by Anne Perry
Monk caught up with her as she strode purposefully around the corner into another one of the multitudinous alleyways of Seven Dials, crossed a courtyard with a well and pump in it. A drunk lounged in one doorway, a couple kissed in another, the girl giggling happily, the youth whispering something inaudible to her. Monk wondered at their absorption in each other, that they seemed oblivious of the wind and the snow.
Behind a lighted window someone raised a jug of ale, and candlelight fell on a woman’s bright hair. The sound of laughter was quick and clear. Past them and across a main thoroughfare an old woman was selling sandwiches and a running patterer finished up his tale of lust and mayhem and began to jog along the pavement to another, warmer spot to entertain a new crowd with stories, news and general invention.
The next victim of violence was Clarrie Drover. She was almost sixteen, the eldest of a family whose parents were both missing or dead. She looked after six younger brothers and sisters, earning what she could one way or another. Monk did not enquire. They sat in one large room all together while she told Vida what had happened to her in a breathless voice which whistled through a broken front tooth. One sister, about a year and a half younger, nursed her left arm in front of her, as if her chest and stomach hurt her, and she listened to all Clarrie said, nodding her head now and then.
In the dim light of one candle, Vida’s face was a mask of fury and compassion, her wide mouth set, her eyes brilliant.
It was very much the same story. The two eldest girls had been out, earning a little extra money. It was obviously the way the next girl, now almost ten, would also feed and clothe herself and her younger siblings in a year or less. Now she was busy nursing a child of about two or three, rocking him back and forwards absently as she listened.
These two children were not visibly hurt as badly as the older women Monk had seen, but their fear was deeper, and perhaps their need of the money greater. There were seven to feed, and no one else to care. Monk found the anger so deep in his soul that, whether Vida Hopgood paid him or not, he had every intention of finding the men who had done this and seeing them dealt with as harshly as the law allowed. And if the law did not care, then there would be others who would.
He questioned them carefully and gently, but on every detail. What could they remember? Where did it happen? What time? Was anything said? What about voices? What were the men wearing? Feel of fabric, feel of skin, bearded or shaven? What did they smell like, drunken or sober, salt, tar, fish, rope, soot? The older girl looked blank. All her answers confirmed the previous stories but added nothing. All either of them clearly recalled now was the pain and the overriding terror, the smell of the wet street, the open gutter down the middle, the feel of cobbles hard in their backs, the red-hot pain, first inside their bodies, then outside, bruising, pummeling. Then afterwards they had lain in the dark as the cold ate into them, and at last there had been voices, they had been lifted, and there had been the slow return of sensation and more pain.
Now they were hungry, there was hardly any food left, no coal or even wood, and they were too frightened to go out, but the time was coming when they would have to or starve inside. Monk fished in his pocket and left two coins on the table, saying nothing but seeing their eyes go to them.
“Well?” Vida demanded when they were out on the street again, facing into the wind, heads down. There was a thin rime of ice on the stones and the snow was lying over it. It looked eerie in the gloom, reflecting back the distant street lamps with a pale blur against the black of the roofs and walls and the dense, lightless sky. It was slippery and dangerous underfoot.
Monk shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and hunched his coat around him. His body was rigid with anger, and it was making him even colder.
“Two or three men are beating and raping working women,” he answered bitterly. “They’re not local men, but they could be from anywhere else. They’re not laborers, but they could be clerks, shopkeepers, traders or gentlemen. They could be soldiers on leave or sailors ashore. They didn’t even have to be the same men each time, although they probably are.”
“Fat lot o’ use that is,” she spat at him. “We bloody know that much. I in’t paying yer ter tell me wot me own sense can see. I thought you were supposed to be the best rozzer in the force. Leastways you always acted like you was.” Her voice was high and sharp with not only disgust but fear. The emotion had torn through her. She had trusted him, and he had let her down. She had nowhere else to turn.
“Did you expect me to solve it tonight?” he asked sarcastically. “One evening, and I’m supposed to come up with names or proof? You don’t want a detective, you want a magician.”
She stopped and faced him. For a moment she was about to come back with something equally vicious. It was instinct to fight back. Then reality asserted itself. Her body sagged. He could only see the outline of it in the dim light and the falling snow. They were twenty yards from the nearest lamp.
“Can yer ’elp or not, Monk? I in’t got no time ter play games with yer.”
An old man shuffled past them carrying a sack, muttering to himself.
“I think so,” Monk answered her. “They didn’t materialize out of the ground. They came here somehow, probably a hansom. They hung around before they attacked these women. They may have had a drink or two. Somebody saw them. Somebody drove them here and drove them away again. There were either two or three of them. Men looking for women don’t usually go around in twos and threes. Someone will remember.”
“An yer’ll make ’em talk,” she said with a downwards fall in her voice, as if memory was bitter, and there was pain and regret in it.
How did she know so much about him? Was it all repute, and if so, of what? They were in the borders of his area when he had been on the force. Or had they known each other well before, better than she had implied? Another case, another time? What was it she knew of him and he did not know of himself? She knew he was clever and ruthless … and she did not like him, but she respected his ability. In a perverse way she trusted him. And she believed he could work in Seven Dials.
