“We have to look very carefully into his last few days,” Monk said. “Last week or two. What happened that a man who lived in a house like this suddenly got attacked as he was, with such hatred?”

  But a careful search of the rest of the house turned up nothing that seemed to tell of an unusual event. There was no diary, nothing marked on the calendar on the kitchen wall, no notes, letters or invitations.

  “Start next door,” Monk said, peering up and down the street. “Looks well kept, as if there’s somebody there a lot of the time.”

  Hooper smiled. “Yes, sir. I saw the curtains twitch.”

  “Right. I’ll go this way,” Monk said. “You go that.” He pointed in the other direction. “See you at the station.”

  Hooper gave a half salute, and walked away.

  They asked the neighbors all sorts of seemingly ordinary questions, trying to find anything unusual, or, at the very least, what they thought or felt about Imrus Fodor.

  “Nice enough man,” Mrs. Harris said, one door down to the right. She was about fifty, perhaps a year or two older than the victim. “Not that I knew him, of course. Hungarian, he was.” She added that as if it were an explanation.

  “Did he speak good English?” Monk asked.

  “Ah…well, yes, I suppose so. But for all that, he wasn’t like us. Couldn’t be, could he?”

  Sometimes Monk chose to be obstructive, to see how an interviewee changed what they said when they were off guard with annoyance. He decided to use this strategy now.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever even known a Hungarian. What are they like?” He kept his expression polite with some difficulty.

  “Like?” she said stiffly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You said he was not like us,” he reminded her.

  “Well, he wasn’t English, was he!” she snapped.

  “I believe not.”

  “You ever met an Englishman called Fodor?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “No. Was he rude to you? Untidy? Disrespectful? Unclean? Noisy? Did you ever see him the worse for drink? Did he have women coming and going in the house?”

  She looked taken aback. “Well…no. Except Mrs. Durridge, of course. She came and cleaned for him, and might have cooked, for all I know.”

  He got little more from Mrs. Harris, or the next people he spoke to. But the man behind the counter at the corner tobacconist’s was more forthright.

  “Not enough work around here for us, never mind all the foreigners coming in,” he said darkly. “Not that he was bad,” he added. “Took on a few workers, ’e did, but mostly ’is own, like. More foreigners. But what do you expect? Foreign newspapers they’ve got too. Print them right ’ere. That pharmacist fellow, Dobokai, ’as something to do with that. Not any idea what they’re saying about us. Can’t read a word of it. Could be anything.”

  “Perhaps it’s news from Hungary?” Monk suggested.

  The man grunted. “They’re different, that’s all. And now look what’s ’appened! Got himself murdered. Don’t want that kind of thing ’ere.”

  “We don’t need any more,” Monk agreed. “We’ve got enough of our own violence without help.”

  The man looked at him narrowly. “What’s it to you, then?”

  “Police,” Monk replied. “Want to find out who did this to him, and get them put away as soon as possible.”

  “Right. You do that!”

  “Need your help. I don’t know the area here,” Monk replied.

  “Where do you live, then? You foreign too?”

  “Other side of the river,” Monk replied. “Just about straight across from here. Up from the Greenwich Stairs a bit.”

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  Monk surprised himself. “What do you know about Antal Dobokai?”

  “Interesting fellow…” The tobacconist gave it some consideration. “Quiet. But, underneath it, thinking all the time. Educated. But in Hungary, o’ course, where ’e comes from. Does sums in ’is ’ead faster than most of us can on paper, an’ always right. Was an architect once, so rumor ’as it. Harder to find work over ’ere. We got our own. But seems ’e’s doing all right. Why? You think ’e done it?” There was both skepticism and amusement in his face.

  “No,” Monk replied. “Looks as if he’s the one man who couldn’t have, so far.”

  “Why’s that, then?”

  “Time. Can’t be in two places at once.”

  “Bad thing. You’re police: Was it as bad as talk ’as it?”

