"Where did they go from here?" Monk asked, fearing this would be the end of his pursuit. No one would know. They were too weary, too sodden in drink to remember anything, or to care. The next bottle was all that mattered.

One woman shrugged and spat.

A second laughed at him.

The third swore, then mentioned the name of a whorehouse in the Devil's Acre, the teeming slum almost under the shadow of St. Paul's.

That was all he could get from them and he knew it. He had already lost their attention. He rose and left.

It took him two days of bribery, questioning, trickery and threats, and several abortive attempts, before he traced the girls to a brothel off a smith's yard in the Devil's Acre. It was a filthy place awash from overflowing drains and piles of refuse. Rats scuttled along the curbs above the gutters and people, almost undistinguishable from the heaps of rags, lay huddled in doorways.

Monk had been there before, but it still made him sick every time. He was hunched up with a cold that seemed to reach through his flesh to the bones. It knotted his stomach and made him shake till he clenched his teeth together to keep them from rattling. It was partly the wind turning and whistling through the alleys and cracks between the walls, partly the damp which rotted and seeped everywhere. Only when it froze did the incessant sound of dripping stop. And partly it was the smell. It gagged in the throat and churned the stomach.

He was too late. They had been there, scrubbing floors, carrying water from the standpipes four streets away, emptying slops in the midden and bringing back the buckets. They had gone the day before.

Gone... ! Where? Why?

One answer to that leaped out at him; because he had been pursuing them. He had asked questions, threatened. He had made his intense interest only too apparent. Someone was frightened, with or without reason. Before he began to look for them they were simply two unwanted girls shunted from one place to another, tolerated as long as some use could be made of them. His persistence and ruthlessness had made them important. He had driven someone to try to get rid of them.

Where do you get rid of people you don't want to be found? Kill them—if you dare. If you are sure you can dispose of the bodies. The thought almost suffocated him. His heart seemed to rise in his throat and drive the breath out of him. He grasped the man by the front of his clothes and jerked him off his feet.

"If you've killed them, I shall personally deliver you to the hangman! Do you understand me? If you don't believe me, then I had better see to it myself. You will have a hideous accident! A fatal one—precisely as fatal as whatever you did to those girls."