The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [5]
“Jimmy Elders,” she said, looking at him with dislike. “An’ ’is woman. They both come. ’E lives ’alfway along the alley, be’ind the wood door wif the lock on it. But ’e don’ know wot ’appened any more’n I do. Then ol’ Briggs. ’E went for the rozzer.”
“Thank you.” He knew it was a waste of time asking, but he had to go through the motions. “Had you ever seen either of the two men before, when they were alive?”
“No.” She answered without even thinking. It was what he had expected. He glanced around and saw that the supervisor had moved a little closer. He was a large, black-haired man with a sullen face. Evan hoped she was not going to be docked pay for the time he had taken, but he thought she probably would. He would waste no more of it.
“Thank you. Good-bye.”
She said nothing, but returned silently to her work.
Evan and Shotts went back to the alley and spoke to Jimmy Elders and his common-law wife, but they had nothing to offer beyond corroborating what Daisy Mott had told them. Elders denied having seen either of the men alive, or knowing what they might have been doing there. The leer in his face suggested the obvious, but he refrained from putting words to it. Briggs was the same.
They spent all day in and around the alley, which was known as Water Lane, going up and down narrow and rotting stairs, into rooms where sometimes a whole family lived, others where pale-faced young prostitutes conducted their business when it was too wet or too cold outside. They went down to cellars where women of all ages sat in candlelight stitching and children two or three years old played in straw and tied waste bits of rag into dolls. Older children unpicked old clothes for the fabric to make new ones.
No one admitted to having seen or heard anything unusual. No one knew anything of two strangers in the area. There were always people coming and going. There were pawnshops, fencers of stolen goods, petty forgers of documents, doss houses, gin mills and well-hidden rooms where it was safe for a wanted man to lie for a while. The dead men could have come to do business with any of these, or none. They might simply have been entertaining themselves by looking on at a way of life different from their own and immeasurably inferior. They could even have been misguided preachers come to save sinners from themselves, and been attacked for their presumption and their interference.
If people knew anything at all, they were more afraid of the perpetrators, or of their peers, than of the police, at least in the form of Evan and P.C. Shotts.
At four o’clock, as it was growing dark again, and bitterly cold, Shotts said he would make one or two more enquiries in the public house, where he had a few acquaintances, and Evan took his leave to go to the hospital and see what Dr. Riley had to say. He had been dreading it because he did not want to have to think of the younger man again, the one who had been still alive in that dreadful place. The memory of it made him feel cold and sick. He was too tired to find the strength inside himself to overcome it.
He said good-day to Shotts and walked briskly in the general direction of Regent Street, where he knew he could find a hansom.
In St. Thomas’s Hospital he went straight to the morgue. He would look at the bodies and deduce what he could for himself and then ask Riley to explain to him what else there was to learn. He hated morgues, but everyone he knew felt the same. His clothes always seemed to smell of vinegar and lye afterwards, and he never felt as if the damp were out of them.
“Yes sir,” the attendant said dutifully when Evan identified himself. “Doc Riley said you’d be ’ere some time, prob’ly today. I only got one body for yer. Other one in’t dead yet. Doc says as ’e might pull through. Never know. Poor devil. Still, I suppose yer want ter see the one I got.” It was