Whacked in Whitechapel (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  “We are not nowhere; we are in a taxi taking us back to London. And in London is a club where we know that the murderer spent time only the night before last. We will go there now, and we will hopefully discover more than we knew.”

  I sighed inwardly. If we couldn’t find any information about the man from Anita Turner’s home, what chance did we have at a club that he’d visited once a couple of days ago?

  Chapter 6

  100 Club on Oxford Street had an unassuming, tiny entrance. The entire entranceway on the street was the width of two standard glass doors, topped by a stained awning that had at one point probably been bright red, but was so dirty it was almost a maroon color. The plastic sign above the awning had faded into more orange than red, but despite the shabby outward appearance I was well aware that this was still one of the most legendary clubs in all of London.

  The interior looked like one of those classic music venues where you just immediately knew things happened. Music history happened here. The Rolling Stones played a secret warm-up gig here back in the eighties, and the Sex Pistols recorded a live album there once as well. The walls were painted bright red, with a big white ‘100’ sign from floor to ceiling behind the stage. The room was small and cramped, and a little bit dingy looking. Lights and cables hung from the low ceilings, framed photos of times past lined the walls. It was the sort of place that made you wonder how on earth it got to be one of the most famous music venues in all of London.

  The manager was at the bar, along with a woman with a sleeve of tattoos and more piercings than the crowd at a Van Halen concert. The manager was short and plump, however, the tattooed woman was tall and thin, and hung over like crazy from what I could tell.

  “Excuse me,” Violet asked the woman. “Were you working, the night before last?”

  “I sure was, hon,” the lady replied in a thick American accent.

  “There was a man here,” Violet told her, holding out her phone with a photo of him. “Do you recognize him?”

  The woman took the phone from Violet and looked at the photo for a minute, her brows furrowed. “Yeah,” she replied finally. “Yeah, he was here. I’ve seen him a few times, usually when we have a heavy metal band here. We had a group from Finland playing that night, he seemed to be enjoying himself.”

  “We should still have the camera footage from that night if you’d like to have a look,” the manager told us from where he was working on some documents, and Violet and I readily agreed. The woman nodded and took us to the office at the back which was filled with papers piled so precariously on one another I made sure not to touch anything; it looked as though a gentle breeze would bring the whole thing crumbling down and bury us. It would take them weeks to dig through and find our bodies.

  “Okay, here’s the computer, let me open up our security program,” the woman told us, clicking a few buttons on the screen and bringing up the night. “There,” she said. “I’ve set it up for you. There’s four screens there, one for each camera. Use the mouse to rewind and move forward, if you just wanna move a couple seconds at a time the back and forward arrows on the keyboard will move the footage back five seconds, and spacebar will pause it. I’ll be at the front, lemme know if you need anything.”

  Violet sat down at the computer and I stood over her shoulder while she moved through the footage. It was very high quality, and in color. We’d gotten lucky! About ten minutes after the show started I recognized ‘Ed’ from his gait. I let out a cry and pointed him out to Violet, who nodded. He first appeared on the outdoor camera, entering the right side of the frame. A second later he walked into the building and a few seconds later appeared on the screen that showed the main stage area. This time his face was fully visible; he had brown hair and a small nose. His mouth was curled upwards in an almost permanent smirk. I wasn’t sure I’d call him traditionally handsome, but there was something about his face that seemed attractive somehow. He was wearing slacks and a polo shirt with a small stain on it. Ed walked to the bar, where he ordered a drink, then bobbed along to the music for a while. He got five drinks in total, and unfortunately, paid for them in cash. At one point he went out and had a cigarette, and I couldn’t help but notice the self-satisfied smile on Violet’s lips when it happened. When the show ended, he left once more, this time for good.

  “Well that was disappointing,” I said, letting out a sigh, and Violet smiled.

  “Au contraire, I think we now have enough information that we will be able to find him.”

  “Of course you do,” I replied, amazed as always at the information that Violet could glean from something so simple as watching a guy enjoy a rock concert. “Please, share your secrets.”

  “Did you notice the stain?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Ummm… wine?” I guessed, and Violet shook her head.

  “No, no. A stain like that, the bright pink, unnatural color can only come from sweet and sour pork from a cheap Chinese restaurant. There is no other food on earth with that shade that I can only describe as being radioactive.”

  I smiled at Violet’s overdramatics. She wasn’t a fan of anything remotely unhealthy; I imagined cheap Chinese food fell firmly into that category.

  “Ok, so he had Chinese take-out before he came here. So what?”

  “So, he obviously lives within a few blocks of this club.”

  “I like how you use the word ‘obviously’ like it’s obvious to both of us and not just to you.”

  Violet sighed. “Look at his shirt. It is very slightly damp, and the bottom legs of his pants as well.” I squinted at the screen and noticed she was right.

  “Wow, that’s very light rain indeed.”

  “Exactement. That night it rained, but it was reasonably light. You will notice that he did not bring an umbrella. There are two underground stations nearby, but it was raining heavily enough that had he walked from there he would have been wetter than that.”

  “What about the bus?” I offered, but Violet shook her head.

