Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (5 page)

Pickpocketing was a favourite. That red-haired woman I noticed on the first night was a regular dipster. Watches were her thing, but I saw her lift ’kerchiefs, pocket books and even a jewel dangling from a smart lady’s ear. I didn’t mean Red any harm – she was a grafter, I’ll give her that. At the end of that first week me and my cage were moved to The Carnival – a low sort of hall on the other side of Paradise, up Bethnal Green way – and I saw her up to her usual tricks there too. I felt bad, but I thought I’d better mention it to Fitzy.

After that I didn’t see her no more.

Red wasn’t the only one. There were a couple of bum-fluff lads who worked as a team, plying their marks with beer and gin until they were able to strip him (or her) of anything of value as they sat there and stewed.

A tall, well-dressed gentleman had a very neat way with the lifting of small items. I watched him on several occasions as he deftly unscrewed the silver top of his cane to deposit the objects he’d stolen into a hollow space inside.

Then there were the bangtails – the sort unregulated by Lady Ginger – who frequented the shabby boxes at The Carnival. I’m no prude, but the tricks I saw them turn! I didn’t even know that a couple of them were anatomically possible until I had a very frank chat with Peggy one evening after a show. I was glad she generally came with me wherever I performed and I was glad she looked after my paint box too. There were stories doing the rounds of theatre girls who ended up a ruin when a jealous rival put ground glass or acid into their face powder. Plenty of the girls in Lady Ginger’s halls were as hard towards me as Jenny Pierce . . . and I can’t say as I blamed them.

And that brings me to Jenny. No one realised she’d gone missing at first. She’d been so tight wound about what she saw as my promotion that it seemed highly likely she’d flounced off in her feathers and war paint just to prove she still had it in her.

We all expected her to turn up any day, preening in a new bonnet or soaked in some fancy cologne. Even when she missed three shows on the trot, risking Fitzy’s anger and, most probably a fine, we still thought she was off somewhere licking her wounds like a vicious old she-cat. No, Jenny Pierce could take care of herself and none of us suspected that her absence was anything more than ill temper and a sore head.  

Don’t mistake me, we was all frightened by the way the girls from the halls were disappearing, we knew something very wrong was happening, but no one spoke about it for fear of bringing trouble to their doorstep. Like I said, the theatre is a superstitious place at the best of times. We all went about our business as usual, but we’d begun to keep our wits as sharp as the knives a couple of girls hid in their purses.

It was the Wednesday, five days after my first show at The Gaudy, that word came from Jenny’s lodgings in Ropemaker’s Fields. Her landlady, Mrs Skanks, sent pock-faced Bessie Docket – another of the Gaudy girls who called that flea-infested doss-house down near the river home – along to the theatre with a final demand for Jenny’s rent.

Now, Ropemaker’s was a filthy place and Jenny was welcome to it. Mother Maxwell’s wasn’t what you’d call smart, but at least it was clean in every way. Mrs Skanks turned a blind eye to the business some of her girls got up to. Tell truth, she was so far gone on the gin most days she probably wouldn’t have noticed if an entire ship’s crew had walked through her door. But she come to quick enough when the rent wasn’t paid.

Jenny hadn’t been seen at Ropemaker’s Fields – or anywhere else for that matter – since the Friday previous and her landlady thought it only fair, apparently, that Fitzy should pay up for one of his girls. As Bessie told us, still quaking after her encounter with Fitzy, no one at Mrs Skanks’s would dare to skip a rent day – and thinking of that woman’s freckled meaty arms and fists the size of ham hocks, I believed her.

I didn’t like Jenny, but I didn’t wish evil on her. I felt guilty, as if her blood was on my hands.
Out, out damned spot.
That’s what she’d said in my dressing room that evening. She should have known better than to tempt fate like that. I thought back to that last time I’d seen her in the box with her gent. I didn’t give it much thought then and looking back there hadn’t been much to see apart from her big yellow head bobbing up and down.