  “Pretty ugly. Someone hated him, or was out of his mind in some way or other. Is there strong feeling in the community? Rivalries? Feuds?”

  The man looked slightly surprised. “They’re different, I suppose, them Hungarians, but civil enough, if you’re civil to them. Don’t bother me. Of course, there’s always them that don’t like anyone who’s different, dresses different, acts different, like. Stick-in-the-mud, like. Like old Sallis around the corner. ‘Good enough for my father, and ’is father before ’im, good enough for me,’ ’e’ll say. Like change is an insult.”

  “Did you know Fodor?”

  “Some. Nice enough. Always got a good word or two. Never walks right by you, like some. But then, they’re all different, like we are.”

  We, and them. Monk noticed it over and over. He stayed a little longer, then moved on a block or so and asked a greengrocer, then a cobbler. It was late afternoon and he had learned nothing unexpected when he met up with Hooper again.

  “Not much help,” Hooper said, shaking his head. “Known locally, especially among the other Hungarians. Quite a few of them in the area. All come to the same place. Reckon I’d do the same if I had to live in some other country. Not like I would! Why’d they come here? Ones I spoke to were doing well enough. Why not stay at home, where you’re just like anyone else?”

  “Did you ask them?”

  Hooper smiled ruefully. “Got enough people asking that, like they’d no right to be here. Got nothing useful, sir. Everyone says what you’d expect them to. He was all right, but still a foreigner.” He shook his head. “This was someone who knew him well and hated him, or is a madman.”

  Monk had reluctantly reached the same conclusion.

  “Or someone who hated newcomers,” Hooper added. “Felt a bit of that. Some people find change threatening.”

  “Then they should go and live out in the countryside,” Monk said tartly. “The city’s changing all the time. That’s what’s both good and bad about it. I heard the same, but it’s just grumbling, as some people grumble about the weather.”

  “Somebody hated the poor devil,” Hooper said as they began to walk. The sun was lowering in the sky, pavements already partially in shadow. “Perhaps we should get Dobokai to help us? He might pick up inflections we don’t. He knows the people and he speaks the language. Most of them seem to have pretty fair English, but they still speak to each other in Hungarian. We might be missing something.”

  “I think I’m missing everything,” Monk said with a touch of bitterness. “It’s not a random lunatic. There was hatred in that room—deep, irrational, personal hatred. Whoever it was drove a bayonet through his heart, extinguished candles in his blood, broke his teeth and his right hand. And they hacked off his lips. We’ve got something terrible here, Hooper, whether it’s English or Hungarian or something we haven’t looked at yet. Wonder what the candles mean. Nobody lights seventeen candles just to see by. Did you notice two of them were dark, a purplish-blue color? Does that mean something? Or was it just what he had? There’s no panic yet, but if we don’t solve this murder, there will be. Word will spread, and no doubt get worse in the telling.”

  “Yes, sir, I know,” Hooper said quietly, keeping in step with Monk so exactly that he did not need to raise his voice. “You’ll be putting more men on it tomorrow?” It was barely a question.

  “Yes, all we can spare.”

  —

  MONK ARRIVED HOME LATE, although it was still light. No lamps were lit yet in the street as he walked up the hill from the ferry. As he turned onto Paradise Place and looked back, the sun was making a polished shield of the still water of the river, marked here and there by the black hulls of moored ships whose masts barely moved against the backdrop of the sky above the city. The air was still warm. There was no wind to rustle the heavy leaves of the trees in Southwark Park. Violence seemed a distant nightmare.

  He walked the last few steps and opened his door.

  Hester heard him and came into the hall from the kitchen. She was not a traditionally beautiful woman, perhaps a little too thin, and certainly there was far too much courage in her face, and too much intelligence for her demeanor to be comfortable to most men. There had been a time, long ago, when he had found it aggressive. Now it was what he loved in her the most.

  He went straight to her and hugged her, surprising her with the fierceness of his grip.

