The Pierced Heart: A Novel (19 page)

The girl’s eyes widen in disbelief. “I can’t believe you ain’t ’eard—it’s all over London! They say he hacks off their ’eads and ’ides ’em no-one knows where—that ’e does fings to the bodies that the police don’t want the rest of us knowin’ about. Weird fings—like what only some mad person’d do.”

Nancy’s pretty face is really troubled now. “An’ it’ll be full moon in a couple o’ days. The girls are petrified ’e’s gonna do it again.”

Charles starts, then swears under his breath, cursing both himself and the police for failing to see something that was patently obvious even to a horde of common prostitutes. Because she’s right: It was full moon when the first girls died. And it’s nearly full moon now.

Nancy looks from one to the other. “But you musta known that, surely. They wouldn’t o’ called ’im that name else.”

Charles feels his fists clench, because he knows suddenly what she’s going to say.

“What name, Nancy?”

“The Vampire, Mr Charles. They’re callin’ ’im the Vampire.”

She looks at him, waiting for him to tell her that she is being absurd—that the very idea is ludicrous. But Charles is not laughing, and neither (we might observe) is Maddox.

“What can I say to ’em, Mr Charles?” she says pleadingly. “They’re all bloody terrified—”

She looks across at Maddox and flushes. “Sorry, sir—I don’t mean ’ta swear, but Sal says ’alf the girls are too scared to work, and if they don’t work, they don’t eat.” She takes a deep breath. “And it ain’t just that. One of the girls Sal shares wiv ’as disappeared. I knew ’er, too—nice kid. Bit too fragile for the trade if you ask me, but the poor cow didn’t ’ave no more choice about it ’an I did. A few days ago she went out an’ never came back.”

Charles tries to sound reassuring, but his words belie his unease.
“Well, perhaps she’s just found herself a new admirer and gone off with him to Brighton. Enjoying the sunshine while it lasts—”

“You don’t understand,” says Nancy, tears gathering in her eyes. “Alice’s missin’ too. An’ she never took Alice wiv ’er when she was workin’. Not ever.”

“Alice is her daughter?” asks Maddox.

Nancy nods. “She’s six, a bit older’n my Betsy. I used to mind ’er sometimes, before I came ’ere.”

There is silence. Charles knows what he has to ask, but he needs to find a way to do it. As kind a way as he can.

“What does this young woman look like?” he says at last.

“She’s fair, like me. And she ’as a little flower tattooed on ’er ankle. For ’er name.”

“What sort of flower, Nancy?”

She stares at him. “A rose. ’Er name’s Rose.” And then her voice falters as the truth breaks suddenly and terribly upon her. “But you knew that already, didn’t yer. She’s dead, ain’t she? An’ it were that bastard as killed ’er.”

Charles takes a step towards her. “We don’t
know
that, Nancy—not yet. But if it
is
her, then we stopped him before he could do anything to her.” He swallows. “She’s in one piece, Nancy. Her body hasn’t been touched.”

Nancy sits down heavily in a chair and gets out her handkerchief. “She didn’t deserve that, Mr Charles—she never did no ’arm to anyone. An’ where’s Alice? Where’s ’er little girl?”

Charles shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. There was no child with her when they found her. But you can help us, Nancy.” He crouches down next to her and takes her hand. “Can you come with me—look at the girl we found and tell us if it really is Rose? We don’t know who the other girls were, and that’s one reason why we haven’t caught this man yet. But if it
is
Rose—then at least we’ll have something to go on.”

She looks at him for a long moment, the tears spilling over and running slowly down her face. And then she nods.

Charles sends Billy up to Bow Street with a message for Sam, in the hopes he’ll be back at the station, and by the time he and Nancy arrive at Vine Street it’s to find his old friend waiting agitatedly outside, his face grave. Nancy takes one look at him and falls weeping into his arms, which tells Charles more about the state of play between them than mere words ever could. He leaves the two of them together and goes down into the mortuary to look for the attendant. They find a clean sheet (not an easy task in this place) and do their best to make Rose seem at peace, but there’s only so much they can hide. There’s no disguising that the girl Nancy once knew died in fear and in pain. Nancy’s had her own share of both in her young life, but this is too much, even for her, and she turns her face into Sam’s shoulder, her body racked by sobs. Charles, meanwhile, has sought out the police doctor and requested a full
post mortem
examination. Though the man—perhaps understandably—bridles at such an interference from a mere civilian, and informs Charles in somewhat chilly tones that such an expensive (and clearly, in his view, unnecessary) procedure requires a formal requisition from Bow Street, and only when such a notification is received will it be carried out, and not before.

