A Sunless Sea

CHAPTER 19

At mid-afternoon of the following day, Monk stood by the dockside in the wind as the ferry drew near the steps and Runcorn climbed out. He looked tired and cold, but there was no hesitation as he came forward, his eyes meeting Monk’s.

Monk gave him a brief nod of acknowledgment, then turned to walk with him toward the River Police Station. They knew each other too well to need the unnecessary niceties.

Inside they went to Monk’s office, and a moment later a constable brought them tea. Monk thanked him, and he and Runcorn faced each other across the desk. There had been a short note from Rathbone, delivered by messenger. Monk passed it to Runcorn to read. It brought them up to date with both the trial and Rathbone’s own thoughts, and his visit to Barclay Herne.

Runcorn looked up, his face even grimmer than before.

“The more I think of it, the less certain I am that Lambourn killed himself,” he said unhappily. “It looked clear at the time, and the government people were absolutely certain.” He shook his head. “I believed them. All I could think of was the widow and the daughters, and trying not to make it any worse for them than it had to be. I used not to be so … sentimental!” He said the word with disgust.

Words of denial, even comfort, came to Monk’s mind, but he knew they would sound patronizing.

“I’m not any better,” Monk said wryly. “If Dinah had been plain and timid, I might not have gone to Rathbone for her, and for that matter, I’m pretty certain he wouldn’t have taken the case.”

Runcorn gave a quick, bleak smile. “I’ve been supposing Lambourn told the truth about the opium and the damage it does without proper labels. Suppose they’ll have to be pretty clear, too. Lots of people don’t read. They’ll need figures. It will cost. But I don’t see any of the people who import the stuff killing him for that.”

His face took on a vulnerable, almost bruised look. “And I have to accept that what we did in China was horrible, a betrayal of all that most of us think we stand for. We think we’re civilized, even Christian, for that matter. Seems like when we’re out of sight of home, some of us at least are bloody savages. But is anyone going to murder Lambourn because he knew that? We all know at least part of it.” He sighed. “And whoever killed that poor woman qualifies as a savage, in my mind.”

Monk had been thinking many of the same things. But there was the additional element that Hester had mentioned-the desperate dependence upon opium among those captured first by pain, then by addiction. “I’d like to know in more detail what Lambourn did in his last week alive.”

Runcorn saw the point instantly. “You mean what did he learn that provoked someone to kill him? Who did he speak to? How did this person know that he learned whatever it was?”

“Yes. And what the devil was it? What could be a danger to anyone here in London? What could Lambourn have discovered, and been able to prove? Proof is the point. It has to be something personal, something very precious to lose or it wouldn’t provoke a murder like that.”

“There was plenty of barbarity,” Runcorn said, his mouth drawn down, lips tight together. “I’ve heard that as many as twelve million Chinese people are addicted to opium.” He looked at Monk more closely. “Have you ever seen them here, in parts of Limehouse? Opium dens, I mean? Filthy houses in back alleys where people lie on beds smoking the stuff, tiers of them packed like cargo in a ship’s hold. Place is so full of smoke you can hardly see the walls. Like walking through a pea-soup fog. They just lie there. Don’t even know where they are, half the time. Like the living dead.” He shivered in spite of himself.

“I know,” Monk agreed quietly. He had seen it, too, although not often. “I could understand if some Chinamen had come over here and killed scores of us, especially the families that made their fortunes on it. But why Lambourn?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Runcorn agreed. “He found out something else. But what?” He rubbed his hand across his face. There was a faint rasping sound, as if he had shaved badly, missed a bit where the stubble was gray, and in the cold morning light he had not noticed it.

“We should follow his path, as well as we can. I should have done that earlier. They told me it was all to do with the report being rejected, and I believed them.”

“Nothing on the report from Gladstone yet,” Monk responded. “Who did Lambourn give it to?”

“His brother-in-law, Barclay Herne,” Runcorn said. “He told me he passed it on before getting it back and destroying it.”

“Which may or may not be true,” Monk observed.

“He’d have to say that. If he didn’t, his own guilt in suppressing it would be obvious,” Runcorn pointed out.

“Perhaps he edited out whatever was the problem for him.” Monk was reasoning to himself as much as to Runcorn. Even as he spoke he did not really believe what he was saying.

