Minette

by Melanie Clegg

  ‘Who is it?’ I whispered as the porters bent over the body and prepared to lift it into a large sack that had been brought from the dilapidated stable at the back of the yard. ‘She said it was one of her girls.’

  Mrs Bell gave a sad nod. ‘It’s Bea,’ she said. ‘I thought she was in bed but she must have gone out to earn a few more bob.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Whoever it was slit her throat and then cut her open. She hasn’t just been murdered; she’s been slaughtered.’

  I was close enough to see the body now and instinctively recoiled as I looked down at Bea’s pale face, which had a dark smear of blood on the chin. Her hazel eyes were wide open and her rouged mouth hung slack in an expression of startled dismay. ‘We saw it happen,’ I whispered as I took in Bea’s torn and bloodstained pale blue dress and her damp blonde hair, which had come out of its usually carefully coiled and pinned bun and trailed across the dirty cobbles.

  Mrs Bell gave me a sharp look. ‘Are you quite sure, Emma?’ She glanced up to where she knew our window was. ‘It was very dark. Perhaps you were imagining things?’

  I shook my head, ignoring the warning pinch that Marie gave my arm. ‘No, I definitely saw something. I saw his knife and everything.’ With much huffing and puffing the porters lifted up the body, doing their best to support poor Bea’s wildly lolling head and deposited it as carefully as they could into the sack.

  ‘Did you see his face?’ Mrs Bell asked softly. ‘Think carefully, girl.’

  Marie pinched my arm again and after a pause, I gave my head a regretful shake. ‘It was too dark,’ I lied, crossing my fingers behind my back as I had used to do as a little girl.

  Mrs Bell looked at me searchingly for a long moment then gave a satisfied nod. ‘Very well.’

  We all turned to watch as the sack was placed carefully on to the floor of Madame Lisette’s rather shabby black carriage, which had plainly seen better days before she’d snapped it up at an auction house. One of the porters, who looked most displeased about having to drive out in the middle of the night, climbed heavily up onto the perch and gathered the reins in his gloved hands. He then briefly touched his cap to Mrs Bell before driving briskly out of the yard, taking Bea with him and leaving the other porters to throw icy cold buckets of water and thick handfuls of straw onto the bloody cobbles, grumbling to each in French as they did so. It seemed that Madame Lisette had thought of everything in her determination that this crime should go undetected.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Marie whispered to me, shivering as she pulled her thin red shawl closer about her shoulders. ‘I want to be as far away as possible from this place by tomorrow.’

  I nodded and followed her back into the house, with one last curious look over my shoulder at Mrs Bell who continued to stand quietly in the middle of the yard, while the porters went about their grim business around her.

  ‘Poor old Bea, eh?’ Marie said as we clomped back up the stairs to our room. ‘Still, she was almost at the end of the road anyway.’

  I gawped at her. ‘Leave it out, she was only thirty one. That’s hardly ancient, is it?’ I was just trying to be kind though and didn’t quite mean it. I’d turned seventeen my first week in Calais and thirty one seemed unimaginably old to me. Old enough to be a grandmother in the part of the world that I came from. Old enough to be dead already.

  Marie flounced a little. ‘It is in our line of work, sweetheart,’ she said with a pout. ‘If she was a horse, she’d have been packed off to the knackers yard soon enough. Shame she couldn’t find something better for herself before it happened.’

  ‘She never got the chance,’ I said quietly, feeling suddenly terribly sad.

  Marie shrugged. ‘I wonder what’s going to happen to her stuff now that she’s gone?’ she said thoughtfully, looking across at Bea’s closed door, which lay across the landing from our own. ‘She had some lovely things, didn’t she?’

  ‘Madame will have first pickings no doubt,’ I replied listlessly, following Marie’s gaze. ‘We should probably wait until…’ I spoke in vain, of course, as the other girl had already turned the door handle and stolen quietly into the dark room beyond.

  ‘Are you coming in, then?’ she called out and I heard her crash heavily against a piece of furniture and swear with pain and annoyance.

  ‘I’ll fetch a lamp then, shall I?’ I said rather resentfully before going into our room, picking up a small gas lamp that stood on a rickety blue painted chest of drawers next to the door and then returning to Bea’s cologne scented bedroom, where I put it down on the small table beside her carefully made bed, which was covered with a pretty patchwork counterpane that I suspected she’d brought from home, folding it carefully so that it fit into her trunk. I touched it gently and felt sad all over again.

  ‘I reckon we’re the first to come in here,’ Marie said with much satisfaction, pulling open a drawer and rifling through poor dead Bea’s stockings and lace edged petticoats. ‘I told you that she had some nice things, didn’t I?’ she said with glee as she pulled out some pink ribbed stockings and a petticoat with a blue ribbon laced through the edging which she threw onto the bed. ‘Mind you, she always did look like she thought she was a cut above the rest of us poor tarts.’

  ‘I’m not sure we should be doing this,’ I said, looking around but not touching anything. It made me feel miserable to be standing there in a dead woman’s room, seeing her things lying there just had she had left them and knowing that she would never be coming back.

  Marie had moved on to the wardrobe beside the window and threw it open to reveal half a dozen light coloured dresses hanging together with little lavender and rose scented sachets tied to each one by a pale pink ribbon. ‘What does Bea care?’ she said over her shoulder as she pulled a pale lemon yellow dress out, held it up against her then threw it onto the pile on the bed. ‘She’s probably at the bottom of the Channel by now.’ She pulled out a pink dress with a pretty rose bud pattern and added it to the pile. ‘I always liked that one and didn’t think it did anything for her. It’ll look much better on me.’

  I sighed and opened a drawer, not really intending to take anything but at the same time curious to see Bea’s things for reasons that I couldn’t really explain other than that she had been murdered and that, in a way, gave her belongings a certain tawdry glamour and allure. Inside the drawer there was a small blue watered silk box and underneath that, a sealed envelope, stamped and waiting to be sent. I looked warily across at Marie, who was busily trying on bonnets and pouting at herself in front of a tarnished mirror then picked up the envelope, which was addressed to a Miss Alice Redmayne at 18 Grosvenor Road, Highbury, London. I slid it into my corset then opened the box, which held a pretty amber pendant, engraved on the back with ‘To my lovely Beatrice from her Alice.’ I looked across at Marie again, who had now moved with great relish on to Bea’s shoes, which stood in neat rows at the bottom of the wardrobe, then hid the box in my fist.

  ‘I hope you’ve got enough money for the crossing back to England?’ Marie said, buttoning up a pair of shiny red leather boots and turning her slender ankle from side to side, the better to admire the effect. ‘Only, I don’t have enough money saved up for both of us.’

  ‘I haven’t said that I’m coming with you,’ I huffed, quietly closing the drawer. ‘I might stay here for a while.’

  Marie stared at me. ‘Are you simple?’ she demanded. ‘That madman could come back at any time. Didn’t you hear what Mrs Bell said about what he did to poor Bea?’ She pulled off the boot, picked up its fellow and added them to the ever increasing pile. ‘He gutted her. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not staying here to see if he comes after me with that knife of his.’ She picked up another pair of shoes, pale blue this time, and threw them on to the bed. ‘Don’t forget that he clocked a look at you as well.’

  ‘Where should we go?’ I said with a heavy sigh, resigning myself to the inevitable.

  Marie grinned then. ‘I know just the place.’

&nbs
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