SPOILERS!!!
The case takes a sudden turning. It happens when Monk attends Prudence’s funeral. Her sister talks to him, and she says that Prudence used to write to her every two or three days, and in those letters he will find the evidence to arrest the man who murdered her. When Monk reads the letters, he discovers that Prudence kept saying how much she admired Sir Herbert and how he was going to make her dreams come true, but in the last letter she said that she was hurt because Sir Herbert had lied and betrayed her. The way she wrote those letters seemed to indicate that she was in love with Sir Herbert and he had led her to believe that he would leave his wife and seven children. My opinion is that a woman like Prudence, whose main interest was her profession and medicine, was not talking about romantic love. Her father told Monk that his daughter even entertained the idea that she would like to be a doctor. So maybe Sir Herbert made her believe that she could be more than a nurse, but then something happened that made her realise that he had lied.
After that, Monk takes the letters to Runcorn, his ex-boss. Shortly afterwards Sir Herbert is arrested, and Oliver Rathbone is hired as his barrister. Oliver goes to see Monk because he wants to hire him to prove Sir Herbert’s innocence. Everybody says that Sir Herbert was too professional and boring to entertain romantic ideas about the nurse, but the letters seem to leave no room for doubt.
The trial starts but thing do not go well for Sir Herbert. Monk continues investigating, and he goes to talk to the family who Nanette stayed with the night before Prudence’s murder. The woman tells him something that can play to Sir Herbert’s innocence. Apparently, Nanette is having doubts about Taunton because he could be violent. One weekend he was staying in the country, and while the ladies were talking, the men were playing billiards. Taunton thought that he was being cheated, so he pounced on a man called Archie and attacked him savagely with the cue, and hadn’t the other men grabbed him, he would have killed Archie.
When Nanette is called to testify, her testimony is similar to the others, but when Oliver questions her, he brings up the attack on Archie. Nanette says that was a single mistake, but Taunton is a good man, and as she speaks, she becomes quite vocal and emotional. Oliver has done a good job ad now the jury has reasonable doubt.
I wonder who the killer is. I thought that it could be Sir Herbert, but my theory was connected with what happened to his daughter. Now it is obvious that he is innocent. So who is the killer?
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