Runcorn looked at him critically. “If it wasn’t to do with the labeling of opium and the damage it could do if that wasn’t correct, why would Lambourn even put it in the report? Even if Hester is right about these needles, and the addiction, it has nothing to do with the Pharmacy Act.”

Monk did not reply. Runcorn was right and they both knew it.

They finished their tea and sat in silence for several moments.

Then a different idea flashed into Monk’s mind, sharp and bright.

“Perhaps they destroyed the report because there was nothing wrong with it,” he said urgently.

Runcorn looked totally blank.

Monk leaned forward. “There was nothing in it that damaged anyone, nothing that didn’t make sense. Lambourn knew about the opium addiction and knew who was feeding it, but he didn’t include it in the report because it wasn’t relevant to it. It was Lambourn himself they needed to destroy, so he would never speak of it.”

“Ah!” Comprehension lit Runcorn’s face. “They needed to discredit him sufficiently to make a suicide believable. God in heaven, what a bloody wicked thing to do! Ruin the man’s reputation so when they murder him it can be accepted as suicide?” He ran his hand over his brow, pushing back the short, thick hair. “No wonder Dinah felt so helpless. I suppose she has no idea who it was? He wouldn’t have told her, for her safety, apart from anything else.”

“Exactly,” Monk agreed. “He found out who was involved while researching this paper, because …” He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Actually all we know for certain is that he found it out recently, too recently for him to have done anything about it before he was killed. So presumably it was during his research. And the people he gave his report to are connected to what Lambourn discovered somehow, because they suppressed his work.”

“We need to know exactly what he did, where he went, who he spoke with in his last week alive,” Runcorn said decisively. “Have you got any men you can spare? We haven’t long, a few days at most. Can Rathbone hold out until after Christmas?”

“He’ll have to!” Monk said desperately. “The trouble is that selling opium is not illegal, even with the syringe needles. Even if we find whoever it is, the law won’t touch him.”

Runcorn frowned. “Depends what else he’s doing,” he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t an easy thing, distributing things people are desperate for, especially if they can’t always pay.” He looked across at Monk, his eyes shadowed, mouth pulled tight.

Monk nodded slowly. “We need to know a lot more about it. Above all, we need to know if we’re right.”

“Hester?” Runcorn asked, almost as if he dared not even make the suggestion.

Monk met his gaze without flinching. “Maybe.”

He stood up and went to the door. “I’ll get Orme,” he answered. “We’ll start immediately.”

“I’ve got a couple I can trust,” Runcorn added, also standing. “Just for the details, anyway. Check with Lambourn’s household servants for times and dates. We may be able to get a ferryman who can help. Lambourn probably used the same ferries all the time. Most of us are creatures of habit.”

Two hours later, they had filled out several sheets of paper with what they already knew of Lambourn’s last week. The information came both from Runcorn’s original inquiry and from what Hester had told Monk about Lambourn’s visits with Agnes Nisbet and other sellers of opium-containing medicines. It was now a matter of honing it with more accurate details of times and places, in the hope of finding the one piece that did not fit, and which had been the cause of his murder.

Monk pushed his chair back from the table and stretched. He had been concentrating so intensely he was stiff, and his back and neck ached.

“Orme, can you check the ferrymen again? They’ll speak to you, even if you have to go back and forth across the water, or pay them to sit still.” He smiled grimly. “Should be an easy fare, no bending the back to earn a few pence, just rest on the oars and remember.” He turned to one of his other men. “Taylor, see if Lambourn spent any time in the opium dens in Limehouse. I doubt it. There’s probably nothing there we don’t already know about, but you’ve got sources. We need to be sure.”

“Yes, sir. Want me to try the Isle of Dogs as well? There’s a fair few dens there, too,” Taylor asked.

“Yes. Good idea. If Lambourn found something he’d have gone back to make certain. Look particularly for opium dealers out of the ordinary.” He looked at Runcorn questioningly. It was the moment when in the past he would have given orders. There would have been a brief struggle for authority, each guarding his own territory. This time he bit back the words and waited.

He saw the flash of recognition in Runcorn’s eyes, and then the relaxing of his body. “I’m going back to Lambourn’s house to question the servants,” he said calmly. “The valet will know when he came and went, and, I dare say, the cook. Between them they’ll have a good idea. When I spoke to them before they were very loyal to him. If they know it’s to prove he was murdered, they’ll help. The difficulty’ll be not putting words into their mouths.” He opened his eyes wide and looked at Monk.

