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She set down the postmortem request and joined Connor at the top of the table, near the man’s head. She would need only to look fully at the victim once to remember the details of his appearance, then type them later for Constable Murray. She would include his clothing and any other identifying marks too. However, as she took in the victim’s face—his square chin, the crooked line of his nose—Leo went utterly still.

“Miss Spencer?” Connor was waiting for her assistance in removing the man’s coat. “Is something wrong?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, noting the corpse’s full bottom lip. Even without the mustache that had trimmed his upper lip before, his features were unmistakable. “I believe I know who this man is. Or at least, the most recent name he’d been using: Sebastian Lawlor.”

Connor was in the middle of conducting the postmortem on the body of Augusta Lawlor’s husband by the time Jasper arrived at the morgue. The brass bell chimed in the lobby, announcing a visitor, and as Jasper had a standing invitation to enter, the detective inspector joined them without first knocking.

As he crossed the room toward the autopsy table, a feeling charged through Leo, one that had started to occur with more regularity. It was pleasure and longing, tangled up into one urge to stand closer to him, to hear the resonating timbre of his voice. Even now, as they stood over the body of a slain man, his postmortem underway, she felt an irrepressible delight that Jasper had arrived, scowl and all. And scowl he did as he peered at Sebastian Lawlor’s face.

“Damn it,” he muttered. “Did he have anything on him? Any identification or something that might give us a clue as to who he truly was?”

“I checked his pockets,” Leo replied. “They were empty except for these.”

She took from her apron pocket a flat brass skeleton key and two gold bands, one larger in circumference than the other.

“Wedding bands,” Jasper said as he took the gold rings first.

“They were tucked in the ticket pocket of his trousers,” Leo said. The small slit in the waistband might have been easy to overlook if his killer had been rushed.

“Mrs. Lawlor was still wearing her wedding band yesterday,” Leo recalled. “The larger band fits on Mr. Lawlor’s ring finger.” Which, Leo had noted, did not sport a wedding band at all. He’d removed it before he was killed.

Jasper held up the smaller ring. “He had another wife, in the past?”

“Or he still had his other wife when he married Mrs. Lawlor,” Leo suggested.

With a disturbed tuck of his mouth, Jasper gave the rings back to her and took up the brass skeleton key. It had been engraved with a number: 146. “This appears to be a key to a safe deposit box.”

“That was my thought too,” Leo said. “Could Mr. Lawlor have taken it from the study safe and gone to the bank to empty it?”

Jasper shook his head. “Warnock and Mills spoke with the Central Bank’s manager. Lawlor wasn’t there two mornings ago. He did, however, withdraw four thousand pounds the week before from their account.”

It was a staggering amount for most people, though Leo presumed he’d left behind far more than he’d taken.

“The bank manager said the safe deposit box hadn’t been touched,” Jasper went on. He pocketed the key. “I’ll hold on to this and check with Warnock to see if the number matches.”

The bank would have the second, matching key required to open the box, Leo knew.

“Whoever he was, the cause of death is clear,” Connor said. He pointed a bloody, gloved finger toward the damage within the open chest cavity. “Stabbed twice in the heart, and once in the stomach. The blade was about three inches long and thin, likely a slip joint folding knife. The bruising here, see?” He indicated some discoloration on the sides of the chest punctures. “The handle of the blade struck the victim as the knife was plunged in, each time.”

“And those four round marks?” Jasper said, his attention on four identical round bruises at the puncture sites. Each round bruise measured three millimeters in size and were darker in contrast to the rest of the bruising.

“Something on the knife handle made them,” Leo answered. “Some ornamentation.”

“The killer got close with a small blade, which would have been easily concealed, before attacking,” Jasper said. “A man of some strength, I would guess. A mugging?”

“It could appear that way. He was found with no belongings,” Leo said. “Most notably, none of the money he’d taken from Mrs. Lawlor’s safe.”

“But why would his assailant leave behind the wedding bands?” Connor asked. “Muggers would check every pocket, I imagine, and gold is easy to fence.”

“If a mugger saw the bounty in Lawlor’s bags, he would not bother with his ticket pocket,” Jasper suggested.

He lifted the coat from the pile of clothing that Leo had folded and set on a vacant autopsy table. It was a common sack coat, frayed at the cuffs and worn at the elbows.

“These are not the clothes of a wealthy woman’s husband,” Jasper said.

Leo had noted that too. The manufacturing labels on high-end clothing would have been woven into the lining, while the paper labels on cheaper clothing would disintegrate after a few washings. Sebastian Lawlor had been found in the latter type of clothing, the paper labels already gone.

“I think he must have either purchased secondhand clothes or changed into items he had set aside somewhere,” Leo said. “And he shaved his mustache too.”