A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [164]
She carried on with her sewing by the window in the front room, the curtains closed. She was tired but she knew it was futile to go to bed as the party would go on till the early hours of the morning and then it often became raucous once everyone was drunk and had lost interest in the cards.
Raised voices alerted her later that something unusual was happening. Fights were common enough, bottles or glasses would be hurled, furniture turned over, and while she hated the noise and the menace of violence, at least she always knew it meant the party was drawing to a close. But this was something different; the men were drumming on the table, there was excitement in their raised voices.
Yvette wasn’t in the habit of going to investigate anything going on next door. Over the years she’d learned the hard way what might happen. She’d had a full beer can thrown at her, been sprayed with urine, and just being spotted standing at her kitchen sink could result in screamed accusations that she was spying on them.
But her curiosity got the better of her, and she stole quietly out into the garden, keeping her head well below the fence that separated the houses. When she reached the bottom of the garden and the cover of the tree that overhung the back wall, she stood up on an old crate to see into number 11.
Her view of the Muckles’ back room was uninterrupted, and as the lights in there were bright she could see everyone clearly, except for two of the men nearest the window who had their backs to it. There were six men in all, including Alfie, and the table was strewn with glasses, bottles, overloaded ashtrays and cards, with a heap of money in the centre.
Molly was standing, or rather posing seductively, by the door through to the hall, wearing a flimsy red negligee, with just underwear and stockings underneath, and she was holding Angela by the hand.
One swift glance at the men’s leering faces, Molly’s coquettish expression and Angela’s look of complete bewilderment was enough for Yvette to know exactly what Molly was offering.
Her body or that of the child’s, in exchange for the money on the table.
Had she not experienced the self-same thing herself as a child, she might very well have imagined Angela’s presence was an accident, that she’d come down for a drink at an inopportune moment. But there was no mistaking the slathering hunger in the men’s faces, and nothing else would create such a highly charged atmosphere, certainly not just Molly’s body which could probably be bought for a bottle of drink.
‘There’s over two hundred quid in the pot,’ one of the men yelled out. ‘She ain’t worth that much.’
Yvette began to tremble. She clasped her hands together and offered up a silent prayer that the men would denounce a mother who could sell her child, and leave hurriedly.
‘Ones this young don’t come cheap,’ Molly said, then bending over she caught the hem of the child’s nightdress and with a flourish whipped it off over Angela’s head, leaving her stark naked.
‘No, Mum!’ Angela cried out, trying to cover herself with her thin arms.
Only a completely perverted beast could possibly have viewed the skinny little girl with her dirty face and unbrushed hair as an object of desire. Her ribs stood out like a relief map, her arms were like sticks of macaroni. But this was obviously what the men were feeling, for there was a buzz of appreciation. Overcome by a wave of both terror and nausea, Yvette got down from the crate and hurried indoors.
‘I was sick again and again,’ she whispered to Fifi. ‘I ’ad feelings Alfie did theese to Mary, and I’m sure he also do it to his older girls when they lived there too. But Angela ees so leetle. She ’ave no breasts, no ’ips, just a small child. I should ’ave gone to the police right then, but I was too frightened and sick.’
Fifi felt sick herself. If she’d had any food inside her she was sure she’d have brought it up. She had formed