“Can you go tell her I like her?” she muttered.
“Who?”
“Alba,” Evelyn said. “It’s not her fault I’m injured. Go apologize and tell her she’s doing a great job so far.”
“Why don’t you go tell her?”
Her cheeks turned pink. “Because I’m embarrassed, all right?”
After completing Evelyn’s favor, we passed an independent bookstore to pick up reading material. Evelyn chose a book about a martial arts form she hadn’t learned yet. I yearned to find the newest documentation on the Ripper, but with Evelyn’s disapproval burning like the hot sun into the back of my neck, I picked a random murder mystery instead. Since we couldn’t spend every day touring London like a couple of foreigners, we needed things to do at home other than stare at the TV. Evelyn had a bad habit of binge-watching crappy horror films. No matter how poor the quality, those sorts of movies always gave me nightmares. Unfortunately, no amount of reading material could keep Evelyn from her terrifying addiction.
“It’s not real,” she reminded me that evening as she turned on the telly to continue the latest series she’d been watching. Her book lay facedown, the spine broken. She had already read half of it, and I suspected most of the pages were full of figures and diagrams of how to complete the moves rather than actual words. “Demons and ghosts, yeah? They don’t exist.”
“How can you be sure of that?” My eyelids dragged each time I blinked. That afternoon, I’d fought off a nap, hoping to nix the last bit of jet lag holding me down, but as I chopped an onion with a sharpened chef’s knife, I began to rethink my decision. I curled the tips of my fingers under, protecting them from accidental amputation. “There are things about the world we don’t know, like if other life forms exist. Do you believe in aliens?”
“I think it would be naive of the human race to assume we are the only intellectual beings in the universe. Is that the same thing?”
“Sure, good enough.” I finished dicing the onion and moved on to a bulb of garlic. “What’s the difference between believing in ghosts and believing in aliens?”
“Science,” Evelyn replied matter-of-factly. “It’s like you said, we don’t know everything. We’re constantly discovering something new, in the oceans, in space. As advanced as we are, we don’t have the tech to explore further.”
“In that same vein, perhaps we don’t have the tech to discover that demons and ghosts are real yet?”
Evelyn rolled her eyes. “I forgot you can debate your way out of any corner.”
“It’s one of my best attributes.”
“Debatable.”
I lifted my wineglass in a toast to her. She responded by turning up the volume of her show. On the screen, a small man with narrow shoulders and enormous glasses that dwarfed his face crept through a dark alleyway.
“He’s a goner,” Evelyn predicted.
I couldn’t help but watch. As the man turned a blind corner, the camera angle flashed, and the killer whipped a knife across the character’s throat. Fake blood—too pale to be mistaken for the real thing—splattered across the alleyway in fat spurts. I wrinkled my nose.
“That is not how blood moves when someone’s throat has been cut,” I said. “It spurts at first, but then it dribbles down. It doesn’t splash everywhere like that.”
“I don’t like that you know that.”
To avoid getting sucked into the unrealistic show, I put in my wireless headphones and propped my phone against the backsplash to watch the news. While I minced garlic, the same reporter from that morning gave me an update on the kill.
“The police refused to give any more updates,” said the reporter, “after they announced there is no CCTV footage of the murder on Durward Street. Police are saying the cameras installed were not pointed in the right direction to capture the killer during this act of violence.”
I drifted toward the window and looked at the street. From this height, I spied at least three sets of cameras on Evelyn’s street alone, covering every angle. You couldn’t sneeze without those glass eyes watching you. It seemed impossible that a killer could get away with such an ostentatious act.
I pulled my apron off over my head and dusted my hands. “Hey, Evelyn? I’ve got to run out real quick. I forgot thyme, and this dish doesn’t taste the same without it.”
“Didn’t you buy that yesterday?”
The thyme itself was perched on the shelf above the stove. I shoved the herbs into my back pocket. “I used it all. I’ll be back soon.”
In the dribbling rain, I walked from Evelyn’s flat, past the nearby market. Alba’s warning not to go wandering around in the night and Baker’s advice to exercise common sense echoed in my head. Curiosity yelled the loudest, though. It nipped at my heels, herding me toward Durward Street. I should have been scared by how few blocks lay between the site of the murder and the place I was staying, but I didn’t feel like I was in danger. If the new Ripper stuck to his schedule, the Whitechapel locals wouldn’t need to worry for another week or so.
The crime scene tape was gone. The police must have cleared all the evidence in the alleyway. If it wasn’t all over the news, I would have never known someone had been murdered here a few nights ago. I always expected something to linger—remorse or fear—but nothing triggered an emotion in me. It was just an alleyway.
I looked up. At either end of the street, a set of CCTV cameras watched as people rushed home from work or ran errands. I stood in the same spot as I remembered the crime tape to be. From my location, two different lenses focused on me, glinting in the drizzle. A team might have come out here to adjust the cameras after the police discovered the blind spot. Or perhaps there had never been a blind spot.
I caught a whiff of the crushed thyme in my pocket. It made me smell
