“Stephen never would have harmed Master Teddy,” Decamp said, though his voice shook.
“Of course not, Decamp,” Nadia said quickly. “I just remembered that they would sometimes rendezvous there. I’m sure I’m wrong about the night of Teddy’s death.”
An awkward quiet fell over the room. Wishing to change the subject, Jasper focused on the maid again.
“Ursula, you’ve explained your transgression of reading Mrs. Stroud’s letter, but you still have yet to explain how Frederick Cowper learned of it and knew to reprimand you for it.”
The maid’s coloring flooded back into her cheeks, and she again appeared timorous.
“I went to the billiards room to bank the fire for the night,” she began. “Mr. Cowper was there alone, and he commented that Mrs. Dalton had seemed distressed at dinner. He asked me to bring her something for her nerves. I’d been so upset all day, I just started to cry. He made me tell him why, and when I explained about reading the letter, he was furious.”
“As he should have been,” Nadia murmured, her dislike of the maid plain.
“Thank you for explaining, Ursula,” Jasper said, frowning. Frederick had said the maid had been gossiping about Francine’s decision to give up the Craven Hill home to strangers. He hadn’t mentioned anything about knowing the contents of the letter. Jasper wished to know why.
He checked his watch. If he was going to visit Sam Everton in Sudbury on his way back to London, he needed to leave now.
“Constable Wiggins will be by shortly with Stephen’s body,” he said as gently as possible to Decamp. “Given the circumstances surrounding your son’s death, an inquest will bestandard. I believe the viscount is a magistrate, so I will leave it to him to organize.”
With the evidence as it was, there was little doubt it would be quickly ruled a suicide. Although there was still a niggling sense that there was more to it than that, Jasper had nothing firm to stand on, other than a feeling of the scene being just a little too neat.
He started for the door but recalled something. “Someone should collect the dog. It was tied up and barking when I arrived. I’ve turned it loose, but I’m sure it’s still hanging about the farm.”
“Beau was tied up?” Decamp shifted in his seat to peer at Jasper, his expression one of confusion.
“If Beau is the collie I saw, then yes,” he replied.
Decamp continued to frown. “How peculiar. Stephen never tied up Beau. The dog has the run of the place. One of the best herding dogs there is.”
The sense of foreboding Jasper felt upon arriving at the farm and seeing the barking collie tethered to a post returned. If Stephen had been planning to kill himself, it made sense for him to have wanted to close the front door to his house to keep the dog outside. But to tie him up as well didn’t seem to have much purpose.
“Are you certain he would not have restrained the dog?” Jasper asked.
“I suppose he might have, if he had company that didn’t care for dogs,” Decamp said with a shrug, but then rubbed his face again, his heavy anguish palpable.
If his company didn’t care for dogs.Not liking dogs was a phrase Jasper had heard recently. His mind sought where he’d heard it and from whom. Grasping the answer felt like grabbing hold of a live electrical wire.
“Excuse me,” he said, his pulse quickening as he unceremoniously left the butler’s pantry. He needed to be on the next train to London.
Chapter Seventeen
The first time Leo visited Gleason’s Department Store, she had felt supremely out of place and unfashionable. The salesclerks, trained to spot those with wealth and those who were merely browsing with dreamy-eyed hope, had quite obviously dismissed her as one of the latter. However, this time, she arrived better prepared, in one of her nicest ensembles—a green-and-black-striped silk bodice and skirt, complete with a small bustle beneath to give her figure a voguish S-shape.
Leo rarely bothered with such sartorial details; even when she and Jasper had gone out to dine before he left for Liverpool, she hadn’t worn the uncomfortable bustle. But for this new turn in her investigation into Lydia Hailson’s murder, she’d decided she could not arrive at Gleason’s as the usual Leonora Spencer.
“Are you quite sure about this?” Connor Quinn held Leo’s arm stiffly as they strolled onto the housewares floor.
“Not entirely, but I think we stand a good chance of success,” she answered softly, then pasted on a bright smile as the same housewares clerk from the other day approached her. If he remembered her at all, he did not show it. But unlike the lasttime when he’d given her a once-over and found her lacking, he simpered and sketched a small bow in greeting.
“Good afternoon, and welcome to Gleason’s. How may I be of service?”
The clerk looked to Connor for a reply, but disconcerted as he was by this spontaneous undercover ploy Leo had cooked up within the last few hours, he remained silent.
Leo could understand Connor’s ruffled state. She had felt the same agitation after leaving Eddie Bloom’s carriage earlier that day. Once inside the morgue, she’d walked past Connor, who was already at work on the first postmortem of the day, and gone straight to her desk in the office. There, she sat down and opened Lydia’s folio. Mr. Bloom had given Leo until later that evening before one of his men came to reclaim the materials, but she would not need that much time. One thorough read-through of everything, and it would be firmly ingrained in her memory.
Connor had followed her into the office, both concerned and curious as to what she had found at the lodging house. He’d been shocked to learn that his former betrothed, who had worked as a switchboard operator, had become a reporter. He’d been even more dismayed that she had been working undercover at the department store at the time of her murder.
Together, they’d gone through the folio, reading Lydia’s notes and a partial first draft of her article. As Mr. Bloom had said, there was no mention of his name anywhere among her writings. It seemed she had respected their agreement to keep him out of the limelight. Lydia’s disjointed notes had proved that she’d not imagined anyone but herself would ever read them, and the partial draft of her article was riddled with lines of ink scratching out words and messy notes made in the margins. In her journal, fragmented sentences and thoughts had been jotted down, alongside sketches of people and of items. Vases and snuffboxes, pots of creams and cosmetics were drawn withoutexplanation. One sketch on the final page of notes in her journal was of a fleur-de-lis symbol.
