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mattress might see five or six different bodies in the space of an hour. The same woman had had her face slashed by a broken bottle wielded by a drunken sailor, but Eliza hadn’t even contacted the authorities, saying it would be bad for business. Instead, the woman had been dismissed. She’d been told no one would want to fuck a girl with a scarred face. There were few businesses Pyke knew of where the laws of the market were practised with the same cold efficiency.
     
    ‘So who is she?’ Eliza Craddock asked, when Pyke showed her the drawing of the dead woman. She sat behind her desk like an enormous beached whale, folds of blubber hanging off her arms and face.
     
    ‘I take it she’s not one of yours?’
     
    Craddock grinned, revealing an enormous gap in her front teeth. ‘Most of the bucks come in here would just as well poke a hole in the wall. But a gal like that would cause a riot.’
     
    Pyke nodded. Her thoughts confirmed his own suspicions that the dead woman probably wasn’t a prostitute, at least not one who plied her trade on the Ratcliff Highway.
     
    Craddock had another look at the charcoal sketch. ‘You reckon she might be a blue-skin, then?’
     
    Pyke had already mentioned this. He then described Arthur Sobers and asked whether she had seen him.
     
    ‘I don’t know him but we see all sorts in here. I ain’t prejudiced against the darkies. Even employed one for a while.’ She crossed her arms and shrugged. ‘You could talk to her, if you like. Popular with the Lascars and the blackbirds, she was. But I had to let her go.’
     
    ‘You know where I can find her?’ It was unlikely that this woman had known Mary Edgar or Arthur Sobers but it was worth a try.
     
    Craddock held out her chubby hand and Pyke tossed a shilling coin on to the table. She scooped it into her apron and rested her arms, two mounds of flesh, on the table. ‘Jane Shaw. Last I heard she’d taken a room in the old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street, near New Road.’
     
    ‘Is that how it works?’ Pyke felt the skin tighten around his temples. ‘You use them up and when they’re beyond repair you toss them away?’
     
    But the criticism was lost on Eliza Craddock. She stared at Pyke, as if he’d spoken to her in a foreign language, and asked, ‘The girl you’re looking for. Is she dead or just missing?’
     
    ‘Would it make any difference?’
     
    Craddock shrugged. ‘I don’t like it when a girl gets killed. Makes folk jittery and it’s bad for business.’
     
    ‘It’s bad for the girls, too.’
     
    She regarded him with cynical good humour. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’ll always be more girls.’
     
     
The old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street had long since been overrun by rogues and vagabonds of every hue: broken-down coiners, their skin eroded by the liquids used to oxidise base metal; footpads waiting to beat up their next marks; ageing prostitutes prowling the corridors; distillers inhaling fumes that would kill them; pickpockets as young as ten emptying stolen pocket handkerchiefs into the hands of their receivers; rampsmen polishing their brass cudgels; and mudlarks picking caked mud and faeces from their old boots.
     
    Pyke found Jane Shaw in one of the rooms right at the top of the building. There was no heat or light and he’d had to pay for a lantern to guide his way through the mass of bodies, either sleeping or staring vacantly into space. A few of them begged for money, but he kept moving, only stopping to ask where he could find the ‘blackbird’ and only giving a farthing or two to those who helped him. Most were drunk or, as he discovered later, pacified by laudanum.
     
    Jane Shaw could have been thirty or sixty, for all Pyke could tell. Her hair and all of her teeth had fallen out, and when he brought the lantern up to her face and saw her ravaged nose, it confirmed what he had suspected from the first moment he had stepped into the room.