Margo shivered. “Yeah. All this gives me the screaming willies. He’s smart. And that’s scary as hell.”
“My dear,” Shahdi said very softly, “all psychopathic serial murderers are terrifying. If only we could only eliminate the abuse and poverty and social sickness that create such creatures . . .” She shook her head. “But that would leave the ones we cannot explain, except through biology or a willful choice to pursue evil pleasure at the expense of others’ lives.”
“No matter how you look at it,” Margo muttered, “when you get down to it, human beings aren’t really much better than killer plains apes, are they? Just a thin sugar-coating of civilization to make ‘em look prettier.” Margo couldn’t disguise the bitterness in her voice. She’d had enough experience with human savagery to last a lifetime. And she wasn’t even eighteen years old yet.
Shahdi’s eyes had gone round. “Whatever has happened to you, my dear, to make you say such things at so young an age?”
Margo opened her mouth to bite out a sharp reply; then managed to bite her tongue at the last instant. “I’ve been to New York,” she said, instead, voice rough. “It stinks. Almost worse than this.” She waved a hand at the poorly dressed, hard-working people bustling past, at the women loitering in Church Passage, women eyeing the men who passed, at the ragged children playing in the gutter outside the Sir John Cass School, children whose parents couldn’t afford to send them for an education, children who couldn’t even manage to be accepted as charity pupils, as Catharine Eddowes had been many years previously, whose parents kept them out of compulsory public-sector schools in defiance of the new laws, to earn a little extra cash. How many of those dirty-faced little girls tossing a ball to one another would be walking the streets in just a few years, selling themselves for enough money to buy a loaf of bread and a cupful of gin?