Death in the Devil's Acre - Anne Perry [84]
“Throw him out, Elsie!” Mary shrieked. “Throw him out! Throw him hard, go on! Put him in the gutter! Set Dutch on him!”
The great woman took another step forward. Her face was expressionless. She could have had her sleeves rolled up to do laundry or knead bread. Beside her, Dutch’s snarl grew higher.
“Stop it!” Victoria’s voice shouted from the head of the stairs where she had disappeared a short time before. “That’s not necessary, Elsie. Mr. Pitt is not a customer—and he won’t hurt anyone.” Her tone became sharper. “Really, Mary, sometimes you are stupid!” She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and handed it to the maid. “Now pull yourself together, Millie, and get on with your work! Stop sniffling—there’s nothing to cry about. Go on!” She watched as the girl ran away and the enormous woman and the dog turned and trundled obediently after her.
Mary looked sullen, but kept her peace.
“I’m sorry,” Victoria said to Pitt. “We found Millie in a bad way. I didn’t know who was responsible, but perhaps it was Pinchin. Poor little creature nearly bled to death. She got with child and her father threw her out. She worked herself into one of the houses, where someone aborted her. Then, when they threw her out because she was useless to them, we picked her up.”
There was nothing Pitt could say, the situation was beyond trite sympathy.
Victoria led the way back toward the front rooms. “Mary shouldn’t have called Elsie. She’s only for customers who get difficult.” Her face was bleak. “I hope you were not frightened, Mr. Pitt.”
Pitt had been terrified; the sweat was still standing out on his body. “Not at all,” he lied, glad she could not see his face. “Thank you for your frankness, Miss Dalton. Now I know what Pinchin was doing in the Acre, and where his additional income came from—at least to furnish his cellar. You don’t happen to know whom he practiced for, do you?”
“Millie was with Ambrose Mercutt, if that’s what you want to know,” she said calmly. “I cannot tell you anything more than that.”
“I don’t think I need anything more.” Pitt came out into the main room, and both constables, scarlet-faced, sprang to their feet, tipping two laughing girls off their laps. Pitt turned to Victoria affecting not to notice. “Thank you, Miss Dalton. Good night.”
Victoria was equally imperturbable. “Good night, Mr. Pitt.”
9
GENERAL BALANTYNE COULD NOT put the devil’s acre murders out of his mind. He had never heard of Dr. Pinchin or the last victim, Ernest Pomeroy, before the newspapers made them synonymous with terror and abomination in the dark. But the face of Max Burton, with its lidded eyes and curling lip, raised in him disturbing memories of other murders, hideous incidents from the past that he had never fully understood.
And Bertie Astley belonged to Balantyne’s own class, something less than true aristocracy, but far more than merely gentry. Anyone might come by money, and manners could be mimicked or learned. Wit, fashion, and even beauty were nothing; one enjoyed them, but no one worth a thought was taken in by them. But the Astleys had breeding; generations of honorable reputation, of service to church or state, had made them part of a small world of privilege that had once seemed golden—and safe. Occasionally some knave or fool stepped out of it—but no invader had beaten his way in.
How had Bertram Astley’s body come to be found in a doorway to a male brothel? Balantyne, of course, was not naïve enough to exclude the possibility that Astley had gone there for the obvious purpose, or that he had been murdered by a chance lunatic. Neither could he dismiss the fear that it was not accident but design that had selected him. He mistrusted the comfortable belief in a random killer that chose two men, Max and Bertie, so dramatically dissimilar, yet both known to him.
He broached the subject to Augusta. She immediately assumed he wished to discuss the Devil’s Acre itself, and some plan for reform of prostitution and its ills; her face closed over.
“Really, Brandon, for a man