Hooper shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve been thinking of that myself. I haven’t been able to check Rosza, but the other two didn’t do any business together. They’re not related. No common investments that I can find. Didn’t belong to any club or society that anyone knows of. Never courted the same woman even. All Roman Catholic, but then so is the whole community.”

  “Then what links these people?” Monk could hear the note of desperation in his voice. “There has to be something. And what precipitated the murders now? They’ve all been here at least ten years. Why now? What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Hooper was as exasperated as Monk. This latest death seemed to have affected him more deeply also. Or perhaps it was just the feeling of hopelessness. They were no further along in their investigation than they’d been after the death of Fodor. There was a mass of information, and if it had any meaning, they had not found it.

  “Let’s go back to Fodor again,” Monk said. “There’s nothing else here. We may as well walk to the station.” He opened the kitchen door and led the way out. He gave brief instructions to the men now waiting in the hall, and he and Hooper made their way into the street. They ignored the crowd gathered there, frightened and angry.

  Unconsciously they matched stride, moving rapidly along the footpath toward the river.

  “We’ve examined everything we know about the week before Fodor was killed, sir,” Hooper said as they came to the High Street. “No one had a quarrel with him. No one owed him money and he didn’t owe anyone. He wasn’t having an affair with anyone’s wife or daughter—or anyone at all! No threats of any sort.”

  “Then we’re missing something,” Monk insisted. “I’m going to check Haldane’s story for this one. I’ll ask him obliquely.”

  Hooper frowned. “Why Haldane? His wife’s Hungarian. He’s one person who has nothing against them.”

  “He’s also an Englishman who’s got a foot in both camps, as it were,” Monk pointed out. “And loyalties both ways. I’d like to push him a bit harder about the number seventeen. The candles mean something. He may know without realizing its importance.”

  “Sir…”

  Monk stopped and turned to face Hooper. “What is it?”

  Hooper looked deeply unhappy. “Aren’t you forgetting Fitzherbert?” He did not add the rest of the implication, but it was in the air between them, unspoken, all but suffocating.

  “No, I’m not forgetting him. He’s been in London at least as long as the murders have been happening, and he’s, at the kindest, unstable. You don’t need to remind me of that, Hooper. I know.”

  Hooper’s face was bleak. “Yes, sir. I don’t want it to be him either, but we might have to face it.”

  Monk did not reply.

  —

  THAT EVENING MONK WENT to see Roger Haldane at his home. He expected to interrupt the Haldanes at dinner, and he succeeded.

  Haldane himself was clearly disturbed by seeing him, caught off balance. But he did not make any attempt to have Monk leave. In fact, he behaved as if this was a visit he welcomed, despite the unforeseen timing.

  Adel Haldane greeted him with evident pleasure.

  “We are eating, Mr. Monk. Will you join us? There is plenty. Please? Come in and sit down.” As if certain that he would follow her, she turned and led the way.

  The dining room was warm, full of cheerful colors. He noticed several hand-embroidered cushions in unusual designs, and a painted dish hanging on the wall.

  He realized that Adel was watching his face. He smiled at her.

  “Thank you.”

  “Sir…” Haldane invited him to sit, pulling up another chair before Adel asked him to. “My wife will bring you a dish.” Having given the instruction, he sat again and resumed eating.

  Monk sat down also, thanking him.

  Haldane took another mouthful and ate it with relish before he spoke.

  “I hope you are moving forward with your investigations,” he said. “This…this is causing us all a lot of distress. There is no peace in the community. Everyone is frightened, quarreling in ways we never used to before. We are all suspected and we know it, and yet we are the victims.” He looked across at Monk, anger in his face, but also confusion.

  “I am aware of that, Mr. Haldane,” Monk said gravely. “We are looking for two things, and I believe, with your standing among the people, you might be able to help.”

  “Me?” Haldane looked surprised. “I don’t even speak the language well. But my wife does, of course.” He took another spoonful of the stew and the fragrance of it wafted across toward Monk. He was delighted when Adel came back in with a large dish and placed it in front of him. The steam from it made him realize that he was really very hungry.

  But he must not allow himself to be distracted.

  “As I’m sure you know, there has been a third murder,” he began. “Again there were seventeen candles.” He saw Haldane stiffen, and momentarily stop eating. “Are you sure you haven’t heard the number seventeen mentioned anywhere, Mr. Haldane? It is clearly of intense significance to someone.”

  “Seventeen,” Haldane repeated. “I…I don’t know. You say all the dead men had seventeen candles around them?”

  “Yes. In each case two were dark-colored, sort of purplish.”

  Haldane looked not only puzzled but afraid. He stared at Monk intently, reading his eyes. “I have no idea. It’s…not natural. If it’s some ritual, I have not heard of it.” He turned slowly to Adel. “Do you know?” It was almost an accusation.

  “No, of course I don’t!” she protested quickly. “If I knew, I’d say. If it’s some secret society then they wouldn’t allow women. None I’ve ever heard of does.” She looked at Monk. “You asked me before, and I’ve tried to think of anything, but I can’t.”

  Monk changed the subject. He glanced around and a picture of the same young man caught his eye. He was handsome, with high cheekbones like Adel, and her fair coloring.

