Page 16 of Cloaked in Deception (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #4)

The tricky question wasn’t one she could evade.

“I…consult, from time to time, on inquiries.” Then, before Esther could ask another question, she added, “For this inquiry, I’ve offered to help gather some information about Mrs. Seabright’s family. You said you hadn’t spoken to her in about seven years?”

Esther blinked, taking in Leo’s answer and considering the tacked-on question. “Yes. We saw each other briefly seven years ago, but it was by chance. Before that, we hadn’t been in contact for several more years.”

Leo waited in silence, hoping the woman would continue speaking. Being patient worked.

“When we were girls, my sister and I were close. She was different then. Oh, she certainly had a deviousness about her that would infuriate me. Always taking my things and hiding them away in places I never thought to look. I remember her as selfish, but I thought—hoped—she would grow out of it.” Esther shook her head as she fiddled with her hankie.

“I couldn’t countenance it,” she went on. “Handing over her children to an orphanage. What kind of mother would do such a thing?”

“Her husband had been killed,” Leo said. “Perhaps she couldn’t care for them alone.”

Esther scoffed at the suggestion. “Martha would have had plenty of help from others, myself included. My husband and I would have taken the children in, done anything, anything at all to support her. But she would not be swayed. No, my sister wanted to be rid of them, and the orphanage was the answer to her prayers.”

She gave a small moan and pressed the square of linen to her nose, obscuring her quivering chin.

An uncomfortable moment of quiet stretched on as Leo sorted through what Esther had just revealed.

In the scant amount of time she had been in Martha’s presence—while she’d been alive, at least—Leo had observed a hardness to her.

But to give her children, including an infant, to an orphanage with the eagerness Esther was describing put a cramp in Leo’s chest.

“How long were you and your sister close?” she asked.

Esther’s flare of temper had cooled, and she nodded morosely. “Until she married. Dan—that was her husband—changed her.”

“In what way?”

She sighed heavily. “He was cruel, and it made her small. Scared. She shut me out completely, though she did allow the children to see me from time to time. I appreciated that, at least.”

The healed, circular burn scars on Martha’s body had undoubtedly been inflicted by the burning end of a cigar. If her husband had abused her, Leo wondered if he’d also harmed their children.

“When Dan was killed, I wasn’t sorry,” Esther said, speaking tremulously as if the confession embarrassed her. “And I don’t believe my sister was sorry, either. I think in her heart, Martha hated him. She hated any piece of him, any reminder.”

Looking upon his children every day would have made it impossible for Martha to forget him, Leo imagined. Perhaps her solution had been to rid herself of them, so she could rid herself of him completely.

“What were the children’s ages when they were sent to the orphanage?” Leo asked, feeling sorrow for the confusion and pain they must have suffered.

At the thought of the children, a small grin emphasized the round apples of Esther’s cheeks.

“Paula was the eldest, at fourteen. Her brother, Gavin, was eleven. Oh, he was such a scamp! Not in any devious way. At least, not before his mother sent him away.” The grin faltered.

“And there was little Edward. Just four months old when Martha shunted him off to that unfeeling place. He was there a month before a fever took him. He was so little. I can’t even remember what he looked like. ”

She touched the creased hankie to her nose again, eyes squeezing shut.

The mention of the baby put Leo in mind of the worn letter in Martha’s handbag, dated May 1871.

“When were the children placed in the orphanage?” she asked Esther.

When the woman opened her eyes, they were watery. She’d been fighting tears. “It was in April of 1871.”

So then, the infant boy would have died around the time of the letter.

“How did Martha handle the news of Edward’s death?” she asked next.

“It still hurts to think about it, if I’m honest. I cried more than she did, I can tell you that. I made the trip down to Twickenham to visit Paula and Gavin, and to lay flowers on the baby’s grave. Their mother hadn’t come, they told me. My heart broke for them.”

The picture Esther had painted of her sister so far was not generous. Leo found herself slipping in her sympathy for Martha Seabright. But, as cruel and selfish as she allegedly had been, she had not deserved to be murdered in cold blood.

“Did Paula or Gavin resent being sent to the orphanage?”

Their rejection of the benefit dinner invitations would indicate they did.

“Oh, yes,” Esther answered without hesitation. “As soon as Paula turned sixteen and became too old to remain there, she came directly to me. She wanted nothing to do with her mother.”

“And Gavin?”

Here, she bobbed her head to the side. The sunlight coming in through her sitting room’s window tapered as clouds thickened in the sky. It cast Esther’s face in gray shadows.

