Stabbed in Shoreditch Read online

  Stabbed in Shoreditch

  Samantha Silver

  Blueberry Books Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Also by Samantha Silver

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I was pretty used to weird things when I walked into Violet Despuis’ house, but today, she’d taken crazy to a whole new level.

  It had been about a week since I’d heard from her, so I decided to stop by her place – it wasn’t exactly a long trek, being just down the street from mine – and make sure everything was ok. After all, I couldn’t help but think in the back of my mind that there was a very real chance that one day someone would try to kill her.

  In fact, I’d been around a few times when that very thing had happened.

  When I knocked on the door, there was no answer. She also hadn’t replied to the five text messages I’d sent her over the last couple of days. Great. I really hoped my friend’s lifeless body wasn’t in there, but at the same time, I was a bit nervous about breaking into Violet’s home. After all, I would absolutely not have been surprised if she had the place booby trapped.

  I sent Violet a text asking where she was, but when five minutes later there was no reply, I decided it was worth the risk. What if she had simply been injured in an attack and was inside, needing help? I had to make sure everything was fine.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have Violet’s skill at breaking into places. She was admittedly far better at that sort of thing than I was.

  I considered my options, then went with the old-fashioned way: taking off the scarf I was wearing – it was getting to be pretty cool in London these days as summer began to wane and fall made its appearance – I wrapped it around my hand, had a look down the street to make sure no nosey neighbors were having a peek at what I was doing, and quickly punched a hole through one of the panes of glass of Violet’s front door, wincing as the sound of shattering glass filled my ears.

  Hopefully, it wasn’t as loud out on the street as it seemed to me; I was pretty sure someone was going to call the cops on me. After all, this was one of London’s nicer neighborhoods.

  Still, there was no time to think about that now. I quickly slipped my hand through the new hole I’d created and unlocked the door, then opened it about a hundred times more carefully than I would have anyone else’s door.

  I was half expecting some sort of Indiana Jones-inspired booby trap, like having a giant boulder roll down the stairs to crush me, or having flaming arrows come out from the ground towards me, but there was, strangely enough, nothing.

  I shook my head, incredulous. Violet Despuis was probably the best detective in the world, had made, surely, thousands of enemies – in both the criminal world and in the police force – and yet by all appearances all she used to protect her home was a simple deadbolt?

  Surely, even Violet wasn’t that insane.

  “Violet?” I called out carefully as I entered her house. I knew my way around it, of course. I just didn’t know if I was about to fall through the floor into a pit of spikes or something.

  I heard some sort of movement coming from the living room, the room off to the right of the front door. Inching my way towards it, I turned the corner and let out a scream of surprise and terror.

  There was a komodo dragon in Violet’s living room.

  Why?

  A split second later, I realized that to my immense relief, the large reptile was actually in a cage. He stared at me with his big, lizard eyes, and I turned around and high-tailed it out of there as fast as I could. I was definitely not going to share the living room with a freaking three-meter-long lizard.

  Where on earth was Violet, and why was there a komodo dragon in her living room?

  Talk about questions I didn’t expect I was going to ask when I woke up that morning.

  “Violet? Are you home?” I called out again, more loudly this time. Again, there was no response. Shaking my head, I decided to check out the second floor of her house before making my way past the prehistoric monster in the living room to get to the kitchen.

  As soon as I got to the top of the stairs I opened the door to the room on the right, the guest bedroom, but a quick scan told me it was empty.

  Making my way back out into the hallway, I realized my heart was beating at over a hundred and fifty beats per minute. Was this how people in horror movies felt before something – in my case an oversized lizard, maybe – ate them?

  No. That lizard had definitely been in a cage, and he probably couldn’t get out of it, or he already would have.

  Making my way further down the hall, I went into Violet’s bedroom. It was surprisingly well made-up; I had assumed that Violet was the sort of person who wouldn’t really worry about things like making the bed in the morning, but it turned out I was wrong.

  But again, there was no sign of her. She definitely wasn’t here.

  “Violet?” I called out again, just in case. The door to the ensuite was closed, and despite my apprehension, I made my way towards the door.

  “Please don’t let there be anything too creepy in here,” I whispered. I didn’t know what I was more afraid of right now: finding Violet’s body slumped in the bathtub, or finding a family of cobras or something living in it.

  I opened the door about a foot and almost had a heart attack.

  Penguins! The bathroom was full of little blue penguins. There had to be half a dozen of them, and as soon as I opened the door they began to gakker at me – I was fairly certain I was being told to get away from their territory.

  They were absolutely adorable, despite the fact that they apparently thought I was intruding on their turf. Their fat little bodies gawked at me as I cooed towards them. This was definitely an improvement on the scale of random animals to come across in someone’s home.

