Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [12]
“That bad?” he asked. “But she did take other people’s customers?”
Agnes laughed sharply. “Yeah! Course she did. ’Oo wouldn’t? She were pretty, an’ smart. She ’ad a quick tongue, made ’em laugh. Some toffs like ter laugh. Makes ’em feel less like they’re in the gutter. Feel like it’s a real woman. Them as can’t laugh wiv their la-di-da wives ’oo are all corsets and starch.” She lifted her lip in a sneer which still had a remnant of pity in it. “Poor cows prob’ly never ’ad a decent laugh in their lives. Ain’t ladylike ter laugh.”
He said nothing. A dozen images crowded through his mind, but she would understand few of them, and it would serve no purpose trying to explain to her.
In the house, somewhere above them, a door slammed and feet rattled down the stairs. Someone shouted.
“And o’ course there’s them as likes the gutter,” Agnes went on, frowning. “Like pigs in muck. Somethink in it excites ’em.” The contempt was thick in her voice. “Jeez! If I din’t need their bleedin’ money, I’d stick the bastards meself.”
Pitt did not doubt it. But it led him nowhere nearer to who had killed Ada McKinley without a fight. There was no blood in the room, and her body was hardly marked, except for the coldly, deliberately broken fingers and toes. There were no scratches, no bruising such as would have been caused by a drawn-out fight. One fingernail on her right hand had been torn, that was all.
“Who did she know that would have called on her here?” he repeated.
“I dunno. Tommy Letts, mebbe. ’E’d come ’ere. Or ’e would ’ave. She don’t work for ’im no more. Got someone better, she said. Bragged about it, jammy bitch.”
“Could the man you saw have been Letts?”
“Nah!” She swung her feet. “ ’E’s a dirty little weasel, black ’air like rats’ tails, an’ abaht my size. This geezer were tall, an’ thick ’air, wavy, all clean like a gent. An’ Tommy never ’ad a coat like that, even if ’e stole it.”
“You saw him?” Pitt was surprised.
“Nah, I never did. But Rose did. An’ Nan. Taken bad, Nan were. Soft cow. That doc were good to ’er. For a rozzer ’e were ’alf ’uman.” She pulled a face. “Young o’ course. ’E’ll change.”
There was little more to learn. He pressed her about having heard anything, but she had been busy with her own clients, and the fact that she claimed to have noticed no sounds at all was only indicative that there had been no screams or crashes of knocked-over furniture. Pitt had already assumed as much from the nature of the death and the comparative order of the room. Whoever had killed Ada McKinley had taken her by surprise, and it had been quick. It had been someone she had trusted.
Pitt left Agnes and went back to the corridor outside, where Ewart was waiting for him. Ewart glanced at him and saw from his expression that there was no escape, no new knowledge to free them from the necessity of going to Finlay FitzJames. A glimmer of hope faded from his black eyes and he looked smaller, somehow narrower, although he was a solid man.
Pitt shook his head fractionally.
Ewart sighed. The air blew up the stairs from the open door out to the alley. Lennox waited at the bottom in the shadows, his face lit yellowly by the constable’s bull’s-eye lantern.
“FitzJames?” he said aloud, a curious lift in his voice.
Ewart winced, as if he had caught an eagerness in it. His teeth ground together. He seemed on the edge of saying something, then changed his mind and let his breath out in a sigh.
“I’m afraid so,” Pitt answered. “I’ll see him at breakfast. There’ll just be time to go home and wash and shave, and eat something myself. You’d better do the same. I shan’t