Charles has a good deal to do to contain his impatience, but it can’t be helped. He thanks the man for his help with only the faintest hint of sarcasm, then withdraws to wait for Sam and Nancy outside.

London has never seen such a richness of race and nation as it has these last months of the Exhibition, and even on this commonplace street there’s a family chattering excitably in French and two Indian gentlemen strolling, hands locked behind their backs, in bright turbans and long white cotton robes which are clearly more comfortable in this heat than the shirt, waistcoat, and heavy black woollen jacket
Charles himself is wearing. When Sam and Nancy finally emerge, the three of them walk down to Piccadilly and Charles hails a hansom and tells the driver Granby Street. The driver raises his eyebrows—it’s not often that someone in this privileged part of town gives him that particular address, at least during daylight hours, and he winks knowingly when Charles hands Nancy up into the cab, but the sight of Sam’s uniform has him touching his cap quickly and moving the horse along. They travel back past Trafalgar Square and the Strand, and then cross the river at Waterloo Bridge. The walkways are thronged with families taking the air, and enjoying the breeze off the water, but Charles sees Nancy bite her lip and look away at the sight of one young woman strolling with a little girl. A little girl with bright golden curls and a rag doll swinging from her plump hand.

The driver pulls up eventually at a small dingy house, and when Charles goes to the driver to pay he realises that they’re barely three doors along from where Nancy used to live. As far as he knows, she hasn’t been back here since he found her on the doorstep in Buckingham Street on Christmas Eve, and when she steps down from the cab he sees her look briefly at her old lodgings and then turn her back.

“Don’t worry, Nance,” says Sam, who has obviously divined—or been told—her apprehension. “That Arnie won’t dare come near yer while I’m ’ere.”

She nods, the ghost of a smile on her face. “But one look at you an’ the girls won’t talk neever. Let me go in an’ explain, an’ then I’ll come out an’ get yer.”

She pulls her shawl up over her hair, then hurries up to the house, where she stands waiting, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, until the door opens and she disappears inside.

Charles and Sam kick their heels—literally, in Sam’s case—for a good quarter of an hour, then the door opens again and Nancy beckons them in.

She leads them through a sitting-room scattered with discarded stockings and underclothes through to a pokey back kitchen that reeks of damp, even in this warm weather. There are three girls there, a redhead and a blonde perched nervously on rickety wooden chairs, and a third standing with her back to the window. All are in some stage of half dress, with thin peignoirs pulled hastily over corsets and bloomers. There are cups and spoons strewn across the table, and a jug of milk with seaweedy white grease just visible beneath the surface.

“D’yer want tea?” says the fair-haired girl at the table. Charles shakes his head, but Sam has a stronger stomach—or greater diplomacy—and accepts.

“So what yer want wiv us, then?”

It’s the girl by the window who speaks. She’s clearly a lot older and more street-hardened than the other two, and Charles suspects she’s also the one who came looking for Nancy.

“I don’t see what soddin’ point there is you comin’ ’ere. We can’t tell yer nuffin’. An’ even if we could, we bloody well wouldn’t.”

Charles sees Nancy glance nervously at her, but he’s heard much worse. And besides, there’s a quality of nervousness about this girl’s bravado that argues for something more than just the whore’s habitual contempt for the rozzer.

“We want to find the man who killed Rose,” answers Charles evenly. “And we want to find her daughter. I assume you would all want to help us do that.”

There are surreptitious glances, then, from the two at the table, and Nancy goes over to the girl at the window and puts her hand on her arm. “They want to ’elp, Sal. Really. You can trust ’em.”

Sal looks at her scornfully, but says nothing. And that silence seems to be permission enough for the others, because a moment later the redhead looks up at Charles. “It were Wednesday a week back when we last saw her.”