But what was I supposed to see?

For all that I was up there in the cage night after night, watching all the petty thefts and indecencies that gave the halls such a black name, I wasn’t picking up on anything that could point me the way to finding out what had happened to Jenny Pierce or to any of them other missing girls.

When I took my crumbs back to Fitzy I could tell he wasn’t happy and it didn’t make me feel too easy in myself. Tell truth, I was beginning to feel a right nark telling tales on poor types like me who needed to make a living. The problem was I needed to give him something to feed back to the old bitch to show I was keeping my part of the bargain and I had nothing else to offer.

On the evening of my last show at The Gaudy he caught me and Peggy just as we was leaving. He stood in front of the door leading out to the workshop and barred our way.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I felt Peggy stiffen beside me, but he wasn’t talking to her. I looked up into his coarse red face. The usual aroma of liquor was rolling off him and the remains of something he’d eaten was caught up in the whiskers around his mouth. I gripped Peggy’s hand and squeezed it.

‘We’re going back to our lodgings – we always walk together part of the way now – all of us do. You know it’s not safe for a girl alone.’

‘Safe!’ Fitzy snorted and leaned forward. The stench of his rotten teeth made me catch my breath. He stared at Peggy and I saw his tongue move over his lower lip, then he looked back at me. ‘A bit early for you two to be leaving, isn’t it?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s late and it’s cold. I need to rest before we move over to The Carnival. Madame Celeste said I should have at least one free day a week, for the sake of my muscles. She was most particular on that, remember? Come on, Peg.’ I stepped forward.

Fitzy didn’t move, but his little eyes narrowed. ‘Have you been going home straight after the performance every evening, girl?’

I knew what he was driving at. It was common knowledge that a lot of girls in the halls offered late entertainment, if you get me, and Fitzy liked to take a cut of their earnings, but that was never part of this deal. I squared my shoulders and looked at him straight.

‘I’m not going to wait around making chit chat with the Johnnies, if that’s what you mean. Isn’t it enough that I’m hanging up there every night all done up as a tuppenny drab, without me actually putting out as one? I’m doing what you want, aren’t I?’

‘Are you now? We’ll see about that.’ He grunted and moved away from the door. As me and Peggy stepped down into the icy yard he called out, ‘And it’s not me you want to be worrying about, is it, Kitty? Think on that.’

As if I’d forgotten. Every night now when they winched the cage with me inside it up from the stage and out over the hall I’d close my eyes, hold Joey’s Christopher tight in my hand and promise him that everything would come right. This time I’d see something.

It never worked.

But I tell you one thing – I
was
a sensation, just like Fitzy told Lady Ginger. My act even made a corner of
The London Pictorial News
:

Well, that was all very complimentary, but those fine words were accompanied by a bold sketch that showed even more of my legs (and other parts) than that little spangled costume allowed. It made Lucca remark that my ‘purity’ and the ‘effulgence’ were probably not the first things that would arrest the readers’ attention when they turned to page seven. Lucca had to explain to me what effulgence meant and I thought it was a lovely thing to say, quite the sort of word that Joey might have used.

At least there was one thing that made Fitzy happy – the takings.

Every evening now, queues formed in the streets outside the halls where I performed. I had thought that the success of that first night was down to Fitzy’s theatricals with his whispers on the street, the black cover over the cage and all that malarkey, but I was wrong. No, the punters knew what they were getting all right, and they were wild for it. Fitzy had my cage illuminated by strategically positioned limelight flares, and, as the customers filed in, I fluttered about a bit and I gave out as good as I got when they called up to me.

Most of them were respectful, but just occasionally you’d get a drunken Johnny with a really filthy mouth on him. Although there was no love lost between me and the old bugger, I’ll admit I was grateful when I saw Fitzy’s barrel of a body bumping a half-cut heckler up the aisle and out through the curtains. It didn’t do for a girl in my position to get a reputation. Joey had always been very clear on that.