“Gavin was torn. Still is, I think, though we’ve fallen out of touch.

He made excuses for his mother’s choices, just like Martha did for her husband’s abuse.

I think Gavin wanted so much to believe she loved him, but deep inside, he must have known it wasn’t true.

He and Paula seemed to fall out over her too. It’s all so sad. Poor boy.”

If he’d been eleven years old when he entered the orphanage, Gavin would now be twenty-four. Much too old to be seen as a boy any longer.

“Did Gavin not come to you then, like Paula did, when he left the orphanage?”

She shook her head tightly, giving the impression of disappointment. “He went straight out into the world, that one.”

“Not back to Martha?”

At Esther’s deep inhalation, Leo thought she might have pressed too hard with questions. The woman answered succinctly, “He tried. It didn’t last.”

“Do you know why it didn’t?”

Again, Esther adjusted her position on the settee cushion, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Surely that isn’t anything the police need to know.”

“I don’t wish to seem rude, but in a murder inquiry, it is better to share more than less,” Leo urged.

The wrinkles bracketing Esther’s chin deepened as she tucked her chin in a show of defiance. Leo waited it out, and the older woman relented.

“Very well. My sister had started to entertain gentlemen friends, if you understand my meaning.” She avoided looking directly at Leo as she spoke. “After Gavin returned home and found out, he refused to stay under the same roof with her any longer.”

Her meaning was clear enough. Martha Seabright had prostituted herself, and when Gavin learned of it, he’d left.

“I see.” Leo imagined such a revelation might have angered him. But that had to have been roughly eight years ago now. “Did he keep in contact with her after that?”

“Here and there, I believe.”

What more Leo could ask eluded her. It didn’t shock her that Martha would have turned down the path of prostitution, not really.

If her surname was still Seabright, that indicated she hadn’t remarried.

She would have needed to support herself somehow.

Leo couldn’t fathom such a route for herself.

But then, she’d always had Claude and Flora for support.

She’d had the Inspector too. And of course, Jasper.

In the fall of silence, she turned to peer around the room.

The fireplace mantel held a few framed photographs; one was of a much younger Esther and a man who was not her equal in looks but had a kind smile.

Her husband, perhaps. The two others were of a little boy in a sailor’s suit, posed next to a chair, and of a young man seated with his elbow propped on a desk.

They appeared to be of the same person; in both photographs, his bright-eyed stare seemed to burrow through the photo paper and challenge Leo.

“That is my son,” Esther explained, having followed Leo’s gaze to the photographs. “Felix. Handsome, isn’t he?”

“Very. Do he and his cousins get on at all?” Leo asked.

“Only with Paula. She’s like my daughter now,” Esther answered, again cheering visibly. She gestured to the room around them. “All this is thanks to her. My own husband, well…he was a shopkeeper. A good man, but never rich. Paula, however, married a man who could provide.”

And he’d apparently provided well for Esther too.

“Blickson, is that right?” Leo asked.

“Archibald Blickson,” she said with a proud nod.

He must have been very well off indeed to have afforded her rooms at Gunnerson’s Rest Home. Leo wondered if Jasper might permit her to visit Paula next. Right then, however, she was supposed to be gathering more information about Gavin.

“Before I leave you, Mrs. Goodwin, I was hoping you might know where the police could find Gavin to inform him of his mother’s death,” Leo said, the fib light and hopefully believable.

Esther’s expression returned to the shadowed one she wore when speaking about her nephew. “Last I knew, he had lodgings in St. Bride.”

“We have the address for those and that of the hospital where he works, but the police couldn’t find him this morning. Is there anywhere else he might go?”

The woman looked baffled and lifted her shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea. Like I said, I don’t see him often.”

“So, you wouldn’t know if he was seeing a lady friend?” Leo asked, thinking of the woman Mrs. Beardsley had mentioned. The one who’d picked him up in a hired hack.

“I’m sorry, no,” Esther replied.

Leo stood from the chair, her legs stiff from having sat so tensely. “Thank you for speaking to me, Mrs. Goodwin.”

At the top of the stairs, Irene was waiting to see her out. She followed the nurse to the front door, which was shut practically on her heels once she was out on the stoop.

Leo breathed in the warm, mineral scent of a coming rainstorm. A drop of rain struck the bridge of her nose; the clouds would soon break open. She hurried from the manse toward a cabstand. She’d been away from the morgue all afternoon, and Connor must certainly be wondering what had become of her.