A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [137]
Fifi didn’t know whether she was more or less frightened by Yvette being brought here too. But she knew she had to hide her fear and try to make some sort of impact on these men.
‘Why have you brought her here?’ she asked more boldly than she felt. ‘Are you going to bring in everyone from Dale Street? If you do, you might need a bigger cage.’
She was disadvantaged in every way – they were in shadow, whereas she was caught full on in the beam of the torch, and she knew she must look awful with her face blotchy from crying, and her skirt and blouse all creased up. Under the circumstances her appearance wasn’t going to make a scrap of difference to how they treated her, but if she couldn’t look good, she was at least going to have a stab at making herself memorable.
‘Don’t try and be funny,’ Del said.
‘Will you think I’m trying to be funny if I ask for a bucket to pee in?’ she said with a wide, false smile.
‘I’ll get you one,’ he said, turning away and walking towards the door.
Fifi was burning to examine Yvette, but being left alone with Martin was a golden opportunity to try to work on him.
Moving over to the bars, she put her hands through them. ‘What did you bring me to eat?’ she asked. ‘I’m starving.’
He came right up to the bars. ‘Just a pork pie and a cake,’ he said with a rueful half-smile. ‘It was all we could get.’
Fifi waited until she’d got the bag in her hand. ‘Are you a child molester too?’ she asked, looking hard at him. She knew she had no proof that this was what his boss was, for the conclusions she’d come to were only guesswork. But she had to say something to rattle a response from him.
He certainly didn’t look or act like a would-be gangster. His light brown hair was cut into the fashionable college-boy style, and he was wearing what appeared to be a handknitted jumper under his donkey jacket. He might be brawny but she didn’t think he was a cruel man; his eyes looked far too gentle.
‘No, I’m bloody not,’ he retorted, looking startled and puzzled by such a question.
‘So why are you helping men who are?’ she asked.
‘Whatcha mean?’ he asked, and the way the torch swayed in his hand suggested he was unnerved by her question.
Fifi thought it was possible he knew nothing of the murder in Dale Street if he didn’t read newspapers or live in Kennington; none of the girls in the office had said anything about it. He could have been ordered to do this job without knowing what lay behind it.
‘A few weeks ago a seven-year-old girl was raped and killed in Dale Street. Both Yvette and I live there, it was me who found the little girl. So whoever ordered you to bring us here is up to their neck in it, or they wouldn’t want a couple of innocent women out the way. So you can’t blame me for thinking you must be a nonce, if you work for one.’
She didn’t know the word ‘nonce’ until Angela died. But since then she had heard people spit it out with utter disgust, and she knew the average man would want to tear apart, limb from limb, anyone with a leaning that way.
Martin looked at her in horror, his eyes wide and panicked. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, gulping so hard his Adam’s apple went up and down like a yo-yo.
The barn door opened and Del came back in.
‘I haven’t got it wrong, but I think you have,’ Fifi said quietly but firmly. ‘Think on it. Would your mother or your girlfriend be proud of you if they knew you worked for beasts that screw children, then kill them?’
Del was too far away to hear what she had said, but as he came into the arc of light he was scowling. ‘What’s she going on about now?’ he asked Martin.
‘I was just asking him how he came to have such a dirty job,’ Fifi said airily. ‘But I suppose if you’re up to your neck in shit all the time, eventually you get to like the smell of it?’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ Del asked, and opening the cage door again, put a bucket in.
‘Do you see me laughing?’ Fifi replied and she asked Martin to shine the torch on Yvette while she knelt down beside her to examine her. To Fifi’s relief,