Read William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea for Free Online Page B

some irritation. Whatever it was, he was in no mood to deal with it tonight. Even if some client had been arrested and was in jail, there was nothing he could do about it at this hour.
    “Mr. Brundish, sir,” Ardmore replied. “He says he has something of great importance to give you, and he is unable to return in the morning because of other commitments. I explained to him that you were out, and that I did not know at what time you might return, but he was adamant, sir.”
    “Yes, you did the right thing,” Rathbone said wearily. “I suppose I had better go and take delivery of whatever it is. What is it, do you know? A letter of some sort, I suppose.”
    “No, Sir Oliver, it is quite a large parcel, and from the way he carried it, it seems to be of considerable weight.”
    Rathbone was surprised.
    “A parcel?”
    “Yes, sir. Would you like me to bring whisky, sir? Or brandy? I offered him both earlier, but he only accepted coffee.”
    “No, thank you. It will only incline him to stay.” He was aware it sounded ungracious, but all he wanted was to accept the package and see the man leave. And very possibly, Brundish was as keen to get to home as Rathbone was to be left in peace.
    He walked into the withdrawing room and Brundish rose from the chair he had been sitting in. He was a stocky man dressed in a striped suit. He looked tired and a little anxious.
    “Sorry to call at this time of the night,” he apologized before Rathbone had a chance to speak at all. “Can’t come tomorrow, and I needed to … deal with this.” His glance slid to the box on the floor beside his chair. It was approximately a foot in height and breadth, fifteen inches long. It appeared to be some kind of case.
    “Deal with it?” Rathbone asked, puzzled. “What is it?”
    “Your legacy,” Brundish replied. “From the late Arthur Ballinger. I’ve been holding it in trust for him. At least, I held the key and the instructions. I only retrieved this today.”
    Rathbone froze. Memory came flooding back. Ballinger’s messageto him: that he had bequeathed him the blackmail photographs in a final irony as bitter as gall. Rathbone had assumed it was a dying joke, a threat empty of meaning.
    He looked now at the case sitting on the beautiful carpet (another choice of Margaret’s), and wondered if that was really what was in the box: pictures of men, important men, powerful men with money and position, indulging in the terrible vice that Ballinger had photographed and with which he had then blackmailed them. At least his blackmailing had usually been for good; Rathbone thought of the judge who had been disinclined to close down a factory polluting the land and causing terrible disease. The threat to make public his taste for the violent sexual abuse of small boys had changed his mind.
    Each member of that hideous club had had to pose in a picture so lewd, so compromising, that the publication of it would ruin him. After this initiation, exercise of the vice was relatively free—until Ballinger needed their help in some favor or other.
    Only after some years had it degenerated into payment with money rather than action. And then—when possession of the riverboat on which it had all taken place had satisfied Ballinger’s own power for gain—finally to murder.
    Rathbone did not know beyond doubt of Ballinger’s guilt in, or even his knowledge of, the murders of the boys grown too old to please the tastes of such patrons, or too unwilling to be coerced anymore. He preferred to think that of those additional crimes, perhaps Ballinger was innocent.
    None of this Margaret believed, and she had never seen or even imagined the pictures. Rathbone would fight with everything he had in order that she never did. Such things seared themselves into the mind and could not be erased. Rathbone himself still woke in the night soaked with sweat when he dreamed of them, of going into the boats themselves and feeling the pain and the fear drown him, like