Old Kohler seemed a bit frightened by her fierceness and involuntarily stepped back:
"Liv, this is a detective sir. He wants, he wants to help you find Daisy."
Liv's face, covered with wrinkles and peeling skin, turned to Klein, and she said coldly:
"We've already called the police."
She might be only in her thirties, but she looked nearly fifty.
Klein glanced around the room hung with many wet clothes. He vaguely remembered that when he was here last time, there was a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl who was carefully holding a crude, homemade iron, ironing the wrinkled, dried clothes, and her hands had many burn marks on them.
So she is the "missing" Daisy... Klein turned back to the laundress Liv and said in an emotionless tone:
"Do you believe the police in the East End will actually put effort into finding Daisy?
"Are you sure that the people who caused Daisy's 'disappearance' won't turn their attention to your home?
"Do you want to lose another daughter after losing one?"
The cruel but piercing words reached the ears of the laundress Liv. Her cold expression gradually crumbled. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and the corners of her eyes turned red.
She suddenly buried her head and muttered painfully and despairingly:
"I have no money..."
The room suddenly became quiet, and even the sobbing girl stopped.
Klein pursed his lips, let out a silent sigh, and said:
"I occasionally do volunteer work, just to help others. Ha, it's been a long time since I did it. Please give me a chance."
"Volunteer?" Liv raised her head, chewing on the word.
Klein nodded slightly:
"This commission is free. No, it's not completely free. Acts of kindness bring me great satisfaction.
"Anyway, you have no other options. Why not give it a try?"
Liv was silent for a moment. She raised her hand, which was wrinkled and swollen from long immersion in water, wiped her eyes, and said in a low voice:
"Detective, you, you really are a kind and good-hearted gentleman..."
Her voice suddenly choked:
"...The thing is, two days ago at noon, Freya led Daisy to deliver a batch of washed clothes. It was just outside the East End, and they had to go several streets.
"To make it back for lunch, Freya chose a quiet alley, but she only looked away for a moment, and she found that Daisy, who was following behind, had disappeared.
"She went back the same way to look for her, but she never found her, and Daisy never came back."
"Freya, where was that?"
The girl named Freya had already stood up, her eyes red and swollen.
She sobbed and said:
"It was, it was at Broken Axe Alley, detective. Will Daisy be okay?"
"Hopefully," Klein replied without much expression.
He looked around and then asked:
"Does Daisy have any items she often carries? I can borrow a police dog. It has an excellent sense of smell and can track down a person by their scent."
"...No." The laundress Liv thought for a moment and said sadly.
The girl Freya shed tears again, feeling that the matter seemed to have reached another dead end.
Suddenly, she blinked and said:
"Yes, there is one thing.
"Daisy's word book!"
"Word book?" Old Kohler repeated beside her.
Liv sniffled and said:
"I let Freya and Daisy go to the free night school. I can keep washing clothes, but they, they can't stay like this forever."
This woman is really a good mother... Klein couldn't help sighing.
The free school was a night school established by the three churches or some charitable organizations. Classes were from eight to ten in the evening, completely free, even providing writing tools and a certain amount of paper. It was literacy education, at most covering some religious knowledge. Old Neil once taught at the free school of the Goddess of Night for a few years, and Klein had heard some details from him.
——Because there were few volunteers to be teachers in free schools, a unique teaching model had formed. The teacher arrived early, first gathered the best-performing students, taught them the content for the day, and then they were responsible for teaching in different classes, while the teacher patrolled, correcting mistakes. This was called the "monitorial system."
Corresponding to free schools, there were also free organizations like technical workshops. These were the few channels that the truly poor could access to escape their social class.
Unfortunately, there were too few such organizations; they were a drop in the bucket and could hardly play a substantial role.
At this time, Freya sobbed and added:
"Daisy loved learning very much. She had already been appointed as the monitor of her class. She would collect the papers where she copied words, sleep with them under her head and hugging them every day, and then get up early to go to the street outside and recite them in the morning light. She always regretted that there were no street lamps nearby..."
As she spoke, Freya rushed back to the bed and took out a stack of wrinkled papers from under the tattered pillow.
Because of the long-term humid environment, the words copied on the paper had spread a bit.
The edges of the paper were worn, as if they had been flipped through frequently.
"Detective, is, is this okay?" Freya handed Klein the so-called word book, which wasn't even bound, with both hands, and looked at him eagerly.
"Yes," Klein replied very concisely.