have, but she did not.
A flicker of understanding crossed her features, and knowledge of all the nuances of failure and his perception of what it meant, and his momentary regret.
She forced herself to smile, made it almost real. “Not reg’lar, like calling. See the same faces, but nobody makes appointments. Might come on the chance, sure enough. Ada was popular.” Her face crumpled, her shoulders sagged, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “She was quick with her tongue, poor little beggar, and she could make you laugh.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “And people like to laugh.” She looked at Pitt. “She gave me a pair of boots once. We had the same size feet. They had a real pretty heel. She’d done better than me that week, and it was me birthday.” The tears spilled over her cheeks and ran down the paint on them, but she did not contort her face. There was a strange kind of dignity in her, a genuineness of grief which made nothing of the shabby room with its unmade dirty bed, the garish clothes, the smell of the midden coming up from the yard, even her weary body, too often used, too little loved.
All Pitt could offer was to lend Ada McKinley the same worth.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly and without thinking, placing his hand for a moment over hers. “I’ll do everything I can to find who did this to her, and I’ll make him answer, whoever he is.”
“Will you?” she asked, swallowing awkwardly. “Even if he’s a gent?”
“Even if he’s a gent,” Pitt promised.
He went through the same questions with the third woman in the house, whose room was next to Ada’s. Her name was Agnes Salter. She was young and plain with a long nose and wide mouth, but there was a vitality to her which would probably serve her well enough for at least another ten years. With the bloom gone from her skin and the firmness from her body, she might find it much harder to make her way. Most probably she was as aware of that as he.
“ ’Course I knew Ada,” she said matter-of-factly. She sat straight in a hard-backed chair, her skirts hitched up almost to her knees. Her legs were excellent, her best feature. No doubt she knew that too. She was not regarding Pitt as a man. He could see in the total disinterest in her expression that it was merely habit, and possibly quite comfortable. “Bit cocky, but not bad,” she went on, referring to Ada. “Willin’ ter share. Lent me a garter once.” She smiled. “Knew I ’ad better legs ’n ’er. Not that ’ers were bad, mind. But money’s money. I did well wi’ that. Some geezers get ’igh on garters. Guess fancy ladies don’t wear ’em. All whalebone stays and cotton drawers.”
Pitt did not comment. It was now daylight outside and there was traffic on the street beyond the alley and the sweatshop opposite was hard at work.
“Can’t tell yer nuffink,” Agnes went on. “Don’t know nuffink. I’d see the bastard quartered if I could. There’s risks-and there’s risks.” Her fingers were clenched, knuckles white, belying her studied casual air. “Yer ’spect ter get beat up now’n again. It’s part o’ life. An’ mebbe the odd cuttin’, which can go too far if yer man’s had a skinful. But this in’t right, poor sow. She never asked fer this.” She pushed out her large lower lip and her face was filled with anger. “Not that I s’pose any o’ you lot give a toss. Just another tart got done. There’s more’n enough tarts in London anyway. Mebbe it’s some ’oly Joe cleanin’ up the place?” She gave a laugh, a little high and sharp, and Pitt heard the fear in it.
“I doubt it,” he said sincerely, although it was a possibility he had not thought of in this instance. It should not be ruled out.
“Oh yeah?” She was curious. “Why not? Ada were a tart, just like the rest of us.”
He did not quibble the use of words. He answered honestly.
“There are evidences which suggest it could have been a man of wealth, and possibly position. She didn’t bring him up. According to Nan, he came here and Ada let him in. Sounds as if he’d been here before.”
“Yeah?” She was surprised, and at least to some degree comforted. “Mebbe ’e were someone as she knew?”
“Who did she know?”
She considered for a while. Pitt had asked only out of diligence. He still believed it would prove to be Finlay FitzJames. There was no other likely explanation for the Hellfire Club badge under the body.
