Whacked in Whitechapel Read online

  “Bring a centrifuge and do show-and-tell. I know when I was back in medical school, all the guys especially loved the centrifuge. Telling them they get to play with it regularly would be a huge plus.”

  “Well I only get to use a centrifuge occasionally, but I get your point. It is really fun to play with. Don’t tell my boss I said that. And definitely don’t tell him that we sometimes play with the expensive medical toys in our downtime.”

  I laughed. “When I was in undergrad a few of us had managed to sneak some peas into a class and put them in a centrifuge for about half an hour.”

  “Oooh, peas, I’ve never tried those. What happened?” Jake asked.

  “They separated into three separate layers. There was a liquid layer, a butter-like layer, and a solid layer.”

  “Interesting,” Jake laughed. “Anyway, if you’re not too busy saving the country you should come if you want to. I’d be interested in getting an honest opinion about whether or not I’m the world’s worst promoter of pathology as a medical specialty.”

  “Well, I’m not going to lie, I probably can’t give you an unbiased opinion,” I replied. “As far as I’m concerned you make everything sound sexy. But I can come and have a look for sure. Let me know when and where, I’m sure even if we haven’t solved the case by then Violet will be able to do her thing without me for a few hours.”

  “Thanks,” Jake replied, shooting me a grateful smile as the waitress came by with our steaks. “I’d appreciate it. I’ll try and make cutting dead people open sound even sexier than usual, just for you.”

  I almost spat out the sip of red wine I’d been drinking as I held in my laugh. “You’re a crazy person, you know that?”

  “I do,” Jake replied with a wink. “Anyway, it’s not the sexiest date ever, but I figured maybe after we could grab a bite to eat or something. It’s short notice, the presentation is two days away.”

  “Sounds good,” I replied. “I guess we’ll either have caught the thieves by then, or we’ll be overtaken by a disease that will probably not kill an enormous number of people but certainly will spread panic and chaos all around the city.”

  “In which case they’ll probably cancel my talk anyway,” Jake joked.

  “Exactly, so if it’s on, I can make it.”

  “You’re the best,” Jake told me as he dug into his steak.

  An hour later we left the restaurant and slowly meandered our way through Covent Garden, arm in arm, until we passed Gelatorino and decided that since it was summer we deserved a cool, late night dessert. “Oooh, I’m getting salted caramel,” I announced, ordering a single scoop, while Jake went for the double–one scoop of cookies and cream, one scoop of gianduja.

  “What?” he said, seeing me eyeing his bowl. “Half the reason I work out is so I can eat as much ice cream as I want.”

  “You’re truly a man after my own heart,” I replied. “I’m just lamenting the fact that my metabolism doesn’t function nearly as well as yours. But of course, calories from your bowl don’t count!” I added, pouncing toward him and dipping my spoon into his bowl, grabbing a big scoop of the gianduja and eating it.

  “Hey! That’s so unfair!” Jake said, and he chased after me as I ran down the street, giggling and shrieking like a schoolgirl. Something about Jake brought the playful side out of me. Jake caught up to me easily, wrapping his arms around me when he did.

  “You can’t steal a man’s gelato,” Jake told me, sticking his spoon in my scoop and eating it himself.

  “Is that a rule, is it?” I asked.

  “It is. It’s the most important rule. First, no stealing gelato. Second, no cheating.”

  “I like your priorities,” I told him as we made our way back down the streets once more. We fell into a comfortable silence, enjoying each other’s company, until finally, with the night sky upon us we decided to call it a night.

  “Do you want me to come back to Kensington with you?” Jake asked as he hailed me a cab.

  “You’re going the other way, aren’t you? No, I’ll be fine. Thanks though,” I told him, taking him by the hand and looking deep into his gorgeous blue eyes.

  “Well then I’ll just have to do this here then,” Jake replied, leaning down and kissing me on the lips. Electricity instantly began to course through my body. For a split second, it was like someone had taken my breath away; like time stood still. Then, almost instinctively, my body reacted as I leaned into the kiss. I pressed my body against Jake’s and closed my eyes as his lips enveloped mine. I wished this moment would never end.

  Just then, the cabbie that had pulled up leaned on the horn.

  “You want a cab, or not?” he shouted out the window, and Jake and I pulled away from each other, both of us laughing at the awkwardness of the situation.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Jake said as he opened the door for me.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “Tonight was great.”

  “We’ll do it again soon, hopefully with no interruptions next time,” he replied as he closed the door behind me.

  I was positively glowing the whole way back to Euston Road.

  Chapter 10

  One thing I’d learned from being involved in solving cases with Violet Despuis was that she had no concept of either time, or personal space when she was working on a case. I got home from the date, and while I knew that she had told me to come by her place the following morning, I was equally aware that I could wake up in the middle of the night to Violet being in my apartment, telling me we had to go out and rob a bank or something in order to solve the case. So when my alarm went off at eight am the next day and I still hadn’t gotten a middle-of-the-night visit from Violet, I happily pressed the snooze button and rolled over. Biscuit meowed his annoyance at me daring to try and get a little bit more comfortable, and I enjoyed the warmth of the blanket for another nine minutes before the alarm went off again and I forced myself out of bed.

