A Buried Past Page 5

  “Can I help ye, miss?” he asked in a gruff voice. He was so bald that his head shone under the fluorescent lights. His name tag said Potter.

  “I was wondering if you had information on the Durward Street murder case,” I answered. “I heard on the news that no CCTV cameras were pointed toward the killer, but I just came from there, and the cameras are obviously in the right place, so—”

  “Are ye a reporter?” he asked bluntly.

  “No, I’m a private investigator.” I’d told that lie so often that it came out like the truth. “I’ve been looking into the matter—”

  “Someone hired you?”

  “No, but—”

  Potter walked off, deeper into the station. Since he hadn’t answered my question, I took this as an invitation to follow him. He lifted an eyebrow when he noticed me tagging along.

  “We can’t release information to the public,” he said. “Run along, miss.”

  I kept pace with him. “Is it true you don’t have any CCTV footage? Or do you believe the footage was tampered with? Is it possible the footage was deleted, or are the police trying to cover up their incompetence?”

  “Ye must make friends easily,” Potter replied sarcastically, lowering his robust figure into a desk chair. The chair groaned beneath his weight. “I can’t tell ye anything, miss. Please leave before I have to escort ye out.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but a familiar man burst past me, knocking me into Potter’s lap.

  “This is bollocks!” the charging man was saying, and I realized where I’d seen him before: that morning on the telly. “Who told the damned news we don’t have the footage? We look like idiots!”

  “Oi, get off me,” Potter said, lifting me up.

  But I was already out of Potter’s chair and following Chief Inspector Baker. A few officers trailed after him like pilot fish alongside a shark. Baker expressed his frustration through vigorous hand motions. As he moaned, his hands flew through the air. His subordinates ducked and swerved Baker’s emphatic jabs.

  “Shut it down,” he barked at no one in particular. “I don’t want the news all over this. If it gets out we don’t have any leads—sod it!” The inspector had accidentally hip-checked his desk in his attempt to sit down, causing a miniature earthquake. Files and paperwork went flying. A cup of pens tipped over and rattled away, spitting writing utensils across the floor. A glass paperweight rolled off the desk and shattered. “Bollocks!”

  I began to assume that was Chief Inspector Baker’s favorite word. His shoes crunched on the broken glass as he slipped out from behind the desk.

  “Someone clean this up!”

  As the inspector stalked off, a single constable stayed behind to right the desk. A folder balancing on the edge of the desk caught my eye. I bumped into the constable, turning him away from the file in the process.

  “Oh, sorry!” I said, keeping one hand on the constable’s waist as if to steady him while I grabbed the file and used my other hand to tuck it up the back of my jacket. “I’m so clumsy. Ask Constable Potter. I practically flattened him a moment ago. Toodles!”

  “Yanks,” Potter muttered, shaking his head.

  I slipped out of the station before anyone noticed the missing file. As I hurried toward Evelyn’s, I pulled the file out and flipped through it.

  It contained the inspector’s personal notes on William Lewis, the man who had been killed. My heart sank when I saw Lewis’s age. He was twenty-three. I read on, squinting to decode Inspector Potter’s messy handwriting. According to his notes, Lewis was a medical student, on his way to a shift at the Royal London Hospital when he was taken down by the killer. Ironically, Lewis had been shadowing consultants in the Trauma Surgery department.

  No amount of trauma knowledge would have saved Lewis from his wounds. Potter had included detailed descriptions of the attack. Lewis died from two cuts that severed his throat, but the attacker hadn’t stopped there. Lewis’s abdomen had also been jaggedly slashed open. Potter’s scribbled drawing was enough to make my stomach turn, but I couldn’t look away. The wounds matched the Ripper’s first kill, down to the finest details. The only difference was the victim’s gender.

  When I looked up from Baker’s notes, I found myself passing the Royal London Hospital. My route back to Evelyn’s had taken me straight to the hospital building. It wouldn’t hurt to go in, right?

  My feet carried me through the Accident and Emergency entrance without conscious thought. I shoved the file up my shirt again and zipped my coat to keep it in place. It was a busy evening for emergencies. The waiting room was full of potential patients.

  “Can I help you?” asked the nurse behind the check-in desk.

  “Yes, I’m Jacqueline Frye,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. Is there someone here I could speak to about William Lewis?”

  The nurse’s eyebrows furrowed together. Surely, she wondered why an American was investigating a murder in London. “We already spoke to the police about this.”

  “I’m not with the police,” I said. “I need the information for my own investigation. Is it possible to speak with someone who knew William?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You’re here about William?” A young man in a white coat emerged from the adjacent hallway. He could have been a doctor, but the absence of scuff marks on his polished loafers gave away his inexperience. “He was my best friend.”

  I turned away from the nurse and offered my hand to the young man. “I’m Jack. And you are?”

  “James.”

  “Do you feel comfortable talking about William?” I asked. “Maybe you could show me around the hospital?”

  “I’m on my way to a patient’s room.” James gestured for me to walk alongside him. The click of his loafers echoed through the hallways. “What do you want to know?”

  I turned on my phone’s voice recording app. “How long have you known William?”

