Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online

lift of hope. “Maybe they killed him? One hit him with something, two others strangled him? That could be why the odd marks. Maybe it isn’t a rope at all? Couldbe boys’ shirts, all tied together.” He turned to face Monk, his features ghostly in the lantern light. “They’d have gone. We’ll never find them.” All the emotion of his unspoken meaning was in his face.
    “No point in even looking,” Monk agreed. “Murder by persons unknown.” He took a deep breath. “But we’d better make certain. There’ll be rooms for them below, and a galley of some sort. They have to feed them.”
    Orme said nothing.
    They found the ladder down and descended to the deck below. Immediately it was different. The heavier, more fetid air closed over them, and the lantern shone on darker walls only a couple of feet away. Monk felt the sweat break out on his skin, and then chill instantly. His heart was knocking in his chest.
    Orme pushed at the first door, but it held fast. He lifted his foot and kicked it with all his weight. It burst in, and there was a cry from behind it. He held the lantern higher and the yellow light showed four small boys, thin, narrow-chested, half-naked, and cowering together in the corner.
    Monk wiped his hand over his face, forcing himself to focus.
    “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Parfitt is dead. We’re going to take you away from here.” He stepped forward.
    They all shrank farther back, flinching, though his hand was several feet away from the closest of them.
    He stopped. What could he tell them that they could believe? They probably didn’t know anything but this. Where was he going to send them, anyway? Back into the streets? Some orphanage, where they would be looked after? By whom? Perhaps Hester would know.
    “I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated, feeling useless. They wouldn’t believe him; they shouldn’t. Perhaps they shouldn’t believe anyone. “Are there more of you?”
    One nodded slowly.
    “We’ll get you all, and then take you ashore.” Where to? How many boats would they need? It was night already; what was he going to do with them? A dozen or more small boys: frightened, hungry, possibly ill, certainly hideously abused. Then he thought of Durban,his predecessor, and remembered his work with the Foundling Hospital. “We’ll go where they’ll look after you,” he said more firmly. “Give you warm clothes, food, a clean bed to sleep in.”
    They looked at him as if they had no idea what he was saying.
    It took Monk and Orme the rest of the night to find all of the fourteen boys and take them ashore, a boatload at a time, persuade them they were safe, and then get them to the nearest hospital that would accept them. Later the hospital would send them on to a proper institution specifically for foundlings. Technically, of course, they were too old for that, but Monk trusted in the charity of the matrons in charge.
    D AWN WAS COMING UP , pale over the east and lighting the water, clean and chill, soft colors half bleached away, when Monk stood with Orme on the dock outside the Wapping station of the River Police. He was so tired, his bones ached. He realized that in the three weeks since Jericho Phillips’s death he had slowly let go of at least part of the horror of it. Now it was back as though it had been only yesterday. It was the sweat and alcohol in the air, the claustrophobia belowdecks. But sharper and more real than anything else, filling his nose and throat, it was the smell of fear and death.
    Mickey Parfitt was another Jericho Phillips, one that catered to an upriver clientele, away from the teeming closeness of the docks. Instead it was the quiet reaches of the river where deserted banks were marshy, mist-laden at morning and evening, and stretches of silver water were tree-lined. But in the night the same twisted brutality was enacted upon children. Probably the same blackmail of men addicted to their