Page 7 of Cloaked in Deception (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #4)
Chapter Four
His eyes burned as he left his house just before eight o’clock. Though his head ached from the plaguing memory of Leo being hastened away at the point of a gun—and the older woman who’d been brutally shot in her seat—Jasper was not distracted enough to overlook the fact that he was being followed.
The man had been waiting at the corner of Charles Street and St. James’s Square.
Jasper gave no indication that he’d seen him.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the man fall into step behind him.
Three days ago, the same man had been lingering outside Scotland Yard, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper.
The burnt-orange color of his bowler hat was just uncommon enough to stick out in a crowd.
Several other times over the last handful of weeks, a prickling sense of being watched had crawled along Jasper’s shoulders and up the back of his neck as he went about his day.
Easy to brush off once, maybe twice, but not more than that.
Jasper turned onto Haymarket and swung a casual glance over his shoulder. The orange-hatted man was there, though far behind. As he continued, hands in his pockets, Jasper contemplated a response. The man was clearly keeping tabs, perhaps reporting back to someone about his movements.
Was he someone Jasper had arrested in the past? Some ex-convict seeking retribution? Or perhaps the man was a private detective. Though who would have hired him to tail Jasper, and why?
He reached Whitehall Place, where a costermonger was set up, hawking sausage rolls as he did every morning.
Pausing at the cart, Jasper took another look back the way he’d come.
The orange-hatted man wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
His jaw ticking in annoyance, Jasper paid the costermonger and took the sausage roll into Scotland Yard.
Tension coiled through him as he made his way to the detective department.
He would figure out what to do about his unwanted shadow later, but right now, the events of last night were more important.
“Reid,” Detective Chief Inspector Dermot Coughlan barked from the entrance to his office. He signaled for Jasper to join him. The chief inspector’s office, along with Jasper’s had been destroyed in the May bombing, but reconstruction had been swift. Jasper shut the door behind him.
“I’m glad to hear Miss Spencer was found unharmed,” Coughlan began.
Though he wasn’t fond of Leo or her involvement in some of Jasper’s past cases, he wasn’t malicious and would never wish harm on her.
That probably couldn’t be said for a few of the other officers in the Criminal Investigation Department.
“She made some observations about the suspects last night that might prove useful,” Jasper replied. “I’ll get her statement today.”
Coughlan cocked a brow. “Keep her involvement limited, Reid. You are on thin ice here as it is. I don’t dispute your success last month in solving that parliamentary aide’s murder and the Lloyd bombing. It was good police work. But it won you no favors among some of your colleagues.”
“Those colleagues being Tomlin,” Jasper replied, referring to the Special Irish Branch detective inspector who’d arrested Geraldine Stewart based on negligible evidence.
Under scrutiny and challenged by Jasper’s own investigation, Tomlin’s case against the suffragist had fallen apart.
“It is my job to solve crime, sir, not dance around the egos of other detectives.”
“Careful not to get too self-righteous,” Coughlan warned. “This department functions best when my detectives work well together. Put plainly, Reid, if no one likes you, what makes you think they’re going to do their best work for you?”
Jasper clenched his jaw and took the hit on the chin.
It was no secret, especially not to him, that he wasn’t overly popular with some of the men there.
Many believed he’d risen to the rank of detective inspector by riding upon his father’s coattails.
In all honesty, he’d often wondered if they might be correct.
Maybe that was why Jasper tended to work longer hours and delegate fewer tasks to the team of detective constables than his colleagues, and why he was apt to bring work home with him on his days off.
He’d made his life revolve around Scotland Yard, and yet…
it didn’t seem to have changed how others there perceived him.
“Understood,” Jasper answered the chief, if only to move the conversation along. He had work to do. “I’d like the case. As I was present at the time of the robbery and shooting, I have an advantage.”
Coughlan assented with a nod. “Price and Drake were sent to Sir Eamon’s home last night to take witness statements and collect any evidence.
