Part 29 (1/2)
He went into the crowded, noisy, steamy barroom and ordered and ate a good meal of pie with excellent pastry. He dechned to imagine what the filling might be, judging that he preferred not to know. He followed it with a treacle suet pudding and a gla.s.s of stout, then began his enquiries.
He was glad he had eaten first; he needed the strength of a full stomach and a rested body to hear what was told him. It seemed the landlord had paid more attention to the low price than to the goods he was purchasing. When he had got the girls back to Rotherhithe he had put them to work in the sculleries was.h.i.+ng gla.s.ses and dishes and scrubbing the floors. They had worked from before dawn until the public house closed at night. They had eaten what they could scavenge, and slept on the kitchen floor in a pile of sacking by the hearth, curled up together like cats or dogs.
They were willing enough to work, but they were slow, hampered by partial deafness and by being undersized and frequently ill. After a few months he had come to the conclusion that they were a bad bargain and cost him more than they were worth. He had been offered the chance to sell them to a gin mill in St. Giles, and seized the opportunity. It was a few s.h.i.+llings' return on his investment.
Where was the gin mill?
The publican had no idea.
Would a little money help him to recall?
It might. How much money?
A guinea?
Not enough.
The anger exploded inside Monk. He wanted to hurt the man, to wipe the greedy smile from his face and make him feel for a few minutes the misery and fear those children must have known.
”There are two possible ways of encouraging people to tell you what you need to know,” he said very quietly. ”By offering a reward ...” He let the suggestion hang in the air.
The man looked at Monk's face, at his eyes. He was slow to see the rage there. He felt no more than a short s.h.i.+ver of warning. He was still working out how much money he could squeeze.
”Or by threat of something very nasty happening to them,” Monk finished. His voice was still polite, still soft, but there was an edge of viciousness in it a sensitive ear would have caught.
”Oh, yeah?” the man said with more bravado than a.s.surance. ”You got something nasty in mind, then, 'ave yer?”
”Very,” Monk answered between his teeth. He had the perfect excuse. He knew all the details. He had helped pull the body out of the river before he had quarreled with his superior and left the police force. ”Do you remember Big Jake Hillyard?”
The man stiffened. He swallowed with a jerk of his throat.
Monk smiled, showing his teeth. ”Do you remember what happened to him?”
”Anybody could say they done that!” the man protested. ”They never got the bloke who done it.”
”I know they didn't,” Monk agreed. ”But would anybody else be able to tell you exactly what they did to him? I can. Would you like to learn? Would you like to hear about his eyes?”
” 'E 'ad no eyes . . . w'en they found Mm!” the man squeaked.
”I know that!” Monk snapped. ”I know precisely what he had ... and what he hadn't! Where in St. Giles did you send those two little girls? I am asking you very nicely, because I should like to know. Do you understand me... clearly understand me?”
The man's face was white, sweating a little across the lips.
”Yeah! Yeah, I do. It were ter Jimmy Struther, in Coots Alley, be'ind the brickyard.”
Monk grinned at him. ”Thank you. For the sake of your eyesight, that had better be the truth.”
”It is! It is!”
Monk had no doubt from the man's expression that indeed it was. He let the man go, then turned on his heel and left.
St. Giles turned out to be only another stop along the way. According to the woman he questioned there, the girls had remained for several years. She was not certain how many, seven or eight at least. Many of the patrons were too drunk or too desperate to care what a serving girl looked like, and the work was simple and repet.i.tive. Little was asked of them, but then little indeed was given. Such affection or companions.h.i.+p as they ever received was from each other. And apparently each was quick to defend the other, even at the cost of a beating. The elder had once had her nose and two ribs broken in a brawl to protect her younger sister from the temper of one of the yard men.
Monk listened to the stories, and a picture emerged of two girls growing up totally untutored and unhelped, learning what little they did by trial and error-sometimes acutely painful error-able to speak only poorly, words m.u.f.fled by crooked lips, heard by partially deaf ears. They were sometimes mocked for their afflictions, feared for their appearance, as if the disfigurement might be contagious, like a pox.
One woman said that she had heard them laugh, and on two or three occasions seen them play games with one another. They had a pet dog for a while. She had no idea what had become of it.
”Where did they go from here?” Monk asked, fearing this would be the end of his pursuit. No one would know. They were too weary, too sodden in drink to remember anything, or to care. The next bottle was all that mattered.
One woman shrugged and spat.
A second laughed at him.
The third swore, then mentioned the name of a wh.o.r.ehouse in the Devil's Acre, the teeming slum almost under the shadow of St. Paul's.
That was all he could get from them and he knew it. He had already lost their attention. He rose and left.
It took him two days of bribery, questioning, trickery and threats, and several abortive attempts, before he traced the girls to a brothel off a smith's yard in the Devil's Acre. It was a filthy place awash from overflowing drains and piles of refuse. Rats scuttled along the curbs above the gutters and people, almost undistinguishable from the heaps of rags, lay huddled in doorways.
Monk had been there before, but it still made him sick every time. He was hunched up with a cold that seemed to reach through his flesh to the bones. It knotted his stomach and made him shake till he clenched his teeth together to keep them from rattling. It was partly the wind turning and whistling through the alleys and cracks between the walls, partly the damp which rotted and seeped everywhere. Only when it froze did the incessant sound of dripping stop. And partly it was the smell. It gagged in the throat and churned the stomach.
He was too late. They had been there, scrubbing floors, carrying water from the standpipes four streets away, emptying slops in the midden and bringing back the buckets. They had gone the day before.
Gone... ! Where? Why?
One answer to that leaped out at him; because he had been pursuing them. He had asked questions, threatened. He had made his intense interest only too apparent. Someone was frightened, with or without reason. Before he began to look for them they were simply two unwanted girls shunted from one place to another, tolerated as long as some use could be made of them. His persistence and ruthlessness had made them important. He had driven someone to try to get rid of them.
Where do you get rid of people you don't want to be found? Kill them-if you dare. If you are sure you can dispose of the bodies. The thought almost suffocated him. His heart seemed to rise in his throat and drive the breath out of him. He grasped the man by the front of his clothes and jerked him off his feet.
”If you've killed them, I shall personally deliver you to the hangman! Do you understand me? If you don't believe me, then I had better see to it myself. You will have a hideous accident! A fatal one-precisely as fatal as whatever you did to those girls.”
”That in't fair!” the man squawked, his eyes rolling.
”Of course it isn't!” Monk agreed, not loosening his grip in spite of the man's gasping and struggling. ”There are two of them-and there's only one of you!” He grinned at the man savagely, as if a suddenly brilliant idea had occurred to him. ”I've got it! I'll string you up, and then when you're nearly gone-when your lungs are bursting and your face is blue and you're almost on fire-I'll cut you down, throw a bucket of water over you, give you a gla.s.s of brandy, wait till you're all right... then do it again! Once for each girl. Is that fairer?”
”I din't do nuffink!” The man saw death in Monk's face and was nearly sick with fright. ”They're fine! They're alive and well, I swear ter Gawd!”
”Don't swear. Show me!”
”They in't 'ere! I sold 'em... pa.s.sed 'em on like. I give 'em a chance ter better theirselves. Get out o' Lunnon and go somewhere better for their 'ealth.”
”Where, precisely?” Monk snarled.
”East! Across the water. Honest ter Gawd!”
Monk jerked him up again harshly, hearing his teeth clatter. ”Where?”
”France! They're gorn ter France!”
Monk knew what that would be for. From there they would be snipped to G.o.d knows where: the white slave trade.