Far more than if she had been some decent, wealthy woman, he wanted to succeed for her. It was mainly because of the rage in him against the brutality of these men, the injustice of it all, their lives and the lives of these women; but it was also pride. He would show her he was still the man he had been in the past. He had lost none of his skills … only his memory. Everything else was the same—even better. Runcorn might not know that …
The thought of Runcorn brought him up sharply. Runcorn had been his superior, but never felt it. He was always aware of Monk treading on his heels; Monk being better dressed, quicker witted, sharper tongued; Monk always waiting to catch him out.
Was that memory speaking to him or only what he had deduced from Runcorn’s attitude after the accident?
This was Runcorn’s area. When he had the evidence it would be Runcorn he would have to take it to.
“Yes …” he said aloud. “It might be hard to find where they come from … but easier to find where they went. They’d be dirty after rolling on the cobbles with the women, fighting. One or two of them might have been marked. Those women fought … enough at least to scratch or bite.” His mind was picturing shadowy figures only, but some things he knew. “They’d be elated, touched with both victory and fear. They’d done a monstrous thing. Some echo of that would be there in their manner. Some cabby, somewhere, will have noticed. He would know where he took them, because it would be out of the area.”
“Said you was a clever sod.” She let out her breath in a sigh of relief. “Nah there’s one more for yer ter see. Dot MacRae. She’s married legal, but ’er ’usband’s useless. Consumptive, poor devil. Can’t do nothin’. Coughin’ ’is lungs up. She gotta work, an’ shirt stitchin’ don’t do it.”
Monk did not argue, nor did he need it explained to him. Somewhere in his memory was burned such knowledge. He walked beside her in the thickening snow. Other people
were hurrying by, heads down, occasionally calling out a greeting or even a joke. Two men staggered out of a public house, supporting each other as far as the gutter, then collapsed, cursing, but without anger. A beggar wrapped his coat tighter around himself and settled down in a doorway. Within moments another man joined him. They would be warmer together than separate.
Dot MacRae told them essentially what they had already heard. She was older than the others, maybe forty, but still handsome. Her face had character and there was courage in her eyes. There was also a helpless anger. She was trapped and she knew it. She did not expect either help or pity. She told Monk quite simply what had happened some two and a half weeks before, when she had been attacked by two men approaching her from opposite sides of a courtyard. Yes, she was quite certain it had been only two men. One of them had held her down while the other had raped her, then when she had fought back, they had both beaten and kicked her, leaving her almost senseless on the ground.
She had been found and helped home by Percy, a beggar who frequently slept in a doorway in the area. He had seen there was something badly wrong and done all he could to assist her. He had wanted to report it to someone, but who was there? Who cared if a woman who sold her body was beaten a little or taken by force?
Vida did not comment, but again her feeling was evident in her face.
Monk asked questions about time and place, anything Dot could remember which would differentiate these men from any others.
She had not seen them clearly; they had been no more than shapes, weight, pain in the darkness. She had been aware of an overwhelming sense of rage in them, and then afterwards excitement, even elation.
Monk walked away through the snow so blind with anger he was almost oblivious of being cold. He had left Vida Hopgood at the corner of her street and then turned to leave Seven Dials and head back towards the open thoroughfares, the lights and the traffic of the main areas of the city. Later he would find a hansom and ride the rest of the way to his rooms in Fitzroy Street. Now he needed to think and to feel the quick exercise of muscles, pour his energy into movement, and smart under the sting of ice on his face.
This helpless rage at injustice was familiar. It was an old pain, dating far back before the accident, into the times he only caught glimpses of when some emotion, or some half-caught sight or smell, carried him back. He knew the real source of it. The man who had been his guide and mentor when he had newly come south from Northumberland, bound to make his fortune in London, the man who had taken him in, taught him so much not only about merchant banking and the uses of money but about cultured life, about society and how to be a gentleman, had been ruined by injustice. Monk had done everything he could to help him, and it had not been enough. He had suffered that same feeling of frustration then, pacing the streets racking his brain for ideas, believing the answer was beyond his reach, but only just.
He had learned a lot since then. His character had become harder, his mind faster, more agile, more patient to wait his chance, less tolerant of stupidity, less afraid of either success or failure.
The snow was settling on his collar and seeping down his neck. He was shuddering with cold. Other people were dim forms in the gloom. In the streets the gutters were running over. He could smell the stench of middens and sour drains.
There was a pattern in these rapes. The violence was the same … and always unnecessary. They were not seeking unwilling women. God help them, they were only too willing. These were not professional prostitutes. They were desperate women who worked honestly when they could and went to do the streets only when hunger drove them.
Why not the professional prostitutes? Because they had men who looked after them. They were merchandise, too valuable to risk. If anyone was going to beat them, disfigure them, reduce their value, it would be the pimps, the “owners,” and it would be for a specific reason, probably punishment for thieving, for individual enterprise instead of returning their takings to their masters.
