Page 35 of Cloaked in Deception (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #4)

Chapter Eighteen

T he beaker of strong black tea would not be enough to carry Leo through the morning.

Exhaustion weighed on her eyelids and even her bones as she sat at the kitchen table with her aunt and uncle.

At least it was Sunday, and as such, the Spring Street Morgue would be closed.

She was supposed to be at her leisure on her days off, but after the events of last night at the Hayes home, there were too many things she needed to see to. A second cup of tea would be necessary.

Like usual, Claude had prepared his wife’s plate, spreading a thin layer of marmalade on a triangle of toast and cutting her sausage into small, bite-size pieces.

Flora stared at her food quizzically and then turned up her nose.

She had not been eating much lately, and it was beginning to become worrisome.

“You did not sleep well last night,” Claude said to Leo after trying, and failing, to entice his wife to eat a slice of sausage. “I heard you pacing in your room at all hours.”

She lowered her beaker to the table, the wood scarred and pockmarked with age. “I’m sorry I kept you awake.”

“Not at all,” he said with a dry laugh. “I’m awake most of the night anyhow. A result of my age, I’m sure.”

Leo wasn’t quite sure she believed that.

Her uncle was finding it difficult to no longer go into work each day.

Though he smiled when she left for the morgue in the mornings, there was a wistful envy in his expression that he could not conceal.

Caring for his wife was something Claude would never complain about or resent.

But Leo, who had always been closer to her uncle than to her aunt, knew how much he’d loved his job at the morgue.

She suspected a persistent longing for his old life was what kept him up during the night.

He was correct, however, that she had not slept well.

After leaving Bloomsbury Square, Leo and Oliver Hayes had traveled back to Scotland Yard.

The general post offices were all closed at that hour of the evening, and their telegraph lines would not reopen until eight o’clock the next morning.

A message needed to be sent to Jasper without delay, and the only place Leo could think of to do that was the Yard’s telegraph office.

Lord Hayes had gone into the building, leaving Leo to wait impatiently in his carriage.

As much as it annoyed her, the truth was her presence inside would have only caused Jasper more grief among his superiors at the Met.

As a viscount and one of Jasper’s respected friends, the operators in the telegraph room were more likely to send the message if it came from him.

Leo, however, had composed the telegram, telling the viscount exactly what to have the operator tap out.

With any hope, Jasper would question Matron Westover. Perhaps even arrest her.

A second telegram had been sent to the police constabulary in Hampshire, and constables were dispatched to the Hayes estate of Beechwood to determine if George had gone there on his own. Leo, however, did not believe the boy had.

Lord Hayes had been delivering her home when he’d seemed to interpret her silence. “You mentioned earlier that George has siblings.”

“Gavin Seabright and Paula Blickson,” she replied.

“Could either of them have found George? Approached him?”

Leo would have said yes straightaway, but she couldn’t imagine how they would have known where to find him. Unless Martha had confessed something to them before she was killed. Or perhaps the former Nurse Radcliff.

“I’m not sure, but it would be beneficial to speak to them. Gavin is lying low right now. Paula Blickson will be easier to locate to question.”

Lord Hayes had nodded. “Reid will be back tomorrow. First thing, I’m sure. I’ll mention it to him.”

Though Leo had nodded, she’d had the distinct feeling of being shuffled to the side. After all, Oliver Hayes had only permitted her involvement because Jasper had been away.

Across the table, Flora accepted the smallest bite of toast before sticking out her tongue. Claude sighed and turned to his own food, which had already cooled.

“Are you helping Inspector Reid with the benefit dinner case?” he asked.

“He wouldn’t like me to say I’m helping, but yes,” she replied.

She had not yet told her uncle about the death of one of the masked men, Harry, and with Flora present, it was better not to talk of murder at all.

She was sensitive to the topic. As her aunt had started to live more and more in the past, she often thought of her sister’s murder, and those of her nephew and niece.

Any time she did, she would devolve into hysterics.

But there was something Leo did want to discuss with her uncle, which she thought her aunt might not react to.

