Jasper nodded. “Very well. Tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fourteen typed death certificates sat at Leo’s elbow, and the fifteenth was nearly complete. The backlog had grown over the three days she had been forced to stay home and recuperate from her neck wound, and now, over a week later, she was just barely catching up. Jasper, Claude, Dita, and Connor had all banded together to keep her from returning to work. Had the slice from the paper knife been anywhere near fatal, Leo might have understood her need to stay at home to ensure a complete recovery. But as it had only been a minor wound, their overly cautious handling of her had turned Leo into a wretched, belligerent patient.
Bound to the confines of her home, Leo had grown increasingly restless to resume her duties at the Spring Street Morgue. Her worry that Connor couldn’t possibly work as swiftly or smoothly without her was dashed when Dita visited on the second day and informed her that a medical student had come to assist him in her absence. But the news agitated Leo and instilled a different worry—this time, of being replaced.
When, on the third day, she entered the kitchen and told her uncle that she was taking herself to the morgue, Claudehad merely sighed and asked her to be careful. Walking the short distance to Spring Street had been as uneventful as she’d expected, and Leo had arrived to find that Connor had dismissed the medical student for being sluggish and disorganized. The news had lifted her spirits. As had the letter from Jasper, posted from Liverpool.
He'd left London the morning after the confrontation with Frederick Cowper, and now, in the final stages of wrapping up the counterfeiting case, which included mounds of paperwork and preliminary court appearances for those who’d been arrested and were to stand trial, Jasper wrote that he would be home—for good this time—within a week.
Helen Dalton’s murder case would not be as painstaking to conclude, considering the man who had confessed to the crime was no longer able to stand trial or receive punishment from the Crown. By dawn of the morning after the carriage accident on Spring Street, Frederick Cowper had succumbed to his injuries. Since Jasper was leaving for Liverpool once again, Chief Coughlan handed the case over to Sergeant Warnock, but not before Viscount Cowper had managed to corner Jasper outside the morgue at St. Thomas’s Hospital.
Cowper was a broken man, Jasper had told Leo afterward, desperate to blame his son’s death on Jasper. However, when he was made aware of the full extent of Frederick’s crimes, the viscount had paled and gone silent. He’d then turned on his heel and left. The viscount retreated to his Harrow estate, and Frederick’s wife, Millicent, reportedly left for her ancestral home in northern England before the funeral had even taken place. What she’d known about her husband’s actions was not clear, and Leo supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter. Nothing would change the fact that he'd killed Helen and Teddy, that he’d confessed to it, and that Leo had narrowly escaped becoming another of his victims.
The missing phaeton was found stashed in an unused barn at Cowper Fields, and when word of the scandal lit Harrow like a flame to dry kindling, Constable Wiggins heard quickly from a local farmer about the handsome horse he’d found in one of his fields the morning after Helen’s murder. He’d presumed the animal had spooked and jumped a paddock fence during the wild thunderstorm the night before, but when none of his neighbors recognized the horse, he’d shrugged and seen it as good fortune.
And when a livery owner near Craven Hill confirmed that he’d been awakened from his slumber around four in the morning for an exchange of horses that same stormy night by a man fitting Frederick Cowper’s description, there was no longer any doubt what his movements had been.
These details Leo had gleaned from Detective Sergeant Roy Lewis when he’d paid her a visit at home a day after her injury. Leo had shown him into the front sitting room, and while Claude was gone, making tea and opening a tin of biscuits, Sergeant Lewis had discussed how Warnock was wrapping up the case. He’d then set in with questions about the arrest of Mrs. Gleason and the opium smuggling ring Leo had somehow uncovered. She’d merely relayed that Connor Quinn had asked her to look into the murder of Lydia Hailson, and in the course of her investigation, she’d discovered Lydia’s writings, which had detailed the operation.
“She took too large a risk, working undercover like that,” Sergeant Lewis said with a sad shake of his head.
Leo didn’t refute his comment. Perhaps, if Lydia had not been working entirely alone, if she had instead trusted another person with what she was doing, she would have had someone to watch her back.
Although Lewis had not specifically mentioned anything about Leo having conducted her own inquiry without help,she had acknowledged it to herself. She’d missed discussing elements of the case with Jasper, and although Connor had been with her at the department store during her confrontation with Mrs. Gleason, it hadn’t been quite the same as having Jasper at her side.
Leo made no mention of Eddie Bloom or his interest in the stolen opium to Sergeant Lewis during the brief interview over tea and biscuits. She wasn’t at all keen on making an enemy of Mr. Bloom. Already, she had failed to give him the materials she’d taken from Lydia’s lodging house—and not only because she had been at St. Thomas’s at the appointed hour.
To make any charges against Mrs. Gleason stand required proof, and Lydia’s notebook, her writings, and sketches were what Sergeant Lewis would need to do just that. So, she had decided to give the folio to him, despite the risk that doing so would incur Eddie Bloom’s wrath.
Somehow, Mr. Bloom had learned of her injury and had given her a day of reprieve. His hired man arrived soon after Sergeant Lewis’s visit, and Leo had permitted Mr. Bloom’s muscle into the foyer. If the man felt any compassion for her at the sight of her bandaged neck, he didn’t show it.
“Mr. Bloom won’t be happy you don’t have the folio,” he warned when she explained she had given it to the police.
“I have something better for him,” she’d replied. “A name.”
Sergeant Lewis, it turned out, had been all too happy to divulge over tea and biscuits that Tricky Mills, one of the higher-ups in the Spitalfields Angels, had been taken into custody for trafficking opium into Gleason’s. Mrs. Gleason had not given up her contact within the criminal gang—she was too wise to do so. But her sales associate, the one who had tried to sell the jade urn to Leo and Connor, had not been sufficiently afraid of the Angels and gave up the name. Whether the associate, a Mr. AlistairFindlay, would survive his reduced prison term remained to be seen.
Mr. Bloom’s man had accepted the name with a nod and left. And Leo had exhaled as she shut and locked the door behind him, her body trembling from pent-up nerves.
Now, as Tibia sprang onto Leo’s desk, her four charcoal-gray paws daintily avoiding the pile of typed certificates, Leo eyed a manila envelope pinned beneath her chipped teacup and saucer. It had been on her desk that morning when she’d arrived at the morgue, though it had not been there when she’d left the previous evening. At first, she’d wondered if Mr. Sampson, the night attendant, had left it for her. However, upon opening the envelope, the sight of a ten-pound note inside had cured her of that idea. That, and the folded piece of paper accompanying it.
Once unfolded, the scrawled words had seemed to spool from the page and wind around Leo like a rope plagued by burrs.
A token of my gratitude. You’ll make a fine spy, Detective Spencer.
Must be in the blood.
It hadn’t been signed. Nevertheless, she knew who had left it for her.
“It’s nearly six o’clock.” Connor swept into the office, pulling Leo’s attention from the envelope.
The protective canvas coat and tall, rubber boots that he’d worn during the autopsies of three corpses that day had been replaced with a suit of herringbone wool in a shade of chocolate brown.
Leo straightened her back as he tugged at the lapel of his coat. “That is a new suit,” she observed. Or at least, she’d never seen him wearing it before.
“Is it too stuffy?” He looked down at himself. “I fear I resemble my father.”