Monk gave him a momentary smile, in an acknowledgment of the changed balance of power between them. “I’m going to find this Agatha Nisbet that Hester told me about, and speak to her again. I want to know what Lambourn said to her, and anything else she knows about him.”

“Good. Where’ll we meet?” Runcorn asked.

“Back here, nine o’clock tonight,” Monk replied.

“My home, ten o’clock,” Runcorn argued. “You can walk from here. And we’ll need that long. Rathbone won’t be able to string the trial much more than a couple of days after Christmas. That gives us only a few more days to find whatever it is.”

Monk nodded. “That’s sense. But make it my house. The kitchen. Hot tea and something to eat.” He looked at Orme.

“Yes, sir,” Orme replied. “Taylor, too?”

“Certainly,” Monk answered. “Paradise Place, Rotherhithe.”

“Yes, sir, I know.” Taylor nodded, smiling as if he had been given some kind of accolade.

It took Monk more than an hour to find the makeshift clinic that Hester had described to him, but far longer than that to oblige Agatha to make time for him and sit down in her tiny office, uninterrupted, and answer his questions.

She was a huge woman, about his height but much larger boned. He could imagine very easily being intimidated by her. Only when he looked at her eyes did he see any of the compassion or intelligence Hester had spoken of.

“Wot d’yer want, then?” she said bluntly. “I in’t got nothin’ to tell the River Police.”

Whatever chance he had of her cooperation, it would die the moment she suspected he was lying. He decided to be as blunt with her as he imagined she would be with him.

“I’m trying to solve the murder of a good man, before his wife is convicted and hanged for it. Or, more accurately, she’s convicted of another murder the same person also committed. I believe the good man, a doctor, was killed because he discovered something very bad about someone connected with the opium trade.”

Suddenly Agatha’s boredom changed to interest.

“That’d be Dr. Lambourn, an’ that poor creature they slit open over on Limehouse Pier. If it wasn’t the doctor’s wife ’oo killed ’er, then ’oo was it?” She looked at Monk with hard, bright eyes, and he noticed that her hands, bigger than his, were slowly clenching and unclenching among the scattered papers on top of the wooden table.

“Yes,” he agreed. “When Dr. Lambourn was searching for information about opium he accidentally found out a few other things. One of those things was so dangerous to someone that they defamed Lambourn professionally and then killed him, trying to make it look like suicide. That way they would be certain that their own secret would stay buried.”

She waited, still watching him, an unmoving mountain of a woman.

“I think he discovered this in the last week of his life,” Monk went on. “So I’m following as closely as I can in his footsteps.”

“Soft, like,” she said with bitter humor. “You don’t want ter end up in the river yerself, wi’ yer throat cut, or worse.”

“I see you understand perfectly. What was Lambourn looking for from you, and what did you tell him?” He wondered if he should add anything about her safety, but to offer to protect her would be insulting. She would know as well as he did that it would be impossible.

“Opium,” she said thoughtfully. “Lot o’ things to do with it in’t so nice.”

“Such as what?” he asked. “Stealing? Cutting it with bad substitutes so it’s impure? There’s no smuggling; it comes in perfectly legally. What’s worth killing anyone for?”

“Yer can kill to corner the trade in anything!” Agatha said with disgust. “Bakers an’ fishmongers do it! You try cutting inter the meat market, an’ see ’ow long yer last!”

“Is that what Lambourn asked you about?” he said.

Her face tightened. “I got me own ways o’ getting opium-pure. I give it for pain, not for some rich fool to escape ’is troubles. I told ’im that.”

“Then why would anyone bother to murder Dr. Lambourn? Come on, Miss Nisbet!” he urged. “He was a good man, a doctor trying to get medicine labeled properly so people didn’t kill themselves accidentally. They murdered him to keep him quiet, and then butchered his first wife to hang his second wife for it. Whatever it was he found out it was a damn sight worse than a petty trade war that I could hear about in common speech on the dockside.”