“Someone as’d kill ’er?” she said thoughtfully. “I s’pose anyone ’oo quarreled wiv ’er. I’d ’a’ said some other tart as she pinched a customer from, ’cept she’d ’a’ fought and there’d ’a’ bin one ’ell of a row, an’ I never ’eard nuffink. Anyway …” She shrugged. “Yer might scratch someone’s eyes aht. Or, if yer was real vicious, take a knife ter their faces ter mark ’em, but yer’d do it in the street, wouldn’t yer? Yer’d ’ave ter bin a real mad bitch ter foller ’em ’ome an’ do it cold, like. An’ Ada weren’t that bad.”
“That bad?” he asked. “But she did take other people’s customers?”
Agnes laughed sharply. “Yeah! Course she did. ’Oo wouldn’t? She were pretty, an’ smart. She ’ad a quick tongue, made ’em laugh. Some toffs like ter laugh. Makes ’em feel less like they’re in the gutter. Feel like it’s a real woman. Them as can’t laugh wiv their la-di-da wives ’oo are all corsets and starch.” She lifted her lip in a sneer which still had a remnant of pity in it. “Poor cows prob’ly never ’ad a decent laugh in their lives. Ain’t ladylike ter laugh.”
He said nothing. A dozen images crowded through his mind, but she would understand few of them, and it would serve no purpose trying to explain to her.
In the house, somewhere above them, a door slammed and feet rattled down the stairs. Someone shouted.
“And o’ course there’s them as likes the gutter,” Agnes went on, frowning. “Like pigs in muck. Somethink in it excites ’em.” The contempt was thick in her voice. “Jeez! If I din’t need their bleedin’ money, I’d stick the bastards meself.”
Pitt did not doubt it. But it led him nowhere nearer to who had killed Ada McKinley without a fight. There was no blood in the room, and her body was hardly marked, except for the coldly, deliberately broken fingers and toes. There were no scratches, no bruising such as would have been caused by a drawn-out fight. One fingernail on her right hand had been torn, that was all.
“Who did she know that would have called on her here?” he repeated.
“I dunno. Tommy Letts, mebbe. ’E’d come ’ere. Or ’e would ’ave. She don’t work for ’im no more. Got someone better, she said. Bragged about it, jammy bitch.”
“Could the man you saw have been Letts?”
“Nah!” She swung her feet. “ ’E’s a dirty little weasel, black ’air like rats’ tails, an’ abaht my size. This geezer were tall, an’ thick ’air, wavy, all clean like a gent. An’ Tommy never ’ad a coat like that, even if ’e stole it.”
“You saw him?” Pitt was surprised.
“Nah, I never did. But Rose did. An’ Nan. Taken bad, Nan were. Soft cow. That doc were good to ’er. For a rozzer ’e were ’alf ’uman.” She pulled a face. “Young o’ course. ’E’ll change.”
There was little more to learn. He pressed her about having heard anything, but she had been busy with her own clients, and the fact that she claimed to have noticed no sounds at all was only indicative that there had been no screams or crashes of knocked-over furniture. Pitt had already assumed as much from the nature of the death and the comparative order of the room. Whoever had killed Ada McKinley had taken her by surprise, and it had been quick. It had been someone she had trusted.
Pitt left Agnes and went back to the corridor outside, where Ewart was waiting for him. Ewart glanced at him and saw from his expression that there was no escape, no new knowledge to free them from the necessity of going to Finlay FitzJames. A glimmer of hope faded from his black eyes and he looked smaller, somehow narrower, although he was a solid man.
Pitt shook his head fractionally.
Ewart sighed. The air blew up the stairs from the open door out to the alley. Lennox waited at the bottom in the shadows, his face lit yellowly by the constable’s bull’s-eye lantern.
“FitzJames?” he said aloud, a curious lift in his voice.
Ewart winced, as if he had caught an eagerness in it. His teeth ground together. He seemed on the edge of saying something, then changed his mind and let his breath out in a sigh.
“I’m afraid so,” Pitt answered. “I’ll see him at breakfast. There’ll just be time to go home and wash and shave, and eat something myself. You’d better do the same. I shan’t need you for several hours, at least.”
“Yes sir,” Ewart agreed, although there was no relief in his voice. The time was put off, not removed.
Lennox stared up at Pitt, his eyes wide, shadows on his face in the darkness, unreadable, but there was a tension in his thin body under the loose jacket, and Pitt had a momentary vision of a runner about to move. He
