Her name was Angela Carson.
'You knew her?'
The question spilled out before I could stop it. According to the reports I'd read, witnesses had seen Monk in his fourth victim's neighbourhood before the murder, but it was assumed he'd simply been stalking her. There was never any suggestion that he'd known Angela Carson, let alone that they'd had any sort of relationship.
The look in Monk's eyes was answer enough.
After that first, accidental meeting the pair had been drawn together. Both were lonely. Both, in different ways, excluded from society. Angela Carson was almost completely deaf, and it was easier for her to sign than speak. Monk didn't know how, but the two of them still managed to communicate. In the plain young woman he finally found someone who was neither terrified nor repulsed by him. For her part, it wasn't difficult to imagine that she found his strength comforting. He took to visiting her after dark, when there was less chance of being seen by neighbours.
It wasn't long before she asked him to stay the night.
The blackouts had been less frequent since they'd met. He'd been calmer, less agitated. He'd allowed himself to believe they were over. Even so, he hadn't meant to fall asleep.
But he had.
He claimed to have no recollection of what happened, only that he found himself standing by the bed. There was a pounding on the door as the police tried to break in. All was noise and confusion. His hands were covered in blood, but none of it was his.
He looked down and saw Angela Carson.
That was when Monk lost what little control he had left. When the police burst into the room he attacked them in a frenzy. Then he ran until his legs gave way, futilely trying to escape the images of that bloodied room.
Without even thinking about it, he'd gone out on to the moor.
And gone to ground.
That the police would be looking for him didn't really enter into his thinking: he was trying to escape from himself, not them. Cold and hunger drove him up after a few days. He'd lost all sense of time, and it was night when he emerged. He stole clothes and food, and what equipment he needed, and was back in his sanctuary before dawn.
Over the next three months he spent more time underground, beneath the gorse and heather of Dartmoor, than he did in the outside world. He only emerged into fresh air and daylight to move to another system of tunnels, or to steal or forage fresh supplies and check the traps he'd laid for rabbits. The surface reminded him of who he was and what he'd done. Underneath the dark rock he was able to bury himself away.
And forget.
Indifferent to his own safety, he was able to find places and worm into tunnels that no one else would dare to enter. Twice he had to dig himself out when the roof collapsed; another time he was almost drowned when the system he was in flooded after heavy rains. Once he sat unseen, hunched in the shadows as a group of cavers clattered by only yards away. He let them go, but afterwards sought out a less public refuge.
The blackouts continued, but down there he was only vaguely aware of them. Sometimes he would wake in a different cavern or tunnel from the one he remembered, with no memory of how he had got there. He took to sleeping with a torch in his pocket for when that happened.
Then one day he found himself walking on the roadside in broad sunlight. He felt confused, his thoughts as muddy as his clothes, with no idea of where he was or what he was doing. That was how the police found him.
The first time he heard of Tina Williams or Zoe and Lindsey Bennett was when he was charged with their murders.
'Then why did you plead guilty?' I asked.
Monk absently rubbed at a spot between two of his knuckles, the button eyes staring at nothing. I'd always thought they were empty: now I wondered how I could have missed the pain in them.
'Everyone said I'd done it. They found their stuff at my caravan.'
'But if you couldn't remember-'
'You think I fucking cared?'
He glared at me, but even that seemed too much effort. He convulsed as another coughing spasm took him. It was even more violent than before, and when it passed it left him gasping.
Without thinking, I reached out for his wrist. 'Here, let me check your pulse-'
'Touch me and I'll break your arm.'
I lowered my hand. Monk sat back against the rock, regarding me with suspicion. 'If you're a doctor, how come you dig up bodies? Think you can bring them back to life?'
'No, but I can help find who killed them.'
I wished the words back as soon as they were out, but it was too late. When Monk started wheezing I thought it was another coughing fit until I realized he was laughing.
'Still a fucking smartarse,' he rumbled.
But he soon broke off. Each breath was a ragged whistle, and there was a sheen of sweat on his face. The black eyes seemed sunken into his skull as it pressed through the yellow skin.
'The heart attack wasn't faked, was it?' I said.
Monk stroked his hand back and forth over his head, his thumb fitting disconcertingly into the depression in his skull. It seemed to calm him.
'It was charlie.'
It took me a moment to understand. 'You overdosed on cocaine? Deliberately?'
The big head nodded. His hand continued to rasp over it.
'How much?'
'Enough.'
It explained how Monk had fooled the doctors. As well as sending his blood pressure sky high, a cocaine overdose could trigger tachycardia, making his heartbeat dangerously fast and irregular. The symptoms could easily be mistaken for the onset of a heart attack, and prove just as fatal. Judging from Monk's condition I guessed he'd suffered cardiovascular damage at the very least, perhaps even heart failure. Throw in a respiratory infection and it was a miracle he wasn't dead. No wonder we'd escaped from him out at Black Tor.
He'd been too sick to catch us.
'You could have killed yourself,' I said.
His mouth curled. 'So what?'
'I don't understand. You waited eight years, why escape now?'
His mouth twitched in what at first I mistook for a smile. Then I saw the look in his eyes and realized it was anything but.
'Because the bastards stitched me up.'
I'd been on the verge of believing him until then. Even, God help me, pitying him. Monk was capable of a lot of things but acting wasn't one of them. But while I'd have sworn the bizarre seizure I'd witnessed was genuine, this was pure paranoia. I must have let my thoughts show.
'You think I'm a psycho, don't you?'
'No, I-'
'Don't fucking lie!'
He was glaring at me, big head jutting forward. Careful. 'Why do you think you were set up?'
He glared at me for a moment longer, then examined his scabbed fists. Blood still dripped from the one he'd hit against the rock, but it didn't seem to bother him.
'I got word that this new cunt was saying he'd seen someone poking around under my caravan before it was raided. They pulled a warrant card on him and said it was police business. Told him to fuck off, that if he told anyone he'd get banged up on paedo charges and thrown to the nutjobs. Said he'd be doing himself a favour if he kept his mouth shut. So he did. Never told anyone until he got sent to Belmarsh and wanted to big himself up to the hardmen.' Monk turned his head and spat. 'Like I wasn't going to find out.'
This wasn't the paranoid rant I'd been expecting. It had been the discovery of Zoe Bennett's lipstick and hairbrush under his caravan that had confirmed Monk's guilt. He would have known that, of course, but even so…