Page 11 of Cloaked in Deception (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #4)

Chapter Six

L eo stormed out of the detective department at Scotland Yard, and an instant tug of regret beleaguered her.

It added weight to her heels, slowing her.

She’d overreacted to Jasper’s suggestion that she take the day off, and though she wanted to blame her snap of temper on exhaustion, that wasn’t it entirely.

It was embarrassment.

Leo had already spent an hour that morning at the morgue, typing her witness statement, her eyes drifting to the postmortem room door time and again.

The body of Martha Seabright had been delivered overnight, admitted by the night attendant, Mr. Sampson.

Leo had never avoided a corpse before. And yet, earlier that morning upon her arrival, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to enter the darkened postmortem room.

The presence of dead bodies didn’t affect Leo; they didn’t turn her stomach, and she wasn’t afraid of them as so many others were.

Her friend, Dita Brooks, could not even bear to set foot in the Spring Street Morgue.

Yet, picturing Martha Seabright on an autopsy table had put a new, strange chill in Leo’s bones.

She shouldn’t have snapped at Jasper. He hadn’t meant to suggest she was unfit for work; he just knew that Mrs. Seabright’s body would be a visual reminder of what very well could have happened to her .

The night had shaken her. And Leo did not like feeling shaken, but she took small comfort in knowing that Connor soon would be arriving at the morgue.

She took several deep breaths as she approached the packed-dirt lane to the old vestry, where the door to the back office was located.

During the summer, she would keep the door propped open to help clear the unpleasant odors that built up as the heat of the day intensified.

However, she’d done no such thing earlier that morning when she’d been working in the office, and she had certainly closed the door and locked it on her way out, before going to Scotland Yard.

Now, she saw that the back door was open a scant inch.

She approached slowly, a prickle of awareness darting along her arms and up her neck.

It was possible Connor had arrived a few minutes early and had not fully closed the door behind him, though he generally entered the morgue through the front lobby.

As Leo opened the door more fully and listened from the threshold, she heard no sounds of movement.

“Hello?” she called, finally stepping inside the building. No reply came. Instinctively, she knew that other than the corpses, she was alone.

Her eyes went to the postmortem room door.

It was wide open. Leo hesitated. This wasn’t the first time she’d entered the morgue after finding that the lock to the back door had been picked.

In January, she’d come in late at night while a man, Mr. Samuel Barrett, had been hiding a box of photographs being used in a blackmailing scheme in the crypt below the morgue.

She hadn’t known who it was at the time but had glimpsed the figure of a man running off into the burial ground behind the church.

There was still a chill in the air in the back office.

It would be gone within the hour, once the morning sun slid through the stained glass windows in the postmortem room.

The fetid odor of rot and waste would then begin to mount.

Right now, though, Leo only inhaled perfume.

Sharp, pungent traces of grassy neroli and sweet bergamot, enough to make her eyes nearly water.

Someone had been doused in the stuff, and for the scent to still be so strong, they had not left the morgue long ago.

The scent lingered in the postmortem room too, and when she entered, her eyes went straight to Mrs. Seabright’s body.

She was still fully clothed and, as such, did not need a sheet to cover her.

Mr. Sampson had never broken protocol before to touch a body, so the fact that the woman’s right arm had been raised and draped over her chest was startling.

Leo’s eyes hitched on the positioning as she neared the body, her footsteps echoing off the arched beamed ceiling.

The placement of the arm reminded Leo of the way she’d rested the Inspector’s hand on his chest the morning he’d died.

Leo had sat beside his bed, lacing her fingers through his for a few minutes while saying her goodbyes.

Then, she’d placed it on his chest, just like how Mrs. Seabright’s hand was positioned now.

She had only seen the woman briefly in life, and Mrs. Seabright had not wished to exchange pleasantries when they were seated next to each other.

However, Leo recalled her chapped hands as they unfolded the fine linen napkin and placed it on her lap—over the handbag she had kept with her rather than stored in the coatroom as other ladies had done with theirs.