  “Years,” he replied. “We grew up together in Bristol. We applied to the student program together.”

  “Did William have any enemies?” I said. “Anyone who would have wanted to hurt him?”

  “No, everyone loved Will,” James answered. “He was always a laugh.”

  We got into an elevator and rode up to the next floor, where we exited.

  “What about outside the hospital?” I asked. “Did William have any hobbies? Anything that might have gotten him into trouble. Drugs or drinking?”

  James checked a clipboard outside a patient’s room. “We grabbed a pint after work sometimes. William was a good boy. He never even smoked a spliff.”

  “Who do you think did this to him then?”

  James pretended to be intrigued by the information on the clipboard, but I could see his eyes watering. “I wish I knew. I miss my mate already. He texted me, you know? Right before it happened. I got on his case because he was late again. If he’d listened to me—” James sniffed and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his coat.

  “Can I see the text?”

  He pulled out his phone, but the conversation between the boys did not reveal anything at all. “You’ll find out who did it, yeah?” he asked. “We haven’t got much faith in the police, not after this whole CCTV fluke.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Behind James’s head, I caught sight of an analog clock. It was well past dinner time. I’d been gone for an hour and a half. I scribbled my number on the back of James’s hand.

  “If you hear anything, give me a call.”

  The lights were out in Evelyn’s flat. She wasn’t in the main room. The ingredients for dinner lay abandoned on the counter, half chopped. I felt for the thyme in my pocket. The leaves had fallen off the sprigs, making it hard to remove from my jeans.

  I peeked into the bedroom. Evelyn sat half-dressed at the foot of the bed, struggling to pull her shirt off with one hand. When she spotted me, she scowled and turned away.

  “Out of thyme, eh?” she asked. “Why do I get t
he feeling you went to Durward Street instead of the market?”

  “Good instincts?”

  “You lied to me.”

  When she winced, I rushed over to help her with the shirt. “I’m sorry. They were talking about the CCTV cameras on the news, and I had to know for myself if they were telling the truth.”

  She let me pull the shirt off and stared up at me with sad eyes. “I was worried about you. I expected you back in a few minutes, and you’re gone for two hours? Do you know how many scenarios went through my head?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I won’t do that again.”

  “And you’re done with this Ripper thing?” she asked.

  William Lewis’s file fell out of my coat and landed on the floor, spewing the investigator’s notes everywhere. That night, Evelyn slept with her back to me.

  5

  In the morning, I did my best to convince Evelyn I was through with the Ripper case. I cooked enough food to feed a small family and washed all of Evelyn’s clothes, along with the ones I’d already worn. I cleaned the flat twice. I put fresh sheets on the bed and individually shined the tiles in the bathroom. When every surface sparkled, free of dust, but I was still polishing countertops, Evelyn must have realized she needed to get me out of there. We spent the rest of the morning at a nearby coffee shop, chatting like normal friends and people-watching. One of Evelyn’s favorite things to do was make up stories about passing strangers.

  “Ooh, that girl there,” she said, jerking her chin toward a young woman strolling past the café. “She tells everyone her coat is from Burberry, but she only paid twenty quid for it. She wishes her boyfriend would propose and wants to dump him at the same time.”

  “Who hurt you?” I teased. As the girl paused to hail a cab, I looked her over. “The coat is Burberry, or it’s a good fake. I can see the signature plaid inside the sleeves, and those are designer buttons. Also, she’s wearing a ring.”

  Evelyn set down her tea and craned her neck to see. “Damn it. You’re right.”

  “You’re awfully terrible at reading people for a bodyguard.” I watched as the girl got into her cab and drove away. “Shouldn’t you be able to tell if someone looks like a threat or not?”

  “That’s a different skill,” she replied. “Besides, we’re taught not to rely on stereotypes. For all you know, that girl has a knife in her pocket and she’s on her way to stab her fiancé’s secret lover because she’s found out he cheated on her with the secretary at his office.”

  “How tragically specific.”

  “Look, here comes her boyfriend to stop her.”

  From the shop next door came a spindly man about the same age as the cab girl. He glanced wildly up and down the street, as if searching for someone, then ran off. His shoes, not meant for athletic activity, slid off his heels with each step, so he attempted to run flat-footed, which resulted in an awkward rocking gait.

  “He should have known better,” Evelyn said seriously, as if the story she’d made up for the couple was undoubtedly true. “That girl was way out of his league, and he gave it all up for the slutty secretary. Maybe she’ll forgive him.”

  “Have you forgiven me?” I asked her. “For running out last night?”

  We hadn’t talked about it yet. Evelyn could be hard to read when she wanted to be. Her stoic nature allowed her to hide a variety of emotions. She manipulated her entire manner—facial expressions, tone of voice, posture—to keep you from guessing what might be on her mind. This ability of hers made me often wonder about the nature of her secretive job.

  As if to demonstrate this skill, she put on a mask of indifference. Her gray eyes gave nothing away. “That depends,” she said. “What are you going to do with that file?”

  The file in question was currently hidden in the bottom of my suitcase, out of Evelyn’s sight. I half-hoped she’d forgotten about it, but forgetfulness was not in Evelyn’s nature.