She nodded her head slowly. “There’s worse than thievin’,” she agreed. “There’s slow poison. There’s good men gone bad an’ a kind o’ living death that’s worse than a grave. Opium’s a powerful thing, like fire. Warm yer hearth, or burn yer ’ouse down.”

Monk was aware of how closely she was watching him. The slightest flicker in his face, an instant’s movement of his eyes, and she would see it. For a brief second he wondered what this woman had seen and done; what life had denied her that she had chosen this path. Then his attention returned to the present, to Joel Lambourn dead in disgrace and Dinah waiting to face the hangman.

“My horrors have all been commonplace,” he answered her, knowing that she would not continue until he had made some acknowledgment. “A woman raped and beaten to death, a man hacked up and left to rot, children tortured and starved. It’s all happened before, and it will happen again. The best I can do is try to prevent it as often as I can. What do you know that’s going to ruin anyone in London, now?”

Something inside her closed up tight and hard. “Murder,” she answered quietly. “It all comes down ter murder in the end, don’t it? Murder for money. Murder for silence. Murder for dreams, for peace instead o’ screamin’ pain, murder for a needle an’ a packet o’ white powder.”

He said nothing. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door, fast and light, someone hurrying, and beyond that the noises of pain. No creak of bedsprings, only the rustle of straw palliasses on the floor.

“Who?” he said at last. “Who did Lambourn find out about?”

“Dunno,” she answered without a second’s hesitation. “Don’t want ter, ’cos then I’d ’ave ter kill ’im.”

Monk had no doubt that she would. He was uncertain of his own morality, because he might feel the same, but he smiled.

She smiled back at him, showing huge, white teeth. “Ye’re an odd duck, aren’t yer?” she said with interest. “If yer find the bastard, put an extra twist in the noose fer me, will yer? He’s ruined two right good men, an’ there in’t enough o’ them ter waste one, Gawd knows. Lambourn, and the ’ooever ’ee’s got sellin’ for ’im.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she held back tears far too long and her throat ached from it.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “When I get him.”

“They said Lambourn slit ’is wrists?” she went on, staring at him steadily.

“Yes,” he agreed.

“But ’e didn’t,” she pressed. Her voice was firm now, no doubt in it.

“I don’t think so,” Monk said quietly. He would not pretend to be certain.

“Better off than some, but it shouldn’t ’ave ’appened.”

“What sort of person am I looking for?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”

She gave a little grunt of disgust. “If I knew that, I’d get ’im meself. Someone secret, ’oo don’t look like ’e’d know opium from corn flour. Someone ’oo’s clean an’ polite an’ never seen wot ’appens to them as sticks that stuff in their veins an’ takes a one-way visit to madness. But now an’ again the ones like me sees their faces lookin’ out between the bars at the rest of us.”

Monk was silent for several moments, then he stood up.

“Thank you,” he said, then turned and walked away.

He went back to Wapping, his mind teeming with what Agatha Nisbet had said. He was looking for the man who profited from selling not just opium, but the needles that made it possible to become lethally addicted to it within a matter of weeks, even days. It was nothing to do with ordinary doses anyone could buy in patent medicines, or even the Chinese habit of smoking it, bad enough in its slow destruction.

The problem was not only to find him, but even when he did, what would he do about it? To sell such damnation might be one of the vilest of sins, but it was not against the law. Unless, of course, the man was also involved in the murder of Lambourn and of Zenia Gadney.

But since it was not a crime to sell opium, and needles, even if Joel Lambourn found out, why kill him? What could he have done to harm such a man? What could he prove?

It was still a tangle too dense to penetrate.

In his office Monk reread all he had on the people concerned in the research for the Pharmacy Act, making a list of all of those who had come into contact with Joel Lambourn. He would have to compare this list with whatever Runcorn could find on Lambourn’s movements in the last week of his life.

But then, of course, it did not have to be direct contact. It might have been indirect, someone who mentioned a name, a fact to someone else.

Who was the person that Agatha Nisbet believed had been corrupted into selling opium and needles for the man behind the scheme? How would they find him, and if they did, would he tell them anything of use?

The other half of the problem was not yet answered, perhaps the easier half: Who knew what Lambourn had learned so that it reached the man behind the sales, the real profiteer, the one who had killed him, and then killed Zenia Gadney? What was the line of reasoning that connected them all?

