Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [97]
Finally in the later afternoon of the third day they found Bessie Jones, as Clemency Shaw had done before them. It was in the heart of Mile End, off the Whitechapel Road. There seemed to be an unusual number of police around.
Bessie was crouching in the corner of a room no more than twelve feet by sixteen, and occupied by three families, one in each corner. There were about sixteen people in all, including two babies in arms, which cried constantly. There was a blackened potbellied stove against one wall, but it was barely alight. There were buckets for the necessities of nature, but no drain to empty either that or any other waste, except the one in the courtyard, which overflowed and the stench filled the air, catching in the throat, soiling the clothes, the hair and the skin. There was no running water. For washing, cooking, drinking, it all had to be fetched in a pail from a standpipe three hundred yards away along the street.
There was no furniture except one broken wooden chair. People slept in what scraps of rag and blanket they could gather together for warmth; men, women and children, with nothing between them and the boards of the floor but more rags and loose ends of oakum, and the dross of the cloth industry too wretched even to remake into drab for the workhouse.
Above the crying of children, the snoring of an old man asleep under the broken window, boarded with a loose piece of linoleum, was the constant squeaking and scuttling of rats. On the floor below were the raucous sounds of a gin mill and the shouts of drunkards as they fought, swore and sang snatches of bawdy songs. Two women lay senseless in the gutter and a sailor relieved himself against the wall.
Below street level, in ill-lit cellars, ninety-eight women and girls sat shoulder to shoulder in a sweatshop stitching shirts for a few pence a day. It was better than the match factory with its phosphorous poisoning.
Upstairs a brothel prepared for the evening trade. Twenty yards away rows of men lay in bunks, their bodies rotting, their minds adrift in the sweet dreams of opium.
Bessie Jones was worn out, exhausted by the fruitless fight, and glad now at least to be under shelter from the rain and to have a stove to creep close to in the night, and two slices of bread to eat.
Charlotte emptied her purse and felt it a gross and futile thing to have done, but the money burned her hand.
In all of it she had followed the path that Clemency Shaw had taken, and she had felt as she must have felt, but she had learned nothing as to who might have killed her, although why was only too apparent. If the ownership of such places was accredited publicly there would be some who would not care, they had no reputation or status to lose. But there were surely those who drew their money from such abysmal suffering, and who would pay dearly to keep it secret, and call it by some other name. To say one owned property implied estates somewhere in the shires; farmlands might be envisioned, rich earth yielding food, cattle, timber—not the misery, crime and disease Charlotte and Gracie had seen these few days.
When she reached home she stripped off all her clothes, even her shift and pantaloons, and put them all in the wash, and told Gracie to do the same. She could not imagine any soap that would cleanse them of the odor of filth—her imagination would always furnish it as long as the memory lasted—but the sheer act of boiling and scrubbing would help.
“What are you going ter do, ma’am?” Gracie asked, wide-eyed and husky. Even she had never seen such wretchedness.
“We are going to discover who owns these abominable places,” Charlotte replied grimly.
“An’ one of ’em murdered Miss