For some reason, the spot just under my cage was particularly popular. Most nights I’d look down and see all these calf-faced ninnies staring up at me. Generally they just looked, but sometimes I caught sight of the odd dirty bleeder fetching mettle. What they was doing with their hands turned me over. I wondered what would happen if The Limehouse Linnet brought the fatty chops she’d had for her dinner up over their greasy little heads, but I reflected that it probably wouldn’t be good for trade. No, when that happened I just concentrated hard on my purity and effulgence. Now I knew what they were.

We soon discovered that there was no point in anyone else going on before me. Mrs Conway was right put out and I don’t think Dismal Jimmy was too pleased about it neither. The regulars turned quite mutinous until they saw their pay packets, but what could you do? If a punter came into the hall and saw me hanging up there in my little bits of sparkled stuff, he wasn’t going to sit through a dog act, a sentimental serenade, a magician and a puppet routine before getting stuck into the main course.

Fitzy worked out that if I opened the evening and closed it a couple of hours later, then everyone (except Mrs Conway) went home happy – ’specially if the chorus came on in the middle and did a nymph routine.

That gave me a lot of time every night to watch from my cage, not that it did much good.

By the time I was due to start at the third of Lady Ginger’s halls, The Comet, exactly two weeks after that first night, it wasn’t only Jenny Pierce who’d gone missing. Another girl – just fourteen years old – had disappeared from The Gaudy, right under my very cage.

Lucca threw another shovel of coal onto the fire. His room, under the bony eaves of a tall, gloomy house just a street away from the river, was damp and always cold, even at the height of summer. Now it was January and the cobbles outside were crusted with hoar frost thicker than a man’s finger. I took his coat off the bed and wrapped it round me.

‘I don’t know why you don’t try to find yourself somewhere better than this,’ I complained. ‘It’s cold enough in here to freeze a duck’s arse.’

Lucca wrinkled his nose and threw another, very small, nugget of coal into the grate. After a moment he turned to look at me. I was sitting as near to the hearth as possible with my back against his bed.

‘You have become coarse since you have become famous.’ He pushed his long dark hair back so that I could see the scarred half of his face in the firelight and he narrowed his gaze. ‘You never used to feel the chill in here, Kitty. But that was before you dressed as a . . .’

He stopped and pursed his lips, but he continued to stare at me, the fingers of his right hand rubbing at the ridged and melted skin beneath his blind eye, like he was trying to pull it back to see me more clearly.

‘Dressed as a what?’ I was indignant. ‘She gave me money to buy myself some better clothes, so I did. What of it? And Fitzy says I should look my best at all times – like a lady. I might be up there half-naked in that cage, but I don’t want to give the Johnnies the wrong idea, do I?’

I smoothed the skirt of my new blue satin dress. It was cut to the fashion with a snug bodice and tight sleeves that frothed into a billow of lace at the elbow. I shrugged my shoulders so that the lace that was tucked around the dipping neckline came up a bit higher and I pulled the coat tighter round me. Lucca’s words had made me feel self-conscious, but worse, I knew he was right.

‘I’ll wear what I like,’ I snapped. ‘And I’ll mind my language if you mind your manners. You don’t own me, Lucca Fratelli.’ I stood up, took off his old coat and threw it on the bed, then I rammed a new feathered bonnet down over my curls and turned to the door.

‘I might as well freeze in my own room back at Mother Maxwell’s.’

Lucca sprang up and caught my hand. ‘I’m sorry, Fannella, truly. Don’t go, please. I was thoughtless.’ He smiled apologetically and squeezed my hand. ‘I’ll put some more coal on the fire. It seems so long since we talked properly – like before?’

He kneeled in front of the hearth again, poking at the glowing coals with the shovel. The scarred half of his face was hidden in shadow as he got a lively little fire crackling.