  After all, there was a terrorist to catch.

  An hour later I had showered and blow-dried my hair, Biscuit was happily munching on his breakfast, and I grabbed my purse and headed out the door to Violet’s place, wondering what the day was going to bring.

  When I got to the front door of Violet’s house, just a few down from my own, there was a note on the front: Cassie, do not bother knocking, just come in.

  I shrugged and took the post-it off the door as I opened Violet’s front door and made my way into her study. She was at her computer, speaking in French with a man whose face filled her computer screen.

  “Mais vous savez que je n’aurais pas dû vous donner cet information, et si on me demande, je dirais que vous mentez,” the man said in a stern tone.

  “Bien sûr que je comprends. Vous n’avez pas à vous inquieter,” Violet replied before cutting the connection and turning toward me.

  “Ah, Cassie, good morning,” she said, a wide smile spreading across her face.

  “You look happy this morning,” I told her, taking a seat on the small sofa that lined one side of the study. “Does that mean you know who stole the Ebola and killed Ed Harding?”

  “Mais non, not yet. But I am happy, because thanks to the contact of mine who you have just seen who works at Interpol, I know exactly who Edward Harding really is.”

  “Oh yeah?” I replied, my interest piqued.

  “Yes. It is nice, knowing people. Especially when they owe you. There was an event in Budapest, in which the French government was going to be quite embarrassed. I prevented it, and now there are people in that administration who owe me, including Jean-Luc, with whom I was speaking. Edward Harding is in fact, Artie Ingram,” Violet announced gravely.

  If Violet had been expecting me to gasp dramatically, or drop my mouth open, or have any sort of reaction to that pronouncement at all, she was severely disappointed. “Who?” I asked, and she sighed and shook her head.

  “It is truly a testament to the man’s invisibility that his name is not known throughout the world. Artie
Ingram is one of the world’s most successful thieves. However, he was never active in the United Kingdom until now. His activities were mainly centered in eastern Europe.”

  “And your guy at Interpol is sure it’s him?”

  “Yes. He is as certain as it is possible to be, at any rate. There are not many photos of Artie Ingram available publically, but with the good photos we were able to get at the 100 Club, Jean-Luc was able to determine with almost one hundred percent certainty that our man is Artie Ingram.”

  “But that doesn’t help us,” I complained. “We know who he is, but he’s already dead.”

  “That is true, but everything is helpful,” Violet told me. “After all, we now can have a better idea as to why the Ebola was stolen in the first place.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well Artie Ingram has never shown any sort of political affiliation or leaning. He has stolen from people on the right, and from people on the left. A person’s politics does not seem to affect him in any way. He is purely a money man. If a theft can earn him a significant sum, he will commit it. If not, well he will pass.”

  “So for Artie to have gotten involved in the theft of the Ebola vials, there would have had to be money in it for him; he didn’t necessarily want to cause a panic himself.”

  “Exactement,” Violet nodded. “Which means that we now know that either someone paid Artie to steal the virus, or, what I find to be more likely is that he discovered that the virus was to be stored at the Royal London for a few days and stole it with the intention of finding a buyer afterwards.”

  “And the buyer screwed him over by killing him instead of paying him, and taking the vaccine with them?”

  “Précisement. That is the most likely scenario at the moment.”

  “So now all we need to do is find the person or people Artie Ingram planned on selling the vials of Ebola to, and we’ll have likely found our murderer.”

  “Yes, that is what we will do now. I do not believe he used his real name; I believe Ingram used the Edward Harding identity nearly all the time while in England. He likely had other identities, most of which we will not know. I spent most of the night looking through Edward Harding’s computer–I took the liberty of copying his hard drive when we were at the apartment–and I think I know where we can start to look.”

  “Great, this is going to involve breaking laws, isn’t it?” I asked. Violet’s methods of solving crimes seemed to involve committing them a lot of the time.

  “Not immediately, but do not fear, the day is still young. We may have to break into somewhere before the day is out!”

  “Fantastic,” I muttered as Violet grabbed her purse and we headed out the door.

  Chapter 11

  “Where are we going?” I asked Violet when we got into the cab.

  “We are going to visit an acquaintance of mine. She is the center for criminal information in all of London. If something worth knowing has happened in this city, she knows of it. She will know that Artie Ingram was here, and she will likely be able to point us in the right direction. I was hoping that it would not come to this, that I would be able to solve the case without consulting her, but alas, it seems inevitable, and in the interests of time we will go and visit her. I will warn you, however. Lily Hunter is rather strange in her mannerisms.”

  “Wow, if you’re warning me about someone acting funny then it must be true,” I joked, and Violet laughed.

  “It is true, I am practically normal compared to her.”

  “You know the weirdest people.”

  “She is not only strange, she is also dangerous. The Black Widow of England, she is known as in some circles. It had long been rumored that she murdered her husband, although there was never any evidence that his death was anything except natural. Now she spends her days dealing in information. She is a consulting criminal, for the lack of a better phrase.”

