Belle - Lesley Pearse [27]
Noah was so horrified and appalled that his wits left him temporarily and he couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. He’d been out on insurance investigation for the past week and hadn’t bothered to buy a newspaper. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes and that embarrassed him. ‘I can’t believe it! Who would kill such a lovely girl? When was this? Has the killer been caught?’ he croaked out eventually, and had to hope Mog wouldn’t realize he’d had romantic dreams about Millie.
Mog gently suggested they sat down and she told him the whole story. Noah found it curious that a woman who worked in a brothel should be so sensitive and kindly. She explained how she had been out for the evening and arrived home just after the police left, and she told the murder story through the eyes of the young girl who had witnessed it. As she got to the point where Annie, the girl’s mother, had lied to the police and said Belle slept through the whole thing, she had to dab tears from her eyes with a handkerchief.
Noah hadn’t imagined Annie having a child, much less a fifteen-year-old living on the premises. Just from the way Mog spoke of her it was clear this young girl was very innocent and he could hardly bear to think she should have witnessed something so shocking.
‘But to make it even worse, now Belle has been snatched!’ Mog exclaimed, her voice rising in her distress. ‘Snatched right off the street! It were yesterday while we were at Millie’s funeral.’
‘Oh, my good God,’ Noah burst out. ‘You went to the police, I’m sure?’
‘Yes, of course, though little good it did us as they don’t know Belle saw the murder and they won’t be rushing around on our account. So we don’t know what to do. Then Annie remembered that you were an investigator and that you really liked Millie. So we hoped you might be willing to help us.’
Noah the journalist couldn’t help but think this could be the scoop he’d always hoped for to make his name. But he immediately felt ashamed of such a thought. He had been very fond of Millie, and though he would like to be the man who brought her killer to justice, he couldn’t possibly exploit her death to further his career.
He hadn’t known she was a whore when he first met her. He had been in the Strand shortly after a child had been run down by a hansom cab, and hoping to be first with the story, he began asking people if they’d seen what happened. Millie was just one of these people. She was so pretty and helpful, concerned for the child and its parents, and when she said she had to get home, he walked with her. Just as they got to Jake’s Court she blurted out what she was. He said he didn’t care, he still liked her just as much.
He had only been to a brothel once before he met Millie, and he wouldn’t have gone then but for a friend dragging him there when he was drunk. He disliked the concept that a man could buy a woman as if she were a bag of sugar or a sack of coal. But he was desperate to see Millie again, and nervous as he was about going into Annie’s Place, it was the only way to see her.
On that first visit, he didn’t even want to have sex with her. He told her he just wanted to be with her, so they went to her room and simply talked and kissed.
On the next and subsequent visits he did have sex with Millie – he couldn’t hold back once he was up in her warm, cluttered room and she took off her dress and stood there in her underclothes with her full breasts billowing over the top of her chemise. It was wonderful, the most thrilling thing he’d ever experienced, yet it wasn’t just the sex, he liked everything about her – her sweet, kind nature, her silky skin and her vivid smile.
Maybe he was fooling himself, but he believed she liked him as much as he did her, and over the period of the next six or seven weeks he went to see her every Monday night, the quietest night at Annie’s. But the last time he