I heard the sound of something breaking, the whisper of skirts against wood and then someone swearing before the door is opened a crack. ‘Who is it?’ An eye appeared in the crack and then the sliver of a face. ‘Em, is that you?’
‘Course it’s me. Who’d you think it was? The bleeding Queen?’ I said, wondering what mess Marie had got herself involved in this time. ‘Now are you going to let me in or not?’
She gave a sigh of relief and half heartedly opened the door to let me in. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said gruffly by why of an apology and greeting as I looked around the room. It was small, damp and shabby with plain white washed panelled walls and only a few pieces of rickety old furniture, namely a wooden bed, a chair and two knackered and very dirty tables that wobbled on the unvarnished wooden floor when she brushed past them. Instead of curtains she’d made do by hanging her clothes over string at the two cracked and mould covered windows and as far as I could make out the only decoration in the whole sad little room was a faded old print of a miserable faced woman staring out to sea which hung over the tatty plaster fireplace, which was black with decades old smoke and grease. ‘It’s a bit different to Madame Lisette’s place, isn’t it?’ Marie said with a shrug as I looked around. ‘I’d offer you some tea only I’ve run out.’ She bent down to pick up the pieces of the already handleless mug that she’d knocked over before answering the door.
‘It’s alright, I’ve just had tea at the shelter,’ I said, sitting on the only chair as Marie, after some hesitation, shoved the pieces of broken cup into the fireplace then perched on the edge of the bed which had not been made and was covered with a tangle of not very clean sheets and blankets. ‘I only came to see how you are doing.’
Marie gave a small smile. ‘Och you know,’ she said, patting her auburn hair which hung loose down her back and not meeting my eyes. Her Irish accent, never particularly strong unless she was angry or drunk, had faded even more and was now melded with a slight Cockney twang. ‘Same as usual. You know how it is.’
I looked around the room, looking for some evidence of male occupancy but didn’t see anything, not so much as a pair of socks or a twist of tobacco, that would declare that a man lived there too. ‘You still with that bloke?’ I asked.
She went a bit pink about the ears. ‘You mean Joe?’ she said vaguely. ‘Yeah, I’m still with him. He’s out looking for work right now but he’ll be back later on.’
‘I thought he was working as a porter in the market,’ I said, trying to recall Joe to mind. I’d only met him once in passing when he came to the Ten Bells to chivvy Marie into going home with him and he seemed nice enough - tall with a thatch of dark hair and kindly pale blue eyes set into a slightly too long face. He wasn’t Marie’s type at all but if he made her happy what business was it of mine?
Marie gave a sigh. ‘He got laid off,’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘They said he was stealing but he never took nothing. It was all made up, so it was. The buggers believed it though and sacked him, the stupid sod.’
I looked around the mean little room again, noticing the absence of food and the meagre pile of coals heaped in the fireplace. ‘How are you doing for money?’ I asked gently. ‘I can’t give you anything but if there’s any way that I can help then you only have to ask, you know that don’t you.’
Marie smiled then and pushed her hair out of her face. ‘I know, Em and I’m truly grateful for it.’ She gave a sigh then dipped her head and fished under the bed to produce a half empty bottle of gin. ‘There’s no glasses as I’ve already hocked them both,’ she said with a rueful grin, handing me the bottle. ‘We’ll have to take it in turns.’
I unscrewed the top and took a small swig of throat burningly rough gin then wiped my mouth on my sleeve before passing the bottle back to Marie. ‘So how is it then?’
She grimaced and took a long slug from the bottle. ‘It’s been better,’ she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand before taking another even deeper swig. ‘We’re completely flat broke and several weeks behind with our rent.’ She shrugged and handed the bottle to me. ‘It’s a total bloody mess.’
I took a sip of gin and handed it straight back. ‘You need it more than me,’ I said with a smile. ‘Are you getting evicted then? Does your landlord know?’
She pulled a face. ‘Oh, old McCarthy knows all right,’ she said. ‘The thing is…’ She took another shot of gin and coughed as it went down the wrong way. ‘The thing is that he’s said we can stay and make up the arrears if I go back on the tralala again.’
