A Deadly Deception by Tessa Harris

Author:Tessa Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2019-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

EMILY

Dusk descends on Whitechapel; it’s a milky glaze that coats the sky and lengthens shadows. Detective Sergeant Hawkins leaves Commercial Street Station to head for his lodgings in the section house but a few streets distant. He has endured yet another frustrating day at his office. No one is any nearer, it seems, to finding evidence that will lead to the arrest of the Whitechapel fiend, and as days since Alice Mackenzie’s killing slip into weeks, it seems that her murder will also be consigned to a file with the word Unsolved stamped across it.

Bidding adieu to the desk sergeant, he steps out into a warm evening. He sniffs the air. The smell of dung is particularly pungent, thanks to the higher temperature. It’s almost eight o’clock as he strides down Commercial Street lost in his own thoughts. There are a few people about and the ubiquitous carts and wagons ply up and down the main thoroughfare, but he pays little notice as he turns down Cloak Street for the section house and, he hopes, some of Mrs. Moody’s pie, which she so often leaves to warm for him. A sudden pang of hunger reminds him he forgot to eat anything all day, when, from out of the shadows in front of him, a man steps into his path.

“Detective Sergeant Hawkins?” asks a strange, nasal voice.

Hawkins stops dead and lifts up his head to see not one man, but two—one, quite tall, in a slouch hat, the other in an odd-looking cap—barring his way. He does not care for their mien. Their stances appear aggressive.

“Who wants to know?” he asks, drawing himself up to his full height. At the same time, he’s considering just how he might dodge any imminent assault.

One of the men, the taller one with a close-cropped beard that hugs a pointed chin, suddenly reaches inside his coat.

A knife! thinks Hawkins immediately, and he is just about to take flight when he sees that what the man is doing is nothing more than showing him a silver badge pinned to the lining of his jacket.

“Walter Hahn, from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” he says in an accent that Hawkins suddenly finds easy to place. “And this here is Detective Lewis Kowalski.” He points to the short man at his side with the odd hat, and, it appears, a hostile attitude.

Feeling somewhat relieved, although not entirely convinced that his personal safety is assured, Hawkins nods. He is familiar with these so-called Pinkertons. They come from across the Atlantic. He knows that although the organization, this “agency,” is a privately owned concern, it is hired by the United States government to cover the shortfall in its law enforcement requirements.

“If that’s the case, then the answer is yes. I am Detective Sergeant Hawkins, gentlemen. But to what do I owe the pleasure?” he replies, doffing his bowler.

The detective’s dry humor is clearly lost on the ill-tempered man, who scowls at him.

“You trying to be clever?” he growls, clenching a toothpick between his flaccid lips.

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