Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [55]
“Ada’s child died, poor thing.” She did not say whether her pity was for the child or for Ada herself. “I’d tell you who did it, if I knew, mister, but I don’t. Anyway”—she shrugged her wide shoulders—“as Mr. Ewart said, who’d believe me anyway?”
Pitt felt a wave of anger again.
“Did Mr. Ewart say that?”
“Not in them words, but that’s what he meant. An’ he’s right, in’t he?”
“That depends on several things,” Pitt said, evading the question. He could tell the truth; she would not have thanked him for it. “But if you aren’t sure, then it doesn’t matter anyway. Tell me more about Ada. If it wasn’t FitzJames, who do you think it was?”
She was silent so long he thought she was not going to answer. Flies droned against the glass. There was a banging upstairs and along the corridor someone swore.
Finally she spoke. “Well, if it weren’t for the boots all buttoned up, I’d have said Costigan, he’s her new pimp. Nasty piece of work, he is, an’ no mistake. Pretty.” She said the word with condemnation. “Thinks every woman should want after him. Temper like a mousetrap. All cheese one minute, an’ then bang! Takes off your legs.” She shrugged. “But he’s a coward. I know that sort. The moment he’d seen she was dead, he’d have taken off, scared for his life. He’d never have stopped to do up the boots an’ put the garter ’round her arm.” She looked at Pitt blankly. “So I reckon as it was her customer, FitzJames or not.”
She had not mentioned the broken fingers and toes, but then she did not know about them.
“Perhaps it was the customer who did the boots and the garter?” he suggested. “And then Costigan came in before she had time to undo them?” It was a reasonable thought.
Nan shook her head. “Me or Rosie’d have seen him, if there’d have been two. Or Agnes. It may look as if no one sees who comes and goes in these rooms, but it isn’t that way. We look out for each other. Have to. Mostly it’s old Madge who watches. Never know what a customer might do. Some of them have too much to drink and get nasty. Some want you to do things a sane person wouldn’t ever think of.” She blinked and sniffed hard, wiping her nose on a piece of rag. “That’s what’s funny about it. You’d have thought she’d have shouted out, wouldn’t you? She can’t have had any idea until the stocking was ’round her throat, poor little bitch.”
“That doesn’t sound like a first-time customer,” Pitt reasoned. “Rather someone she’d had before, and expected to do something odd like that. Was Costigan her lover as well as her pimp?” He leaned forward, forgetting the chair, which tipped violently.
“He’d like to have been,” she said with a curl of her lip. She ignored the chair. She was used to it. “Don’t think he was, but then I don’t know everything. Maybe. But if she let him, why’d he kill her?”
“I don’t know. Thank you, Nan. If you think of anything else, tell me—or Mr. Ewart.”
“Yeah, yeah, course I will.” She watched as he stood up and the chair righted itself with a clatter.
Pitt spent several hours tracing all he could of Ada’s daily life, and found nothing different in it from the pattern of most women who made their living on the streets. She rose in the middle of the afternoon, dressed, ate her main meal, then started to walk the pavements. Very often she stayed in the Whitechapel area. There were plenty of customers. But sometimes if it was a fine evening, and especially in the summer, she would go up to the traditional areas for picking up wealthier men: Windmill Street, the Haymarket, Leicester Square. There the theater crowds, elegant ladies and men about town, paraded side by side with prostitutes of all classes and ages, from the well-dressed, expensive courtesans down to the ten- or twelve-year-old children who ran along, tugging at sleeves, whispering obscene offers, desperate for a few pence.
Ada had been beaten the occasional time, usually by her former pimp, a man named Wayland, a mean-faced, part-time drayman who supplemented his income by sometimes bullying, sometimes protecting, girls in the