I stared at her. ‘I thought you said that Joe made you give all that up,’ I said. She’d been furious at the time, seeing it as interfering but in the end had become reconciled, had even started seeing it as a bit romantic that he should want to have her all to himself.
She put the bottle, now almost empty, down on the table between us. ‘He did,’ she said softly, picking at the label until it peeled off in clumps on to the table.
‘Are you giving sauce to McCarthy as well?’ I asked bluntly.
She laughed then and shook her head. ‘Gawd no. You should see him.’ She peeled off some more of the label and wouldn’t quite meet my eye. ‘Sure, I wouldn’t touch him with someone else’s.’
I sighed. I could always tell when she was lying. ‘Are you sure?’
Her face crumpled. ‘Oh alright, I might have sucked him off a couple of times but nothing more than that and it’s worth it to keep us off the streets, isn’t it?’ She leaned forward then and clutched at my hands, her fingers cold and dry as bone. ‘You mustn’t tell Joe,’ she whispered urgently. ‘He’d kill me if he ever found out why it is that we’re allowed to stay. The stupid bugger thinks McCarthy lets us keep the room out of the kindness of his heart and it’d kill him if he ever found out the truth that…’
‘That it’s down to your kindnesses to him,’ I finished her sentence, shaking my head. ‘Marie, this isn’t right. You should just move out. Tell him to stick his bloody rent where the sun don’t shine and do a runner.’ I clutched at her hands. ‘You’ve done it before, why don’t you do it again?’
She pulled her hands away. ‘Because this is Dorset Street,’ she said flatly. ‘If we do a runner from McCarthy he’ll send some of his bully boys after us and they’d mess us both up so badly that neither of us’ll ever work again. I couldn’t do that to Joe, not after he’s tried so hard to look after me.’ She stood up and went to the window, peering out between the petticoats and shirts that had been haphazardly hung up there in the absence of curtains. ‘There’s no point letting him evict us either as we’d never find anything as good as this for this cheap.’
‘It’s not really cheap though is it?’ I said quietly but she shook her head and refused to listen to me.
‘And what about you?’ she said, changing the subject as she put the top back on her bottle and hid it underneath the bed again. ‘Did you say you stayed in the shelter last night?’
I nodded. ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ I lied. ‘The nuns are kind enough and at least they don’t expect us to work for scraps of food unlike some places. I’ll be glad not to go back though.’
Marie sighed. ‘I don’t know why you waste your time thieving to make ends meet when you’d make three times as much on the game.’ Clearly it was now her turn to lecture me about my shortcomings. ‘It’s different for you,’ she went on angrily, when I opened my mouth to remind her that she wasn’t all that happy to earn a living on her back either. ‘You don’t have a bloke to stay nice and clean for. You can do whatever you like.’ She sounded a little wistful and more than a bit drunk. ‘And look at the state of that bruise. You never got hit like that when you was a tart.’
‘No, because no one ever hurts tarts, do they?’ I said with a meaningful look that made her glance quickly away as the shared and never to be spoken of memory of Calais reared its head again between us.
’You could always go home,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s got to be better than this.’
‘As if they don’t already know,’ Marie scoffed. ‘Oh come on, Em, all you need to do is turn up again and give a pretty little speech about how sorry you are and they’d welcome you back with open arms.’
I shook my head and stood up to leave. ‘I doubt it,’ I said, straightening my shawl. ‘I reckon they were glad to see the back of me.’
Marie shrugged and stood up as well. ‘Promise you won’t tell Joe if you see him?’ she asked as I put my hand on the door latch. ‘Honestly, he’d kill me if he ever found out what’s been going on.’
‘Course I won’t tell,’ I said reassuringly, opening the door. ‘Nothing to tell, is there?’
She came to the door as I started to walk down the alley back to Dorset Street. ‘You take care of yourself, won’t you, Em?’ she said softly.
I looked back at her and smiled. ‘You too, Marie.’
