William Monk 09 - A Breach of Promise

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. Theywere 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.
    That was all he could get from them and he knew it. He had already lost their attention. He rose and left.
    It took him two days of bribery, questioning, trickery and threats, and several abortive attempts, before he traced the girls to a brothel off a smith’s yard in the Devil’s Acre. It was a filthy place awash from overflowing drains and piles of refuse. Rats scuttled along the curbs above the gutters and people, almost undistinguishable from the heaps of rags, lay huddled in doorways.
    Monk had been there before, but it still made him sick every time. He was hunched up with a cold that seemed to reach through his flesh to the bones. It knotted his stomach and made him shake till he clenched his teeth together to keep them from rattling. It was partly the wind turning and whistling through the alleys and cracks between the walls, partly the damp which rotted and seeped everywhere. Only when it froze did the incessant sound of dripping stop. And partly it was the smell. It gagged in the throat and churned the stomach.
    He was too late. They had been there, scrubbing floors, carrying water from the standpipes four streets away, emptying slops in the midden and bringing back the buckets. They had gone the day before.
    Gone…! Where? Why?
    One answer to that leaped out at him: because he had been pursuing them. He had asked questions, threatened. He had made his intense interest only too apparent. Someone was frightened, with or without reason. Before he began to look for them they were simply two unwanted girls shunted from one place to another, tolerated as long as some use could be madeof them. His persistence and ruthlessness had made them important. He had driven someone to try to get rid of them.
    Where do you get rid of people you don’t want to be found? Kill them—if you dare. If you are sure you can dispose of the bodies. The thought almost suffocated him. His heart seemed to rise in his throat and drive the breath out of him. He grasped the man by the front of his clothes and jerked him off his feet.
    “If you’ve killed them, I shall personally deliver you to the hangman! Do you understand me? If you don’t believe me, then I had better see to it myself. You will have a hideous accident! A fatal one—precisely as fatal as whatever you did to those girls.”
    “That in’t fair!” the man squawked, his eyes rolling.
    “Of course it isn’t!” Monk agreed, not loosening his grip in spite of the man’s gasping and struggling. “There are two of them—and there’s only one of you!” He grinned at the man savagely, as if a suddenly brilliant idea had occurred to him. “I’ve got it! I’ll string you up, and then when you’re nearly gone—when your lungs are bursting and your face is blue and you’re almost on fire—I’ll cut you down, throw a bucket of water over you, give you a glass of brandy, wait till you’re all right … then do it again! Once for each girl. Is that fairer?”
    “I din’t do nuffink!” The man saw death in Monk’s face and was nearly sick with fright. “They’re fine! They’re alive and well, I swear ter Gawd!”
    “Don’t swear. Show me!”
    “They in’t ’ere! I sold ’em … passed ’em on like. I give ’em a chance ter better theirselves. Get out o’ Lunnon and go somewhere better for their ’ealth.”
    “Where, precisely?” Monk snarled.
    “East! Across the water. Honest ter Gawd!”
    Monk jerked him up again harshly,