  Still, the penguins offered absolutely no insight as to why Violet’s home was filled with animals, nor where Violet might have been.

  I closed the door to the bathroom and backed out of the room slowly. I wasn’t actually one hundred percent sure that I wasn’t in some sort of weird, real-life horror movie.

  I also wasn’t sure I wanted to see if there were any other animals anywhere in the house.

  Penguins, a komodo dragon… what was next? A tiger in the kitchen? I shivered at the thought.

  Wondering if I should leave this house of horrors, pretend I’d never been here, and call DCI Williams so that the police had to go through this place to see if Violet was alright, I began making my way back towards the stairs, having a good, hard look before I left the bedroom to make sure the komodo dragon hadn’t gotten out of his cage, looking for a tasty, Cassie-sized snack.

  When a voice called up to me from downstairs, I nearly had a heart attack.

  “Allo? Cassie? Are you here?”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered to myself as Violet’s voice carried up the stairs.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I shouted back as I practically sprinted to the stairs. When I got to the landing I looked down to find a slightly amused Violet Despuis looking up at me. “Are you ok?” I asked breathlessly. My relief at finding her stand
ing there, apparently in perfect health, was mingling with the confusion related to her new roommates.

  “Of course I am fine, why would I not be?”

  “I’ve sent you like five texts over the last few days and you haven’t answered any of them.”

  “Ah, I apologize. I was busy. I was going to respond later this afternoon.”

  “Do you know there’s a komodo dragon in your living room?”

  “Kyle? Yes, I am aware.”

  “It has a name?”

  “Of course he has a name, the employees at the London Zoo name all of their animals.”

  “Well, my next question was going to be where did he come from, and I guess if I think about it, the zoo is probably somehow the most reasonable answer to that question. Still… why is Kyle in your living room?”

  “He is awaiting transport back to the zoo.”

  “Why was he in your living room in the first place?”

  I had so many questions. So, so many questions.

  “Well, after I discovered who the thieves were, it was paramount that the rescued animals were kept in a safe location. Where is safer than my own home?”

  I shook my head. Violet was unbelievable.

  “What if I’d come in here and he’d gotten out of his cage and was just wandering around the living room?”

  “Then you would have never broken into my home again. I think Kyle makes a very good guard lizard.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I am not the one who committed a crime by breaking into someone else’s home.”

  “I was checking to make sure you weren’t dead, since you weren’t replying to texts.”

  “You know me well enough you should know I would not be dead.”

  “How did you know it was me, anyway? You shouted out my name?”

  “You were sloppy in the breaking of the glass; there were a few red and orange fibers in the shards of the window from that scarf you have been wearing for weeks.”

  I sighed. I should have known that I wouldn’t manage to break into Violet’s place without her figuring out it was me, instantly.

  “Ok, so there’s the dragon, and there’s the penguins upstairs. Do I need to worry about getting my face mauled if I go into your kitchen?”

  “Mauled? No. Although, do be careful if you do choose to do so, as the meerkats currently in there are rather quicker than you might expect.”

  Meerkats. Of course there were meerkats.

  “So, uh, why have you decided to open up a new branch of the London Zoo, anyway?”

  Violet gave me a look that screamed ‘you should know already’.

  “Do you not read the papers? My goodness, Cassie, you must really stay up-to-date with what is happening in your city.”

  “The news is depressing,” I replied. Plus, I wasn’t about to admit to Violet that I’d spent the last few days holed up at home trying to avoid decision-making and being an adult. Not when Violet was out doing, well, whatever it is she had done that resulted in her house becoming a makeshift zoo. I’d received three acceptance letters from different medical schools in London, and to be totally honest, I’d kind of found them overwhelming, which led to holing myself up in my apartment and ignoring the fact that there was an outside world for a few days.

  “Just because it is depressing does not mean you should stay unaware. In this case, robbers had stolen multiple animals from the London Zoo, likely with the intention of smuggling them out of the country and selling them on the black market. Kyle was one of the unfortunate victims, and the penguins and meerkats are some of the others. The rest have been returned to the zoo already, except for one raccoon who escaped before I was able to rescue them, and they are sending someone to pick up Kyle and the other animals later today.”

  “That’s… actually a surprisingly believable reason,” I replied. “Anyway, I think today took about five years off my life, so I’m just going to go ahead and go home now.”

  “You are not,” Violet ordered. “I know you. You are going to take your slightly unpleasant experience and use it as an excuse to order something incredibly unhealthy. You have gained what, four pounds since I saw you last?”

  “Three,” I muttered in reply.

  “No, it is closer to four.” Ok, fine, Violet was right. It was closer to four, I just didn’t want to admit it.