Chapter Nine
I hadn’t gone far down Dorset Street when I was hailed by another familiar voice and turned to see Annie, a lairy old tart that I’d known ever since I first came to Whitechapel, hurrying down the street towards me, almost pushing people over in her haste.
‘Alright, Annie?’ I said without enthusiasm as she got nearer. ‘What’s up?’ I started to feel nervous when I saw the intent look on her podgy face. Annie was a nasty drunk and I’d seen her lash out, mostly at other women and usually over nothing, more times than I could count. I stopped and waited for her to huff up to me, wondering what, if anything, I had done to offend her this time. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘There’s been another murder,’ she said abruptly, panting a little. ‘Over on Buck’s Row.’ Marie’s once upon a time description of Annie’s face being like a bulldog chewing a wasp wasn’t far wrong, I thought, as she stood before me, jowls trembling with annoyance and exertion and small, mean eyes swivelling suspiciously from side to side.
I pulled a face. ‘It wasn’t all that long ago that Martha got stiffed as well,’ I said, wondering why she’d made such an effort to deliver this bulletin to me.
Annie frowned, which made her look absolutely murderous. ‘You mean that woman in George Yard?’ she said dismissively, folding her arms over her bosom. ‘I didn’t know her but sounds like the nasty piece of work had it coming.’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah, well…’ I didn’t disagree with her, after all the last time I saw Martha she’d nicked the envelope with the pendant I was meaning to hock for doss and food money out of my pocket, the bloody cow, but even so it still felt wrong to speak ill of someone who’d died so horribly. ‘The thing is, Annie, what’s this got to do with me?’
‘Coppers want to talk to you about it,’ she said, rolling her eyes as if I was the stupid one for not being able to magically read her mind and work it out for myself. ‘They think it was one of your friends from Thrawl Street and want you all in to identify her.’
My blood ran cold. ‘Which friend?’ I asked faintly. I thought of Poll dancing around on the pavement outside the Frying Pan and felt queasy with dread. Why couldn’t she just come to the shelter with me when I asked her to?
‘Polly? Is that her name?’ Annie said with a pretence at forgetfulness. ‘The short one with a scar on her forehead. Looks and acts younger than she is and got a very high opinion of herself even though we all know she’s on the run from the coppers for thieving.’
I sighed, feeling all cold and empty inside. Oh Poll. ‘I’d best get back there then.’ I turned to go back up towards Commercial Street, my heart heavy. ‘Thanks, Annie.’
She sniffed and shrugged, exuding a dank aroma of stale beer, cigarette smoke and bad living from her stained and torn black dress. ‘Cheerio then.’
I walked slowly back up Dorset Street then turned right down Commercial Street, which was busier now with carts and omnibuses standing still in places as they waited for the traffic to ease up. Spitalfields Market, a huge building opposite Christ Church was in full swing and I heard the shouts of the market traders as I walked away, passing a group of blind musicians standing on the corner of White’s Row, playing their violins and nodding thanks when they heard the clink of pennies in the enamel cup placed at their feet.
As was usual for this time in the morning, Commercial Street was crammed full of people, mostly tired looking housewives carrying baskets of shopping; out of work men who sat aimlessly in the doorways of the tall old weaver’s houses and dozens of noisy street children who darted underfoot and had their hands permanently outstretched for money. The whores were all sleeping the gin off in their pokey lodging houses in the rookeries and wouldn’t be out again until much later on.
I crossed the road further down, darting between a couple of carters who were close to having a full on brawl about their right of way on to Whitechapel High Street then carried on to Thrawl Street, a miserable thoroughfare lined with smoke blackened dilapidated houses, most of which were in use as cheap lodging houses where anyone with fourpence could pay for a bed for the night and the use of a dingy little kitchen. The atmosphere, never exactly jolly at even the best of times, was unusually sombre as I headed straight for number eighteen, probably because the police, who were intensely distrusted and disliked in this corner of Whitechapel, had come knocking earlier on, an event that would almost certainly have driven virtually every resident of the street indoors so that the only sounds to be heard were the insistent hungry wail of a baby from an upstairs room and the barking of some dogs chained up in the overgrown backyards.
