fancy-lookin’ sod, but ’e in’t that clever. Never liked ’im meself.” She shrugged. “But then I never liked any o’ them. They’re all swine, w’en it comes ter it. Bleed yer dry. An’ w’ere was ’e w’en she needed ’im, eh?” She sniffed and the slow tears trickled down her enormous cheeks. “Gawd knows. Not ’ere!”
He woke Rose and Nan also, and asked them all the same questions, and received the same answers. By that time Agnes was up anyway, and he asked her too, but she contributed nothing to his knowledge, except when he demanded a physical description of Ada, whose face he had never seen except disfigured by death. Her hesitant words were of limited use, but he discovered in Agnes a ready pencil which produced a sketch which was more of a caricature than a portrait, but highly evocative. He could see the character of a woman of humor, even spirit. It was extraordinarily alive, even on the lined notebook page. He could imagine her walk, the angle of her head, even her voice. It made her death immeasurably worse, and her torture something he could not bear to think of.
He went back to Bow Street and ate a cold mutton sandwich and a mug of tea at about six o’clock. He wrote down carefully in order the notes he had taken, and he began to see a pattern in Ada’s behavior. She had obviously worked her own patch in Old Montague Street and then the Whitechapel Road in the early evenings, and sometimes late as well, but there were regular times when she was absent, excellent times for her trade when one would have expected her to take full advantage of the opportunities.
One answer leaped to mind. She had gone to a more profitable area. Was this the influence of Albert Costigan, a more ambitious man, and she had been only too willing to try to improve her situation? Was it possible that in this new guise she had met either one of Finlay’s enemies or one of his father’s? Was it even remotely worth searching?
So far neither Tellman nor Ewart had discovered anything of relevance.
He spent the evening, and the later part of the following day and the one after that, walking the prostitutes’ beats around the West End, Windmill Street, the Haymarket, Leicester Square and the streets and alleys close by. He saw thousands of women much like Ada, some gorgeously dressed, parading like peacocks, others less so, some in little more than gaudy rags. Many, even in the gaslight after dark, still looked long past their prime, raddle- cheeked, slack-bodied. Some were country fresh, come to the city to seek their fortune and finding it in the accommodation rooms in hasty fornication with strangers, often their fathers’ or even grandfathers’ ages.
And there were also children, eight or ten years old, running after men, pulling at their sleeves and whispering dirty words in hope of exciting their interest, or thrusting into their hands lurid, pornographic pictures.
Side by side with them were the theater crowds, respectable women, even wealthy ladies on their husbands’ arms, arriving at or leaving the performance of some play or concert.
Pitt tried every contact he had in the rooming houses, the pimps and madams he knew, but no one owned to recognizing his picture of Ada or knowing her name other than from the news that she was dead. Since Finlay FitzJames’s connection had not been mentioned, the newspapers had made little of it. No one knew of the broken fingers and toes except Lennox, Ewart, Cornwallis and himself.
He was close to defeat when it occurred to him to try away from the West End and into the Hyde Park area. He had one more personal acquaintance to try, a huge, complacent and unctuous figure known as Fat George. He ruled his prostitutes with a rod of iron and the threat of his right-hand man, Wee Georgie, a vicious dwarf with a filthy temper, and quick to use the long, thin-bladed knife he always carried.
He found Fat George in his own house, an extremely well-appointed, classically proportioned building off Inverness Terrace.
Fat George did not rise; his enormous body was almost wedged into his chair. It was a warm day and he wore a loose shirt, newly laundered, his greasy gray curls sitting on the collar.
“Well now, Mr. Pitt,” he said in his whispering, wheezy voice. “What brings you to call on me so urgently? Must be something terrible important to you. Sit down! Sit down! Haven’t seen you since that ugly business in the Park. Long time solving that, you were. Not very clever, Mr. Pitt. Not very efficient.” Fat George shook his head and his curls caught on his collar. “Not what we pay our police force for. You’re supposed to keep us safe, Mr. Pitt. We should sleep easy in our beds, knowin’ as you’re out there protectin’ us.” If there was humor in Fat George’s black eyes, it barely showed.