Her hand now placed palm-down on her chest, appeared work-worn, the nails short and rough.

Someone had come into the morgue, lifted her right hand, and arranged it in this reverent, almost prayerful position.

No longer hesitant, Leo turned on the gasoliers overhead.

Part of her job was to catalogue a corpse’s possessions, and if she hadn’t been a fearful goose earlier that morning, she would have done it— before the body had been tampered with.

What if the intruder had taken something of importance from Mrs. Seabright?

The body was still adorned in the outdated black, beaded gown she’d had on the previous evening.

Looking more closely now, the seams along the shoulders were frayed—evidence that it was either a secondhand gown or that she had worn it many times over the years.

Walking around the table, Leo noted the soles of the woman’s shoes were scuffed, and she’d taken care to daub blacking on the worn uppers.

The handbag she’d kept with her, even at the dinner table, was also present, tucked between her torso and her left arm.

It was made of blue silk, and when Leo opened it, she found inside two shillings, a key on a length of ribbon, and a yellowed envelope, which had been split open by a penknife.

The person drenched in perfume had not been a thief.

Had they been, they would not have left without the handbag, or at least the money inside.

From the envelope, which was addressed to Mrs. Seabright at 19 Well Street, St. Giles, she retrieved a piece of folded notepaper. The crease was well established, and like the envelope, the paper had yellowed with age. Unfolding it, Leo read a few lines of handwriting:

May 14, 1871

Dear Mrs. Seabright,

Enclosed is the agreed upon sum. This concludes our business.

You have done the right thing.

- N. C. R.

The lack of a postmark on the envelope hinted that it had been delivered by private messenger. Though there was nothing to indicate who N. C. R. was, the handwriting was slanted and practiced, a sign that the sender had been well-educated.

So, Mrs. Seabright had accepted an amount of money for a decision she’d made thirteen years ago.

A business decision? There was nothing else in the envelope to provide more clues, certainly no money.

Why would she have brought this missive to the benefit dinner?

And might it have to do with the terse words she’d exchanged with Sir Eamon?

The familiar sounds of the lobby’s front doors being unlocked interrupted her musing. Connor came in through the postmortem room door a moment later and pulled up short when he saw her.

“Thank heaven, Miss Spencer.” He exhaled a gust of air. “A constable knocked on my door at six o’clock this morning with a message that you’d been found, but he wouldn’t say anything more.” He came toward her, shrugging out of his light summer jacket. “Are you injured? How did you escape?”

He stopped when he saw Mrs. Seabright’s body on the table and gave a forlorn shake of his head.

“I’ll tell you everything while we work,” Leo said. A sense of normalcy returned to her as she put the letter back into the handbag and went to fetch paper and pencil.

Together, they prepared the body for the postmortem examination.

It had taken Connor some time to adjust to undressing bodies with a woman standing at his side.

He’d flushed fiercely at first and still did if they made eye contact during the process, but he was coming around to the truth of the matter: Leo’s professionalism was unflinching when it came to this sort of thing.

It was one of the reasons why he wanted her to be hired as the official morgue clerk.

According to Connor, too many of his fellow medical students at university had been indolent or pompous or only there because they were following a well- trodden path that their fathers and grandfathers had taken before them.

Connor could have become a physician and opened a practice, but after watching a surgeon perform an autopsy, he claimed to have become fascinated with the secrets a body could whisper after death.

As Leo had come to know him better over the last handful of weeks, she’d faced the fact that he would be replacing her uncle at the morgue. So had Claude. And they both agreed that the chief coroner’s pick could have been much worse.

“How did Mr. Feldman handle the news about last night?” Connor asked once the naked corpse was covered by a sheet. “He must have been worried.”

“I’m grateful he was unaware of everything until after I’d been found,” she answered. Her uncle would be turning seventy next month, and though his health seemed otherwise top rate, the tremors that plagued his hands worried her.