A young woman with sloppily pinned up mousy brown hair and a filthy pale blue apron fastened over her red dress sidled out of the house next door as I paused for a moment on the doorstep of number eighteen, also known as Wilmott’s thanks to the cracked and peeling wooden sign that hung above the door. ‘You heard then?’ she asked without preamble, her accent one that I could never quite place other than to recognise it as Northern in origin. ‘The coppers have been.’
I sighed. ‘I heard,’ I said, imagining the scene. ‘Did they speak to everyone, Mary?’
She shook her head. ‘We all went indoors when we seen them coming.’ She shrugged and smoothed down her apron with grimy hands. ‘Mister thought they might knock and ask us questions but they only wanted to speak to the people lodging here.’
I nodded. ‘Poor old Poll,’ I said, feeling miserable again as I said her name. ‘If it is her.’
Mary pulled her mouth down at the corners in an expression of regret and sorrow. ‘It’s right sad,’ she said. ‘Poll was a nice woman. A bit dim, right enough, but there was not an ounce of harm in her, not really.’
‘I know,’ I said, putting my hand on the door handle and bracing myself for whatever lay inside. ‘I hope to God it’s not her after all.’
Mary shrugged. ‘Well, if it’s not her then it’s some other poor cow, isn’t it?’ She gave me a nod and went back into her house, leaving me with nothing else to do but turn the handle and step into Wilmott’s lodging house.
It was usually a hive of noisy activity with both men and woman hanging about in the corridors and kitchen at all hours of the day and night, keeping themselves warm and dry and enjoying a bit of company but today I was greeted with a heavy silence, all the usual residents having clearly scarpered onto the streets after the police’s visit. ‘Anyone home?’ I called, grinning to myself a little at the strangeness of calling such an inhospitable place with its damp, dirty walls and filthy loose floorboards ‘home’.
I walked down the corridor to the kitchen, which lay at the back of the house and was a dark cavernous room with smoke and grease stained walls and ceiling, ominous splashes of long past dinners and tallow candle wax all over the floor and tables and a row of knackered old chairs arranged here and there around the fire. A couple of chipped plates, still with a few crumbs of bread and scrapin
gs of cheese and some mugs half full of now cold tea had been left out on the tables, telling me that the kitchen had been vacated in something of a rush earlier on and that no one had yet dared to return.
‘Em?’ I heard a familiar voice whisper from the stairs that I had just passed in the hall. ‘Is that you?’
‘Course it’s me, Emily,’ I called back. ‘Bobbies been have they?’
A small dark haired girl with huge blue eyes crept timidly into the kitchen, smiling with relief when she saw me standing alone by the dead fire. ‘Been and gone again,’ she said, her voice trembling as she picked up some of the cups and plates and took them over to the sink. ‘Most people scarpered but I stayed to talk to them.’
I sat down heavily on a chair by the fire and mournfully surveyed the kitchen as Emily half heartedly scraped some crumbs of food into an overflowing tin bin on the floor and tipped tea down the sink. ‘Where did you get to last night?’ she asked eventually, turning back to me. ‘Bloody hell, I was right worried about you.’
I sighed and stretched my feet out in front of me, noticing as I did so that the upper part of one of my boots was coming away from the sole again and would need to be mended. ‘I went to the shelter on Brick Lane,’ I said. ‘Some geezer caught me stealing his handkerchief and took all my earnings to teach me a lesson so I had no money to pay for my doss.’
‘Gave you a smack too by the looks of things,’ Emily said with a slight smile, sitting down next to me. She smelt like she’d spent the night beside a bonfire and I noticed that she had some dark smudges of black ash on her pale green dress and on her face. She pulled my hair away so she could get a proper look at the bruise on my cheek. ‘My Mam would have put a bit of beef on that to make it come down a bit,’ she said with a tut.
‘If we had a bit of beef, it’d be in our stomachs not wasted on bruises,’ I said, more sourly than I intended. ‘What happened with the coppers anyway?’
From Whitechapel Page 10
