New Book - A Sunless Sea - William Monk 18 - by Anne Perry (Pages 1 - 53)

 

First Published: August 28, 2012

Monk and Orme hear a scream one evening, and they rush to find a woman who has discovered a dead body. 

It is a woman who has been mutilated and her body is dead open. The police surgeon later tells them that the woman was hit in the head, and the mutilation was done postmortem. 

The first step to take is to identify the body, and one of the police officers made a drawing of the dead woman. It is Orme who gets an identification. The woman's name was Zenia Gadney. When Monk goes door to door, an old neighbour tells him that Gadney was a pleasant woman who kept herself to herself, but she had a single visitor, a gentleman that stopped coming two months ago. Monk also questions the hardware store kepper, who confirms the woman's words, and he says that Zenia sometimes often bought opium for her headaches.

Monk identifies the man who visited Zenia after he talks to hansom drivers. The man's name is Joel Lambourg from Greenwich, and the sergeant he talks to says that he was a doctor, and he died two months ago. The man was respectable, and the sergeant warns Monk against distrubing Mrs Lambourg. Monk ignores him, and he goes to talk to the woman. She claims not to know Zenia Gadney or that her husband visited her. Mrs Lambourg says that her husband was working on the dangers of opium and there were some people who were against him. Monk had been told that the doctor had committed suicide, but now Mrs Lambourg says that her husand was murdered because of the consequences of his research. The woman admits that she did know about her husband's visits to Mrs Gadney, and she hints that maybe she was murdered for a reason connected to her husband.

Oliver Rathbone appears in one chapter, and he is going through a terrible patch. His wife, Margaret, has left him because she can't forgive his role in the fall of her fahter when he was found guilty. Oliver tries to talk to Margaret but it seems an impossible mission. That night at home a man is waiting for him, and he brings him a package which is the legacy of Arthur Ballinger, his father-in-law. Oliver knows that the man threatened to send him the dirty photographs he had, and when he opens the package, there are no photographs but the plaques. Oliver wonders what to do with it or how to destroy them. The last thing he wants is for Margaret to know some of the details of her father's wickedness.

This is an interesting start. I am sorry for Oliver and I hope that he and Margaret can reconcile.