Margo met Shahdi Feroz’s gaze again and forced a shrug. “It just hit me a lot harder than I expected, seeing her like that. She’s so pretty and everything . . .”
The look Shahdi Feroz gave her left Margo’s face flaming. You’re young, that look said. Young and inexperienced, for all the down-time work you’ve done . . .
Well, it was true enough. She might be young, but she wasn’t a shrinking violet and she wasn’t a quitter, either. Memory of her parents had not and would not screw up the rest of her life! She shoved herself away from the sooty bricks of McCarthy’s chandler shop. “Where did you want to go, now? Whitehall? That’s where the torso will be found in October.” The decapitated woman’s torso, discovered between the double-event murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes and the final murder of Mary Kelly, generally wasn’t thought to be a Ripper victim. The modus operandi simply wasn’t the same. But with two killers working together, who knew? And of course, the rest of London would firmly believe it to be Jack’s work, which would complicate their task enormously as hysteria and terror deepened throughout the city.
Shahdi Feroz, however, was shaking her head. “No, not just yet. To reach Whitehall, we must leave the East End. I have other work to do, first. I believe we should go to the doss houses along Dorset Street, listen to what the women are saying.”
Margo winced at the idea of sitting in a room full of street walkers who would remind her of what she’d fought so hard to escape. “Sure,” she said gamely, having to force it out through clenched teeth. “There’s only about a million of ‘em to choose from.”