  After a moment she pulled away, concern in her eyes.

  He could tell straightaway that she had not heard of the murder in Shadwell.

  “You didn’t go to the clinic today?” he asked.

  The shadow in her eyes was immediate. The clinic was in Portpool Lane, to the north of the river. She had founded it several years ago, to take in and treat women off the streets who were ill or injured. It was her final role as a nurse, a career that had begun with Florence Nightingale, and the Crimean War. Now others ran the clinic, but she still took part.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I meant you haven’t been out, or you would have seen the headlines in the evening papers. We had a pretty terrible murder in Shadwell, just along from the Wapping Station.”

  “On the river?” She turned and led the way back to the kitchen. The kettle would be on the hob, as it always was at this time of evening.

  “Just off it, but practically on the Shadwell New Basin. Regular police were glad to get rid of it. The victim works with boats. Hungarian. There’s a bit of a community there. Just a few hundred, at the most.”

  Hester pulled the kettle onto the hottest part of the stove, which was stoked and lit only for water and cooking. It was more than warm enough in the house, so it wasn’t needed for heating. The only thing Monk could think about was hot, fresh tea. Hester had no need to ask.

  “Cold beef and bubble and squeak for dinner?” she asked. “And I’ve got apple pie.”

  It was exactly what he wanted, especially the pie.

  CHAPTER

  2

  MONK BEGAN AGAIN EARLY the next morning by going to see Dr. Hyde at his office next to the morgue.

  “Can’t tell you anything helpful,” Hyde said immediately. “You must have made your own estimate already, and there’s nothing to add. Death was due to loss of blood. Happens when you stick a bayonet through the heart. Very messy, very melodramatic, but a quick way to go.”

  “Hardly a merciful way,” Monk said sourly. “You’re not telling me there was no hatred in it?”

  “Far from it.” Hyde gave him a sharp look. “Rage! Takes a lot of strength to skewer a man like that. On the battlefield you would charge so you’d get up that impetus. Whoever did this was in a fury—either that, or was terrified. And since he held the bayonet, and presumably took it with him, and there was no sign of poor Fodor having had anything with which to defend himself, rage looks far more likely. Could be vengeance, but if it was, whatever Fodor did must have been damned appalling.”

  “So you can’t tell me anything more useful than either the murderer had an intense hatred, born from something that ought to stand out in someone’s past, or else there’s a raving madman who has so far been invisible; come out of nowhere, and seems to have gone back there again?”

  Hyde raised his eyebrows as if mildly surprised. “I didn’t create the situation, Monk. If you wanted a peaceful and predictable job you should have been a bookkeeper or a greengrocer.” He moved over to his desk, which was littered with papers. “I can tell you that the killer seems to have taken the victim totally by surprise. Man never had a chance. He was big, in good health, and he made no attempt to defend himself.”

  “So he wasn’t afraid?” Monk deduced. “He didn’t think he had any reason to be.”

  “Looks like it. If it was an old quarrel, it was one-sided. You’d better learn a lot more about Fodor. I don’t think this one is going to unravel itself for you with just a tweak here or there. Now, if you want a cup of tea, the kettle’s on the shelf, and you know where the burner is. Otherwise get out of here and leave me to get started on the day. Accident down on the Surrey Docks. I’ve got two more bodies to look at.”

  “Thank you,” Monk replied with a faint smile. “I’ve put three more men on it. I’d better go and see how they’re doing.”

  “Fairly decent lot, the Hungarians,” Hyde added. “Not the dregs, by any means. Some of them could be political fugitives. You could look into that. They had a rough time from the Austrians, always the underdogs. But I believe they’ve got a lot more latitude in the last few years.”

  Monk had been intending to do exactly as Hyde suggested, but he thanked him anyway, and left the morgue. It was always cold in there, even in the summer, and the smells of lye and carbolic made him think of the even worse things they concealed.

