The Silent Cry Page 0,39

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