The Candle Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

the girls, he’d tried to imagine what it would be like shanking a woman. Of course, he’d slapped around a few in
his time, tarts trying to short-change him, tarts who really should know better. But he’d never stabbed a woman.
    It wasn’t as difficult as he thought it might be. Not now he’d started. Just a little more squirming from her and it was all going to be over.
    It was unusual though, to say the least: some gentleman actually putting a price on a tart’s head. Mind you, this one . . . she was clearly no ordinary tart. She had some class,
some poise. He wondered if she was something more than a maid. Perhaps a governess? He knew some of the posh buggers in London – the really posh types – paid for educated ladies from
places like France to come and teach their children a bit of culture.
    She finally sagged, her body’s dead weight suspended by the blade of his bayonet still wedged into the soft plaster wall. Bill looked at the small triangle of pale skin at the hollow of
her throat: the only skin below her beautiful oval jaw not covered by a dark tributary of blood. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman of class, albeit a dead one. He grinned. An added
little perk to the generous money that gent was paying him to do this. He could feel the bulge in his trousers pressing against her narrow-framed body. He was fumbling at his buttons before he knew
it, wanting to enter her before the warmth of her body had begun to wane.
    Annie and Polly found the baby’s cot up a flight of stairs in a small front room. It was a sparse room with bare floorboards, but the woman downstairs seemed to have gone
some way towards making it more homely. Several threadbare teddy bears and stuffed farmyard animals sat side by side beneath the small window.
    ‘Oh, lord, ’elp us,’ gasped Polly. ‘Look at it!’
    Annie was. It wasn’t freshly born as Bill had promised them. It looked to her eyes like a baby several months old. She steadied her resolve with a mantra, one she silently repeated over
and over whenever she had to do a job like this.
    Not even properly human yet . That’s how Annie rationalised it. Not like her little daughter who died of meningitis a few years back. Two years old, a cheeky smile that melted her
heart and a mouth always full of jibber-jabber half-words. A real little person. Not like this fleshy, slug-like creature.
    They ain’t human ’til they can walk an’ talk.
    ‘Oh god, Annie! It’s not freshly born!’
    ‘Just an unwanted , Polly, s’all it is, love.’
    ‘We . . . we . . . can’t—’
    ‘Ain’t even a proper baby ’til someone says they want it, right?’
    ‘It’s a little boy.’ Polly stared in silence down at him, legs and arms kicking fitfully as he lay on his back fast asleep. This wasn’t what she was used to. The brats
her and Annie had disposed of looked no different to piglets: squirming folds of discoloured flesh that promised to suck a young woman dry like a parasite, promised to turn a young working
girl’s life to shame and ruin.
    Every one of those bastards they’d gotten rid of had been unwanted; every one of them like a monster in the corner of a room, the mother cowering away from it in another. But this one
– she looked at the row of soft toys – this baby was loved .
    ‘It ain’t right,’ uttered Polly.
    Annie turned on her. ‘The mother’s dead now, stupid! What you gonna do? Look after it yourself?’
    Polly shook her head silently.
    ‘Bill’s payin’ us good for this one.’ She glanced down at the baby in the cot, stirring in his sleep. ‘It’s just a fuckin’ crib-rat ,’ said
Annie. She reached down into the cot. ‘An’ what do we do with bloody rats, girl?’
    Polly shook her head as Annie tossed the blanket aside and grabbed the baby’s bare feet. She turned to look away as her friend lifted him out of the cot by his feet, the baby now wide
awake and squirming in her tight grasp. ‘We bash their little