  “Did you see a bus pass on the street just before he entered? No, you did not. And it is the same thing with the taxi. A taxi would have parked directly in front of the camera to drop him off. No, he came on foot, and he must live approximately, I would say, one hundred meters of the 100 Club in order to have got as wet as he did.”

  I threw up my hands. “There have to be like, a thousand people that live within a hundred meters of here.”

  “Yes,” Violet nodded, “But a lot less than that bought cheap Chinese food the other night.”

  “Ohhhh,” I said, realizing where Violet was going with this. “You think he bought the Chinese from somewhere near here.”

  “I do,” Violet said. “Ed is not a young man. He would appear to be in his late thirties, perhaps early forties. He is not of the demographic to use a delivery service such as Deliveroo or JustEat; he would likely have found a Chinese food place near to his home that he enjoyed, and visited it regularly.”

  “So now we just have to visit all the Chinese food places around here. There can only be what, like a hundred of them?”

  “Well, it is not so difficult as that. We are on the border right now of two neighborhoods, Fitzrovia and Soho, that are very–how do you say–posh. The Chinese restaurants around here are not the type to have sweet and sour pork on the menu. They are very much more into the gastronomie around here. In fact, I can think of only two restaurants two hundred meters around here that would make the type of Chinese food that Ed had two nights ago.”

  “Maybe there are more that you just don’t know about,” I offered.

  “There are not,” Violet said matter of factly, and I smiled to myself. It looked as though our next stop was going to be much more delicious than this one!

  By the time we reached Red Dragon Kitchen, a hole-in-the-wall tucked away in the tiny basement underneath an old bookstore, my stomach was really grumbling. After all, it was nearly noon, and I
’d skipped breakfast on account of thinking Violet had been in the hospital when I ran out that morning, and I’d passed on the cafeteria food.

  I placed an order for the lunch special–two spring rolls, fried rice and lemon chicken–while Violet spoke to the owners.

  “Does this man order from you often?” Violet asked, showing them a picture she took of Ed from the 100 Club security footage. Unlike the hospital photos, this one showed his face very clearly. The woman, around fifty years old and from China, shook her head.

  “No, I don’t know. But my son, he does the deliveries.” She shouted something into the kitchen in Mandarin and a minute later a bored looking teenager came out. His eyes immediately moved to Violet’s cleavage and he perked up considerably. The mom said something to him again and he held out his hand for the phone, which Violet handed to him.

  “This man, yes, he gets delivery. I dunno, maybe once every two weeks or so.”

  “Do you remember where you deliver it to?” Violet asked, her eyes gleaming.

  “Yeah,” the kid said slowly. “Yeah, he lives in one of the flats on Great Chapel Street. He ordered a couple nights ago, I can get you the exact address,” he said, rifling through old delivery slips. A minute later, we had it: 20 Great Chapel Street, Apartment C.

  “That’s only about two blocks from the club,” Violet said triumphantly. “We have him.”

  “There’ll be time for self-congratulation later,” I told Violet. “Right now, let’s go get him, and the virus he stole.” We thanked the family that owned the restaurant and went back into the street.

  “I do not know why you are so concerned with Ebola,” Violet told me, looking at my container of Chinese food, which was now half-empty. “The chemicals that you willingly put into your body are far worse than any virus can be.”

  “When eating a bowl of Chinese food has a fifty percent chance of killing me between six and sixteen days after I’ve eaten it, get back to me,” I replied, taking a big bite of a delicious spring roll. Violet rolled her eyes, muttered something about E-coli and salmonella, and I followed her for the five minute walk to Great Chapel Street. She texted someone, presumably DCI Williams, to tell him what we’d found.

  I was really, really hoping we were going to find the missing Ebola vials in that apartment, still sealed.

  Chapter 7

  Number 20 Great Chapel Street housed a music store on the bottom floor, with the exterior painted a deep blue color. The apartments above weren’t much to look at from the outside: the plain bricks were painted white, which somehow made the building look worse for wear than had they kept the original brick colors. The interior wasn’t that much better. It was small and narrow, and Violet easily broke into the apartment C, on the top floor.

  The kitchen was tiny, featuring a half-size stove, a sink with two empty beer bottles in it, a bar fridge and about a foot of counter space to work on. A miniature window in the corner gave a view of the next street over. The linoleum tiles covered the whole apartment, including the bedroom–featuring one double bed that hadn’t been made–and the living room whose furniture consisted of a small desk in the corner with a laptop on it, a single sofa and a small TV. The walls had been painted an off-white color, and had absolutely zero decorations.

  I didn’t notice any of that when we first came in, however. No, my eyes were immediately drawn to the body of ‘Ed’, lying on the floor. He’d been shot in the head.

  “We’re not going to find the Ebola here, are we?” I asked Violet, who shook her head.

  “No, I do not think we will.”

  Still, Violet handed me a pair of latex gloves from her purse and I put them on while she did the same, and we searched the apartment. Violet looked in the most obvious place–the fridge–while I searched the tiny bathroom and the bedroom. It was strange; Ed owned about three shirts and maybe two pairs of underwear. If I didn’t know any better, I would say it seemed he didn’t live here at all.

