Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [97]
One answer leaped to mind. She had gone to a more profitable area. Was this the influence of Albert Costigan, a more ambitious man, and she had been only too willing to try to improve her situation? Was it possible that in this new guise she had met either one of Finlay’s enemies or one of his father’s? Was it even remotely worth searching?
So far neither Tellman nor Ewart had discovered anything of relevance.
He spent the evening, and the later part of the following day and the one after that, walking the prostitutes’ beats around the West End, Windmill Street, the Haymarket, Leicester Square and the streets and alleys close by. He saw thousands of women much like Ada, some gorgeously dressed, parading like peacocks, others less so, some in little more than gaudy rags. Many, even in the gaslight after dark, still looked long past their prime, raddle-cheeked, slack-bodied. Some were country fresh, come to the city to seek their fortune and finding it in the accommodation rooms in hasty fornication with strangers, often their fathers’ or even grandfathers’ ages.
And there were also children, eight or ten years old, running after men, pulling at their sleeves and whispering dirty words in hope of exciting their interest, or thrusting into their hands lurid, pornographic pictures.
Side by side with them were the theater crowds, respectable women, even wealthy ladies on their husbands’ arms, arriving at or leaving the performance of some play or concert.
Pitt tried every contact he had in the rooming houses, the pimps and madams he knew, but no one owned to recognizing his picture of Ada or knowing her name other than from the news that she was dead. Since Finlay FitzJames’s connection had not been mentioned, the newspapers had made little of it. No one knew of the broken fingers and toes except Lennox, Ewart, Cornwallis and himself.
He was close to defeat when it occurred to him to try away from the West End and into the Hyde Park area. He had one more personal acquaintance to try, a huge, complacent and unctuous figure known as Fat George. He ruled his prostitutes with a rod of iron and the threat of his right-hand man, Wee Georgie, a vicious dwarf with a filthy temper, and quick to use the long, thin-bladed knife he always carried.
He found Fat George in his own house, an extremely well-appointed, classically proportioned building off Inverness Terrace.
Fat George did not rise; his enormous body was almost wedged into his chair. It was a warm day and he wore a loose shirt, newly laundered, his greasy gray curls sitting on the collar.
“Well now, Mr. Pitt,” he said in his whispering, wheezy voice. “What brings you to call on me so urgently? Must be something terrible important to you. Sit down! Sit down! Haven’t seen you since that ugly business in the Park. Long time solving that, you were. Not very clever, Mr. Pitt. Not very efficient.” Fat George shook his head and his curls caught on his collar. “Not what we pay our police force for. You’re supposed to keep us safe, Mr. Pitt. We should sleep easy in our beds, knowin’ as you’re out there protectin’ us.” If there was humor in Fat George’s black eyes, it barely showed.
“We can only solve crimes after they’ve happened, George, not before,” Pitt replied, accepting a seat. “There are a good many around here you could have prevented. Do you know anything about this woman?” He passed over Agnes’s sketch.
Fat George took it in his pale-skinned, freckled hand, his fingers swollen so the bones were invisible.
“Yeah, I’ve seen her,” he said after several seconds. “Smart girl, ambitious. Like to have her meself, but she’s greedy. Wants all her money for ’erself. Dangerous, that, Mr. Pitt. Very dangerous. She the one that got killed up Whitechapel? Should’ve seen that coming. Don’t have far to look, likely.”
“Don’t I?”
“Not clever, Mr. Pitt.” George wagged his head, pushing out his lower lip. “Losin’ your touch, are you? Try ’er pimp, fellow called Costigan, so I hear.”
“Very public-spirited