Page 101 of A Treacherous Trade
Regret. True remorse.
“Amelia,” she said, as if chiding a wayward child. “This was never a tangle until you interfered. Until you involved poor Fiona here.”
Amelia’s pain, her bewilderment, was a palpable thing. It vibrated through the air toward me and plucked my heart right out of its cavity.
Betrayal.
“I was trying to help you find Alys and Jane’s killers,” Amelia said. “I thought—”
“I know what you thought.” Beatrice sighed, leaning her shoulder against the wall as if she needed to be propped up. “I’ve known you for fifteen years, enough to know you’d never suspect a whore of hurting another whore like this.” Her features hardened. “But you always forget that I’m not one of you, and never have been.”
“But you sell women,” I blurted, my Irish blood heating me from the inside as it gathered rage from fear. “Don’t imagine that makes you any better than they are.”
“Iambetter, dear,” she said with absolute conviction. “When I found my husband had squandered the money I brought in my dowry on his mistresses, on his whores, I could have murdered him. I went to the brothel to do just that, in fact, seeking revenge. What I found was an opportunity. The oldest profession in the world. Women selling their bodies. And if they don’t walk the streets, they must rely on men to sell it for them. Men who keep the profits. I could not stand for it, and so I used my husband’s name to start a business of my own.”
“None of that explains this filth.” I motioned to the photographs.
She shook her head at them, as if they offended her as well. “I had a complicated couple of years. Made bad investments. Ran afoul of a few dangerous men who hated the idea of a woman among their ranks. I was forced to search for additional avenues of revenue, which was how I found Mr. Hartigan here.”
The man in question bowed as if being presented to debutantes, beaming with pride.
Looking at him made me physically ill.
Amelia shrank back as well, gripping my hand as if doing so lent her strength. “I know there are periodicals and publications full of lewd pictures, and that is always going to be the case, but this is something different, Beatrice. This is… this is…”
“I believe the term is necrophilia,” Charles supplied helpfully.
“It’sdisgusting,” Amelia spat. “No. Worse than that. I don’t even think there’s a word for the depravity. For the inhumanity. How could you supply such violence?”
Beatrice pushed herself away from the wall as if rejuvenated by her own growing ire. “Because violence against women makes men come. And men buy what makes them come. Sex is everything to them, once you get down to it. They are simple creatures of pathetic and predictable tastes driven by a hunter’s instinct to fuck, maim, and murder.”
“That isn’t true,” I argued.
“Oh? And how would you know?”
I swallowed, cowed by the condescending antipathy in her voice. I knew good men. And I knew a few bad ones, as well. All of them had mentioned they liked their women warm and willing.
And alive, I’d assumed.
“Sex is the urge to mate, and you can’t reproduce with the dead,” I said carefully. “This feels to me like a very specific deviancy,”
“And a profitable one,” Beatrice said.
“How dare you?” Amelia stepped forward, her grip on my hand tightening to painful. She trembled, but I read as much rage in her as fear. “You murdered Alys,my friend, so this sack of dusty shit could sell photographs of himself defiling her corpse?”
Beatrice put up her hand as if to stop her. “Oh, dear God no,” she said. “No. Alys and Jane both consented to have these photographs taken. As did Indira here. They were all remunerated.”
I’d placed my body in between helpless Indira and the rest of them. They’d have to go through me to get to her… but I rather thought that was what they meant to do.
“What did you do to her?” I demanded.
“Oh, it’s just a bit of chloral hydrate,” Beatrice said. “Same as you. She’s a touch more sensitive to it, evidently. She should wake up any moment.”
“Does that mean you’re going to let us go?” Amelia asked without much hope in her voice.
“I’m afraid not.” Beatrice sniffed as if holding back invisible tears as she turned to me. “I really am sorry you were caught up in this. I wish you’d been easier to scare away, and yet when you showed up with your wounds to warn me, I knew that if I didn’t have to be rid of you, we might have been friends.”
“You sent Izzy to hire that man to attack me,” I accused.
