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"Yeah! Yeah, I do. It were ter Jimmy Struther, in Coots Alley, be'ind the brickyard."
Monk gri
"It is! It is!"
Monk had no doubt from the man's expression that indeed it was. He let the man go, then turned on his heel and left.
St. Giles turned out to be only another stop along the way. According to the woman he questioned there, the girls had remained for several years. She was not certain how many, seven or eight at least. Many of the patrons were too drunk or too desperate to care what a serving girl looked like, and the work was simple and repetitive. Little was asked of them, but then little indeed was given. Such affection or companionship as they ever received was from each other. And apparently each was quick to defend the other, even at the cost of a beating. The elder had once had her nose and two ribs broken in a brawl to protect her younger sister from the temper of one of the yard men.
Monk listened to the stories, and a picture emerged of two girls growing up totally untutored and unhelped, learning what little they did by trial and error-sometimes acutely painful error-able to speak only poorly, words muffled by crooked lips, heard by partially deaf ears. They were sometimes mocked for their afflictions, feared for their appearance, as if the disfigurement might be contagious, like a pox.
One woman said that she had heard them laugh, and on two or three occasions seen them play games with one another. They had a pet dog for a while. She had no idea what had become of it.
"Where did they go from here?" Monk asked, fearing this would be the end of his pursuit. No one would know. They were too weary, too sodden in drink to remember anything, or to care. The next bottle was all that mattered.
One woman shrugged and spat.
A second laughed at him.
The third swore, then mentioned the name of a whorehouse in the Devil's Acre, the teeming slum almost under the shadow of St. Paul's.
That was all he could get from them and he knew it. He had already lost their attention. He rose and left.
It took him two days of bribery, questioning, trickery and threats, and several abortive attempts, before he traced the girls to a brothel off a smith's yard in the Devil's Acre. It was a filthy place awash from overflowing drains and piles of refuse. Rats scuttled along the curbs above the gutters and people, almost undistinguishable from the heaps of rags, lay huddled in doorways.
Monk had been there before, but it still made him sick every time. He was hunched up with a cold that seemed to reach through his flesh to the bones. It knotted his stomach and made him shake till he clenched his teeth together to keep them from rattling. It was partly the wind turning and whistling through the alleys and cracks between the walls, partly the damp which rotted and seeped everywhere. Only when it froze did the incessant sound of dripping stop. And partly it was the smell. It gagged in the throat and churned the stomach.
He was too late. They had been there, scrubbing floors, carrying water from the standpipes four streets away, emptying slops in the midden and bringing back the buckets. They had gone the day before.
Gone…! Where? Why?
One answer to that leaped out at him; because he had been pursuing them. He had asked questions, threatened. He had made his intense interest only too apparent. Someone was frightened, with or without reason. Before he began to look for them they were simply two unwanted girls shunted from one place to another, tolerated as long as some use could be made of them. His persistence and ruthlessness had made them important. He had driven someone to try to get rid of them.
Where do you get rid of people you don't want to be found? Kill them-if you dare. If you are sure you can dispose of the bodies. The thought almost suffocated him. His heart seemed to rise in his throat and drive the breath out of him. He grasped the man by the front of his clothes and jerked him off his feet.
"If you've killed them, I shall personally deliver you to the hangman! Do you understand me? If you don't believe me, then I had better see to it myself. You will have a hideous accident! A fatal one-precisely as fatal as whatever you did to those girls."
"That in't fair!" the man squawked, his eyes rolling.
"Of course it isn't!" Monk agreed, not loosening his grip in spite of the man's gasping and struggling. "There are two of them-and there's only one of you!" He gri
"I din't do nuffink!" The man saw death in Monk's face and was nearly sick with fright. "They're fine! They're alive and well, I swear ter Gawd!"
"Don't swear. Show me!"
"They in't 'ere! I sold 'em… passed 'em on like. I give 'em a chance ter better theirselves. Get out o' Lu
"Where, precisely?" Monk snarled.
"East! Across the water. Honest ter Gawd!"
Monk jerked him up again harshly, hearing his teeth clatter. "Where?"
"France! They're gorn ter France!"
Monk knew what that would be for. From there they would be snipped to God knows where: the white slave trade.
"When?" He slammed the man back against the wall. He regretted it instantly. He could have knocked him senseless, even broken his neck; but then he would be able to tell him nothing. "When did they leave?"
"Yest'y! They went down to the docks… Surrey Docks… yest'y night." He thought he was staring death in the face. "They'll go out on the afternoon tide terday."
"Ship?" Monk demanded. "What ship? Tell me you don't know and I'll send your teeth out through the back of your neck!"
"The S-Summer Rose" the man stammered. "So 'elp me Gawd!"
Monk dropped him and he slid to the floor, lying there sobbing for breath. Monk turned and ran from the room, out across the dripping yard and along the alley overhung with creaking boards and sagging half roofs onto the wider, crooked street He had about an hour and a half before the tide. He would like to have gone home and changed into respectable clothes and collected some more money, but there was no time.
He stopped on the narrow pavement. It was begi
He turned towards the river and ran down the next alley and into another broader street. There were drays and carts in it, and one closed carriage. No hansoms.
He started to swear, then saved his breath for ru
Perhaps along Upper Thames Street, the closest one to the water, there would be cabs. It was too far! He needed to hurry. They would have to make a detour around the Tower of London.
He stood on the curb waving and shouting. No one stopped. They all splashed by in the harder and harder rain, going complacently on their way. He started to run eastwards. Queenhithe Dock was a little ahead of him. Stew Lane Stairs were to the right.
A long string of barges was pushing downriver, making slow way. The tide had not turned yet, but it would be slack water soon.