He was still off-balance from his ex-fiancée’s body arriving at the morgue the previous day, and she could not fault him for it. As Leo made them tea on the cottage range, Connor sat at the small table they kept in the office. He was reading the postmortem report she’d typed before leaving with Jasper for Craven Hill.
“Asphyxiation,” he said in a flat tone.
The bruising around Lydia Hailson’s neck had been evidence of strangulation, and Claude had concluded it was the cause of her death.
“A fractured hyoid bone supports my uncle’s finding,” she said cautiously, as Connor seemed particularly on edge. “There were no other injuries.”
Even though Miss Hailson had been shorter and slighter than Leo, her bone structure dainty, and her neck swanlike, itstill would have taken some degree of strength to apply enough constant pressure to break the hyoid bone, located just above her larynx, and asphyxiate her.
“Do you know if she had a new beau?” Leo asked, thinking of what Jasper might ask. He’d been immediately suspicious of Connor, which she, of course, knew was absurd, but Leo had to acknowledge that strangulation was, generally, a crime of passion.
He lowered the report to the table and shook his head. “I don’t know. We hadn’t spoken in some time. Months.”
Lydia’s corpse was still under a sheet in the postmortem room, waiting for the funeral service to arrive and collect it. Before Claude had arrived the evening before, Connor had explained that Lydia’s only living relative was a grandfather in Wales. She was on her own, and as it would surely take some time to locate her grandfather and decide what was to be done with the body, Connor had decided to take charge of her burial himself.
He placed the report back in the manila folder and pushed it toward Leo’s elbow. “Send it along to Mr. Pritchard and to Scotland Yard. I want the inquest and investigation into her death to begin as soon as possible.”
Leo did not mention that he would be a suspect himself, given his past relationship with the victim. He was intelligent enough to anticipate that eventuality.
“We have another body in the postmortem room for this morning. I think we should move it to the top of our list,” Leo said, wanting to begin the morning’s examinations with Helen Dalton.
He drained his tea and stood. “Why is that?”
“Because Jasper and I found the body in the house we now own.”
The coroner knocked the backs of his legs into his chair and set down his cup with a rattle. “You found a… What body? Whathouse?”
She hadn’t wanted to bother Connor with the details of their visit to Harrow yesterday; he’d been bowled over by his own shock and grief. So, as they entered the postmortem room and made their way to the autopsy table that Helen had been laid upon, she explained everything to him—from the bequest to the letter from Francine Stroud to Helen’s disappearance in the night and, finally, to the discovery of her body in the house on Craven Hill.
Once she’d concluded her retelling of events, the hiss of the gasoliers overhead was the only sound in the room for several moments. Connor drew back the sheet covering Helen’s corpse, and a frown tugged the corners of his mouth.
“Why do I have the feeling you are about to tell me that you’ll be absent from the morgue quite a bit more?” he asked, a brow raised in mock annoyance.
While helping Jasper solve a few cases in the past, she’d kept irregular hours at the morgue. However, that was when she’d been little more than a volunteer. Now, as a paid employee, she would not have the luxury of time off whenever it suited her.
“Inspector Reid doesn’t need me for this investigation, I’m sure,” Leo said, ignoring a tug of disappointment in her stomach.
Connor merely made a disbelieving grunt in the back of his throat before preparing for the postmortem examination of Helen Dalton. Leo tied on an apron and gathered a pencil and paper to note down his findings. Admittedly, it was discomfiting to observe the autopsy of a woman whom Leo had just been seated across from at dinner a few nights ago. She could still easily recall everything about the dinner, from the details of the room, the table settings, and the décor to what everyone waswearing and how they had behaved. The images of Helen’s stiff posture, the nervous darting of her eyes, and the thin seam of her mouth when her husband acted like a drunken buffoon were foremost in Leo’s mind as Connor examined the body.
It was not the first postmortem he’d performed on a pregnant woman, nor was it Leo’s first time viewing one, but when it became clear that Helen was indeed about four months along in her pregnancy at the time of her death, a respectful dip in conversation marked the acknowledgment of the dual loss of life.
It wasn’t impossible that the unborn child had been Anthony Dalton’s. However, the note in Helen’s handbag, with the instruction tomeet at our spot,led Leo to believe it was more likely that she’d had a lover.
During the cranial examination, Connor named the cause of death. Leo already knew Helen had received a severe blow to the head, however, Connor discovered that she had been struck twice. A first strike against her right temporal bone would have been debilitating, while a second, more forceful blow to the frontal bone had been what killed her. As Jasper had already found the brass statue of a peacock with blood on it, Connor agreed after hearing a description of the statue that it sounded a likely match for the murder weapon.
In the process of replacing the skull cap and preparing to suture it closed, something fell from Helen’s untidy bun, clinked against the table’s edge, and landed on the floor. Her long hair, which had been neatly coiled and pinned into a voluminous topknot, was now in a loosened state, and with good reason, considering all it had endured. But the clattering of the object to the floor near Connor’s feet didn’t sound like a loose hairpin or comb. It rang hollow instead, like glass.
“Would you mind picking that up, Miss Spencer?” he asked, stepping aside while holding the skull cap in place.
Leo stepped forward and nearly lost her breath. It was a small glass tube about half the length and width of her pinkie finger. At the time of its firing, the clear glass had been swirled with cobalt and amethyst. Though it appeared to be empty, the tube was stoppered with a small wedge of cork. Two holes in the top rim would have accommodated a chain, or a length of ribbon or leather.
Leo stooped to pick it up, holding her breath. This had to be the glass vial Francine Stroud had described in her letter, the one that had been hidden under the bedroom floorboard.
“What in the world is that?” Connor asked as he continued to work. Leo stepped aside, still marveling at the small bottle.
“I think this is what Francine Stroud wanted Jasper and me to find at the house,” she said. Quickly, she explained about the small glass vial Francine had found clutched in her dead son’s hand after he’d fallen from the roof, and her directions to the specific floorboard that covered a small hollow, where the vial had been hidden.
“Helen must have gone to the house in a rush because she knew we were going to find it,” Leo theorized. “And she wanted to get to it first.”
