The Hireling's Tale Read Online Free PDF

trade union as such, but they certainly had a self-help network. Girls who got little support from anyone else had to be able to depend on each other. So while Dawn and Zara avoided contact with the police in most circumstances, to help find the killer of a fellow working-girl they were prepared to break the habit of a lifetime.
    If she was a fellow-worker. The two women pored over the photograph Liz put on the table, took the time to picture her alive, and in the end were sure they’d never seen her before.
    Liz frowned. ‘She isn’t a local girl? The
pathologist who did the post mortem reckoned she was on the game.’
    Dawn, who was the older of the two, shrugged. ‘I’m telling you what I know. She doesn’t work in this town.’
    ‘Could she be - I don’t know - an enthusiastic amateur?’
    Dawn shook her head, a mass of coal-black curls dancing on her shoulders. ‘If she was enthusiastic enough for it to show up at the autopsy, we’d know her. I’m telling you: that’s not a local girl. She was brought in. Maybe for a special. They do that sometimes, if there’s a big conference or something.’
    ‘Conference?’ The Barbican Hotel was big enough for the conference trade.
    Zara sniffed. ‘Think themselves a bit sophisticated, the conference trade do. A cut above the local talent. They come down from London in a coach.’
    Liz blinked. But the principles of business are much the same whatever business you’re in: if you want work you have to put yourself in its way. ‘Are they in town at the moment?’
    Dawn shook her head again. ‘We’d know if they were. There was some sort of a gathering at The Barbican this weekend - a few of us met up with guys there - but there wasn’t anything laid on in the way of entertainment. People were making their own arrangements.’
    ‘Maybe she knew one of the guests personally,’ Liz speculated. ‘Does that happen - a man calls a particular girl to meet him somewhere?’
    ‘Honey,’ said Dawn heavily, ‘in this business
everything happens. Sure he could have called her. He’d got away from the wife for a long weekend, he had his own little friend, he told her where to come and they spent a few days together instead of the usual hour-and-a-bit. That way we wouldn’t even have known she was in town.’
    ‘He went to that much trouble so he could kill her?’ said Zara doubtfully. She had warm café-au-lait skin and blonde streaks dyed through her dark hair.
    ‘Maybe she threatened to tell his wife,’ hazarded Liz.
    But Dawn wasn’t buying that. ‘No way. Not if she was a pro - it’s the one thing you never do. For one thing, you don’t want them to leave their wives. You don’t want to live with them, for Chrissake! - you want them safe at home, just restless enough to pick up the phone from time to time. If the wife chucked them out, they might shack up with someone who’d keep them happy, and that’s bad for business.’
    Liz thanked them for their time and paid the bill. She didn’t envy these women their lifestyle but she didn’t condemn it either. She wished there was a way of keeping them safer, but suspected that, however liberal the law became, a working prostitute would always find herself beyond its protection. Not because she wanted it that way but because the clients did.
    ‘OK. Well, thanks for your help. And go carefully, won’t you? - till either we’ve got this man or we’re sure he’s left town. Just in case it wasn’t personal, and beating up on girls is how he gets his kicks.’
    ‘Wouldn’t be the first one,’ grunted Dawn. With a
hand decorated with blood-red talons she waved a cheery farewell to an outraged waitress as they left.
     
     
    The Guelder Rose had been tied along the north wharf, under the angle of the northern and eastern blocks of The Barbican. The four buildings framed a great atrium with Mere Basin in the well, springing across the four canals on massive brick arches. They were built as warehouses when