Cocaine Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

has a truck. But she’s laid up with piston trouble so we’re doing a double shift. Nah, I can’t remember. Why do you want to know?’
    ‘To inform the police, of course,’ stated Dr MacMillan quietly. ‘He must be found and put in jail. If she dies, he is a murderer. Butchers! They batten on the respectability of these stupid girls—it’s always the innocent and deceived that get caught—and they mutilate them, charging ten pounds for the savagery that a cannibal wouldn’t stoop to, and then they dump them like so much garbage to bleed out their lives in the gutter. Nothing is too bad for such men—nothing. If I could but lay a hand on them myself I’d inoculate them with bacteria, and watch how they liked trembling and shrieking their lives away down to an agonizing, filthy death.’
    ‘Not the jacks, though,’ mumbled Bert. ‘Not the cops…’
    ‘And why not? You are essential witnesses.’
    ‘Yair, but Cec and me don’t have no cause to love the jacks.’
    ‘I am not asking you to love them, nor will they be concerned with your petty crimes. You will come down to Russell Street with me this afternoon and you will tell them everything you know, and I will answer for it that you will walk out again. Do you understand?’
    They understood.
    ***
    At three o’clock in the afternoon, Bert and Cec tailed Dr MacMillan into the police station, under the red brick portal, and came before the desk-sergeant on his high pedestal.
    ‘I am Dr Elizabeth MacMillan, and I have an appointment to see a Detective-Inspector Robinson.’
    ‘Yes, Madam,’ said the desk-sergeant. ‘He’s expecting you. These are your people, Sir,’ he added to a soberly dressed young man sitting beside him. They followed him along a corridor and into a small, bleak office painted institution green. It contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and four hard chairs. The cable-car clanged outside. At his signal, they all sat down and there was a moment’s silence while he took down a folio ledger and unscrewed a black fountain pen.
    ‘Your names, please,’ he said in a carefully unmodulated voice. The man was colourless, with mid-brown hair, mid-brown eyes, and nothing noticeable about him at all. They gave their names. When he heard ‘Albert Johnson’ and ‘Cecil Yates’ he grinned.
    ‘The red-raggers, eh? Still fighting the capitalist menace? Been to Russia yet? With a lot of property reasonably suspected to be unlawfully obtained?’
    Cec stared mournfully at Dr MacMillan.
    Bert, glaring at the policeman, snarled, ‘Your time will come. Oppressor of the widow and orphan, upholder of the exploiter…’
    ‘That will do,’ interposed Dr MacMillan. ‘I spoke to you, officer, if you recall, about these gentlemen. They behaved, in relation to this wretched girl, with notable gallantry and gentleness. I have assured them that they are required only to state what they have observed about this butcher of an abortionist, and I would not be forsworn.’
    She fixed the uncomfortable detective with her eye, and he flinched.
    ‘That’s right, Madam, you are quite correct. Now, tell me all about the man.’
    Bert, assisted by Cec, repeated the description, and the detective lost his indifference. He flicked over the pages in the ledger and read aloud, ‘Six feet tall, cropped hair, swarthy complexion, signet ring on his left hand.’
    ‘Yair,’ agreed Bert. ‘We couldn’t see his hair because he had his hat on, but I reckoned that it was black, or very dark brown, like shoe polish. And a little smear of a moustache, just a line on the upper lip.’
    ‘That’s him,’ said the detective. ‘He’s been involved in this racket for three years—or that’s as long as we’ve known about it. We call him Butcher George. The first victim was a girl called Mary Elizabeth Allen, found dead in the Flagstaff Gardens, dumped out of a car by a man of that description. Good girl, by the way. The next was a common prostitute known as Gay Lil, real