From the end of the passage came the sound of a low singing snarl. Pitt swung around. There, under the gas lamp, stood a squat, white, rat-faced bullterrier, with teeth bared and bow legs quivering. Behind him was the most enormous woman he had ever seen, her bare arms hanging loosely, her flat face like a suet pudding, with eyes shrouded in creases of fat.
“Never you mind, Miss Mary,” the woman said, in a soft, high voice like that of a little girl. “I won’t let ’im ’urt yer. Yer just leavin’, ain’t yer, mister?” She took a step forward, and the dog, bristling, lurched a step forward with her.
Pitt felt horror flood through him. Was he looking at the Devil’s Acre slasher? Was it this woman mountain and her dog? His throat was dry; he swallowed on nothing.
“Throw him out, Elsie!” Mary shrieked. “Throw him out! Throw him hard, go on! Put him in the gutter! Set Dutch on him!”
The great woman took another step forward. Her face was expressionless. She could have had her sleeves rolled up to do laundry or knead bread. Beside her, Dutch’s snarl grew higher.
“Stop it!” Victoria’s voice shouted from the head of the stairs where she had disappeared a short time before. “That’s not necessary, Elsie. Mr. Pitt is not a customer-and he won’t hurt anyone.” Her tone became sharper. “Really, Mary, sometimes you are stupid!” She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and handed it to the maid. “Now pull yourself together, Millie, and get on with your work! Stop sniffling-there’s nothing to cry about. Go on!” She watched as the girl ran away and the enormous woman and the dog turned and trundled obediently after her.
Mary looked sullen, but kept her peace.
“I’m sorry,” Victoria said to Pitt. “We found Millie in a bad way. I didn’t know who was responsible, but perhaps it was Pinchin. Poor little creature nearly bled to death. She got with child and her father threw her out. She worked herself into one of the houses, where someone aborted her. Then, when they threw her out because she was useless to them, we picked her up.”
There was nothing Pitt could say, the situation was beyond trite sympathy.
Victoria led the way back toward the front rooms. “Mary shouldn’t have called Elsie. She’s only for customers who get difficult.” Her face was bleak. “I hope you were not frightened, Mr. Pitt.”
Pitt had been terrified; the sweat was still standing out on his body. “Not at all,” he lied, glad she could not see his face. “Thank you for your frankness, Miss Dalton. Now I know what Pinchin was doing in the Acre, and where his additional income came from-at least to furnish his cellar. You don’t happen to know whom he practiced for, do you?”
“Millie was with Ambrose Mercutt, if that’s what you want to know,” she said calmly. “I cannot tell you anything more than that.”
“I don’t think I need anything more.” Pitt came out into the main room, and both constables, scarlet-faced, sprang to their feet, tipping two laughing girls off their laps. Pitt turned to Victoria affecting not to notice. “Thank you, Miss Dalton. Good night.”
Victoria was equally imperturbable. “Good night, Mr. Pitt.”
9
General Balantyne could not put the devil’s acre murders out of his mind. He had never heard of Dr. Pinchin or the last victim, Ernest Pomeroy, before the newspapers made them synonymous with terror and abomination in the dark. But the face of Max Burton, with its lidded eyes and curling lip, raised in him disturbing memories of other murders, hideous incidents from the past that he had never fully understood.
And Bertie Astley belonged to Balantyne’s own class, something less than true aristocracy, but far more than merely gentry. Anyone might come by money, and manners could be mimicked or learned. Wit, fashion, and even beauty were nothing; one enjoyed them, but no one worth a thought was taken in by them. But the Astleys had breeding; generations of honorable reputation, of service to church or state, had made them part of a small world of privilege that had once seemed golden-and safe. Occasionally some knave or fool stepped out of it-but no invader had beaten his way in.
How had Bertram Astley’s body come to be found in a doorway to a male brothel? Balantyne, of course, was not naive enough to exclude the possibility that Astley had gone there for the obvious purpose, or that he had been murdered by a chance lunatic. Neither could he dismiss the fear that it was not accident but design that had selected him. He mistrusted the comfortable belief in a random killer that chose two men, Max and Bertie, so dramatically dissimilar, yet both known to him.
He broached the subject to Augusta. She immediately assumed he wished to discuss the Devil’s Acre itself, and some plan for reform of prostitution and its ills; her face closed over.
“Really, Brandon, for a man who has spent the best part of his adult years in the army, you are singularly ingenuous!” she said with some contempt. “If you imagine you are going to alter the baser instincts of human nature by a little well-meaning legislation, then you belong in some nice village pulpit where you can dispense tea and platitudes to unmarried ladies of earnest disposition, and do very little harm by it. Here in a sophisticated society, you are ridiculous!”
He was stung. It was not only cruel, but totally unjust. And it was not what he had meant. “There are many words I have heard applied to the murder of Bertie Astley,” he said cuttingly. “But you are the first to choose ‘sophisticated.’ It is an allusion whose appropriateness escapes me!”
A dull color marked her cheeks. He had misunderstood her willfully, and as painfully as she had mistaken him. “I do not appreciate sarcasm, Brandon,” she answered. “And you have not the wit to do it successfully. Bertie Astley was an unfortunate victim of whatever lunatic is perpetrating these outrages. What purpose took him to that area we will probably never know, and it is none of our business. Suffer him to be buried in peace, and his family to mourn him decently. It is indelicate in the extreme to remind anyone of the circumstances of his death. I imagine a gentleman would not do so.”
“Then it is time we had fewer gentlemen-and a greater number of police, or whatever it is that it takes to get something done!” he retorted. “I, for one, do not desire to see any more mutilated corpses turning up in London.”
She looked at him wearily. “We have few enough gentlemen already. I would wish there were more, not less!” She turned and walked away, leaving him with the feeling that he had lost the argument in spite of the fact that he was in the right.
The following day, Christina had luncheon with her mother but declined to go calling. Balantyne found himself in the withdrawing room alone with his daughter. The fire was blazing halfway up the chimney, and the room was full of warm, flickering light. It seemed familiar, comfortably timeless, almost as if they could have slipped back into his youth and her childhood, when affection was taken for granted.
He sat back in his chair and stared at Christina as she stood by the round piecrust table. Her face was remarkably pretty: the small features, rounded lips, wide eyes, shining hair. Her figure, in its fashionable dress, still had the freshness of a girl’s. She was a strange mixture of child and woman-perhaps that was her charm. Certainly she had had many admirers before she married Alan Ross. And, to judge from the social occasions at which he had seen her, she still had, even if they were now more discreet.
“Christina?”
She turned and looked at him. “Yes, Papa?”
“You knew Sir Bertram Astley, didn’t you.” He did not allow it to be a question, because he would not accept denial.
She faced him when she spoke, but bent her eyes to a china ornament on the table. The subject was trivial, not worth a conversation.
“Slightly,” she replied. “One is bound to meet most of the people in Society at some time or another.” She did not ask why he had mentioned it.
“What sort of a man was he?”
“Pleasant, as far as I could judge,” she answered with a slight smile. “But quite ordinary.”
She was so confident that he could not disbelieve her. And yet he knew she moved in circles that were