  “But then doesn’t that mean she might be behind what happened?” I asked, and Violet frowned as she shook her head.

  “No, I do not think so. I know her well, the Black Widow. This is not the sort of thing she does. It is too high profile. It has too great a chance of coming back to her. However, we will see what she knows.”

  Just then, the taxi stopped. I wasn’t sure where I was expecting us to be. I supposed in my head I was expecting us to be at a big, looming office tower, or maybe a house worth tens of millions of pounds. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see the statue of Achilles indicating that we were at one of the entrances to Hyde Park.

  Violet and I walked along the small paths, separated into lanes for those walking and for those on bicycles. The day was warming up quickly; it seemed the few days of summer showers we’d been experiencing were over, as despite the fact that it was barely ten in the morning, I was already feeling a bit hot. Luckily the huge, leafy trees in the park offered substantial shade.

  “I honestly didn’t expect her to be here. This seems so… public… for a criminal mastermind.”

  “What is better?” Violet asked. “In a world where the police attempt to listen in on every conversation, where is a better place to hide than in plain view? For the Black Widow, the police can get a warrant to tap her phones, to tap her house even. But how do you tap the entirety of a public area? You cannot. You would never get a warrant for it. There are CCTV cameras in Hyde Park, yes, but they are not everywhere, and the Black Widow knows exactly where to be to avoid them.”

  “It still seems very open,” I said, looking around. There were hundreds of people and families, spread out along the lawns, having a stroll, taking their bikes out for a spin.

  “What the regular people do not care about is absolutely phenomenal. She would not be here if it was not completely safe for her,” Violet replied as we curled around and joined a path that ran adjacent to Serpentine Lake. We were now fully in the sun, on a wide promenade. I took my sunglasses out of my purse and put them on; Violet was already wearing her pair of mirrored lens Oakleys. About three minutes later I noticed a woman feeding the ducks. She wasn’t tossing them bread; she had a mixture that looked like oats, corn and peas. She had the confident posture of a woman who knew where she was going in this world. Her black hair was tied back in a braid that ran nearly halfway down her back, with a few loose strands floating in the slight breeze coming off the water. As we made our way toward her, a cacophony of quacking erupted as the ducks tried to find a middle ground between avoiding the strange new humans and still getting some of the food they were offered. The woman looked toward us, and a small smile crept up onto her face.

  “Violet Despuis,” she said in a perfect high English accent. She sounded like she could have been best friends with the queen. “It has been quite some time since I have seen you.”

  “And you, Lily,” Violet replied. The electricity between the two of them was practically palpable.

  “You got yourself a pet, how adorable,” Lily Hunter said, looking toward me. I rolled my eyes in her direction. What kind of person insults someone like that? “Oooh, and she has an attitude. I like her. American, yes? And a doctor as well. I see she’s recently had undiagnosed depression as well, but it’s passing. That must have been your little project, was it not?”

  My heart was suddenly gripped with fear. How the hell did this woman know all this stuff about me? Sure, if what Violet said was true about her knowing everything, she could have heard that Violet had a new friend from America who’d trained as a doctor. But the depression? All of that? No one knew that except a select few people in my life.

  “You never did do too well in the summer months. It is ironic that the heat gets to you, what with you being the devil and all. But Cassie is not a doctor, not quite. She had trained as one, but she does not have the certificate.”

  “Oh, it must have been the car accident then,” Lily replied. “How silly of me.”

  I tried not to look surprised or scared. This woman was a bully, nothing more. I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted
, and she would go away. That was how bullies operated. But I couldn’t deny the fact that inside, I was actually worried. How the hell had this woman known so much about me? There was only one person I knew who could do that, and she was standing right next to me. Surely there couldn’t be two women out there with that same weird ability.

  “We are not here to discuss the changes in my life,” Violet told Lily. “I need information on Artie Ingram.”

  “Ohhh, congratulations,” Lily said, breaking into a big smile. “I really didn’t know how long it was going to take you to get that far.”

  “You always did underestimate my skills. It is your biggest weakness.”

  “I do not underestimate your skills; it is simply that mine are better. You know the difficulty of determining the speed at which the normal people discover things. I have that same difficulty with you.”

  The two women were being so incredibly polite, but there was a tenseness there; it was obvious they had a history.

  “I need to know who hired Artie Ingram to steal the Ebola virus.”

  “And why would I possibly tell you that?”

  “Well, it is obvious that appealing to the goodness of your heart is pointless, as you do not have one.”

  “Usually, when a person wants something from another, they make it a point not to insult that person.”

  “You and I are both well aware that there is nothing ‘usual’ about the two of us.”

  “Fine,” Lily said, the small smile creeping up her face once more. She was pretty, but the smile was incredibly creepy, like the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a horror movie just before someone dies. “I have some information that could possibly be useful. What do you have to offer me in return?”

  Violet reached into her purse and pulled out a small box. “You can have this.” She handed the box to Lily, who fingered it gently.

  “Ah,” she said happily, closing her eyes. “Yes, that is a nice bribe. If I am not mistaken, there is a Fabergé Egg inside of this.”