"Who was she?" Hester asked.

"Mary Havilland," he replied. "Her father took his own life a couple of months ago." He saw the shadow of grief in Hester's eyes, and the tightening of her mouth. "Her sister believes that she did not recover from it," he added. "I'm sorry."

She looked away. "It's over," she said quietly. She was referring to her own father, not Havilland's. "Why did he do it?" she asked. "Was it debt, too?"

"Apparently not," he replied. "He believed there was some danger of an accident in the tunnels. They're building some of the new sewers."

"And not before time!" she said fervently. "What sort of an accident?"

"I don't know." He explained the family relationships briefly. "Argyll says his father-in-law had a terror of landslips, cave-ins and so on. He became obsessed, lost his senses a bit."

"And is that true?" she pressed, clearly still forcing herself to think only of the present case.

"I don't know." He went on to tell her about Mary's proposed engagement to Toby Argyll, and that she had broken it off, but no reason had been given, except her distress over her father's death and that she refused to believe that he had caused it himself. She could not let the matter go.

"What was it, then?" Hester asked. "Accident? Or murder?" She was being severely practical, but he saw the stiffness in her, the deliberate control, and the effort.

"I don't know. But the police investigated it. It was Runcorn's patch." He looked at her steadily with a bleak smile.

She understood why that added irony and pain to the case. More than he wished, she had seen his ambition for authority, the way he had fought with, crushed, and infuriated Runcorn in the past. She did not know the flashes of memory and shame that Monk had had since then, the realization of how he had used Runcorn in his own climb to success, before the accident that had taken his memory. There were things that it was kind for forgetfulness to cleanse from the mind.