The Queen's Accomplice (Maggie Hope Mystery #6)(2)
In the darkness, Vera tripped and nearly fell, saved only by her trusty walking stick. “What the—?” she muttered, her grip in leather gloves tight on the silver handle. She righted herself, glad Mr. Saunders hadn’t been there to see.
She looked down at a long blanket-wrapped bundle. Leaning over, flashlight in one hand, she lifted and pulled back the wool covering with the tip of her cane.
Vera gave a sharp inhale, but didn’t cry out when she saw the butchered body of a young woman. The corpse looked to have belonged to a girl in her early twenties—healthy and athletic, hair curled. Her throat had been slashed so savagely her head was nearly severed from her body. Her belly had been slit through her ATS uniform, which was soaked through with blood.
Vera felt as if she’d been struck dumb. But she swallowed and braced her shoulders, gathering her strength. “Murder!” she managed to croak. “Murder!” she cried, louder this time. “Someone—someone fetch the police!”
A blond boy in a tweed cap walking past stopped and stared. “What the devil’s going on? Are you all right, ma’am?”
Vera lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and deployed the stiff upper lip she’d perfected over a lifetime of practice. “Yes, yes, of course I am,” she reassured him. “But I’m afraid she isn’t,” she added, pointing to the woman’s mutilated body with the silver tip of her walking stick.
The boy squinted in the darkness, eyes following the flashlight’s beam. When he realized what he was seeing, he tore off his cap and crossed himself, whispering, “Bloody hell.” He looked from the body back to Vera. “She’s been ripped, ma’am.” He shook his head, his hands worrying at his hat. “Looks like she’s been done in by Jack the Bloody Ripper himself.”
“What are you going on about, young man?” Despite her occasional daydreams—or night dreams—Vera had no patience for macabre nonsense. But the boy was looking past her to the park’s brick wall, gaping at the lettering.
With a shaking hand, Vera raised her flashlight. The words scrawled across the wall were in the same ghostly, glowing white paint as the curbs.
They read, JACK IS BACK.
Chapter One
Something was wrong. Maggie Hope was sure, but she couldn’t yet put her finger on it. What could it be? Frowning, she went over the encoded document yet again.
Maggie was working as a girl Friday in a dim reception room at 64 Baker Street, at the Special Operations Executive’s offices. It was in an anonymous gray limestone building down the street from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address and Regent’s Park, only one of the many unremarkable SOE offices scattered around the Marylebone area of central London. Because of lack of space in Whitehall, Baker Street and its surrounding area had become home for SOE, and several buildings had been fitted with discreet plaques reading INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. The staff and those in the know called it the Firm, the Org, or the Racket, and its employees were known as the Baker Street Irregulars, in honor of Holmes’s young informants.
The atmosphere in the shabby third-floor offices of 64 Baker Street was informal, with almost everyone sipping mugs of hot tea and smoking Gauloises, men and women passing through speaking perfect French. The icy reception room was small and narrow, with only one window and a low ceiling. A fire extinguisher and a notice pointing out the direction of the air-raid shelter decorated one wall, while a tacked-up postcard of the Arc de Triomphe covered the cracks of another.
Maggie wore an old skirt, a white blouse, and a thick navy-blue wool cardigan patched at the elbows. She was never without her pearl stud earrings, a graduation gift from her Aunt Edith, and her long coppery hair was up in a bun that had begun the day tidy but was now slipping, tendrils springing free around her face and neck. She sat at a dented metal desk with a Remington typewriter, behind a line of telephones in assorted colors, and an overflowing wooden inbox.
Only twenty-seven, Maggie had already performed any number of missions as an agent for SOE, but had taken a desk job in London while she was waiting for the arrival of her German half sister, Elise Hess, a Resistance worker in Berlin. Her rescue to London, ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself, was taking longer than expected—but Maggie knew all too well these missions never went exactly as planned.
And so she waited, and while she did, she made herself useful at the SOE offices. When she wasn’t greeting prospective agents arriving for their various interviews, she was checking coded messages transmitted by F-Section agents. After all, she’d been secretary to the P.M. himself—as well as saving the life of the Princess Elizabeth, parachuting into Nazi Berlin, teaching at a paramilitary camp, and keeping the First Lady of the United States of America safe from scandal. How hard could managing an office be? And it was only temporary, until her half sister arrived in London and settled in.
On this Saturday afternoon, as the light from the grimy window began to fade, Maggie was performing a task known as “code check,” going over an agent’s transmission from the field, making sure all was in order. Maggie—a mathematics prodigy who’d graduated summa cum laude from Wellesley College, with a special aptitude for codes and ciphers—liked to try her hand at transposing the worst of the garbled messages. As she worked, she rubbed absently at an ink stain on her blouse’s cuff and then buttoned up her sweater against the office’s chill.