“Maybe why he went to her in the first place?” she suggested.
“Now that’s something you really don’t want to know,” he said sharply. “If he were bent enough that he had to go all the way from Greenwich over the river to Limehouse to get whatever it was he wanted, then it’s something no lady needs to know about, nurse in the army or not.” He frowned. “Which does make you wonder why she wasn’t fly enough to deal with some bleeding lunatic what wants to cut her up, don’t it? I mean you’d think she’d smell he was a bad ’un and leave him alone, not go clarting off onto the pier with him. She got real, real careless. Damn stupid place to go fornicating, anyway! But that still don’t matter to you.”
“Or she was desperate,” she said quietly. “Who do I ask, Squeaky?”
He sighed with exasperation. “I told yer! Leave it alone. Yer can’t help her, poor cow. What’s Mr. Monk going to do if you go and get yerself cut up, eh? For that matter, what are we all going to do? Sometimes I think you haven’t got the wits of a tuppenny rabbit!”
She smiled at him, ignoring the insult. “Then come with me, Squeaky.”
He sighed heavily and put away everything on his desk with more care than necessary. Then he followed her out of the door into the hallway, and then the street.
He grumbled all the way to the omnibus, and when they got off on Commercial Road in Limehouse he stayed so close to her she all but tripped over him half a dozen times. But, walking along the narrow, dank, rain- chilled backstreets, she was very pleased to have his presence.
“Told yer,” he said after the fifth person they had spoken to had, like all the others, denied ever having seen or heard of Zenia Gadney. “They’re all too scared to say anything. Want to pretend they never heard of her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Hester retorted sharply. “They worked in the same streets. They have to have heard of her. And what do they think I want to know for, except to help catch the man?”
They continued for several more hours, but all they could learn of Zenia Gadney was what Monk already knew. She had been a quiet woman, well spoken. If you listened to her, she did not sound like the local prostitutes, or even like the shopkeepers, laundresses, and slightly more respectable housewives. No one they spoke to owned to particularly liking or disliking her. Certainly none of the prostitutes considered her a threat.
“ ’Er?” one coarse-faced blond woman said indignantly. “Too old, fer a start. I’m not sayin’ as she were downright ugly or nothin’. In fact, not bad, if yer took the time ter look, but dull. Dull as a bucket o’ mud, if yer know wot I mean?” She put her hands on her hips. “Got no fight in ’er, an’ no fun. A man wants yer ter more’n just stand there! If yer ain’t got looks, yer gotta ’ave something else, ain’t yer?” She looked Hester up and down, making her judgment. “Ye’re too skinny by ’alf, but yer’ve got fire. Yer might make enough ter get by.”
“Thank you,” Hester said drily. “If I need to fall back on it, it’d better be soon.”
The woman’s face split into a wide grin. “Ye’re right about that, love. Yer in’t got too many years left ter ’ang around.”
“Did she use opium much?” Hester asked suddenly.
The woman was startled. “ ’Ow the ’ell do I know? But if she did, what of it? P’raps she’d got pains. ’Aven’t we all? She don’ sell it, if that’s wot yer mean. Quiet, she was. I ’eard someone say she read books. If yer want the truth, I think she were all right once, an’ she fell on ’ard times. I’d say ’er ’usband died, or went ter jail. Left ’er ’igh an’ dry. Got by the best way she could, poor cow. Until some bleedin’ madman got to ’er. If the rozzers were any good at all, they’d ’ave ’anged the bastard by now.”
Squeaky nodded as if he understood perfectly.
Hester glared at him, and he smiled back, showing crooked teeth, several of them dark with decay.
“Well, even if you ain’t got nothin’ ter do,” the woman went on, “I ’ave.” And without adding anything more, she swirled her skirt and walked away, swaying invitingly.
Hester returned to see Dr. Winfarthing and found him sitting hunched up in his office, his expression one of deep gloom. He barely managed a smile as he hauled himself out of his chair to welcome her.
“What did you find?” she said without preamble.
“Barely scratched the surface,” he answered. “But enough to know there’s a devil of a lot going on underneath. This is a rats’ nest, girl. Hundreds of rats in it, including some very big, fat ones with sharp teeth. Lot of money in opium. I asked enough to get some idea of how they bring the raw stuff into the country, which I suppose we all know, if we thought about it. They cut it with God knows what. But it goes back a lot further than that. Back to the Opium Wars in China, ’39 to ’42, then ’56 to ’60. There’s a whole lot of that you don’t want to know about. Lot of death, lot of cheating, lot of profit.”
She sat down at last. “I know some people eat opium whom you wouldn’t necessarily expect to. Artists and writers we admire.”
He shook his head, his lips pursed. “It isn’t the eating of it that’s the big, ugly thing you’re going to uncover, girl. It’s the nice, respectable fortunes that were built on deceit, and the deaths of a lot of soldiers sent in to fight a filthy war, not for honor but for money. And God knows how many Chinese. Tens of thousands of them. Nobody’s going to like you for showing them that. It’s all right for foreign savages to behave like savages, but we don’t want to hear that we did it-that Englishmen were without honor.”
“Those of us with any knowledge of history already know it,” Hester said very quietly. Even though she meant it, it was still painful to admit. Perhaps that, as much as the senseless death, was what infuriated her still about the Crimea.
He nodded. “Those of us who’ve seen it, and had to try to clear it up, not the rest. Did you ever meet anyone else who wanted to learn about it anymore, because as sure as hell’s on fire, I didn’t.”
“Is that what was in Dr. Lambourn’s report?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s what would be in mine, if I made one. Some of the things we did out there would shame the devil.” He glared at her, angry because he was afraid for her. “Leave it alone, Hester. You can’t save Lambourn, God rest him. And it didn’t have anything to do with this poor woman’s death. She’s just one more incidental victim.”
“Thank you.” She smiled at him bleakly.
“Don’t thank me!” he roared. “Just tell me you’ll leave it alone!”
“I never make promises I don’t mean to keep,” she answered. “Well, hardly ever. And not to people I like.”
He groaned, but knew her too well to argue.
CHAPTER 8
The newspapers were still writing black headlines about the murder of Zenia Gadney and the police failure to solve the crime. Monk walked briskly past one paperboy after another, ignoring them as much as it was possible. But he could not close his ears to the singsong voices calling out the headlines in an attempt to lure people into buying the whole paper.
“ ‘Terrible murder in Limehouse still unsolved,’ ” one gap-toothed boy cried out, thrusting the paper at Monk. “ ‘Police doing nothing!’ ”
Monk shook his head and walked on, increasing his pace. He and his men were doing everything he could think of. Orme was busy in the Limehouse area. Others were questioning lightermen and dockworkers, anyone regularly on the water, asking if they had noticed anything strange, or someone acting in an unusual manner. Nothing had been revealed so far. No one else in Copenhagen Place or its surrounding streets admitted knowing Zenia Gadney. To them she was an interloper, someone who disturbed the safe ordinariness of their lives and brought police questioning them. Worse than that, by being so viciously murdered, she had frightened away prospective customers. Who wanted to look for a prostitute with the police hanging around? If there were a madman on the loose, it was wiser to curb your appetites, or satisfy them elsewhere. It was only a ferry crossing to Deptford and Rotherhithe, or there was always the possibility of going west to Wapping, or east to the Isle of Dogs.
For the prostitutes there was nowhere else. Every street corner or stretch of pavement already belonged to someone. Interlopers were run off, as a strange dog is driven from the territory of another pack.
The only people everyone agreed to blame for the inconvenience were the police. It was their job to catch
