"Dunno." Her eyes clouded. "Smell? Wot yer mean? They din't smell o' nuffink!”
"No drink?”
"Not as I can think of. No… din't smell o' nuffink at all.”
"Not soap?" Then instantly he wished he had not said it. He was putting the suggestion into her mind.
"Soap? Yeah, I s'pose so. Funny, like… diff rent.”
Did she know what cleanliness smelled like? Perhaps it would be odd to her, an absence rather than a presence. It did not tell him anything more than Nellie West had, but it reinforced the same picture: two or three men coming into the area from somewhere else, and becoming increasingly violent in their appetites. They apparently knew enough to pick on the women alone, not the professional prostitutes who might have pimps to protect them, but the amateurs, the women who only took to the streets occasionally, in times of need.
It was dark when they left, and the snow was beginning to lie. The few unbroken streetlamps reflected glittering shards of light on the running gutters. But Vida had no intention of stopping. This was when they would find the women at home, and apart from the fact that they might not speak in the company of their colleagues, she was not going to lose good work time by asking the questions when they should be un picking or cutting or stitching. The practicalities must be observed. Also it crossed Monk's mind that perhaps Mr. Hopgood was not aware of her campaign, and that indirectly he was paying for it. He might very well not feel as personally about the issue as she did.
Monk caught up with her as she strode purposefully around the corner into another one of the multitudinous alleyways of Seven Dials, crossed a courtyard with a well and pump in it. A drunk lounged in one doorway, a couple kissed in another, the girl giggling happily, the youth whispering something inaudible to her. Monk wondered at their absorption in each other that they seemed oblivious of the wind and the snow.
Behind a lighted window someone raised a jug of ale, and candlelight fell on a woman's bright hair. The sound of laughter was quick and clear. Past them and across a main thoroughfare an old woman was selling sandwiches and a running patterer finished up his tale of lust and mayhem and began to jog along the pavement to another, warmer spot to entertain a new crowd with stories, news and general invention.
The next victim of violence was Carrie Barker. She was almost sixteen, the eldest of a family whose parents were both missing or dead. She looked after six younger brothers and sisters, earning what she could one way or another. Monk did not enquire. They sat in one large room all together while she told Vida what had happened to her in a breathless voice which whistled through a broken front tooth. One sister, about a year and a half younger, nursed her left arm in front of her, as if her chest and stomach hurt her, and she listened to all Carrie said, nodding her head now and then.
In the dim light of one candle, Vida's face was a mask of fury and compassion, her wide mouth set, her eyes brilliant.
It was very much the same story. The two eldest girls had been out, earning a little extra money. It was obviously the way the next girl, now almost ten, would also feed and clothe herself, and her younger siblings, in a year or less. Now she was busy nursing a child of about two or three, rocking him back and forwards absently as she listened.
These two children were not visibly hurt as badly as the older women Monk had seen, but their fear was deeper, and perhaps their need of the money greater. There were seven to feed, and no one else to care. Monk found the anger so deep in his soul, that whether Vida Hopgood paid him or not, he had every intention of finding the men who had done this, and seeing them dealt with as harshly as the law allowed. And if the law did not care, then there would be others who would.
He questioned them carefully and gently, but on every detail. What could they remember? Where did it happen? What time? Was anything said? What about voices? What were they wearing? Feel of fabric, feel of skin, bearded or shaven? What did they smell like, drunken or sober, salt, tar, fish, rope, soot? She looked blank. All her answers confirmed the previous stories, but added nothing. All either of them clearly recalled now was the pain and the overriding terror, the smell of the wet street, the open gutter down the middle, the feel of cobbles hard in their backs, the red-hot pain, first inside their bodies, then outside, bruising, pummelling. Then afterwards they had lain in the dark as the cold ate into them, and at last there had been voices, they had been lifted, and there had been the slow return of sensation and more pain.
Now they were hungry, there was hardly any food left, no coal or even wood, and they were too frightened to go out, but the time was coming when they would have to, or starve inside. Monk fished in his pocket and left two coins on the table, saying nothing, but seeing their eyes go to them.
"Well?" Vida demanded when they were out on the street again, facing into the wind, heads down. There was a thin rime of ice on the stones and the snow was lying over it. It looked eerie in the gloom, reflecting back the distant streetlamps with a pale blur against the black of the roofs and walls and the dense, lightless sky. It was slippery and dangerous underfoot.
Monk shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and hunched his coat around him. His body was rigid with anger, and it was making him even colder.
"Two or three men are beating and raping working women," he answered bitterly. "They're not local men, but they could be from anywhere else. They're not labourers, but they could be clerks, shopkeepers, traders or gentlemen. They could be soldiers on leave or sailors ashore. They didn't even have to be the same men each time, although they probably are.”
"Fat lot o' use that is!" she spat at him. "We bloody know that much!
I in't paying yer ter tell me wot me own sense can see! I thought you were supposed to be the best rozzer in the force! Leastways you always acted like you was!" Her voice was high and sharp with not only disgust, but fear. The emotion had torn through her. She had trusted him, and he had let her down. She had nowhere else to turn.
"Did you expect me to solve it tonight?" he asked sarcastically. "One evening, and I'm supposed to come up with names or proof? You don't want a detective, you want a magician.”
She stopped and faced him. For a moment she was about to come back with something equally vicious. It was instinct to fight back. Then reality asserted itself. Her body sagged. He could only see the outline of it in the dim light and the falling snow. They were twenty yards from the nearest lamp.
"Can yer 'elp or not, Monk? I in't got no timeter play games with yer.”
An old man shuffled past them carrying a sack, muttering to himself.
"I think so," Monk answered her. "They didn't materialise out of the ground. They came here somehow, probably a hansom. They hung around before they attacked these women. They may have had a drink or two.
Somebody saw them. Somebody drove them here, and drove them away again. There were either two or three of them. Men looking for women don't usually go around in twos and threes. Someone will remember.”
"An yer'll make 'em talk," she said with a downwards fall in her voice, as if memory was bitter, and there was pain and regret in it.
How did she know so much about him? Was it all repute, and if so, of what? They were in the borders of his area, when he had been on the force. Or had they known each other well before, better than she had implied? Another case, another time. What was it she knew of him, and he did not know of himself? She knew he was clever, and ruthless…
and she did not like him, but she respected his ability. In a perverse way she trusted him. And she believed he could work in Seven Dials.
Far more than if she had been some decent, wealthy woman, he wanted to succeed for her. It was mainly because of the rage in him against the brutality of these men, the injustice of it all, their lives, and the lives of these women; but it was also pride. He would show her he was still the man he had been in the past. He had lost none of his skills… only memory! Everything else was the same, even better! Runcorn might not know that…