Was the damning information in Lambourn’s report, or was its destruction a red herring to justify his apparent suicide? Monk knew he must look harder for it, at the very least find out exactly who had ordered its destruction, and who had carried it out.

He would ask Runcorn to put someone good on to the task of looking yet again.

The report had been handed to Barclay Herne, who had apparently told Sinden Bawtry that it was so ill prepared as to be no use for the purpose of persuading Parliament to pass the Pharmacy Act.

Who else had seen it? If no one had, then the seller of opium had to be one of those two. But would Herne have killed his brother-in-law? Both Bawtry and Herne had alibis. They had been at the Atheneum the night Lambourn died, as attested to by a dozen or more people.

The seller of opium would surely have others in his employ, including the man Agatha Nisbet said had once been good. How could Monk find him? And how soon?

Runcorn, Orme, and Taylor met at Paradise Place just before ten o’clock, all sitting around the kitchen table on the four hard-backed wooden chairs normally kept there for dining. One more chair had had to be brought along from Scuff’s bedroom, Hester creeping in to collect it without waking him.

The oven warmed the room, which smelled of fresh bread, scrubbed wood, and clean linen.

Over tea and hot buttered toast Monk told them all what Agatha Nisbet had told him, emphasizing the need to find the other man she spoke of in particular. No one said anything. He looked up and saw Hester’s eyes on him, watching, trying to judge from his face just what he thought.

“Did she tell you anything else about this man?” she asked him quietly. “Anything at all-age, experience, skills, what he does now?”

“No,” he admitted. “I think she was protecting him on purpose. It grieved her badly that he had been so corrupted.”

“Opium does that to you.” Hester’s face was bleak. “I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard a bit, seen a bit. Sometimes you have to use it for terrible wounds, and then it’s too hard to give it up, particularly if the wounds never really heal.”

Monk looked at her. Her shoulders were tense, pulling the fabric of her dress, the muscles of her neck tight, her mouth closed delicately so the pity showed like an unhealed wound of her own. He wondered how much more she had seen than he had, horror that she could never share.

He reached across the table and touched her fingers on the wooden surface, just for a moment, then pulled back.

“Do you know where to look?” he asked her. He hated doing it, but she would know that he had to, and resent it if he did less than his job, in order to spare her.

“I think so,” she answered, looking at him and not any of the others around the table, all watching her, waiting.

“I’ll go with you,” Monk said immediately. “He could be dangerous.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We haven’t time to send two people to do one job. We’ve only a few days. I have an idea of who it might be. When I saw him before, I didn’t even think of him being addicted himself. I should have.” There was anger in her voice, bitter self-criticism.

“You’re not going alone,” Monk responded without hesitation. “If he is the person who killed Lambourn and hacked Zenia Gadney to pieces, he’d do the same to you without a second thought about it. Either I come with you, or you don’t go!”

She smiled very slightly, as though some tiny element of it amused her.

“Hester!” he said sharply.

“Think of what else there is to do,” she replied. “Agatha said he was a good man once. The remnants of that will be left, if I don’t offer any threat to him.” She leaned forward a little, as if to command their attention. “We have to know who is using him. That’s whoever killed Lambourn, and Zenia Gadney-or had them killed.”

Monk clenched his teeth and breathed out slowly. “What if it’s this man who killed them?” he asked, wishing he did not have to.

He saw the sudden awareness leap in her eyes.

It was actually Runcorn who said what she must have been thinking.

“That’ll be why there was no bottle or vial where Lambourn was found,” he said unhappily. “He didn’t drink the opium, it was put into him with one of those needles. And of course whoever killed him took that away with them. He wouldn’t want anyone to know of it. There can’t be so many people have them.”

“Still doesn’t change that we have to know who killed Zenia Gadney.” Orme spoke for the first time. “I’ve been back and forward around the Limehouse Pier. No one admits to seeing her there that evening, except with a woman. If she met a man, doctor or not, someone paid by Herne or Bawtry, then it was afterward.” He looked at Runcorn, then at Monk. “I suppose you’ve thought that it could be that Dinah Lambourn did kill them both, nothing to do with jealousy or rage, but because someone paid her to, because of the opium?”

No one answered. The thought was impossible to rule out, but neither did anyone want to accept it.

It was Runcorn who broke the silence in the end.

