A Christmas Odyssey by Anne Perry Page A

buying and selling anything, especially people. It was more than distaste he felt, more than a clogging stench in his nose and throat.
    Bessie was pulling on his coattails. He wanted to turn round and slap her away. She trusted him, and she had no right to. It was stupid, as if she were trying to remind him of all those other girls that he had put into the trade, faces he couldn’t even remember now.
    He stopped abruptly and she collided with him, hands still clinging on to the stuff of his coat.
    “Stop it!” he snarled at her. “Don’t follow me like …” He was going to say ‘like a dog,’ but that was too harsh, even if it was apt. She looked just like a loyal, trusting, stupid little dog that expected him to treat it right.
    She let her hands fall, still looking at him,which made him feel as if she had kicked him in the pit of his stomach.
    “Like … like I could look after you,” he finished. “Someone’s got to find out what happened to the corpse. In’t fit for you to see. Stay with Mr. Rathbone.”
    “I seen corpses,” she told him, putting out her hand and taking hold of his coattails again. “I’ll ’elp yer.”
    He blasphemed under his breath, and felt Henry Rathbone’s eyes on him, even though he was farther from the light and his figure was only a shadow behind them.
    “Aren’t yer going on, then?” Bessie asked. “Yer in’t given up, ’ave yer?”
    Squeaky swore again, turning around to continue his way along the passage and up more steps to a door. Beyond it were sounds of music and laughter.
    “No, I in’t given up,” he answered her at last. “But we’ve got to think what to do now. If Lucien’s dead, that’s the end of it.”
    “If it wasn’t Lucien, then who was it?” Henry asked. “And even more important, who killed him, or her?”
    “You mean, was it Lucien?” Crow said softly.He looked at Henry. “Do you want to know that? What are we going to do if it was?”
    Henry was silent for several moments. No one interrupted his thoughts.
    “That may depend on the reasons,” he answered at last, hope struggling in his voice, in what they could see of his face in the dim light. “Maybe it was self-defense. In a place like this that is imaginable.”
    Squeaky was torn between pity and the urgent desire to tell Henry not to be so naive. This was getting more ridiculous by the moment.
    “Lucien wouldn’t kill nobody less ’e ’ad ter,” Bessie said at last. “If … if it weren’t ’im as were killed.”
    “Right, Bessie,” Henry agreed warmly. “We need to find anyone at all who has seen him in the last few hours—two or three, let us say. Please lead on, Mr. Robinson. If we can find Sadie, she may well know.”
    Squeaky bit back the words on the edge of his tongue, and started forward again.
    They went from one tavern or doss-house to another all through the night and well into the cold, midwinter daylight. They shook people awake to ask about Lucien or Sadie. They threatened andpromised. Squeaky lied inventively, while Henry persuaded—often with a few coins or a ham sandwich that he bought from a peddler—but no one would admit to knowing anything about murder. Even a hot cup of coffee from a stand on the corner of one of the alleys elicited nothing useful.
    They found people huddled in doorways, covered with old clothes or discarded packing and newspapers, sometimes too drunk to even be aware of their freezing limbs. All questions about Lucien or Sadie were met with vacant stares. For most that was also true for any mention of Shadwell. The two or three who reacted did so with blank denial and with shivering more than was warranted by the cold of the icy morning.
    They stopped at last for a hot breakfast at a tavern off Shaftesbury Avenue. There was a good fire in the hearth. Although the room was dirty and everything smelled of smoke and spilled ale, they sat at a scarred wooden table and ate bacon, eggs, and piles of hot toast, and drank fresh