A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [165]
‘Do you know which man got her?’ she asked.
‘Oui,’ Yvette whispered. She was trembling by Fifi’s side. ‘I did not see him but I ’eard his voice and I know it was ze big older man, who come so often. I know ’is name is Jack Trueman, because Molly she boast so often about this rich man who is her friend.’
The name meant nothing to Fifi, but it could very well have been the man with the Jaguar. ‘So he took Angela upstairs?’ she asked.
‘I don’t hear right away,’ Yvette said. ‘Later I go outside again when some of ze men are gone. I ’ope I am mistaken, you see, but then I hear the sound coming from the room at ze top. The old bed creak and poor Angela crying.’
Fifi shuddered. ‘Then what?’
‘I hear Angela crying in the morning. I think Molly must slap her to shut her up, and then I see ze whole family leave for their day out. I am, ’ow you say?, out of my wits.’
‘Beside yourself,’ Fifi corrected her automatically, seeing in her own mind the Muckles leaving the house that morning and her amusement at the spectacle of them all in holiday clothes.
‘Yes, that is it, beside myself. I want to go in there and comfort her. I feel so badly for her. So I climb over ze back fence and go in.’
She described the filth she saw as she got into the kitchen, and Fifi was there with her, reliving every step of the way that she’d taken herself later that same day.
‘I come to that top room and I open ze door, and there Angela is, suffering the way I suffered so many years ago. She had ze blood on her, her privates swollen and red. She look at me with theese big eyes, they say to me that she knows this is what she will get every Friday night, and even if I take her now, look after her and get ’elp, she will never forget. Just as I can never forget.’
Yvette made a kind of keening sound in her throat and began rocking herself.
‘So what did you do?’ Fifi asked, putting her arm round her and hugging her tightly. What she wanted to hear was something which didn’t fit in with what she’d seen, for she still didn’t believe Yvette was capable of killing the child.
‘She didn’t speak. I theenk she was in shock. I put my hand on her forehead. I say I ’elp her, but she is stiff, like she is paralysed. Just her eyes pleading with me, and it comes to me that she is asking me to kill her.’
She fell silent for a moment or two, and then when she did speak again her voice was suddenly cold, crisp and unrepentant. ‘I pick up ze pillow and I hold it over her face. She didn’t even struggle. Just her hands coming up like so.’
Fifi felt the fluttering of Yvette’s hands even though she couldn’t see them.
‘It was quick. I wait till her hands go down, then I take the pillow away. She is dead and will never suffer that again.
I go out on ze landing where there is cupboard; I find a clean sheet and put it over her. Then I go back to my flat.’
Too stunned to speak, and appalled as she was, Fifi could understand what made Yvette do it. She had no doubt that when she was confronted by the ravaged child, her mind flipped back to her own terrible experiences in France.
Maybe after the first man raped her, Yvette had lain like that in the bed wishing for death.
What Yvette did, in her own mind at least, was an act of compassion. She was putting a fatally wounded animal out of its misery. Giving Angela what had been denied her.
‘You understand now why I do not want to live?’ Yvette said suddenly, breaking the silence. ‘I ’ave theese on my conscience, I cannot forget. And now you are afraid of me too?’
‘No, I’m not afraid of you,’ Fifi said slowly. ‘I can understand.’
She lay there silently for some little while. She felt sick and giddy, and she was frightened too by the enormity of what she’d been told. To think that all this had been going on just across the road to her. A seven-year-old child sold to the highest bidder! How could any mother be so depraved?