. Zillah had apparently been a willful fifteen-year-old, full of dreams and certain no one else understood them, except Hugh. She had read the great romances in the schoolroom.

By all accounts her parents had been generous and more inclined to indulgence than harshness. Any responsible mother would have done as Delphine had, possibly even sooner. The only answer to such a liaison was to leave the city for a while. Hugh was unsuitable socially-he had no means to keep a wife and no prospects; and Zillah was too young, and utterly impractical. The unplanned nature of the departure made it unarguable that Delphine had discovered a situation which could not be allowed to continue even another day or two, let alone weeks.

Did Barton Lambert know of it? Had it been serious enough for public knowledge of it to ruin Zillah?

But surely if it had, and Lambert knew about it, then he would not have begun the proceedings against Melville?

Had anyone else been concerned? Was there something about Hugh Gibbons? If Monk had pursued him instead of Zillah, would he have found something ugly enough to prompt murder? It seemed highly improbable. He could not imagine what. Another affair, perhaps a child or a rape? What had happened to Hugh Gibbons since then?

Before pursuing that, which might take a long time and be quite fruitless, he decided to speak to Barton Lambert.

It was shortly before one o'clock, and he was admitted readily into the house and, after the briefest hesitation, was shown into the large, very comfortable withdrawing room. French doors opened onto a small lawn surrounded by hydrangea bushes carpeted underneath with tiny white flowers.

The room was warmed by a handsome fire, and heavy brocade curtains framed the big windows and kept the draft from chilling the air. Delphine Lambert was sitting on one of the sofas. She was dressed in vivid blue, her enormous skirts gleaming in the light. She looked calm and happy. Wystan Sacheverall was standing closer to the window only a yard from Zillah; in fact, the frills of her dusky pink skirt covered the toes of his polished shoes. He was looking at her, disregarding Monk's entry as if he were not even aware of it and in any case it held no interest for him whatever. His face was filled with eagerness and he was talking to her, and smiling.

Zillah appeared to be absorbed by something in the garden beyond the gla.s.s, a flower or a bird. She did not take her eyes from it even when Sacheverall seemed to be asking a question. Her shoulder was lifted a little, pulling the fabric of her bodice, and Monk could only see the side of her head and the curve of her cheek. As soon as she heard his voice she turned and started towards him.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Lambert, Mrs. Lambert," he said formally. "Miss Lambert..."

"Good afternoon, Mr...." Delphine trailed off as if she had already forgotten his name.

"Monk," Lambert supplied. "Good afternoon, Monk. What can we do for you?"

Sacheverall deliberately remained by the window. He stared at Monk but made no move to come forward. His coldness could hardly be misinterpreted.

Zillah, on the other hand, seemed almost pleased to see him. Whatever had interested her in the garden was instantly forgotten.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Monk. How are you?"

She looked still tired, still hurt, but there was no air of self-pity about her, and no blame towards Monk. Again he was consumed with anger at this whole absurd charade which had already destroyed Keelin Melville and was going to damage Zillah yet further. He even hesitated whether to say what he had come for. What good would it do now?

He looked past her at Sacheverall, who had turned to face the room, watching Zillah. Was it affection in his eyes or enlightened self-interest, plus perhaps a little very natural desire towards an extremely attractive young woman? And she was attractive. She had an unusual mixture of innocence and individuality. A man who loved her might waken all kinds of pa.s.sions in her, and high among them would be loyalty.

Monk looked beyond her again at Sacheverall and disliked him profoundly.

"What may we do for you, Mr. Monk?" Lambert enquired.

Monk recalled himself. "I am sorry to intrude," he apologized. "May I speak with you alone, Mr. Lambert? I hope it will be brief."

Lambert glanced at his wife.

"Oh, there is plenty of time before luncheon," she a.s.sured him. "It is still a trifle cool for me, but T daresay Mr. Sacheverall would like to take a short walk around the garden. Zillah can show him some of our treasures."

Zillah looked at her father appealingly, but he misunderstood. "Yes, of course, my dear," he agreed. "I daresay we shall be no more than half an hour at the most."

Sacheverall offered his arm with a smile and considerable enthusiasm, and Zillah accepted it.

Lambert went to the door and opened it into the hall to usher Monk towards somewhere more private.

Monk excused himself to Delphine and followed.

They went to the study. It was a pleasant room, well furnished with books. A large desk was scattered with papers and there were two cabinets for the storage of yet more papers. Four chairs for visitors faced the desk, and Lambert turned to look at Monk, his brow furrowed, his eyes still filled with his sense of tragedy.

"Well, Monk, what is this about? Is this some further matter to do with Melville?" The absence of t.i.tle suggested he still thought of Melville as a man. Over the shock of disclosure and all the loss that had followed, he remembered the friend he had known and cared for.

Monk felt a tightening inside himself. A daughter, even as pretty and as charming and as seemingly agreeable as Zillah, was a source for all kinds of fears. Illness and accident were only the worst. There were so many humanly made, unnecessary other traps and snares, even in a young life barely begun.