  “You know, I don’t think the person with a giant lizard in their living room should be commenting on my life choices.”

  Before Violet had a chance to reply, however, we were interrupted by the doorbell ringing. Thank goodness. I really hoped this was the person from the zoo ready to take Kyle out of here.

  Chapter 2

  Unfortunately, I was nowhere near that lucky. When I opened the front door – I was closer to it than she was – I was expecting to find the kind of burly, muscular-looking guy, possibly with an Australian accent like Steve Irwin that one would expect to come pick up a komodo dragon, a bunch of meerkats, and a small colony of penguins.

  The person standing in front of me, however, was female, no taller than five foot one, with dark hair framing a pale face. She wasn’t what I had expected, but who was I to judge.

  “Hello, are you Violet?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “Um, no, but she’s here. Come in. Are you here about the animals?”

  “Animals? What? Um, no. I was hoping to be able to speak to Violet.”

  “Oh, um, ok,” I replied, suddenly aware that if the girl wanted to speak to Violet and wasn’t here about the animals, she was also going to see Kyle. “Follow me, and uh, don’t worry about the komodo dragon in the living room. He’s securely locked in that cage.”

  At least, I hoped he was.

  On the bright side, if Kyle escaped, there was one more person I’d hopefully be able to outrun before he ate me, first.

  I led the girl into the living room, making sure to steer well clear of Kyle’s cage at the far end of the room. The girl eyed the cage warily, but to her credit, she simply sat down on the couch where I motioned for her to sit, across from Violet, who sat in an armchair, casually giving the girl the once-over.

  She probably knew what elementary school the girl had gone to by now. I was getting ready to turn and go when Violet motioned for me to sit down on one of the chairs as well.

  I did so, and as soon as I sat, Violet spoke.

  “So, you are here for help?” she asked the girl.

  “Yes,” the girl replied. “You’re Violet?”

  “I am,” Violet replied. “This is my assistant, Cassie. Please feel free to speak freely in front of her, and me. We are very discreet, I assure you.”

  The girl let out a small laugh. “Well, I can’t say discretion is particularly necessary in this case. My brother’s life has been all over the papers already.”

  “You are Isabella Knightbridge, is that not so?” Violet asked, and the girl nodded.

  “See? Even you already know my name. You probably know why I’m here, too.”

  Great. Of course everyone in this room knew what was going on except for me. I had no idea who Isabella Knightbridge was, who her brother was, or why she was sitting in this room talking to Violet.

  “I have an idea, but I do not like to – how do you say – jump to conclusions. Please, tell me everything, assuming that I know nothing of your brother or his situation.”

  Isabella closed her eyes for a minute and took a deep breath, obviously thinking hard about the words she wanted to say.

  “Alright,” she finally nodded. “Ten months ago, my brother’s girlfriend, Melissa Carnegie, was murdered in her home. The police investigated, and three days later they arrested my brother for her murder. He was tried, and convicted, and given a life sentence with a minimum term of twenty-five years. But the thing is, I know Tom didn’t do it. He’s innocent, and no one believes me when I tell them. No one is investigating. After they arrested him the police told me it was up to the Crown Prosecution Service to do anything about it, and t
he CPS won’t return my calls anymore. He told me the evidence proved my brother was guilty, and there were no two ways about it. No one believes me, and I have no one else to turn to. You’re in the papers. They all say how good you are at detecting. I beg of you, please find proof that my brother didn’t do this.”

  “Why do you believe in your brother’s innocence?” Violet asked, leaning forward in her chair. “After all, if I remember the papers correctly, there were allegations of abuse in the home, were there not? A woman is far more likely to be killed by her domestic partner than anyone else.”

  “Those stories were lies. I know, it’s normal for a sister to say that, but believe me. I work in social services. I know the signs of abuse, and if I thought for a moment that Tom was abusing Melissa, I would have helped her get as far away from him as possible. But the thing is, Melissa played hockey her whole life. At school she was the captain of her team, and she kept it up as an adult. So yes, that picture of her with a giant bruise on her arm was real. But it didn’t come from Tom; it came from an opponent’s hockey stick.”

  If I didn’t know any better I could have sworn I saw just the tiniest flicker of a smile on Violet’s face.

  “So you want me to prove your brother is innocent?”

  “He must be!” Isabella pleaded. “You’re my last hope. No one will listen to me. They all think Tom is this monster, but he isn’t. He is the kindest, gentlest soul you’d ever meet.”

  “And if I were to look into the case, and determine that your brother is, in fact, guilty?” Violet asked.

  “Then I’ll have to live with that, and I’ll accept that his sentence is the right thing. If he really did kill Melissa, then he deserves to be in jail.”