“I’ve talked to everyone in the Lambourn house,” he said. “I’ve got a fairly good list of where Dr. Lambourn went in his last week, but it’s only what we already expected.” He pulled two sheets of paper out of his pocket and laid them down in the middle of the table.

Monk glanced at them, but he could see in Runcorn’s face that there was more.

“I tried to piece together his last day,” Runcorn went on. “Whoever killed him planned it very carefully, very believably.”

One by one around the table they nodded agreement. No one mentioned Dinah, but the very absence of her name hung between them.

“Who did he see that day?” Monk asked. He knew before Runcorn spoke that the answer would not be so easy. It was written in the confusion in Runcorn’s eyes.

“Dr. Winfarthing,” Runcorn replied, “in the morning. Just tradesmen in Deptford in the afternoon. He came home for an early dinner, then worked in his study before going for a short walk with Mrs. Lambourn in the evening. They both went to bed at about ten. No one saw him alive again. He was found the next morning by the man walking his dog up on One Tree Hill.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Hester said unhappily. “There’s nothing in a day like that to make him kill himself that night. It wasn’t even the day he heard about the report being rejected, was it?” She looked from Monk to Runcorn, and then back again.

“No,” Runcorn replied. “They told him three days earlier. The idea was that it took him that long to steel himself to do it. Or perhaps he thought they would change their minds, or he’d find some other facts. Winfarthing said he was still determined to fight when he saw him that morning.”

“We’re back to Dinah Lambourn,” Orme pointed out.

“No one contacted him?” Monk asked Runcorn. “No one called, left a message, a letter? Could there have been something in the post?”

“I asked the butler that,” Runcorn replied. “He said Dr. Lambourn looked at the post when he came home at about five o’clock. There was nothing but the ordinary tradesmen’s bills. No personal letters.”

“He went to bed?” Hester asked, puzzled. “Are you sure? Could he have gone out again when Dinah went upstairs?” Her voice dropped a little.

“The butler said they both went up. He spoke to Lambourn and Lambourn answered him. But he could have read awhile, I suppose, and come down again,” Runcorn replied.

Taylor looked embarrassed. “Unless he really did take his own life?” He bit his lip. “Are we certain she isn’t innocent of killing him, but lying to restore some dignity to his name? Nobody wants to admit, even to themselves, that somebody they love did that. She’d want her daughters to think it was murder, wouldn’t she? Women’ll do most things to protect their children.”

Hester looked at Taylor, then at Monk. Monk could see in her face that she believed it possible.

Runcorn was stubborn. “Either someone came to see him, or he went out to see someone,” he said flatly.

“On One Tree Hill?” Monk asked. “It’s close to a mile from Lower Park Street, and uphill. Who would he meet in the middle of the night?”

“Someone he trusted,” Runcorn replied. “Someone he didn’t want to be seen with, or who didn’t want to be seen with him.”

“And he didn’t expect to go far,” Hester added. “You said he didn’t take a jacket, and it was October.”

“Someone he trusted,” Monk said gently. “Perhaps someone who could get close enough to him to put a needle in his vein and do whatever you have to do to get the opium in.”

“That’s like poor Mrs. Gadney,” Orme said. “She was killed by someone she trusted, or she wouldn’t have been standing out on the pier with them, alone in the dark.”

“Certainly not a prospective client,” Monk said with conviction. “Not out in the open like that.”

“No,” Orme cut in. “I asked more carefully this time. No one ever actually saw her with a man apart from Lambourn at any time. They assumed. The newspapers said she turned to prostitution, but there’s no proof.” He leaned forward across the table, his voice assured. “What if she was there with someone she knew, someone she didn’t fear at all-just like Lambourn?”

“The same person?” Monk said what he knew they were all thinking. “Who would Zenia know that Lambourn also knew?”

“Someone respectable,” Runcorn said slowly. “Someone Lambourn trusted, and someone she would never suspect of hurting her. Maybe …” He thought for a moment. “Maybe someone who said they were Lambourn’s solicitor, or a friend.”

“A doctor,” Hester said very slowly. “Or a member of the family.”

“Or his wife,” Orme said sadly.

No one argued.

“Now we’ve got until the day after Boxing Day to prove it,” Runcorn said, looking from one to the other of them. “If Sir Oliver can make the trial last that long.”