“The investigation has gone in a new direction,” she said. “There is a young boy who is missing.”

“What boy?”

“It’s a complicated tale,” she said. “He was adopted in a shady dealing thirteen years ago when he was an infant.”

Claude’s white brows furrowed behind the rims of his thick spectacles. “And now someone has taken him?”

Leo believed that was the most likely thing, and so did Constance.

As cold and peevish as she had been toward Leo the previous night, she refused to believe her brother would run off.

“George just isn’t like that,” she had insisted as Lord Hayes and Leo prepared to leave Bloomsbury Square.

“He isn’t temperamental in the least. He is a veritable angel compared to me. ”

“If he has discovered he was adopted, he might react in unexpected ways,” the viscount had reasoned.

Leo could not deny that possibility, but what continued to perplex her as they rode toward the river and Scotland Yard was how the masked man who’d shot Martha Seabright might be connected to George.

Or rather, Edward . If this masked man had wanted Martha dead, was it because of her deal to sell her youngest child to Stanley Hayes?

“Yes, I think someone has taken him,” Leo answered her uncle, then drained the last sip of her now cooled tea.

A vague notion of whom George might have gone off with had stayed in the forefront of her mind all night.

It was the framed photograph of the young boy on the occasional table in Stanley Hayes’s sitting room that had turned her mind in an unexpected direction.

“Uncle Claude, do you recall a pair of corpses that came into the morgue three years ago in late December? The two women were delivered at different times that day,” Leo said, remembering them perfectly.

One had been younger, wearing a red and black frilly dance hall costume.

She had been poisoned shortly before taking to the stage at a bawdy club and had died of acute arsenic poisoning.

The other, older woman had been fished from the Thames.

Witnesses told constables they’d seen her jump into the river.

“Three years ago?” Claude said with an indulgent laugh. “My dear, have pity on my average memory.”

“You remember them,” Leo assured him. “They were a mother and daughter. Though at first, we did not know as much.”

Recognition lit Claude’s eyes, and he nodded. “Ah, yes, now I recall. The matching birthmarks.”

It wasn’t until the two women were undressed and lay upon different tables at the morgue that Claude noticed they each bore the same dark, pigmented mark on their left shoulder. Claude had known straightaway that the two women were related.

“You explained that pigmented marks, such as moles and port wine stains, are often passed down from mother to child,” Leo said, as she poured another cup of tea for herself.

“Yes, that has been my observation,” he replied. “And in that case, it proved correct.”

It turned out the mother, furious with her daughter for defying her strict edicts and choosing to dance at a bawdy club, had poisoned her. Then, she’d gone straight to the Vauxhall Bridge and leapt to her death.

“Why do you mention these two women?” Claude asked.

“The young boy who is missing,” Leo began. “He has a large mole on the side of his face.”

“A boy,” Flora said, speaking for the first time since entering the kitchen. “A little boy.” She lifted her hand and touched the table, petting it as if it was something other than a table. “My little boy.”

Then, without warning, Flora’s face screwed up into an expression of pure anguish. She let out a low moan, her hands coming up to cover her face.

“My darling,” Claude said, pushing back his chair and coming to his feet. “Flora, dear.”

But she continued to sob, the heart-wrenching sounds so alarming that Leo did not know what to say or do.

Claude took his wife’s arm and tried to bring her up from her chair.

Finally, Leo snapped out of her stunned stupor and stood to assist him.

Amazingly, Flora allowed Leo to touch her arm and help Claude get her to her feet.

“Uncle?” Leo whispered as he began to guide Flora slowly from the kitchen.

“It’s all right, Leonora,” he told her, readjusting his spectacles. “As for this boy you mentioned, the mole. It isn’t always the case, but it would most likely have been passed to him by his mother.”

She nodded at her uncle’s rushed explanation, and then, a moment later, she was standing alone in the kitchen.

Flora’s sobbing grew distant as Claude helped her upstairs to her room.

Leo shook off the strange turn her aunt had taken and cleaned up the breakfast dishes before getting ready to go out.

She had an important visit to make, though nothing she could explain easily to her uncle.