She must be the youngest—probably no more than fourteen—and it’s not a London voice either; Wiltshire or Dorset, Charles guesses,
and he wonders what choice or necessity has brought her, so young, so far from home, and so far down.

“Do you know where she was going?”

A shake of the head.

“Had she been seeing any clients in particular lately?”

Another negative.

“Or perhaps someone new? Someone who might have been giving her trouble?”

A hesitation now.

“Well,” says the third girl, “I did ’ear her mention one bloke—said she’d seen ’im two or three times. Told me ’e were givin’ ’er the creeps.”

“In what way? What made her say that?”

The girl shrugs. “All I know is she was scared. That ’e did fings to ’er that she didn’t like. I don’t know what. When I asked, she just clammed up.”

Sam puts his cup down. “Was there anyfing else you remember? What ’e looked like per’aps? Or where she picked ’im up?”

She shakes her head. “I never saw ’im. But it were up the West End somewhere.”

Charles and Sam exchange a glance.

“Is it possible it was Piccadilly?”

“Could be. She worked that beat a lot.”

The red-haired girl leans towards her then, whispering something the men can’t catch.

“What did she say?” says Charles, barely breathing now.

“Lou says she thinks ’e were a foreigner.”

“And she ’ad the little girl wiv ’er when you last saw ’er?” asks Sam.

There’s a silence then, and as it lengthens Charles realises the fair-haired girl has started to cry.

“What is it?” he asks, moving towards the table.

“I said,” the girl stammers through her tears, “I said it weren’t right to turn ’em out—not when we knew they ’ad nowhere else to go—”

Charles takes a deep breath. “So she didn’t leave here of her own accord.”

Neither of the younger girls will look at him, so he straightens up and turns to Sal, realising now that her coming looking for Nancy was prompted more by guilt than by real concern. “I assume this was your doing.”

The girl’s look is defiant, but her cheeks are red. “That brat of ’ers was a bleedin’ nightmare. Waking up screamin’, week after week. And then if that weren’t bad enough she started wanderin’ round in the middle of the night—I ’ad two johns up and leave and not bleedin’ pay after she came in on us—standin’ starin’ at ’em at the end of the bed, it completely put ’em off. I told Rose—if she couldn’t find someone to look after the kid when she were on the job then that was it, they both ’ad to go.”

The merest glance tells Charles that Nancy had been told none of this, and it will do nothing to make Rose’s passing easier for her. Because now she will start wondering if none of this might have happened if she’d still been here—if she’d still been around to mind the child—

Something of the same thought must have been in Sam’s mind, because he goes to Nancy and takes her by the arm. “Let’s go, Nance,” he says softly. “We’ve got all we’re gonna get ’ere.”

The cab is still waiting outside and Charles watches Sam help Nancy into it. She has her handkerchief to her eyes, and her shoulders are shaking with her sobs.

“You not comin’, Chas?” says Sam.

Charles shakes his head. “I’m going back to the Exhibition. They should have re-opened that gallery by now.”

“Right you are. I’ll take Nancy back then go on to Bow Street. If our
man really is a foreigner come for the Exhibition we can get the ’Ome Office to give us a list of arrivals for the last few weeks. And then we can start knockin’ on doors, startin’ in Piccadilly an’ workin’ outwards. It’ll be a lot’a bloody boot-work, an’ a bit like lookin’ for a needle in an ’aystack, but at least we know what sort o’ needle we’re after now.”

The Exhibition halls are quieter, and the light softer, now that the sun is dropping and the gas-lamps are lit. Charles negotiates a party of large sturdy ladies armed with notebooks and lorgnettes, and returns up the stairs to the medical and surgical section, catalogue in hand. It’s just as well he’s prepared, because the exhibits are ordered according to no classification method Charles has ever come across, with cases of lancets and trusses placed next to samples of mineral teeth and dentistry instruments, and something calling itself an
aneuralgicon
, developed and sold by one C. T. Downing, MD, and designed to “apply warm medicated vapour to
tic douloureux
&c.” There are stethoscopes and microscopes, anatomical models and artificial limbs, hearing-aids and homeopathic tubes, but Charles is not going to be distracted. Not this time. Because now he knows exactly which exhibit number he’s looking for: