Whacked in Whitechapel Read online

  DCI Williams looked around. “I’m going to stay here until the crime scene people arrive, at least. Depending on how long that takes, I’ll either meet you at the office, or talk to you later.”

  Violet nodded and the two of us made our way back onto the street, heading back up toward Oxford Street to hail a cab.

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted Ed Harding dead?” I asked Violet, and she shook her head.

  “No, but seeing as the list of people who would steal the Ebola virus from a murderer and kill him does not include very many people that I would want to see have access to the virus, I think it is safe to assume that the terror threat level being raised to critical is not a mistake.”

  That definitely didn’t fill me with confidence.

  Chapter 8

  Anthony Roman worked in one of those huge glass towers in the city, at an investment firm called Fullerton Investments. The company directory that I looked up on the way indicated that he was an options trader, working out of an office on the forty second floor of the building. That he was above the people working in cubicles on the floor indicated to me that he was definitely not low down on the company hierarchy.

  Violet and I made our way to the forty second floor, where the elevators opened onto an expansive, almost to the point of being ridiculous, lobby. It was bigger than my entire apartment, and yet apart from a few plush leather chairs along one wall, with a glass coffee table in front of them, a plant in the corner and the receptionist’s desk, it was completely empty. The three walls were painted beige, with the fourth consisting of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the London skyscape. This was definitely a multi-million dollar view.

  The two of us strode toward the receptionist.

  “Hello, we are here to see Anthony Roman,” Violet told the receptionist, a prim looking woman who seemed to be in her late twenties.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked, pursing her lips.

  “We do not, no,” Violet replied.

  “Well I’m afraid without an appointment Mr. Roman will be unable to see you.”

  “I’m afraid you do not understand,” Violet told her, pulling out a police badge from her purse and flashing it at the woman. “This is a police investigation; I need to speak with Mister Roman now.”

  I tried not to stare too incredulously at the badge, and instead put on my most authoritative face.

  “Of course, one moment,” the woman replied with a slight look of surprise, picking up her phone and mumbling into it. A moment later she hung up, then stood up and motioned for us to follow her. “This way, please.”

  We followed the receptionist through a side door and down a hallway lined by offices on either side. Blue lights set a cool tone to the whole area, and the hardwood floor only added to the cold, crisp feel of the offices.

  “Where the hell did you get a police badge?” I hissed at Violet as we made our way down the hall.

  “I nick them from the detectives when they annoy me. I keep one on me at all times just in case of situations like this.”

  “You realize that’s probably illegal, right?”

  “Oh, very much so. But I only use the badges for good, so it is all right.”

  I rolled my eyes in exasperation as the receptionist stopped in front of a glass door behind which a man with black hair and eyes was furiously typing into his computer. She knocked curtly on the door twice, then opened it and let us through.

  The man motioned for Violet and I to have a seat while he continued typing for a moment. His L-shaped black desk had only a couple of files and pens on it; the majority of the space was taken up by three large monitors. The other side of the room was lined with a tall bookcase filled with books on trading theory, all leather-bound volumes. The windows behind Anthony Roman looked over London. He had such an incredible view, but always sat facing away from it. The chairs Violet and I sat down in were comfortable and modern, made of leather. About two minutes after we entered, he finally looked up at us.

  Anthony Roman was one of those people with a hard look to him; his face was angular, his eyes were cold and uncaring, like you’d expect from someone who worked in the cutthroat world of the stock market. His suit was obviously expensive, although next to him was an old handkerchief, probably a gift from his mother going by the feminine style, monogrammed AR, although the line in the ‘R’ had worn away making it look like it said AP. So he was good at his job, but he loved his mom enough to keep the memento from her. I was sure Violet could glean some sort of information from that, but I certainly couldn’t. All I saw was a man with a plastered on smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Hello, apologies. The markets have just closed and I was trying to get some last minute moves made. What can I do for two of London’s finest?”

  “Not a problem, thank you for seeing us,” Violet replied, shaking his hand. “I’m Violet Despuis, and this is my associate, Cassie Coburn. We were wondering if you could answer for us some questions about Edward Harding.”

  I didn’t know what kind of response I was expecting from Roman, but the one we got certainly wasn’t it. “Who?” he asked, confused.

  “He had an appointment with you three days ago at six pm,” Violet said. Roman typed away at his computer for a minute.

  “Ohhh,” he replied, nodding. “Yes, of course. Edward Harding came in here for a job interview a few days ago. I need a new assistant for a few months; the old one’s gone on maternity leave. Unfortunately he wasn’t a great fit.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us about him?” Violet asked. “Anything that stood out to you about him. Anything that he mentioned about his life. Trust me, it may be extremely relevant to our investigation.”

  Anthony Roman leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Well, to be honest with you, the man wasn’t that memorable. He mentioned a girlfriend, I think. She worked at a hospital, maybe as a nurse. I think he mentioned that in one of his answers. What else? He uh, enjoys watching the F1 on the telly. I think that’s really it for any personal information he provided. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  Just then, the door opened again and DCI Williams was shown in.

  “Ah, this is one of my esteemed colleagues, Detective Chief Inspector Williams,” Violet said, and I noticed DCI Williams giving her a sidelong glance as he shook hands with Anthony Roman.

  “Apologies for being late, I’ve just come from the crime scene,” DCI Williams said, taking the third chair in front of Anthony Roman’s desk.

  “Not a problem. I was just telling these two ladies that I really didn’t know Edward Harding, he had been interviewed for a job here a few days ago. He was rather unmemorable, I thought.”

  “Did you get the impression of there being anything strange about him at all?” DCI Williams asked, but Anthony Roman simply shook his head.

  “No, nothing of the sort. Quite frankly, I thought he was a decent enough bloke looking to make himself a bit of money on the side. His CV seemed normal enough; he’d done some office work for a few different companies in the UK over the years.”

  “So were you going to hire him?” DCI Williams asked.

  “Well, if I’m totally honest, no. I realize it’s not allowed and all that, but in the interests of helping you lot out with your investigation, I’ll be frank with you: I prefer my assistants to be a bit nicer to look at, if you know what I mean.”

  “You want a female assistant,” DCI Williams said, spelling out the obvious, and Anthony Roman shrugged.

  “This is such a high pressure environment, options trading. You can’t blame me for wanting someone nice to look at a few times a day,” Anthony Roman replied casually.

  “What kind of options trading do you do?” Violet asked.

  “Insurance and travel, mainly,” Roman replied. “I’m specialized. It’s better to know everything about one or two markets than eighty percent of all of them. I know you’re not really supposed to ask, but I have to know, is Edwar
d Harding in trouble? Because if it wasn’t for his, er, his looks, I might very well have hired him.”

  “He isn’t in any trouble anymore, I can tell you that much,” DCI Williams said. “Thank you for your time.”

  The three of us stood up and shook hands with Anthony Roman again–after his comment about wanting someone to ogle all day I did another button of my cardigan up before standing–and we headed back down the hall and into the elevator.

  “The receptionist at the front desk seemed to be under the impression that you two were with the police,” DCI Williams said as we headed back down to the ground floor.

  “As you are well aware, not everyone is capable of my own skills in the art of reasoning. It is not my fault if she assumed a fact that was incorrect.”

  “It’s funny you should say that, because she says you showed her a badge.”

  “Yes, they do sell those in children’s toy shops. The little boys, they love to play with the fake police badges.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” DCI Williams asked. “Wait, no, don’t answer that. I don’t know how you got the badges, but impersonating a member of law enforcement is a crime in this country. You need to stop doing it.”

  “It is all right, I only do it when I absolutely must,” Violet replied, and DCI Williams rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, yes, well if you absolutely must then that makes it all right,” he replied sarcastically, and I hid a smile, mostly just trying to blend into the back of the elevator. I wanted to stay as far away from this discussion as possible.

  “All right, I promise to avoid pretending to be a detective in the future.”

  “You’d better,” DCI Williams said. “I can turn a blind eye to a lot of things, but this is not one of them.”

  “I will call you in the morning,” Violet told the detective as we made our way out of the elevator and back onto the street. She hailed a cab and we climbed in to avoid the rain; apparently summer storms were definitely a thing in London this year.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked. “I feel like it’s the tenth time I’ve had to ask that today.”

  Violet smiled. “They cannot all be simple, the mysteries. But for now, there is nothing to be done. We go home, and I will do some thinking. Come to my place tomorrow morning, and we will discuss more. For now, you have a date to go on.”

  “Wait, how do you know about that?” I asked Violet. I hadn’t told her, but Jake Edmonds, one of the pathologists at the main morgue in London, was taking me out to dinner tonight. We’d been on a few small dates here and there, mainly getting coffee, and this was our first real going-out-to-dinner bona fide date.

  Violet shrugged. “It is obvious from the way you have been acting. All morning you have been idly fidgeting with your hair when we pass a mirror, and yesterday you returned home carrying a bag from Selfridges, which was too small for clothing, so was most likely filled with makeup. You are obviously going out with Jake.”

  “You know, some people might call what you do stalking.”

  “I do not stalk, I simply observe. It is not my fault that you make your habits and actions so simple to deduce.”

  “Fine,” I told Violet as the cab pulled up in front of her house; my basement suite was only a couple houses down the street. “I’m having dinner with Jake tonight.”

  “I know. Have fun,” Violet told me. “But do not spend the whole night with him; in the morning we will have work to do.”

  I opened my mouth to reply–I wasn’t sure if I wanted to deny that I was going to spend the night with Jake, or tell her that spending the night with Jake would almost certainly be more fun than trying to hunt down vials of a stolen virus, but before I got the chance to Violet simply waved and headed back to her house. I shook my head, laughing to myself at the absolutely insane attitude of hers, and then immediately set about getting ready for my date.

  After all, I had a man to impress.

  Chapter 9

  When I heard the knock on my door at exactly seven oh three at night I jumped about a foot. I’d been resisting the urge to check the front of the apartment every ten seconds or so, and he was finally here.

  I took a deep breath and glanced at myself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom one last time before heading to the door. I was wearing my new makeup, going for a slightly muted, natural look. The green sundress I was wearing brought out the dark auburn color of my hair. I looked good.

  I opened the door, flashing a smile at Jake as I let him into my apartment. He always looked good. Just a smidge over six feet tall, with wavy blonde hair and an easy smile that made him look like he belonged in a swimsuit ad rather than a lab coat. Right now, however, he’d dropped the lab coat in favor of slacks and a shirt that despite their loose fit couldn’t quite hide the fact that the body underneath was incredibly muscular. The fact that Jake spent his days hidden down in the basement of a public mortuary was pretty much a crime to humanity, as far as I was concerned. My eyes moved to the bouquet of beautiful white and purple tulips Jake had brought me, and the smile on my face widened.

  “Oh, they’re gorgeous!”

  “I’m glad you like them,” Jake replied.

  “I know I saw a vase in here the other day, let me put them in some water,” I insisted as Jake made his way further into my apartment. As I rifled through the cupboards in the kitchen–I knew I’d found the vase in there somewhere just a couple days ago–Biscuit wandered out into the main living room and toward Jake, purring softly.

  “Hey, little guy,” Jake greeted my cat, who rubbed up against his leg contentedly.

  “He has good taste in men,” I told Jake as he leaned down and began to stroke Biscuit’s head. Seeing the gorgeous glass vase at the back of a cabinet, I pulled it out, filled it with water and put the flowers in it. “Either that or he’s hoping that by being a suck-up you’ll bring him back something nice from the restaurant,” I joked.

  “Knowing cats, it’s probably the second one,” Jake replied with a smile as we headed out the door. I promised Biscuit I’d be home soon, giving him a small treat to placate him before we left.

  A fifteen-minute cab ride later Jake and I were seated at one of the rustic tables at the Flat Iron restaurant in Covent Gardens. Jake offered me the choice of sitting at either the long bench against the wall or the chair on the other side, and I chose the bench. The whole place felt like a modern version of an old ironworks factory from the Industrial revolution. The exposed brick meshed beautifully with the glossy black columns, but the round, sophisticated lights and well-restored wooden walls on the other side of the room gave the place a twenty-first century, clean feel.

  “So, anything interesting happen today?” Jake asked me, and I laughed.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Uh oh. Does that mean Violet’s dragged you in on one of her cases again?”

  “Definitely. Have you heard the news going around that some vials of Ebola that were being stored at the Royal London were stolen this morning?”

  “Of course. It’s the only thing anyone could talk about at work this afternoon. Do you mean that the two of you are trying to solve it?”

  “Well, we’ve solved part of it.” I proceeded to tell Jake the whole story of the day. By the time I’d finished, we’d both ordered the Flat Iron steak, some fries for a side and a large carafe of red wine. I finished by telling Jake about the rather unhelpful visit to the banker’s office and Violet getting scolded by DCI Williams for impersonating a police officer.

  Jake leaned back and let out a low whistle. “You should write a book about these stories,” he told me. “They’re insane. You just know the paper tomorrow’s going to run an article about how the vials were stolen by a man and a woman, and they’ll never know the full story behind it, or what went into actually solving the case.”

  “Well that’s one of the problems, isn’t it? The case isn’t solved. Sure, we know Ed Harding killed Anita Turner. But Ed Harding is also dead, and the Ebola vials we
re taken from his apartment.” I made sure to keep my voice low; the restaurant was filling up quickly and I didn’t want anyone to overhear our conversation. I realized to the casual bystander it probably looked like Jake and I were whispering sweet nothings to each other, rather than discussing an imminent terrorist attack. In a way I wished we were, but at the same time I liked that Jake was the kind of guy I could talk to about these things in a reasonable way without it being blown out of proportion.

  “You’re right,” he answered. “That is worrying. What are the two of you doing now?”

  I shrugged. “Violet is apparently going to spend the night thinking and doing whatever else it is she does, and hopefully in the morning there’ll be more of a plan.”

  “I hope so,” Jake said. “Well, I’ve never seen her fail yet, and I once had a body come in that had been sitting in the Thames for six weeks. She looked at it for five minutes, then told the detective on the case who to arrest for the murder.”

  “Ha!” I replied. “That does sound like her. What about you? Any interesting cases today?”

  Jake shook his head. “No, nothing of the sort. Actually I spent most of the day getting ready for a speech I’m doing for a handful of medical school students coming by in a couple of days.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “They had another pathologist scheduled, but he’s come down with a bad bug and rightfully doesn’t want to spread it around a whole class of students, so they’ve asked me to fill in.”

  “Does that mean we get to call you Professor Edmunds now?” I joked, and Jake stuck his tongue out at me.

  “That makes me sound like an old man. Nope, you can stick with Jake.”

  “Good, I prefer Jake anyway. What are you going to tell them?”

  “I’m just going over the basics of pathology, why they might want to consider it as their line of work when they become doctors.”