Not for the first time I found myself thinking what a good-looking lad Lucca would have been if it wasn’t for the accident. No, more than that – he would have been beautiful. His profile was perfect, like one of them statues he was so fond of showing me in his arty books. Lucca had a veritable library piled under his bed – mostly in Italian, although the pictures were lovely.

As I stood there, I noticed how his eyelashes curled and how his lips seemed very firm and distinct and of a sudden I wondered what it might be like to kiss them. Lucca looked up and I saw the melted half of his face again. Would it matter, I wondered? I felt a flush spread up from my neck and across my cheeks.

‘That’s better, Kitty, you look warmer now –
accogliente
.’ Lucca grinned and patted the threadbare carpet in front of the fire. I rustled down next to him, crossing my legs under the stiff satin skirt that peaked up around me like a small blue tent. I kept my eyes fixed on the fire, not wanting to give him the idea that I’d been thinking about anything other than getting cosy.

It was a funny thing, me and Lucca. Apart from Joey, there was no one I cared more about in the world. When he’d come to work at The Gaudy, just after his accident, none of the other girls would talk to him at first. They were afraid of his face, which looked a lot worse then, I can tell you, what with all the flaking bits of skin and the angry red ridges of scorched flesh that stretched down to his collar.

But one evening I was clearing up in the gallery, singing away as usual, and after I’d finished I heard someone clapping from the stage. It was Lucca, who was working late on a painted bit of scenery. That was the first time he called me Fannella.

I suppose I’d just turned fifteen at the time and Lucca was . . . well, I’m not too sure to be straight with you. I’d lay a bet he’s never more than twenty now, so he must have been about seventeen then. And that’s another thing, see, Lucca never talks about his past, about his accident or about how he came to be here in Limehouse.

He’ll talk about his village back home, and about Naples where he was prenticed, and sometimes he’ll talk about his family – brothers, sisters and that. But if I was to ask him about where he was before The Gaudy and what brought him to London in the first place, he’ll slam up tighter than a whelk. Now, I know better than most when not to press a point. I had enough of that with Joey, so I bite my lip, but all the same . . .

Working in the halls you get a very clear idea of just how dangerous limelight can be. We’re all wary of it. Some of the hands have burns running up past their elbows. It’s a vicious light, but we rely on it, every night, to make the magic work. Lucca must have had a bad time of it and I wasn’t surprised he didn’t want to be reminded – ’specially as it took away half his face just when it mattered. For what it’s worth, I reckon he ran away to hide at The Gaudy, and I reckon there was someone he was running away from too – someone who couldn’t love a ruin.

Lucca sat back and propped the coal shovel against the side of the grate. For some reason at that moment I became very aware of his wiry body on the rug next to me. I shifted and the satin whispered as it settled into a new shape.

‘So, what have you discovered, Fannella? What have you seen from your gilded cage?’

I was grateful for the question.

‘Nothing. Well, nothing that can help those poor girls, anyway. Did you hear that Maggie Halpern has gone now?’

Lucca nodded. ‘She was so little – just fifteen?’

‘Fourteen.’ I shuddered. ‘She went missing on my fifth night at The Gaudy. I saw her too – she was serving the tables in the hall. I watched her trying to get round with a tray. You know what a scrap of a thing she was. I was worried she might drop it.’ Truth is I noticed her particularly because she reminded me of Alice – just for a second I looked down and mistook her.

Lucca bit at a shred of skin around his thumbnail. His fingers were stained with paint as usual. ‘It makes no sense. Maggie was so quiet. She was a decent girl. Some of the others were grown women and perhaps they—’

‘They what?’ I asked sharply. ‘You knew them. They were
all
decent types – Clary and Sally could be a bit wild, but they weren’t dabbing it up for punters. Jenny, well, I give you she had a sideline going as a penny upright . . .’, Lucca winced as I continued, ‘but the others – no, I can’t see it. And there’s Alice.’

