The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [4]
“City,” Evan corrected. “City boots. City skins. Country men would have had more color.”
“Then up west. They wasn’t from anyw’ere near ’ere, that’s for certain positive. So ’oo around ’ere would know ’em to ’ate ’em that much?”
Evan pushed his hands into his pockets. There were more people passing the end of the alley now, men going to work in factories and warehouses, women to sweatshops and mills. The unknown numbers who worked in the streets themselves were appearing, peddlers, dealers in one thing and another, scavengers, sellers of information, petty thieves and go-betweens.
“What does a man come here for?” Evan was talking to himself. “Something he can’t buy in his own part of the city.”
“Slummin’,” Shotts said succinctly. “Cheap women, money-lenders, card sharps, fence a bit o’ summink stolen, get summink forged.”
“Exactly,” Evan agreed. “We’d better find out which of these, and with whom.”
Shotts shrugged and gave a hollow laugh. He had no need to comment on their chances of success.
“The woman, Daisy Mott,” Evan began, starting towards the street. He was so cold he could hardly feel anything below his ankles. The smell of the alley made him shrink tighter and feel queasy. He had seen too much violence and pain in a short space of hours.
“The doc were right,” Shotts remarked, catching up with him. “An ’ot cup o’ tea wi’ a drop o’ gin wouldn’t do yer no ’arm, nor me neither.”
“Agreed.” Evan did not argue. “And a pie or a sandwich. Then we’ll find the woman.”
But when they did find her she would tell them nothing. She was small and fair and very thin. She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five. It was impossible to tell. She was tired and frightened, and only spoke to them at all because she could see no way of avoiding it.
The match factory was busy already, the hum of machinery was a background to everything, the smells of sawdust, oil and phosphorus were thick in the air. Everyone looked pallid. Evan saw several women with swollen, suppurating scabs, or skin eaten away by the necrosis of the bone known as “phossie jaw,” to which match workers were so susceptible. They stared at him with only minimal curiosity.
“What did you see?” Evan asked gently. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
She took a deep breath but said nothing.
“In’t nobody cares w’ere yer was comin’ from,” Shotts interposed helpfully. “Or goin’.”
Evan made himself smile at her.
“I come inter the alley,” she started tentatively. “It were still mostly dark. I were near on ’im w’en I saw ’im. First I reckoned as ’e were jus’ drunk an’ sleepin’ it orff. ’Appens orften down ’ere.”
“I’m sure.” Evan nodded, aware of other eyes staring at them, and of the supervisor’s grim face a dozen yards away. “What made you realize he was dead?”
“Blood!” she said with contempt, but her voice was hoarse. “All that blood. I ’ad a lantern, an’ I saw ’is eyes starin’ up at me. That were w’en I yelled. Couldn’t ’elp it.”
“Of course. Anyone would. What then?”
“I dunno. Me ’eart were goin’ like the clappers an’ I felt sick. I fink as I jus’ stood there and yelled.”
“Who heard you?”
“Wot?”
“Who heard you?” he repeated. “Someone must have come.”
She hesitated, afraid again. She did not dare implicate someone else. He could see it in her eyes. Monk would have known what to do to make her speak. He had a sense of people’s weaknesses and how to use them without breaking them. He did not lose sight of the main purpose the way Evan too often did. He was not sidetracked by irrelevant pity, imagining himself in their place, which was false. He did not know how they felt. He would have said Evan was sentimental. Evan could hear Monk’s voice in his mind even as he thought it. It was true. And people did not want pity. They would have hated him for it. It was the ultimate indignity.
“Who came?” he said more sharply. “Do you want me to go around