Page 2 of A Treacherous Trade
“You look terrible,” was his eventual verdict.
“I meant, tell me something useful and relevant, you addlepate.” I pushed myself from my seat and turned my back on him, stalking to the bookshelves that dominated his walls.
Were I a hedgehog, my quills would have stood on end, and I did everything in my power to advertise that I was prickly with impatience andnotself-consciousness.
I crossed my arms over my tender middle and gave his enviable collection of fiction undue examination.
Croft and I had been at odds ever since he’d held me captive, spitting and screaming, as I discovered the mutilated corpse of my dearest childhood friend, Mary Kelly. He’d objected heartily when the landlord offered me money to clean Mary’s blood and offal from the anemic, moldy rooms off Dorset Street, once her body had been carted away by the coroner.
And he’d renewed those objections as I built my career doing that very thing for so much of the greater London area for nearly three years now.
The dead often left a terrible mess behind… and I could get blood out of just about anything.
One would think I’d be used to Croft’s brusque brand of brevity after so long. And yet I’d allowed him to provoke me with this opportunity afforded by a murder in Whitechapel, and also by a droll comment on my dreadful appearance…
Of courseI looked no better than ghastly. In the past handful of months, the love of my life had been stabbed to death in front of me by a man well-deserved of his vengeance. On top of that, Jack the Ripper—my sworn nemesis—had taken to sending me cryptic letters from his throne in Hell. One such missive solved the murder of several copycat killings in his name. Another had been attached to a journalist the Ripper claimed to have butchered formybenefit.
Now, only I and two other souls knew the perpetrator of the three officially unsolved Ripper-esque killings, and evidently I was the only one of the trio cursed with a conscience.
For months I’d been nothing but a creature of grief. But eventually, guilt had seeped through the mortar of my melancholy, and driven me out onto the cobbles in search of the absolution that only came to a true-born Irishwoman, such as I, through confession.
It’d be a cold day in Hell before I confessed to a priest again, but I’d truly planned to unburden my soul to one of Scotland Yard’s most relentless detectives. I’d come to inform him that my business as a postmortem sanitation specialist wasn’t the sole reason I could afford my lovely rowhouse in Chelsea. Indeed, my skills had been conscripted for one of the most notorious criminals of the London underworld, “the Hammer,” and his prolific assassin, “the Blade.”
Inspector Croft had three open murder cases I could close with the whisper of one name.
A name it would kill me to malign.
But I’d come to do just that, ready to consign my fate to his large, square hands—astoundingly callused for a man with a desk job, I noted.
However, he’d ruined my plans to do so by intimating that more dead working women in Whitechapel had invoked the terrifying name at the top of the suspect list.
The Ripper. The man I’d vowed to search for while I still had breath in my body.
And instead of granting me the subsequent details, Croft told methis?
That I look terrible?
Did he assume I didn’t own a mirror? That I couldn’t see for myself that my auburn hair had lost its luster? That my wan flesh merely haunted my skeleton because grief had frozen my blood as sluggish as the Arctic and stolen my appetite for living, let alone food? My lips had drawn thin, and color deserted them. Freckles that had once danced across my nose paled, lending doubt to the notion that the sun ever kissed me at all. Dimples had lengthened to lines, bracketing an ever-present scowl.
Even my fashionable dark woolen winter gown and velvet cloak couldn’t hide how bitter and brittle I’d become. Yes, I knew all this, and I didn’t bloody care.
“Is it him?” I asked the tomes, wishing I couldn’t feel his eyes on my back. “Is it Jack?”
“Fiona, if it were, don’t you think the city would be on fire with the news of it by now?”
How would I know? I had no idea when the murders had occurred. Yet he seemed to think I might. He’d intimated that it was his sister who’d summoned me.
But I’d found him home alone.
A strange coincidence, that.
“Where is Miss Croft?” I queried. “Should she not be here?”
I wouldn’t mind a reprieve from being alone in the inspector’s lair. The rest of the house boasted a decidedly feminine touch, enriched by the aroma of vanilla and baking bread. These scents permeated the study as well, intermingled with a darker spice and the clove tobacco the inspector was so fond of.
He took this scent with him into the world, and it had always befuddled me because it matched him not at all… and somehow simultaneously complemented him.
Which was irritating in the extreme.