  “How are your son’s studies going?” he asked politely.

  “Well,” she answered. “He is very clever.” Then she blushed. “I’m sorry. That sounds…too proud…”

  Monk smiled back at her. “It is natural to be proud of him.” He looked at Haldane, to include him, but Haldane’s expression was unreadable.

  Monk began his meal. He knew Adel was watching him and he looked up at her and nodded, his mouth full. “Excellent,” he said, as soon as he had swallowed.

  She was satisfied, and resumed her own meal.

  It was Haldane who broke the silence.

  “The fear is growing. We are beginning to suspect each other, and we are on the verge of violence. There have already been fights in the street. People are watching each other and gossip is growing. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else, even people they have known for years. They are saying it is some Englishman, and I am English, so they blame me. Me! My wife is Hungarian. I am now neither part of one people nor part of the other…” There was fear in his voice and on his face.

  Adel drew in her breath as if to speak, perhaps to argue, but she said nothing. She also must be torn between the two communities.

  It was the perfect opening.

  “Well, then you can tell me exactly where you were when poor Rosza was killed, and that will put an end to any suspicion of you,” he suggested.

  “Of me?” Haldane was startled.

  “It is true for everyone,” Monk told him, although he was interested that Haldane thought of himself so quickly.

  “Will you say so?” Haldane asked immediately.

  “Yes, if you wish.”

  Haldane blinked, and his long, heavy face filled with relief.

  “I’m lucky, very lucky. I intended to go to meet a man I do business with this morning. He lives the other side of the river, and I would have had to go quite a long way north, and then cross. No one would be likely to have remembered me.”

  “The man you were due to meet?” Monk suggested.

  “We haven’t met before. He wouldn’t know if it was me or not. Just letters—and they were to his staff. But he canceled our meeting yesterday. Would have looked as if I had lied. Poor Rosza was killed very early, they say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could have done it, and then gone on to the ferry.”

  “Then where were you?”

  “I didn’t get up until almost seven, as Adel and my servants will attest. And I went to the café on the corner of Cable Street and Love Lane. It’s quite a walk, but it’s a really good place to sit and talk. Good coffee and spiced sausage and bread.”

  “Who did you meet there?”

  “Matyas Andrassy. You can check. And there were other people there as well. Matyas’s wife, Greta, for one. I wasn’t anywhere near where poor Rosza was killed.” This time he met Monk’s eyes with a faint smile.

  “Thank you, Mr. Haldane.” Monk managed to make his voice sound civil, even as if he were pleased. He would check Haldane’s account very carefully, but he believed it.

  He glanced at Adel, intending to give her reassurance, but he was intrigued by the look on her face. It was both surprise and relief. Had she not known him to be innocent, or, at the very least, intensely believed it?

  Monk finished the meal, too little aware of its taste to appreciate it as it deserved. He found it interesting that Haldane had evidence of his having been at home at the time of Rosza’s death. There had been in Monk’s mind a growing suspicion that Adel Haldane had had a greater affection for Fodor than was acceptable to suit her husband. He had seen the flash of it the first time they met. It was only a warmth, a skirting around the subject, a shadow across Haldane’s face, but he realized now that it had been real, at least to Monk.

  And if Adel had had an affair, it might have ended in violence—a fight, or even, accidentally, a death. But there was nothing accidental about the murder of Fodor. It was violent, bloody and premeditated. And the others were exactly like it.

  Haldane could not have committed this one, or Lorand Gazda’s murder. Antal Dobokai could not have committed the first. The victims all knew each other, but only casually. Monk and Hooper had both tried to find any deeper connection, relationships, and failed.

  Was it really a ruthless madman killing Hungarian newcomers to the area, because they were different and, in his mind, dangerous? Threatening what? English businesses, their religion, their freedom or prosperity, their safety in the streets? Nothing, that he could see.

  He finished the meal and thanked Adel for it, and Haldane for his hospitality.

  “You are welcome,” Haldane assured him, shaking his hand with fervor. “Come again.”

  —

  MONK CONTINUED, WITH HOOPER, to inquire into groups or organizations that might be anti-Catholic, people who had expressed nationalistic or anti-religious views, any secret societies at all. He had to use the four men from his squad, leaving the station short-handed for tackling the other crimes that beset the river. There were no men left to investigate a matter of petty thefts of timber from Regent’s Canal Dock. There was a knife fight above Prince’s Stairs on the south bank—unpleasant, but no one badly injured—but he had no one to spare for it. Only one man could be sent to investigate smuggling on the East India Docks.

  Three days went by and Monk could see no appreciable progress in the murder inquiry. The tension mounted. Tempers were short, the slightest irregularity in anything sparked fear, suspicion, blame. Stories were exaggerated in the telling. Gossip was like a weed with roots that spread under the foundation of everything, and seeds that blew on the wind. Doubts and suspicions were everywhere. False leads came in suggesting dark rituals, obscene beliefs, all of which had to be looked into, and turned out to be nothing.

  Then on the morning of the fifth day after Rosza’s murder, Monk was awoken again by a loud, sustained banging on the front door. It was daylight already, but in the summer that only meant it was after five.

