Her Dark Curiosity. Megan Shepherd

slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surely his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.

      Four. I knew all four victims.

      And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.

      The idea made me step away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it – nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, four people who had wronged me.

       Almost as though …

      I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.

       … almost as though someone was watching out for me.

      I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.

      A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.

      By Edward.

      Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.

      And yet the fear kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already aching. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. On the island, I had read and memorized meticulous autopsy reports from Father’s files for all of Edward’s victims. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

      I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.

      They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

      I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.

      The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.

      Edward had done this.

      7

      I felt like the room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

      Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

      Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London – why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.

      My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.

      We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.

      Was that why he had returned, as part of a grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat after I’d spurned his advances?

      I paced, hands knitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone …

      Hands trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the bodies. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.

      I couldn’t shake this new information: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.

      Footsteps came from down the hall, and I spun, expecting to find Edward’s yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.

      Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.

      My heart shot to my throat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.

      ‘Miss … Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?’

      ‘Nothing, Inspector,’ I stuttered. ‘Visiting some old friends.’

      His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. ‘You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.’

      ‘Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew last year, before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so …’ I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.

      My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could protect me only so far.

      ‘I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.’

      I sighed in relief. ‘That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.’ I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.

      ‘Wait, Miss Moreau.’

      My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he dropped his voice to a whisper.

      ‘After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report …’ He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.

      ‘It was self-defense,’ I said firmly. ‘Dr Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—’

      He dismissed that with a wave. ‘None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault – it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.’

      My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.

      At my silence, he continued. ‘I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.’

      I stared at him, speechless. After I’d been hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for help? I might have laughed, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.

      ‘I assure you, you can trust me,’ he continued. ‘We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.’

      ‘Care