  “I can’t exactly give it back,” I said in a low tone. For all I knew, a plain-clothed constable could be sitting nearby. “They would charge or arrest me for taking it in the first place.”

  “Perhaps that would persuade you from committing such acts of stupidity in the future,” Evelyn replied.

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “I did it on a whim, okay? I saw it there, on the edge of the desk, and it was so easy. I didn’t think about the consequences.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I’ll give it back,” I promised. “I can mail it—”

  “If you mail it, they might trace it back to me,” Evelyn cut in. “Is that what you want? To implicate me and put me out of a job? You know I have security clearances, right? If I get arrested for your mistake, my company won’t be able to employ me anymore.”

  She was still mad. Despite her controlled emotions, she couldn’t conceal the slight quaver in her voice at the end of her last sentence. Most people wouldn’t have caught it, but I had spent years studying Evelyn’s protective outer shell. Every once in a while, I found a crack in it.

  “I’ll go back to the station, then,” I promised. “I’ll say I found the file on the ground outside or something. Maybe if I dirty the pages—”

  “Forget it,” Evelyn said shortly. “They won’t believe you. Keep it hidden. We’ll figure out what to do with it if the time comes to do so.”

  “We?” I ventured.

  “Don’t push it.” She fiddled with the strap of her brace. “This piece of shite keeps digging into my neck.”

  My chair scraped as I got up to help. While I rearranged the strap to sit more comfortably against Evelyn’s collar, I noticed the woman at the next table over was reading an article about William Lewis’s death. It was dated that morning. According to the article, the police remained stumped and clueless about the homicide.

  Evelyn noticed my lack of attention to her brace and glanced over her shoulder. With her good arm, she pulled me back into my chair. “Enough already,” she said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Oxford.”

  Once upon a time, I dreamed of attending the University of Oxford. It was a place of paradise to me for many reasons. My mother had studied there, and she loved it so much that she became a professor to remain there. As a child, I admired her tortoiseshell glasses and smart blazers. She always smelled of the ancient libraries she spent so much time in, a scent that made me want to lay my head on her chest and never move. She always spoke of this piece of literature or that one and how they influenced modern books. Her field of study also included the English language, and I often found her reading texts of unfamiliar runes and words. Later, I discovered it was Old English and that my mother could translate it instantaneously.

  At Oxford, my mother met my father. He had traveled from New York to visit the Divinity School as a graduate student in religious studies. After an afternoon tour of the Radcliffe Camera, Nathan Frye encountered Priya Pearson at the café in the new library. She accidentally picked up his coffee instead of her own, and the rest was history—a complicated, messy history that resulted in having married parents, in an indefinite long-distance relationship, who resided on different continents.

  As the daughter of two scholars, it was natural for me to lust after Oxford’s academics as well. Evelyn and I had joined a class trip to the campus during our time at boarding school. We toured the lecture halls and various libraries, but I already knew every inch of the campus by then. I begged the trip’s organizer to let me visit my mother’s office, and when they said no, I snuck off to see her anyway. She was shocked when I showed up beside her desk and promptly returned me to the rest of my class. After that, I swore to myself I’d have the authority to roam Oxford unimpeded one day. Of course, the universe had its way and that day never came.

  “What did you want to study?” Evelyn asked as we packed the car with snacks, got on the road, and headed northwest.

  From Whitechapel, it took almost two hours to reach Oxford, but I didn’t mind taking the wheel. Evelyn usually protested agains
t road trips—her legs were too long for her to stay cooped up in a car for more than half an hour—but she encouraged this one. Anything to get my head off the Ripper case.

  “Archaeology and anthropology.”

  She knew this already. When I lamented about my lost potential, which I did often in the years following my mother’s death, I filled Evelyn’s ears with mournful proclamations of how much I desired to study the subject. At one point, when we were sharing a flat before I moved back to the States, she’d invested in a pair of noise-canceling headphones to drown out my repetitive complaints.

  “That’s right,” she said, as if recalling those moments between us. “I never understood why you thought humans were so interesting.”

  “I never understood how you don’t think we’re interesting,” I countered. “Have you studied evolution? It’s fascinating. Adaptation alone is such a bizarre concept. I mean, can you believe the human body is so capable of changing itself to fit the world around us?”

  “No,” she replied dryly. “Because we’re too busy trying to change the world to fit our needs.”

  “I meant back then.”

  She stretched her legs across the dashboard and watched the scenery rush by the window. “Is there anything anthropological that I would be interested in?”

  “You?” I thought about it. “Caribbean piracy? You always loved Elizabeth Swann.”

  Evelyn grinned and winked. “I think that had more to do with Keira Knightley than an interest in Caribbean piracy.”

  “Touché.”

  When Oxford came into view, an invisible band constricted around my heart. As I searched for a legal place to park, Evelyn studied me from the passenger seat.

  “All right?” she asked. This time, I knew what she was asking.

  “I haven’t been here since before my mom died.”

  “Should we turn back?”

  I shook my head. “We made it this far. I’m excited. This will be good for me.”