Jasper held out his arm, stopping her from taking another step toward the staircase. He’d lowered the lantern, strange markings drawing his eye to the floor. Crouching, he brought the light closer to a mess of muddy boot prints on the white-tiled floor.
“Someone has been here,” he said.
Leo followed the prints through the foyer. “They look to be coming from the back of the house.”
Jasper stood tall again. “Stay with me,” he commanded, his pulse rising. “Whoever made these could still be inside the house.”
Leo did not return to his side. Instead, she crouched low, as he had. “Bring the lantern over here, will you?” She waved him down beside her. He saw it right away—a streak of rusty red mixed into the brown mud, as if a boot heel had slipped and skidded to the side.
“Is it blood?” she asked.
Jasper reached for his revolver. “It looks to be. Go outside. Stay there while I search the house.”
“Absolutely not.” She jumped to her feet. “I’m staying with you.”
Of course, she was. He gritted his molars and handed her the lantern. “Fine. At least stay close.” He continued toward the stairs, with Leo on his heels. As they climbed the staircase, more traces of mud and blood could be seen on the pale blue carpet. The press of blood into the fibers of the carpet appeared denser as Jasper followed the prints toward an open door at the landing. It was the room, he realized, that Francine Stroud had directed them to in her letter.
Before clearing the threshold into the room, an inkling of what they would find shuddered through him. Sheets draped everything inside this room as well—except for the woman lying in the dark, prone on the floor. A pool of blood underneath herhead gleamed in the lantern light. She’d come to rest so that her unseeing eyes were turned toward them.
Leo gasped, though Jasper knew it wasn’t a reaction to seeing a dead body. It was because of who it was.
They had found Helen Dalton.
Chapter Seven
Leo noticed several things as Jasper approached the body. While her heart had stuttered at seeing Helen Dalton lying dead on the bedroom floor, the ghastly surprise had not led to panic or fright. Being accustomed to corpses, Leo didn’t feel the need to stare at the body. Instead, she peered at a rug on the floor, which had been peeled back and left in a heap. A short plank in the wooden floor, exposed by the lifted rug, had been pried up and set aside.
“It appears Helen knew about the hole in the floor that Francine Stroud described in her letter,” Leo said.
And she’d left Cowper Hall in the middle of the night to come here and retrieve the object hidden beneath the floorboard. But how had she known about it, and why would she have rushed to London under the cover of darkness and in a terrible storm, no less? It was just a glass vial, a trinket according to Mrs. Stroud.
“She appears to have been struck on the head,” Jasper said, inspecting the body by the light of the cab lantern. With her blonde hair swept away from her forehead and pinned tightly into a high bun, a profound, bloody depression in her righttemple was easy to see. The skull’s frontal bone had received a blow too.
Leo wished to see inside the hollow in the floor, but she was more interested to know how long Helen had been dead. She went to the body, careful not to step in the pool of blood. She noticed someone already had done so by the smudging along the outer rim of the pool and the shoeprints marking the person’s retreat from the room.
“Let me have a look,” she said, removing her gloves. They were soft kid leather, and not only did Leo not wish to stain them, but she could better determine the approximate time of death depending on the corpse’s body temperature.
Helen Dalton was cold, of course, and in full rigor. Her head and neck could not be manipulated when Leo attempted to move them, and her arms and legs were equally rigid.
“Helen’s been dead at least twelve hours,” she estimated.
Jasper made a thoughtful noise in the base of his throat as he calculated the time. “So, she was killed before five o’clock this morning.”
Her skin was dreadfully pale and cold, and her clothing was damp too. “She was last seen at Cowper Hall at eleven o’clock last night,” Leo said, recalling what her maid had told the solicitor, Mr. Corman. “Without any trains running, she would have needed a carriage or some other conveyance to make the trip. How long do you think it took to travel here by carriage?”
“Two hours, perhaps longer, considering the weather,” he replied.
“She must have been drenched when she arrived,” Leo said. “The cold house and her lack of body heat have slowed the drying of her clothing.”
Jasper braced his elbows on his thighs as he crouched. “Her husband left much earlier than eleven.”
“But he was at home this morning,” Leo said.
Jasper shook his head. “Not necessarily. All we were told was that Mrs. Dalton had not been seen.”
He was correct, now that she recalled the conversation in the breakfast room that morning. Leo had only assumed Mr. Dalton had been at home, as no one had been concerned over his whereabouts as they had been his wife’s.
“You think he came here?” she asked.