  He stumbled out of bed, unintentionally wakening Hester also. She had no need to ask him what it was. The power and the urgency of the banging could not be misread.

  Monk snatched his robe off its hook on the door and went downstairs barefoot. He threw the door open. As he had expected, it was Hooper on the step, again looking ill-dressed, his coat collar half turned under. His face made the question unnecessary.

  “There’s been another,” he said before Monk could speak. “The worst so far. I’ve got the ferry waiting. You’d better dress for the day—it’s going to be a long time before we’re back. A man called Kalman Pataki. Hungarian, been here only a year or so.”

  Monk stepped back and made room for Hooper to come inside. There was no need for conversation. Monk waved a vague hand toward the kitchen, then went back up the stairs, two at a time.

  Hester was up and in her robe, her hair in a loose braid, out of the way. She looked at his face, and did not ask. She moved past him to go downstairs.

  “No time for tea,” he said, already taking off his robe and reaching for his shirt. “Hooper’s probably in the kitchen, but I can’t stop to rake out the stove or light it again.”

  “A glass of water, and something to take with you,” she said from the landing. “And for Hooper too.”

  She was gone before he could reply.

  He washed and shaved too hastily, cutting himself slightly on the chin. It was only a nick, but of course it bled. Swearing gently, he put astringent on it, and winced. He had too strong a beard to go unshaven; it made him look as if he were not ready, half-asleep still.

  Hooper was in the kitchen eating a sandwich of fresh bread and cold meat that Hester had prepared for him. A glass of water was beside it on the table, and the same for Monk.

  “Thank you.” Monk lifted the glass, drank the water straight off, kissed Hester quickly, picked up the sandwich and led the way out the door, Hooper on his heels.

  This body was on Lower Shadwell Street, only one block from the river itself. Kalman Pataki was in a small room in one of the warehouses with frontage onto the water. The whole space was perhaps twelve feet by fourteen, furnished as the simplest sort of office, with an old desk, badly scarred and stained with ink, and water rings where cups and mugs had stood. There was an inkwell on it now, and a scattering of at least twenty sheets of paper: letters, lists and receipts. There were two hard-backed chairs and a number of filing cases and drawers.

  But that was all in Monk’s peripheral vision. What held his attention and made his stomach churn was the figure of a middle-aged man sprawled on his back across the floor, arms flung wide. A rusty saber jutted out of his lower chest, just about in his stomach, and there was blood all over the middle of his body, pooling onto the floor.

  Monk forced his gaze from it, searching for the now familiar candles dipped in blood. They were there, as he had known they would be. There were seventeen of them, as before. They were of a wider variety, different lengths and circumferences, some wax, some merely cheap tallow, but all dripping blood.

  But what appalled him was a small plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary. Its face was smashed, and the whole thing was soaked with blood, as if someone had taken it by the feet and jabbed it into the open wound, face-first.

  He let out a sigh. There were no words he could think of that seemed adequate. Words could frame the familiar and create the new, but not of this order of horror.

  What mind could contain such things?

  He was not surprised that the newspapers, the usual police, everyone, were demanding an answer, a solution, an end to this. They had the right to expect it. Why was he not able to see what must be in front of him? How could any man capable of this not be obvious to anyone, let alone a man who had spent his adult life in the police force, or as a private agent hunting those who killed? What was wrong with him that he floundered like this, helplessly letting it go on?

  He had suspected both Haldane and Dobokai, and been proven wrong by their ability to account for themselves at the time of at least one of the killings. But the murders were taking place early in the morning, before daylight. Most people were in their beds. Monk was in his! If he did not share a bed with Hester, he would not be able to prove his own innocence.

  Haldane shared his with his wife, but how sound a sleeper was she? Or how prepared to lie for him?

  Dobokai was not married.

  Monk turned to Hooper and saw how pale he was. Were the same thoughts racing through his mind?

  “Where’s Hyde?” he asked.

  “Not here yet,” Hooper replied. “Got another crime a mile away. He’ll be in no hurry to get to this.”

  There was nothing to argue with, nothing even to talk about. Monk felt as if he were standing in a now familiar nightmare. The rest of the day unfolded as if he had lived it before, and try as he might, he could not break the spell of it.

  The same people were in the street, their faces distorted with fear and grief. Their voices had the same sharp edge. Even the words in Hungarian were making sense because he had heard them so many times. He could not have pronounced them, but he was learning to recognize the often-repeated words for “incompetence,” “lazy,” “stupid,” “dangerous.” He would not have argued back even if they had been said in English.

  As always, Dobokai was among the gathered throng, pushing his way to the front.

  “They think you don’t care, because we’re strangers here,” he explained. “They are saying that if your own people were being slaughtered like animals, you would have found the killer the first time.” His face looked weary and his pale skin was tightly drawn across his bones, his nose sharper. “I keep telling them that is not true. You are doing your best, but they begin to disbelieve me.” He stared at Monk, searching his eyes, trying to read them. Was he looking for hope? He had a right to expect something.

  “Don’t you think I would solve such a crime if I could?” Monk asked. “I don’t blame them for being angry, and frightened.”