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Just then, Leo Spencer entered the detective department. Her lively hazel eyes found him from across the room and brightened even more as she started walking in his direction. No doubt, she’d come to learn what had transpired with Castelan.

“I plan to attend,” Jasper replied to the superintendent, his resolve strengthening. “And Miss Spencer will be accompanying me.”

Monroe’s open expression shuttered, and a frown of disappointment swept away whatever good sentiment he’d exited the interview room with.

“I see,” he replied curtly.

“I’m glad you do. Good evening, Superintendent,” Jasper said, just as curtly. Without hesitation or a backward glance, he strode forward to greet Leo.

He felt a jaunt in his step, reveling in Monroe’s look of disappointment and feeling a thrill of the unknown. Monroe could retaliate, but Jasper would not worry about that yet. He’d done what he needed to do, and it had felt good.

Leo peered at the retreating superintendent’s back. “He didn’t look very happy. Is it about Mr. Castelan? Did the questioning not go well?”

She followed Jasper toward Warnock’s desk, where he’d left his coat and hat.

“Everything went well. He confessed, and he’ll be on his way to Newgate shortly,” Jasper replied, and to move past the topic of Superintendent Monroe, he added, “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to come. How is Flora?”

Leo and her aunt and uncle had left the hospital while he’d been interviewing Mary Keating. Two warders had gone with them to help transport Flora, whose leg was confined to a cast for the time being. Before departing, Leo said that she would try to make it to the Yard later.

“Mrs. Zhao arrived a short while ago,” Leo said. “She sat with Flora while Claude and I arranged the sitting room into a temporary bedroom. It was quite a lot of work, but thankfully, the laudanum the doctors gave Flora kept her calm. She was sleeping when I left.” Displaying her usual lack of patience, Leo immediately asked, “What more did you learn from Mr. Castelan?”

Jasper took his coat and hat from Warnock’s chair. “I’ll tell you everything while we eat.”

“We are eating?”

He put on his coat. “Christ, I hope so. I’m starved.”

Reaching into his coat pocket for his gloves, his fingers grasped paper instead. The note from Tabitha Pierce. He’d completely forgotten about it in the disorder with Castelan and Mary Keating.

“I should tell you about this,” he said, giving Leo the note. “It came in earlier this afternoon for me.”

Faint lines creased the space between her brows as she read the brief message. “How did she know you were looking for her?”

“Someone must have heard me while I was in Spitalfields, asking after her.” It was the only thing he could think of at least. He’d presented himself as Inspector Reid both at the bakery and at St. Emmanuel’s.

Leo’s fingers rubbed the sheet of thin paper. It had been torn at one edge, Jasper noted now, as if ripped from a book. She turned it this way and that, peering at it.

“This has been taken from a Bible, I think. Or a hymnal.”

Jasper hadn’t inspected it closely earlier, but now, he did. “Are you certain?”

He’d been forced to attend Sunday services as a boy at Cheltenham, but he’d hardly ever opened a Bible to follow along.

“We have Bibles in the lobby at the morgue for families in need of them,” Leo said. “It’s the thin texture of the paper. Do you see? It’s nearly translucent, like onion skin.”

Parishioners had been exiting St. Emmanuel’s when he and Leo had arrived. There had only been one parishioner, an old woman in a pew; the reverend; and then at the pulpit, the altar boy.

“The boy,” Jasper murmured. He saw it now. The messenger boy who had bumped into Jasper’s arm in the Yard’s lobby. His flaming red ears and cheeks, and straw-blond hair under a tweed cap.

“The altar boy who dropped the chalice at the church,” Jasper said to Leo. “He delivered this note.”

Tabitha Pierce was at St. Emmanuel’s.

“We need to go there. Now,” Leo said. “Before the Carters find her.”

“I will go,” he said. “You’ve been in enough danger for one day.”

She cut in front of him as he started for the door and placed both hands on his chest. “I am coming with you, Jasper Reid. It is high time you accept that I will determine for myself what is too dangerous.”