"What is it?" Lambert repeated, not yet offering Monk a seat.

Monk had been considering where to begin. Lambert was a blunt man. He would not appreciate prevarication.

"I have been looking into Keelin Melville's death," he said directly, watching Lambert's face. "For Rathbone's sake as much as anything. It seems so..."

He saw the look of pain in Lambert's eyes.

"So oddly timed," he went on. "According to the police surgeon, she must have taken the poison while she was actually in the court, and yet she was observed all the time, and she neither ate nor drank anything at all. And why then, rather than later at home? Why would anyone choose to take poison in public in order to die in private, when doing both at home would have been so much easier?"

Lambert stared at him, puzzled and now also troubled. It seemed that up until now his emotions had crowded out thought. This came to him as an ugly intrusion, but he did not evade it.

"What are you trying to say, Monk? You are not a man to come here to see me simply to say there are things you do not understand. You have no need to understand, unless you believe there is something wrong, something criminal, or at the very least, something profoundly immoral. What do you expect of me?" He walked back to one of the chairs, not the one behind the desk but one of those arranged in front of it, and sat on it.

Monk sat in one of the others, crossing his legs and leaning back.

"One possibility troubles me, and I would like to prove it wrong before I let go of it."

"Yes? What is that possibility, and how does it concern me or my family?"

"I am not sure that it does," Monk admitted. "The possibility is that she was murdered."

Lambert leaned forward. "What?" He seemed genuinely not to have understood.

Monk repeated what he had said.

"Why?" Lambert puckered his face, his eyes narrowed. "Why would anybody want to murder Melville? He was the most..." He swallowed. "She was the most likable person. Of course, she had professional rivals, but people don't kill for that sort of reason." He waved his hand. "That's preposterous. And no one except Wolff knew she was a woman. You're not suggesting Wolff killed her, are you? I don't believe that for an instant!" Everything in his voice, his expression, emphasized what he said.

"No I don't," Monk agreed. "If it was murder, then I think it was to stop the case from going any further."

"The only person who'd want to stop that was poor Killian ... Keelin ... herself." A twinge of pain shot over Lambert's face. "I'm sorry ... I still find it hard to believe all this. I liked her, you know. I liked her very much, even after she- she ... d.a.m.n it! Even after the marriage with Zillah fell through, I still liked him-her!"

Lambert stood up and began pacing restlessly back and forth across the room, seesawing his hands in the air.

"I went ahead with the case because I had to!" He looked at Monk with a desperate urgency, willing him to believe. "I had to protect my daughter's reputation. If I hadn't, people would have said Melville had discovered something about her that made it impossible to marry her. They would a.s.sume she was without morals, a loose woman. No one would have had her." His lips tightened. "Do you know what happens to a young woman whose reputation is gone, Mr. Monk? She has no place!" He chopped the air again. "No decent man will marry her. She is no longer invited to the decent houses. Young women with hopes no longer a.s.sociate with her, in case the dirt rubs off. If she marries at all, it is to a man beneath her, and he treats her as what she is, one of society's castoffs."

He looked at Monk intently, willing him to understand. "Or she stays single, dependent upon her father, while all her friends gain husbands, houses, status-in time, children. Would you want that for your daughter? Wouldn't you fight any battle, any justified battle at all, rather than let that happen? Especially when you know she has done nothing to warrant it."

"I should probably do it whether she had warranted it or not," Monk said frankly. He disliked what he was going to do. Only there was the remembrance that Keelin Melville had been a young woman too, also denied what she wanted most because of the beliefs and conventions of others. There had been no one to feel for her, now not even herself. "What about Hugh Gibbons?"

Lambert's face showed nothing. No man could be so complete a master of himself as to have hidden guilt behind such a bland exterior.

"Who is Hugh Gibbons?"

"A young man who was in love with Zillah some three years ago," Monk replied. "He was unsuitable and the romance had gone too far. Mrs. Lambert took Zillah away, very suddenly, on a prolonged trip to the seaside-in North Wales. Crickieth, to be precise."

Lambert's face paled suddenly. He remained motionless where he was by the window, the light behind him.

"You remember now," Monk said unnecessarily.

The blood rushed back to Lambert's cheeks. He came forward to the desk, leaning over it. "Are you saying my daughter has lost her virtue, sir?"

"I have no idea," Monk replied. "I am agreeing with you that malicious supposition, whether true or not, can ruin a young person, and it would be natural for those who care for them to go to great lengths to prevent that."

Lambert drew in a long, slow breath. "You are accusing me of murdering Melville to hide some d.a.m.ned indiscretion which was caught before it was anything! G.o.d Almighty, what kind of a man do you think I am?"

Monk glanced down and saw that Lambert's hands on the desk were shaking and his knuckles were white. He would have swom that the idea genuinely horrified him.

"I am not accusing you, Mr. Lambert," Monk answered quietly. "I am trying to find out why Keelin Melville chose such an extraordinary time to kill herself, and how. She did not eat or drink anything during the time when the police surgeon says the poison entered her body ... yet he says it was swallowed. It does not make sense, does it?"

