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Frank let the curtain fall back across the window. “Maybe,” he said. He turned back into the room. It was a tart’s lumber, a cheap single room where punters would come up to get what they’d bought with their oncer: five minutes of slap and tickle and a dose of the clap so bad it’d peel the jewels right off. Cheap furniture, dirty clothes strewn about, unwashed pots and pans in the sink. Squalid. The business transacted inside was gruesome and desperate but it was hardly novel. Frank had seen plenty of rooms like this in Soho and Fitzrovia, especially in the last month.
A neighbour had noticed the door had been shut for three days and had stopped the local bobby. The woodentop had put his size twelve through the flimsy door and discovered the poor girl. Her body was spread out across the single divan. Her tongue protruded from between bluish lips and the bruises around her throat were dark and evocative, the shape of fingers from where they would have met beneath her chin. She had been stabbed a dozen times, probably more than a dozen, and her blood was on the walls, the floor, soaked into the bedding.
“What do you want me to do, guv?”
“Wake Spilsbury up—he better take a look.”
“What do you reckon?”
Frank looked at the girl: seventeen or eighteen if she was a day, a grim and brutal life cut short. He’d been working on the case like every other detective on the manor and he recognised the handiwork. “It’s him.”
He was sure. He’d only taken five days’ rest this time.
Whoever this poor doxy was, she was one of his.
Number five.
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ALSO BY MARK DAWSON
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The Black Mile
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The Imposter
War hero Edward Fabian finds himself drawn into a criminal family’s web of vice and soon he is an accomplice to their scheming. But he's not the man they think he is - he's far more dangerous than they could possibly imagine.
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