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Rob jumped up, his cup of tea spilling onto the table.

“That!” Paul pointed to the basket as it shifted again, and a rustling noise came from within.

Leo stood, her intrigue sharpened, though she wasn’t alarmed as the deliverymen seemed to be.

“Cor, it’s a live one!” Rob exclaimed.

Sure enough, a soft moaning emanated from the basket.

Claude popped the last bite of his hand pie into his mouth and brushed his hands together as he rose from his chair. “It seems you were too early in removing the body,” he said with professional calm.

Leo went quickly to the basket, which encouraged Paul and Rob to also come toward it. She crouched beside it and worked at the toggles holding the lid in place. Freeing them, she finally pushed back the lid of the basket.

Inside, lying on her back, was a woman—who was very much not dead. She stared up at Leo, her pale, sweaty brow creased in confusion. She blinked and, slurring her words, asked, “Who are you? And where the devil am I?”

Chapter Two

Amusement wasn’t an emotion Jasper ought to have been experiencing as he approached the entrance to the undertaker’s premises. In fact, it felt sinful to have to bite back the grin that had been plaguing him on the short walk there from Scotland Yard.

Constable Price had flagged Jasper in the Criminal Investigation Department just as the detective inspector was returning from an arrest in another case, a note held in his raised hand.

“It’s from Miss Spencer, sir,” Price had said. “Says she’d like a detective sent to Tate’s Funeral Service.”

The young constable’s forehead had crinkled in what looked like skepticism as Jasper plucked the note from his hand. When he read Leo’s brief message, he understood why.

A detective is needed at Tate’s Funeral Service on James Street.

A woman’s corpse arrived. I suspect poison.

P.S. She is not dead.

Jasper’s foul mood—which had set in when the man whom he’d just arrested for housebreaking clocked him in the jaw while attempting to flee—dispersed after reading Leo’s peculiar missive.

“A constable from E Division delivered it,” Price added as Jasper folded the note. “Said Miss Spencer insisted Scotland Yard be notified.”

The note was not addressed specifically to Jasper, but as he’d been the one to receive it, he decided to see what the situation was about. And he much preferred the chance to see Leo to processing the arrest of the housebreaker. So, he’d left that task to PC Price and started out for James Street.

Now, as he entered Tate’s, he forced the absurd image of a dead body suddenly sitting upright and alive from his mind. It was nothing to laugh at, to be sure. Especially if Leo suspected poison was involved.

A man wearing a somber black suit came forward at the sound of the brass bell above the door. Jasper withdrew his warrant card from his pocket.

“Detective Inspector Reid from Scotland Yard,” he said. “Miss Spencer summoned me.”

The man dabbed his glistening forehead with a kerchief. “Yes, yes, she is in my office. It’s been quite a shock, Inspector. This sort of thing hasn’t happened here before, not once.”

“You are…?” Jasper asked as the frazzled man led him toward a door at the back of the parlor.

“Otto Tate, at your service.”

Jasper knew Leo’s uncle had been working at Tate’s, and that Leo would often bring him his tea, but he’d never had a reason to come here himself. Following Mr. Tate into a back hall, past another room full of portraits of death photography set on easels, he decided he preferred the morgue to a funeral parlor. The elegance of the stuffy rooms, with their displays of glossy caskets and ostentatious funeral wreaths, mourning trinkets, photographs of the deceased made to look alive, and endless urns of flowers, was somehow more miserable to Jasper than the cold postmortem room at the Spring Street Morgue. Perhaps it was because the funeral industry shamelessly capitalized on people’s grief, while the work of a coroner at a morgue was simply to seek answers for anguished loved ones.

In the back hall, Mr. Tate opened a door and stepped aside, allowing Jasper to enter. When he did, his attention immediately hooked on Leonora Spencer. She sat perched on the arm of a sofa, looking down over a woman of considerable size, who lay prostrate, a plaid blanket covering her. Claude Feldman sat in a chair next to the woman and was holding her wrist, as if measuring her pulse.

Leo’s eyes, the color of honeyed amber, widened when she saw him enter the small office.

“Jasper,” she said, her voice husky with surprise. She stood and came toward him in a rush. “I didn’t know if my message would be delivered to you. I’d hoped, but I thought you might be out on some other business.”

He stifled the potent urge to drag her to him and kiss her; had they been alone, he would have done it. Nearly two weeks had passed since the last time they’d shared a kiss. In the privacy of an enclosed carriage after leaving a restaurant, they’d burned through the five-minute ride to Duke Street with a feverish kiss. Instead of sating him, it had only left him craving more.