Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [114]
Lennox was standing half behind one of the women, one hand on her shoulder, a cup of tea in the other, holding it out for her. He looked pale and tired, his nose accentuated by the deep lines scored down the sides of his mouth. He stared at Pitt warningly. His voice was hoarse when he spoke.
“Good evening, Superintendent. If you want to question these women, they are ready to answer you. Just don’t tell them details you don’t have to, and be a little patient. It isn’t easy to remember, or to find words, when you are terrified.”
Pitt nodded and turned to Ewart. “You could try the neighborhood. See if anyone else has noticed anything unusual, if they can remember a face, someone coming or going at about …?” He looked at Lennox enquiringly.
“Between four and five,” Lennox answered, then smiled in bitter mockery of himself. “Not medical brilliance, Superintendent. Observation of witnesses. Pearl heard Nora calling out in the corridor at about four o’clock. She’d just got up and was asking Edie if she could borrow a petticoat.”
Pitt looked at the women Lennox indicated. Pearl was pale-faced with flaxen hair of extraordinary beauty, sheer as spun glass and reflecting the light of the candles like wheatsilk, a patch of luminosity in the room. Edie was heavy and dark with olive skin and handsome, liquid brown eyes.
“And you lent her a petticoat?” Pitt asked.
Edie nodded. “She ’ad ter pin it, as she in’t ’alf my size, but she took it any’ow.” She sniffed and controlled herself with an effort.
“And the other time?” Pitt asked Lennox.
Lennox turned to another woman, dark, narrow-eyed, with a pretty mouth. She looked ashen, the rouge standing out on her cheeks, her hair lopsided where she had run her fingers through it, pins sliding out.
“Mabel can answer that.”
“Me first customer’d just gorn,” Mabel replied, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “I were goin’ past Nora’s door an’ I looked in. Dunno ’ow I knew she were by ’erself. Quiet, I s’pose.” She frowned, as though the puzzle mattered. “I saw ’er lyin’ on the bed wif ’er ’and up ter the post. I reckoned as ’er customer’d bin keen on that kind o’ thing, an’ left ’er like that. I even said summink to ’er….” She sniffed and swallowed with a painful constriction of her throat. Her body was shaking so uncontrollably her fingers skittered on the table.
Lennox moved across behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, holding her against him as if to give her of his own strength. It was a gesture of extraordinary gentleness. She might have been a friend of long standing, not a street woman he had only just met.
It steadied her, like a ray of sanity in the chaos.
“Then I saw ’er face,” she said quietly. “An’ I know as it ’ad ’appened to ’er too. The same one as got Ada McKinley’d got ’er too. I s’pose I must ’a’ yelled. Next thing everyone were there, an’ all yellin’ an’ callin’ out.”
“I see. Thank you.” Pitt turned to Ewart. “You’d better find out what men were seen coming or going from this building between four and five. Get descriptions of all of them and compare them with each woman and her customers. Get times as near as you can. Any man at all. I don’t care if they’re residents, pimps, or the lamplighter! Everyone.”
“Yes sir.”
Ewart departed and Pitt concentrated on the four women present. The last one, Kate, was still sobbing, pushing a wet handkerchief into her mouth and gasping for breath. Lennox went back to the stove and made another cup of tea, passing it to her, closing her stiff fingers around it awkwardly as Pitt began questioning Pearl, sitting on a rickety chair at right angles over the table from her.
“Tell me all you can remember from just before you saw Nora at almost four o’clock,” he prompted.
She stared at him, then began hesitantly.
“I ’eard Nora come inter ’er room an’ call ter Edie abaht a petticoat, but I din’ ’ear wot Edie said. I were