Lambert frowned. He sat down again, this time behind the desk. "No... not that I can see," he agreed. "But if she did not eat or drink anything, then how did anyone else poison her?"

"I don't know that either," Monk confessed. "I'm looking for a lot of things. I've seen Keelin Melville's buildings, her dreams, something of what was in her soul. I can't let this go without doing everything I can to understand what happened to her."

Lambert swallowed, his throat convulsing. "Dammit! So am I! I'll retain you if necessary. Nothing we do can bring her back. Nothing I do can alter my part in it. But I can find out what finally broke her, and learn to live with it... or if it was someone else, then I'll see they pay." He bent his head and put his hands over his face. "Listen to me! Am I going to find the man I want to punish is myself?"

Monk was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of empathy with him. They were as different as possible, physically, in pattern of life and fortune, in turn of mind and personality, and yet Monk had stood in exactly the same place: pursuing what he believed to be a monster and terrified that when he found him, it would prove to be his own face he saw.

"Are you not going to punish yourself anyway?" He did not move his eyes from Lambert, and slowly Lambert looked up.

"Yes. But either way I have to know the truth, if you can find it."

"What happened to Hugh Gibbons?"

"What? I've no idea. Can it matter now?"

"I don't know. Can you think of any other incident in Zillah's life which anyone might fear my looking into?"

"I don't fear that." Some of the indignation came back into Lambert's voice. "It could have been tragic, but it wasn't. My wife dealt with it before it went too far. Took Zillah away." There was no shadow in his face, not the slightest duplicity. If there had been anything more to it Monk would swear Lambert knew nothing of it. But then that was entirely possible. A wise mother might well not tell the father of any such thing. She might fear his reaction, his anger, his sense of outrage. He could all too easily lose his temper and, without realizing it, bring about the very disaster his wife was laboring to avoid.

Lambert saw the disbelief in Monk's face. "It wasn't!" he repeated fiercely.

"What about Hugh Gibbons?" Monk said again. "Might he have gone on to become involved with another young woman, and her mother not have acted so quickly, or so effectively?"

"I've no idea. What difference could it make?" Lambert's eyes opened wide. "Are you suggesting Gibbons came to the courtroom and poisoned Melville to stop you from looking into it? That's ridiculous. How? Why didn't we see him? And how would he know about you anyway? What would you have done about it if you had found something? You would hardly have ruined some other young woman just for the sake of it. It wouldn't have helped Melville's cause." His contempt for the idea was plain.

So was Monk's, he had to admit. If it was this incident, then it was to do with Zillah.

The same thought must have occurred to Lambert. He rose to his feet.

"We'll ask my wife and get the whole thing disposed of. Come."

Monk followed obediently, catching up with him at the withdrawing room door. "Would you rather not discuss it with Sacheverall present?" he asked.

"Not at all. He is our family lawyer, and as you may have observed, extremely fond of Zillah. We have no secrets to hide from him." He opened the door and walked in.

Delphine was sitting elegantly on the sofa with a piece of embroidery in her hands, although she was paying it little attention. Zillah and Sacheverall had returned from their walk in the garden. Perhaps it was a little cool. Now they stood over by the window close together, and Sacheverall was talking to her earnestly, gazing at her eyes, her lips. The sunlight caught the brilliance of her hair, shining bronze and gold. They all looked at Lambert as he came in.

Lambert went straight to the point. "Mr. Monk has told me some disturbing things about Melville's death. It seems it is not as simple a suicide as it first appeared."

Sacheverall made as if to interrupt, coming a step forward into the room.

Lambert overrode him. "There are things which need explaining, and we cannot let the matter go until that has been done."

"With respect, sir," Sacheverall argued, "to continue to go over the matter can only cause further distress to innocent people. That Melville should take her own life is easy enough to understand." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "She was obviously a person of-at its kindest-a disturbed mind and unnatural disposition. She realized the great wrong she had done both to Zillah"-he smiled at her and put his hand on her arm-"and to Isaac Wolff. To avoid further dishonor, she killed herself. What further explanation can be needed?"

"A great deal," Lambert answered with a sharpness that surprised Monk, and from the look in his face, Sacheverall also. Only Zillah seemed happy with her father's words.

Delphine looked merely annoyed. "Leave the wretched creature in peace." She shook her head. "As Mr. Sacheverall so wisely says, she was only too obviously disturbed. Pursuing her reasons for taking her life can only distress you, my dear, and perhaps cause you to blame yourself where there is no justification. I have told you over and over that no fault lies with you. You believed what she told you, as did we all." She placed her hand lightly on his arm. "It is not fair to hold yourself responsible in any way. I hate to see you suffer for this. Please ... let us all put it behind us. No good can come of knowing any more, even if it were possible." She regarded him very earnestly. "And truly, Barton, can we say that her inner turmoil is any of our business? Can we not allow her, at least in death, a little privacy?"

For the first time Lambert hesitated. He glanced at Monk, then back at Delphine.