Page 98 of A Breach of Promise (William Monk 9)

Where was the gin mill?

The publican had no idea.

Would a little money help him to recall?

It might. How much money?

A guinea?

Not enough.

The anger exploded inside Monk. He wanted to hurt the man, to wipe the greedy smile from his face and make him feel for a few minutes the misery and fear those children must have known.

“There are two possible ways of encouraging people to tell you what you need to know,” he said very quietly. “By offering a reward …” He let the suggestion hang in the air.

The man looked at Monk’s face, at his eyes. He was slow to see the rage there. He felt no more than a short shiver of warning. He was still working out how much money he could squeeze.

“Or by threat of something very nasty happening to them,” Monk finished. His voice was still polite, still soft, but there was an edge of viciousness in it a sensitive ear would have caught.

“Oh, yeah?” the man said with more bravado than assurance. “You got something nasty in mind, then, ’ave yer?”

“Very,” Monk answered between his teeth. He had the perfect excuse. He knew all the details. He had helped pull the body out of the river before he had quarreled with his superior and left the police force. “Do you remember Big Jake Hillyard?”

The man stiffened. He swallowed with a jerk of his throat.

Monk smiled, showing his teeth. “Do you remember what happened to him?”

“Anybody could say they done that!” the man protested. “They never got the bloke who done it.”

“I know they didn’t,” Monk agreed. “But would anybody else be able to tell you exactly what they did to him? I can. Would you like to learn? Would you like to hear about his eyes?”

“ ’E ’ad no eyes … w’en they found ’im!” the man squeaked.

“I know that!” Monk snapped. “I know precisely what he had … and what he hadn’t! Where in St. Giles did you send those two little girls? I am asking you very nicely, because I should like to know. Do you understand me … clearly understand me?”

The man’s face was white, sweating a little across the lips.

“Yeah! Yeah, I do. It were ter Jimmy Struther, in Coots Alley, be’ind the brickyard.”

Monk grinned at him. “Thank you. For the sake of your eyesight, that had better be the truth.”

“It is! It is!”

Monk had no doubt from the man’s expression that indeed it was. He let the man go, then turned on his heel and left.

St. Giles turned out to be only another stop along the way. According to the woman he questioned there, the girls had remained for several years. She was not certain how many, seven or eight at least. Many of the patrons were too drunk or too desperate to care what a serving girl looked like, and the work was simple and repetitive. Little was asked of them, but then little indeed was given. Such affection or companionship as they ever received was from each other. And apparently each was quick to defend the other, even at the cost of a beating. The elder had once had her nose and two ribs broken in a brawl to protect her younger sister from the temper of one of the yard men.

Monk listened to the stories, and a picture emerged of two girls growing up totally untutored and unhelped, learning what little they did by trial and error—sometimes acutely painful error—able to speak only poorly, words muffled by crooked lips, heard by partially deaf ears. They were sometimes mocked for their afflictions, feared for their appearance, as if the disfigurement might be contagious, like a pox.

One woman said that she had heard them laugh, and on two or three occasions seen them play games with one another. They had a pet dog for a while. She had no idea what had become of it.

“Where did they go from here?” Monk asked, fearing this would be the end of his pursuit. No one would know. They were too weary, too sodden in drink to remember anything, or to care. The next bottle was all that mattered.

One woman shrugged and spat.

A second laughed at him.

The third swore, then mentioned the name of a whorehouse in the Devil’s Acre, the teeming slum almost under the shadow of St. Paul’s.