“You, Frye,” he barked. “Come with me.”
I lunged to my feet as Stowick unlocked the door. “About damn time. How’s my friend Evelyn? Did you check on her like I asked?”
Stowick chuckled under his breath. “Did you think you were getting out of here? You got another thing coming, miss. Follow me.”
Bewildered, I followed Stowick out of the holding cell and into another room, one with a single desk, a lamp, and a two-way mirror. A laptop rested on the desk.
“Is this for investigations?” I asked. “What are we doing in here?”
Stowick gestured at someone behind the two-way mirror. A moment later, another officer came in and dropped a backpack onto the desk. I stared at it.
“That’s mine,” I said.
“Excellent deductive skills,” Stowick remarked.
“You can’t take my things!”
Stowick sat on one side of the desk, folded his hands together, and grinned. “Don’t you remember, Miss Frye? You gave us permission to search your items.”
“What the hell are you on about?” I growled.
“You asked us to check on Miss Evelyn Gray in room 209 of the Royal London Hospital,” Stowick reminded me. “One of my officers did as you asked, and I’m happy to report that Miss Gray is fine. She’s awake, alert, and asking about you.”
The update on Evelyn’s condition came as a slight respite from the tension holding my body so tightly wound, but my anger quickly returned. “I gave you permission to check on Evelyn, not go through my things. The backpack?”
“Your knapsack was in Miss Gray’s room, partially opened,” Stowick explained. “My officer happened to see something in your bag that worried him. He called me and explained the situation, and I asked him to confirm.”
“Confirm what?” I spat.
Stowick slid my backpack across the desk. “Why don’t you pull the zipper open for me, Miss Frye?”
I roughly grabbed my bag. “All you’re going to find in here is a few empty bags of crisps. I don’t know what you think you saw—” I unzipped the bag and fell quiet as William Lewis’s and Rosie Brigham’s stolen files poked out. I’d forgotten I’d brought them along on the stakeout.
Stowick pulled out the Lewis file. “This went missing from the chief investigator’s desk at the beginning of September. Would you like to explain how it ended up in your knapsack?”
“I—I don’t—”
“You don’t know?” Stowick’s grin widened. “Because Officer Potter remembers you perfectly. He said you pestered him about the case then knocked a bunch of files off the inspector’s desk. We have security footage of you sliding this file under your jacket before slipping out of the station.”
“I’ll believe that when I see the footage,” I said stoutly.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Stowick replied. “I have a few movies I’d like to watch with you.”
He opened the laptop and pulled up a video player. Three files popped up, each labeled by date. He clicked on the first one.
The video was from the day I’d harangued Officer Potter at the police station near Whitechapel. The footage showed me tapping Potter on the shoulder then hounding him around the room. My attention shifted when Inspector Baker walked in and upset his desk. The files went flying. I hurried away from Potter, distracted the constable in charge of cleaning the desk, and—plain as day on the surveillance video—stole the file and shoved it up my jacket.
Stowick hit the pause button. “Believe it now?”
I said nothing. It would do no good to defend myself, and without a lawyer present, I’d probably get myself into more trouble.
“Nothing to say, eh? How about this one?”
He clicked on the second video, and another security feed, this time from the hospital, played in the open window. There I was, lingering outside the supposedly locked file room. Matthew Thompson emerged from the room, and I grabbed him. We spoke briefly before he handed me Rosie’s file from beneath this shirt.
I let my eyes drift shut. I knew what it looked like: that I had hired Matthew to sneak into the hospital’s record room to take Rosie’s file.
“What’s that look like to you?” Stowick asked.
I remained quiet.
“Still not talking, eh?” Stowick shook his head. “Fine then. This last one should do the trick.”
He clicked on the final video, which was from the CCTV cameras located in Mitre Square. The angles covered the front door of the bank building and the access to Mitre Passage. Eira Kent appeared from the building, put on her coat, and hurried into the alleyway. I kept my eyes peeled on the shadows to the right of the passage, waiting for the killer to follow her. He never came. The next person the video showed entering Mitre Passage, after Eira, was me.
I spoke at last. “That’s not right.”
“Sorry?”
“You’ve tampered with the footage,” I accused Stowick. “You’ve cut out the killer.”
Stowick’s nose wrinkled. “What are you on about? This is straight off the CCTV records. We’ve got you running after the victim into the alleyway where she was attacked. You might as well admit that you took a knife to her throat.”
“But I didn’t!” I cleared my throat and tried again in a calmer tone. “If you didn’t alter the footage, then someone else did, because I wasn’t the first person to follow Eira. The killer went in before me. I saw him.”
Stowick played the video again. “Point him out.”
“He was here,” I said, gesturing to the shadowy area on the right. “He’d been standing there in the dark the entire time. Your team couldn’t see him. Neither did I, not until he followed Eira. He waited for her to go into the passage then went after her. I chased after him, afraid he would kill her.”
Stowick pressed his lips together as he watched Eira, then me, head into the passage. No sign of the killer. He rewound the footage and