  He walked back to Shadwell—it was not far—and he saw Hooper when he reached the dock itself.

  “Morning, sir.” Hooper looked grim. “I’ve asked along the streets. Everybody I’ve spoken to so far is pretty jumpy. Some of these Hungarians have been here several years, and speak English quite comfortably, but most still have trouble with it. It’s easy to misunderstand little things. That fellow Dobokai is willing to help, and so far he seems to be the one person whose whereabouts mean he couldn’t have killed Fodor.”

  Monk would rather not have used Dobokai, but it seemed he had no choice. He told Hooper what the police surgeon had said.

  Hooper stared across the open water of the dock, the sunlight on his face. In the distance rang the shouts of men working and the clank of chains as loads were made fast, ready to lift.

  “Looks like a big job, sir. We’re outsiders to them, for all they live here in our city. They’ll be polite, but won’t let us in, if you know what I mean.”

  “We need to find out all we can about the last month or two of Fodor’s life. Hatred like that doesn’t come out of nowhere—unless we really are looking for a lunatic…”

  “I’ve got a couple of men asking whether any strangers have cropped up lately,” Hooper replied. “Most people around here can be accounted for. Business, work here, buying or selling something, relations. People are badly upset by this killing. More it sinks in, the worse it gets. Everyone knows about it now.”

  “Then we’d better get started,” Monk agreed. “We’ll dig into Fodor’s past. What do we know about him so far?”

  Hooper’s expression was blank. “Honest in business, well-mannered, good employer, doesn’t have any debts, sober, agreeable, quiet and clean, generous…” He stopped.

  “I take your point,” Monk agreed. “No reason on earth to wish him dead. Therefore his associates are all innocent and we should indeed look for a random lunatic from outside the community. It’s going to be hard work.”

  “Yes, sir. In a way, you can’t blame them. When you’re in a strange country that looks after its own, you’ve got to look after your own as well.”

  Monk did not bother to reply.

  They found Antal Dobokai on the pavement outside one of the cafés run by a Hungarian family. There were pastries on display in the window, and a rich, spicy aroma drifted out through the door. Dobokai seemed almost to have been expecting them.

  “Good morning,” he said with only partially concealed satisfaction. “Have you discovered anything of help?”

  “Not a great deal,” Monk admitted. There was no point in pretending: it would appear weak if he lied. “Either it was a random killing, which in the circumstances looks unlikely, or else there is an old enmity of great depth, of which most people were unaware.”

  Dobokai appeared to be thinking; there was a discernible hesitation before he answered. “Or there is another possibility,” he said slowly, picking his words as if his familiarity with the language had suddenly deserted him. “That poor Fodor was the focus of a dislike that exists in some people for those who are different.”

  “London is packed with people who are different,” Monk pointed out. “Especially in the dockside areas. Just about every nationality in the world is here, and many of them look a lot more different than you do. I couldn’t tell you were not English, until you spoke.”

  A brief smile crossed Dobokai’s face, and vanished. “Then you are not as good a detective as your position suggests,” he said frankly.

  Hooper looked away, and Monk had a fair idea he was smiling.

  As if to rob his words of offense, Dobokai continued, “Our women wear their clothes a little differently, if I may say it, with more…flair. And we have different bones, just a bit.” He touched his own slightly more prominent cheekbones. “Wider,” he added. “We try to learn your ways, but we will not abandon who we are.”

  “If that were so,” Monk said more gently, “then why Fodor? Why not anyone? There must be some reason behind it, some chance that made whoever it was choose him. And choose yesterday. That may be our only opportunity of finding the murderer. We would be grateful for your help, Mr. Dobokai.”

  “Of course,” Dobokai agreed, nodding slowly. “You are right. However repulsive, or difficult to equate with sanity, there is always a reason. I will help you find it, before…before people forget what they have seen or heard and the trail goes cold.” He gave a brief smile, there and then gone. But the remarkable blue eyes were bright.