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“Yeah? Wot a shame,” she said laconically. “Never mind, better luck next time.” The brilliance of her eyes and the curl of her lip made her meaning obvious. “Well, none o’ this lot’s ’ot, so naff orff! I’nt nuffink ’ere for yer. An’ I i’nt tellin’ yer nuffink abaht nobody.”
He debated whether or not to tell her he was no longer with the police, or if it would be useful for her to believe he was. It lent him power, a certain authority, the loss of which still hurt him.
“The only people I want to know about are the men who raped and beat you in Steven’s Alley a couple of weeks ago.” He watched her face and was gratified to see the total amazement in it, making it blank of all other expression for a moment.
“I dunno wot yer talkin’ abaht,” she said at length, her jaw set hard, her eyes flat and still filled with hatred. “Nobody never raped me. Yer wrong again. Damn sure o’ yerself, y’are. Come down ’ere in yer fancy kit like yer was Lord Muck, flingin’ yer weight arahnd, an’ yer knows nuffink!”
He knew she was lying. It was nothing he could define, not a matter of intelligence but an instinct. He was met with disbelief and contempt.
“I overestimated you,” he said witheringly. “Thought you had more loyalty to your own.” It was the one quality he was certain she would value.
He was right; she flinched as if he had struck her.
“Yer not one o’ me own, any more ’n them rats in that pile o’ dirt over there. Mebbe you should go an’ try one o’ them, eh? Yer want loyalty ter yer own … they might speak to yer, if yer ask ’em pretty, like.” She laughed loudly at her own joke, but there was a brittle edge to it. She was afraid of something, and as he looked at her, sitting huddled in her gray-black shawl, shoulders hunched, hair blowing across her face in the icy air, the more the conviction hardened in him that it was him she feared.
Why? He posed no possible threat to her.
The answer had to lie in the past, whatever it was that had brought them together before and which had made her rejoice when she had believed him dead.
He raised his eyebrows sarcastically.
“You think so? Would they be able to describe the men who beat you … and all the other women, the poor devils that work in the sweatshop all day and then go out in the streets a few hours in the night to try to get a little extra to feed their children? Would they tell me how many there were, if they were old or young, what their voices were like, which way they came from and which way they went … after they beat sixteen-year-old Clarrie Drover and broke her younger sister’s arm?”
He had achieved his effect. She looked hurt and surprised. The pain in her was real. For a moment her anger against him was forgotten and it was aimed against these men, the world of injustice which allowed such a thing, the whole monstrosity of the fear and the misery she saw closing in on her and her kind, and the certainty that there was no redress and no vengeance.
He was the only living thing within her immediate reach, the only one to share the hurt.
“So wadda you care, yer bloody jackal. Filth, that’s all you are.” Her voice was hoarse with bitterness and the knowledge of her own helplessness, even to hurt him beyond a mere scratch to the skin, nothing like the jagged wound which was killing her. She hated him for it with all the passion of futility. “Filth! Livin’ orff other folk’s sins … if we don’t sin, you in’t worth nothin’ at all. Shovel the gutters, you do—clean out other folk’s middens—that’s all you are. Can’t tell yer from the muck.” There was a gleam of satis
faction in her face at the simile.
It was not worth retaliating.
“There is no need to be frightened of me; I’m not after stolen candlesticks or teapots—”
“I in’t afraid o’ yer!” she said, fear sharp in her eyes, hating him the more because she knew he saw it as certainly as he had before.
“I’m not with the police,” he went on, ignoring her interruptions. “I’m working privately, for Vida Hopgood. She’s paying me, and she doesn’t give a damn where your goods come from or go to. She wants the rapes stopped, and the beatings.”
She stared at him, trying to read truth in his face.
“Who beat you, Sarah?”
“I dunno, yer eejut!” she said furiously. “If’n I knew, don’t yer think I’d ’a got somebody ter cut ’is throat fer ’im, the bastard?”
“It was only one man?” he said with surprise.
“No, it were two. Least I think so. It were black as a witch’s ’eart an’ I couldn’t see nuffink. Ha! Should say black as a rozzer’s ’eart, shou’n’t I? ’Ceptin’ ’oo knows if a rozzer’s got an ’eart? Mebbe we should get one an’ cut ’im open, jus ter see, like?”
“What if he does, and it’s just as red as yours?” he asked.
She spat.
“Tell me what happened,” he persisted. “Maybe it will help me to find these men.”
“An’ wot if yer do? ’Oo cares? ’Oo’ll do anyfin’ abaht it?” she said derisively.
“Wouldn’t you, if you knew who they were?” he asked.