I stared into the fire and thought of that half-sewn skirt on her bed and the needle and cotton on the wash stand in her tiny room below mine. What had happened to her?

‘She was just a child, Lucca, and a good one. There was never any trouble with Alice. Fact is, I often wished she’d shown a bit more spirit, but she was soft as a lamb, you know she was.’

‘What does Peggy say?’

I shook my head. ‘She won’t talk about Alice and not because she’s a superstitious type like the others. Peggy won’t talk about her because it hurts. Peggy and me were all she had – and you on Sundays.’

Lucca crossed himself – he was a regular at St Peter’s over Hatton Garden way where the services was all in Italian. ‘When she came to mass with me, she couldn’t understand the Latin, but she said she loved the sound of it.’

‘She’s the worst, and I feel responsible somehow.’

He was quiet for a moment. ‘So what is happening to them? Where are they? If they are dead, where are their bodies? If they are living . . .’

I shivered despite the heat that was coming off the little fire now.

Alice Caxton, Clary Simmons, Esther Dixon, Sally Ford, Jenny Pierce, Martha Lidgate, Maggie Halpern.

Those seven girls had disappeared off the face of the earth just like Joey. I’d been up in that cage for nearly two weeks now and I hadn’t seen a thing that could help him or them. Lady Ginger’s voice crackled in my head.
Unless you satisfy me, you will never see him again.
How could I ‘satisfy’ her if I didn’t know what I was looking for? I reached into the neck of my dress and rolled Joey’s Christopher between my fingers.

After a moment I said, ‘All I know for a fact is that if I want to see my brother again, I’ve got to find out what’s happening to Lady Ginger’s girls.’

Lucca leaned forward and prodded the coals. His hair flopped forward and I couldn’t see his face as he muttered something in Italian. Ah, he’s thinking it through, I thought. Lucca was a clever one, like I said.

‘There must be something. You must have seen something from the cage? Maggie – tell me again, who did she serve, who did she speak to?’

I looked into the flames and pictured the hall. The Gaudy was packed that night. My act was attracting punters from all over the city so it wasn’t a surprise to see that several tables served by Maggie were occupied by toffs. Usually their sort wouldn’t be seen dead at a place like The Gaudy – it was better than The Carnival, mind, which was little more than a gin palace with a hall attached, but it wasn’t as smart as The Comet neither. It didn’t matter, though, people were so wild to see The Limehouse Linnet – and tell their friends all about it – that they were willing to park their tails in the cheap seats with the lesser sorts.

The air had been thick with smoke and with the smell of ale and gin. I remembered seeing Maggie’s scrawny arms as she strained to carry the tray. I’d watched her pick her way between the tables and I’d seen the men who didn’t budge or give her a second glance as she tried to get by. Maggie Halpern was a colourless creature, her face, her hair, her clothes – they was all a faded shade of brown. No one noticed her except me – and maybe someone else?

I shook my head. ‘There’s nothing. It was business as usual. No one spoke to her, no one even knew she was there. You know what she was like.’

Lucca leaned forward, resting his forehead in his hands. It was his thinking position.

‘And Jenny? What about her? Tell me again, what you saw.’

I went through it all – Jenny in the box . . . her head going up and down . . . the man behind the curtain – Lucca held up his hand. ‘Yes! The man she was with – what do you remember about him?’

‘Nothing. I couldn’t see him proper, remember? And, anyway, how was I to know that was the last time I’d catch sight of her? After that set-to in the dressing room, I wasn’t exactly feeling warm towards the old rantipole.’ I grinned. ‘Mind you, I was going to tell you all about it – how he didn’t even have to look at her mug while she was on the job. And how – all the while – he was beating time to Professor Ruben and the boys. I kept seeing the ring on his little finger on the box rail catching the light – up and down, up and down, like Jenny’s yellow head.’

Lucca just stared at me. ‘There you are, Fannella, you have your first clue – he wears a signet ring.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘And so does half of London. Even Joey wore a ring.’