The Candle Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

nothing more than several pounds of potatoes. He turned back to the work at hand.
    The head was completely off now and covered like a badly wrapped gift in a length of tarpaulin. The body was stripped naked, the clothes ripped and bloodstained and in a pile on the floor. He
was going to have to bag them up and burn them later. The headless body he was going to roll up in the bloody rug on the floor and tonight, after dark, drop it into the Thames. The head? Well, he
was friendly with a brickmaker who let him use his kiln from time to time for a few coins, no questions asked.
    Bill nodded. A very easy two hundred pounds earned, that was.
    Very easy indeed.
    He was rather pleased with himself, with the fore-planning, deciding to do the job in the middle of the day when all that noise from across the street was likely to cover a solitary scream. As
opposed to the still of night, when a voice could carry.
    Well done, Bill.
    Two hundred pounds. A skilled craftsman might take half a year to earn that kind of money. And he’d earned it in the space of a few minutes. The girls were asking for ten pounds each, but
he knew they’d done baby farming for far less. Tonight he was going to give them half that, and if they got all leery about it, maybe fifteen between them with the certain warning that if
they asked for more, they’d be asking for a slapping.
    He hunkered down beside the naked form of the headless body and studied her pale, unmarked skin.
    She was such a beauty, though.
    Certainly no common tart. Slender but none of the sharp edges of the malnourished, none of the bruises, scratches and scrapes that came as normal with the whoring profession. Perhaps a maid,
then – a household maid who’d managed to catch her employer’s eye? A scullery maid from one of them big tall houses in Holland Park?
    Bill knew not to ask questions. A professional didn’t ask questions. The gentleman who’d met with him had given him everything he needed to know: an address, a description of her
and, in carefully nuanced language, what he wanted done with her and the child. But no one needed to be a genius to work out some west end toff had found his way into a very awkward situation. This
unlucky girl presumably had been put up here for a while. She no doubt had assumed her fate had been sorted, the matter resolved; that her gentleman lover was going to provide for her like this
indefinitely. A regular monthly allowance and a roof over her head. Never again having to work. But, the gentleman in question had opted for a far cheaper solution for this nameless foreign girl,
presumably with no family in the country. To simply make her disappear. Another no one lost in the sprawling dim and dark beehive of humanity. London lost ‘no ones’ all the time.
They pulled them out of the Thames nearly every day.
    The gentleman hadn’t even bothered to ask what Bill would charge for his services. If he had, Bill would have, poker-faced, insisted on fifty pounds and not a penny less. Although, truth
be told, he would have let it come down to thirty and still have been reluctant to walk away from such easy money.
    But two hundred pounds the gent had offered! Even a nib with education and decent clerk’s position would struggle to earn that over six months toil.
    He stuffed the last of her blood-soaked clothes into the bag. Not expensive clothes by the look of them, but certainly not the stained and second-hand frills and lace most working women wore to
threads every day.
    He could imagine the girl in her new home with a crisp folded finny in her purse to spend on a brand new wardrobe, then taking herself on a hasty shopping trip along Oxford Street. Perhaps
thrilled with the experience of possessing so large a denomination. Five pounds. A fiver! Being called ‘ma’am’ by some store girl her own age, who yesterday wouldn’t even
have deigned to acknowledge her if she’d entered in her maid’s uniform.
    As he lifted the last of her