“We can only solve crimes after they’ve happened, George, not before,” Pitt replied, accepting a seat. “There are a good many around here you could have prevented. Do you know anything about this woman?” He passed over Agnes’s sketch.
Fat George took it in his pale-skinned, freckled hand, his fingers swollen so the bones were invisible.
“Yeah, I’ve seen her,” he said after several seconds. “Smart girl, ambitious. Like to have her meself, but she’s greedy. Wants all her money for ’erself. Dangerous, that, Mr. Pitt. Very dangerous. She the one that got killed up Whitechapel? Should’ve seen that coming. Don’t have far to look, likely.”
“Don’t I?”
“Not clever, Mr. Pitt.” George wagged his head, pushing out his lower lip. “Losin’ your touch, are you? Try ’er pimp, fellow called Costigan, so I hear.”
“Very public-spirited of you, George, and very quick to blame one of your own,” Pitt said dryly.
“Gives me a bad name,” George wheezed sententiously. “Bit o’ discipline is all very well. Necessary, or you’d be walked all over. Can’t ’ave that. Girls’d be cheatin’ you left and right. But stranglin’ is overdoin’ it. Brings people like you around, an’ that’s all very nasty.” He coughed and his vast chest rumbled with congestion. The room was hot, the high windows all closed, giving it a musty air in spite of its cool colors, gracious lines and at least half a dozen potted palms placed here and there.
“So why didn’t Costigan discipline her?” Pitt asked, eyebrows raised. “Killing her would seem to defeat his own purpose. Only a fool destroys his own livestock.”
George made a gesture of distaste. “Oh, very crudely put, Mr. Pitt, very crude indeed.”
“It’s a crude trade, George. What makes you think this Costigan even knew Ada was sneaking up west occasionally and then keeping her earnings?”
Fat George shrugged, and his ripples of fat shook all down his body. “Maybe he followed her? Natural thing to do.”
“If he was following her,” Pitt reasoned, “he’d have known the first time she left Whitechapel, which was several weeks ago.”
Fat George rolled his eyes. “How do I know?”
“Maybe someone told him?” Pitt suggested, watching George’s face.
There was a very slight flicker, a tightening of the sallow skin, enough for Pitt.
“You told him, didn’t you, George.” It was not a question but a statement. “She was on your patch, but refusing to pay you either, so rather than let Wee Georgie at her, and risk unpleasantness for yourself, you told her own pimp and let him deal with it. Only he went too far. Not your fault, of course,” he finished scathingly. “When did you tell him?”
The room was becoming suffocating, like a jungle.
George raised colorless eyebrows. “The day she were killed, but I’m hardly to blame, Mr. Pitt. Your tone in’t polite. In fact, most unjust. You’re an unjust man, Mr. Pitt, and that isn’t right. Expect the police to be just. If justice itself don’t …”
Pitt stood up and shot him a look of such contempt Fat George left the rest of his complaint unfinished.
“Costigan a trouble to you, was he?” Pitt said bitterly. “A threat?”
“Hardly!” Fat George tried to laugh, broke into a wheeze, and ended coughing again, his massive chest heaving as he fought for breath.
Pitt had no sympathy for him at all. He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving George purple in the face, gasping for air, and furious.
Pitt took Constable Binns with him when he went to see Albert Costigan later that afternoon. He knew the area and found him without difficulty in the rooms he rented in Plumbers Row, just the other side of the Whitechapel Road from Pentecost Alley. It was narrow and gray on the outside, like all the other tenements, but inside was well furnished, even comfortable. Costigan liked to do nicely for himself, and his expensive tastes showed in the small extras: engraved glass gas mantels, a new carpet, a very nice oak gate-legged table.
Costigan himself was of average height, with large, pale blue eyes, good nose and white teeth. His brown hair was brushed back in waves from his brow. At a glance, before one noticed the defensive, aggrieved expression in his face, the aggressive angle of his body, he was not unlike Finlay FitzJames. Had chance given him the same
