Mrs. Clark poured more tea. “ ’Course she was, poor creature,” she said tartly. “Wot do you think? Told ’er she were beautiful, an’ ’e meant it. So she was, too. But she were no lady, an’ she never imagined she were. Knew ’er limits. That were part of ’er trouble. Never thought she were more’n pretty. Never thought no one’d care for ’er once ’er skin and ’er figure went.”
In spite of himself, Monk was struck with a stab of sorrow for a woman who thought her only worth was her beauty. Had she really no sense of her value for her laughter or her courage, her ideas, just her gift to love? Was that what life had taught her? That no man could simply like her, rather than want to look at her, touch her, use her?
A vision of fear opened up in front of him. He saw her constant anxiety each time she looked in the mirror, saw a line or a blemish on her skin, an extra pound or two on the rich lines of her body, a slackness real or imagined, that signaled the decline at the end of which lay hunger, loneliness and eventually despair.
Mrs. Clark went on talking, describing a life in which beauty was caught on canvas and made immortal for the pleasure of artists and viewers, yet was strangely disconnected from the woman, as if her face, her hair, her body, were not really her. She could walk away unnoticed, leaving the image of herself, the part they valued, still in their possession.
The loneliness of it appalled him. He pressed her for more stories, more details, names, places, times.
He felt subdued and deeply thoughtful when he arrived to meet Runcorn nearly an hour late. Runcorn was sitting in the corner of a tavern nursing a mug of ale and getting steadily angrier as the minutes passed.
“Mislaid your watch, have you?” he said from between his clenched teeth.
Monk sat down. He had drunk so much tea he had no desire for ale or cider, and the good-natured babble of the crowd around him made it impossible to speak quietly. “Do you want to know about her or not?” he replied, ignoring the remark. He refused to explain himself. He already knew Runcorn’s views on the virtues of women, which consisted mostly of being hardworking, obedient and chaste, the last being the necessity which framed all else. He had been too long away from the streets and the reality of most women’s lives, perhaps too afraid of his own frailties to look at other people’s.
Runcorn glared at him. “So what did you find, then?” he demanded.
Monk relayed the facts of Sarah’s parentage and career up to the point of Allardyce’s seeing her and then shortly afterwards employing her exclusively. He also gave him the name of her onetime lover, Arthur Cutter.
Runcorn listened in silence, his face heavy with conflicting emotions. “Better see him, I suppose,” he said at the end. “Could be him, if he thought she’d betrayed him somehow, but doesn’t seem likely. Women like that move from one man to another and nobody cares all that much. No doubt he expected it, and has had half a dozen different women since then.”
“Somebody cared enough to kill her,” Monk responded angrily. What Runcorn had said was probably true; it was not the fact that cut Monk raw, it was the contempt with which Runcorn said it, or perhaps even the fact that he said it at all. There were some truths that compassion covered over, like hiding the faces of the dead, a small decency when nothing greater was possible. He looked at Runcorn with intense dislike, and all his old memories returned with their ugliness, the narrowness of mind, the judgment, the willingness to hurt. “She’s just as dead as Elissa Beck,” he added.
Runcorn stood up. “Go and see Bella Holden,” he ordered. “You’ll probably find her at her lodgings, 23 Pentonville Road. She’s another artists’ model, and I daresay it’s a bawdy house. Unless you want to give up? But looks like you’re as keen to find out who killed Sarah Mackeson as you are about Beck’s wife.” He walked between the other drinkers without looking back or bothering to tell Monk where to meet him again. Monk watched Runcorn’s high, tight shoulders as he pushed his way out and lost sight of him just before the door.
The house at 23 Pentonville Road was indeed a brothel of sorts, and he found Bella Holden only after considerable argument and the payment of two shillings and sixpence, which he could ill afford. Callandra would willingly have replaced it, but both pride and the awareness of her vulnerability would prevent him from asking. This was friendship, not business.
Bella Holden was handsome, with a cloud of dark hair and remarkable pale blue eyes. She must have been a little over thirty, and he could see underneath the loose nightgown she wore that her body was losing its firmness and the shape an artist would admire. She was too lush, too overtly womanly. It would not be long before this house, and its like, were her main support, unless she learned a trade. No domestic employer would have her, even if she were capable of the tasks required. Without a character, a reference from a former employer, she would not be allowed over the step, let alone into the household.
Looking at her now as she stared back at him, holding the money in her hand, he saw anger and the need to please struggling against each other in her face, and a certain heaviness about her eyelids, a lethargy as if he had woken her from a dream far more pleasant than any reality. It was three o’clock. He might be her first customer. The indifference in her face was a lifetime’s tragedy.
He thought of Hester, and of how she would loathe having a stranger’s hand on her clothes, let alone on her naked skin. This woman had to endure intimacy from whoever chose to walk through the door with two shillings and sixpence to spend. Where did the ignorance and the desperation come from that she would not prefer to work, even in a sweatshop, rather than this?
And the answer was there before the thought was whole. Sweatshops required a skill in sewing she might not possess, and paid less for a fourteen-hour day than she could make in her room in an hour. Both would probably break her health by the time she was forty.
“I don’t want to lie with you, I want to ask you about Sarah Mackeson,” he said, sitting down on the one wooden chair. He was trying to place the faint smell in the room. It was not any of the usual body odors he would have expected, and not pleasing enough to have been a deliberate perfume, even if such a thing had been likely.
“You a rozzer?” she asked. “Don’t look like one.” There was little expression in her voice. “Well, yer can’t get ’er fer nothin’ now, poor bitch. She’s dead. Some bastard did ’er in a few days ago, up Acton Street. Don’t yer swine never tell each other nothin’? Even the patterers is talkin’ about it. Yer should listen!”
Monk ignored her resentment. He even saw the reason for it. She probably saw herself in Sarah Mackeson. It could as easily have been she, and she would expect as little protection before, or care afterwards.
“I know,” he replied. “That’s why I want to learn what I can about her. I want to catch who did it.”
It took a moment or two for her to grasp what he had said and consider whether she believed it. Then she began to talk.
