The noises were coming from that room! The room where, the redhead was convinced, lay the Justice and his whore. Intrigued, she bent her ear to the door and, on hearing the sound she had first recognized as a ‘muffled, choking sound’, she suddenly stiffened with alarm. It was coming from inside. But it weren’t no sound made by pleasure… more like the sound of a body having the life choked out of it! No, no. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It were all that fever in her mind, and the obsession with getting her own revenge on the beast in that room. A terrible sensation of fear took hold of her. The sounds had stopped. All was silent from within. But it was a strange, uneasy silence that put the fear of God into her. Yet there was something else it put into her. Curiosity. She had to see for herself what was going on in there.

Slowly, and with trembling fingers, the redhead tried the door handle. It could well be locked from the inside, she thought, but that was not always the case. Locking a door bespoke shame, and many of the clients who frequented a place such as this were without shame.

The door handle moved easily beneath her touch. Trembling softly and with bated breath, she inched the door open, until, in a moment that seemed like a lifetime, she could see right into the room. And what she saw there stopped her fast in her tracks, her mouth wide open and her eyes narrowed into thin dark slits that seemed to want to shut out the scene before them.

It was the Justice right enough, even more repulsive in his nakedness. The whore was with him, a slim, dark-haired thing with white thighs and crimson lipstick besmirching her face. But her face was stark white and her naked body was awkwardly spread-eagled over the edge of the four-poster bed, her legs stretched wide apart and there, lying between them, was the Justice. The two of them might have been ecstatic in the throes of lovemaking – were it not for three things which were immediately obvious. The room was in a shocking shambles, as though someone in a terrible fury had vented all their rage on it; there was not a single item that hadn’t been broken, torn, or split asunder. The whore was too still, too limp. The Justice was raised above her, staring down in horror, his two hands still wrapped about her throat. Now, as he turned to see who had entered the room, he began whimpering like a baby.

‘Christ Almighty!… What have you done?’ The redhead’s voice was hushed with shock. Coming quickly into the room, she instinctively let the knife fall to the carpet and, dropping the lamp on to the dresser, she rushed to the bed, viciously pushing aside the mound of blubber that was shaking with terror. ‘You bastard!… You’ve done it this time!’ Even as she spoke, she saw that it really was a night for revenge after all!