“Whoops,” I said, steering away from the center of the aisle. “Sorry about that—”
“Miss Frye?”
I looked up from my cart and found the owner of the opposing buggy was William Lewis’s mother, Linda. By the set of her thin lips and furrowed brow, she was none too pleased with me.
“Mrs. Lewis!” I said, doing my best to keep my tone and expression cheerful. “How are you doing?”
“How am I doing?” she demanded. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks! Then I see your picture on the news in conjunction with the Ripper case. You’re not a private investigator at all, are you? Just another scam artist trying to take advantage of an old woman.”
“No, Mrs. Lewis, I had no intention of scamming you,” I insisted. “I really was trying my best to get to the bottom of your son’s death, but some complications arose—”
“Don’t try to swindle me again,” she said. Her increase in volume had begun to attract other shoppers. They lingered at both ends of the aisle to watch our confrontation. “I want my money back!”
After our initial interview, she had wired me two hundred pounds as an advance for my investigative services—two hundred pounds I had already spent on taking care of Evelyn.
“I don’t have your money, Mrs. Lewis,” I said weakly.
She boiled like a kettle, her cheeks red with rage. Without warning, she whacked me with the plastic box she kept her coupons in. “You—disgust—me—terrible—woman!”
I fended her off as best as I could until I accidentally knocked the coupon box from her grasp. When it hit the floor, the box popped open and spewed coupons across the aisle. Mrs. Lewis cried with fury.
As Mrs. Lewis repeatedly rammed my buggy with hers, one of the concerned onlookers summoned a market employee. The manager—a stern woman with curled gray hair, wearing dungarees with the name of the shop embroidered on the front—grabbed hold of Mrs. Lewis’s buggy.
“Enough of that,” the manager said firmly. “What’s going on here?”
Poor Mrs. Lewis, in her fit of anger and grief, pointed at me and announced, “She’s the Ripper!”
Pandemonium ensued. Mothers and fathers abandoned their groceries to carry their children as far away from me as possible. Others closed in around me, shouting insults and threatening to “take care of me.”
“It wasn’t me!” I said hotly. “The police released me! I saved Eira Kent.”
Nothing I said helped the situation. The manager couldn’t keep the angry shoppers at bay. Someone pushed past her and grabbed my arm. Another onlooker seized me around the waist. As they yanked me away from my buggy, a voice boomed over the crowd.
“Out of the way! Move! Get away from her!”
My father, all five feet and ten inches of him, pushed the shoppers apart. When he saw the two men who had me in their grasp, he froze in place. The look on his face was terrifying, as if he intended to rip out my captors’ throats with his teeth.
“That is my daughter,” he said, his voice rumbling at the back of his throat. “Let her go, or I will break your fingers off and shove them up your arseholes one by one.”
The men released their grip on me and ran off, as did the other shoppers. Dad pulled me into a hug, the first one we’d shared in many years, and I gratefully sank into his protective embrace. Over my head, he addressed the manager.
“She is not a criminal,” he said. “The police have said so themselves. You should not allow those people to continue shopping here.”
The manager babbled an apology and scurried away, though I doubted she would heed my father’s word. If anything, she was about to call the police and inform them of the scuffle.
“This is why I haven’t let you go out alone,” Dad said, finally letting me go. “I was afraid something like this might happen. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just shaken up a little. Can you stay with me while I finish shopping?”
“My pleasure.”
Like the other shoppers, Mrs. Lewis had disappeared. Though it was her fault I’d been manhandled, I didn’t blame her. She had her reasons. She was a mother in mourning, and I hadn’t helped her in the way I’d promised. I either owed her two hundred pounds or the identity of her son’s killer. Unfortunately, I had little money and no new leads to go on.
“Evelyn needs hand soap,” I said, turning down the aisle of cleaners. “She likes lavender. Is that okay with you?”
“I’m confident enough in my masculinity to enjoy lavender,” Dad remarked.
As we passed an array of perfume bottles, shampoos, and other bathroom supplies, I caught a whiff of a familiar flowery scent, one that automatically triggered a memory: that of racing into Mitre Passage and facing the cloaked, fair-haired figure.
I followed my nose, sniffing like a dog until I found a bottle of cheap perfume on the shelf that smelled much like what I remembered from the alleyway that night. The scent wasn’t quite right, though. It was lighter and fruitier than the Ripper’s perfume. What kind of killer was stupid enough to wear perfume anyway?
“Is that for Evelyn?” Dad asked.
“I thought I recognized the scent.”
I set the bottle back on the shelf.
Though the potent smell of curry filled every corner of Evelyn’s loft, the only scent that filled my head was the one from Mitre Passage. It wasn’t Eira Kent’s perfume. I hadn’t smelled it after the Ripper was gone or in Eira’s hospital room afterward. That scent must have come from the killer.
One day, while Evelyn was napping and Dad was holding court for one of his classes from the living room, I slipped out of the flat with the car keys. I knew one place that would be perfect for sniffing out the killer’s scent—Harrods, the biggest department store