Speak to them and get their reports. The victim, Martha Seabright, was brought to Spring Street Morgue.
” Here, he cocked his brow again, relaying yet another warning to Jasper, albeit silent, about Leonora Spencer.
“It goes without saying,” Coughlan went on, “that we need this case solved and the murderer arrested fast. This was a strike against some of our own. Don’t get distracted, Reid.”
He dismissed Jasper with a jerk of his chin, and Jasper suppressed a scowl as he turned to leave.
Distracted ? He did not become distracted while investigating any case, especially a murder.
Most murders were simple to solve, as most killers were not diligent enough in covering their tracks.
But there were some cases, as with a few of Jasper’s more recent investigations, that diverged from the straight and narrow path the chief inspector would have preferred.
Detective Sergeant Roy Lewis, seated at the desk he no longer had to share now that Jasper had an office again, bounced to his feet as soon as Jasper cleared Coughlan’s door. He followed the detective inspector into his new, though still small, office.
“You’ll need this,” Lewis said, dropping a manila folder onto the desk blotter. “Price and Drake spoke to the guests still there when they arrived, though Sir Eamon said quite a few had already left.”
Jasper flipped open the folder and started to read. He had rushed off to search for Leo without stopping to order anyone from the Met or City Police to contain the guests until they could be questioned. Apparently, no one else had thought to do so either.
“Miss Spencer had quite a fright, I hear,” Lewis said. Jasper drew in a long, slow breath; it helped to fight the knot of tension cramping his chest whenever he thought of Leo’s abduction.
“Thankfully, she is unharmed.” The succinct statement felt piteously insufficient for what Leo had endured.
And Jasper hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it.
He’d been powerless during the intrusion as well as afterward, when launching a search for her.
That futile state had left him charged, ready to explode.
When the telegram had come in that she was at Battersea station, a sob of relief had lodged in his throat.
Leo had assured him that she hadn’t been interfered with, but it maddened him that she’d been subjected to the possibility. Five men. One of them, a murderer. Though, from what she said on the cab ride home last night, the other four had not expected anyone to die during their bold break-in.
“That’s a relief,” Lewis said. “Did I hear right that she got herself locked up in Battersea station by confessing to a murder?”
A grin broke out on Jasper’s lips. He shook his head in awe of her ingenuity. “Thank you for reminding me; I need to arrange an upbraiding for the station sergeant there.”
“Do I want to know why?” Lewis asked.
“Let’s concentrate on what happened at Sir Eamon’s dinner,” Jasper replied, trying to divert his sergeant’s attention away from Leo and back to the case.
He read the reports on the victim quickly.
Martha Seabright had been a widow some thirteen years.
Her husband, Sergeant Daniel Seabright, a former corporal in the Queen’s army who later became a policeman, had been killed while on patrol.
He’d been stabbed while foiling a mugging in Clerkenwell.
It had taken two days for him to die. Jasper winced, thinking of the suffering the man likely had endured.
Mrs. Seabright had been left with three children, and as the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage had just opened its doors the previous year, in 1870, the Seabright children were among the first the orphanage had taken in.
“Mrs. Seabright was invited to the benefit dinner to stand as an example of the orphanage’s goodwill,” Jasper read aloud, then lowered the file. “She didn’t look happy about something just before dinner was announced. I saw her in a terse discussion with Sir Eamon.”
“I didn’t read anything about that in the report,” Lewis said.
“I’ll need to talk to Sir Eamon to find out why their conversation left her in a fit of pique.”
The older woman had still been wearing her scowl when taking her seat next to Leo at the table.
Briefly, the image of the blood spatter on Leo’s face after Martha Seabright had been shot rose to the front of his mind.
At least, the woman had not seen it coming.
A blessing maybe, but it did nothing to soothe the curl of loathing he felt for the nameless, faceless man who’d so callously shot Mrs. Seabright in the head.
Jasper pushed the memory aside and returned to reading the file on his desk.