SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman Read Online Free PDF

sleeve. Ellen Jacoby half turned away from him.
    "Cross me once more, Ellen Jacoby," he said pleasantly, "and I'll have such things done to you that'll break your heart clean in two."
    Then she turned back, lips narrower than ever, looking like a cat about to spit defiance. Her eyes moved quickly and angrily over him.
    "It'll take a considerable bigger man than you to touch me," she muttered. "I'm that handy with me mauleys, it'd take you and six more to get me through that door. And I got friends in certain places."
    "Not in the workhouse, you haven't," said Verity softly, "not in the dear old spike."
    For the first time he saw the self-assurance ebb from her eyes.
     
    "Go on with you," she said feebly, tipping back her gin.
     
    Verity picked up his own glass of shrub, the gin hot and the pineapple cordial pungent.
    "You'll pick oakum there, my girl, till those pretty fingers are raw. You'll cry at night to see the blisters and the corns."
     
    "Won't scare me," she said bravely.
     
    "Not even the Hoo Union?" Verity inquired. "Because it'll be the Hoo Union for you, I give you my word. Mr Miles's little house of sorrow."
    Now she was frightened. As a girl of fourteen she had been in the notorious Hoo workhouse. She had known James Miles, the workhouse master, who ruled girls by the rod and loved his work.
     
    "You got no right ..." she said hopelessly.
     
    "With a known whore, I have special rights-at all times," said Verity placidly. "Not all the jacks in "C" Division can help you there."
     
    "I've done nothing. It's Roper who carries the cash for the girls."
    "Mr Miles remembers you," said Verity cheerfully, "and those afternoons you spent kneeling over the block in nothing but a pair of stockings. But with such a fine young woman as you've grown into, why, he'd wear out four or five birches on your backside and think nothing of it. If the justices send you to the old spike, Miss Jacoby, it'll be the Hoo Union for you. Why, Mr Miles would never forgive me if I let a strapping young dox y like you slip away from him ! "
    "All right," she said venomously, "Monmouth Street. You might find that little shickster in the gaff there. But she won't talk to you."
    "And why not?" asked Verity, his face a study in plump, angelic innocence. Ellen Jacoby tipped back the last of her gin.
    "Why not? Because she thieved some codger's watch and clothes and spouted them for all she could get. Bloody near put Ned Roper in quod. Now she wears his mark to remind her."
    "What mark?"
    Ellen Jacoby put her hand under the chignon of blonde hair at the back of her neck.
    "Just there. Took two men to hold her down while he did it. Put a great cross there with a knife-blade heated twice. That bitch won't ever wear her hair up again. She hates Roper like a dose of poison, but she's a hundred times more scared of him than she'll ever be of you."
    Verity finished his shrub, watching Ellen Jacoby move away from him across the room. He felt warm and content.
    He had heard of Roper's ways with his girls, but now Jolie, scarred for life by him and hating him, would be easy to talk round. She might even inform against him on her own behalf, for grievous bodily harm. At the very least she would turn Queen's evidence over McCaffery. Not at first, perhaps, but when Verity h ad talked to her about the death cell and the last morning, and the suffering of a bungled hanging. It seldom failed with young women, who would generally do anything to stay alive. It never failed when they would otherwise face death to shield a man they hated. Roper was stupid as all of them, in the end. To mark a girl like that and then turn her loos e, knowing what she did!
    In his mind's eye, Verity saw himself standing before Inspector Croaker on Monday morning and, with an air of effortless superiority, laying the conclusive evidence before him. For the present, he eased his way through the crowd towards the door. As he passed by Ellen Jacoby, he allowed his hands to travel over