The Face of a Stranger

Evan shook his head.

"No. It was two men I don't recognize at all from Grimwade's description. But he said they were from the police, and he saw their papers before he let them in."

"Papers?" Monk repeated. There was no point in asking what the men had looked like; he could not remember the men of his own division, let alone those from any other.

"Yes." Evan was obviously still anxious. "He said they had police identification papers, like ours."

"Did he see if they were from our station?"

"Yes sir, they were." His face puckered. "But I can't think who they could be. Anyway, why on earth would Runcorn send anyone else? What for?"

"I suppose it would be too much to ask that they gave names?"

"I'm afraid Grimwade didn't notice."

Monk turned around and went back up the stairs, more worried than he wished Evan to see. On the landing he put the key Grimwade had given him into the lock and swung Grey's door open. The small hallway was just as before, and it gave him an unpleasant jar of familiarity, a sense of foreboding for what was beyond.

Evan was immediately behind him. His face was pale and his eyes shadowed, but Monk knew that his oppression stemmed from Runcorn, and the two men who had been here before them, not any sensitivity to the violence still lingering in the air.

There was no purpose in hesitating anymore. He opened the second door.

There was a long sigh from behind him almost at his shoulder as Evan let out his breath in amazement.

The room was in wild disorder; the desk had been tipped over and all its contents flung into the far corner-by the look of them, the papers a sheet at a time. The chairs were on their sides, one upside down, the seats had been taken out, the stuffed sofa ripped open with a knife. All the pictures lay on the floor, backs levered out.

"Oh my God." Evan was stupefied.

"Not the police, I think," Monk said quietly.

"But they had papers," Evan protested. "Grimwade actually read them."

"Have you never heard of a good screever?"

"Forged?" Evan said wearily. "I suppose Grimwade wouldn't have known the difference."

"If the screever were good enough, I daresay we wouldn't either." Monk pulled a sour expression. Some forgeries of testimonials, letters, bills of sale were good enough to deceive even those they were purported to come from. At the upper end, it was a highly skilled and lucrative trade, at the lower no more than a makeshift way of buying a little time, or fooling the hasty or illiterate.

"Who were they?" Evan went past Monk and stared around the wreckage. "And what on earth did they want here?"

Monk's eyes went to the shelves where the ornaments had been.

"There was a silver sugar scuttle up there," he said as he pointed. "See if it's on the floor under any of that paper." He turned slowly. "And there were a couple of pieces of jade on that table. There were two snuffboxes in that alcove; one of them had an inlaid lid. And try the sideboard; there should be silver in the second drawer."

"What an incredible memory you have; I never noticed them." Evan was impressed and his admiration was obvious in his luminous eyes before he knelt down and began carefully to look under the mess, not moving it except to raise it sufficiently to explore beneath.

Monk was startled himself. He could not remember having looked in such detail at trivialities. Surely he had gone straight to the marks of the struggle, the bloodstains, the disarranged furniture, the bruised paint and the crooked pictures on the walls? He had no recollection now of even noticing the sideboard drawer, and yet his mind's eye could see silver, laid out neatly in green-baize-lined fittings.

Had it been in some other place? Was he confusing this room with another, an elegant sideboard somewhere in his past, belonging to someone else? Perhaps Imogen Latterly?

But he must dismiss Imogen from his mind-however easily, with whatever bitter fragrance, she returned. She was a dream, a creation of his own memories and hungers. He could never have known her well enough to feel anything but a charm, a sense of her distress, her courage in righting it, the strength of her loyalty.

He forced himself to think of the present; Evan searching in the sideboard, the remark on his memory.

"Training," he replied laconically, although he didn't understand it himself. "You'll develop it. It might not be the second drawer, better look in all of them."

Evan obeyed, and Monk turned back to the pile on the floor and began to pick his way through the mess, looking for something to tell him its purpose, or give any clue as to who could have caused it.

"There's nothing here." Evan closed the drawer, his mouth turned down in a grimace of disgust. "But this is the right place; it's all slotted for them to fit in, and lined with cloth. They went to a lot of trouble for a dozen settings of silver. I suppose they expected to get more. Where did you say the jade was?"

"There." Monk stepped over a pile of papers and cushions to an empty shelf, then wondered with a sense of unease how he knew, when he could have noticed it.

He bent and searched the floor carefully, replacing everything as he found it. Evan was watching him.

"No jade?" he asked.

"No, it's gone." Monk straightened up, his back stiff. "But I find it hard to believe ordinary thieves would go to the trouble, and the expense, of forging police identification papers just for a few pieces of silver and a jade ornament, and I think a couple of snuffboxes." He looked around. "They couldn't take much more without being noticed. Grimwade would certainly have been suspicious if they had taken anything like furniture or pictures."

“Well, I suppose the silver and the jade are worth something?"

"Not much, after the fence has taken his cut." Monk looked at the heap of wreckage on the floor and imagined the frenzy and the noise of such a search. "Hardly worth the risk," he said thoughtfully. "Much easier to have burgled a place in which the police have no interest. No, they wanted something else; the silver and the jade were a bonus. Anyway, what professional thief leaves a chaos like this behind him?"

"You mean it was Shelburne?" Evan's voice was half an octave higher with sheer disbelief.

Monk did not know what he meant.

"I can't think what Shelburne could want," he said, staring around the room again, his mind's eye seeing it as it had been before. "Even if he left something here that belonged to him, there are a dozen reasons he could invent if we'd asked him, with Joscelin dead and not able to argue. He could have left it here, whatever it was, any time, or lent it to Joscelin; or Joscelin could simply have taken it." He stared around the ceiling at the elaborate plaster work of acanthus leaves. "And I can't imagine him employing a couple of men to forge police papers and come here to ransack the place. No, it can't have been Shelburne."

"Then who?"

Monk was frightened because suddenly there was no rationality in it at all. Everything that had seemed to fit ten minutes ago was now senseless, like puzzle parts of two quite different pictures. At the same time he was almost elated-if it were not Shelburne, if it were someone who knew forgers and thieves, then perhaps there was no society scandal or blackmail at all.

"I don't know," he answered Evan with sudden new firmness. "But there's no need to tiptoe in this one to find out. Nobody will lose us our jobs if we ask embarrassing questions of a few screevers, or bribe a nose, or even press a fence a little hard."

Evan's face relaxed into a slow smile and his eyes lit up. Monk guessed that perhaps he had had little taste so far of the color of the underworld, and as yet it still held the glamour of mystery. He would find its tones dark; gray of misery, black of long-used pain and habitual fear; its humor quick and bitter, gallows laughter.