Zoë Archer - Sweet Revenge

“Hair color’s not right, either,” Jack noted.

“That can be dyed,” the morgue attendant suggested.

Eva pressed her fingertips to her mouth to hold back an inappropriate giggle. A dead man—someone with a whole history, a life now gone—lay in front of them, and they spoke as if discussing the suitability of a sofa. She’d thought herself hardened by her work with Nemesis, but clearly there was more for her to learn.

“Got anything else?” Charlie asked.

Tiffield flicked the cover back over the corpse and moved farther through the rows of bodies. The procedure was repeated as he uncovered another cadaver, and Charlie and Jack debated over its merits.

“This one’s throat is all torn up,” Jack complained.

“Got it cut over a woman,” Tiffield explained. “She didn’t come to claim ’im, though.”

“We need something with not too many visible wounds,” said Jack.

The morgue attendant heaved a sigh. “Sure got a lot of requirements.”

“It’s important,” Eva said dryly.

Tiffield covered the body and moved on to another. He pulled back the cloth, revealing the corpse beneath. “This here chap might suit. Come in earlier tonight. Was a bully for a bawdy house who got pushed down some stairs by a customer that argued the price. Snapped the bully’s neck. Think of it, a big bruiser like this gets done in by a man half his size.” Tiffield shook his head. “Ain’t no logic.”

The dead man had no argument for the morgue attendant. Whoever he was, whatever his name, he did closely match Jack’s size and build. It made Eva shiver, to see someone so like Jack stretched out in the indifference of death, his strength now utterly gone. To reassure herself that Jack was very much alive and strong as ever, she glanced up at him as he studied the body. He must have been entertaining similar thoughts, for his gaze was shadowed.

“Dark hair,” Charlie noted. “That’s good. But the mustache’s got to go.”

“Think there’s a razor somewhere about,” Tiffield said.

Without inflection, Jack said, “Go get it.”

The morgue attendant took a step, then asked, “You sure this is the one you want?”

“He’ll do,” Jack answered.

Tiffield scurried away, presumably to find shaving implements.

“Won’t someone notice if a body’s missing?” Eva asked.

“Not these lads.” Charlie waved an unconcerned hand at the rows of covered corpses. “No one comes to claim ’em, and the police don’t care about some dead—what’s the word?—reprobate. They’re unwanted.”

It seemed London was full of superfluous men.

“A hard world, this,” Jack murmured. His gaze met hers over the body. It was clear they thought the same thing—it could just have easily been him upon the table, unclaimed, growing colder, with no one to mourn his passing.

I would, she told him silently. For whatever solace it brings you, I would find the loss of you to be a hard burden.

Perhaps it was enough. She couldn’t know, but there was some satisfaction in his eyes, dark as darkest night.

She realized suddenly that there would come a time when she would lose him. When the mission was over, he couldn’t stay in England. He’d have to start his life over, somewhere far away. And she could never leave Nemesis—their work meant too much to her. Which meant that someday, if the mission was successful, she and Jack would never see each other again. The thought hollowed her.

Bustling in with a cup of foam and a razor, the morgue attendant set to work shaving the corpse’s face. “I ain’t a mortician,” he grumbled, “making a body pretty for a funeral.” Yet Tiffield didn’t stop in his task.

Once the dead man had been shaved, Jack produced a bundle of clothing from the pack he carried and tossed them toward Tiffield.

“Put those on him,” Jack said.

The morgue attendant studied the wad of garments. “They look just like your clothes.”

“Never you mind that,” Charlie snapped. “Just get the stiff dressed.”

Tiffield complained under his breath again, but pulled the garments onto the cadaver. Eva winced at the rough, impersonal way the morgue attendant handled the body, as if it were nothing more than a haunch of meat at Smithfield Market. Her one consolation was that rigor mortis hadn’t yet set in.

“There,” Tiffield announced. “All nice and handsome for you.”

“Needs one more thing,” Charlie said. From a pocket in her skirt she produced a flask, and splashed strong-smelling whiskey across the body’s chest and face. “Now he ain’t dead, just dead drunk.”

Though the words felt odd and sour in her mouth, Eva asked, “How much do we pay you for the … body?”

Tiffield started to speak, glanced at Charlie, then stopped. After a moment, he said, “Nothing.”

Eva looked back and forth between the morgue attendant and Charlie. Clearly, Tiffield was in some kind of debt to the bookmaker, but whether it was a financial debt or another kind of obligation, Eva wasn’t certain—nor did she want to know. The many faces of London were often ugly, and possessing a certain amount of believable deniability often worked in one’s favor.

Before Tiffield could change his mind, Jack hefted the body onto his back. “Blimey, he’s a heavy bugger,” he said through gritted teeth.

“We weighed him yesterday,” the morgue attendant said. “Over sixteen stone.”

“Me, too,” Jack muttered.

“Got to go now, Tiffield,” Charlie announced. “Standard terms apply.”

“I know” was the sullen answer. “I never saw you. I don’t remember anything.”

Charlie strode to Tiffield and patted his face. “Good lad.”

The woman could give lessons in sheer audacity, Eva decided.

In short order, they were back outside. Eva breathed out in relief to be away from so many corpses, but her sigh was short-lived as she pointedly remembered the dead man Jack carried. She, Jack, and Charlie gathered far away from incriminating light.

“Where do we send payment?” she asked Charlie.

“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” the bookmaker answered.

“I don’t carry debts,” Jack growled. “Tell me what I owe, and it’ll get paid.”

Charlie’s smile was singularly ominous. “Sorry, ducks. The where, when, and what—that’s up to me to decide.” Cheerfully, she said, “Good to see you out of the clink, Jack. And it’s been a pleasure, Miss Prim,” she added with a wink. “Have a charming evening.”

Before Eva could object to her unflattering sobriquet, Charlie seemed to melt into the shadows. One moment she was there. The next, nothing. Eva strained to hear even the lightest footstep on the pavement. But Charlie had vanished.

Eva wasn’t sorry to see her go.

Grunting, Jack shifted beneath the weight of the body. “Feels like I’m carrying my own corpse.”

“You are.” Despite her cavalier words, she felt all too aware of the similarities between him and the dead man.

Jack snorted. “What do the toffs say? Indubitably. Now let’s go get me killed.”

* * *

The gaming club was the sort of place gentlemen liked to frequent. It trod the line between seedy and smart that seemed to draw well-heeled blokes by the cartload. Not quite as elegant as the clubs of St. James’s, not as unsavory as the dens clustered near Covent Garden. Jack knew from experience that the club kept a few girls upstairs, but for the most part the men came to play cards and roulette, drink too much and laugh too loud.

Rockley was inside. He came here every Thursday, but just to be certain, he checked the mews behind the club and saw the bastard’s carriage. The hour approached four, when Rockley usually left and headed home to sleep the sleep of the conscienceless. Eva was in place. All Jack had to do now was wait in the shadows across the street.