Monk had already ruled out a rival trying to take over a territory. These women did not share their takings with anyone. They certainly did not threaten any regular prostitute’s living. Anyway, a pimp would beat, but he would not rape. This had none of the marks of an underworld crime. There was no profit in it. People who lived on the edge of survival did not waste energy and resources on pointless violence time after time.
He turned a corner and the wind was bitter and stung his skin, making his eyes water. He wanted to go home, weigh what he had heard and plan a strategy. But these crimes had happened at night. Night was the time when he should look for other witnesses, cabdrivers who had picked up fares and taken them from the edge of Seven Dials back westwards. It was less than honest to go to his own warm rooms, to hot food and a clean bed, and tell himself he was trying to find the man who had done these senseless and bestial things.
He stopped off at a public house and had a hot pie and a glass of stout and felt at least fortified, if not comforted. He thought of scraping a conversation with some of the other patrons, or with the landlord, and decided against it. He did not yet want to be known as an agent of enquiry. Word would spread rapidly enough. Let Vida do the more obvious asking. She belonged there and would be respected, probably even told the truth.
He worked until long after midnight, trudging the streets on the edges of Seven Dials, generally to the west and north, towards Oxford Street and Regent Street, speaking to cabby after cabby, always asking the same questions. The very last began as they all had.
“Where to, guv?”
“Home … Fitzroy Street,” Monk replied, still standing on the pavement.
“Right.”
“Often work this patch?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Sorry to take you so far out of your way.” He put his foot on the step, taking his time.
The cabby gave a sharp laugh. “That’s wot I’m ’ere fer. Jus’ ’round the corner in’t no good ter me.”
“Take a few trips north and west, do you?”
“Some. Are yer gettin’ in or not?”
“Yes,” Monk answered without doing so. “Do you remember taking a couple of gentlemen from this area, probably about this time of night or later, who were a bit roughed up, maybe wet, maybe scratched or bruised, back up west?”
“Why? Wot’s it to yer if I did? I take lots o’ gents ter lots o’ places. ’Ere, ’oo are yer, an’ w’y d’yer wanna know fer?”
“Some of the local women around here have been beaten, pretty badly,” Monk replied. “And I think it was by men from somewhere else, probably west, well-dressed men who came down here for a little sport and took it too far. I’d like to find them.”
“Would yer!” The cabby was hesitating, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of cooperation. “W’y? Them women belong to yer, do they?”
“I’m bein’ paid for it,” Monk said honestly. “It’s worth it to someone to have it stopped.”
“ ’Oo? Some pimp? Look, I in’t standin’ ’ere all night answering damn silly questions for yer, less you pays, right?”
Monk fished in his pocket and brought out half a crown. He held it where the cabby could see it, but did not yet offer it.
“For Vida Hopgood, whose husband owns the shop where they work. She doesn’t approve of rape. I take it you don’t care?”
The cabby swore, his voice angry. “ ’Oo the ’ell are you ter tell me I don’ care, yer bleedin’ toff from up west yerself? Them bastards come down ’ere an’ took a woman, an’ used ’er like dirt, then go ridin’ back ’ome like they’d bin on a day’s outin’ in the city!” He spat with terse contempt.
Monk handed him the half crown and he bit it automatically.
“So where did you pick them up, and where did you take them?” Monk asked.
“Pick ’em up Brick Lane,” the cabby replied. “An’ took ’em up ter Portman Square. ’Nother time took ’em ter Eaton Square. Don’t mean ter say that’s where they lives. You in’t got a cat in �
�ell’s chance o’ finding ’em. And wot if yer do? ’Oo d’yer think’s gonna believe some poor bitch from Seven Dials agin’ a toff from up west? They’ll say she’s sellin’ ’erself, so wot’s wrong if ’e’s a bit rough? ’E’s bought and paid for it, in’t ’e? They don’t give decent women much of a chance wot’s bin raped. Wot chance ’as an ’ore got?”
“Not much,” Monk said miserably. “But there are other ways, if the law will do nothing.”
“Yeah?” The cabby’s voice lifted in a moment’s hope. “Like wot? Top the bastard yerself? Yer’d only get strung up for it, in the end. Rozzers’ll never let murder of a gent go. They won’t upset theirselves too much over it if some ’ore from down ’ere gets bashed over the ’ead an’ dies of it. ’Appens all the time. But let some gent get a shiv in ’is gut an’ all ’ell’ll get loose. There’ll be rozzers up an’ dahn every street. I tell yer, it in’t worth it. We’ll all pay, mark my words.”
“I was thinking of something a little subtler,” Monk replied with a tight, wolfish smile.
“Yeah? Like wot?” But the cabby was listening now, leaning sideways over his box, peering at Monk in the lamplight through the snow.
“Like making sure everyone knows about it,” Monk replied. “Making it a news item, with details.”
“They don’t care!” The cabby’s disappointment was palpable. “ ’Is friends’ll all think it’s clever. Wot’s one ’ore ter them?”
“His friends might not care,” Monk replied savagely. “But his wife will. His parents-in-law will, especially his mother-in-law!”