  “Find anything?” I asked her when we both finished our search, and she shook her head.

  “No. No virus, at any rate. The Ebola is gone.”

  “Great,” I said, sitting on the couch and letting out a sigh while Violet went to the computer. I knew she was a good hacker; in less than a minute she’d cracked the password and was scrolling through files. The Chinese food was settling badly in my stomach, but I certainly wasn’t going to let Violet know that. She was arrogant at the best of times; I didn’t want her knowing that her warning about the Chinese food being bad for me was right as well.

  About ten minutes later DCI Williams and a few other police officers arrived at the apartment. When DCI Williams saw what happened to Ed, his face was grim.

  “Any sign of it?” he asked, and I shook my head.

  “None. We had a look, but we didn’t move the body and we wore gloves.”

  “Good,” DCI Williams said, nodding. The same officer who had almost arrested us at Anita Turner’s apartment was now standing over the body.

  “Are we sure he hasn’t died from Ebola?” the man asked. “Shouldn’t we have a hazmat team come and have a look at the body just in case?”

  “Admittedly, I am not a doctor,” Violet said without looking up from the screen, “But even my amateur knowledge of medicine allows me to say with confidence that a gunshot wound is not, in fact, a symptom of Ebola poisoning.”

  “Oh,” the man said, his ears going red. I saw the other constable trying to hide a smile.

  “Perhaps, Constable Carson, you should go outside and set up the police line. After all, this is a crime scene now. And please notify the investigations unit, as well as the morgue so they can send people over.”

  “Yes, sir,” Constable Carson muttered, embarrassed, as he made his way outside.

  “Can you tell anything about the murderer or the victim yet?” DCI Williams asked Violet.

  “Give me a minute,” she replied, making her way to the body. I watched as Violet knelt down, looked at the wound, looked at the floor, wandered around the apartment and eventually made her way back to where we were standing and stood up tall.

  “The killer was likely a male, one hundred and eighty-five centimeters or so. Six foot two,” she continued as DCI Williams opened his mouth to ask for the measurement in feet and inches. “The killer was invited into the home by Ed–the name he is using, by the way, is Edward Harding. That much is obvious from the markings on the floor near the front door. You can see that there are marks that come from a size ten Adidas running shoe on the tile, whereas Ed’s only pair of shoes are size eight loafers. There are traces of the water the man’s shoes dragged in all over the apartment, including the kitchen. If he had broken in, why would the killer bother to have a beer with the man he was about to kill, as is evidenced by the two empty bottles in the sink.”

  I shook my head at the things Violet was able to deduce just from looking around this sparse apartment. “That is all I can tell you about the killer. Edward Harding, on the other hand, is almost certainly not the man’s real name, although it is the one he had been using for at least the previous year or so. The computer correspondence also confirms that he was seeing Anita Turner. I suspect that this is not his only residence, and that he keeps at least one other elsewhere in London. He also had an appointment with a man named Anthony Roman at an investment firm in the city three days ago at six o’clock in the evening.”

  I’d noticed the post-it note on the fridge with the name, date and time on it. I wondered what it meant. “Also, the murderer almost certainly took the samples of the Ebola virus. If you look inside the refrigerator, you will notice that every inch of it is full, save for a space on the middle shelf that is precisely the size of the insulated box in which Ed took the virus from the hospital.”

  “So you can’t tell me the name of the murderer right now?” DCI Williams asked, looking slightly dejected.

  “Well, I only discovered the body twenty minutes ago,” Violet replied. “I am more intelligent than mo
st people on the planet, but I am still not a miracle worker.”

  “That’s the most humble thing I’ve ever heard you say,” I replied.

  “Give me time. I will find the killer, and I will find the vials of the virus.”

  “Good,” DCI Williams said. “We’ve managed to keep it out of the press for now, as far as I know, but it won’t be long before someone gets wind of what’s happening, and then we’re probably looking at full-out panic all over London. Already the terror alert level has been raised to critical by MI5, which means the public will be demanding answers as to why a terror threat is imminent.”

  “Speaking of MI5, I assume you were the winner of the penis-waving contest to determine who gets the credit when I solve this case?” Violet asked, causing DCI Williams to roll his eyes.

  “If you must know, I spoke with the head of their internal terrorism department,” DCI Williams replied. “When they learned that you were already on the case, he seemed less than eager to send his men out once again, after the way you embarrassed Agent Tompkins the last time.”

  “Oh, le pauvre. I suppose I hurt his feelings. Well, I did warn him that I was better than he was.”

  “So now the pleasure of investigating this potential terrorism threat is all mine,” DCI Williams replied. “All because a friend at the Whitechapel Safer Neighborhoods Team Station needed some time off and I took over his work for a week. However, you should know that MI5 is monitoring this case very closely, and I am reporting to both my own superior and theirs.”

  “Ah, but it is lucky for you that you have endeavoured to solve this case,” Violet replied. “When I solve this case, you will be the one receiving all of the credit for stopping a terrorist attack on British soil, regardless of the intentions of the thieves.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll have taken five years off my life at that point,” DCI Williams replied.

  “Only because you do not have faith in me. I have found the thief, and the killer.”