William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

reference from a former employer, she would not be allowed over the step, let alone into the household.
    Looking at her now as she stared back at him, holding the money in her hand, he saw anger and the need to please struggling against each other in her face, and a certain heaviness about her eyelids, a lethargy as if he had woken her from a dream far more pleasant than any reality. It was three o’clock. He might be her first customer. The indifference in her face was a lifetime’s tragedy.
    He thought of Hester, and of how she would loathe having a stranger’s hand on her clothes, let alone on her naked skin. This woman had to endure intimacy from whoever chose to walk through the door with two shillings and sixpence to spend. Where did the ignorance and the desperation come from that she would not prefer to work, even in a sweatshop, rather than this?
    And the answer was there before the thought was whole. Sweatshops required a skill in sewing she might not possess, and paid less for a fourteen-hour day than she could make in her room in an hour. Both would probably break her health by the time she was forty.
    “I don’t want to lie with you, I want to ask you about Sarah Mackeson,” he said, sitting down on the one wooden chair. He was trying to place the faint smell in the room. It was not any of the usual body odors he would have expected, and not pleasing enough to have been a deliberate perfume, even if such a thing had been likely.
    “You a rozzer?” she asked. “Don’t look like one.” There was little expression in her voice. “Well, yer can’t get ’er fer nothin’ now, poor bitch. She’s dead. Some bastard did ’er in a few days ago, up Acton Street. Don’t yer swine never tell each other nothin’? Even the patterers is talkin’ about it. Yer should listen!”
    Monk ignored her resentment. He even saw the reason for it. She probably saw herself in Sarah Mackeson. It could as easily have been she, and she would expect as little protection before, or care afterwards.
    “I know,” he replied. “That’s why I want to learn what I can about her. I want to catch who did it.”
    It took a moment or two for her to grasp what he had said and consider whether she believed it. Then she began to talk.
    He asked questions and she rambled on, a mixture of memories and observations, thoughts, all charged with so much emotion he was not certain when she was referring to Sarah and when to herself, but perhaps at times they were interchangeable. A painfully clear picture emerged of a woman who was careless, openhearted, loyal to her friends, feckless with money, and yet deeply frightened of a future in which she saw no safety. She was untidy, generous, quick to laugh—and to cry. If any man had loved her enough to feel jealousy, let alone to kill, she certainly had not known it. In her own eyes, her sole value was as an object of beauty for as long as it lasted. Both time and fashion were already eroding it, and she felt the cold breath of rejection.
    Bella Holden was walking the same path, and she could offer no clue as to who might have killed Sarah. Reluctantly, she named a few other people who had known her moderately well, but he doubted they could help. Bella would not compromise her own future for the sake of finding justice for Sarah. Sarah was dead, and past help. Bella had too little on her side to risk any of it.
    Monk thanked her and left. This time he returned to the police station, and found Runcorn in his office looking tired and unhappy, his brows drawn down.
    “Opium,” he said, almost as if he were challenging Monk.
    Suddenly, Monk placed the smell in Bella Holden’s room. He was annoyed with himself for not having known at the time. That was another gap in his memory. He hated Runcorn’s seeing it, especially now. “Sarah Mackeson was taking opium?” he asked with something close to a snarl.
    Runcorn misread his expression for contempt. His face flushed with anger almost beyond his control. His voice shook when he spoke. “So might you, if you had nothing to offer but your looks, and they were fading!” He gulped air. His knuckles shone white where his hands were pressed on the desk in front of him. “With nothing ahead of you but doss-houses and selling your body to strangers for less and less every year, you might not stand there in your handmade boots looking down your damn nose at someone who escaped into a dream every now and then, because reality was too hard to